Video Game Characters as Digital Avatars

Posted on June 9, 2018 by Adam Randall

Many video game characters are designed to be digital avatars of the player. Miis are a clear example of this, where they’re just a way for you to put you and your friends in games. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Today, I’d like to talk about how some video game characters can become very strongly associated with people we know in reality to the extent that they become so tightly linked, that you can’t think of the character without thinking of the person in reality.

Let me give an example: Professor Layton. Now, here’s a character who is very clearly not supposed to be an avatar. He has a mind, personality and backstory of his own – but there’s a good friend of mine who will always be associated with him for me. I only played a Professor Layton game for the first time recently and it reminded me of my friend to such an extent that it made me miss him quite a lot. My friend has lots of Layton based memorabilia, he would play me songs that he’d found in the games and he’d even prepare puzzles from the game for me to solve. Now anything with Professor Layton in it will have that added emotional impact for me.

Similarly, another friend of mine is a big Pikachu fan. She loves Pokémon in general, has a Pikachu onesie and will sometimes do little Pikachu impressions. I’ve a lot of fond memories of comparing our Pokémon collections and of discussing the series with her in general. The other day I came across a very nice remix of a song in a Pokémon game and it included audio clips of Pikachu. Because of this association, the first thing I thought of was my old friend and the memories we had shared.

One last example is Spyro the Dragon. A friend of mine absolutely loves him and all of his games. Since we first met, he has always talked about how much his loves Spyro the Dragon. He did a very good job of making me want to play the games (which I have now done.) Before this, Spyro was just a generic game character to me, but now he has a lot more meaning. As I play through the games myself, I imagine my friend playing them for the first time as a young child and I love to try and imagine it as it would have been through his eyes all those years ago. It makes the experience so much more valuable to me.

I think game characters in particular are more likely to attract this kind of thing, because they are much more of a blank slate than you’ll get with characters in other mediums. This makes it very easy to paint your sentimental feelings about your friends onto them. I could have given some more examples, but I feel like this post would get a little repetitive if I went on. It’s nice to consider the ways that our own experiences affect our appreciation of art.

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On Love and Barley by Basho

Posted on June 6, 2018 by Adam Randall

I’m not somebody who goes out of their way to buy poetry. Sure, I have been bought some in the past or had to buy some for school or university, but I never could quite understand the appeal in the same way that I could understand the appeal of some regular old prose. It often seemed a little pretentious and didn’t really do a good job of making me feel anything… Now I realise I was reading the wrong poetry!

On Love and Barley is a selection of haiku written by Basho – a Japanese monk from the 17th century. He lived a very solitary life and wandered between different places, often passing through the most beautiful wilderness as he did so. I feel like this selection of haiku is kind of like a selection of snapshots from his life, except they’re much more emotive than any literal snapshots could ever have been.

With the majority of these haiku, I felt as though I had seen the world through his eyes for just a few seconds. It really did feel like I was seeing, hearing and feeling all of the things that he had seen, heard and felt as he wrote these poems. What’s so incredible is that he just captures such small, inconsequential moments (such as a quiet night out on the road, a spider making a web, rain starting to fall etc.) and he still makes them seem absolutely sublime – and they are.

I’m always been somebody who has appreciated the beauty of the world, but I could never capture it in quite the same way as Basho. It’s so uplifting to read these poems and it makes you think – with all of these natural beauties around us, why should we ever feel sad? Our lives are just fleeting moments on something so much bigger and so much more wonderful than we can properly comprehend and the thing is, we’re a part of that huge and incomprehensible, wonderful thing.

I’ll admit, one or two of them did depend a little on historical context (and thankfully, the footnotes cleared them up for me) but the large marjority of these haiku are truly timeless. So if you want to hear the sound of snow that fell four hundreds ago, smell rain that’s fallen and evaporated a thousand time or experience a brief moment in the life of a bird who would otherwise have left no record of his time on this earth, this is the book to buy. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Rating: 9.8/10

Buy it here.

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The Adulthood Catalyst

Posted on June 4, 2018 by Adam Randall

When you’re in school, most of us will have a group of people who are our friends and a selection of people who we do not like at all. It all comes down to the fact that everyone is a bit meaner as a teenager and that, in turn, means that we’ll all end up having especially negative opinions of certain individuals.

What I find especially nice, as I grow older, is that I see these ill feelings just falling away. As people become more mature and enter the catalyst that is adulthood, they come out with more empathy and compassion. Even people who didn’t like each other will often be on friendly terms, just because the old rivalries that they had are now just memories of a shared childhood.

I always like to see people overcoming their issues and teenagers have a lot of issues. I think growing up with a person helps you to respect them more for this very reason and I often find myself feeling momentarily sad about the fact that I will not be able to grow up with the friends who I met later in life. When you get to see somebody evolve, you kind of get to meet different aspects of them.

Of course, some people will always remain trapped in a teenage perspective, which is a shame – in part, because they can be quite annoying. But, ultimately, you have to feel more pity than annoyance for these people, as their lack of development will prevent them from forming real bonds with others or, indeed, from appreciating life to the fullest extent.

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Responsibilities

Posted on June 2, 2018 by Adam Randall

There’s a fair number of people whose wellbeing I consider to be my responsibility. I have been told by one or two people that this is an unhealthy attitude. We are each responsible for our own happiness and our own happiness alone, they’ll say, so taking responsibility for somebody else’s wellbeing is particularly unwise.

I do understand that point and, equally, I do think it’s unhealthy when people expect others to be responsible for their own happiness. You have to take responsibility for yourself and you can never, ever demand that of others. Nonetheless, there will still be a few people who do feel responsible for it.

But for me, once I consider a person a friend and I know that they will go out of their way to do things for me/to see me, I feel that I can return that by doing my best to be responsible for their wellbeing. I want all of my friends to have happy and healthy lives, so I do everything I can to ensure that they are. I think it’s healthy and normal to do so.

At the same time, I do appreciate that I have limits. We all have limits. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we can’t do anything to help people. Sometimes we need to accept this. But I don’t think that it’s unhealthy to try our best. Too often people hear something concerning from somebody else, but feel that it is not their business to get involved and try to help, but I genuinely think that the world would be a better place if we all took a little more responsibility for each other’s wellbeing.

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Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem!

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Adam Randall

If you’ve heard of this game, I have a feeling I know what you’re thinking. Is it “Oh great, another Mario vs. Donkey Kong game based around Mini-Marios, I can’t wait” with a sarcastic mental intonation? If so, that’s understandable. After all, there had been not one, but two very similar Mario vs. Donkey Kong games on the DS already. What more could there be to experience in a third game following the same formula? Even I, a deranged fan of all Donkey Kong games, didn’t buy it until over five years after its release. But you know what? It’s actually a pretty good game. In fact, it’s the best Mario vs. Donkey Kong game on DS, so if you’re going to buy only one of them, make it this one.

Once again, the story goes that Mario and Pauline are opening a new theme park when Donkey Kong gets mad about something and kidnaps her. Mario then sends his Minis after him in order to rescue her. Very basic and, unlike the last two games, it doesn’t have a twist ending – which was disappointing for me. It also provides the most menacing portrayal of modern Donkey Kong that I’ve ever seen and that’s not quite how I like to see him… but these are nitpicks, really.

In terms of what specifically makes this one more interesting than the other two, it’s hard to say. Overall presentation has been polished up, backgrounds look nicer, animations are all much more fluid and so forth – these may just be small things, but it all adds up and it contributed to my enjoyment of the game.

Ultimately, I think what I liked about this game, was that this seemed to be the point that they really perfected the Mini-Mario gameplay. You set off your Mini-Marios and then you use the stylus to manipulate the environment to guide them safely to the exit. You place platforms, ladders, conveyor belts and other items in just the right places for them to avoid enemies. You’ll know this if you’ve played the others, but it can be very satisfying to get them all to the end. By this point, their level designs were better than ever and it’s all very fun – never too easy, never too hard and certainly never too boring. The fact that you get to use the Mini versions of Donkey Kong, Pauline, Peach and Toad helps to add a further layer of variety too.

This is genuinely a good game and one that I would recommend. It may not stand out due to the fact that it’s one of three very similar games on the same console, but I don’t think that does anything to subtract from its individual merits. With a nice number of levels in the main game (with plenty of extras too unlock) plus the capacity to make your own stages, there’s a lot to this game.

Rating: 8.8/10

Buy it here.

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Love is Not Ownership

Posted on May 28, 2018 by Adam Randall

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about romantic love and some worryingly negative attitudes that I’ve seen and heard a lot of recently. Namely, as you may have guessed from the title, I see a lot of people viewing love as a sort of ownership.

Now, if you meet and fall in love with someone, you likely want them to be a part of your life. This is reasonable and this is healthy – the problem is that I see people who want their partner to be a part of their life, but who don’t want to be a part of their partner’s life. It might sound like a contradiction, so let me explain…

People (or, perhaps that should be, some people) don’t like to think of their partner having an existence that is separate from them. It’s an ego thing, I suppose, where the idea that their partner wants or needs anything that they cannot provide them with is something that they don’t like or makes them feel insecure. It’s ridiculous, of course, because one person can never give another everything that they need – it’s just not how people work.

This kind of attitude is a little more understandable in the early days of a romantic relationship. People are overexcited and not thinking entirely clearly – they may say or think things which are not entirely healthy. This is just an early days infatuation and it’s not exactly “love” though a lot of people mistake it for that. Once the infatuation phase is over, some people just begin to lose interest in the other and that just goes to show just how worthless infatuation is. For sure, it’s the precursor to love, but they are definitely not the same thing – in some sad cases, people never move on from it. It mutates into horribly unhealthy romantic relationships.

People act like big gestures along the lines of “I want to spend every single day of my life with you” are signs of love, but I’d argue that that’s more a symptom of infatuation. The deepest, and most valuable love, comes from people accepting that their partner has an existence which is independent to them – and that’s okay.

This will be slightly different for everybody. Some couples will have 90% of their lives tied to each other and only 10% which is not, and that’s okay. Others will have more of a 50-50 balance. Everybody is different, but the main thing to understand is that people always need something that’s theirs and theirs alone.

You’ll notice that, most often, relationships where this unhealthy attitude is present, it’s only in one partner. One partner has a healthy balance in their life and wants the other to just be part of their life and to not have an independent life. That’s because this is an abusive trait. I think, other than in the early days, any serious couple is only ever going to have this be a one sided thing.

And here’s my personal perspective on it: this kind of thing is never love. It’s ownership. They’ll say that they love their partner so much that they want to provide for them in every aspect of life – and it’s easy to be roped in by those sweet words. But the reality is that they don’t truly love their partner, they only love the idea of them – a person who doesn’t need anything else in their life. An object to populate their life with. But loving the idea of someone is very different to actually loving someone and if you do genuinely love some one, the best thing you can do is be as much of a supportive person as you can, while accepting that they will always need to do some things independently from you.

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Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Adam Randall

I love the five Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels written by Douglas Adams. He has such a beautifully unique writing style which is both completely absurd and also somewhat profound. That this was the last one he could write before the tragedy of his early death really highlights that loss. The fact that this book is much more melancholy than the others makes it all feel a little sadder.

However, while Mostly Harmless is more sombre than its prequels, it is by no means less of a good read. After it was kind of touched upon on the previous book, the storyline this time has a large focus on parallel universes. It’s often quite thought provoking actually and even rather beautiful. There was a particular scene about a character with no filters as to what they could see that really blew me away.

The story starts with Trillian on Earth pursuing a career as a television reporter. While the fourth book had had a lot of Earth-based scene too, nothing had felt quite so grounded in reality as this opening – especially as this version of Trillian never left the planet. I really like this change as tone, because it helps to stop the plot feeling like random silliness and it gives us something which is quite new for the series.

We soon find that Ford and Arthur have also gone their separate ways (Arthur is now living as a sandwich maker on a primitive version of Earth and Ford is reporting back to the Guide headquarters.) There are a lot of unexpected developments for all of them and their paths end up crossing once again. I’d not like to talk too much about what happens, because part of the joy is how unexpected so much of this is, but you may be particularly shocked by the ending. I certainly was.

But I do have some criticisms. For example, Fenchurch does not appear in this book. She is acknowledged, but only in terms of giving a quick explanation for her absence. This was pretty disappointing, because I quite liked her and I kind of think, can’t Arthur ever have anything good in his life? It’s pretty obvious that Adams just didn’t know what to do with her. It was also a shame not to see Zaphod again, after he had been such a large (and hilarious) part of the earlier novels.

Despite those problems, this is actually my second favourite of the Hitchhiker’s novels. I prefer things to be a little more serious and a little more bleak. It just feels more compelling to me. I can strongly recommend this book. It’s a wonderful finale.

Rating: 9.5/10

Buy it here.

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90s Video Game Heroes and Me

Posted on May 21, 2018 by Adam Randall

Let’s take a look at the 1990s. During this time, Donkey Kong was at his peak. His new games were coming out at a faster rate than they were before or after and they were of the highest quality. There was an evolving storyline and a cast of colourful, loveable characters. Sadly, as the years went by, the Donkey Kong series diminished. Many of the characters disappeared and games became much rarer. Today, when they do come out, the games are still as good as ever – but most of DK’s appearances are cameos in other franchises and many of the old characters no longer appear at all. It doesn’t feel like an ongoing story, just odd appearances.

When I look back in my own life (not as far as the 90s) there was a time when there were many good friends that I saw regularly and it felt as if there were a set ‘path’ that I was on in life. Things were developing in certain direction. Sadly, as years went by, these things slowly faded away. Occasionally, I do still see those old friends and, when I do, it’s still just as good as ever, but there are some who I no longer see at all. A lot of the time, I feel as though what I do is within a context which has no real connection to the important experiences I had in the past. Much like Donkey Kong.

I don’t mean that to sound too negative. It was just a correlating pattern that I wanted to highlight – not that it means anything. It’s just a very specific pattern which is interesting to nobody but me.

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Lament for the Terrible Fictional Character, Percy What

Posted on May 19, 2018 by Adam Randall

Back in 2007, I created a character called Percy What, or as I called him “Doctor What.” He was made to be a parody of Doctor Who – the joke was that, of course, in Doctor Who people ask the question “Doctor who?” and in these stories, people would ask “Doctor…?” and he would say “What?” making them believe he was hard of hearing, since he was a very old man, but actually he was answering the question and could hear fine. That was just his surname. Also, his first name was Percy just because I thought it was a boring and generic name (which amuses me.)

When I first introduced the character, I had him as a huge, muscular, person of colour who was extremely capable – he gets killed in an intense battle against the Daleks, only to then regenerate into a feeble old white man. The idea of somebody coming out much worse after a regeneration was amusing to me. I also had a little bit where he was the successor to the real Doctor after he is finally defeated, because I always like to tie things together. He carried a Sonic Machine Gun, which he found much more useful than a Sonic Screwdriver.

I only wrote a small number of stories about him, including one about an evil alien brain called the Chavimus which made all the people around it behave in an unpleasant and aggressive ways (and it just happened to be hiding out in a certain part of Corsham.)

By all means, these stories were not well written. I was young at the time and I hadn’t really learned how to write well yet. I also hadn’t matured enough to come up with any real, substantial story ideas. There was no chance that this would ever have been published and I probably would never have revisited the original drafts to enhance them.

But the thing is, the other day, I realised that the files for these stories were missing from my writing archives. Though they were terrible, it’s sad that they’re gone. At the end of the day, they were still my creations and I think losing any piece of writing is always going to make me a little sad. So while Percy What was a terrible fictional character, he will be missed…

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Yoshi’s Story

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Adam Randall

Ever since he first appeared in Super Mario World, Yoshi had been a very popular character. Not only did he become a core part of the Super Mario games (appearing in most of the games in some capacity) but he became the star of his own sub-series of games too. The thing is though, Mario himself always seemed to be in these games as well (even if just as a baby) which I feel robbed the series of its own identity somewhat. Yoshi’s Story was Yoshi’s first adventure not to feature Mario, firmly cementing his franchise as something that could stand without Mario to draw people in (although Bowser is still in the game, as a baby.)

What makes this game quite unique, is that unlike most 2D platformers, it isn’t based around getting from point A to point B, but rather eating a certain number of fruits within a set area to proceed. This puts the emphasis on exploration, which I appreciate as there are actually some pretty nice secrets to be found in these levels.

In terms of what they actually are, you’l find an array of tropical locations, all presented in a sort of “home made” style – each level looks like it was made out of a combination of rubber, cloth and other material. It’s a nice aesthetic – although it does sometimes look a bit weird. Levels include ocean depths, spooky caves, castles, tropical island landscapes and even snowy fields. They’re a pleasure to navigate.

And it’s not just the levels that are nice, but the Yoshis themselves too. They’re adorable, more so than ever before in this game. They have very cute, baby-like voices and all of their little animations (for example, walking on the spot saying “dum dum dum”) make them so endearing. They’re so cute, in fact, that you’ll probably be very upset when you lose a life and you see a Yoshi in tears, being carried away by Bowser’s Toadies. Heartbreaking.

The main problem with Yoshi’s Story is that it is very short (and also quite easy.) You only have to win six levels to beat the “story” of the game. It makes up for it by letting you take different paths and do different levels through each play through (assuming you pick up enough collectable hearts on the way) and by giving you the extra challenge of winning by only eating melons (and none of the other fruits), which is quite tricky.

At times, I also felt like the designs of the enemies were really weird (looking like awkward mishmashes of rubbery blobs) and these bad designs honestly weakened the experience for me. The soundtrack was another thing: sometimes it was bizarre and incorporated human voices in an almost unsettling way – though I must admit that other tracks were quite good.

Overall, I suppose you could say that it was a mixed back. Yes, the game did have some very good features, but it was weaker in other ways too. Nonetheless, I think it’s something which just about anybody could enjoy. It might not be the best 2D platformer Nintendo has done, but it’s certainly not the worst either.

Rating: 8.1/10

Buy it here.

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