I don't often feel in the mood to write about any single movie, book, or video game - my only other 'review' being more of an exercise in what not to do to food (see: McDonalds Seared Chicken Burger) - but for the only video game to have ever made me so very close to crying, I think I can make an exception.

To the Moon

PC video game, $11.95 USD, developed and published by Freebird Games
http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/

I discovered To the Moon when I was going through RPG Fan's list of top RPGs of 2011. It won the indie category with a lot of praise going towards its story. I never heard of the game before, but to have what RPG Fan were calling the best story of any video game this year, it intrigued me enough to read their full reviews on it, as well as find out what other people were saying about it.

For those who don't know (and to stop my dad from making some terrible joke about how RPG is a programming language), RPGs in the video game world are short for 'role-playing game' - a genre of video game where you assume the role of someone whose progression through the game is typically determined by classes/specializations (what kind of traits you want your character to have), statistics (assigned numbers to each of those traits), and story.

Now that I've told you that bit about RPGs, you can forget it all because To the Moon has neither classes nor statistics - it's basically an interactive story that just happens to be made with a tool called RPG Maker, so I don't know whether the RPG classification is really all that justified.

With that out of the way, To the Moon's premise goes something like this: in the future, people can be granted their dying wish thanks to a technology that allows doctors to create artificial memories in the patient, thus granting them the memories of having done something that never actually happened.

In this game you take the role of 2 doctors, Dr Eva Rosaline and Dr Neil Watts, as they grant their latest patient, a dying man named Johnny, his wish to go to the moon. Johnny isn't entirely sure why he wants to go to the moon, so with only a day or 2 to live the doctors dive into Johnny's mind and retrace his memories back to his childhood to plant in his childhood self the ambition and drive to become an astronaut, and ultimately to go to the moon.

Telling a story in reverse isn't easy, and the last time I came across a reverse-story in the movie Memento, it messed with my head for the first couple of minutes. But like Memento, To the Moon, manages to pull-off this reverse narrative, teasing your own assumptions and experiences to fill-in the blanks and treating you to a different form of suspense - instead of the usual "what happens next?", you're instead left wondering "why/how did this all happen?"

It's in unravelling Johnny's life that a heart-felt human story takes place, and just to re-iterate so many other reviews of the game out there, it truly is one of the better written stories I have had the pleasure to play through. There's nothing 'grand scale' or 'sweeping epic' about it; it's just a story of a man and a life filled with friends, places, struggles, love, and loss, and it's in uncovering each of these memories through the doctors' (and your) eyes, reliving each emotion as it takes place, and piecing together the life of the man that is Johnny that the game really shines.

I'm trying to think of an example in the story, but mentioning anything beyond the initial few minutes feels almost like a spoiler since so much of what the game makes you feel is in discovering who Johnny is for yourself. Every little discovery isn't spelled-out for you, leaving you to come to your own conclusions and encouraging you to read between the lines, making each and every discovery your own.

Because it's a story about a life, many of Johnny's memories can hit quite close to home, so I found myself pretty emotionally involved. I would sympathize with Johnny quite a lot - laughing with him over a dinner with friends, mentally putting a hand on his shoulder when the situation got bad, and urging him forward when he struggled with nerves in the moments before talking to a girl. I've been there, I'd find myself thinking, I know how you feel...

As for other aspects of the game, the music is probably the next strongest part about To the Moon, helping only to add to the emotion that you're probably already experiencing. None of the pieces are too busy, and most are written around a simple piano motif that was stuck in my head (in a good way) for days afterwards.

There is no voice acting, but in this game that's hardly a negative. The characters of Dr Rosaline and Dr Watts are so well-written it's like reading the witty banter between long-time friends. The things they say tend more towards the light-hearted side of things which, in a sombre tale such as this, is a good way to balance the tone of the game.

As I've mentioned, the game was put together using RPG Maker, so the game looks a lot like a top-down 2D adventure from the Super Nintendo era of the early 90s. Heck, even my widescreen monitor would complain whenever I'd load the game, telling me I shouldn't be running it at such low resolutions. Regardless, the 2D graphics still manage to set the scene, and To the Moon makes use of the 2D to paint some pretty good-looking scenes, even those that you visit over and over again in Johnny's memories, without feeling repetitive or copy-and-paste.

As a game though, it's very lacking in the ever-important gameplay department. Controlling the doctors is done primarily through the mouse (click on a spot on the ground to walk there, click on some object to investigate/interact with it), and some basic puzzle solving that feels incongruous at first is the only thing that stands between you and the next of Johnny's memories. The mouse controls didn't seem all that responsive, so I found myself reaching for the keyboard whenever I could (left hand on the arrow keys, right hand on the mouse to scan the environment). This left me in a bit of an awkward position though with both of my hands nearer the right side of my desk.

The strength of To the Moon lies entirely in its story, and wow is it a story to be experienced. Supported by the beautiful music tracks (some of which I learned is composed by Laura Shigihara of Plants vs Zombies fame) this game will tug at the heart strings and, not so much refuse to let go, but rather you'll find yourself giving them up to the game to see where it will take you. More of an 'interactive novel' than RPG, this game took me just over 4 hours to complete, but the impression it's left on me has stuck and, in the several days since, still refuses to leave.

And yes, at one point it did almost make me cry. I remember when it happened, my cheeks and eyes started to feel funny and I brought a hand up to them thinking, What the hell, what is this feeling? before rubbing at my face and shaking the feeling away. Was I about to cry?

I've never had a video game do that to me before.

9 out of 10.

Ah, I had a lovely break last week. There wasn't any particular occasion; the city had its anniversary day so we got Monday off (yay 3-day weekend), but I took the rest of the week off as well. I called it my own Christmas / New Year's holiday since I was unfortunate enough to be the guy working over the actual Christmas / New Year's break, drawing the short straw because of my lack of plans and lack of dependants.

So what did I do? Well, constructive stuff surprisingly: I worked on improving this website's stability (5 days without an error page! Fingers still crossed.) and other features for myself, I started writing this idea I had for a story based on a song my guitar buddy and I came up with last year, and because of said story I did a bit of extra subject matter reading which unfortunately had me read some pretty bad books. I also trimmed and replanted what used to be my 2-feet-tall basil plant into 2 much smaller / more manageable plants (gave a lot of leaf cuttings to my family, had basil in almost every meal the weekend that I spent with them).

As for things that fall into the unconstructive basket: I bought Castlevania: Lords of Shadow :D

Towards the end of the break, I spent the weekend with family, and upon returning to my place, found the living-room window smashed from the outside and a helluva lot of glass on the floor.

While the possibility existed, I didn't really think my place had been broken into; there were signs that wasn't the case. Instead, my mind, and everybody else's who I mentioned it to (landlord and property management company included), got to wondering: what the hell caused that hole?

Without CSI-like knowledge or a CSI-like flashback of events, it was a difficult question to answer. The blinds were down at the time, so whatever smashed the window was likely bounced back out after it did its job. Everyone had their theories: bricks, epic strong winds, a water balloon which defied physics and obtained the mass of a brick (that tiny red thing on the window sill in the right shot was a deflated balloon), etc. The most common theory though, was that it was a bird.

On hearing the bird theory, my mind made the following logic leaps: bird > bird hurling itself towards my window > bird breaking shit > bird must've had a temper > Angry Birds.

For the 5 of you out there who don't know what Angry Birds is, it is quite possibly the most popular iPad/iPhone game ever (with ports for various other devices being made) in which limbless birds, controlled by you, hurl themselves at terribly-constructed structures to kill the limbless animals that live inside for the satisfaction of watching large numbers appear on screen proportional to the damage your bird has done.

Thinking about that game, things started making an odd sort of sense in my head. I didn't imagine that someone had been hurling birds at my apartment building in hopes of knocking it down, but thought that the birds of the world, having had enough of being portrayed as projectiles for destruction thanks to the game, decided to get their revenge, ironically, by acting as destructive projectiles.

Why the hell they picked me, I'm not sure. I don't even own an iPad/iPhone. Hell, I imagined myself sticking my head out the broken window, turning my head towards the birds above and shouting: "WHY ARE YOU TARGETING ME!? I DON'T EVEN LIKE APPLE PRODUCTS!" Unfortunately for my imagined self, there were Apple fanboys crowding the streets and alleys outside, so instead of birds throwing themselves again at my other windows for my remarks, there were Apple fanboys throwing their iPods, white earbuds and all, at my face.

The window isn't fixed yet - living several stories above ground makes proper repairs a bit difficult. My dad and I, with the help of a lot of spare tape from a friend who lives up the road, covered the hole with thick plastic and backed by wooden shelving from the kitchen. We kinda went overboard on the tape as well, the visible surface of the window covered with more tape than plastic.

A glazier came over the next day, remarked on the good job of the tape and shelving overkill, and replaced it with a temporary pane which was simply glued to what was left of the window, and sealed with 4 bits of tape. Suddenly the job my dad and I did to cover the window lacked both practicality and elegance.

At least I have a sort of window now. I just owe my friend a helluva lot of tape.

Continuing again on the subject of books, but back to the one about zombies, I made the judgement that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was lacking in zombies. In my own mind I extended this opinion to the genre as a whole - the 'insert-zombies-here' genre - but I may have jumped the gun on that one. You see, while waiting for the doors to Kick-Ass to open (an awesome movie by the way; everyone who meets the age requirement should go see it), I stumbled across this while perusing the shelves at the nearby Whitcoulls:

If the image isn't clear enough for you to see, the title of that book is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Reading the blurb on the book reveals that it is a prequel to the events of the original parody, set several years before, when the zombie plague that seems to have taken hold of English society was just starting.

When I saw that book, I started to think that the publishers were really milking the whole idea - much like how the market seems to be flooded with vampire romance books a la the Twilight series. But then when I got home and tried to find the title on Amazon, I found that the Jane Austen + monsters 'genre' was far from alone.

The search results listed a book which re-wrote the Robin Hood tale to have him and Friar Tuck be zombie killers, another book gave Huckleberry Finn a zombie partner-in-crime, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was given a good dose of mummies, and The Wizard of Oz became The Undead World of Oz.

Without having to be tied-down to any original text, Dawn has the potential to be funnier for me than Pride, but as soon as I saw those search results, I was hit with zombie fatigue.

I'm tired of everyone trying to insert zombies into things to try make a quick buck or extend the life of some long-dead idea. Adding the undead to something doesn't necessarily make it more alive! Sure I've only read 1 'insert-zombies-here' book, but the gamer side of me can give you a laundry list of zombie titles that I really don't think are worth the megabytes of storage on your disk drive or the DVDs they are printed on.

My pet peeve, Call of Duty: World at War, has Nazi zombies in them... NAZI ZOMBIES! It's bad enough that developers have been churning out WWII games longer than WWII itself has lasted, but then to insert zombies into them to get that little bit of post-mortem movement from a dead horse that's already been beaten more times than a drum is a kind of necromancy that should be as illegal as necrophilia.

On that note, if by some crazy circumstances the real zombie plague just happens to start because somebody was screwing over that horse (or any other idea-corpse) too hard because they already inserted zombies into everything, then they deserve to have their brains eaten-out by that exact same corpse when it turns into a zombie.

There'd be a certain irony to that.

Update: From the blog of sci-fi author, John Scalzi:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, adapted by Tony Lee, Illustrated by Cliff Richards (Del Rey)

Really? I mean, come on, now, guys. Really? Also: Really? Out May 4.

The Beatles: Rock Band came out earlier this week, which should mean that in the lead-up to the release date I'd be very excited (I was) and that after bringing it home and giving it a go I'd be enjoying the game thoroughly (I'm not).

"I'm not" I say? Does the game suck? Well, I don't know yet.

On the morning of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band (a work day, unfortunately), I got the usual message from the mail room that a package had arrived for me to pick up. Ooooo, exciting! I was thinking, because I knew exactly what waiting for me.

The remainder of the work day was not ordinary, but rather uneventful: picked-up the package, went to lunch w/ dad (although I didn't have to pay for his meal this time), browsed the CD store with him to check out the release of the digitally remastered Beatles albums, worked until all enthusiasm was drained from me, read the local rag on the train ride home, ate dinner, watched CSI: New York on TV...

...and THEN, it was time to play The Beatles: Rock Band with the family.

We were all pretty excited. For me, because it's a new toy; for my brother, probably the same reason; for my parents, because they finally get to play to songs that they grew up with (a change to having to play Boston in Rock Band 2 over and over again - don't get me wrong, I looove Boston, but repetition does remove the mirror sheen on even the nicest things).

So we plugged-in/turned-on all the controllers, loaded-up the disc, and... wait, what's up with my controller? The Xbox guide button on my fake plastic guitar just kept flashing; couldn't register as a controller with the Xbox. Oh F***!!!

I kept the expletive thoughts to my inner voice, conceded my position as 'lead guitar' and let the family play on without me. I went back to my room and sulked by browsing the internet for the guitar tablature to emotion-infused meaningful songs I know so I could learn to play them then and there on my real guitar :(

I've had this problem before (this is actually the 3rd fake plastic guitar I've gone through: the first one having a broken strum bar and the second one having this same flashing light issue) and the guitar is still under warranty, but it means having to send the damn thing back and waiting anywhere from a week to a month for a replacement... again (stupid courier costs associated with returning items when buying from an internet vendor).

Not that I'd want to: I'd rather head for the nearest store, buy a new WIRELESS guitar, and pray the thing doesn't get a bung strum bar. And if it does, at least I'll have the option of going down to the store and venting my frustrations out on the nearest store employee who will likely be some unsuspecting teenager who has absolutely nothing to do with the failings and design faults of my fake plastic guitar.

*sigh*

As you can imagine, I'm not very happy right now. Here I am, blogging about another situation that is out of my control. So, this lunch time, I'm gonna go fill my stomach with tasty fast-food, knowing full well that what I'm putting into me isn't very good for my body and that my patronage is lining the pockets of already-rich corporate billionaires overseas.

At least I still have control over that.

So around the time I was coping with my own battle against swine flu, I spent a lot of time just sitting at home and doing nothing. I tried to do some programming, but thinking on that level became tiring. I thought I could give my art a go, but I wasn't feeling particularly creative. All that was really left for me was to vege out on video games, so at my brother's recommendation, I played Dead Space on his Playstation 3.

To summarize, Dead Space is a sci-fi survival-horror action game set on a large spaceship that seems to have been overtaken by grotesque alien monsters. If you need comparison materials, think Doom 3 meets Event Horizon.

Anyway, as is expected of games in the survival-horror genré, you see a lot of blood, strange writing on walls, undecipherable symbols on walls, said writing/symbols drawn in blood, and any other combination of the above. When the blood on the walls started showing-up in Dead Space, I didn't really think much of it. But when the blood-soaked writing and strange alien symbols started showing-up, I began wondering: "Where are the pictures of dicks?"

As gay as that sounded, let me take a step back to write about an observation I made several weeks before.

The internet is notorious for its childishness. Given the chance, people will create usernames which allude to sex or dicks (case in point: my brother has registered the username 'PhallicThunder' on some forums), create banners depicting dicks (eg: first time my friends took Mario Kart DS online, they competed against others with dicks on their banners), or creatures shaped like dicks or boobs (eg: Spore Creature Creator).

This obviously isn't an internet-only thing. Just the other day I walked past a construction site with grafitti of dicks on the walls. And when taking the lift up to my floor at work where the covers used to protect the walls against scratches are installed, those covers have their fair share of phallic pictography (same thing at my mum's work I've learned).

When I saw our elevator covers with their dick pics, I started to wonder, who in this building would do this? I mean, this is a workplace where the average age of employees is somewhere in the late 40s. If I had to accuse anybody of drawing those, I'd quickly point the finger at myself because a) I'm one of the youngest there, b) I'm pretty childish myself, and c) I really have a hard time imagining my middle-aged managers taking out a pen and scribbling pictures of dicks on the elevator wall covers while they giggle childishly.

So there I was, playing Dead Space, staring at a wall of blood-soaked words, wondering where the hell the dick graffiti was...

I imagine that, with your dying breath, writing warnings or hints to potential survivors about 'cutting off their limbs' or how to survive certain alien attacks takes precedence over posting phallic imagery on the walls of a spacecraft. But then again, when you're on your last legs, why the hell not?

(slightly unrelated, but my favourite example of vandalism has to be the one where they removed some letters from the sign PUBLIC PARKING, such that it read PUBIC KING)

I made it pretty obvious in a post this month that I got Rock Band 2 and was loving it. Several days on, I'm still loving it, although I have left it and the Xbox back at my family's place since I couldn't be bothered bringing all those fake plastic instruments back to my apartment.

Yes, I'm Xbox-less right now :( The removal of said gaming machine has given me a lot more time to work on PC-related stuff (ie: this blog and other ongoing website developments) and general responsibilities (eg: cleaning, cooking). Without the Xbox the TV is only used to watch broadcast television, so I went and hooked-up my PC to it so I could watch my videos and have music in the lounge again.

So yeah, I'm blogging from my lounge today, and will be for several days to come while I continue life Xbox-less. I'd take photos of the PC-next-to-the-TV setup, but I don't have a digital camera. Yes, you read that right: this tech-savvy IT guy DOES NOT HAVE A DIGITAL CAMERA (and I'll probably turn that into a blog post for another day in April).

Anyway, back to Rock Band 2

So I was introduced to the world of fake plastic instruments through Guitar Hero 3. Being a (fake-)guitar-only game, it got me pretty good with the 5-button guitar side of things, and it also got me really excited about the evolution of the music & rhythym game genre when it turned into Rock Band (or Guitar Hero: World Tour if you wish to stick with the GH franchise). So when Rock Band came out, and my friends brought it around one night, I instantly loved it.

That night I stuck to the guitar part, but when I bought Rock Band 2 I resolved to try out the other parts: drumming and singing.

My family isn't the most musical kind out there but it's musical enough; my dad doesn't play any instruments, so any music genes must've come from my mother's side. She plays the classical guitar, my brother plays drums and some guitar, and I play piano and some guitar. We can all keep pitch, can keep in time, and sing to some degree.

Finally, all those years of singing in the shower and walking down the street as I hum the tune to what's blaring out of my MP3 player would come to fruition. RB2 would give me all the reason I needed to sing my lungs out. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened; I sung my lungs out (and my throat and voice too).

When I decided to tackle the singing component of RB2, I went straight to the Hard level (I can keep pitch right?) and picked a song that I enjoyed but didn't really realize was way out of my range until that very moment. The result: I was often flat or sharp, and ended-up shouting my way through choruses. At every step of the way, RB2 was there critiquing my progress after every major phrase with words like 'Good' or 'Awesome', except what mostly popped-up was 'Weak' along with a loss of my score multiplier and integrity of my throat.

Even after picking songs within my range, my throat and voice started crapping-out on me, and as I slipped below the 80% mark at the end-of-song score, even RB2 decided to stop heaping its hollow praises on me. I sucked, and RB2, myself, and my brother - who was unfortunate enough to be in the room - knew it.

So what now seeing that 1/4 of the Rock Band experience is locked-away from me? Well, I always have the fake plastic guitar to fall back on, and the drums are pretty fun (so at least I wasn't wrong about my ability to keep time). But it looks like 'learning to sing into a mic' is now on my to do list. That's right, the singing part has become my white whale and my sheer stubbornness - and the fact that I've spent hundreds of dollars on this game and I'll be damned if I'm not going to squeeze every last penny out of it, especially during the recession - is going to propel me forward.

Hopefully I'll have more luck than Captain Ahab, and won't destroy my voice in the process.

I've left today's blog a bit too late to write something approaching the average number of paragraphs I've had for every other entry thus far of Blog Every Day April, but I was held-up for good reason. That reason: Rock Band 2.

So I'm gonna leave it at: I just got Rock Band 2, and OMG it's awesome :D (proper blog coming post tomorrow)

One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time. Oh how wrong I was.

When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things. Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be. Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate. Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.

Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking. Yes, cooking.

Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some. The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers. The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.

Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.

I followed an interesting tangent of related topics in the gaps between work today. It started last night as I was at home trawling through some Devil May Cry 3 and 4 skill/combo videos. These videos are always played to some kind of metal; one of them was covered by 2 Rhapsody of Fire songs, and several others I couldn't name. It was then I discovered another power metal band, Kamelot.

Kamelot's When the Lights Are Down was the song being used, so I found which album it was on, did a bit of reading about the album, and it turns-out the album is a sequel to an earlier concept album, loosely based on the story of Goethe's Faust. It was this part caught my attention because my brother (film/theatre student) has been involved in several productions of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Intrigued by the naming coincedence, I continued my reading and learned that both Goethe and Marlowe wrote their stories based on a German legend about a man (Faust) who makes a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge.

I knew how the Marlowe version went from my brother, so I focused on learning about Goethe's version and about Goethe himself, and somewhere along the way I realized, "Holy crap, I've stumbled upon a literary heavyweight!"

You can read about Goethe's epic resumé and mark on history anywhere on the Internet just by Googling his name. As I did I felt both awed by his achievements, and stupid for not having heard of this guy before. The last time I felt like this, was when I threw "circles of hell" into Google (I was using the concept in a story of mine) and came across another epic: Dante's The Divine Comedy. Therein lay several other Devil May Cry and popular culture references.

So what did I learn? Plenty. And that power metal and video games can be educational too :P

As a belated Christmas present, my brother got me Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Game Of The Year Edition, which includes both the original game (The Longest Journey) and the more recent sequel Dreamfall, as well as the soundtrack to Dreamfall.

I've never owned a point-and-click adventure game before, so this was rather new for me. That's probably one of the reasons it's so fun; the original game may be technically outdated (1999, 640x480 screen res), but most of the themes and the story still hold-up pretty well: saving the world, meeting a magical race, killing the evil witch, all clichés that I've never had the time to completely appreciate, until now.

I'm now onto Dreamfall, and the more modern game is a welcome sequel and step-up from it's predecessor. However, I can't seem to get passed how stiff the character models are during some of the talking scenes. I mean, for an Xbox 360 and PC game released in 2006, I was kinda hoping for more natural movements. Didn't all those developers get that right after the Half-Life 2 / Doom 3 era?

Oh well, just a small blemish in an otherwise enjoyable adventure thus far.