A Window, A Light...

..today. Not that it was awful or anything, since it wasn't. Just... unimpressive. Maybe seeds from today will improve tomorrow. I guess there are worse things to hope for.

The deck prototype I worked on failed pretty awfully. It's still a seed of a clever idea, but it's not really anything close to good in its current incarnation. I slapped together something else, and I don't really like it. It's a quick win in theory, but I feel it has a glass jaw.

I've gotten home and it's pretty late, so I don't feel like I've got any time for any meaningful writing. Anything I put down would just be a token to appease my desire to write daily, but I'll probably do it to keep writing something consistently.

And tomorrow's Thursday, which is my easiest day. Plus, I've got some discounted cards coming in the mail, and I think I'm supposed to get my yearbook in (which leads to my driver's license, and I'm not sure if that's a story I've told yet here but that really is a whole different issue).

Have I said anything about Disney buying Marvel. I know it's old news, but I like to rehash that shit a bit because, hey, with new stuff happening every day, it's easy to forget something like that. Or maybe just easy for me. Anyway. There are people that are bent out of shape and people that are enthusiastic (and we geeks are usually pretty negative as a matter of course but...), then there are people like me who instantly realized that Wolverine can now fight along side Sora or whatever in Kingdom Hearts 3: Infinite Cash Franchise. I make a joke like that because KH does pretty much plant a money tree as it's basically just weird Disney/Square-Enix fan-fiction, but people eat it up. But hey, there's nothing wrong with fan-fiction in principle, and the games arn't too bad, so go crazy, Square.

If you like KH, don't tell me you're not dying to see Nightcrawler and Cyclops fighting with Squall, Cloud, and fucking Donald Duck. But seriously, our media has really become myth, and that is the only way this shit could ever happen. And that is something I am dying to research now that I've written down. It is never going to get out of my head.

There's not much to say about console rpgs, in general. They seem like a weird phenomenon, but in reality, they're a fairly obviously genre when you think about the desires of any general gaming audience.

As I was inching towards consciousness this morning, my dream skewed strangely when suddenly I was reading a Penny Arcade front page. Tycho opined thusly:

"Final Fantasy 6 is a game that we can characterize as being, perhaps, several generations behind. It was, generally speaking, the product of an era right before games really took off with the Playstation, which brought us Final Fantasy 7.

Final Fantasy 7 had several advantages over 6. More powerful graphics and a more unified storyline for example. Its iconic character, Cloud, was perhaps not more compelling then the cast of characters from 6, but his brooding image certainly tended to have more screen time. We over at Penny Arcade studios had recently replayed both 6 and 7 - something that Gabe had expressed dislike of in the same method that an animal might express dislike of having its paw caught and mangled in a terrible iron trap. Perhaps the pacing of these things never appealed to him.

Final Fantasy 6, or FF3 in the US at its release (as any console partisan will tell you), was an amazing example of what an rpg could be despite it being hindered by its processing capabilities - just like FF7 never became the MMO that it maybe should have been. Does FF6 show us where to go in future games? We're still thinking it over. To a certain degree, the point is moot. We likely do not have the power to enforce our will over giants like Square-Enix but, well, they have released Dissidia, so they have recognized the existence of these older games in their ever-expanding narrative."

I think that is a weird thing to dream.
I have just written Penny Arcade opinion column fan-fiction that came to me in a dream about console RPG franchises.
In other news, I am desperately torn between if I should play FFXI until dinner tonight or if I should go to the Magic draft. Neither is going to be the highlight of my day, but either would last for several hours. It's a tough call. I think my desire to level my character finally and my desire to save additional monies is going to win out over my desire for new cards, great though that desire to aquire is.