October 2001
The Big Huge October Update
Following in the footsteps of
the Big Huge February Update earlier this month comes the Big Huge October
Update, because I was too lazy to write an entry for each day. I
finally got around to playing Final Fantasy VIII again and actually getting
further into it than the Fire Cavern at the beginning. When I got
the game, I had played it for a while but it didn't really keep my interest,
but when I started it again this month, I found it more enjoyable than
I remembered. The junction system took some getting used to, and
I think it was the most complex of all the Final Fantasy systems.
I was always having to manage my junctions and avoid getting an unjunctioned
character into a battle, because a character without junctions is really
weak in Final Fantasy VIII. One thing that's annoying is that there
isn't any easy way to heal all your characters. Cure spells and the
Recover command only heal one person, the Mega-Potion heals everyone but
only by 1000 HP, and the closest thing to a heal-all spell is Selphie's
Full-Cure or Quistis's White Wind blue magic limit break, which are actually
quite useful, especially after the attack that brings everyone's HP down
to 1. I wish I could have learned that Gravija spell that some enemies
used against me, but I didn't use summons much so maybe the Diablos summon
is just like it.
There were many beautiful days
here in Wisconsin. The sun was shining brightly, the birds were singing
and the squirrels and chipmunks were getting ready for winter, and the
trees had turned to their lovely fall colors. But none of this could
wrench the darkness from upon my soul, because I had discovered yet another
Drakan bug. This one is on the same seriousness level as the one-space
bow bug, because some people might not even run into it, but it's still
a way to break the game. The bug involves the freeze damage effect
and death mages. Whenever you kill a death mage with a freeze weapon,
it freezes, and then after it thaws out, it just hangs there in midair
doing nothing. You end up with a permanently visible death mage carcass
hovering above the ground. Normally this would just be a simple graphical
glitch I could just shrug off, but for me, it is more than that.
I plan on putting places in Azenera where death mages continually respawn,
so you can't backtrack without some danger and so there's more challenge
and incentive to get through these places quickly. They're set up
so that there can only be 1 death mage per spawn point on the level at
a time. The freeze bug makes it so that the mages stop respawning,
and that's just not going to work. I'll have to remove every single
freeze damage effect from Azenera. Luckily, I found a way to modify
a burn effect to look like frost. It's a real shame, because I really
wanted to have a way to kill giants with a melee weapon without the danger
of them falling on you, and the freeze effect was the only way to do that.
If only the game were better designed! Maybe it's no accident that
the point in Drakan where you get the ice sword and the point you first
encounter death mages are so far apart.
It's November now. Did
you know that? I'm waiting until the last minute to write the rest
of the Big Huge October Update. Wow, I'm such a procrastinator.
Lately I've become quite the Final Fantasy freak, and I'm sorry to say
that I won't be able to post an updated Azenera because it hasn't been
thoroughly tested for bugs yet and I can't fit it on a disk with all its
files anymore. Sorry about that, everyone, and I swear I WILL GET
THIS FINISHED if it's the last thing I do in life. I'll be going
home for thanksgiving soon so I'll be able to update this and get all that
annoying August stuff off the front page.
We are the world, my friends.
We are also the children. There's a choice we're making, and we can
make a difference, just you and me. Over the past few years, the
people of the Drakan community have been suffering because everyone is
going away and abandoning the Drakan ways. You can find evidence
of this in what is left of most of the major Drakan web sites. Drakan-game
is gone, and Drakan.net has been abandoned only to be resettled by a porn
portal. I urge you not to make any jokes if your opinion was that
anything regarding Drakan was already like that before the change, because
it would not be an appropriate time for humor. Our people are dying,
one by one, slowly but surely, and all those assorted fat cats all over
the world can do is laugh while smoking a cigar and wearing a fancy suit.
I must say they are in some danger now because I am sure some of our people
are into some religion and will feel oppressed and try to get whatever
higher power they believe in to make the cigar ashes fall onto the fat
cats' new shoes and leave a nasty mark. Perhaps it is deserved, but
petty revenge will not bring back the Drakan community. We need to
be saved by the people. The people we love. We need you all
to love us and save the Drakan rainforests and eat Drakan tofu and vote
for the Drakan equivalent of Nader, because it would truly be a cultural
shame if Drakanites continue to be left starving by the wayside.
I mean starving in an artistic, figurative sense. It's better to
think of our people as sort of like an ethnic community, as if instead
of a different skin color we have a different game we play and that's just
the way it is. We need support. I think the United States should
amend its affirmative action plans to make it so everyone who wants to
work in a big corporation or even a small business should have to play
Drakan just for a few weeks, so they can walk a mile in our leather laced
boots or dragon talons, depending on whether we like ground or air combat
that particular day. Please, people, help us out and we'll pay you
back with many years of joy as you tell stories of dragons and heroic escapades
to your children and grandchildren. If you must, read this paragraph
again while listening to a Bob Dylan song and you'll begin to understand.
I wonder what it must have been
like to live back in one of those old villages where they didn't have any
concept of the number zero. It was probably pretty freaky.
Imagine you are a lumberjack back then, and you're going out into the forest
to cut trees. But instead of going to the forest, you accidentally
make a wrong turn and go out into a bare field. Now, in reality there
are zero trees in that field, but because you don't have any concept of
the number zero, you don't know how many trees there are! You'd be
running all over that field with your axe, chopping at the air, because
there has to be at least one tree! There can't be negative trees,
and one is the lowest number there is, so where is that tree? It's
invisible! I think experiences like that are the reason most people
were so superstitious back then.