mvu.one

Game Thoughts: Pokemon Evolved

I've been a big Pokemon fan since I was probably 8, and it's followed me into adulthood as a fun occasional hobby to engage in with my partner.

I don't usually go in for the non-mainline games, and despite being briefly enamored by Pokemon Unbound I usually don't bother with romhacks.

A friend from work, however, showed me a short video of a new romhack that caught my interest: Pokemon Evolved. It offers a very simple premise: they didn't rework the story or do anything particularly fancy with this, they just gave the original 151 Pokemon more evolutions.

That's it -- original Pokemon Leaf Green game, but more evolutions and they beefed up some battles to have higher level 'mons to show them off.

My god I had fun with this.

Some of the evolutions were absolutely amazing and felt natural, some were horrible messes, some were eldritch horrors. My childhood favourite starter got three new evolutions, snorlax evolves, and I was surprised to find myself using cubone and doduo's evolutions right through the Elite Four (which was a very close fight). I think there's something like 350 Pokemon in the final Pokedex, and while I didn't catch all of them (fuck you, chansey) I did manage to see all the new designs in the game.

I've barely been able to keep myself engaged with multi-million dollar AAA games lately for more than 4-5 hours, but this 20-year-old gameboy advanced title that fans modded and unceremoniously dropped on github kept me glued for 15+ hours. (30+ in-game, but I played the whole thing on 2X speed).

The original game holds up, (though I wouldn't have been able to stomach it on 1x speed) and the modding the team managed to mix back in the mystery and excitement of pre-internet pokemon gaming. It wasn't something I expected to finish, but I had a great time comparing new evolutions with my friend and reliving a playthrough of the Kanto region.

(For the record, I do own a physical copy of Leaf Green)

Thoughts: Music as a Hobby

I've been dabbling with music stuff for almost a year now and honestly I still suck at it. I've rented guitars and drums, I've played with VSTs and DAWs -- I even bought myself a hardware synth since my last post on the topic!

However I can still only play a handful of songs, my grasp on theory is tenuous at best, and I've failed every listening test I've tried (even ones just listening for a single note). Despite this I can sincerely say that I love this hobby.

My hobbies have always been goal oriented. Writing a piece of software, drawing a specific picture, playing single-player narrative games -- these are all things that have a roughly concrete end state. With my attention span and wide interest pool I frequently fail to get to that state, leaving me often feeling like I've failed.

I have discovered that music, on the other hand, can be an ephemeral act of creativity for me. Of course you can always produce a song or compose a finished piece -- those things of course exist within music -- but since I've started spending a lot of time watching people online with their instruments and gear and software I've come to realize that many musicians (and amateur music people like me) simply enjoy the act of making organized noises.

After work I'll sometimes sit at my little station and plug in some wires and throw on some pre-made drum loop, then I'll tweak some knobs and put a weird lead sound together and flip on and off different recorded loops and just jam. It's garbage, but it does something to the soul to be actively making something, even temporarily, that is some semblance of music.

I saw a post mastodon recently that I can't find now which philosophizes that music (or art, in general) is a human behavior -- innate to us like making a nest is to birds.

I have no innate talent in music. Starting as late as I have (and at the rate that I'm going) I don't believe I'll ever be a particularly good musician, but this discovery of the joy of making music (or sounds, at least) has been a revelation that I'm grateful to have had.

Game Thoughts: Stories of Sol: The Gun-Dog

I'm a fan of old mech anime and I'm a fan visual novels -- so when I saw the Steam storefront page for Stories of Sol: The Gun-Dog I bought it immediately without any prior knowledge.

It's a great little visual novel! They absolutely nailed the look and mood -- and while the story and characters aren't terribly deep, they were certainly colourful enough that I got attached to or hated hated (in a good way) most of the cast to one degree or another.

I wish it was longer for the price. I'm not one to complain about short games, but this was too short. The game ends on a cliffhanger that comes too soon right after a pretty great story sequence that had me really wanting more.

More as in closure -- I think there's other paths I could go back and take for a different experience, but I want to know what happens next now that there's momentum, not what alternative events could have been!

The game was made with Ren'py, and is good reminder that I should try that out sometime. I'm more into playing VNs than writing them, but I've got good python chops and could probably do some interesting things!

Game Thoughts: Grim Fandango

I grew up playing classic point-and-click adventure games like King's Quest, Monkey Island, and Sam & Max Hit the Road -- however somehow Grim Fandango never made it onto the family PC.

I've rectified that now with the Remaster, and it was definitely a nostalgia trip. It had the same overall vibes and sense-of humor as the aforementioned games, chock full of the cheeky sarcasm that was a hallmark of the genre.

I think there's a lot of things Grim Fandango did right compared to all those other games. It was designed in such a way that you can't get completely stuck -- there's no winding up on an island missing some random item you were supposed to find 4 chapters ago here, and I greatly appreciate that. To pull this off, each chapter of the game has a fairly limited number of screens and a reset of items which definitely made it a smoother ride than some of its peers.

That doesn't mean the game is above the borderline-impossible-to-solve puzzles that plague the genre. More than once I had to pull up a guide after spending 20 minutes visiting every available screen and talking to every NPC -- only to find the solution was some completely arbitrary connection I'd never have thought of. When I pick up a guide for a puzzle game I like my reaction to be "ahhhh I should have thought of that", not "who the fuck thought of this?". Combined with the excruciatingly slow transition animations in some locations (almost every ladder), I felt like I spent too much time traveling between locations instead of solving puzzles in some chapters.

Visually it holds up great! The remaster did very little graphically outside of a bit of shading and smoothing of the characters. The pre-rendered backgrounds and janky 3D models feel intentional rather than dated, and though much of the game is in somewhat washed-out colours this felt right considering the game essentially takes place in limbo.

The story was definitely unique, fun, and filled wacky characters -- but I wish there has been a bit more depth to it. It felt like the world presented has so much unique storytelling to offer, and there would have been ample room for a story that was funny and thought-provoking rather than just funny.

(Don't get me wrong, there's plenty here to provoke thought, just not much of that comes from the story or character interactions)

Still, for a game from the 90's this does hold up well, and I had a good time getting through it. I'm kind of craving a Sam & Max remaster playthough now, or maybe I'll finally play Day of the Tentacle.

Tech Thoughts: I like Bun

I've been doing this web-dev thing for about 12 years now. I'm primarily self-taught, so I wouldn't classify myself as any degree of "good programmer", but after 12 years that amounts to enough burned fingers that I know how to operate the oven pretty well.

It's always felt kinda illegal to run Javascript server-side. I know Node's been around for a thousand years at this point, but when I began writing websites in the jQuery days Javascript was dirty.

It still is, but I feel like after ES2015 things got a lot better. Also, since the declarative UI revolution I write wat more Javascript than I do other languages -- so much so that at some point it became my native tongue over the Python I was raised on.

And why not? Javascript is everywhere. No other language is so readily at your fingertips -- just open the web inspector of any browser and you're ready to sling code, transform some data, or test a Regex. Nowadays JS ships with a ludicrous amount of built-in functionality as well -- everything from MIDI to WebGPU to USB interactions. Look at all this stuff!

I've always been a Python-backend kinda person. Flask, FastAPI, Django with it's various fixings -- I've been using Python server-side my whole career. But for small stuff, the microservices and simple SPAs I frequently need to assemble for work, the static-site builder for my blog, for all the little scrapers and scripts that I write on a daily basis, I'm switching to Bun .

Book Thoughts: A Half-Built Garden

I had a minor crisis because of this book. Not because it was good, but because I felt it wasn't.

Spoilers ahead, but mostly about stuff that happens in the first couple chapters.

Game Thoughts: Tactics Ogre Reborn [DNF]

I've had a complicated relationship with Tactics Ogre.

My love of the Final Fantasy Tactics subseries drove me to buy the PSP version of this game over 10 years ago, and yet I never managed to get into it. I don't think I even managed to finish chapter 1 before now, pinning the game near the top of my backlog for over a decade.

It took so long that they remastered the remaster onto the Switch (which I promptly purchased a physical copy of).

I absolutely adore the visual style of these games. Something about the isometric sprites and serious character portraits scratches some kind of itch deep in my brain that nothing else comes close to. The character art for Reborn is absurdly good and blows its Final Fantasy cousins out of the water -- so much so that I purchased an artbook just to ogle the illustrations despite never having finished the game.

On Paper, Tactics Ogre is everything I want. Final Fantasy Tactics-style gameplay with a richer and more adult story -- in practice, however, it's something entirely different.

Thoughts: I need to get out more

Think about the last time you were with a group of people and didn't know everyone. Not a homogenous group, but people with different age ranges, interests, and lifestyles. What kinds of things did you talk about? What kinds of stories did you tell or hear?

It dawned on me today that despite spending so much of my time inside doing the things I love -- learning, exploring ideas, experimenting, -- the stories I fall back on are of things that happened outside of my home. Places I've been, foods I've tried, people I've spent time with, events I've been to. These are the things that build not only memories, but memories that can be universally shared and flower into discussions with people from any walk of life.

Yesterday I planned to stay home, watch a show, play a game, and tinker on my computer. Instead, my partner and I went outside.

We ended up in a neighboring city, found an art supply store, spent an hour speaking with the owners and bought some origami paper. We tried a new kind of coffee drink with egg cream in it. We explored a cool comic book shop and we discovered a local interesting restaurant with a blind tasting menu.

It was the best day I've had in a while.

I need to go outside more.

Book Thoughts: Little Brother

I first discovered Cory Doctrow on Mastodon -- he was a well-spoken guy who posted ridiculously long threads that would completely consume my feed. After actually reading one of those threads and learning he coined the term "Enshittification" I figured I'd give one of his books a read.

I picked Little Brother at random. It's a young-adult novel about a middle-class teenage hacker developing a deep grudge against the US government (or a branch of it) after they go too far following a terrorist attack.

There were a lot of bits that weren't for me. The goopy teenage romance, the immaturity of most of the characters, the angst -- but this is a YA novel, so criticizing those things would be like complaining a horror movie was too scary for my tastes.

What was fun was how author didn't shy away from going full nerd-out on details about encryption key-pairs and other technical jargon that, while I'm already well-versed in them as a grown-ass computer-adjacent human, I would have absolutely found interesting and useful when I was a "young adult" myself. I really liked the "edutainment" vibes here even when it was covering stuff I already knew.

The story also resonated with me quite a bit more than I expected. Not so much the "middle class white boy mad at government" bit -- though I'd be lying if that didn't do something to the inner teenage me shouting "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" along with my RATM CD driving my mom's car at 17 -- but the "privacy isn't a matter of hiding things, its a matter of privacy" bit.

There's a line in the book, I'm paraphrasing here, to the tune of "Everybody takes a shit but that doesn't mean you want to do it where everyone's watching," and it rang a big bell in my head. That, combined with the absolute wild shit going in the U.S. really inspired me to spend a bit of time taking stock of my digital life -- and I wasn't that impressed.

I took the initiative to do a little bit of de-googling and switching up some of my dependency chain. I signed up for a secure email address and moved my web hosting to a paid plan with a small web hosting company. I made backups of my important shit and passwords, and I moved whatever friend chats were willing to over to Signal. With everything going on, I think everyone should take the time to educate themselves a little about digital privacy, regardless of your political beliefs or technical competency level. Install signal, get it installed for your loved ones. Figure out how to use a VPN and how to get back into your life if you get locked out of a service.

We're entering a weird age, and the billionaires that the people that control our maps, our phones, our entertainment, and every form of modern communication are banding together to do stuff. I suspect only those with net worths well beyond 50 million will be benefitting from that stuff.

If their masks are off, it's our collective responsibility to put ours on. Protect yourself and your loved ones. Maybe read a young-adult novel or two if you need a little help getting radicalized.

(Book was O.K. probably won't read the second one but I'll check out his other works)

Game Thoughts: Arco

How much hatred can you stuff into a handful of pixels? That's the question Arco tries to ask as you control a handful of characters through Mesoamerica to kill the "Newcomers" who are murdering your people for the gold and oil in your lands.

It's an absolute blast. The story is dark, but lined with quirky humour. The vistas are pixel-art masterpieces, and the characters are somehow still discernable despite being made up of only a couple pixels themselves.

The battle system's where the game shines the brightest. It's a very fresh-feeling tactics-style RPG where you plan out each character's action in freeze-time, then everyone on the screen moves at once. There's lots of skills in each characters' tree, and while there's really not a tonne of room for diversification (each character stays in their niche), the game's short enough that it didn't matter much.

There was one thing I very much didn't like about the game. The Ghosts. If you rack up too much "guilt" by making shit choices, ghosts will show up in battle. Unlike everything else on the screen they do not respect the time-freeze portions of battle and instead slowly approach while you're trying to make decisions.

When there's only one character in your party this isn't too bad, but since there's often times with more than one character you need to pick an action for before everyone moves these ghosts can be crazy stressful to be floating around.

As a result I ended up playing the "low-guilt" storyline. I have no regrets! I watched some youtube playthroughs and there's definitely more content if you go full-guilt, but I'll live having beaten the game myself once.

Great little game. Do recommend.