Final Fantasy Falls Short with All The Bravest…

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I stumbled across this game late last night thinking it might be kind of cool, but it turns out … it’s not.

The idea is simple enough – it’s just the heroes and monsters from the Final Fantasy series fighting and the more you play, the more characters you can unlock to put in your party. Except that you’re not really fighting in the sense that you’ve grown to expect from the various games in the series. To “fight,” you simply swipe the character and he does his attack action, then gets back in line to wait his turn again.

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That’s all that everybody does, so it’s literally the equivalent of holding down the A button until the battle is over and XP is awarded.

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The whole game is basically just a ploy to get you to buy DLC, except that even that is random and in the two $0.99 purchases that I made, I got two random characters from games that I’ve never played. Awesome.

I get that the game can’t be a little more complicated without being a lot more complicated – I would’ve loved to see a setup where I could build a party from FFIV and FFVI characters and then pit them against the four elemental fiends from the first game – that would be cool, and I think if the game auto-leveled them appropriately on the spot you could still get a balanced fight out of all of the characters.

But I want to control their actual actions, too. In this game, every character is one hit and they’re out, which is fine for a throwaway game but the Final Fantasy series is loaded with rich characters and diverse abilities – to whittle these guys down to a single move that defines what they do is insulting to the series that created them.

This could’ve been a neat game with a whole lot of nostalgia factor, but instead it’s just blatant cash grab for in-app purchases where the creative process both begins and ends at the Premium Character Shop. 🙁

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an evolution of identity

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musicI used to be WAY into music when I was younger, but now I’m kind of not.

I mean, I still listen to music in the car or whatever … it’s just that my passion for music doesn’t define me like it used to back when I was a teenager.

Over the weekend we went over to Epcot for the Food & Wine Festival and one of the features besides all of the food and drink are the random bands of yesteryear that they bring in to play throughout the month and a half that the festival runs. Even though a lot of the names used to be fairly popular, it’s never really been a big draw for me because it’s no secret when they list “Night Ranger – known for their song Sister Christian” in the program, that’s pretty much the only song that the group is known for…

…or at least the only one that anybody remembers anymore, anyways!

Case in point – a few years ago, we happened to be doing Food & Wine when Night Ranger was playing, and although it was kind of neat to be walking by when they were going into the power ballad that is Sister Christian, it’s not like I exactly stopped to take in the rest of their set, either.

So this year when we made an impromptu decision to do Food & Wine on Saturday after spending a few hours at one of the water parks, I picked up a guide book and sure enough, Sister Hazel was performing that night. I’ve always liked Sister Hazel, particularly after seeing them in concert while I was in college, and although they’ve been playing Food & Wine for a while now, I’ve never gotten a chance to see them just because we never seemed to go over during their three-day stretch of the festival.

I thought it might be cool, after having first seeing them live circa 2001 in the thriving metropolis that is Big Rapids, Michigan, but after not even half a dozen songs, I just wasn’t feeling it.

And it was weird because here after all of this time kind of mocking groups that settle on playing theme park gigs because they’re kind of yesterday’s news, here I was actually wishing that they’d just play that one song that they were famous for, too!

You know it’s not good when the singer actually introduces their next song as, “Now we’d like to play you one of our new songs … so if you could not leave and go back to eating and drinking for a while, we’d really appreciate it!” 😯

I hung around in the back for a few songs and we danced a little with the baby, who seemed to be more into the colored lights than the loud music, and then we proceeded on down our path to more desserts and drinks and by the time we had reached the Germany pavilion, the ambient music pretty much drowned out the band that we had left behind, anyways.

And the more I think about it, I guess that’s sort of what’s happened to me and music in the last decade or so, too.

Music used to be my everything – I wore the t-shirts and went to countless rock concerts, I had hundreds of CDs and posters on the walls, and for a while there I was even under the fun, little delusion that I could actually be a rock and roll star myself! But then it slowly started to fade away as I got more into writing, and publishing on the ‘net, and video games made a resurgence in my life, and then I moved to Florida and found me a wife and a family, and now when I look back at those live shows that I used to blow so much money on … I don’t really miss ’em all that much.

Every now and then when I hear that so-and-so artist is coming to town, I think for a moment whether maybe it would be fun and we should get tickets to go, but I just don’t have the drive that I used to, and then I find that tickets are way more expensive than they were back in the day, and frankly there are just so many other ways at this point that I’d rather spend my time and money.

It’s nothing against music, of course. Music served to give me one of my first identities during those teenage years when you’ll stop at nothing just to be you, and to figure out what that is, and for a while there, I was the long-haired, tie-dye wearing hippie guy who had way too many black light posters for the minuscule amount of weed that he realistically smoked and who lived through his guitar and emulating his rock heroes.

Now I’ve moved on and it’s a little weird to revisit that and find that I’m not nearly as into it as I used to be.

Which is strange in its own way when you consider how ridiculously nostalgic I am and you wonder why it doesn’t really carry over to music as much as it did some of the earlier stuff, but that’s another thought train for another day!  8)

Dream Journal : Driving the School Bus…

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So as the title implies, I was a school bus driver, apparently.

It actually wasn’t all that bad except that the bus I had to drive was a piece of crap and the brakes didn’t work very well.

Everything went smooth picking the kiddies up, but when I showed up at the school, something was going down and there was no place for me to park in the front parking lot, so after some careful deliberation I ended up driving my bus up onto the sidewalk so that the kids could just walk inside and avoid all of the random, unexplained chaos that was happening outside!

Just before I was about to open the door, though, I got a call from the principal and he said to hold the kids on the bus because he needed to bust two kids in the back for possession of marijuana. Or so he said because when he and a teacher came out to board the bus, he kind of got the crap beaten out of him by a couple of girls that were fighting near the front of the bus. I mean, they were fine for me, but when I saw him struggling to pull these girls off, suddenly his shirt was all bloody and it looked like he’d gone through hell!

The girls weren’t looking much better…

Anyways, once the drama had departed, I hit the button to open the doors for the rest of the kids and was waving goodbye as they got off when I noticed that the scenery around us seemed to be changing … in that my stupid bus wasn’t staying in one place despite the brakes being firmly engaged! Most of the kids managed to just roll with it (pun intended) and we got all of the kids off within a few feet of the school, so that was close enough.

On my way back to the bus garage, all I could think about was yelling at the garage guys for giving me an improperly maintained school bus.

Exciting stuff! 😉

movie thoughts … Transformers: Age of Extinction

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MV5BMjEwNTg1MTA5Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTg2OTM4MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_Good god, was this thing awful.

I mean, for what it’s worth, we both agreed that it was going to be terrible before we even pushed play, so I guess in that way it met expectations.

Still, if the universe needed a sign that it’s time to stop making Transformers movies, it should be pretty safe to say that Age of Extinction can go ahead and be that sign…

I mean, seriously – by mid-movie I was actually kind of rooting for the end of the Transformers as a race, until they revealed their actual “plot” and it just became one long groan that lasted the entire rest of the movie.

When it comes down to it, I think that by far the biggest problem with this franchise is that the writing is incredibly lazy. It bugged me way back to the second one where the title was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and they actually had a character named The Fallen. Seriously?! Because up until that reveal, it was actually kind of a bad ass title, and then you had to go cheapen it all up … was the Transformer naming guy sick that week and an intern was just pressured into coming up with something on the spot???

It’s that same laziness that in Transformers 4 brought us Transformium  … because the writers of a billion dollar franchise couldn’t be tasked with making up a name for the crap that makes up these things in the first place. I guess they figured it didn’t really matter because all of the new, human-made Transformers all looked like shit while they were “transforming” because they were just blobs of metal instead of actual parts moving around, anyways.

That said, the casting is equally awful in this movie, starting with “the new star” … and don’t get me wrong because I like Mark Wahlberg in a lot of his movies, but he just seems so out of place in this movie, I could’ve sworn that there were times that Sara could probably hear my eyes rolling during the movie. The action shots, the stupid lines, “I think we found a Transformer!”, the fact that never before have we really seen humans standing a chance against these things, and yet now Mark Wahlberg just picks up a Transformer gun and starts blasting them like he’s the Last Action Hero!

At least the other movies all showcased big scenes of robot boxing that could distract us from the ridiculousness of the actual plots, but this movie was hanging on by a thread and honestly the action scenes that we got really weren’t all that great.

Plus, how come nobody ever learns in this franchise?! Seriously, the only reference to the previous movies is how Chicago got all fucked up and we must never forget and these robot aliens are our enemies, yet the real plot has the government siding with evil robots to kill the good robots after the good robots defeated the evil robots in the last siege, and by the way, now we’re also going to try to make some new – probably evil – robots of our own?!

I know that this is fiction, but good fiction is good because the story is actually plausible. The plot for Transformers 4 was just stupid.

And yes, for what it’s worth, I do think that it hurts the franchise that Shia LaBeouf wasn’t in this movie. It was weird watching a Transformers movie without him and Megan Fox, and not just because Marky Mark was horrible as a replacement. The story seemed so forced to not even acknowledge anything from its own past – like there wasn’t some point where the Transformers would be sitting around and someone would go, “Hey, I wonder how Sam is doing … you know, the guy who helped us and who we swore to protect for the last how many years? The human who was kind of Optimus’ BFF? Whatever happened to that guy???”

They said that this wasn’t supposed to be a reboot, but save for a forgetful Optimus and Bumblebee, it pretty much was. New human actors – all of them, new Transformers that were terrible – sorry, but John Goodman was a lousy giant robot, a plot that forgets just enough of the past movies to make the same stupid mistakes all over again … and giant robots fighting.

I mean, I probably rolled my eyes at that scene more than any other, but Optimus Prime riding a Dinobot was probably the most worthwhile image in the entire movie. And they had already given it to us in the trailer.

I laughed afterwards when the TV jumped back to the menu after it finally ended and I saw that Transformers 4 had an 18% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It kind of makes me glad that I wasn’t more of a Transformers fan growing up or my nostalgia would be hurting pretty bad right now…

Three Positive Things for the Week of 9/28

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Children’s Book #2???!
Still just an inkling at this point, but I started jotting a couple of random ideas down for the next awesome kids book, and even though it’s a bit in a different direction than I was thinking when we did the first alphabet book a year and a half ago, I think it might be kinda cool!

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping…
This seems creepy even though I’m his Dad … which seems weird typing even 6 months in! … but I’ve noticed lately that I have kind of a habit of peeking into Christopher’s room when he’s sleeping either at night or during the day to check in on him, and it makes me feel kind of good. 😉

Christmastime is Nearing!
Lastly, managed to lock down a few details for when my sister and her family will be coming to visit for Christmas, and don’t tell Madelyn because I think it’s going to be a surprise, but we’re going to spend a couple of days over at Disney World while they’re here! One night we’re going to Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, which is something that Sara and I haven’t done yet, either, we’ve got a nice room booked at Kidani Village using our brand new DVC points, and I just think that the whole thing is going to be a lot of fun and a very well-deserved holiday vacation.

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Creator Rights

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I don’t understand how a creator can hold so much disregard for the rights of a fellow creator.

I stumbled across a weird, little rant on Facebook earlier today that went something like this:

  • Guy raves about a picture that photographer created.
  • Guy brings picture into Photoshop and “enhances” said picture.
  • Guy presents enhanced picture to photographer as “a gift.”
  • Photographer asks that guy not make changes to his pictures.
  • Guy gets his feelings hurt over his gift being rejected and decides that they can’t be Internet friends anymore.

There are different types of creators – some are very open to collaboration and embellishment, whereas others are more insular and prefer to create their art by themselves.

I myself certainly fall into that latter category. I really haven’t done very many collaborative works, and frankly if somebody took it upon themselves to improve my work without my consent, I’d be pretty offended by that, even if the gesture was done benevolently. That’s just who I am and how my creative process works – the things that I write are a reflection of who I am, and it just wouldn’t feel right for me to open up the canvas to allow most others to free form in my space.

But that’s just me, and there are tons of other artists who thrive in an openly creative space where people are constantly tweaking and improving each other’s works, adding layers upon layers of creativity as they build to the final work. Almost every major motion picture, TV show, radio show, and many of our favorite websites are collaborative works and they’d never work if only a single creative person held the reins for the entire process.

The thing is, everybody who works in those spaces has made a conscious decision to create like that. It’s not something that’s sprung upon them halfway through the season when suddenly they start getting draft edits back from the other 30 writers on staff. They all know what they’re getting into right off the bat because it takes a certain kind of person to create in that manner.

And neither way is wrong – some people just work differently than others, so while you may prefer working on a team with half a dozen other creatives, when I write the things that I write I prefer to go it alone. But I think that sometimes it’s difficult for those in the collaboration camp to remember that.

To give you an example – if I were to invite you over for tea, and when I went into the bathroom, you took it upon yourself to start rearranging the furniture in my house, chances are I’d have select words for you  when I came back! And it doesn’t matter if you’re a master at Feng Shui and your furniture is immaculately arranged in your own home – the point is that it’s inappropriate to come in and rearrange the furniture in someone else’s house without being asked to do so.

Art is the same way. By all means, if you’re the collaborative type and they’re the collaborative type, you should look into ways that the both of you can work together to improve each other’s work beyond what you’re capable of doing yourselves! But you’ve got to ask first because until you know otherwise, you have to respect that copyright belongs to the person who created that work and that you have no rights to make any modifications to it until they’re granted to you.

What you may see as a gift may actually be perceived as an insult to an artist who wasn’t interested in your collaboration in the first place, and as a fellow artist, you need to respect that others may not be as anxious to collaborate even if you are.

TL;DR – Don’t mess with stuff that doesn’t belong to you. (circa – kindergarten?)  😕

Three Positive Things for the Week of 9/21

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Dolphins!
Hands down the coolest thing that has happened in a while – we were at the beach last week while Sara’s sister was in town and for a good 15-20 minutes while the three of us were just standing out in the water talking, we got to see some dolphins in the wild!!!

I didn’t see the first appearance, whereas Sara gasped out because she said the thing almost came up on top of me, but then a few minutes later we all together noticed a fin maybe 20-30 feet off in the distance, then it would disappear for a while, then eventually appear with another, and even a third. It was hard to tell how many were there in total because I think they were in two groups at one point, but at best sometimes they were maybe 15-20 feet away – just casually swimming around us while we watched for them to surface, and it was so cool.

I’ve tried to think back whether I’ve actually ever seen dolphins in the wild before or not. I’ve obviously seen them at Epcot and SeaWorld and other aquariums, but that might be it. On the other hand, my wife actually sent me a text message the morning we got married boasting that she’d seen two dolphins playing in the water from her room and this was only down the beach from there, so some six years later I guess I finally got to see mine! 🙂

Pumpkin Spice is Coming…
I’ve been really up in the air about whether I really want to do the site this year, but after picking up a couple of random things on my own volition and still enjoying them, I think that I’ll be doing something … just maybe not quite as overboard as I’ve done years in the past.

Billy Bass Graceland
Just the fact that this little slice of singing heaven exists gives me hope for our next family road trip. My favorite quote? “Almost all of them are brought by women…”