How to Be an Artiste: Expound at Length on Nonsense!

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Photo #603: Feathery TwigsLocation Taken: Lake Michigan, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

You know, when I saw this tangle of feathers and branches in the snow, my artsy side started tingling.

There has to be some sort of Message in there! Really!

Let’s see… Finality of Death’s a classic, and the feathers scattered around make you think of birds losing them and the twigs are vaguely bone-like. And cold is frequently associated with Death, right? Nah, that’s stretching it too far, and it’s a message that far too many artists have used in the past. Gotta be original, right?

Hmmm… Bird feathers, twigs… Nests! Maybe there’s something in there about nests! Um, um, and it’s in the snow, which is not where you want your nest. So how about something about infertility, or maybe the pain of a child dying? But there’s not too much else backing those up…

Enough with the feathers, what about branches and snow? The branches are twisted and pointy. There might even be some really tiny thorns on them, too. I think I see them if I squint right. So how about a lesson about The Dangers of Life, or Walking the Gauntlet of Pain, or other fabulously highfalutin stuff like that?

…Yes, highfalutin is actually a word. It means fancy and pretentious and prone to use over-the-top language. You have to know these things if you want to be a Pretentious Artist!

Which I don’t. So I guess I’ll stop looking for messages and start looking at the interesting textures the combination of feathers, branches, and snow make instead…

  

Icy Rock? Rocky Ice? Rocky Rock? Icy Ice? Ice Rock Ice Rock Ice…

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Photo #602: Rocky IceLocation Taken: Lake Michigan, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

Did you know that ice is actually a rock?

Really, it is! A rock is defined as an aggregate of one or more minerals, and sure enough, ice is on the big list of minerals! So there’s no difference between a hunk of granite and a hunk of ice, right?

Well, sort of.

A large part of why “ice=rock” seems so odd to us is that we’re used to thinking of the water molecule as, well, water. And to us, ice is a form-shift of the liquid form. Plus, we tend to deal with ice right near the edge of its melting point. Things act a bit differently when they’re on the edge between stages, since the various form-shifts of periodic melting can cause all sorts of interesting crystallization and what not. And of course, our body temperature is above the melting point of ice, so when we pick it up to look at it, it starts shifting to the liquid water form. Imagine how odd it would be if you picked up a pebble and it just melted away in your hands. And yet, we take that sort of thing for granted with ice.

If we lived on a place where the primary liquid was, let’s say, methane (with all necessary biological shifts for surviving in such a place), ice would be just another rock. Perhaps an odd one, with its semi-transparency, but still, you could build your houses and aqueducts out of ice without any thought towards it melting. Well, not aqueducts, that means “water conduit” in its Latin roots. Hmmm… Methaneducts? That just sounds odd…

By the way, methane isn’t an arbitrary choice. One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has liquid methane on its surface, which acts a lot like our water in many ways, from methane lakes to methane rain. Well, our lakes have a much lower chance of catching fire, but hey, what’s life without excitement?

Now this picture has the odd aspect of looking like it’s a sandstone rock outcropping literally covered in ice, including fun icicles. But it’s the other way around. It’s an ice rock outcropping literally filled with sand! Though it still has fun icicles. That didn’t change.

  

The Joys of Giant Rocks, or, maybe I should have gone into geology rather than art…

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Photo #601: Giant RockLocation Taken: Banff, Alberta
Time Taken: June 2010

I want a giant rock…

Well, I at least want to sit on a giant rock. Maybe climb it too. Maybe I should go on some sort of road trip. I’d do that right now, but it’s 1:42 in the morning and it’s a wee bit dark out there. I knew being nocturnal had a downside…

It’s amazing how many of my earliest memories involve rocks. Well, rocks and dirt. But then, I grew up in areas without too many good rocks around, so I had to make do with dirt.

There’s the time when my family lived in Marquette, Michigan. I was very young at the time, but I still remember the large rock in the park behind our house. Well, at least I remember it being large, but I was rather small at the time and such things are a wee bit relative. I definitely remember loving to climb that thing, though.

There’s also the time my Mom took my sister and I to the Gettysburg Battlefield. She was homeschooling the two of us at the time, and part of what she did was take us to all sorts of awesome historical sites. There’s nothing quite like being at a place to make the history that happened there feel real. I only vaguely recall the place itself, except for the really awesome Devil’s Den rock formation. It’s named that because it’s a, shall we say, unholy mess of rocks. And a great place to run around and hide and what not, if you’re a rock-loving kid.

And then there’s the Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio. Again, a historical site my mom brought my sister and me to, so we could learn about the mound-building culture that lived in that area hundreds of years ago. It’s a thousand-foot-long human-made mound of earth in the shape of a serpent, winding through the trees. And well, I found that awesome to climb on as well. I’m so respectful of history, don’t you agree?

I also really liked digging in the dirt in our backyard, carving out water channels and small caves and what not. Then I’d put my dolls in the caves and pretend it was their house. I have such high ideals for housing too.

That and awesome parents who tossed me outside to play and took me to awesome places when I was a kid. I definitely have those.

But I don’t have a giant rock.

  

The Foggy River of Disappointment… No wait, I LIKE Foggy Rivers…

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0600FoggyRiverLocation Taken: Fraser River, British Columbia
Time Taken: June 2010

Siiigh… After I wrote that long rant on Pokemon X yesterday, I realized I still had the game running from checking on how many pokemon I’d caught. So I hopped into the game to start catching the rest of the ones I was missing.

After a quick check on my favorite pokemon info site, a quick Fly over to the right town, and a wander into the wilderness, what should I find but the exact pokemon I was looking for? And not just once. I ran into the pokemon I was seeking right after entering the region about four or five times. The only one that gave me any trouble was Dedenne, which took around five minutes of wandering in the right area before one showed up. And guess what? Five of the seven pokemon I caught were in quick balls. Quick balls overpowered!!

I also started some of my usual postgame activity of breeding and trading pokemon, but with as few new pokemon as there are, that’s going to be fairly simple. Though so far no one’s willing to trade me a Slurpuff for my freshly hatched Froakie. So sad, so sad. The pokemon that evolve via trading are annoying to get if you have only one game and no friends that play. At least there’s a Global Trade System so I can actually manage to get them eventually by trading with strangers…

Still, I had expected this to be a hundred-hour game, and I’ve only put 41 hours into it and am running out of things to do. I’ve put 132 hours in Pokemon Black, 90 hours into White 2 (which was in the same generation as Black and had only a handful of pokemon I needed to catch), 162 hours into Pearl, and a whopping 258 hours into HeartGold! I’d tell you how many I put into the earlier games I’ve played (Red, Gold, Crystal, Ruby, and FireRed) but I either don’t have a functional system to start them up to check my time or I’ve restarted the game from the beginning a few times and the time listed is not the whole amount. Or both. I’m planning on replaying HeartGold and Pearl soon, too, now that I’ve gotten all the pokemon I caught and want to keep off of them and into my Black cartridge.

But with those times, running out of things to do at 41 hours (less than half the nearest other!) is just sad! I mean, that barely even makes my rule of economical entertainment, where I want to get at least one hour of entertainment out of each dollar I spend on it! Many video games make that mark, with enough going over to cover the cost of the equipment as well, but stuff like going to the movies fail it, which is why I’ve seen very few movies in my life and have played many video games. But the game cost $40, so I only just hit that point with it when playing last night. So sad, so sad…

I’ve got several series that I usually expect to hit at least a hundred hours of game play per game with, and the Pokemon series is one of the top ones. The Rune Factory series is my other DS series that does that, and the Elder Scrolls series is my big one for the PC. I’ve also played two games, Minecraft and Guild Wars 2, for well over a thousand hours each (talk about getting my money’s worth!). Those are all games that just have enough content to them that it takes a long time to run out of things I can do. But this does mean that any time one of those series comes up short I feel really disappointed in it, even if 41 hours is a respectable amount of time gotten out of a game in most cases.

I guess I’ll just mope around looking at pretty pictures of foggy rivers. Or play more Minecraft and Guild Wars 2. One of the two, at least.

  

And they say Pokemon is just for kids… Foolish Mortals! Attack them, Charmeleon!

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Photo #599: CharkidsTime Drawn: October 2013

I finished the newest Pokemon game last week, and I’ve spent a noticeable time since then trying to figure out why it’s solidly my least favorite in the series. (In case you’re wondering, I picked up the Pokemon X version. There’s also Pokemon Y, and together they count as the sixth generation of Pokemon games, called X and Y. The twin game thing has been going on since the first Pokemon games, Red and Blue. There’s always pokemon that are exclusive to one or the other, so you either have to buy both or trade with other people to get all the pokemon.)

At first I thought it was because the story was barely there. But my favorite game in the series, HeartGold, also has a minimal story. And it follows the standard formula of “Evil team shows up, inconveniences people, you encounter them a few times while working your way through the eight gyms, and beat them before fighting the Pokemon league champion.” And this one tossed in a touch of historic storytelling to introduce the villain’s Dire Plan. Which was, um… Ummmm…. Hmmm….

Really, that’s the main problem I had with the story. I never felt like Team Flare was really bothering either me or the people of the world that much, and despite having just finished the game, I don’t recall what the motivation of their boss was. Some generic “I feel wronged so I’m going to ruin everyone’s day with this GIANT DEATH LASER!!!” plotline or the like. Really, it felt phoned in. I bumped into them a few times where they just ran off when I defeated them without bothering to tell me why they were there, then we skipped right to the “stop the big bad from doing his evil thing” step, with very little build-up in between. And don’t get me started on how inane the in-game “friends” they assigned me were…

Now, the story of the Pokemon has never been the focus of the series, though last generation’s Black and White games actually had a good story with some actual parts that made you sympathize with the villain’s goals, if not their actions. So this really felt like a step down. But still, the fun of the games is in fighting and collecting the Pokemon.

So how does this game compare on those aspects? Well, I do have to give major points for the introduction of Fairy type. If you don’t know, Pokemon uses an elaborate rock-paper-scissors-esque series of types. There’s now sixteen types, which are strong against certain types and weak against others. There’s a whole lot of strategy in using the right type against the enemy without having to use a pokemon that’s weak to their attacks, especially since you only have six pokemon with four attacks each in your team. And attacks can be different types from the pokemon who’s using them, and a lot of pokemon have two types that shift their weaknesses and so on.  Adding an additional type upset the balance and made some types stronger and others weaker, so I’m having to run a different mix than usual. With sixteen types available and only twelve type slots for your pokemon to be (six with two types, not that you can easily manage that without overlap), you will have some weak spots where you only have one pokemon who can handle certain enemies and if that one goes down, well, it can be a real struggle as you try to get it back up before the rest go down.

Well, at least it should be. But Pokemon X and Y made it a wee bit too easy to level your pokemon in this game. Between making the Experience Share item affect your entire team, making it super-easy to keep your entire team up in levels, and in adding the Pokemon-Amie minigame that lets you become friends with them by feeding them sweets and rubbing their bellies (seriously), which gives them a major boost in how much experience they get, well, I never had a difficult fight. Usually I reach the Champion with pokemon around the same level as the ones she brings to the fight, in the mid-to-high 60’s (out of 100 max). And I usually have to use a lot of items keeping my team in fighting shape going through the five tough back-to-back fights that include the champion.

This game, well, I had a pokemon at level 90 when facing the champion. That’s a full 22 levels higher than the toughest enemy I faced. And while that was the one I had used and pampered the most, the rest of my team was still around level 80. I normally only get to those levels well into the post-game, and with great difficulty. Each extra level grants you a lovely dose of additional stat points that make you hit harder and faster and all that fun stuff. I’m sure you can figure out what that much extra power on my side meant for the fight.

It’s not like I’d gone out of my way to level my pokemon, either. That was gained just following the storyline plus checking out the various corners for what loot I could find. And my team did have some serious weaknesses. But when you can arrange things so that the enemy is dead before they get a chance to attack, your weaknesses don’t matter any more.

Actually, the overleveling was part of why the story seemed so boring. I just kinda waltzed through the enemies and never even came close to being in danger. Heck, I think in the course of the game, I only had pokemon faint on me about three or four times, period! I usually have a period where I’m desperately scrounging for the Revive item to keep from losing battles due to having no available pokemon (followed soon after by my stocking up on 40 of the things), but here I barely used them.

Alright, so the story was lame and the fighting was too easy. How about the collecting?

Oddly enough, there were simultaneously too many pokemon and too few. To be specific, too many old pokemon and too few new ones. First off, there’s now 718 pokemon (yes, really). They decided to include so many of the old ones that there’s only about 125 that you can’t catch in either the Pokemon X or Y version, 80 of which are either starter pokemon or legendaries that are supposed to be rare (you can usually only get one of each per playthrough of the game, though starters can be bred to get more copies). There’s also two sets of 20 pokemon that are version exclusives. Which means that there’s a full 573 pokemon you can catch in each game without doing any sort of trading with other people. I’m sure you agree that’s a wee bit absurd.

So, how many are new?

They decided to make this a smaller set of pokemon, only adding 69 new pokemon. Let’s see, 69 divided by 573… That means, on average, about 12% of the pokemon you can encounter are new. And 12 of those are starter/legendaries, which you can only find in certain spots, so drop that a bit more. They did add in some old legendaries and even starters, so if you chop those off the list too, let’s see… Ah, there’s 13 old starters and legendaries added in, so 57/548, which means about 10% of the easily available pokemon are new. Huh, even lower.

Now, there are differences in how common certain pokemon are, but still, I was seeing a lot of the same old faces. And I didn’t particularly want to catch those ones again, either. I grabbed the new ones as I found them, but I still caught a mere 35 pokemon total in my playthrough. I was also having absurdly good luck with the Quick Ball item, which gives you a bonus to catch the enemy if used on the first time. Usually you have to whittle down the pokemon’s hit points to as low as you dare (all the while praying you don’t get a poorly timed critical hit that kills it), possibly put them asleep or something, and then throw your pokeballs at it turn after turn hoping one will take before the enemy knocks out too many of your pokemon. But the quick ball is a nice “let’s just skip all that” move, if you get lucky.

And my goodness was I getting lucky. Let’s see… Seven of my 35 pokemon were given to me, so they don’t count. Twelve are in the most basic pokeball, which I stopped using around the same time as I started getting quick balls. Of the remaining 16, a full seven of them are in quick balls. That’s a 43% success rate on a first-turn capture. I’d tell you what the normal probability is, but it’s both highly dependent on which pokemon you’re trying to catch and also full of complex math (seriously, read through that page and tell me that pokemon is simplistic). For instance, a cute little level 3 Pidgey is at least a hundred times easier to catch than a level 50 legendary like Xerneas. Legendaries are one-per-game and extra tough to catch, usually taking upwards of forty high quality Ultra Balls to snag, which can take half an hour or more of real time to manage.

My Xerneas is in a quick ball.

There’s nothing quite like starting a major epic fight, with special music and battle arena and all, with the game carefully saved beforehand just in case you get that ill-timed critical and kill the thing – and then you just toss a single ball and click, it’s caught.  It’s simultaneously awesome and anti-climatic.

This game’s going to be easy for legendaries. They only added three new ones, and one of those is exclusive to the other version of the game, so I’m going to have to trade for it anyway. So I’ve only got one more to grab, and I still have my guaranteed-catch, one-per-game Master Ball. The Zygarde fight will be as easy as the Xerneas one…

Now, a large part of why having all these old pokemon available is irritating is personal. You see, I’m very close to catching them all already in my older games, and don’t want to clutter up my boxes with duplicates. I’ve been working on that big goal of the series since I started playing this series with Pokemon Red back in 1999. I’ve accumulated all the legendaries and all but one of the other pokemon family trees in the 649 pokemon that existed before this game. I just need to restart my HeartGold game to get a Totodile as my starter and then do some leveling to get the upper evolution levels for some others. And, most importantly, get all of these critters in the same game. Which does make the fact that the Pokemon Bank system for bringing the pokemon you caught in older games into X and Y isn’t coming out until December 27th rather irritating. I want to start shifting things over already, geeze! With how easy it is to level in X, it’ll be a snap to finish up those last few upper evolutions and everything!

…Not that I’m 100% looking forward to bringing forward my pokemon. They swapped from 2D sprites to 3D models in this game and well, the new models look kinda, well, uninspired and boring. They’re fully accurate and do have some nice animations at times (though the sprites were animated too), but the advantage of sprites is that you can easily pick a dynamic pose that adds a lot of character to each pokemon.  Show their best side and all. But the new models all just kinda stand around most of the time. Just look at this comparison of the different portrayals pokemon Snorlax through the various games. You go through a serious of interesting poses as it rolls around and then, well, just stands there like a lump. And Snorlax isn’t exactly the most dynamic pokemon out there, to put it mildly. It’s best known for laying around sleeping!

I guess moving to 3D models was something that needed to happen at some point. But please, could you have at least put more character into how they stand?!

Perhaps having to make models for a whopping 718 pokemon ate up all the time they could have spent making them look better, but still, my art geek tendencies keep twitching at the blobs shaped like pokemon half-heartedly bouncing up and down…

So yeah, now that I’ve written a massive wall of text about a video game that’s marketed towards kids (if also played by a lot of adults who grew up with the series and never stopped enjoying it), I suppose I should stumble towards some sort of conclusion. Pokemon X and Y is my least favorite generation because it’s a bit too easy compared to previous games, and the story, collecting, and battling all have some noticeable flaws. If you’re into the series, well, you already own your own copy by now. If you’re not, this is not the game to start on.

However, this game does make one of my favorite pokemon, the adorable Deceiver Pokemon, Mawile, actually usable, so much is forgiven. It used to be pure Steel type with an absolutely horrible list of attacks it could learn (with not a single Steel type damaging move in the lot!), so while I found it an adorable and awesome design, it was worthless in battle. But now it’s Steel/Fairy and has access to two really powerful attacks at higher levels, the Steel type Iron Head and Fairy type Play Rough! And since the new Fairy type is weak to only Steel and Poison, having a Steel type in the party is extra awesome for taking out those pokemon, plus Steel is immune to Poison and resistant to Steel attacks so adding the Fairy type into Mawile’s mix doesn’t add any extra weaknesses! It actually takes one away, since Steel’s weakness to Fight is canceled out by Fairy’s resistance to it! It’s awesome! And Fairy type’s so useful too, being strong against the very common Fight, Dark, and Dragon types! It’s a perfect combination! Or something like that. And yes, my Mawile was the one I got up to level 90, since I used it so much. I definitely pamper my favorites…

…I’m also definitely a Pokemon geek…