Uncle Tim

Tomorrow marks the one=year anniversary of the day that my Uncle Tim left this world.  He was a great guy and an awesome gamer.

On paper, he married into the family: he and my aunt tied the knot in 1996.  As far as I’m concerned, he was family blood.

It’s been a tough year without him.  Holidays ofcourse are a living hell, but he was my friend and that makes it especially hard.  I can’t tell him about the awesome new games that have come out, I can’t race go-karts with him anymore at Adventure Landing, and I can’t go to turkey shoots with him during the holidays.  It makes me sad and angry.

Angrier still because he died due to corporate irresponsibility, and the company he worked for receive a slap on the wrist by OSHA and little else.  While I will gladly tell the whole story to anyone who will listen in reality (so to speak), I’d rather not give any permanence to it even on this insignificant blog: I wouldn’t put it past the piles of talking excrement and bile that run the construction company that employed my uncle to take me and my family to court for smearing their ill-gotten good name.  Just know that my uncle’s death taught me a valuable lesson: there is no justice in this world, and the best we can hope for is a sad imitation of revenge.

Alas, the real issue here is that I don’t have my Uncle Tim anymore.  It doesn’t matter that I’m angry or that the very people who caused his death are wiping their butts with hundred-dollar bills right now: my Uncle Tim is gone.  I miss him and I want him back.

The last video game we played together was Halo 3.  I had just gotten my Xbox 360 shortly after Christmas.  He had had one for a while.

The game we played together the most has got to be Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64.  Even though we had not played it in years, we spent so much time playing it together that I doubt we had played any game more.

His favorite game was Donkey Kong.  He also was addicted to Bejeweled for some time.

One time, he came home and had just bought a new car–well, new to him and my aunt anyway.  It was a big old car–a Chrysler–and it really did look like something that a pimp would drive.  So I immediately christened it the Pimpmobile, and him Big Pimp Daddy.  Big Pimp Daddy was eventually shortened to Big Daddy; my little brother and I called him that.  He acted like it annoyed him, but he always smiled when we teasingly called out “Love ya Big Daddy!” as he left the house.

Love ya Big Daddy.

I’ll go back to writing about games tomorrow or the next day, but I wanted to write this today.

My New Year’s Resolution for 2009

Can I get personal for a moment?

I don’t want to be doing what I do to earn my keep for the rest of my life.  I want to be doing something creative, something artistic, something a bit more fulfilling than public service.  For some people, public service is fulfilling; not so for me.

I majored in English in college because, well, it’s what I was good at it and I wanted to write novels.  I had no idea on how to pursue professional novel writing career, and when I found out later in my college years I suffered the disillusion that I had the stuff to do it, that I was talented enough to be a best-selling author right out of the gate.

Boy was I wrong.  I wrote a novel (not a very good one; in fact, it’s rather bad) and had my query letter turned down by five agents.  That’s right.  My query.  So I kind of gave up on that.  I came to miss it, and started writing again.  Not intensely, but every once in a while.  This blog is part of my writing habits.  I focus now (or try to, anyway) on craft and not just story-telling.  I try to be more aware of how I’m writing.  It’s all well and good to write for yourself, but you should not write in a bubble–there is also something to be said for dropping pretension.  You see, a good deal of young writers tend to try and present themselves as worldly, sophisticated, literary types when in truth they are basement-dwelling geeks (I’m one of those–check out some of the stuff I wrote on my old blog before I figured out that it was games I knew best, so games would be the focus of what I wrote).

Recently, I’ve been thinking of pursuing a career as a game designer, and I will be starting another Bachelor’s degree hoping to learn how to do that.  That does not mean that I want to forsake writing (I do kind of have a blog you know).  I would not mind being known as a game designer and a writer.

So I’m going to school for game design, but what about this writing thing?  Simple: next year, I’m going to write another novel.

I’ll be planning/outlining it this month, and starting in January, I’m going for 10,000 words a month.  Hopefully by this time next year, I will be nearly done with a 120,000 word manuscript.  And hopefully by 2010, I will be able to call myself a novelist.

Wish me luck, I guess.

Turkey…and STREET FIGHTER II! And “Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down!”

I hope my readers (all two or three of them) had a great Thanksgiving.  If you’re not from the States, then I just plain hope you had a great day today.  While the jaded and cynical part of me says that the reasons behind observing Thanksgiving have more to do with the economy than actually, you know, giving thanks, the kid inside of me says that it would be really awesome if the whole world sat aside one day to rest, reconnect with friends and family, eat lots of food, and think about all the great things that have happened to us in the past year.

Such as Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.  First of all, I don’t think that title is long enough.  Capcom should have tacked on “old school revival” there at the end.  Then, the acronym could be SSF2THDROSR; the greatest acronym ever.

I have, and always will, suck at fighting games, but since I grew up in the nineties I loved Street Fighter II (despite my suckiness).  Many a fourth-grade lunch period was spent arguing over which franchise was superior: Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.  While I gladly concede that MK had a better story and a more fully-realized fantasy world, SF always had more depth and complexity when it came to mechanics; of course, in the fourth grade, what I said was more like “But all the guys in Street Fighter II, have like more moves and stuff!”  Ah, childhood innocence.

My friends all preferred MK, mostly because they had…issues…involving violence.  You see, while I was the glasses-wearing fat geek, all of my “friends” were the athletic types from rich families; in other words, bullies with an entitlement complex and sociopath tendencies.  Of course they liked MK better: you could rip out somebody’s spine in it!  You could totally set somebody on fire.  Sure, every character had the same basic move set–right down to how those basic moves worked–but it had BUCKETS OF BLOOD!  BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD!

I wonder what my friends are up to now?  I wonder how many of them needed counseling, are now abusive boyfriends/husbands, or finally came to peace with whatever demons they had wrestling inside of them.

I don’t know why I just told that story, except to say that SSF2THDROSR (I’m calling it that whether Capcom wants me to or not) is, for me, more of a trip down memory lane than Mega Man 9.  It brought back all those birthday parties at the skating rink, where my fat ass was stuck playing video games because I couldn’t skate.  It brought back one of my friends trying to convince me that Ryu was a “Shotokan ninja,” though his mastery of ninjitsu was not mentioned anywhere in the manual, the short-lived comics series, any video game magazine, or anywhere.  It brought back not-so-fond memories of CPU opponents being mind-reading machines that never, ever allowed for one single mistake (Easy just means you won’t be beaten quickly).  It’s all awesome, and I highly recommend this title, especially if you’re too young to remember the first time SF2 came around.

I do have to find fault with Capcom calling versus mode “multiplayer” however.  Seriously Capcom?  Multiplayer?  This is a one-on-one fighting game; it’s VERSUS MODE OR NOTHING.

Anyway, when I wasn’t playing SSF2THDROSR or Fallout 3, I was eating and watching TV.  First of all, Cartoon Network pulled off the greatest Rick Roll ever at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  If you missed it, you can find a video here.  Second of all, I saw Jingle All the Way for, like, the zillionth time.  Really.  During the Holiday season at my house, that movie is weekly–sometimes daily–viewing.  I love it.  It’s not a good movie, not even a little, but it’s one of my favorite holiday movies simply because it’s so bizarre.  I mean, it seems like your typical holiday affair, but when you really let it sink in, you realize that it takes place in some alternate reality where the absurd is not just everyday, but people don’t even freaking notice it.  It’s not something easily described by words; if you’ve never seen it, please see it at least once (without the MST3K riff tracks!).

Well, I will not be getting up at 3 AM to hunt down sweet Black Friday deals.  If I want a GPS navigator bad enough, I’ll pony up the $10 I would save by standing in line for three hours, and all the video game deals are for stuff I either already have or don’t want, even at AMAZING DISCOUNTS!  So the plan for tonight is to play Left 4 Dead until my eyes bleed.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Michael Crichton finishes his best work ever, and I’m sad.

Michael Crichton, the man who gave us one of the best sci-fi books ever and made dinosaurs even more awesome all at once, passed away yesterday.

A statement from his family mentions that he suffered a long and private battle with cancer, but doesn’t necessarily link the cancer to his death (though I’m sure they are related).  Crichton was 66 years old.

I’m a bit down hearing this.  Crichton was my first favorite author.  I remember reading Jurassic Park back in the fifth grade and getting all wrapped up in it, as if I climbed inside the book.  I went on to being a Crichton fan up until college, when I found his work starting to get a little redundant–still well-written and fun, but redundant.

The last Crichton book I read was Prey, a thriller about nanomachines that became self-aware and bent on world domination.  His final novel is yet to come: it was supposed to be released on December 2, but will now be pushed back (according to his Wikipedia page).

Thank you, Mr. Crichton, for writing some of the best books of my childhood and teen years: Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Rising Sun, Timeline, and Prey.  I wish your family well and congratulate on a life well-lived.

Uh…where’s my game?

I had quite the facepalm experience today.

I had the day off and had nothing to do.  No housework, no yard work, no de-cluttering (which I finished last weekend); I had only sweet and glorious free time.  Therefore, I thought that it would be fun to play some Oblivion.  I hadn’t played it in quite a while, and with Fallout 3 just around the corner, Bethesda was on my mind.

So I went to my games shelf and looked for it.  It was not there.

That’s when I started to panic.  Almost immediately, I knew what had happened to this game, this greatest of all single-player RPGs.  You see, as part of my de-cluttering (and de-Wii-ing) of my pad, I had given the Nintendo Wii to my hyperactive twelve-year old little bro (he loves it) and took a stack of dust-coated games into my local Gamestop to trade in.

After checking my DVDs (more out of denial than hope), I accepted the sad truth: Oblivion had found its way into that stack, and that incredible game was sitting on the shelf at Gamestop, with one of those bright yellow stickers on it…

Needless to say, I made an emergency run to Gamestop.  Thank goodness I was paid yesterday; I didn’t get my copy back (I ended up with one with a “Platinum Hits” motif on the box) but I did get the game back, and that’s all that matters.

The funny thing is that back when I had an X-Box, I (of course) had Morrowind.  I thought I had grown tired of it and traded it in; a couple of months later, I kicked myself all the way back to Gamestop to re-purchase it.

Oh, the money I could have saved…