Neglectful.

i haven't done much with this blog, mainly because i don't know if anyone reads it. i think the lack of commenting has been a big indicator of that, but perhaps not. I'm not begging for comments, please don't think that. it just makes it difficult to gauge whether anyone reads or not. with LJ it was at least sort of implied that people who were LJ Friends read the stuff. this is harder. i tend to try and plug it via tumblr, and i know there are followers of me there, but not that many, and who knows. anyway, enough pity party. just in case anyone does in fact see this and go "he hasn't written anything in a while", i haven't written it off. i've just been slightly neglectful.

as a mini update of sorts: i've been playing Final Fantasy 1 (see previous post on my attempt to play through all of the original 8/16 bit ear FF series) off and on, and it's pretty goddamn hard. we forget that old video games are actually harder, mainly because the bells and whistles of the new games are often used to detract from the actual gameplay/storyline/difficulty. i've beaten way more new games than anything from the NES/SNES/Genesis, etc era. truth be told, i don't even think i've ever been a Mario game. i beat the 1st Sonic The Hedgehog with the help of Game Genie, the "real" ending, anyway (i finished it a few times without collecting all the Chaos Emeralds, which is not actually beating it; Game Genie had a code that gave you 5 out of 6, you pick one up in the first bonus stage, and as long as you can make it through the game, there's the win). and Metroid, as far as classic gaming goes, is my crowning achievement. i did in fact beat that, no game genie or codes, but it did take fucking forever. as for Contra, i distinctly recall using the Konami Code to get 30 lives, and getting very far, but i don't recall ever beating it. shit's hard, y'all.

speaking of old NES, i think the best thing (and it's been widely discussed on the net, some i'm not breaking new ground here) is the incredibly deceptive box art for the old 8 bit games.  one of the best examples of this is the Megaman games.
for example, the US version of the 1st Megaman  box art is this:

what the shit??

the actual gameplay, of course, looks like this:

see, super cartoony and rad. Megaman doesn't carry a weird laser gun or have a yellow suit with blue accents. he's a robot with a kid face, his arm is a gun (specifically a "Buster", why not a "Blaster", i don't know), and his suit is all blue, seemingly with underoos on that outside like an old timey superhero.

Megaman 2 is closer:

still... no cigar.

the suit is right, but it still looks like a dude, and he's holding a gun, rather than the gun being attached to his arm, "Buster" style. also, the actual gameplay looks like the above shot from MM1: 8-bit pixellated cartoony radness. not the super animated for you see here.

it wouldn't be till Megman 3 for NES that we got much closer to what you actually might see within the game, if much more highly rendered to make it more appealing (i guess?) for sales purposes:

yes, that actually looks like Megaman, he has the Buster, the robot look, the enemies look like robots and not guys. i guess they figured by this point the series had caught on in the US, so they had to be a bit more true to form.

incidentally, in Japan, Megaman is known as "Rockman", and here's the box art for the Famicom (original NES) game:

why, that's what they actually sort of look like!

the mind boggles.

incidentally, if you had the original NES, and bought games that were actually developed by Nintendo, the box art was not deceiving at all. it pretty much looked exactly like what the gameplay looked like. that certainly didn't stop anyone from buying millions of Mario games, or Metroid, or even Duck Hunt.

Super Who What-Now? doesn't ring a bell...

if only they had stuck with super rendered,

ridiculously intricate box art that had nothing to

do with the actual gameplay. such a waste!