Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of this blog. It is also the day it closes down. I set out to chronicle my misadventures with a game system with which I was reunited after more than a decade, what I ended up doing was realizing that such a commitment requires way more time, money and effort than I'd like to expend.

So it is with little fanfare that we close shop today. Simply stated the passion wasn't there. I realized that I'm not that big a fan of video games to begin with and trying to find two or three things to write about per week is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Some months were easier than others, shit just came to me, but other months (especially the most recent ones) the days without a post simply piled on and I had nothing to end the droughts with.

See the real money, fame and so forth is in niche blogs. All of these chicks with douchebags, stop making that duckface and other blogs are what its all about. This thing was simply too broad, too ambitious and most often than not too neglected.

It was fun at times. I'm proud of some of these posts, I'm embarrassed at some others and I'm indifferent to most of them. I won't delete the blog because theres no reason to, this is here and its an insight into my mind circa 2009-2010. Just as the former blog (that I deleted) was an insight into my head circa 2003 to 2008. It was a darker time to be sure.

Anyways this is it, it was fun.

Giana Sisters

Giana Sisters was originally a game for the Commodore or TurboGrafx or some other old gaming system which tried very hard to be Mario Brothers. To this end you control a blond girl who walks around hitting blocks, jumping on pipes and eliminating baddies by (you guessed it) jumping on them. Some of the blocks gave you the ability to transform into a red haired version of the girl with the ability to shoot fireballs. In other words its exactly like Mario.

In 2010 the game makes a comeback on another platform: the iPhone. The graphics have been updated, made much prettier actually. While the original game appears to feature grungy women from New Jersey the new sisters are younger, hipper and cuter. They look like little vinyl figurines. And even though its still largely a Mario clone this isn't such a negative thing seeing as how the platform will never see a legitimate Mario game. It's a healthy alternative, I'm not sure how ethical it is but its better than nothing.

Gameplay feels like Mario with the fireballs, jumping, tubes and whatnot. Graphics are pretty, its colourful, you collect jewels instead of coins, you jump through obstacles and face bosses who live in castles. There's lots to like and its varied enough (80+ levels) that you don't get either easily bored or beat it too quickly.

But it also has some problems. The main one is the buttons, because you're not physically touching buttons but rather a flat screen it is often difficult to determine how far a jump will take you, when you're supposed to jump and, worst of all, where the location of the buttons is so you often end up pressing a part of the screen with the wrong command or nothing in it. You lose all instinctive commands and you end up looking at the screen in order to not miss an input, have you ever looked at your hands to make sure youre pressing the fire trigger on an xbox controller when playing MW2? 'course not.

To be fair, however, this problem is not exclusive to this game, most of my bitching about iPhone games is largely because of their non physical buttons. One could safely assume, then, that the whole not having buttons thing does adversely affect iPhone games but apple was not about to sacrifice style for playability so the decision was made to go buttonless. Yes the iPhone is slick as fuck but the question has to be asked again whether its a true gaming platform or not.

Getting back to the actual game: what can I say? its fun. Sure it gets excruciatingly frustrating at times but thats how these things are. A little difficulty never hurt anybody. A solid two basilisks out of three.