Nitpickery: Heaven's Devils

Hey y'all.

Have you ever read a book and wonder how it got published?  The first time I did that (other than with school books...guh) was when I was reading Mary Higgins Clark.  She comes up with really great premises, like a criminal investigator who sees a victim that looks just like her, but the execution of it wasn't that great.  The endings are just too nice, wrapped up in a perfect little bow.

This is my official apology to Mary Higgins Clark.  She only somewhat deserved the things I thought about her, and even then people really do like endings with perfect little bows.  How else do you explain romance novels?  Just because her endings are that way doesn't mean she can't write.  She's able to connect with the readers through emotion, and that's got to count for something.

And that brings us to a recent read of mine: Heaven's Devils by William C. Dietz.  This is an official Starcraft fanfiction, and it's aimed to give us Raynor's backstory.  At least it....tried.

How to Make a Star Fox Sequel

Hey y'all.  So I've been watching let's plays of Star Fox let's plays lately, and now I'm watching Star Fox Assault.  It's really boring.  To watch anyway.  I'm not really going to get into a review of SFAs, but I'll just say that it's a bit lacking.  If you're trying to make Star Fox recover from that "Adventures" debacle, then maybe you should add features rather than cut them.

So a quick summary.  Assault was at least a little less ridiculous than Adventures.  You get to go more into the arwing, but there are a lot of foot and landmaster (tank) missions.  However, there is only one route to go, which is a betrayal of the main Star Fox gameplay.  The voice acting is annoying for several characters, and even where it's acceptable it just doesn't sound anything like the previous incarnations of those characters: Wolf and Leon in particular.  Also, the lines that they're given are very dumb, and the mission briefings are needlessly goofy.  And General Pepper has really creepy eyes.

But, on the plus side, it has good gameplay....hey, is that Fox standing on a wing of a space vehicle?  ...Okay...that's...logical.  Well, this is a video game, and it does look kinda fun.

That's not what this blog is about.  It's just that, while I've been watching the let's plays, I've been thinking of some ways to make the Star Fox franchise find its way again.

Beyond the Scope

Hey y'all.  So this is kinda beyond the scope of this blog, but it was just something I was thinking about, and well, this blog is for stuff I think about.

So I was thinking about atheism.  I like to think a lot, because I'm INTP, and apparently that's the thing we like to do best.  In any case, I was thinking about it, and it occurs to me that the big bang and evolution don't really matter.  Christians don't like evolution because it's supposed to "science away" God (which it doesn't, because it's possible to believe in both or neither), but then it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter if evolution is true or not.  Who gives a crap?  I mean, Christians care because by attacking one part of the theology the atheists are trying to attack the rest, but is such an attack really relevant?

The point of this lays in atheism itself.  The thing about atheism is that it's a negative belief system.  No, not negative as in pessimistic, but because it is based on a negative: there is no God.  There is no positive or additive side to atheism.  It holds that someone else's belief is untrue, and that's about it.

So say you one day decide to become an atheist.  Okay, then what?  What do you do next?  How are you supposed to live?  What gives life meaning?  What's the purpose of life?

It gets even harder for people like me.  INTPs don't exactly get along well with others, being so internal and so focused on fixing problems rather than making friends.  What good does atheism do me?  If there's no God, then the social struggles I go through are nothing.  I have no purpose, no point.  And all those people who make fun of me can rightfully do so, because they are better looking, better dressed, and have better skills than just simply thinking about random stuff for the fun of it.  And they enjoy movies better because they don't have to nitpick.

Even if I was a successful person with lots of friends, what does atheism offer me, other than freedom from morality?  Once I die, it's all gone, and there will have been no point in anything I've ever done, whether that be riches fame, or whatever.  Even if I do good for others, what does that matter?

Let's say I save a country from an oppressive regime -- shoot ahead to the extreme, y'know?  Saving a nation doesn't last forever.  It can just get conquered again.  Or maybe it becomes a morally depraved, glitz and glam shallow society.  Or maybe it turns into one of those dystopian stereotypes Hollywood likes so much.  Or maybe the relative safety of my newly saved country ends up being the home base of the next Stalin or Hitler, because it's just too dang nice to execute people.

So what I'm saying is, there's nothing you can do that can't be destroyed.  Isn't that the second law of thermodynamics?  Everything is in a state of decay.  It'd be kinda nice to know that there's a heaven somewhere, and that stuff there actually lasts.

So that's my rant for today.

How to Doom Your Sequel: Star Fox Adventures

Hey y'all.  So I've been watching let's plays of all the Star Fox games, because it's a great series.  Star Fox is  the story of anthropomorphic animals who save the universe from the evils of the great monkey robot genius Andross, who is constantly trying to take over everything.

Of course, it was a great series before things went horribly wrong.  Obligatory summary-ho!  Just a short one, though.  I get pretty sick of recapping something when I really want to be talking about something else.

Anyway, the glory of the first Star Fox game was in its simplicity.  It's basically where you play as Fox McCloud, a fighter pilot, and you have to fight your way through a path to the planet Venom where you must defeat the evil scientist/robot/monkey Andross.  This is a lot of fun, especially since the graphics on the SNES where so blocky and "retrofuture" -- what the past thought the future would be like.  It seriously reminds me of old sci-fi book covers.

In 2007, I once read an old book where kids from the fifties went into the year 2007.  So, um, why don't we have flying cars again?  Um, yeah.  Retrofuture.

A Music Theory

Hey y'all.  So, I was thinking about something, and I'm going to present the idea to you for consideration.  I've noticed lately that music has undergone a serious change.  Now, if you look back at music from, say, the sixties to the nineties, you'll notice that music has remained, for the most part, a pretty fun thing.  Music was always designed during this period to simply bring people to the dance floor, and it was a fun experience.  And now, if you go back to the nineties, you'll find that the music even that short time ago was very much different from today's.  It was fun, and dared to be goofy.

Do you even see music daring to be goofy like that very much today?  It takes itself far too seriously.  Now, it's all about the lyrics, and all the artists are too busy singing arrogant songs about themselves to really pay much attention to their audience.  Now, that's not to say that all music since the nineties is crap, but the more you think about it, you notice certain things.  This is where you come in.  Think about the recent music you listen to, and see if it has these things --

Write Club -- Prodigies

Hey y'all.  It turns out that my dad's cell phone acts as a hotspot, so I can do some writing on here even though home internet isn't set up yet.  Dad's cell phone, naturally being with him, isn't around all the time, but I can just write up blogs from my personal laptop (no internet there anyway -- too distracting for a writer) and then post them using the laptop.

So I was thinking about things lately, and I realized that there are no writer prodigies.  A prodigy is someone who is naturally gifted to be good at doing a certain activity.  For example, there are study prodigies who are good at learning, music prodigies, repair prodigies, and so on and so forth.  But there are never any writer prodigies.  Beethoven wrote a symphony when he was three, but no three year old of any sort can write a novel of any great significance.  Oh sure, they might get away with one of those odd little Beginning Readers books with ten words per page and a vast illustration (of course done by somebody else) but that is only on the whims of older people who happen to look at what the child is doing and thinks it's adorable.  Not big sellers or important novels.

Mega Man Music -- Mega Man and Bass

Hey y'all.  Sorry this blog is late, but I'm still in the midst of getting internet for my apartment.

I really like Mega Man music.  Can't you tell?  I suppose this means I'll have to give Mega Man and Bass's soundtrack a review.  Heck, why not? 

So Mega Man and Bass is basically the hardest Mega Man game there is, yes?  Yes.  It feels almost like an apology for Mega Man 8.  MM8, while a decent enough game, had its problems.  It was comparatively easy, all the songs sounded like fashion shows or fitness videos, the robot masters called out their moves, and its color combinations could make your eyes explode.

MM&B uses a MM8 engine but erases all of these problems, generally by making the game dang hard.  Burner Man is especially wrathful, and is the bane of many gamers to date.  Even with his weakness, he's still dang hard.  One of the castle levels involves the player fighting a boss while jumping from tiny platform to tiny platform, and sometimes the entire screen goes white while you're playing.  Yeah.  No joke.  But at least you can play as Bass.  He's got a double jump, and that will save your life at times.