the Gaming Post

My main game right now is Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Now, I'm one of the many addicts of this franchise, and I know this. Heck, I bought a PSP for the sole purpose of playing this game. Dissidia Final Fantasy was just a nice coincidence. What I'm loving about KH:BBS is the fact that I don't have to play as Sora or Roxas! There are adult characters! RAD.

That said, my addiction to the franchise is forcing me to take forever to actually finish the game. I'm doing all the side quest things, getting all the weapons and abilities. Y'know the drill. I'm unsure why I bother, though, especially when I'm rewarded with a weapon that looks like the most epic sundae ever. Not that effective, either, as you probably guessed.

Besides that, I've also been playing Soul Calibur 2 casually. One of my roommates brought his Game Cube down, so we fight it out every now and again. Fortunately we're evenly matched, between my frantic button mashing and his attempts to correctly input combo sequences. As a note: long combos tend to not work when your opponent is flailing beside you.

I've also become a big time mobile gamer, now that I've got an iPod Touch and an Android at hand (no pun intended, sorry). While Angry Birds is a paid app on the iPod, it's free on Android. I've got both, but I've been playing the holiday editions on my HTC quite a lot, especially the Halloween one.

On the iPod I'm mostly playing Cut the Rope, and adorably rad and addictive game that's super easy to pick up. I had beaten it once already, but updating the firmware on my iPod erased all that data, so I've been working through it again. No complaints, though. I live to see Omnom make his candy quota.

Back to my Droid. Remember my Kingdom Hearts addiction? Guess what. I installed a Gameboy Advance emulator on my Desire Z, so now I'm playing through KH:Chain of Memories for real. Previously I just wussed out and bought the two volume manga to get me up to speed before playing KH:358/2 Days. Gotta love the power of Androids!

Finally, but not on the mobile gaming front, I'm waiting on Battle Engine Aquila to arrive in my mailbox. It's an obscure Playstation 2/XBox/PC game that I adore above all others. I had it for XBox previously, but my console and games were stolen a year or so back. Figured it was time to fork out for a PS2 copy, a whole $8 including shipping. Yah, really breaking into my savings, eh?
photos by: Square Enix & Disney, Namco, Rovio, Chillingo, and Atari.

Still Alive, I Swear

A couple weeks ago, Bell bought out my contract and upgraded me to a smarphone plan, complete with smartphone. What does this mean? It means that I'm not the very proud (and slightly giddy) owner of an HTC Desire Z! It does everything a phone should do and then some; it even has a GAMEBOY EMULATOR, which means I've been using it as a Gameboy more than I've been using it as a phone. Heh.

Other happenings in the world of me? It's officially reading week now, so I don't have classes next week. So instead of shuffling around here in the snow, I'm heading down to Mexico for a few days to get one of those things they call a tan, on these things called "beaches" that are covered in sand. They don't even have snow, why do they need sand? Huh.

photos by HTC and me.

I Still Believe

Making Connections - Molly Millions & Quorra

Being a university student with some background in Literature and focusing on Culture Studies, I'm accustomed to making connections between and among texts. For instance, the character of Molly Millions in Gibson's novel Neuromancer. In his vision of the cyberpunk future, she is the definition of a femme fatale, a former prostitute turned "Razorgirl," a cyber-samurai if you will.

Of course, the only representation of Molly is on the cover of the novel, where we only see her face. The descriptions in the various books she appears in, though, have allowed fans to conjure a likeness that is more-or-less accepted.  Anyway, Neuromancer is one of those novels that influenced a great many things. Heck, it included the internet before it even existed (Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" himself).

Enter the world of Tron, a community existing within a computer system. The parallels between the Tron franchise and classic cyberpunk are quite apparent. I'd like to look at the character of Quorra, though: she's the Molly Millions of the film. Her appearance is similar, her fighting skills are similar, and she, too, is taught amidst an Asian-inspired aesthetic. Huh.


art by deadinsane, Neuromancer cover art (c) Ace 1984, Tron: Legacy movie still (c) Walt Disney Pictures

Global Climate Change

This is gonna be a short one, I think, though I have the potential to ramble on for quite a while. It's about climate change. But it's not about whether it's real or not. I don't care about that right now. I mean, I'm writing this beside a window that gives me a clear view of the foot of fresh snow outside (which I love, by the way. Not complaining about it yet!).

So what, then, am I wanting to say? This: there are mummified trees in the Arctic Circle. Scratch that, mummified forests. The logical conclusion is that at one time there were forests up there, meaning no ice. We're talking big trees, here, so the climate was right for large-scale plant growth for a substantial period of time.

Really, that's all I wanted to say. Yah, the polar ice is melting, and the slight increases in temperature and global sea level are wreaking some havoc with ecosystems and weather fronts, but who's to say that's unnatural now? A little threatening to us land mammals, sure. But if there were Arctic forests before, why not again?

photo by IngoEs