Remember back in the day when the original Pokémon was the biggest deal in the world? You know what the first non-Game-Boy Pokémon game was? That’s right. Pokémon Freaking Snap.
Everybody was stoked over this game. I mean really, this was a huge deal for us oldschool Poké-freaks who lived in a bizarre world filled with rumors of Mew being under the truck by the S.S. Anne or the Celadon Dept. store thirsty girl giving you a “Pikablu” if you gave her enough drinks. Pokémon Snap was a dream fulfilled. Finally we got to see Pokémon in those glorious, blocky, N64 polygons.
The premise of the game is pretty simple: Go around and take pictures of Pokémon. You get points based on the pictures you take. Then you can sort the pictures into albums and stuff. I know it sounds like some sort of Flash or Facebook game gone wrong or something, but somehow the game managed to be fiendishly addicting.
Also, hitting Mew in the head with an apple over and over again in the last level was hilarious. Especially because it would go “Me-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-eew” as you did so.
…actually, though, there is one reason in particular why this is today’s Classic Video Game Monday. That reason is the Poké Flute song that can be heard here from about 0:16 to 0:31:
I have hummed and whistled this tune all the freaking time ever since this game came out eleven years ago.
I am juuuuust about to leave on a Big Road Trip which will have me out-of-state for a while. As such, don’t expect any updates on either blog until next Monday at the earliest.
In the meantime, have a semi-related video that I made sometime last year:
Lode Runner is one of those games that should probably be more well known than it is. Not to say the game isn’t already pretty well-known, but, you know, in my opinion there should be a chicken in every pot and a Lode Runner in every household.
This oldschool favorite (I played it on the Commodore 64) worked as follows: You, as an adventurous young stick figure, climb up ladders and monkey-bar your way across polls to collect little cubes on the ground, while trying to avoid a bunch of other stick figures who for some reason are out to get you. Also, I guess they’re robots are something.
Fortunately for you, you have a shovel, and you can dig holes into the ground behind you, which your enemies will fall into. This is relatively humane when you do it from higher platforms, but if you do it while on ground level they’ll wind up buried alive.
…fortunately for them, they respawn. Hmm. I suddenly wonder about the ethics of killing someone in a world where you respawn a minute later. There should be a video game philosophy class somewhere.
Also, this song is now stuck in your head.
Anyways, this whole deceptively simple premise is the fuel behind a remarkably addictive puzzle game with probably about a hundred levels, plus a level editor, which was a pretty radical idea at the time. I remember my dad loved this game and got really far. To level 64 or something, which was unheard of for Baby Pike, who plinked around at level nine.
This game spawned a sequel that I also played, called Lode Runner’s Rescue, which had exactly one thing in common with the original game and that one thing was the name “Lode Runner” in the title. Still, for having nothing whatsoever to do with the original, that game was also pretty dang fun. Too bad I can’t find anything about it on Google, so you’ll just have to trust me on this.
Lode Runner is still around– I’ve seen clones of it in the Ubuntu repositories and remakes pop up on various platforms every so often. (Heehee, platforms. I see what I did there.)
But the best praise for it? Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov called it his favorite puzzle game. You can’t get much more legit than that.
So through a very long and convoluted series of events which I shall not recount here, it appears that I am moving again. This time I’m not just moving across town, though. I’m actually returning to my birthplace and moving to:
Specifically the whole island part in the middle of Puget Sound there.
What’s really funny is that I was actually born there so it’s a homecoming more than anything, but I moved away when I was like, 1, so I don’t remember anything. I do remember snatches of the Seattle area, where I lived for a few years after, but even those memories are sketchy. So instead my paranoid brain last night came up with a list of things that scare me about this impending move:
1.) Slugs. They don’t have those here in Podunk Montana. I was looking forward to never seeing one again, but…
2.) Trees. According to my allergist I am allergic to “All trees, all molds, all grasses, and all weeds”. Actually as I type this I have a kleenex stuck up my nose. My solution is clearly to move to the Evergreen State, apparently.
3.) Being at sea level, which freaks me out for some reason, possibly because I’m used to being a mile high and surrounded my mountains. Did I mention that deep water terrifies me?
4.) Traffic/highways etc. I love driving. I do not love billions of cars. Tailgaters scare the daylights out of me. “Rush Hour” here in Montana means I’ll be waiting an extra twenty seconds at the stop light and I might be a few minutes late. I don’t wanna think about how it will be when I’m like an hour from Seattle, especially since commutes and such seem to be likely.
5.) Nobody knowing how to drive in the snow, and me not knowing how to drive in anything BUT snow. Actually I have no idea if that’s true or not, it’s just my guess. When I took Driver’s Ed, there were raging snowstorms going on, the roads were a solid sheet of ice, and I was constantly swerving to avoid hitting deer. I am the master at that sort of thing, but unfortunately they don’t teach us rednecks how to survive in the city. I still don’t know how to parallel park.
But! I am making myself think of the positives, such as:
– More job opportunities
– SteamCon
– More school opportunities
– SteamCon
– Being closer to a ton of friends/family
– SteamCon
– Actually being close to a real city with real stuff
– SteamCon
…who me, one-track mind? *innocent*
Anyways this whole thing is apparently happening next month or something, so this will be exciting.
I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this anywhere but I have this massive infatuation with most types of modern transportation. And I’m not even sure why.
FLYING! I love flying. Airplanes are like the greatest thing. I’m that person who insists on the window seat, uses up every exposure on her camera within ten minutes of takeoff, and generally geeks out over the entire process. Last time I flew it was probably comical; twentysomething me bouncing around in the seat, in stark contrast to the six year old kid next to me who spent the entire flight quietly reading a novel. I dunno, maybe it’d be different if I had to fly everywhere as part of business trips all the time and I was jaded, but I don’t actually fly very often so I get to geek out over it, thank you very much.
CARS. I love cars. And not so much in the whole sup dawg, pimp-my-ride kind of way either. No, my love of cars is more abstract. I love cars because I love driving and I love driving because unless I win the lottery, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to flying my own plane.
AC on, music cranked to 11, cruisin’ down the freeway. One With My Machine. I don’t care, I’m still free, you can’t take my road from me. That’s what I’m talking about.
Now this little love affair of mine tends to put me at odds with the increasingly common zeitgeist that I should be carpooling or biking or something. Putting aside the fact that I hate bikes for various reasons (Hyperbole and a Half is pretty spot on here), or that carpooling is out because I get nervous when other people are in My Car (perhaps because then I can’t get away with squeakily belting out Poker Face)… I understand the sentiment behind said zeitgeist. But it’s hard for me to get into it when I am so very in love with my 2002 Toyota Corolla which allows me to be blissfully free for ten minutes a day.
See, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m fine with tree-hugging, so long as I can do it in a specially constructed tree-hugging robot suit with all the extra bells and whistles and lasers and jetpacks.
Basically my idea of the future is nature and fuzzy animals living in harmony with robot suits and lots and lots of mechanical bunnies.
I like my idea of the future.
Also, lemme know if you find any tree-hugging robot suits laying around that are in need of a good home.
One of Nintendo’s Really Good Decisions was the decision to launch the Super Smash Brothers franchise.
A fighter that doesn’t take itself seriously… pretty much at all, while still providing silly amounts of replay value and being a game that pretty much anyone can pick up and play. Yes, folks, this is a win.
I think what initially won me over was the hammer. See, I grew up playing the original Donkey Kong. The original Donkey Kong includes a hammer, which kills everything, as it plays this little ditty. I had aaaaaaaalmost forgotten about this hammer, and it itself had aaaaaaaalmost faded into obscurity, when Super Smash Bros. came out. And they had a hammer. I sort of died little bit from the sheer levels of Awesome and Win.
You know what other item was great?
The freakin’ BASEBALL BAT.
Because if you time it juuust right, it’s a one-hit KO. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing that sparkle on your bat as time seems to slow down riiiight before it happens…
…
And that noise. CRACK.
It’s the most satisfying noise in the world.
I can’t find any good vids on YouTube but YOU KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.
So, anyway. Pikachu was my favorite character, because come on, it’s freaking Pikachu. We all know what happens when Pikachu gets serious:
I got pretty good with him. I mean, I was never one of those super-die-hard SSB players, but I could hold my own. One time for a school project I went to some other student’s house and we played SSB for a little while. The other kids (well, we were college age, but you know) tried to talk me into playing and at first I refused, cause it had been a while and I was rusty, but finally I relented and grabbed a controller and bust out Pikachu. I won. It was glorious.
Actual photo of Pike playing Smash Bros. Note the goggles.
Ahh, good times.
Really though, classic game right here. I never really got into the successors, though that’s mostly due to lack of time more than anything. (Oh, and not owning a Wii kind of complicates things.) But yeah. One of the better things Nintendo has ever done? Undoubtedly.
When you work in a pet store you soon learn which questions you will be asked more often than others. Aside from the standard fare like “Do the GloFish really glow in the dark” (No), “Can I feed rabbit food to my guinea pig” (No), and “Can I put a goldfish in a bowl/why not/my hairdresser’s sister’s best friend did it for years/pleeeeeeeeease” (…), I am also very frequently asked how I can stand to be around crickets every day. People usually ask this when I’m elbow deep in the cricket bin and I have said insects crawling up my arms.
Now most normal people would probably wonder why I’m able to do this, but seeing as I do this several times a day, several hours a week, I’m very used to it by now and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. As such, the aforementioned question still sort of catches me off guard. I scoop crickets, I count crickets, I feed and water crickets, and I catch them with my bare hands all the time. It’s just a cricket, after all. They’re actually kind of cute.
I have a bizarre relationship with bugs. Some of them I don’t mind. Some of them creep me out but they don’t bother me so long as they keep a safe distance from me– spiders fall into this category. I’m not terrified by them but I’d rather they just stay somewhere where I cannot see them.
But there are two insects that I 100% cannot stand no matter what.
Exhibit A: Moths
…
…
…you know what, I went to Google Image search to find a picture to put here and I closed the tab in about two seconds because CREEPY FLAPPY FUZZY AUGH
The really weird thing is that when people find out how terrified I am of moths, they usually proceed to ask if I hate Mothra/the moths in WoW/Venomoth from Pokemon/etc. The answer is… not really. They actually sort of gain this weird sort of bumbling cuteness when you blow them up to a big enough size. But the little guys horrify me beyond belief. I think it’s the whole random twitchy movements and those ugly flappy wings AAAHHH
And yes, butterflies creep me out a little too.
But yeah. Moving on. *composes self*
Exhibit B: Daddy Long Legs
Yeah, screw you Google Image Search. I’m not even gonna try this one.
Long…
Creepy…
Twitchy…
They live in the receiving room at work…
*shudder*
All other insects, I can live with. Spiders I can handle so long as they’re far away. Superworms are gross but not really scary. Giant evil grasshoppers… well so long as they’re in the yard and not in the house and I don’t have to go outside, then okay.
…but I don’t do moths or Daddy Long Legs. Ever.
…OMG I just saw a picture of like 50 Daddy Long Legs all in one place. I HATE YOU GOOGLE OMG WHY DID I WRITE THIS POST *runs away*
I know what you’re thinking. “Mickey Mouse? Really, Pike? Really?”
Yes, really. This is Capcom platforming at its best. Basically they took a Mega Man game and replaced Mega Man with Mickey Mouse. It sounds lame, but the awesome gameplay is still there, regardless of whether your character is a robot or a rodent.
You play as the Mouse himself as you travel through various worlds to find and rescue Pluto. Yes, your ubiquitous Fire World and Ice World are here, but there’s also a climbing-mountain world and a magical forest world that I found to be unique and memorable. That magical forest world had great music, too:
True to form with Capcom, you get to don a variety of outfits that change your fighting style… in this case, you can have a Wizard suit, a Firefighter suit, or a Climbing outfit. Of these three, the climbing outfit is the most gimmicky, but the other two are great (albeit fairly similar to each other). You can change the outfits whenever you want, including mid-fight… it’s kind of like Fisher-Price’s My First Mega Man.
Combine this with solid controls, hidden item shops where you can buy upgrades, and giant rolling tomatoes, and you’ve got a winner, Disney license or not.
So yeah. At first glance you might think this game has “Generic kiddie platformer” written all over it but really, it’s solid and comes with some great things that make it unique. When Nintendo Power released its first list of “100 Greatest Nintendo Games” back in 1998 or whenever that was, this game was on the list. You know, alongside stuff like Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64. Just sayin’.
P.S. yes, I have this game on Game Boy Advance. The final boss is hard.
Conures are messy, extremely loud, and they engage in self-destructive behaviors if you don’t give them enough attention. (Conures: the original emo kids.)
So why would anyone want to own one?
…maybe because they’re the most intelligent animal I’ve ever had the pleasure of being around?
I’m not kidding. These things are smart. Never, ever underestimate the intelligence of a conure. I don’t treat them like I treat most birds; I treat them like I’d treat a small child. And you know what? They respond to it.
Recently I was cleaning cages and I had to get a conure from one cage to the next. So I opened up both cage doors, and told him to go over to the other cage. He stepped up to the edge of his cage and looked at me, as if to ask if it that was really what I wanted him to do. I assured him that it was, so he walked calmly over to the other cage and stepped inside.
I dare you to find another domestic animal that will do this when it has not been trained and/or there is no food involved. Go on; I’ll wait.
This is my favorite kind– the Green Cheek Conure:
They tend to be (a little) quieter than most kinds, and they’re also little clowns. They warm up to you nice and quick and soon they’ll run up to you and throw themselves to the ground and roll over and do all sorts of silly things because they want to play with you.
We have one at work whom I have nicknamed “Zero”– not sure why, the name just seemed to fit. Zero is a supersmart goofball who will jam his head between the cage bars and demand head-scratches if you approach him. He loves head-scratches. He also loves keys, belly rubs, and playing tug-of-war. He was sold recently, and I was depressed for like a week because he was my buddy and I’d always sneak away and play with him. Then, yesterday, lo and behold, he’d been RETURNED! …for some unfathomable reason. I’m happy that my buddy is back but with it is the urge to smuggle him under my trenchcoat and take him home with me. Bad, bad Pike! Bad! *thwaps self on the head with a rolled up newspaper*
I know, I want a loud and messy bird. Am I insane, or what?
I also want a Jackson’s Chameleon, because they are super sweet:
How can you not love that face?
And now I want a Russian Dwarf Hamster. This is a species that is normally Evil Without Fail, but once a year or so you find one that actually is halfway-friendly and we have one of those in stock right now and I want it so bad.
You know you want one too.
And don’t get me started on the kittens that the Humane Society brings in to display. Just… just… I… I’m going to go somewhere far away where I don’t have to look at all the cute fuzzy/feathery/scaly things.
But at least I’ll always have my faithful (if slightly psychotic) guinea pig, Captain Nemo:
I’m glad I was able to help some people out with my previous post on the matter. I’m still getting some questions and the like; here’s what I’ve been able to ascertain thus far from my own experiences:
The ALSA sound driver doesn’t seem to play nice with SC2. It will crash the game on startup and throw an error box in your face… at least, it does for me. The best workaround I can find for this so far is to go into the Audio tab in winecfg and set the sound to ESound. If you play WoW and have been running it with ALSA, as I have, you’ll just have to deal with manually switching back and forth (until I can figure out an automated way to accomplish this.)
There will be some sound glitches but not many. I’d say the sound is about 95% workable.
I have to run with the graphical settings all the way down but I think that is because of my own personal computer setup more than because of Linux/Wine. My computer is a self-built machine from about four or five years back and it’s definitely starting to show its age. Similarly, videos/cut-scenes are low-quality but run and are watchable. Be sure to make sure you are running the game in opengl mode. I accomplished this by adding “-opengl” to the end of the command on my SC2 desktop shortcut. There is also a way to edit it in the config file, I’m sure.
I experience slowdown on occasion; it helps to close most of your other programs in the background. Still, the game is very playable, and everything that I have tried works so far.
The game occasionally crashes on startup, at random. This is a kernel issue, not a Wine issue. (For the record, this is the same thing that now causes WoW to occasionally randomly crash on login, if you have noticed that these past few weeks as well.) I dunno about everyone else but this problem seems to be showing up less and less for me so I just suck it up and live with it. If you really don’t like it, though, you can patch the kernel. If you want to do that then I would recommend searching up instructions specific to your distro.
I’ve been having a blast with this game, and I’m constantly impressed with the Wine team for maintaining this software and making these great Blizzard games available to us ‘nix-heads. Between playing World of Warcraft on Linux for more than three years now, the original Starcraft, and now Starcraft 2, I think it’s safe to say that I basically owe the Wine people a good chunk of my soul, or at least my firstborn child. Much love, guys! <3
