Z Space Blog

I received Metroid: Samus Returns in the mail this week, which is a 3DS remake of the original Metroid II: Return of Samus for the GameBoy. Before I started playing Samus Returns, I wanted to take another romp through the original, so I hopped on OBS and recorded myself on a casual run. This morning, I watched Emptyeye's great single-segment 100% run of Metroid II, which inspired me to record another run. Before that, though, I wanted to see what I could do to make the game pop a little bit, so it looks and feels good to watch. Here's the end result:

Verdant Miasma - a palette for Metroid 2: Return of Samus, by zlg

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Across the Internet and even in person, I find a lot of people claiming that RPGs are meant to be story-heavy and that's the main draw. Part of me wonders where that idea came from.

The original RPG could be considered Dungeons & Dragons or any similar paper-and-pencil games where you adopt a persona and go on an adventure, with a DM at the reins to guide you and your friends along. The core of those games is not story, however; it's about interacting with your friends in a made-up world. The story, while being in the lime-light, is nothing compared to the feeling of cooperating with your friends and vanquishing foes or telling ridiculous stories because your bard is drunk as shit.

D&D and other paper-and-pencil RPGs have a huge focus on the battle system. Each race has strengths and weaknesses. Ditto for classes. Each class has skills, which have use inside and outside of battle. There are feats. If the game was not meant to have a deep level of combat or world interaction, none of that would be there! You'd just toss a few dice to decide damage and trade blows with no-name mooks.

Even the original RPGs had battle systems, with depth and intrigue.

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Today, I'm announcing the release of vgstash, a command line program that keeps track of your game collection and progress in a small SQLite database. I'm happy to finally bring this to fruition. The story of its inception follows.

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People tend to say that you're not "really a grown-up" until you hit thirty. I can say I managed to not die for thirty revolutions around our dear sun. Due to the simplicity of our decimal number system and our human penchant for patterns, each decade brings with it a sort of "milestone". At ten, it's more for the parents, "Congrats on not killing your kid!" At twenty, it's, "Almost old enough to drink! Welcome to adulthood!" Sitting here at thirty, it's become, "I hope you have a good day. Keep up what you're doing."

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My history of web development goes back a little over ten years. In that time, I've really not built things as well as I'd have preferred. One thing that never changed is that I continued learning and trying new things. But maybe I didn't try enough new things, and held onto older things simply because "Hey, I built that." Sporkblog is a part of that, despite it being the only project I've really stuck with. I've been questioning whether I should continue work on Sporkblog or if I should move onto something that can teach me more.

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