Unsolicited Advice

I've found a new podcast to binge. It's called "Computer Game Evolution", written, edited, produced and distributed as a one-man show by someone who's opted to go by "Tim". It's a very witty, very thorough exploration of how video games got to be what they are, starting in the pre-history of computers when all your tedious calculations were done by hand, and sometimes by post. His intro trailer mentions that he defended a doctoral thesis having something to do with video games, so my guess is that this is the director's cut audiobook of his dissertation, now with 400% of the snark his advisor made him edit out. Tim declines to say where he's from. His accent is distinctly East Slavic, although I admit I don't know enough about the languages in that family to distinguish between them from just their traces in his English. He also mentions that as much as he'd love to take donations for the podcast, he can't, as they don't work ...

One of the rare good memories I have of spending time with family over Christmas break when I was a kid was the video games. Starting at age five, the year my parents brought home a Nintendo and a gold Zelda cartridge, we always took the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve to sit in front of the TV and save the world. My father had the controller, my mother had the notes and the guidebook, and we kids sat on the floor and kibbitzed. ("Have you gone through that door, Dad? No, that door. No, that  door. No, Dad , that thing  is a door.") We kids had no school, Dad took the week off work, and we lived on cheese and crackers and sandwiches and takeout so that Mom could take a break from cooking. After Zelda, I remember playing the original Final Fantasy for NES, and later the first one for the SNES; Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest, in Japan) I, II and IV; The Secret of Mana; The Illusion of Gaia; and ChronoTrigger. I think I'm forgetting a couple. I don't think we...

Those of you who have been hanging around for a while know that I am badly addicted to the Professor Layton games. Every time I get a new one, I sit down in the evening to start the story and then whoops! It's dawn. The main series of games have all been for Nintendo handhelds, but the spinoffs all seem to be coming out for Android/iOS, and I have a Kindle Fire, so... To be fair, Layton Brothers: Mystery Room is not really a Layton game. Also to be fair, the Layton name got me to buy it (well, "buy" it -- unlocking all the episodes costs about $5 total, which is the kind of credit I can rack up on Google Opinion Rewards ). What it is, is a rebranded Atamania game, which is how all of the Layton games started. Atamania is a portmanteau of atama  (lit, "head"; atama ga ii , or "head is good", is the colloquial phrase for "intelligent" or "clever") and the English word "mania", and is the title of a series of puzzle ga...

After the rant about the crushing frustration of poverty the other day, I am now going to make myself sound like an ungrateful wretch by telling you all that I've just gotten a 3DS. I am delighted to own the thing, but somewhat less enthusiastic about the way I feel compelled to justify my possession of it by explaining how I got it, which is that I am on Moggie's equipment upgrade path. My birthday is in early September and, as Mog elaborated, "With [an amount of money she had handy], I could either replace my phone, or buy a New 3DS and a PSVita." So that decision pretty much made itself. She actually asked me if I wanted it. I pointed out that this is a lot like asking the rats if they want this here food. The real question is not 'do you want this', but more 'where should I put this down so you don't accidentally get my hand when you grab it'. She was apparently worried that I'd be disappointed that it wasn't the new kind with the C-s...

One of the things that takes a while to grasp when you learn Japanese is how to spot equivalents in the various fonts. Japanese has different typefaces just like Western languages do, and they're even grouped into families the same way. You've probably read English long enough that you don't think about it anymore, but imagine being a Japanese kid and being presented with a a a a g g g g and being told that all the characters on any given line were supposed to be the same thing. You would think you were losing your mind. The first font you learn to read in your Japanese class is the one in your textbook, which is going to be unfairly legible. It's usually a printed minchou  『明朝』style, which is the equivalent of a serif font in Latin alphabets. The name comes from Ming-chou, as in Ming Dynasty, the period during which they nicked it from China. (The characters mean "light" and "morning", which goes to show you what the Ming ...

As you all know by now, I am physically incapable of putting down any video game that involves crazy puzzles, big gay lawyers, or both. I've found out that there are Detective Conan games, because of course there are, and that they are not available in the US, because of course they aren't. This is why I have a flashcart. My Japanese is, by my own standards, not fantastic. This is because my standards are based on English, a language that I learned to read so early that I do not remember what it was like to see marks on paper and not have them mean things. By the standards of normal Americans, who took two semesters of Spanish in high school and have long since purged it from their brains, my ability to hammer my way through games like this in Japanese is some kind of crazy magic power. The level of incredulity in Boston is much lower than in Flagstaff, where I would get people walking up to me when I had my nose jammed into a not-English book specifically to ask, "Ca...

Hi, I'm Arabella, and I'm still an Ace Attorney  addict. I've given up on ever having enough money to throw it at people like Nintendo or Capcom, so I broke down and spent a bunch of my mindless-repetitive-activity-TV-watching time on running a letsplay of Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies . (I have a lot of this. You don't really need your eyeballs for a lot of hoop drills, and I've knit entire bedspreads in moss stitch without bothering to look down.) This one is a commentary-free but not blind playthrough, so there's no one talking over the soundtrack, and you don't have to watch the LPer flop around for ten minutes at a time, brute-forcing a cross examination that they can't figure out. [This strikes me as being a little like an alcoholic drinking mouthwash because it's all they can afford. But on the other hand, at least mouthwash isn't toxic, and Scope is like 75% of the way to being cheap peppermint schnapps anyway. I try not to think about...

Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Path has eaten my brains. No, you didn't miss an English-language release of Gyakuten Kenji 2 -- Capcom inexplicably decided not to do one. A fantranslation group put out a patch in Xdelta and BEAT formats a few months ago, and I finally got around to trying it. I'm not giving you any of the files, on the grounds that if you can spell at least 50% of the relevant search terms correctly, it'll come up in about 20 milliseconds on Google. It works flawlessly on an early revision Japanese DS Lite with an R4 flashcard running Wood 1.27. (Not that I would know anything about any of these questionable third-party products, nosireebob. I don't have any family history of clever media conversion , and I certainly did not just convince someone to buy a DS emulator for her droidphone so she could play the original Ace Attorney games that Capcom inexplicably only released for iOS. And I would never dream of spending several of my ...

One of the many things I love about Takumi Shuu, the guy responsible for the Ace Attorney games is that he is a devout worshipper at the First Universal Church of Chekov's Gun. Nothing  ever goes away in these games. If the dialogue draws your attention to it, it'll be important. Maybe not now, but later, and then again  when you least expect it. And he has a knack for making it impossible to distinguish between a running joke -- there are several, one of which involves an argument over ladders vs stepladders that Maya and Phoenix have been having for three games now -- and a truly vital piece of evidence until the moment you need it. Some things are both. Pearl's chronic inability to spell is a critical point in not just two separate cases, but two separate games . One of the iconic moments in the games, which has risen to "spoony bard" status among fans, is when Phoenix cracks open a murder case by demanding to cross examine a parrot. For example, in Case 1-1...

Following on the previous post about bludgeoning my way through Gyakuten Saiban  in not-English, it occurs to me that most of my audience probably doesn't speak any Japanese. Give it a shot. It's fun, for a certain highly-contrived, lunatic value of fun . I learned it because I wanted to read manga. I also learned French because I have a thing for Dumas ( père  and fis ) and for Victorian policiers , of which Maurice Leblanc wrote about a billion, and German because I like math and Michael Ende. It's not so much a matter of whether  I can pick up a language, as it is a matter of if I've run into anything I care to read in it, and how far down I am on the list. I touched before on the complexity of formality and respect in the Japanese language. It's worse than you think. There are entirely different sets of pronouns and verbs for different degrees of respectfulness. There are some sets that elevate the person you're speaking to, and some that humble the speak...

I am nothing if not a masochist when it comes to hammering Japanese into my brain, and lately I've needed things to think about that are not related to insurance and paperwork, so I have re-started poking at the Ace Attorney  games -- or, more properly, the Gyakuten Saiban  games. The DS games are remakes of the GBA games and conveniently also contain an English script if I get too fed up with things, although you can't switch back and forth in the same save file, and the English text in the Japanese release has enough typos to rival some of Taito's classic 'quarity tlansration' efforts, from back in the day. Still. It's interesting. The localizations were done astonishingly well, considering Capcom basically released the first one in the US on a whim. As expressive as the English is, though, there are a lot of things in Japanese that just don't come across, because there simply do not exist any equivalents. One of the most basic ones, and usually very r...

Though I am a screaming Ace Attorney  fan -- you may have noticed -- I was not really keen on Apollo Justice . Story-wise, I think it was trying entirely too hard to be weird. AA games are notorious for containing not a single completely sane and ordinary person, anywhere, ever. Phoenix likes to think of himself as normal, Edgeworth likes to think of himself as rational, and Franziska likes to think of herself as prepared for anything, which is why all of them spend a good 50% of their time in court going, "wait, what? " Everything starts out fairly ordinary, and then at some point abruptly rockets off at right angles to reality. It takes a bit before you figure out that, say, Edgeworth is a closet Steel Samurai fanboy, and then Phoenix is as mystified as the player. With Apollo Justice, all the weird is right there, smashed into your face, before anyone can even say anything. Phoenix is a card-playing hobo! His assistant is a teenage magician with magic panties! The prosecut...

I love Professor Layton  games. Loooooooooove them. When I got my paws on the first one, I totally failed to notice that I had stayed up all night poking at it until the sun started trying to sneak in between the slats on the blinds. They're some combination of thinky and quaint and comforting and rewarding that apparently functions much like crack cocaine, as far as my brain is concerned. It probably has to do with the way the things are structured. The series was originally inspired by a collection of puzzle books by Akira Togo, and the fact that the Brain Age  games for DS had sold surprisingly well, so at heart they're really nothing more than a long sequence of brainteasers from a wide variety of genres. Solve a puzzle, get told I'm right! Solve enough puzzles, get to see more cut scenes! It's very Pavlovian. The story, I thought would be a nice little lagniappe, but rather to my surprise, it can get quite involving. The adventures of Professor Layton and his a...

This has been a hell of a week, so I'm trying to think of other, less important things, to keep myself from going completely gonzo. Right now, I'm having an enormous, but ultimately inconsequential, sad over the fact that Gyakuten Kenji 2  is not going to be released in English, pretty much ever. Gyakuten Kenji  translates as Turnabout Prosecutor  -- the series English speakers would know as Ace Attorney Investigations , the semi-spinoff line to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney  games for the Nintendo DS. (The main series is known in Japan as Gyakuten Saiban , or Turnabout Trial Court . The reference is to Phoenix's habit of letting the prosecution get thiiiiiiiiiiis  close to grinding his metaphorical face into the dirt before he remembers something horribly important and snatches victory, and usually some amount of insanity, from the jaws of defeat.) I love these things like you would not believe. They are tremendously clever, and the entire writing staff ar...

I was generally happy with Thief 3 , but there was just one thing that made me twitch. Whoever did the script and/or script editing for the first two games had an ear for language. Whoever did the third game did not. Garrett speaks modern English, with an American accent. Sensible, since the game was developed by an American studio that had limited funds for the voice acting. The other factions speak various other flavors of English, which diverge from standard AmE in various ways. The City Guard are mostly something that vaguely approximates standard BrE; the Keepers speak AmE or BrE which retains a few archaic features and a lot of formality. Both are distinct from Garrett, but nothing you wouldn't hear on television, and you'd have to write fairly badly in standard English in order to write noticeably badly in this. The Hammerites speak what is very solidly a dialect of English which retains the T-V distinction -- for those of you who don't absorb languages at random...