Today is 4th of July. People set up fireworks everywhere to celebrate this great day for their country.
I had a very good day today. The movie was good, the sky was dark (or course), the fireworks were b-e-a-u-tiful, and my friends were lovely.
Friday, when the storm happened, I was on my way home from work. That was the most scary moment in my life. The ice was hitting my car, trees kept falling down to street, I was sitting in my car, no car is moving, which means I can't even get to anywhere. I tried to call my mom, but the signal was off. Everything was just wrong wrong wrong. I was so scared that the next second a tree will fall right down to my car. The sky was so grey, or, just dark, I can't tell. It was only about 5 to 10 minutes, but I felt like it's been forever. I turned on my music to the highest volume, but I still couldn't hear a thing from the radio, all I can hear was the sounds from whatever was hitting my car. The water was so big that I almost fell it was gonna lift my car up.... And I couldn't do a thing, I couldn't think. All I did was just took the drivers wheel as hard as I could, and tried to tell myself, I'll be fine.
I just finished Propose daisakusen today. It's a nice drama, but it made me mad...
I've been really bored the past few weeks. Nothing was going on in my life. Well, there's still nothing much going on now, but I have to say, I have discovered my new love about a week ago.
let's start with this:
I was really bored today. Well, I was bored everything lately.
You may wonder like I do why I only capitalized certain words. Well I could analyze and break it down but A.A. Milne never had to explain when he did it so neither will I. If you didn't read Winnie the Pooh as a child that might have looked like a quasi-intellectual literary reference but sadly I can't really make those. I hate reading books. I can't seem to bring myself to care long enough to get through an entire book. Watch me now describe summer backwards so I can easily segue that last concept:
Today I went with Yellow and Red to Barnes & Noble. I wish someone would bottle the fragrance of that store so that I could smell like books all the time. Other than that, awful time spent there. Yellow bought 6-7 literary classics, including Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. And I'm sorry, I know it's all influential and thought provoking but that book is over 1000 pages in like 6-point font single spaced. That's too much. Condense, honestly. I - prefering the term 'visual minded' to 'intellectually inept' - perused Frank Miller graphic novels I had no intention of buying. I feigned the sense of friendliness they are accustomed to, but I was not having a good time at all. I don't know when it happened, but I am losing closeness with those two very quickly. I'm glad my friends who have graduated college aren't all married with kids and all, but honestly, I can't abide their sense of fun these days. I feel so trapped in Lincoln, I don't know why I came back. I am not supposed to be messing around here like this. I am not supposed to be playing GTA4 for seven hours a day. This is my training period, and I need to exercise self control before this all ends like it usually does with me just finding the easiest way out of the situation at the last minute.
Summer, so far, has been a happy vacation with dental surgery mixed in. Insurance was running out so I had to go to the dentist again. I have like forty-seven cavities and extensive tooth decay because I still eat like I'm ten. Now I'm torturing myself trying not to indulge in my greatest vice, sodie-pop. I am not doing terribly well so far, because my self control is terrible. I don't go to a whole-body doctor either because he'd likely tell me I have Diabetes or Gout or something. Better to be blissfully ignorant of impending doom than waste your life worrying and rationing I always say.
Was there a point here besides rehashing events? Shut up, it's not rehashing, it is Chronicling. But yes I did have something I was going to convey, some kind of reflexive thought to put up for later musing. What was it again? Oh yeah. My brain is a booby trap. I have booby trapped my own brain so that now I can't seem to break this pattern of behavior. This is so annoying to me I can't begin, but I wonder if it's just me sometimes. I usually just go about procrastinating for the purpose of lowering the stress levels of doing actual work and it's worked really well in the past. So what is so different now? I have to ask. I don't dislike myself and I think I'm pretty great most of the time, but I am constantly failing at everything recently. Usually, this signals that it's time for a drastic change, but I still lack any real drive. Utterly pathetic, that I can't even make a serious attempt at what I really want.
If anyone can give me some hints or clues on how to bring this out, or if we're just doomed to be habitually the same thing gradually changing but not ever really changing over the course of our lives. Is there some kind of spirit journey quest I can go on? Can it involve backpacking across Europe or living with monks in Tibet? I'd be more apt to pursue these actions if I didn't think I was secretly wanting to go just to get out of doing more schoolwork and facing the reality that exists in the here and now. Is there a psychadelic drug that would alter my cognitive thoughts to the point of being able to achieve all that I want to achieve? Am I even capable of being the person I want to be, or are my habitual thoughts too deeply-seeded now at this late stage in life?
Comment as much as you can. But I already pretty much know the answer. It is a lame answer, but I have to say it: "The answer lies within yourself". I guess if I truly believe in freewill and the human potential to self-evolve I can only come back to this. It all works perfectly in theory, but self-betrayal is such a bitch. Maybe if I watch I Heart Huckabees again I'll achieve clarity. Ironically, the previous sentence is a perfect example of the one preceeding it. I am a man of words and not of actions. Ideas ultimately bring about nothing without follow-through. Until I can deaden the stigma of action as being too stressful and best saved for later, I cannot hope to conquer any of this.
Now I wrote way too goddamn much about absolutely nothing. Did you even read that?? I did, I just re-read it. I seriously should shut up, how can someone so in love with their own words hate to read? It's arrogant when you think about it. It's like I'm saying that the words I write are the only ones worth writing. I don't actually feel that way, but maybe it's just because I don't trust anyone but myself.
Someone break this cycle. I implore you, I have no one to turn to. I need to trust in other people to help me up, so give me something to go on here. I'm just another lost soul trapped inside a bubble of ego and trust issues! To consciously let the shields down is completely disarming and goes against most of my better judgment. But if I don't take some risks soon I could be in here forever, endlessly reassuring myself that it's safer this way. The rest of humanity isn't something to be feared or quantified from a distance, it's the hope that can save us from ourselves. Right?? Communication is the only way out, but who can we trust?!
This is way too intense, I realize, but damn I've really got some momentum here right now. I desperately need someone who I can believe in. I need more people on my side, and the first step toward that is admitting what the fuck your side really is, so this is it. No bullshit. No fancy joke sentences with parentheses. Someone else catch this drift, I can't move forward alone. Inwardly the mind only spirals toward insanity, countering itself with what it knows to be the next logical step. But that step isn't at all logical, we are all lying to ourselves to try and justify why we're doing what we're doing. Without outside advice from another mind we can't hope to find the real answers of what we're looking for.
Aaaaaaand I've taken some deep breaths. It feels all epiphany-like now, but will it be in the morning?? Yeah probably not. I'm the one who hates the idea of putting these thoughts up on the Internet in the first place and here I am lobbying people to flock to me for aid. It kind of reeks of hypocrisy. Backtracking... fantastic. I guess my AT Field is back up. That stands for Absolute Terror, people. And just because it was named by a man who probably doesn't have a full working knowledge of the English language, doesn't mean it's any less significant. Fear is what's holding us back from each other. Laziness is the evil within us that begs us not to change, or move off of the couch.
For all of my fancy words however, I can't come up with a single practical application of how to defeat either of them. So I'll end with a plea to the rest of humanity: Don't pull any punches with me. I expect you to and react in disbelief because of it. Phrase your words to me as harshly as you can so I'll know you mean them. In return I'll do my best to take the hit, and respond with understanding and compassion.
Okay, look. I love Lost. It's like the most mainstream thing I like. The other being video games. I've played games since I was 5, and lacking the wisdom of experience I played through all kinds of terrible, wretchedly made games bought from bargain bins and given to me as a substitute present for polo shirts and other superfluous items to a child. I really thought I was getting the better deal at the time. Now I'm 24. I don't mess around with no-name third party developers or movie/anime-licensed titles with no depth of gameplay. I thought I was done playing from the bottom of the barrel. But that show... it's so mysterious. Imagine what secrets might lurk behind that mediocre gameplay... I must know!!
2 Days Later: So, I have wasted a total sum of 8 or so hours playing Lost: Via Domus. A game known to be bad even before I got it, but the thirst for Lost clues and the fact that the creators for the show actually told the developers all of the island's plot twists. I naively assumed at first before playing that the game developers would use this secret knowledge to make the game fully part of Lost canon. That even if the gameplay was laughable and the graphics abysmal, I could at least take comfort in the fact that I would be discovering possibly useful facts about the show that might make something, anything make sense finally. Just a disclaimer, the desire for obtaining these secrets must be deeply, deeply ingrained within you before you should even attempt to think about playing this stupendously complete failure game.
It doesn't start out so bad. I mean, you get to relive the beginning of the series and save the main characters from the newly crashed Oceanic Flight 815. Without doing any preparatory research online, you might actually assume at this point that the game is somewhat engaging and non-linear. Surely open-ended exploration of the mysterious isle would be the imminent next step.
But before we get to how that fails utterly, let me tell you a little about who you are playing as. I don't know about you guys, but when I played Kingdom Hearts II my favorite character was Roxas. 'Some people' think Roxas is a 4-5 hour slap-in-the-face to pretty much everyone playing the game. He has barely anything to do with Disney, or for that matter, even the plot of the game. However you get to play as him for a ridiculous amount of time and watch annoying superfluous cinemas of him interacting with his unmemorable friends and doing menial, slightly enjoyable but ultimately annoying, mandatory subquests. Barely any of which has much to do with Sora. Who's Sora? Who really cares who he is, he's played out. The real hero (to me in my extended sarcastic mocking) is Roxas. He's all the best parts of Naruto and Bleach (those of course being the filler arcs where drama and character development are almost completely non-existent). Now, if only someone could make a game where I could be a filler character who no one cares about for the ENTIRE GAME!
Guess what. The fucking did. It's called Lost: Filler Arc, and it's the secret real title for this game. Did you want to play as one of the characters from that show you like? Didn't think so. That's why we made sure that he has absolutely nothing to do with anything on the show, and more than that, doesn't really even have a personality. He doesn't need one. He's too good for it. You play a man with a completely forgettable name who ironically has amnesia. Do plane crashes cause amnesia? Shut up. It's a magic island. Question nothing.
Your main character is very undistinctive-looking, and since you wake up in the forest with that famous 'dilating-pupil' shot, I assumed I was playing as the Sora of the show, Jack Shepard. The face looked very incorrect, but I hadn't expected much from these graphics to begin with. Oh but wait, then I fucking met Jack, looking much more like himself. But the fact that he's essentially an NPC with some terrible voice actor copy made it a much more saddening surprise. The next annoying surprise was when I found that only six of the original cast of the show (none of them main characters) provided voice talent. The rest of them (there are a lot more characters) are imitators who give a range of sub-par (Hurley) to 'DBZ Funimation dub' (Locke) levels of performances.
Now, gameplay. I almost put quotes around that word. Your main character, who turns out to be named Elliot Maslow is a photographer/journalist. Basically a rough archetype of the douchebag-y main character of Dead Rising. 'That game was pretty fun' you're thinking, 'what other gameplay features have they taken from that game?', you wonder.
To be fully blunt, pretty much none. Taking pictures with the camera can be kind of fun with all of the island's mysterious features, right? Well it might be, if you were allowed to keep any photos you take. Elliot has unlimited film, but only wants you to capture about 11-12 monuments throughout the entire game to unlock game secrets. However, you won't even enjoy those moments, as it was apparently deemed unnecessary to add the feature of being able to look at anything you photograph more than once. Therefore, if you just go around taking pictures of things you think look cool, or even things that you think are actually pretty important and want to look at later, Elliot will mutter 'No good', or other equally disparaging remarks because he's a professional photographer. He only wants very, very specific Polaroids which he apparently throws away immediately after taking them, trading them instead for the surely much better unlocking of the game's secrets.
I'll keep you in suspense as to what they are for now. First let's recount my waste of 8 hours. They start you out picking up water bottles and things you find on the beach and trading them to Locke for torches to enter a cave (which if you were confused by the concept of trading, are all given monetary values in American dollars). You don't need light to make it through the cave. It's ridiculous easy. What you need it for is the fact that if you ever stand in total darkness for more than like, a second, you will be instantaneously killed. By what? Are there graphics for this? I don't see why. Lost doesn't need to explain things concretely to you, neither should it's video game. You can curse the gods of fate and redo the entire last part again. Yeah you have to listen to Locke's horse of a voice actor again too.
As the game progresses, the camera does have one other function. Periodically, Elliot will remember a flashback (OMG just like the show right??) by having blurry memories of the past and making you capture a vital clue to the plot by taking a picture of it at just the right time with your camera. Logically, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and basically, it's not really very fun either. But Elliot's flashbacks turn out to eventually be possibly the only juicy tidbit of this game (albeit a far removed one), as they concern Alvar Hanso, founder of the Hanso Foundation. Hanso is said to be the Dharma Initiative's benefactor as was told in the Swan station's orientation video. However, he has never actually appeared on the show. Classic Lost, never give out any information that actually relates to the plot. Even so, it's not the worst or even the most irrelevant flashback the show has ever done.
Eventually you actually get some payoff and you can freely walk around Season 2's 'hatch' and mess with the alarm system to see that awesome neon map of the island Desmond's buddy drew on the blast doors. You even get to discover the never-before-seen giant magnetic turbine that's powering the Swan station (this reveals no secrets, but it looks pretty cool). Then you turn the thing off though, rendering the Swan station harmless and creating a massive plot hole. Don't assume that the game cares about this though. Other than about two or three fully explorable areas of familiar environments which the game merely warps you between, there aren't a lot of fun places to go. Actually the word fun shouldn't be in the previous sentence at all, because it's not fun and there's barely any places to go. You will find yourself back at the dumb beach a lot begging the other castaways to trust you even though you have no memory or proof of your identity. Sometimes you have to run across the forest terrain evading the black smoke with your trusty compass you find that reads 'Via Domus', which magically points the way home.
Wait. Let me re-qualify that sentence. 'Forest terrain' is code for 'one very small simplistically rendered forest map', 'evading the black smoke' means running into a tree hiding place, one of which is located every three feet. And finally 'trusty compass', which really seemed like it should be useful for getting through the map quickly, cannot be seen during gameplay ordinarily but can only be looked at for a few seconds at checkpoints, and even then it doesn't point the way home. It points to other checkpoints. So the path of a linear forest turns into a zig-zag confusion bonanza. Also whenever you have to hide from the evil black smoke (that's about every three seconds) in some trees, when you come back out it randomly loads from a different position and camera angle so you have no idea which way you were facing. That's how you annoy me for an hour and a half with as little programming as possible.
The rest of the game's elements never amount to anything. The electric-box puzzles kind of seemed out of Myst. They were a little creative, but the rest of the game's lack of fun made me cheat and look up the answers. The compass is never used outside of the aforementioned headache forest map, squandering a perfectly legitimate gameplay/plot device. The trading of items isn't even really needed except to buy a gun. A gun which, although you can aim like RE4 with a laser scope, doesn't need to be fired more than three times total throughout the whole game. Shoot a door. Shoot a guy. Shoot some dynamite. Those are your only opportunities. There are no enemies whatsoever in this entire game. Nonetheless they let you make an ass out of yourself and carry up to 150 extra bullets (It comes with 15, unless you go back and unload on something useless I don't think you can even empty the first clip). The rest of the plot isn't even worth mentioning. Eventually you make a deal with the Others to ruin the remaining validity of this filler plot by involving main characters in a final-never-happened-in-the-show-confrontation at the Black Rock. It's not even worth it to explain in detail how retardedly easy the final boss is. You just have to stand in a certain place and shoot the gun once.
After that, you have a minute and a half to get through a Pitfall-esque obstacle run to your boat that will require that you jump AND duck to avoid creative obstacles (tree trunks) in your path. When you win, (you will), John Locke and his terrible voice actor meet you at your boat. I was really, really hoping he'd blow it up as soon as Elliot got on. No such luck. But no matter. In my much-better ending, Elliot's useless compass points him away from the correct heading while leaving the island and he dies from that crazy time sickness Desmond got. If you watch his flashbacks, it appears he indirectly killed the only person who could have been his constant. OOOPS! SPOILERZZ!! I have now saved you all 8 consecutive hours of hate..
Should I reveal the unlockable game secrets too? After listening to my twat of a protagonist repeatedly complain that I wasn't taking pictures well (even of the things he wanted me to) for a good portion of the game, I returned to the start menu to see what secrets I had unlocked.
Original Art from the game's development. I think almost 10 of them! YEAH, I FUCKING SAID TEN. This is apparently Ubisoft tapping into this new "replay value" idea that newer games have now. I think after I beat the game, I spent upwards of ten full minutes mystified that I had actually considered the idea that these unlocks might not suck. Then I spent the next twenty taking a shower because I felt cheap, and the three hours that followed slowly comprehending how sad my life is that I actually made time to beat this game.
Yay uninstall function! With the proceeds from selling the game I was able to purchase a smart polo shirt.
P.S. Dear game developers, if it's still profitable to make another Lost game, (which I'm sure it is) I humbly suggest you abandon the whole 'play-the-show' idea and just make it a 2D fighting game like Guilty Gear. Honestly, at least two or three people get punched in almost every episode, it would be a cult classic instantly. Think of all the possible characters! You wouldn't even have to get the actors to provide voice talent, just use audio from the show for their tough talk before battles. And so many good mid-bosses: Rousseau, Ethan, Mikail, Tom, Michael, the list goes on...
Either that.... or actually render me the entire island and let me sandbox a little in that Dharma van with Hurley. Let me hunt some boar. Let me relive the actual plot I enjoyed and leave easter eggs scattered everywhere rather than an elaborate shit-in-my-mouth plot that barely makes sense. That is all.
I think i get bored too easily. but i can't help. so, here i am, omaha, home, getting bored!
