Ramblings Archive
Ramblings are articles that cover far less specific criteria than the other categories. Ranging from thoughts regarding the gaming industry as a whole, music, or my personal life, Ramblings is perhaps the most versatile and vague collection of essays put together.
How far does your support of freedom go?
Hearthstone tournament winner Blitzchung wore a mask and goggles during the entire competition. He has not said it, but the visual makes it clear that he is in support of Hong Kong’s liberation. These items have been banned in the city due to their use by protestors to fight back against the authorities.
Clearly aware of the statements Blitzchung wants to make, the announcers – “casters”, as they tend to be called – decide to conclude the interview by offering the victor his chance to make his statement. Blitzchung begins to pull his mask from his mouth. The casters giggle to themselves, perhaps out of nervousness, perhaps out of excitement for enabling the young competitor. One ducks his head immediately, reaching his hand over to encourage his companion to follow suit. Mask lowered, Blitzchung calls out his political message.
“Abortion is murder!”
The stream is immediately cut.
Potentially the first of a series in which I embrace old age and yammer on about childhood memories that are useful to no one.
For a long time I’ve felt the pressure to write nothing but thought-provoking essays on this little nook of the Internet I’ve laid claim to. Predictably, this desire to be insightful often charged head first into the immense chasm where my self-esteem ought to be, crying in confusion and fear as it plummeted into the void of darkness. The result has often taken the form of stacks of incomplete and abandoned drafts and a mouth over-stuffed with lo mein, Cheez-Its, macaroni and cheese, pizza, or whatever other comfort food can be desperately poured into that confidence-shaped canyon in my soul.
Some people have Ben & Jerry’s. I have the Wendy’s Baconator.
A conversation with an acquaintance on Discord recently pried open my skull, poring over the nostalgic memories filed away of select game acquisitions of my childhood. It was odd at first, to have so many memories of a game’s purchase filed away alongside the experience of playing it. What was the last game I could recall driving out to buy? Only a handful of titles in College, such as Gears of War and the night my gaming club wound through the halls of the mall in single file to obtain our brand new Nintendo Wii. Not only has the purchase of a new game become a far more common purchase, it has lost all the scenery and circumstance that would embed its apprehending as a memorized event. Sit on couch or bed, click buttons, confirm purchase, begin download. Click “add to cart” on website, punch in confirmation password, wait for package to arrive on doorstep.
I could go on a curmudgeonly rant about how there’s no magic to purchasing a game anymore – or how the new game smell just doesn’t seem so potent without a freshly printed instruction manual packed tightly into the jewel case or shrink-wrapped cardboard box – but I’d rather just reminisce about some of these acquisitions as an old grandfather may tell his grandkids about how he met their grandmother, some crazy antics he’d gotten into with his now deceased sibling, or a childhood memory of his mother’s cooking and lectures.
Will it be insightful? Will your mind be thoroughly provoked into thinking? Doubtful, but passing on memory in such a fashion is, I believe, a necessary part of the human experience. It allows us to touch into a former part of ourselves, to confirm that our experiences were real, to better understand that which has constructed our modern selves through the memories that linger in our minds, and to pass this piece of ourselves onto our families or friends to create a more vivid picture of this world. As such, here are two separate games whose purchase meant as much to me as the experiences they provided during play.
When struck by a creative funk, you sometimes just need to change your perspective and perceive the cause, all blockers, and your motivation from a new angle.
Creativity is an unusual thing. At the most inopportune moments the brain will churn out words that flow like a calming stream in the forest. Your fingers, in the meantime, are preoccupied with the shampoo being lathered into your hair, pen and paper absent from the rather soggy chamber you find yourself in. By time breakfast has been consumed and morning work rituals have been completed, the words are gone, left behind on your bedside table with that book you wanted to bring into the office to read during lunch.
This is the habit I’ve found myself in since pumping out Conflict late one Sunday. I had hoped to latch onto that burning desire to express myself in the days and weekends to come, but the daily rut interfered every time. There was also that lingering sense of pointlessness, the nihilistic belief that every word I put forward would be meaningless.
So despite having come forward and declared a progressive step forward, I still crave that acknowledgment and communication with those I would call peers. I struggle to be satisfied speaking with silence.
It's time I accept that my creative interests have once again shifted, and that I stop trying to force content onto this blog.
Spring is in the air! It took some time, but flowers are finally starting to sprout in southern New Jersey. Which means wasps also happen to be buzzing about, looking for new places to build themselves a nest. It also means days of cool breezes and warm sunshine are bound to swiftly become heavy with humidity, crushed by the sudden onset of summer.
While New Years is typically the season to declare goals for change, it is in Spring that we can see the world transforming into something seemingly new. After months of dead and thirsting grass, leaves the hues of a first-person shooter on the Xbox 360, and then the grey skies and pale snows of winter, the chromatic blossom of Springtime is more than welcome.
It’s a good time to stop and reflect on my own changes and transformations, and to recognize how resistant I’ve been for the past year or more. In particular, an end to the constant pressure to post on this website regularly.
Comparing two similar songs in order to determine how they can convey different emotions and feelings.
A friend of mine recently asked me if I considered writing about music more often. I told him that doing such a thing was too difficult, as I lacked the vocabulary and literacy to critique and analyze the more technical aspects of music. Simultaneously, music is perhaps the most subjective artistic medium there is. To me, a good song evokes emotions in a way that words cannot. How do you convey a response to emotions that are too complex for words? A fool’s task, for certain.
Yet here I am, writing up a post purely due to some errant thoughts I had comparing two songs. If I were to evaluate them on a technical level, I would regard them as both following the same template. That Demons & Wizards – a band formed by Iced Earth’s guitarist and songwriter Jon Schaffer and Blind Guardian’s vocalist and lyricist Hansi Kursch – had such songs on each album would cause me to be skeptical of their creativity. It’s not a mere matter of the “token” acoustic song, as I felt became so popular following Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”. Even the progression of the song is the same.
To use an example, DragonForce’s debut album Valley of the Damned provided a bit of an “intermission” with the slower-paced “Starfire”. A welcome break from the constant, high speed wailing of bloody battlefields and gleaming steel. When they released their following album, Sonic Firestorm, they placed a very similar song in almost the exact same midpoint of the album. “Dawn Over a New World” not only follows the same progression, it also has the same tempo. If you were to remove the introductory sound of rainfall from “Starfire” and played the tunes side-by-side, not only would the first verse end at nearly the same time, but that’s precisely when the electric guitars and percussion would kick in.
By time Inhuman Rampage landed I was unimpressed by the speed at which they played. Of course, by then they dropped the pretense of “variety” in their songwriting and counted on relentless pace of their songs to amaze those unfamiliar with the two-plus decade-old genre of power metal.
We’re not here to discuss that unimaginative group of shredders, though. We’re instead here to discuss the difference between “Fiddler on the Green” and “Down Where I Am”, two very similar songs on Demons & Wizards’ self-titled debut album and its follow-up Touched By the Crimson King.
How I'm trying to overcome my own baggage and enjoy creating again in 2019.
2018 was a weird year for me. I had started it at MAGFest with a declaration that I’d give up YouTube completely if I did not produce at least four videos that year. By time I was working on my fourth video I was beginning to question whether I wanted to keep going with the channel or not anyway. Each essay, each script, each product I worked on carried with it an anxiety that I’d say one stupid thing to warrant everyone’s rejection. A deeper connection to my religion had created a desire to speak about it publicly, yet simultaneously assaulted me with a hostile anxiety regarding people’s response to such open faith. Throughout the year I’ve worked to reinvent and rebrand all of my works to remain consistent, yet I’ve always struggled between being myself and wanting acceptance.
It was a pretty good year to start going to therapy.
I know it’s the hip trend to bid 2018 farewell as a truly awful year, but I actually look back on it with a strange fondness. Despite the suffering caused by my sciatic nerve, anxiety over my faith, and continued lack of growth in my YouTube channel, writing, or even career, I’ve managed to sort through a lot of my personal baggage. “No pain, no gain” as they say, and as a result I’ve entered 2019 with an even more optimistic perspective.
It sounds silly to say, but I’m comfortable doing the things I like doing again.
What a drag it is getting old.
I wonder if becoming a curmudgeon is an inevitability for the opinionated and pretentious. The true meaning of the word pretentious in particular. I feel that the word’s usage has transformed into “snobbish” or “stuck up” rather than one who pretends to be substantial.
While I do not particularly loathe all things new, I must confess a confusion with what becomes favored among younger audiences. In some cases this is a clear generational gap, such as that between my niece and me. It can also be as short a span as five-to-ten years difference with my… younger peers, I suppose they’d be? A question of whether I’ve grown out of touch simply by being born a few years earlier.
While I’m not afraid the things I love will vanish, there is an apprehension towards what the future may bring. I’d like to think I’m open to change, but at the end of the day I imagine all creatures fear the complete loss of their comfort zone.
A consideration on how my shifting thoughts on replayability are changing my playing habits.
I don’t really keep up with what metrics are used to determine a game score these days. Despite writing about games constantly, I keep up with very little games writing in the greater world. I read headlines that catch my eye or the odd post from a friend here and there, but unless your name is Shamus Young then I’m not really keeping up with your work.
To that end, I don’t know if a game’s “replayability” remains a factor in its final score. When I was younger, this notion of “replayability” was meant to capture how enjoyable a game was to return to once the credits rolled. It’s an understandable metric when you consider the arcade origin of games, but even by the Super Nintendo it was becoming an oddly subjective variable that could only be determined by a series of factors.
While it’s been a long time coming, this past year has driven me to truly question the way we value this “replayability”. I touched on some of these revelations back in February in regards to my approach to discussing and analyzing games. The latest catalyst of change, however, was a return to Destiny 2.
Sometimes it's enough just to find something that presses all the right buttons back.
It feels strange to confess that Darksiders might be one of my top ten favorite games of all time.
Keep in mind that I don’t have an actual ordered list in my possession or in mind. I have games that I consider to be foundational and games that I consider favorites, but I’ve never really bothered to sit down and create an official top ten. It just seems a bit absurd since the list will no doubt change as I get older. For example, ten years ago I might have put BioShock on that list. Enough time now has passed that I’m not so certain of its place. In fact, the only reason it’s a consideration at all is the prestige.
When it released, BioShock was a major touchstone of how AAA games could deliver a more literary story. It was the first time many players got to experience a meta-narrative in particular, the game acting as commentary to its own limitation of player freedom. Those familiar with System Shock may have found it “simplified” and lacking a “proper inventory”, but for console players like myself it was a major shift forward in Western games narrative.
Darksiders, on the other hand, was labeled as derivative. The choice description from the press was “a Zelda for grown-ups”. Taking the puzzling dungeon design of Nintendo’s Hyrule-spelunking adventure franchise and pairing it with the simplified combos of God of War and Devil May Cry, Vigil Games released a product that seemed to get a lot of heat for its lack of originality.
Despite all this, Darksiders is most assuredly one of my favorite games of all time.
No matter how many times the revelation of the summit is experienced, beating the habit is a steep mountain to climb.
My sighs are heavy with exasperation as Danny Rand continues to repeat his mistakes in season two of Iron Fist. It is one of my most common gripes with Western television and its undying effort to last forever. Yes, there are plenty of anime that seem incapable of knowing when to stop, but the quantity of entertainment that tells a complete, whole story versus being left to crawl in desperation and futility away from the grave of cancellation is staggering. Once Upon a Time is a television show that was notorious for pushing its antagonists through redemption arcs only to fall right back down the hill at the start of the next season.
I tire of characters that refuse to learn, yet I myself am incapable of the change I desire to see in fiction. For years I’ve repeated the same selfish mistakes with friends and family, driving a willful wedge to create distance. All the while I would deny my part in the division. I pray daily for the strength and willpower to cease the sabotage of myself only to awaken in the morning set on violating my self-imposed guidelines.
I keep insisting I will only write and craft video for myself, only to be obsessed with the thoughts and judgment of others.
Even if perfect objectivity is impossible, pure subjectivity is pointless and provokes no desire for improvement.
Probably tens of thousands of words on this blog have catalogued my ever-growing and expanding perspective on game reviews. I’d imagine during the site’s inception ten years ago I was thoroughly convinced that journalism was broken and needed some enlightened fellow like myself to come along and save it. I even came up with a video game variant of John Updike’s Six Rules for Constructive Criticism.
Many of those words were penned with an attitude of frustration and aggression towards games press that I no longer possess. I may just be getting tired in my ripe old age of thirty-three, or I may finally be maturing like I should have a decade ago. It could also be that I’ve finally come to terms with the source of my aggression being an insecure belief that no one cares about what I have to say about games. Regardless, I have grown to appreciate that there’s a vast ocean of games writing out there. I may not agree with all of it – or more specifically, I may not agree with many of the attitudes behind some opinions – but between the written word, podcasts and YouTube, there’s a little something for everyone out there.
Nevertheless, I feel like I’ve kept my lips sealed a bit too long on the topic of objectivity in recent days for fear of losing the respect of would-be readers. It seems common to hear the word “objective” in regards to reviews and scoff. Of course there’s no such thing as perfect objectivity! I even opened my analysis of God of War with just such an observation!
However, just because perfect objectivity is impossible does not mean that critics should ignore it as a personal goal.
A new layout, a new domain, and a new user-friendliness that will work on any device!
Good riddance to that old news
Hello readers and welcome to the brand new RamblePak64.com! That’s right, a brand spanking new domain to actually create some level of brand consistency! Pictured above is, of course, the previous design. It was pretty much outdated when I created it in 2010, and it only became increasingly awful looking as time progress.
Aside from a lot less clutter, you’ll notice that this website is actually responsive! For those not into the web development lingo, that means no matter what device you’re using, the website scales to look presentable and readable. I’ve been wanting to redesign the site for a few years now, but I only finally got around to it. Naturally, I’m using an old version of Bootstrap, a toolkit that makes responsive design easy. I’m also using an archaic version of Expression Engine for the CMS still. I’m the world’s only luddite web developer.
So, why don’t we get to the nitty gritty? First, the new and simpler approach to the blog before I detail why I cut and trimmed a lot of the extraneous fat.
Everything's not fine, but I have a feeling it could be if I work hard enough
This essay was originally written with pen and paper during my bedridden time recovering from a pinched sciatic nerve. In hindsight I wish I had done more handwritten essays to later transcribe, and may do more in the future just for the fun of it.
It’s likely you never noticed the lack of foul language upon this blog of late. An absence of colorful outbursts in Eh! Steve! has freed me to strip the “explicit” tag from the latest episodes like a band-aid from a healed wound. The past few episodes of RamblePak64 have also been free of “colorful language” – an amusing term considering such words are more like rusted iron bludgeoning the ear canal than chromatic concertos of poetry.
This absence has been an active effort to exorcise cursing from my daily vocabulary. One day I’d like to be able to lead youth at a Church, and while I imagine there are plenty of good leaders whose tongues occasionally slip, I’d like to be the same person no matter whose company I am in.
Months of effort were shattered to dust when an excruciating pain struck along my thigh, flooding my mouth with a torrent of filth. I cannot adequately describe the torment as over a week of time has smeared my memory into an unfocused fog. All I can say was how every fiber of muscle seemed to pull and tear apart, yanking fiercely at the tendons tethering them to bone. My fingers gripped the coat hanger of my brother’s car passenger seat, a piece of plastic I once referred to as the “oh-5#!+-bar” – I’m sure you master code crackers can decipher my meaning there.
As my brother drove us home from the doctor’s he began to discuss something regarding the anime Darling in the Franxx. The sound of his voice managed to breeze its way through my ears but the pain sent the words into a tumultuous storm chaotically clashing in my skull. His efforts to distract me were in vain. Soon all I could do as my leg fought to stretch out, foot pressing desperately to the floor of his car, was pray.
An essay in which I stream-of-consciously discuss a series of feelings that I continue to struggle.
It might finally be time for me to stomach any costs and find a counselor to talk to. I don’t know if I have depression in any sort of medical sense. I simply know that I seem to keep on experiencing it. The epidemic of depressed and anxious “Millennials”, if such a label were to be accurate at all, I’ve theorized to be the result of several decades of deceitful promises and expectations. Prior generations that had grown up in the good times created standards far more difficult to reach as the economy, job, and housing markets changed. Advertisements for decades lied to the populace about the happiness commercialism would bring to one’s soul. My entire childhood was filled with children’s television programming and little plastic trophies dedicated to making every individual feel special.
This is a shared truth, but certainly does not explain every individual’s own struggles with self-worth and the treacherous journey towards contentment.
Last August I suffered an existential crisis brought upon by a few, simple sentences. I had been meaning to call an old roommate of mine, now living in California working for Blizzard. For whatever reason I had never been able to find a good time that I could just dial him up. “Oh, he’s probably busy with friends right now,” or other thoughts would cross my mind. One evening I was feeling particularly awful, sitting at my laptop trying to evacuate the harsh thoughts from my mind and welcome distractions. I opened a Facebook chat window, sending him an apology for being unable to reach out to him like I said I would.
“It’s fine,” he replied. “You were the one who wanted to chat with me in the first place. I don’t feel neglected or ignored.”
Whatever the intention behind his phrasing, this very statement struck me like a sack of bricks being wielded by a twenty-foot tall gorilla. Instead of distracting myself the noxious cloud of existential doubt ignited. My entire soul became a blistering furnace of self-doubt and a certainty of my own worthlessness.
Following up on last week's essay regarding a "starter kit for beginning game critics", I instead ponder about a starter kit for game arts instruction.
This prior Thursday I addressed GoodGamesWriting’s community question of a “starter kit for beginner game critics”. My focus was on the potential downside of putting specific games as examples to study, creating a sense that only certain types of games were worthy of being considered deep or artistic.
I want to specify once again that it is not my intention to suggest the goal of GoodGamesWriting was gatekeeping of any sort – be it of the taste of the would-be critic or the type of game a developer might make. However, while my advice in that essay was for would-be critics, I must acknowledge that it removes the potential necessity for instruction or guidance.
