What I just realized is that many of the things we remember from our childhood were actually from a single source, rather than a mish-mash of one-hit wonders like The Swan Princess, Ferngully, and The Nutcracker Prince. (Or the ones like Quest for Camelot which just didn’t shout out that Warner Brothers made them.)

The more aware of you might be thinking I’m going to be talking about Don Bluth, who brought us cartoons like The Land Before Time, An American Tail, The Secret of NIMH, Thumbelina, and Anastasia (among many other less classic ones), but this isn’t about him.

This is about a little company named Rankin/Bass Productions which sometimes published through Warner Brothers, but was quite visibly not them.

Do you remember those old stop-motion holiday films like Rudolph or Here Comes Peter Cottontail? Early Rankin/Bass Productions.

How about the animated version of The Hobbit or things like Flight of Dragons and The Last Unicorn, which, as an adult, I now find deeper than their better-drawn Disney contemporaries in some ways? You guessed it. Rankin/Bass again.

Incidentally, they contracted a Japanese studio named Topcraft to do the animation. The core members of Topcraft would later found Studio Ghibli, (And The Snow Queen was one of Hayao Miyazaki‘s big inspirations, but that’s as far off-track as I’ll let myself go.)

So, is there a point to this ramble? I suppose, if anything, it’s that, nostalgia and re-examining old favorites aside, learning details like these can help to see your past in a new light. I don’t know about you, but I love that feeling of understanding that comes when a new detail finally “clicks”.

For example, If you’ve watched any significant number of Miyazaki films, take a look at The Snow Queen. It’s fascinating to see what thematic and stylistic elements of it he chose to borrow and refine. Sailor Moon wasn’t on the TV channels I got as a kid but, if you watched it, you probably weren’t aware that it basically introduced the idea of magical girls working in a group to fight off large-scale villains. (Up until that point, that was the domain of Super Sentai. Stuff like Voltron and Power Rangers which I also didn’t watch.)

As for comments, what do you find most memorable about these second-tier classics? The song, This Is My Idea, from The Swan Princess? Amalthea’s words from the end of The Last Unicorn? The intro? James Horner’s soundtrack for the original The Land Before Time? Share it.

Fanon is a rather odd entity. It’s often looked down on entirely, with those who think themselves the ‘best authors’ sneering at any use of it and claiming that you should never resort to such obviously flawed and factually incorrect items. Of course, it does have a purpose and one that, if it’s not noble, at least makes sense.

Some fanon, such as the name “Kimiko”, established for Soun Tendo’s wife in the Ranma 1/2 universe, is simply there because there is absolutely no canon data on the subject, but it’s handy to be able to refer to her by that shorthand and to always have a name to use if you need it.

Other fanon, like the explanation that a Sailor Senshi’s transformation naturally includes a disguise field, helps a person who needs explanations for normally unexplained phenomena, or helps bolster a story if it’s already stretching your suspension of disbelief and doesn’t want you thinking about the why. For example, if Usagi executes a perfectly coordinated wall run and Shingo doesn’t recognize her when she did it while holding him in her arms.

There is a third type of fanon, one that ascribes hitherto vaguely hinted (or not hinted at all) motivations to a character or amplifies (what TVTropes would call flanderizes) established traits such as the insistence on having Minako Aino flub a line every chapter, or having Akane Tendo chase everyone who accidentally sneezes in her direction with a mallet.

These last two types, while occasionally literarily useful, can be somewhat dangerous. For example, there is the habit of an author latching onto one of them as a device that they enjoy using in their work and, through that use, forgetting that it was an author-created device. For example, I often have to remind myself that, in the Anime and Manga, Ranmaverse characters very rarely show any ability to detect the life force of others, and that usually occurs when an aura is being clearly displayed, or a hostile action is being taken against them. It is important to keep track of these devices, as you can find yourself correcting another author on a point of fact that is, in fact, only one of your personal plot devices, or failing to enjoy a story because it violates it.

The strangest effect that modified devices or characters can have on a series is what, for the purposes of this example, I’m calling pervasive fanon, and since it is the thing that brought it to my attention, I will be using Sailor Pluto, and her relationship with the timeline and time gates for the example.

Taking only Sailor Moon, the Anime series as a basis, Sailor Pluto’s limitations and job are rather clearly spelled out. She is to guard the gates of time, ensure that she is standing at them and guarding them at all times (barring earth-shattering emergencies), and not to abuse her powers, most particularly the time stop, the penalty for which is death.

At some point (I have absolutely no idea when or who was responsible), a fanfiction author wished to write a story either revolving around Sailor Pluto, or the act of changing the past. To that end, this author thought that it would be neat if Pluto could open the gates without passing through them, to use them as a sort of temporal viewer rather than a time travel device, explaining that, in his fic, the gates had that function built in to better facilitate her guarding of the timeline.

This plot device was actually quite a good one. It allowed a whole new character interpretation for Pluto. No longer simply the grim guardian of time who stood vigil over one of the most dangerous forces in existence to keep it under control, this Pluto could actually shape events, could enforce her will on the timestream. This is fanfiction, after all, and the possibilities of that are endless, depending on how her character was played.

I’m guessing that the sheer number of possibilities from this plot device, the time gates as a monitoring device, resulted in a wave of fics that used the same premise for various effects and even fics that used it for side or background effects that would help a main story.

This is where things get interesting. The human mind tends to suffer from something called “Source Amnesia.” That is, we sometimes have trouble determining where we heard or learned a piece of information. In a case where we are reading and writing fanfiction about a series that we may not have all of the episodes of, or that we may only be catching once a week, this source amnesia tends to kick in pretty hard, and that’s why things like Pluto’s extra powers over the time gates tend to seep into our knowledge of the series. It’s obvious Pluto can do that, it’s obvious Youma and Dark Generals can absorb large amounts of life force with a single touch, it’s obvious that Sailor Jupiter is actually a dryad… wait, what?

All of these things seem obvious because we’ve seen them so often, as they become popular fanon devices, and we simply cannot go over the canon nearly that much. There are 200 episodes of Sailor Moon, each of them 22 minutes long, and the fifth season is only subbed. Let’s not even talk about the differences caused by the editing done during the dubbing process, and the trick some people (including me), do of assuming that X thing I could have sworn was canon must happen in the subbed version.

All of this seems kind of annoying, but not really that bad, right? Unless someone takes something as fanon that you find really annoying, it shouldn’t bother you. Well, that’s not exactly true. Getting back to Sailor Pluto and the Time Gates. Over the more than a decade that her abilities have been changing in fanon, the generally accepted version of her is capable of monitoring the timeline for change, sometimes remotely, and ensuring that the most likely outcome, right down to decimal point probability, remains crystal Tokyo. If you want to change something, add a major character that shakes things up, many authors will catch themselves wondering, “How would Sailor Pluto let this happen? It would cause X to happen wrong!” and then come up with a long, complex explanation as to how she could tweak things so everything worked out.

But let’s put things back into perspective, here. Recall her original list of abilities? She guards the gate of time, which is a corridor that lets you travel through time. Her only temporally dangerous ability is a timestop that will straight up kill her if she uses it. So you can go ahead and put your new character, scene, or reaction in, because canon Sailor Pluto has no inclination to stop you… unless you’re trying to blow up Usagi or something, anyways. And then she’ll do it by teleporting out of the gates when something or someone else informs her and hitting you upside the head with her staff, not going back to last Tuesday and re-arranging gum wrappers so you never have the idea.

In short, fanon is a useful thing for authors, it lets them do pretty much anything they want with a series and its characters, determined only by the writer’s ability and imagination. But when a stumbling block comes up from what you feel is a well established plot point, don’t be afraid to go back and check the source. If it’s fanon that’s blocking your way, you don’t need it.

Ed.: If you have any ideas as to where in the fandom the expansion of Sailor Pluto’s powers originated, please share them in the comments. Inquiring but overworked minds want to know.

I’m not done, but this is a good place to stop for now and I can’t spare any more time,  so let’s focus on the good things rather than the remnants of the old look, like the ugly navigation box and the dated look for the randomizer’s tab box.

Here are the highlights of the new look:

• Both the randomizer and the VFFA look pretty good now. (I may still change the color scheme, but it’s acceptable now)
• Fluid layout tested all the way down to portrait-mode cellphones. (Developed on desktop development builds of Fennec and tested by a friend on his iPhone. One minor known bug still to be fixed.)
• Print stylesheets (especially useful for the quote randomizer but I’m surprised how many workarounds the VFFA needed for Chrome print renderer bugs)
• Tested with Fangs and tuned to work well with screen readers (I’m still a novice here, so I’m sure there’s more to be done)
• Information on how to help the site is now clearly marked and includes a “fics wanted” list (that I’m still disentangling from the other VFFA TODOs).
• Clear indicator icons for what will download rather than open in the browser.
• Lemons are clearly marked and will ask for confirmation before opening.
• Last updated dates for quotes and last checked dates for external links are now pretty-printed as relative intervals  if Javascript is enabled. (eg. 2 Months Ago)
• Fandom information has been moved out of the description into the story header.
• Stories without descriptions now automatically ask users to submit them.
• Supplementary text is more concise and to the point.
• Quote Randomizer’s tabs no longer trigger a full reload of the page if Javascript is enabled. (Known bug: The stats bar at the bottom stays on the category the page loaded on)

Of course, equally interesting (and time-consuming) is what’s going on under the hood. I’d have made these renovations months ago, but I was running in circles trying to “do the right thing” and reuse an existing static templating tool. I ended up deciding it was simpler and easier to just write my own.

It’s still got a lot of hard-coded stuff, but here are some of the things I’ve already got done:

• Exports over 21,000 quotes to gzipped bundles in 10 seconds. (8 seconds for Mako, 2 seconds for GZip)
• Validates HTML, CSS, and XML using OpenSP and µTidyLib, cssutils, and lxml, respectively. (JSHint and CoffeeScript support planned)
• Lets me define most of the site in a mixture of Mako templates and markdown. (Jinja2, Textile, reStructuredText, and asciidoc support planned)
• Minifies CSS using cssutils. (UglifyJS support and CSS/JS bundling planned)
• Is much easier for me to hack on than Blogofile since I wrote it and also try to keep the codebase lean and well-documented with EPyDoc. (With Blogofile, I couldn’t even figure out how I was supposed to hook in code that takes more than one file in the source tree and produces a single zip in the build directory)

Obviously there’s a ton of stuff I’m not talking about (like how it doesn’t yet rebuild only files that have changed) that makes this only useful to me right now, but once doing so won’t be a procrastination risk for my coursework, I will be putting it up on GitHub. (Probably under an MIT license)

tl;dr It’s pretty, it works nicely with cellphones and printers now, and it’s easier for me to maintain.

Written in the 1940s, Venus Equilateral focuses on the adventures of the crew of the titular space station, orbiting at one of Venus’s libration points in order to relay communication when the sun or its radio output make direct interplanetary communication impossible.

The book is definitely hard sci-fi, which lends it a very interesting flavor, over half a century later (Think “digging up ancient martian vacuum tubes and using oddly-shaped cogs to aim directional antennas so teletype messages can be sent to ships in transit”) but if you don’t mind the technobabble, it lends the stories a very interesting flavor. (Think “Sherlock Holmes”, which was also written in the contemporary style of a period now gone)

The series starts off a bit slow, but just continues to get better and better and, by doing it this way, both the villains and the more fantastic elements of the technology base can be built, grow, and change as you watch. In fact, it reminds me of the Ed stories or, in a more abstract fashion, the feel of some of the steampunk settings I’ve run across.

Each novelette follows a fairly simple formula: Some kind of conflict occurs (eg. a disaster happens, a villain schemes, etc.), some technological advancements have been kicking around, and through grit, innovation, and much technobabble and tablecloth-scribbling, the brilliant oddballs at Venus Equilateral save the day. (For example, when their boss is on a ship that gets hit by a meteor and signals VE for a rescue by turning the central well of the ship into a giant cathode-ray tube)

One especially refreshing example is how, when they eventually start developing matter transmission/replication technology à la Star Trek, the problems they encounter actually make sense as three-dimensional, material versions of electronic input/output problems television engineers of the day encountered, rather than technobabble with no real meaning. There’s something to be said for having an author knowledgeable enough to shrink the actual matter-conversion down to something that can be an infallible black box without the reader caring.

It gets even better when, thanks to the aforementioned technology, you then get to watch, as it happens, the side-effects of all material things (including currency) becoming infinitely duplicable and valueless in a 40s-inspired society… without the ending being some kind of stupid, irritating Aesop’s fable about how progress is evil. (In fact, on the philosophical side, the story in question, “Pandora’s Millions”, feels better than a lot of what authors write on the topic today, over 60 years later.)

The technical side of that particular short could’ve been better, but given that the author lacked knowledge of various other details that fall under the aegis of physics (like the feasibility of two-way communication with a space probe like Voyager 1) that’s easy to excuse as yet another artifact of when the stories were written.

All in all, a very fun read and something I’d highly recommend. Aside from the female characters being supporting cast only (something that really stands out to me now, but is unsurprising for the 40s), it could be a brilliant piece of retro sci-fi written today. 5 out of 5 stars.

VVVVVV is a puzzle platformer with a special twist. Unlike other platformers, you can’t jump… you can only reverse the direction you fall. (I’m guessing the main character is supposed to be weightless and wearing magnetic boots)

The first thing I have to say is that this is a game that’s firmly targeted at the “nostalgia niche”. Its graphics are an intentional knock-off of games from the Commodore 64 era, the soundtrack is composed of chiptunes, and gameplay, while simple and intuitive, is about as far from “push button to win” as you can get while still keeping me as a satisfied player.

However, you don’t have to be an old Commodore gamer to enjoy it (The SNES was the first gaming system I owned) and it’s actually a very refreshing game as long as you aren’t impulsive or impatient. Some levels require to you to stop and think before you attempt them while others are centered on “more speed, less haste”. This is definitely not a game to be played while tired. However, if you’re well-rested and can think well within levels designed to make you hurry (and to kill you if you get lazy), I found it not only satisfying, but rather relaxing. (Just make sure you’re playing the newer C/C++ rewrite. The old flash version’s collision detection is painfully inadequate.)

I especially enjoyed the scrolling “The Tower” segment… which is a bit of a surprise, given that I hate self-scrolling levels everywhere else in gaming. There was a sort of “DDR Zen” to it (plus catchy music) that appealed to me… aside from that jerk move of putting that second trinket far enough from its branch point to keep me from getting everything in the first run.

In fact, aside from when I got tired and started making mistakes, the whole game had a sort of relaxing flow to it.  All in all,  it’s a very well-designed game built around switching between stopping to think one moment and requiring you to be cool and collected under pressure the next.

While I wouldn’t want that in all my games, in moderation, it’s very refreshing. I suppose I’m starting to understand what some reviewers see in the first Castlevania game. It also helps that there’s so much catchy music in the soundtrack.

Not a long game, but well worth it if you can spare the cash.

Most of them were the kind of authors I wouldn’t read if you paid me (people who, as far as I can tell, spend their time writing tired, cliché, fix-it or shipper plots that were done to death years ago) and, of the 10 who have actually written at least one story I recognize as something I’d consider worth reading in retrospect, almost none of them are the authors I’d really recommend for their skill, talent, wit, cleverness, and/or ability to keep it up over the course of several fics.

Given that I had a little free time and a decent collection of records on what I’ve read and liked, I decided to compose my own list, complete with the fics that earned them their place. I really didn’t want to sort all 50 from best to worst, so it’s in alphabetical order instead.

Not everything they write is good, but each of them wrote something good at least once and all of them demonstrated that skill and/or luck in Naruto fanfic. (I’m not sure I’d have been able to find 30 authors, let alone 50, if I limited myself to people who wrote more good stuff than bad over the course of their interest in fanfiction)

Enjoy and, if you think I missed someone, please leave a comment so I can check them out.

1. Aleh (Appreciation)
2. Andoriol (Naruto: Lord of Konoha)
3. Angel of Snapdragons (A Drop of Poison)
4. anothvortex (all four stories)
5. Asha’man of Fire (Kitsune on Campus)
6. atom-of-ice (Naruto’s Advice)
7. Average Naruto (Tomato)
8. Bloodreaver Alpha (Diary of a Madman: Memoirs of a Nukenin)
9. brown phantom (Students of the Snake, Naruto’s Kit)
10. Case13 (Reload, The Art of the Deal… and I’m told his other Naruto stuff is amazing too but it’s still on my to-read list)
11. Chibi-Reaper (Overlord, Uzumaki Naruto, Sorceror for hire, and various clever ideas that haven’t been written far enough yet to list)
12. Chilord (Bondage Style!)
13. ChoppedHige (Nicknames and Shadows)
14. Crimson Skies (This Time Around)
15. Denim88 (Cracked Mask)
16. DisobedienceWriter (Naruto’s Compensation)
17. dogbertcarrol (Glaring Problems, Play it again, Naruto!)
18. Dragon Man 180 (Feel Like A Woman)
19. drakensis (The Night The House of Cards Was Built, Cheaters Prosper)
20. EdStargazer (Naruto: Captured)
21. froznfox72 (Geniuses of Hard Work)
22. gsteemso (The Disorderly Princess and the Fiery Steed)
23. HitokiriOTD (The Book of Naruto)
24. Innortal (Shinobi OneHalf, The Naruto Omake Files: Innortal Style)
25. Jade R. Raven (The Rival)
26. Jonakhensu (Kyuubi no Cabbit)
27. Jonque (The Missing Hokage)
28. Kenchi618 (Better Left Unsaid)
29. Kraken’s Ghost (Foxhound)
30. leafygirl (Loophole)
31. Lord Archive (Between Deception and Truth)
32. Lucillia (Time MixUp, History Exam, Little Uzumaki, The Consequences of Drunken Experiments, Chickenzilla, 5 Hokages, Underwear the Cat, Pet Names, Yukiko, and various others)
33. Majin Hentai X (Naruto: Game of the Year Edition)
34. Minnionette (Switched!)
35. MockV (A Twist of Chance)
36. MogTheGnome (The Great Romantic, Naruto, the Spanking Nin, The Imprint, The REAL Sound Nin, and less memorable others)
37. Nes Mikel (Garden of Sanctuary, Medusa Javelin, Empyreal Paradox)
38. nobody102 (Scorpion’s Disciple)
39. notgonnasay09 (Guardian’s Wings)
40. Nugar (Ask Me No Questions, Anything and Everything)
41. Orrunan (Uprooted)
42. Ozzallos (Tales of the FoxCat)
43. Sarah1281 (It’s For a Good Cause, I Swear!)
44. Shadow Crystal Mage (Death and the Uchiha)
45. ShaperV (Time Braid)
46. Smylingsnake (Oops!)
47. S’TarKan (Out of Darkness: A Jinchuuriki’s Tale, Team 8)
48. The Red Dragons Order (Flip Flop and Fly)
49. TwinEnigma (Secretive, Transcendental Idealism, House of Dogs, Replica, Ad Oculos, Side Effects May Occur, Alternate Hosting, and less memorable others)
50. yasuhei (Ganbatte ne, Oirokechan)

Runners-up:

Entries in this section didn’t make the top 50 list, not necessarily because they weren’t as good, but because I don’t remember them very well, so I have to take my records’ word for it that they’re good… and I don’t trust my younger self’s judgement without nostalgia to back it up.

Some of them are here due to a lack of quality though. They’re still good… just not quite good enough to match one or more similar authors in the list above.

• Arthur Hansen (Infinite Sharingan)
• BukkakeNoJutsu (Coping Mechanisms)
• Danfiction (Naruto Reborn:Sasuke Uchiha)
• daniel-gudman (Spying no Jutsu)
• DigiFruit (Kakashi Junior)
• Eleature (Fuinjutsu)
• esama (End of one world)
• Iced Blood (No Longer Alone)
• KyuubiMan (Prove the Pervert Wrong)
• lord of the land of fire (That Look, Why Kakashi Should Never Read Out Loud)
• Perfect Lionheart (Chunin Exam Day)
• recodan (No More Underwear)
• Saiyan Angie (The Benefits of Omnipotence)
• sambomaster (Cloud Age Symphony)
• TheGreatHibiki (Memories)
• Thundereaper (The Dichotomy of Namikaze Naruto)

Note: Before I get any flames about Chunin Exam Day being down here, please keep in mind that I’m perfectly willing to admit that Perfect Lionheart does have a knack for writing catchy stories with strong starts… he just draws them out and gradually changes them until they’re not what I wanted anymore. (I’ve often wondered whether he’s a troll or just arrogant and too full of hubris)

Late-Comers:

This is where I put authors who wrote really good stuff… but I only found it after I’d written the first version of this post.

• obsidian dreamer (The Mouse of Konoha)
• Shawny Wong (One Small Step)

My answer to them is that Steam violates what I refer to as my “8 PCs in a Bunker” policy but, more fundamentally, it’s a matter of ownership, respect, and principles.

Until games started to use phone-home systems like Steam for their DRM, you effectively owned any game you bought. Yes, there was that nasty little stub of code which meant that, if you broke the disc and you hadn’t made a copy and grabbed a crack, you were screwed but, aside from attacking people reselling used copies on eBay like AutoDesk does with AutoCAD, your intuitive expectations for buying something were upheld and agreeing to the EULA was, for home users, effectively a meaningless formality.

Then, along comes Steam with its addictive sales, ultra-convenient game manager, and integrated social framework… pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. What they don’t want you to stop and think about is that, by buying games with phone-home DRM, you’re not actually buying them anymore. Steam and similar systems give the publisher the power to enforce that license agreement we’ve all grown so used to ignoring. You didn’t buy anything; you just paid a one-time subscription fee… and legal departments always make sure that subscriptions can be revoked at the service-provider’s discretion.

Suddenly, Valve is in a position where they have all the power and I just have to trust that they won’t abuse it. Suppose Steam loses out to a competitor someday and closes up shop, I have to have faith that Valve or the game’s developer will release an update to remove the game’s dependence on it. If they’re killing off the brand anyway and the games are a decade old, do you really think they’ll see a worthwhile investment in that?

Suppose Valve goes public (If a U.S. company grows big enough, staying privately owned becomes more hassle than it’s worth. That’s what happened to Google.), suddenly they’re beholden to shareholders who, I guarantee, won’t put principles above profit. Once again, mandatory auto-update + Steam required + subscription-style licensing = “We think you’re a pirate/cheater/pedophile/communist and we’re revoking your account.”

We’ve already seen how little the promise of a DRM-locked eStore is worth when certain online music stores closed up shop and, at best, left it up to you to jump through hoops to preserve your collection. They’ve already got your money. Why should they care about tarnishing a brand that’s being end-of-lifed anyway?

Paying to be distrusted and quietly disrespected just isn’t the kind of relationship I want to have and I don’t like the “guilty until proven innocent” culture it fosters. Besides, if you can suppress the instinctive “Ooh! Shiny!” reaction that Steam sales are so finely tuned to trigger, it becomes very easy to find ways to spend your time that don’t force you to choose between pleasure and principles.

My favorite ways to have fun without feeling dirty include:

• Playing games released as open-source, freeware, or via offerings like GOG.com and the Humble Indie Bundles which are willing to stake their reputation on being DRM-free.
• Reading novels and short stories (New, used, at the library, on Baen’s Free Library, and on Project Gutenberg)
• Enjoying media produced for the fun of it, rather than the profit (fanfiction, online amateur sci-fi, hobby music, etc.)
• Writing programs and learning new programing languages
• Writing non-fiction and learning how to write fiction (No public URL yet)
• Taking a walk or sitting under a tree while I listen to a podcast (Not so much lately, but that’s mainly because I’ve been doing a lot of programming)

Aside from the pleasure of not feeling like I’m whoring myself out to the corporations (to put it bluntly), there’s a certain degree of satisfaction in being able to save my money, spend most of my time entertaining myself for free, and often have something to show for it when I’m done.

Now, some people might argue that, if you “pirate” games, It will also satisfy many of those goals and prevent them from revoking your access to the game, but part of having principles is doing it right, so you can feel good about yourself for not giving into the temptation to weasel your way around them.

I’d much rather feel good about entertaining myself than validate a publisher’s sense of entitlement and give implicit approval (and possibly word-of-mouth advertising) to a game developer who is unwilling to have principles of their own. It also helps that, when I do refuse to buy a game, I can harmlessly indulge baser instinct (some might call it a guilty pleasure) by reveling in doing my part to consign them to obscurity.

So, with all this philosophical posturing, what exactly is an “8 PCs in a Bunker” policy? It’s something I cooked up in the mid-’90s when I was a poor kid with a lot of smarts and a risk-averse personality to match.

In short, suppose a nuclear war were to break out tomorrow and I was left with only 8 PCs in a bunker, blank hard drives, and a bunch of DVD+R backups. Could I still enjoy what I’d bought to a reasonable degree?

Think about that for a moment:

• Blank hard drives, so you have to be able to install from scratch.
• No Steam servers, so you have to be able to back up the installer to DVD and “phone home at least once to verify ownership” won’t work.
• No phones and no call center, so “phone this number for a manual activation code” won’t work
• No access to a central matchmaking service or an MMORPG server farm, so you’d better hope that, if they’re needed, the server software was available for download too.
• Burned DVD+Rs, so if you’ve got old-style “lock it to the installation media” DRM, you’d better already have a crack too.

There are probably other things I took into account when I first designed the policy, but I think you get the idea. It’s an imaginative way to ask myself “Do I own this? Do they seem to trust me?” that covers pretty much any eventuality the publisher is likely to consider worthwhile.

I actually go further with non-games (insisting on open-source software so I don’t have to “take it to a manufacturer-owned service center” when it breaks) but that’s another story.

Aside from “coursework and other projects”, I’ve also been preparing to switch this blog from WordPress to Jekyll to make it more compact, easier to theme, and more secure. (After all, it’s pretty hard to perform a worthwhile exploit on a site that’s nothing but static HTML and a some JS includes for Disqus, FriendFeed, and AddToAny… especially given some of the security policy extensions on the horizon for HTML)

However, being the perfectionist that I am, I tend to get stuck on sub-problems that, while I can reorder them, must all be done before I can make the switch. (Things like making absolutely certain that no links will break)

To make things simpler, I’ve been working from a known-good export of the blog’s contents and not updating the blog. (Though, as anyone who follows my Identi.ca/Twitter review/rating posts will know, I have continued to work away at the same activities as always)

Given that my switch to Jekyll wasn’t completed before my Christmas vacation, I may reconsider that decision. I have built up quite a backlog of topics to blog on and it’d probably be better for everyone if I just cleared that out and let the switch to Jekyll happen whenever I finally get everything right.

I do still have projects and coursework to do, so I won’t begin posting again right away, and knowing my history with time management, I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try.

A few months back, I was informed of an offering known as the Humble Indie Bundle. Seeing it as an opportunity to finally pick up a copy of World of Goo, I bought in. However, my brother quickly insisted that I try another one of the games in the bundle…

Aquaria is an aquatic platformer. More specifically, an aquatic platformer with gorgeous art, beautiful music, and a focus on semi-linear exploration. If Braid is one possible expression of “Super Mario Bros.‘s almost nonexistant story done right” (A review for another day), then Aquaria is an expression of “Super Metroid done right”.

Everything about the game seems carefully crafted to emphasize the atmosphere around you and it makes exploration a treat, there’s a wide variety of enemies, and the “forms” system throws back to the various weapons Samus had to use… though with less focus on different attacks and more on different skills to pass region barriers.

However, it is still firmly a platformer, so while the story gets a fair bit more work than Super Metroid, there are some rough edges which clearly show that storytelling was not the creators’ specialty and that, while a significant improvement on Super Metroid, improvements still could be made.

The combat mechanic does sometimes take precedence in situations where it’s detrimental to the atmosphere (for example, the boss battles where, without fail, you have to defeat enraged or corrupted gods, receiving boons from them in moments of lucidity before they finally die) and the descent into the abyss near the end of the game does make the game less engaging… something a corresponding increase in story-focus could have mitigated.

However, given how rare Metroid-style exploration platformers are and how much I enjoyed exploring the world, I’m willing to forgive that somewhat. It would definitely have been nicer, though, if they’d provided more “ancient turtle” warp points. (The three largest regions in the game still only get one apiece and one surprise region of respectable size gets none at all, while the surface waters get two) More frequent save points would also have probably been a good idea, given that not everybody is as flexible with their schedule as I am.

A more significant problem, story wise, was the feeling that, toward the end, the story was at once both rushed and sparse. Structuring the game more like an essay, with most of the abyss-crawling in the middle and the triumphant revelation of the coral reefs of the surface (or some “beyond” area) would have helped significantly, as would more voice-acted “vision” sequences. As is, it feels as if it’s building toward something as you head for the surface waters… and then the plunge into the abyss quickly ends the story with loose plot threads being tied up before they could fully be developed.

The fact that, apparently, some recipes in the cooking system are alternate paths to dishes and can only be found by experimentation further develops this impression as players tend to measure their progress by the proportion of discoverable items they’ve found compared to the total number. Speaking of the cooking system…

I did find the cooking mechanic enjoyable, primarily because it let me handle my health and powerup management in my own distinctive fashions (and because I used to play games like Harvest Moon), but I felt that, to use a programming term, the set of recipes was oriented too much toward depth rather than breadth. Too many ingredients useful in only one recipe, too many recipes that require multiple steps, and too much dependence on a small set of core ingredients that aren’t proportionally available unless you grind sources of them. Nonetheless, it was fun.

Finally, the collectable trophies seemed too “collectable for the sake of having them”, given how thoroughly hidden some of them were. (In some cases, you have to either know where they are already, or be just plain insane to find them) Of all the trophies I collected, the one I still like most is the ever-respawning pot of fish meat. (one of those few over-utilized base ingredients I talked about)

Overall, it gives the impression that the designers had plenty of skill and envisioned something that they, at the time, didn’t realize would be twice as long as they had the budget for. Nonetheless, I’d give it a solid 4.5 out of 5 and encourage anyone who enjoyed the old 2D Metroid games (or enjoys 2D platformers and 3D Metroid).

P.S. If you really want to feel the atmosphere to its fullest, let a friend or family member wait through the intro that plays the first time you start the game so you don’t see it, then click on the crystal in the menu screen to view it (for the first time) after completing Mithalas Cathedral. That way, you won’t have any potentially inaccurate preconceptions to color Naija’s initial realization that she knows nothing of her origins.

Update: If you get the chance, listen to the special OST-only track “Fear the Dark” before and after you play Aquaria. It’s a beautiful piece (preview) and it does a beautifully clever job of hiding its relation to Aquaria so that you only “get” it once you’ve beaten the game. (Thanks to their clever use of pronouns and implicit subjects, it just sounds like very beautiful, if ordinary, love song unless you know who is being talked about)

Beta 2 brings the following improvements:

• The detail expanders on the tables are now at least as comprehensive as the original “static HTML page” version of the site.
• The “Other Sites” list has returned, complete with icon-bullets denoting site types and a handy legend.
• I filled in author/artist/director names for almost every entry. (The remaining ones are a bit tricky, so they’ll have to wait)
• At least half of the data has been reworked to be per-character, per-incident-type rather than per-story. When searching is implemented, this will be very important.

The major remaining features left un-implemented are:

• Filtering and searching (You still have to make do with category grouping and adjustable sort orders)
• Spoiler-hiding (Occasionally, there’s a big plot twist that’s relevant to the nature of the gender-bending. This will require much thought because I need to decide how to classify something that seems to be X but is revealed to be Y.
• An interface for submitting new data and reporting errors directly rather than having to visit my usual contact form.

Enjoy.