I hope everyone’s holiday season was a good one.

Like many people, much of my effort was expended on searching for the ever-elusive Nintendo Wii console, made worse by the fact that I was actually on the look-out for two of them.

The first I hunted for while I was up in Washington, right after the initial launch. I called multiple stores - none of which had any, and the clerks were astoundingly tight-lipped on providing details (possibly because they don’t know, but just as likely because they were planning on snapping them up for themselves).

Finally, I tracked down a rumor that a local-ish chain (ShopKo) would have some on “Black Friday”, a day typically reserved for insane people looking for marginal deals on cheap consumer electronics and other crap. I typically stay far away from places of commerce for at least a week past Thanksgiving, but I was on a mission so I somehow found myself in the front of ShopKo at 3 AM in the morning, freezing my ass off surrounded by a bunch of middle-aged housewives looking to buy cheap DVD players or whatever.

Anyhow, 6 AM rolls around and I can barely feel my toes when the doors open and people start heading inside. I’m at the front of the line and any thought of simply walking to the electronics section quickly dissipates when the herd behind me starts charging. Insane. I make it to the counter in one piece only to find that they had no Wiis in stock and wouldn’t until later in the day - at some undetermined time.

Dejected, I drive off and happen to pass a local EB Games and find a guy standing out in front of it. Still half frozen from my previous adventure I park and ask the guy what he knew. EB Games planned to get 3 consoles, and I was second in line. That worked for me, so I stood my ground as other people began lining up. A couple hours later the doors open, we get tickets (well, the first 6 of us - apparently they had a larger shipment than they had thought) and I come home with a Wii.

Flash ahead to mid-December - I needed another Wii. Christmas is coming up and I had planned to split the cost of a Wii with my mom to give to my nieces. I try multiple stores, hoping that demand had slackened. No such luck. I even stood in line in front of Target to get one, but they were out by the time they got to me. I had a chance to get a Playstation 3, but I declined (because Sony sucks).

Coming to terms with the fact that I might not end up getting that second Wii in time for the holidays, I went with a gamble: Amazon, which had been pretty lousy about keeping them in stock, was running a sweepstakes for a chance to buy a Wii. The odds ended up being 1-in-28, but Glenna and I both had separate Amazon accounts so this was lessened to 1-in-14. Still pretty long odds. Despite that, though, I was able to score a Wii. The timing sucked so my nieces would get their console a couple of days late, but in the end it turned out better than I had expected.

…

As for the Wii itself, my impressions are that it’s a whole lot of fun, but it’s going to take some time before there are many great titles to play on it. The new Zelda is good and Rayman is amusing as hell, but there just aren’t that many must-have games for it yet (to be fair, that’s pretty much true of every other console immediately after release, but Nintendo has always had issues with game diversity and availability).

While a lot has been said about how innovative the controls are, they are also somewhat limiting - and will probably have a limiting effect on what kinds of games actually make it for the Wii.

You’d think the Wiimote would be good for first-person shooters, but you’d be wrong - the single analog stick makes strafing impossible and it takes longer to target. I’m also not really convinced that platform games really benefit all that much from the Wiimote. In such games, its use seems a bit gimmicky. It’d be almost the perfect control for a real-time strategy game - something that hasn’t really been common on consoles - but the lack of high definition support pretty much cuts that possibility down.

So - I really don’t see this as being my only current generation console in the long term, though it’s more or less perfect for ‘party’ games and obviously this is the only place you’re going to get your fix of Nintendo’s flagship gaming titles (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc). I’m one of those guys who is pretty much obligated to get every console Nintendo releases based on that fact alone.

As a matter of principle I’m also happy to see Nintendo trying something different and new with console hardware, rather than just sticking with the same-thing-with-better-graphics treadmill the other guys have been on for years. Innovation is hard to find in the gaming industry, especially if you have to depend on the likes of Sony and Microsoft to provide it. It’s just that along with this particular innovation, Nintendo may have pigeon-holed their console into being suitable for a limited style of games - a mistake they also made with both the Gamecube and the N64, to their detriment. I hope I’m wrong.

Some time back, I mentioned that I was starting to get into producing my own music using Apple’s Logic Pro. I’ve been working off and on learning the ins and outs of the software (and there are a lot of ins and outs, trust me) and music production in general.

I’ve done a remix and a few songs, but nothing thus far worth sharing with the world. The other night, though, I whipped up the following rather “upbeat” track and figured I would share. For lack of a better name, I’ve named it “Up (nwtgb)”.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

It’s hardly perfect - the drums are a bit simplistic and the levels could probably use some tweaking - but I figure it’s not too bad for about 4-5 hours of work.

Thanks go to Dallas (half of Submodern) for giving me some pointers.

UPDATE: Just another thought: While I’ve always respected electronic musicians, having actually done a little bit of it has shown just how hard it is to come up with something that sounds half-way decent.

The idea perpetuated by some (guitarists and the like) that using a computer to make music is somehow cheating or requires little skill is pretty laughable to me at this point.

As you may have been able to tell from my moblog entries of late, Glenna and I have recently been traveling. My mom has been diagnosed with cancer which, from what we know after multiple MRIs and the like, has spread all over her body (lungs, chest, even brain - possibly elsewhere). When we found out, we flew up here as soon as we could.

We hope for the best - and the doctors are thus far still trying - but as you can imagine this has weighed heavily on my mind in recent days. My mom and I are very close.

Anyhow, Glenna had to fly back home already (she didn’t have much vacation time saved up) but I’m still here until the end of this week. I’m not really sure if this will result in less or more weblog activity from me in the coming weeks and months - though whatever I do, I don’t think I’ll be posting about this particular topic very often - but figured it warranted a mention.

I’ve been doing some minor bug fixes for MobiLog!, which I hope to push out soon. Nothing major - though I’m planning to revisit it and add some functionality before too long.

Speaking of which, I’m going to make an effort to post more stuff to this site’s moblog. You may notice I uploaded a couple of pictures from my employer’s yearly Halloween party (as you can tell, we have a pretty liberal dress code - you should see what I get away with wearing when I’m actually at work).

Yeah.

Anyhow, the next couple of weeks are likely to be pretty busy for me. Will update soon.

This Penny Arcade post more or less mirrors my thoughts on Final Fantasy XII, which just came out last week. Glenna and I have been playing it just about non-stop over the last few days, and so far we really like it. My mini-review:

Combat

The Final Fantasy series’ quality has varied quite a bit over the different installments, though I’ve found aspects of each that I’ve liked. One thing that hasn’t changed significantly since the original came out nearly 20 years ago is the basic way in which the battle system works. Granted, you’ve had variations such as active time battle and such, but it has always worked like this: You stand on one side of the screen, enemies stand on the other, and you take turns swinging at each-other.

A process requiring strategy, to be sure, but still very much a ‘process’. Many aspects of combat such as position and timing seem to be left out or left to random number generators as much as anything. The scale and beauty of these games obscure this, but hours of game play are spent repetitively performing the same actions over and over again.

With the latest installment, Square Enix made some radical departures in how they handle combat. Most obviously, combat is no longer separate from exploration - no longer will an elaborate screen transition move you from exploration into “battle mode”. Battle and exploration are one and the same. While you can’t necessarily avoid all fighting situations, this does make the game experience feel a lot less disjointed.

Also, you can now control where characters stand in relation to the enemy. For instance, my main warrior-type character can stand behind an enemy and whack it upside the head with his sword while another attacks from the side. A third character can stand back and shoot arrows into it, or smite it with fire spell after fire spell. The point being that now, finally, terrain and positioning actually does make a difference. Standing higher than an enemy gives you an advantage, and being backed into a corner by a half dozen vampire bats is a very bad, bad thing as it prevents you from easily escaping. The team behind the Final Fantasy Tactics games was involved in this game’s creation, and this focus on tactics is proof of it.

Finally - and most controversially - a new aspect of game play called ‘gambits’ are used to put characters into an auto-pilot mode. As a developer, I recognize this for what it really is: a very rudimentary programming tool that allows you to define a character’s artificial intelligence. No longer do you have to micro-manage each and every action a character takes. Now, you can program them to behave as you would if you were directly controlling them. For example, we usually keep our magic users set to automatically heal anyone under 50% of their normal hit points. If that condition isn’t met, they can either strike or use offensive magic. The more you build up your gambits, the more intelligence you can imbue on your characters to deal with different situations.

When I first heard about the gambit system some time ago, I was worried. It seemed that putting the combat process on auto-pilot in this manner would remove a lot of the challenge from the game. This hasn’t been the case, though. It turns out that it really only automates the tedious things that you would almost always be doing without a thought anyhow, while still allowing you to override them when needed. Gambits are smart, but you still have to compensate and take different actions as strategy dictates. This adds a great deal of depth to the game, and I’ve found myself more engaged in combat - not less.

Exploration

One thing I noticed right off is that the game world is absolutely huge. You could spend hours wandering around the initial city you start in alone and still not see everything - in fact, you more or less do wander around this city for the initial few hours of game play. I didn’t mind this so much, but the game does take a while to get off the ground and this could be annoying to more impatient gamers. Then again, it could also be said that impatient gamers shouldn’t be playing role playing games in the first place.

Story/Characters

Unlike previous games, this is definitely an ensemble cast. We’ve over 25 hours in and so far I’ve yet to determine who the “main” character is. The tale is of a wider scope, involving copious amounts of political intrigue and war between two large countries with a few smaller kingdoms stuck in between.

All of the major characters are unveiled right off the bat, with background story dropped in here and there. It’s a very different take on the usual Final Fantasy formula (there’s no cloying love story this time, thus far at least!), and a welcome departure. Each character is memorable and interesting, some moreso than others - the sky pirates Balthier and Fran in particular come to mind. I look forward to seeing these stories develop as the plot unfolds.

One criticism that I had of the more recent Final Fantasy titles (Final Fantasy X in particular) is that they were somewhat linear. Often, you felt like you were being led by the nose through a series of tasks with little say in how it occurs.

This is still largely true, in a sense. The more developed a story line such a game has, by definition the more constrained you are to a central plot. It’s hard enough to maintain story continuity with a traditional 2-3 hour film - it’s almost impossible to do so in a 40-60 hour video game with multiple branching plot paths. What the game does do differently, though, is open its world up to exploration pretty early, allowing you to take on small side quests in order to build up experience. It’s not quite as open as some - ie. the recent, and also quite good, Dragon Quest VII - but it does have a more tightly woven story so this is to be expected. All in all, I believe that a good middle ground has been found.

Complaints

While it’s kind of fun to play around with, I do have some problems with Final Fantasy XII’s licensing system. Much like the sphere grid from Final Fantasy X, this allows you to build up points (license points) with which to improve a character’s abilities and stats. You do this by purchasing what are known as “licenses”. However, these licenses are also required in order to allow you to wield weapons and use armor. Weapons I can understand to some degree, but armor? I don’t see what skill is needed to wear armor other than the ability to actually put it on. This makes no sense to me.

Second, in order to obtain the ability to use spells, you must buy them (and license them). This too seems odd - spells seem like something that should be earned through practice and experience, not purchased as if they were an item. This doesn’t make a big difference in the game’s mechanics, really, but it does take away from the atmosphere of the game somewhat.

…

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this installment. Square Enix took a big chance with the game, and so far it seems to have paid off. I was worried for a bit that they were going to focus their efforts of MMORPGs (which I have little interest in) and spin-offs of previously established franchises (Final Fantasy VII, which they refuse to let die). It’s nice to see that the first truly new installment in 5 years turned out to be worth the wait.