Down in the Hole

So check out this song from M.I.A.:



Very cool. I love M.I.A., I picked up Kala last January and loved it immediately. This song is a cover of a Tom Waits song, five different versions of the song were used as the theme for the HBO show The Wire, which I haven't seen but have heard incredible things about. Anyway just enjoy it.

On an unrelated but obligatory election note, I must say I'm quite relieved that Obama won (actually I'm relieved McCain lost, since I'm not a huge Obama fan--I don't dislike him but I'd much have preferred a different candidate).
But here's the facts: America didn't choose change. Three gay marriage bans passed last night, including Proposition 8 in California, probably the single most important vote for gay rights in history, and things are looking pretty bleak. While I'm proud of my country for refusing another four years of regressivism, it's not enough. Civil rights took a huge hit last night.

Regarding an early favorite

When I was a kid one of my favorite video games was Harvest Moon 64. It's a very simple game: you inherit an empty farm and have to make it successful and functional. The mechanics are very simple. You can also marry one of the girls in the neighboring town and eventually have a kid. It's easy on the surface, but there is a lot to do and it's infinitely replayable. It's possible to befriend every citizen of the town, and you can put additions onto your home.

Farming consists of hoeing a plot, nine squares by nine squares, and planting seeds. Every day you have to water each square and eventually the plants will mature and you can sell the crop to make money. You can also raise chickens, cows, and sheep for eggs, milk and wool respectively. If you work too hard in a day, you will eventually pass out. There's too much to do to describe it in detail but it's an amazing game. Perhaps not for everyone but really really fun.

The reason for writing this is because this weekend I purchased Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness for Nintendo DS and man, is it disappointing. All the fun, simple stuff has been made needlessly complex, and certain gameplay elements are just stupid and annoying. For some reason, instead of just watering your crops everyday, they have a certain threshold for both sun and water needed in order to mature. If they get too much water, they can even die. Also, your stamina goes down so fast that often you can't get in as much in one day as you want. In Harvest Moon 64 it was never impossible to tend to up to maybe six or seven plots and still be able to go out and chop wood, gather wild fruit, and talk to most town citizens. In Island of Happiness you're lucky to be able to water two plots and do any other chores, and the wood chopping system is needlessly stupid.

Another problem is the tools. In all Harvest Moon games you have five tools: the hoe, the axe, the hammer, the sickle, and the watering can. In Harvest Moon 64, repeated use of each tool will cause it to become Silver and then Gold, meaning it will have a larger area of effect or be stronger: for example, the Gold Watering can can water a 9x9 square in one use, rather than having to water each individual square by itself, and the Golden Axe can cut a tree stump in one swing rather than the typical six. In Island of Happiness, however, you have to attach certain things called "Wonderfuls" to your tools to change their function. Wonderfuls, though, can only be obtained late into the first year at the earliest, whereas in 64 you could start getting Silver tools as early as the third or fourth day. This means that it is much more difficult to get cropping started and completed during the incredibly vital first three seasons.

Anyway, the whole point is that a working formula doesn't need to be messed with. There are no glaring flaws in Harvest Moon 64, other than that time essentially stops after six or seven years, and there's no point in continuing. I don't think any of the changes in Island of Happiness are improvements. I've owned a few Harvest Moon titles between 64 and IoH, and it's irritating to see the trend they've been following away from 64.

Bottom line: play Harvest Moon 64. So much fun.

In defense of Indy IV

So I went home this weekend. It was homecoming at my high school, so a lot of my friends were going to be home. Also my boss at my old job was going out of town, it's a small video rental store where only one person works at a time. Since it was homecoming, his regular employees didn't want to work very much, and he wasn't going to be there to cover the open shifts, so he asked me to work a bit, which I happily agreed to since it's the easiest job ever. Friday night, I saw the DVD for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sitting right next to me behind the counter. Obviously I put it in. Now I've already seen it, I saw it at the theater, and I didn't dislike it. I thought the aliens were maybe a little out of place, but no biggie. It was a fun adventure which is really all I expect from Indy. Watching it a second time, though, I decided it was actually much better than I had originally thought. It pretty much follows the formula of Raiders and Last Crusade, ignoring Temple of Doom because that movie sucks so bad I don't want to even think about it.

Anyway, here's what happens in an Indy movie: Indy gets roped into chasing down some artifact (the MacGuffin, if you will), follows it to some legendary ancient location, and discovers the legends about said place/artifact are true. Following this formula, what other legends should have been used? Now obviously there are SOME other choices, but there really aren't any that are as interesting as the Central/South American indians, are there? They might have chosen something from the bible again, but I'm not sour about them trying something different. And if you choose those civilizations, what is the most interesting legend? Definitely aliens (think 2012). I suppose they could have thrown in something about Quetzacoatl or something like that, but first of all lots of people might not know who that is, and there really aren't any interesting things that Quetzacoatl does. Like, the Judeo-Christian god at least has those interesting things like the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, whose supernatural elements shown by Indiana Jones aren't really in the bible, are still intriguing, mysterious legends. Another thing that Kingdom suffers from is the lack of Nazis, but when you wait 20 years to make a movie some updating is required. If it's a tradeoff from Nazis to Cate Blanchett, I'm pretty much down with that. And also, Shia LaBeouf? Not a huge fan, but he played his part ably.

Now just don't get me started on Speed Racer, because that movie is so, so awesome and underrated that it makes me angry just thinking about how it gets made fun of.

PostSecret

I went to the PostSecret event last Thursday. It was really cool, very interesting. Above is my friend Kelly, Frank Warren (the PostSecret guy), me, and my friend Siri. We all bought books and got them signed. So that's my story.