How Final Fantasy X Kinda Sorta Changed My Life A Little Bit

My first real foray into the world of video games happened accidentally, in 2002, at a small Blockbuster branch at the Jersey shore. I was eleven. My gaming habits were repetitive up ‘til then, to say the least—I owned both of the N64 Zelda games but I was terrible at them, so I’d go to Blockbuster to rent the cartridges and play someone else’s save file. It never worked out for me because the person who rented Ocarina of Time before me would always be saved in the middle of Death Mountain and the person renting Majora’s Mask would be at the beginning of the game’s infamous three day cycle, except with lots more masks to play with. I kept renting the same cartridges anyway because I liked running around in the open world and using the items I hadn’t obtained on my own unimpressive save files. I guess you could say I was easily entertained.  Nothing’s changed there.

By 2002, our local Blockbuster had stopped carrying Nintendo 64 games so I was forced out of my habit. It didn’t matter, because I had a brand new Playstation 2 and the list of prospective rentals seemed endless. On this particular day, I was strolling through the aisles when a piece of cover art caught my eye—a ridiculously dressed man standing in the ocean, looking out at the coast. Final Fantasy X. I took it home with me and marveled at the opening scenes—to this JRPG virgin, cutscenes so fluid and graphically intensive were a thing I did not know could exist. When it was finally my turn to take control of the game’s protagonist, Tidus, I ran around the linear path of destruction for ten minutes trying to figure out what I was supposed to do before finally bumping into my very first Final Fantasy boss.

And I lost. Repeatedly. If you’ve played Final Fantasy X, you might remember that the first boss only uses Demi. Despite the fact that it’s technically impossible, I lost to the Sinspawn so many times that even despite the allure of the music and the pretty graphics and the intriguing character design, I turned off my PS2 and gave up.

Unlike Obama, who will never give up on this ice cream cone no matter how long you watch this gif.

The events in between my crushing failure to understand basic video game mechanics and my eventual victory over that first horrifying tentacled nightmare-monster are blurry at best. All I know is that I did beat it at some point and was able to progress. And looking back, I’m glad.

It might seem silly (or given my audience, it might not at all), but playing Final Fantasy X was– for better or worse– a defining moment of my pre-adolescence. Up until then, video games were a passing interest to me. I’d play a little Pokémon Stadium or Super Smash Bros with friends after school, and there was of course my mild Legend of Zelda cartridge quirk, but this was the first game with an actual world and lore that I became absolutely engrossed in. This game had so many things about it that you could know and stuff. I had to know all of the things. It was a full-blown obsession. I didn’t realize it back then, and it probably hadn’t even crossed my mind until just now, but Final Fantasy X had a great hand in melding me into the awfully pretentious and socially awkward mess of a teenager that I was. I promise that’s a positive thing.

I guess it was only ever a matter of time before I’d descended into nerd territory—before this I’d spent an inordinate amount of time pretending that Rivendell was inside a cardboard box in my backyard—but the realization that games like this were out there definitely sped up the process. My friends tried to keep an open mind. I got a couple of them into the game and we even spent some time doing horrible Wakka impressions and thinking we were absolutely hilarious, but it started to become obvious that I was far more emotionally invested in corrupt fictional religions and unnecessary zippers than they were. In typical tween fashion, we stopped hanging out. My reaction was to descend even deeper into the thralls of geekdom, discovering anime and science fiction and western RPGs in the process. As a direct result of my newfound obsession with Final Fantasy, I’d fallen into that category so-often called upon in John Hughes movies and sitcoms geared towards 13-year-olds and probably Glee, but I don’t know, because I don’t watch Glee: I was now an “outcast”.

Not that kind.

But despite the years of wearing oversized Zelda t-shirts and being ridiculed by the whole of my seventh grade English class for declaring that I wanted to make video games for a living that followed, I’m really happy with the way things turned out. Video games have indirectly won me some fantastic friends and experiences, and I even got to spend lots of time in another country and have confetti jizz shot at me by Jarvis Cocker and I even got a husband-to-be out of it (y’know, ‘cause that’s important too). Because video games.

So thank you, Final Fantasy X, for scenes like this:

 

But not so much this:

 

You kinda sorta changed my life a little bit.

Vote for El Presidente Moops in 2012! And forever.

I've got exactly 666 people on my island which pretty much means I'm the Commie Antichrist.

I guess I’ve always been a little bit of a people-pleaser. I hate knowing that someone is mad at me and I like to try and see the reasoning on both sides of any given argument, so when a conflict arises I try to come up with a response that will make everyone hate me the least.

Still, a video game’s a video game. It’s not real and there are no real-life consequences for being a horrible person. As a kid, I never had any qualms about drowning my Sims in a ladder-less pool or killing off random units in my Age of Empires civilization. Shooting fellow survivors in Left 4 Dead 2 matches is still always mildly hilarious and seeing if I can kill Morrowind‘s Vivec with any ease doesn’t leave me with feelings of guilt. So why do I find myself stretching imaginary budgets to their limits and beyond to bend to the whim of every reasonable citizen in Tropico 4?

Tropico 4 is a CMS (construction and management simulation) in which the player is the ruler of a struggling island nation called Tropico. You start out on a largely undeveloped landmass with very few resources and, over several decades, develop said landmass while trying to keep Tropico’s growing population happy…or oppressed. Whatever floats your boat.

I could've been Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, but why would I do that when I could wear a cowboy hat and hipster glasses?

According to Steam, I have played Tropico 4 for twenty five hours. With the options to assassinate or unjustly imprison citizens, declare martial law, destroy homes, build statues in my own honor, decrease wages, oppress rebels and start a nuclear program at my disposal, I cannot even bring myself to build a garbage dump that doesn’t also recycle. When my religious or militarist advisers suggest that I burn books and strengthen my army to quell a potential uprising, I build a new school and declare amnesty for all rebels. My people always have free food and housing and I always ensure that, if possible, wages and job quality are higher than in the rest of the Caribbean. As a result, I end up with a relatively clean island that is educated, 70% happy, fully powered by clean energy and almost entirely self-sufficient as far as imports go. Oh, and I always allow same-sex marriage because fuck you twice, religious faction. But…El Presidente’s personal wealth, and thus my score, is always relatively low because any situation that would net me cash money rather than treasury funds requires me to make kind of a dick move, and I just can’t do it.

It’s my island and I can be Newt Gingrich if I want to, yet I have not allowed El Presidente to be anything less than a class act dictator. What’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m frustrated by the current real-life political climate and just want everybody to be happy. Maybe it’s sort of an ego boost when a population of AI citizens likes me so much that they give me 90% of the vote and allow me to reign over their tiny island for an indefinite number of years. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m less of a jerkass than I was when I was ten. But probably not.

So if you’ve wondered at all where I’ve been or why I haven’t posted in a little over a month, that’s why. Partially. Sort of.

Anyway, it’s been awhile and I wanna know– what sort of dictator are you?

Snickerdoodles: All Up in Your Mouth!

Heyyyy! Long time no recipe post. I’m fixing that today, albeit with a ridiculously simple cookie recipe. We’ve had a bit too much holiday junk food around the house to justify cooking loads of new things. I did make some awesome Snickerdoodles last week though, and they’re only one of the most delicious cookies ever. They’re like sugar cookies but they don’t taste like shit.

I’ve been a big fan of Snickerdoodles since I was a kid, never questioning their etymology. Apparently, the origin of their name is debatable and it may not have an origin at all. According to this source, Snickerdoodles came about a century ago when cookies were given fun, childish names like “plunkets” and “cry babies” for no real rhyme or reason. Still, people have argued that the name was derived from the German Schneckennudeln, which means “snail noodles”. So uh…pretty inconclusive either way.

But you don’t care about the name! You want cookies. Totally understandable. I found a reliable Snickerdoodle recipe here and only made one slight adjustment (I added a little cardamom to my cinammon/sugar mix– om nom nom). Keep in mind that this is a more modern recipe, whereas I’ve seen a lot of more “traditional” recipes that call for cream of tartar. I’m not sure what the difference is. These are amazing. Everyone I gave them to wolfed them down.

Wooo~ purple recipe cloud. That’s it for today! Expect a games post soon on Morrowind and likely Terraria, too. Thanks for reading!

First Impressions! Star Wars: The Old Republic

You’re not interested in recipes today. You want to stay in your room and read my blog on Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s beta, headed by the most boring character in the Star Wars prequels.

Like loads of people, I was invited to the SWTOR beta test this past weekend. I figured I’d probably never buy it so I might as well check it out while I can play for free. Despite the hype, I wasn’t overly excited. In fact, I wasn’t even excited once I’d logged into the game. I wasn’t even excited after the first hour and a half of said game. To me, Star Wars: The Old Republic felt like Star Wars flavored Mass Effect in an online setting. That wasn’t a terrible concept in and of itself, but the mechanics and dialogue felt like more of the same. It seemed cheap.

…but then Sunday rolled around and I gave it a second chance. I’m not sure if it was the combat or the smuggler class storyline, but I played for a good four and a half hours straight, ’til my butt was numb in my chair and my leg muscles were clearly beginning to atrophy. It’s got the addiction factor going for it. To that effect, it’s succeeded as a certifiable money printer.

As often as I felt the writers were laying on the snark and deceit a little too thick, I couldn’t help but become really engrossed in my protagonist’s storyline. I’d met my smuggler just before she lost her ship and the hunt for the jerk who stole it became something that I, as a real breathing human being person, wanted to see through to the end… in large part because I just want to fly a ship. In single-player RPGs this would seem a prerequisite of good games writing, but it’s not something I’ve encountered very often in massively multiplayer games. It’s sad that an MMO having a good story-driven plot is somewhat of an anomaly, but them’s the facts. Or opinions. Y’know.

People who play MMOs have certain expectations. A typical quest asks you to kill so-and-so amount of enemies that are causing trouble outside of town. You’ll find some more of the same here, but that trope is somewhat averted by the fact that killing a certain amount of enemies is usually an optional bonus. That’s not to say the quests don’t get repetitive– I’ve found that most of the tasks handed to my smuggler have involved finding objects on a map and right-clicking to interact with them. Pretty much everyone in the Republic seems to think I’m awesome at hacking into the mainframe. Apparently, I am. Go figure.

Having started in Ord Mantell, I’ve only visited one other planet so far– Coruscant. Knowing that, I can’t really comment on how accurately planets are portrayed or how they compare in scale (and couldn’t anyway because I’m not nearly as big a Star Wars nerd as I’d like to be), but I can say that Coruscant felt overwhelmingly huge in a cool way and I’ve only explored a small portion of it.

As for glitches and general gameplay problems, mine were minimal. There was a bugged mesh spazzing out at the corner of my screen for a good portion of time, but it wasn’t particularly distracting and didn’t prevent me from playing. I did have a problem with the default graphics settings as I’m running on a budget laptop and bloom lighting just isn’t a thing that should ever be enabled. It made the game really aggravating to play, with textures taking ages to load or loading mid-conversation. Once I turned off bloom, though, the game ran very smoothly.

In short, Star Wars: The Old Republic is an MMO. It’s not industry-changing or groundbreaking, but it’s fun and it’s better than lots of other MMOs I’ve played in the past. I went in thinking I wouldn’t like it and that I wouldn’t be in any way tempted to pay a monthly fee, but I was wrong and got fairly sucked into it. If not for the fact that I’ll soon own Skyrim and probably maybe Dark Souls and definitely won’t need to be anymore of a recluse, I might even buy it at launch.

So there’s that. Thanks for reading! I’ll have some more food+games posts up soon, as well as some just-games or just-food posts. Sorry for the change of pace as I sort of work out my format. Combining two very different subjects into the same blog is a weird idea and I’m still working out the most reader-friendly way to go about it.

Thanksgiving!

Today’s post is another atypical food+games post…in that it’s just a food post. Deal with it. I’ll be doing some just-games posts too, because the 1000 words per post food+games format is maybe not the best way to gain readership.

I’m a fatty at heart, and Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday for fatties at heart. An excuse to gorge myself on delicious mashed potatoes, breads, pies, and meat? My conscience me tells me that gluttony is wrong, but I always manage to tell my conscience to sit down in its goddamn chair and eat its goddamn pie.

This year’s turkey dinner was small as there were only three of us. We missed out on some of the standard fare– no sweet potato casserole, ambrosia salad or pumpkin pie. Oh well. I decided to make up for the loss by contributing my own cranberry sauce and pumpkin-spiced dinner rolls. We won’t talk about the dinner rolls. For one, though my parents tried to argue otherwise, they didn’t have enough flavor. Also…I didn’t take any pictures of them. In my post-dinner coma, I stumbled up the stairs and forgot to store them in favor of lying in bed and halfheartedly playing Sims 3 (I have a problem. I’ve bought LIMBO, recently received Zelda: Phantom Hourglass in a trade, started a new character on Morrowind, but still cannot shake my Sims 3 addiction). When I saw them on the counter the following morning, they were hard as a rock. Oops.

The cranberry sauce was ridiculously simple and took all of ten minutes to make. I used a sort of bizarre amount of fruit, but you can just, y’know…eat the rest? Fruit is good. Here’s the recipe.

CRANBERRY SAUCE

4 cups cranberries

1 cup water

1 cup sugar

zest of 1/4 medium-sized orange

1/4 granny smith apple, peeled and diced

Throw it all into a saucepan. Let it come to a boil, stirring occasionally, then bring it down to a simmer. Let it thicken– about ten minutes.

That’s it. That’s legitimately all it takes to avoid consuming another tin can shaped cranberry jelly at Thanksgiving dinner. You’re welcome. It may not have been the most lively or interesting Thanksgiving dinner I’ve ever experienced, but I’m still thankful. This year has arguably been the best, in no small part due to the people around me. FO REALZ.

I’ve still got a recipe for apple handpies lying around that I actually made before Thanksgiving, so I promise I’ll post that one up this week. And also video game things.

Avocado Failures + Not Skyrim

This week’s been pretty uninspired, and I’m going to blame it on the fact that everyone but me is playing Skyrim and I’m stuck playing Sims 3. Jerks.

It didn’t start off that way– earlier in the week, motivated by the strange abundance of recipes involving avocados floating around the internet, I picked up a few of them and decided that my weekly post would definitely involve avocados. First, though, it seemed imperative that I actually try avocado myself. My only prior experience with the fruit was in guacamole, which I have only ever eaten once.

So I made a smoothie. A banana and avocado smoothie. It was the most disgusting smoothie I’d ever had, though when my parents questioned what the fuck I’d just concocted I insisted that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. It was. I’m stubborn like that. Remember when I posted about Green Monsters? Smoothies seemed so incorruptible then. Those were the good old days.

I stayed away from the avocados for a few days, but today was blogging day and I’d yet to make anything special. The avocados were threatening to go bad if I didn’t use them soon, as was the enormous amount of potatoes we’ve got lying around for some reason. I found something that called for both– baked potato chips and avocado dip. Chips and dip! Homemade! Surely I couldn’t go wrong with that.

Except it went terribly, horrifically wrong. Avocado dip is an awful thing sent by Dagoth Ur, like the blight, to turn everyone into Ash Vampires and drive the Imperials out of Morrowind. Oh, and I made a silly rookie error and ruined my potato chips by forgetting to grease my baking sheet.

So this week hasn’t been a good week for my kitchen. Unfortunately, this time I did not rise valiantly from my cooking failures and successfully make something delicious. I just had oatmeal instead. I promise to prepare a recipe worth posting about later in the week, and I’ll have more to talk about games-wise then too.

Update: I ended up unexpectedly working all week, so I didn’t get much of a chance to post! As of now, 11/22, I’m feeling like rather than forcing myself to post a recipe every week, I should probably just post ‘em when I have ‘em. And right now, I don’t have ‘em. I’m at a little bit of a loss as far as what to cook or bake that’s worthy of being posted on the internet. Suggest things?

Rosewater Shortbread + The Sims 3

This week’s post is late, and that has everything to do with the game I’m posting about. I co-hosted Game Dames this past Sunday and The Sims 3 came up in conversation. That was all it took– the very next day, I was reinstalling the game.

I’ve been a fan of The Sims since I was seven or eight years old, and that life-sapping life simulator holds a special place in the part of my brain that occasionally gets an insatiable urge to sit indoors and stare at a glowing, rectangular screen for days on end. I think it’s probably the same part of my brain that occasionally gets cravings for shortbread cookies. In any case, brain matter aligned and I ended up doing both in the same week.

A pretty accurate representation of real life.

It wasn’t enough for me to just make regular ole’ shortbread cookies, so I scoured the internet (“internet” here having the meaning of “one website”) for shortbread that included rosewater, but came up short (see what I did there?). I decided to adapt the simplest shortbread recipe I could find, which was this one. The results were pretty fantabulous, with my only complaint being that I maybe should have added more rosewater or incorporated it more thoroughly. Some of the cookies have that sweet hint of rose flavor, but some of them just taste like shortbread. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I decided to make my fiance and I in The Sims 3. It wasn’t so much out of some horrible need to live a virtual life that’s better than my real one as it was a case of creative bankruptcy. I’m not very good at creating and naming characters in The Sims that I actually want to play for a long period of time. I just like to make myself, and then maybe also the Fisher family from Six Feet Under. And Solid and Liquid Snake.

Callan’s Sim and my Sim quickly had children– twin girls. I was pretty pissed. Raising one toddler in The Sims is annoying enough, but two? This was going to be disastrous. And it was. By the time they’d reached childhood, I’d taught them to use the toilet and talk, but didn’t have time to teach them to walk because of Callan’s busy and lucrative career as a lab test subject and mine as a private detective to the stars. As a result, The Sims deemed their upbringing “rough” and gave one of them the “evil” trait and the other the “brave” trait. You’d think our Sims beat their children. You’d think they were malnourished orphans or something. Who do you think you are, virtual children? The goddamn Batman?

… I should make Bruce Wayne in The Sims.

Double birthday means double birthday cakes! Fatasses.

Whenever I make cookies and people tell me they’re delicious, I feel a twinge of guilt and want to say, “Sorry, I can’t really take credit. I mean I made them and all, but they’re cookies. It’s just in their nature to be delicious.” Butter and sugar– it’s a helluva combination. With that in mind, here’s this week’s recipe.