So in playing through the port of Chrono Trigger on DS, I had a rather jarring realization that it has not only been ported, it has been relocalized. I first noticed this the moment I walked downstairs from my room, and Crono's mother used the word "inventress" to describe my best friend Lucca. "Huh, that's odd," I thought to myself. "She never used that word before."

Later, I picked up an item called "Athenian Water". Athenian Water? says I. What the hell is that? *opens up inventory* oh, it revives. What was wrong with Revive? That is what it used to be called, right? It seems an increase in item name length limit made some of the localization team creative. Power Tabs are now called Strength Capsules, for example.

I reached the peak of my righteous anger when I first got to Manoria Cathedral (which is now called Manolia Cathedral) and Frog, instead of using his familiar medieval English speech by saying "Mine guise doth not incur thy trust," he says something to the effect of "I suppose I shouldn't expect you to trust me, considering my appearance." WTF, the main reason I liked using Frog was to hear him say weird stuff in antiquated English.

But then I got to 2300 AD, and one line in particular really struck me. When I came back to the main dome with the seed, the elder mentioned that we were different from them:
Marle: That's because we haven't given up hope!
Elder: Hope... that's a word I haven't heard for some time. It does have a nice ring to it though.

Previously, it went something like this:
Marle: That's because we're healthy!
Elder: Heal...thy. That has a nice ring to it.

I really like this change, because the new text emphasizes that their mental state, rather than their physical condition, is what really sets them apart. The people of the future are living in a time where a machine keeps their bodies functioning, even though they're trapped in this dome with no food, and the skies are gray and poisonous, and rogue robots and mutants are all that await them if they try to venture outside. We are different from them because we are vibrant and hopeful, and when we see Lavos we do not despair, we try to find a way to stop it.

And it really made me think about the previous example. As amusing as Frog's speech is, why DID he speak in such an medieval dialect? Nobody else in the game spoke like that. All of the other people in 600 AD might have used slightly more polite speech than those in 1000 AD, but Frog is the only one who constantly spoke with Thous and Thys. I really see why this change makes sense. After all, Ayla uses her primitive speech, and all of the other people in 65,000,000 BC do too, so it makes sense.

I think I would have preferred if they changed all of the other people in 600 AD to match Frog's speech, but after working in game QA for so long, I kinda know why they didn't. Not only that, but I've seen what happens when Squaresoft goes overboard with "flavor" by trying to give the characters accents through text (see: Chrono Cross, where some characters have such thick accents that I have to sound out their speech aloud just to keep up with the story) so I'm playing through the game now, not quite as annoyed and angry as I was about this relocalized text.

PS: Not to say Squaresoft is awesome and they can do no wrong, because we all know I have many reasons to hate Squaresoft. However, because rereleasing their most classic games on systems I currently own is the main thing I want from them (they've already proven to me that they lost their ability to make good NEW games after FF7) I'm willing to overlook some localization that I happen to disagree with. I didn't use Frog much anyway.

So Khoa and I headed out to Microcenter on my one day off today, to get a preorder of Windows 7 (only $40 for the Home Premium if you preorder like... today), and also to see if they had a copy of Chrono Trigger for DS (because it's the most awesomest game evar and I wanna play it again). So we have to ask someone there to find the CT copy for us, because it's apparently the last one and we can't find it on the shelf. We take this copy up to the front register and the following happens:

Employee: Wow, I've never heard of this game. Chrono... Trigger. Weird.

Me: Really? It's one of the best RPGs ever made, re-released on DS.

Employee: All I know is Pokemon. Whenever anybody asks about DS, they're always asking if we have Pokemon. *laughs* You know what the best game for DS is? Mario Kart.

Me/Khoa: Yeah...

Employee: Do you have it?

Khoa: Well, we've played it a couple times... but I can't justify buying it.

Employee: You should just get an R4.

Me: Oh, I have one.

Employee: You have an R4 and you're still here buying games?

Me: (thinking: wtf?) Well... yeah. I work in the games industry, it makes sense for me to be supporting it.

Employee: Oh really? Where do you work?

Me: I work at a game company called ****.

Employee: Oh? That's cool. What do you do?

Me: Oh, mostly tech support. I used to work at Namco though, so I think it's good to support the game companies by actually buying the games.

Employee: That's cool. I've always wanted to get into the game industry. How do you get a job there?

Me: Oh, you just have to do searches. The temp agencies hire the game testers, I found my listing on Craigslist.

Employee2 from the next register over: Sweet.

Employee1: I like how you're just listening in on our conversation like that.

Employee2: What? You're talking about games. I'm so there.

Employee1: Yeah, I'd totally love to work at EA testing out their sports games.

Me: Oh yeah, that's not hard, EA hires a LOT of testers. I know a lot of people who used to work there.

Employee1: That's awesome. I'd love to play games for a living!

And the conversation pretty much wound down after that. I have two WTF reactions about this whole thing:

1. I am at your store, purchasing a video game, and you are not only encouraging me to pirate said games, but seem confused as to why I am not already doing so. "You have an R4 and you're still buying games?" "Yes...? Because it's the right thing to do and not in any way illegal?"

2. You want to get into the gaming industry but you've never even HEARD of one of the best games of all time? Sure I don't play first person shooters, and don't like them in fact, but I can at least recognize the names of the most popular ones, even if I've never played them.

Furthermore, I own an R4 for two reasons:

1. So that I can test out games that I might not otherwise want to take a chance at purchasing (for example, I would never have found out what an awesome game My World My Way is if I hadn't played it on my R4 for a few hours first) since my trust in game companies was killed by FF8 years ago.

2. It allows me to carry my entire game library in a single cartridge instead of having to find a convenient portable storage solution for several dozen stamp-sized plastic parts.

I will NOT play a game on my R4 and enjoy it without actually purchasing it. If I enjoy playing a game, they deserve my money, and they shall get it at my earliest convenience. I also buy my games new, because I want to support the companies that actually make the games, not the companies that vulture over their remains after people are done with them.

So with so many options of gaming currently (Oblivion, Pokemon, Spore, Sims 3 -- now fully legal copy -- and My World My Way) why do I find myself playing Game I Test For Work? (Or as the case may be, NOT playing it, if you're one of the people who knows what I mean by that.) I have no idea. Maybe it gives me time to sort through my iTunes playlist that I have recently recovered from my broken iMac's hard drive?

So Khoa and I have made our decision to return to WoW when 3.2 comes out. Because it's just that awesome, and it promises to make end-game similar to the way it was in 2.4: grind on 5-man heroics endlessly for really awesome lewts. That and being able to fly as soon as you get to Outland sounds really awesome.

1. We are going to start over on Horde side. We still haven't seen Northrend from a Horde perspective.

2. I am going to play an orcish enhancement shaman (most likely dual-spec with healing) and he shall play a blood elven protection paladin (as he is generally known to do).

3. My professions will be alchemy and herbalism, because as awesome as inscription is for making money, it's SO complicated that I rarely have time to play, and the improvements to alchemy look hella awesome.

4. My first challenge will be to do everything with a single character, not even have a bank alt. Instead of leveling alts, I shall work on achievements.

5. My second challenge is to play in complete default UI. Not a single addon to speak of. I'd like to see how the other half lives, and it's been so long since I've played with Default, I'd like to see how much it can do.

6. Our new server has some requirements:
a. It must have a good Horde/Alliance ratio.
b. It must be an RP-PvE realm, as RP folks tend to have better language skills.
c. It must be in Pacific Time Zone. It's terrible trying to find a group when everybody on the server is asleep.
d. It must be located in a datacenter somewhere on this side of the contiguous united states. I don't want to be dealing with high latency just because my Pacific-timezone server happens to be located in Boston.
e. It must be a relatively new server, because I realize I dislike being the new kid on the block when people can trace the history of their guild back to wiping against Molten Core bosses in level 55 blue gear.

We seem to have settled on a little server called Wyrmrest Accord. It's Pacific-time RP-PvE, and it was only just created in January. It has approximately the same 12,000 population on both sides. Shamans are apparently very rare on this server, and nearly half of the Horde side population consists of blood elves.

Sure it's located in the Seattle datacenter instead of Los Angeles (if not for point E, Feathermoon would have been a better bet) but Seattle is still closer than Boston and we've already checked our latency to be reasonably good on that server. On a side note, Khoa uncovered something amazing that slightly changes our system in order to reduce our latency from 160ms down to around 55ms.

So, we've got things planned out. In a couple of months when the patch is out, we shall return to our nostalgic little world.

Wanted to mention:

My World My Way: Cute little RPG by Atlus, brilliantly localized. You're a spoiled princess who's always used to having her way, and she falls in love with an adventuring hero who tells her "Bah, you're a spoiled princess. You don't know anything about the real world." so she runs away from home to become an adventurer and learn about the world. The king lets her go, with one of his soldiers to secretly guide her along the way by making sure the challenges aren't too tough for her and stuff. It's a lot of fun, with a quirkyness because the princess can Pout for things she wants using special "Pout Points" like "wah, the monsters aren't dropping enough gold!" and "I don't like this grassy field. I want it to be a forest! No wait, forests are boring too. Make it a dancing forest!" and the terrain changes to a dancing forest. This game has just the right amount of fun + simplicity that I'm thinking about writing a guide for it.

Spore: Yes, I've been pulled back into Spore, at least for now. I made a race of armless birdlike creatures that I molded into the Knight archetype and I'm working on building their space empire. Woo!

Sims 3: Played it a little bit before it was out, but I'm holding off on getting completely addicted until I buy a legal copy. They totally deserve my money for that game.

Pokemon Pearl: Khoa found a cheat I could apply to my R4 copy of the game that would let me get craptons of experience whenever I want to, basically allowing myself to do the "catch every pokemon I see and keep them all around the same level" thing that I always want to do, but am always prevented from doing due to the incredibly low amount of experience given by wild pokemon. This is on hold for now due to My World My Way.

Oblivion: I have my perfected level 40 character, but now am at a loss for what to do with him. I've done a few quests, had my ass handed to me by the random monsters I come in contact with (cast shield, summon Clannfear, unsheath magic stat-debuffing sword, slice at enemy to debuff them, start pummeling them with touch-based fire spells while my Clannfear keeps them busy) and usually can't play for more than an hour or two. Also, still doesn't run on MY computer, so I have to use Khoa's to play -- but I think I'd rather be playing Spore at the moment.

Looking forward to:

Champions Online: Was originally looking forward to the July release date so that this game could distract me from WoW's new patch 3.2 of awesomeness. I want to create a superhero based on my Vexis persona, a silver dragonlike creature (as best it will allow me) with healing/buffing powers and wind/nature based attacks. Unfortunately, the release date has been pushed back to September 1st, and with WoW 3.2 already on the PTR, I'll probably be pulled into my new orc shaman persona on WoW by the time Champions is out.

Aion: An absolutely beautiful asian MMO where you play as good and evil angels, that I kinda want to check out because of how pretty it is, but I'm questioning the whole "PvPvE" idea. Apparently, end-game raid bosses are outdoor bosses, and they want you to fight the raid boss while at the same time competing against players of the opposing faction who are trying to stop you or kill the boss themselves. If it doesn't have PvE-only servers, that'll be a dealbreaker for me, but I'm still keeping my mind open for now. Thankfully, it finally has a release date of September 22nd, which probably means I'll be too busy with Champions and/or WoW to care about Aion.

So funny story.

Last Saturday, I'm lying around with Khoa after the wedding rehearsal/brunch, just relaxing. Khoa suddenly straightens up, alarmed.

Says to me: "Damn, I'm such an idiot! I just realized I won't be able to go to (best friend)'s D&D game tomorrow!"

Me, with a bemused face: "......uh...... yeah? Obviously. What with (sister)'s wedding and all."

Says he: "I need to tell (best friend)! She's probably going to be wondering where I am!"

Says I: "Hon, I'm pretty sure you're the only person who could POSSIBLY overlook a detail like that."

So (in a total "isn't this so funny?" kind of way) I relate this story to Best Friend over Skype (she is not online at the time, but it's a good way to leave messages). When I see her again on Monday so that we can carpool to work, she tells me "yeah, that totally didn't occur to me until yesterday either." What am I gonna do with these two?

The actual wedding went as planned, nothing huge went wrong at the last minute or anything. The sun came out at just the right time so that it wasn't all cloudy and stuff. Unfortunately due to that sun, I have a nasty sunburn that's made it quite painful to move my shoulders ever since. Yummy cake was eaten, my sister put me squarely in her shadow once again, and I now have a dozen pots of purple petunias in my living room.

Here's a pic from Stepsister's camera of that day, the entire album I like to refer to as "Stepsister is Prettier Than Me In That Dress And She Knows It":

No, my emotions haven't been going up and down like a rollercoaster this month, why do you ask? I prefer not to think about the kind of things being around family for an extended amount of time does to my mental state. Deep breath, handle it, back to life as usual.

I know it's 3 AM, but I totally don't wanna sleep, so I'm gonna write instead.

Atlantica Online was a bust -- after spending so much time "downloding" it, it would not even start up without the Korean language pack installed. At least PW games will run without the Chinese language pack, as long as you stay in windowed mode.

I tried another game called Luna Online, which is said to be EXTREMELY cute (and it is) but the fact that mouse-clicking was my ONLY allowed method of movement (no WASD keys here!), plus the cacaphony of noise that assaulted my speakers the moment I ventured anywhere near the monsters I had to kill for the first quest, made this one a definite NO. Also, quests were a little complicated to pick up -- I would go through the quest dialogue, and it would just stay there on the last page of the dialogue with no concluding response that would close the dialogue and inform me that I had picked up the quest.

But good news -- Khoa got Oblivion working -- on HIS computer. I don't know why, and I'm not gonna try to figure it out. His computer is older than mine, his graphics card is not as good, etc. He built my computer after his. For some reason, Oblivion works perfectly fine on his computer. So I've spent the past few nights completely maxing out my character's stats. At level 40, all of my stats are at 100. I've maxed out Conjuration, Alteration, Mysticism and Speechcraft, so I can use really high-level spells. After I finished, I uninstalled my skill journal addon and my x16 skill experience addon, and now I'm just going to enjoy the story and sidequests of the game without having to worry about levels.

And also, Khoa found a way to get me hooked on Pokemon yet again. He realized that I prefer to have a completionist strategy. I want to catch every pokemon, then keep them all around the same level and use them ALL more or less as the situation warrants. The only problem is, wild pokemon give so little exp, that once I hit level 20 or so, the vast amounts of grinding necessary for this becomes too much for me to handle -- so either I catch everything I see but never use anything but my main team, focusing most of my trainer-gained exp on them, or I don't play at all.

He's found a way that I can do this in a non-frustrating way, by way of a gameshark cheat. Basically, it allows me to hold down R when I kill a wild pokemon, to gain 1280 experience instead of like... 20. He copied Pearl with the cheat code onto my R4 cart earlier tonight and I forsake Oblivion to play Pearl for the remainder of the night. He says that if I get to a point where 1280 experience isn't enough, I can enable the other cheat code that will raise it to 9999 experience. This is gonna be so much fun. I've never actually played any meaningful distance through Pearl (I think after I bought it, I got to around level 20 and got bored) so all of this is completely new to me. Whee!

Gonna go see UP tomorrow morning, then probably spend the rest of the day planting flowers with my sister. Her wedding just HAD to be the day before the open beta, didn't it? Oh well.

So what does a Kiryn do when she doesn't play WoW? Well, she tries to play other games, mainly. After planning out my Oblivion character in previous posts, I went to work on actually doing it. I was thrown off a bit when my Major Stats only gave me +5 instead of +10, but all that meant is that I had to get to level 14 instead of 13 to max out my endurance (ignore the numbers on the last post, I obviously start at level 1 so the 1 there is referring to my first levelup which is actually 2 and so forth).

I ended up splitting my other +5 points per level pretty evenly between Intelligence and Willpower. It mainly had to do with how much I had to spam Restoration spells on myself to keep from dying while the rats chewed on me to increase my Heavy Armor skill. I was trying to get a good mix of Armorer (when I had the hammers to do so) + Heavy Armor + Block, evening it out on the other side with Restoration/Destruction + Alteration. If I managed to get enough Endurance skillups to reach 10 before getting too many Restoration points, I'd take Intelligence by way of Conjuration and Mysticism instead.

However, throughout this whole process, I get very frequent rather random crashes. It crashes when I'm swinging my mace to bash this skeleton's head in for a strength point. It crashes when I'm running over that way. It crashes when I'm opening this door. One time, it even crashed before I even loaded the game, after I tried to change the game resolution from the MAIN MENU and then quit... it crashed as soon as I selected Quit. Wonderful.

I tried downloading the most recent update. I tried defragging, updating my graphics card drivers, uninstalling my mods (how painful it is to play without my skill journal, even for a moment!) getting some compressed air and cleaning the dust out of my computer's fans. I tried uninstalling the game, but it wouldn't let me, gave me some error. Had to try installing again, THEN I could uninstall, and then when I tried to reinstall it just hung there without doing anything.

We think maybe it's a problem with the disc... gonna try to download a new copy, and if that doesn't work, I might just have to try buying a real copy. Though I feel silly buying a game for PC when I already own it for XBox 360. Sigh. They've taken enough of my time though, I guess they do deserve my money -- though I have to ask the question: do they deserve my money, if their game refuses to run for more than 5 minutes without crashing on my machine? If owning a real storebought copy doesn't fix this issue, I'm encouraging their shoddy code. I'm not sure I like that idea.

Apart from Oblivion, I'm working on polishing up one of my old sketches (hoping to have the finished version up here by the end of the week), and I went to an awesome science museum in San Francisco with a friend on Saturday. I took the train so I wouldn't have to drive there -- it was kinda exciting, I haven't ridden on a real train since 5th grade (BART doesn't count as a train). My car's still in the shop anyway while they try to figure out why it's making that alarming sputtering noise when it gets too hot. So I spent yesterday (as Khoa was out playing D&D for most of the afternoon) taking the light rail over to the great mall and looking at the plants at the hardware store. Mmmmmm jasmine. One of these days I'm going to buy myself one of those.

And trying out other various Free to Play MMOs. I came to the conclusion that I don't like Free Realms, since their "free 200 station cash" for being around when they hit the 1 million player mark was a Slap In The Face. I was hoping I could buy a pet to play around with the pet trainer class, but it turns out that despite there being cats that only cost 200 station cash, both of them require you to be a member to purchase them. The other cats, from 250-400 station cash, don't require you to be a member, which I didn't find out until after I went around looking at the two cats to decide which one I wanted, then attempted to buy it. When I browsed through the other pages of their marketplace looking for things I could buy, it was a choice between a pirate hat, some sweat pants, a pair of sandals or some consumable potions. Every single other item cost at least 250-300 station cash. Woopdedoo. I'm not playing their game any more.

On Tobold's recommendation, I downloaded a game called Luminary that's supposed to have an extremely advanced player economy with extremely simplified combat, but their localization is so horribly bad that I can't click on ANYTHING without wondering if they even HAD a QA department. Seriously, it's trying to explain this item database thing to me, it tells me to check the "category" list, but that dropdown box is labeled "type". It tells me to click on the red square when I've found what it's telling me to look for, and despite reading SEVERAL TIMES on Tobold's blog and having ample warning of what this mysterious "red square" is supposed to be, it STILL took me several minutes to find it. And as soon as I leveled up by killing one leaf-raccoon, it popped up with a message saying "Congratulation on reach Lv2". Mmmmmmmmm no thanks. I wouldn't call that open beta. Ask me again when the game has actually been properly localized. Also, the game was having trouble deciding if it was called Luminary or Goonzu, or even what company it was by. Half of the time it said Aeria Games, but then sometimes it was made by nDoors. Make up your mind!

One person said Atlantica Online is supposed to be a good game, but despite not trying it out yet, I don't have high hopes as the downloader for the game was asking me where I wanted to download BitTorrent (obviously not what I was downloading) and then proceeded to call itself the "Downloder". I'd show you screenshots of said bugs but I'm at work and they're at home. I'll try out the game one of these days and let you know what I think.

Well, as soon as it finishes loading that is.

The three of us have decided to shut down our WoW accounts this week. It's mostly because the game has lost its excitement. I can't explain it. I still find it fun, but it's an ordinary everyday kind of fun. It's the SAME fun I've been having for the past four years. The only reason I've really logged on at all since 3.1 came out is to gouge idiots on the auction house for massive amounts of gold. But with 40k in the guild bank, that's really starting to feel more like a part time job that I'm not even doing for fun any more.

And I keep looking longingly at my 360, at the games I have sitting on my shelf, reading about awesome games that I can actually PLAY now because I have an awesome PC. I'm having so much fun now, exploring Free Realms, reacquainting myself with Oblivion, playing this awesome game that Khoa just got for me as a gift, and hell, I even plan on playing the game I'm testing at work once it comes out (I made a second secret account so I can play without the GM tag next to my name). I'm totally also checking out Champions Online and that new Star Trek MMO in the next couple of months.

It's not just that WoW is boring, or that there are other games to play. It's that I'm realizing that Khoa is right, Blizzard is not perfect, and there are some serious flaws in WoW, mostly in the social systems, from my perspective. Things that I want, that it will never provide. That maybe no MMO can provide.

First, it is practically impossible to play with my friends without EXCLUSIVELY playing with them. If one of us plays even for an hour by ourselves, our quests are all out of sync and someone is going to have to repeat quests with no benefit to themselves. And if you're way higher level than your friends, it just doesn't make sense to play together. If Nikki can't play very often, for example, it's just frustrating to me because I'm not "allowed" to play that character without her. Either I really love that character and I'm forced to not play it, or I don't like that character at all and I'm forced to play it with her. I'd love to have a game that lets me play with my friends using my high-level character, but without feeling like I'm trivializing everything for them.

Second, guilds are little more than glorified chat channels with a collective friends list. I want some way to do things together with guildmates that don't involve everyone being at the level cap and well-geared and meeting at a specific time to kill some boss just because it would be impossible to do it alone. There's no cohesion, no rewards for being part of a guild as opposed to just pulling random people together to do those things. We proved it when I managed to gear up my druid with best-in-slot gear at the end of Naxx in what was basically a PuG. Not that I'm a very social person, I really prefer doing most things on my own, but it would be awesome if my solo play could somehow help make my guild more powerful, rather than just increasing the amount of gold in the guild bank.

Also, one of my biggest pet peeve about WoW, is how despite having 11 million players, and the fact that most gamers I meet do play WoW, how hard it would be to play WITH those people. With so many different servers PLUS the faction differences, it boggles my mind that I have even met one single person who USED to play on my server years ago. And if I meet friends at work, and they play on a different server, it's practically impossible for me to join them.

I'd have to either pay large sums of money (because it's per character of course, penalizing people who like to play multiple characters like I do) to transfer my characters to their server (and in the process, leaving my friends on the other server behind) or reroll a new character from scratch. I'm realizing I'd much rather play a smaller-scale game that only has one or two servers, but with each of those servers having multiple "realms" in the PW or Free Realms style -- keep crowding down by separating players into a dozen or so channels, but letting them switch to a specific one to play with their friends if they want to.

I'm looking for something fresh and new. WoW is starting to get stale. Bloggers have been giving up and quitting for real life and other games. I haven't even been to Ulduar, and I have no intention of ever going there. It has been said that an MMO only really has a 4-5 year lifespan before the continuous additions make it too complicated to continue growing. I think Blizzard is realizing this, since they're already hard at work on their next MMO, a brand new franchise unrelated to Warcraft, Starcraft or Diablo. I'm really looking forward to seeing it, to see what they have learned from WoW and how they will make this next game even more popular. But until then, I will be exploring all of the amazing games that have been coming out for the past four years that I was too busy playing WoW to notice.

And when I close my WoW account, I will make very sure to list as my reason (because they let you specify exactly why you are leaving) the game I am currently working on. Because hey, somebody at Blizzard might take a look at my account, see my vast numbers of characters at high level, the fact that I have had a continuous subscription for almost exactly 4 years, and then see that a loyal customer such as myself is leaving for this new F2P MMO. Ha!

And yes, I'm still going to Blizzcon. Even if I'm not still playing WoW, I believe in Blizzard as a company (and I'm hella looking forward to playing Diablo 3 now!)