The Character Lackground

I intended to be diving back into this, not that my life is finally getting settled.  I was going to start emerging from my house every once a while, begin training for the eventual ultimate battle between good and evil again, then maybe find a nice girl or three to settle down in my old age that shall never come because I’ll have attained true immortality by them.  You know, the usual.  Point is that I had plans.  Big plans.  Like this:

PLANS

But then Fallout 4 came into my life.  And all those plans went out the window.  Fallout is one of those series I’ve got so much history with it’s impossible for me to be objective on, and Fallout 4 has been an absolute experience for me.  I treated my first time with the game like a new lover.  I enjoyed peeling away the layers slowly, took my time getting into it, and spent a good long while exploring every inch of that game.

When I’m given the option, I like to project onto my video game characters.  Not necessarily the whole self-insertion deal, although I am sometimes prone to that because you would be too if you were as awesome as I am.  Building my own characters on top of the blank slate MCs some games provide?  I am all over that.  And Fallout has always had allowed you to do just that.  Except Brotherhood of Steel.  But let’s not talk about Brotherhood of Steel.  Anyways, I was totally prepped to do that here.  Had myself a big badass woman war hero with a complex set of morals ready to bring some tough justice to the Commonwealth.  So excited.  But then the game apparently decided that wasn’t good enough.  Instead I had to be a lawyer.

I immediately lept from my Cryopod and brought some good old pre-war violence to the commonwealth.  As a lawyer.  I have little talent for speaking but plenty for shooting.  But I’m a lawyer.  I almost immediately took command of what became one of the greatest combat forces in the Commonwealth.  The lawyer.  There’s something off there.

I love established characters.  I love being able to impress my own characters into the game. Either way, I’m good with it.  But you have to let me have one or the other.  Giving me a blank character with a few very specific background traits just ruins whatever I might have going.

Is it Next Gen yet?

One benefit of this big life shift I’m still finding myself digging through; I’ve jumped into the deep end of the new console generation.  Aside from the 3DS and a few select releases I could pick up on last gen’s consoles, I’ve been mostly ignoring the immediate past of video games, but I’ve had to adapt to life on the second floor by replacing my old, massive CRT TV with something I could actually lift up the stairs, and now that I had a tv that could accept the signal and enough credit card rewards to get a new console for virtually free, things just lined up.  It was like God had decided that he’d been putting me through some rough times, so he’d toss me a PS4 and call it even.

For the first time in a good long while, I’ve actually been looking at the games that’ve been coming out.  Playing newly released games.  I’m in the now of videogames.  Well, at least as far as Fallout 4 reaches.  Aside from that, don’t have much of a collection.  Anyways, I’m paying attention to new releases for the first time, and I’ve not really been finding what I expected.  I’ve been through a few generation handovers in my day.  I remember, how the games are, I remember the wonder and adjustment of actually being able to do new things in your games.  Sure, every console has made better looking games, and that’s been the big selling point, but visuals only take you so far.  Where the new console generations have truly excelled is by offering the power to create new types of games, new gaming experiences.

And they’ve all had games ready within the first couple months to really highlight that.  The 32/64 bit era had Mario 64 lead the charge by making the third dimension work, and work fluidly, for the first time in a long while, followed by Final Fantasy 7 demonstrate the cinematic and storytelling potential newly available to the medium. The PlayCubeBox era had a couple of games you could point to for this, but for me, it was Pikmin, which showcased the console’s ability to compute numerous actors in a wide area, keeping the span and amount of moving parts in its RAM going in a way that was not even thought of in the last generation.  Last gen brought us both the Wii, with Rayman Raving Rabids and WarioWare: Smooth Moves bringing to light all the potential uses of the Wiimote, and the PS360, where the Xbox’s Dead Rising demonstrated the new generation’s power in being able to process and compute so many independent parts of a game in much the same way Pikmin did a generation ago.

For this generation, even after two years, I’m not sure what games we have to lean on, that truly demonstrates the new consoles’ capabilities over the old.  WiiU aside.  There’s plenty I’ve seen that takes advantage of the WiiU’s capabilities, to the point that I was rather torn as to which console to pick up.  There’s a lot of games to show the new levels of detail available with the PS4 and Xbox One, which is nothing short of impressive, but as I said, visuals only go so far in creating an experience.  I haven’t seen a lot of the new generation’s games yet, and there’s still plenty for me to consider before making any sort of judgement, but still, I find myself wondering if we truly needed a new console generation.  Visuals aside, have the new machines really expanded the tools available for developers, or could these games just as easily have ended up on last gen’s consoles?

Going Down in Dark Souls

Last time, on Diamonds, Daisies, and Dark Souls, we did nothing!  A whole lot of nothing!  I mean, we’ve had our Dark Souls breathers before, but this was spectacular in its nothingness.   We accomplished absolutely zilch in our last post.  But don’t worry.  That one was just the appetizer.  I hope you didn’t fill up, because here’s where we get to the actual meal.

And yet every time I start a post like that, I always spend the first couple paragraphs just dicking around.  Who am I to break with a good tradition?  In this case, I just bugger off to Anor Londo, and spend a good long while hanging with the giant blacksmith there.  He’s not my best friend.  I haven’t had good luck with best friends.  But he’s close.

Specifically, meeting Sif in the past reminded me that I had his soul in my pocket.  I figured I saved his life, so he probably won’t mind this next part, and have the giant blacksmith hit his spirit with a hammer until my shield absorbs it.  That gives me the same shield Artorias granted him, to protect him from all those ghosts in the Abyss.

Except mine’s a lot sexier, of course.  I know, because I picked up the original, worn out shield from Sif back in the past as well.  Oh, and do you remember how Elizabeth decided to keep my deeds and glory a secret, in order to keep the whole time paradox thing from happening?

Yeah, causality can go screw.

I have armed myself with two of the exact same shield, from different points in time.  I bear the power of paradox itself.  Let’s see how good it is in a fight.

The zombie gazes into this impossibility I have created.  One shield sure, but two of them?  Its mind tears itself apart from the very thought of it.

The reality of my paradox resolves itself right in its face.

None can stop the wrath of time itself, the thing that should not be!

Because It’s There. The Allure of Challenge

I’ve been away.  But I haven’t been idle.

Because of the move, I’ve had to make do with my consoles.  That hasn’t really impacted the amount of gaming I’ve been doing or anything.  Just given me the opportunity to play some games that have been a bit farther down my backlog.  Games like Zelda 2.

Zelda 2 is famously difficult.  Zelda 2 is not a good game.  By any means.  Even for its time, it wasn’t a good game.  Sure, it has some interesting things with the shield mechanics and defensive combat, but beyond that, it’s pretty much just a cut-rate Castlevania.    Beyond the difficulty, Zelda 2’s controls and mechanics are just poor, and often at odds with themselves.  There was never a point in playing it where I actually enjoyed the game.

I just finished the whole blasted thing.

And that’s left me wondering why.  I’ve enjoyed some hard games in my time.  The fun I’ve been having with Dark Souls is quite well documented.  I’ve got some fond, fond memories of the Ninja Gaiden series.  And yet, I’ve never enjoyed games just because they’re difficult.  They’ve always had something worthwhile underlying it.  Zelda 2 didn’t, and thus was never enjoyable to me.  But I do feel quite fulfilled at having finished it.

There’s a lot of things you can get out of a video game.  A good plot.  Immersion.  Exploration.  And, such as in this case, accomplishment.  Games don’t necessarily need to be fun to give a good experience.

And that’s where I’m at with Zelda 2.  It’s not a fun game.  But in having cleared the Great Palace, saved Hyrule, and established myself as a real hero, I have conquered a challenge that has been haunting people since before my childhood.  And that is worthwhile too.

A Dark Souls Pacifist Run

What is this?!  Three months since a Dark Souls post?!  This is an outrage!  Who’s running this place, I’m going to complain to the manager!

Oh, right.  But anyways, this won’t do.  We’ve got to get this Dark Souls bidness taken care of.  Do you have any idea how close we are?  So close!  With exclamation points!  That’s how close we are!  We have to keep the momentum up!  This Dark Souls train cannot be stopped!

It only takes detours.

And it’ll take one today.

Last time.  We kicked ass.  We kicked giant ass.  We kicked huge stupid demon monkey ass.  Which, I mean, granted, that ass kind of smeared us across town for a good long while, but still, in the end, we prevailed!  Eat that, Manus!

And of course, with victory, comes the spoils.  I’ve rescued the damsel.

She’s totally my girlfriend.  Have I told you guys about that?

Right, and she’s so happy to see me, and we are going to go on the best date after this.

She’s showering me with smooches and okay what the blazes.

The whole ordeal has left her senseless.  I use Artorias’s pendant to kick the Abyss back a bit, but it doesn’t help.  She is completely unaware of everything around her.

Bringing it Back to the Blog

My life is in tiny little boxes, and I have carried the weight of every single one of them.

Sounds slightly poetic, and very poncy, but it’s true.  Literally, at least.  Moving sucks.  It has torn my life asunder, and flipped my world upside down.  That part’s not literal.  Don’t worry.  In any case, that has been the cause of that great big Aether-shaped hole in your heart that you just have not been able to fill.  I know it’s been hurting you.  It’s been hurting me too, feeling the need to create but just being unable to with everything else that’s been going on.

And yet, there is no true king in my life but myself.  If I want the time to write up something, I just need to command my life to allow it. And so I do here.  Sure, there may be consequences, the tasks left undone, but the choice is completely mine.

Basically, this is a lot of words to say I’m back.  Gonna try to be, at least.  We’ll see how well I can balance the time between here and the aforementioned consequences.

And now that I’m here, I thought I’d take a look at what’s bringing you lot here as well.  Sometimes I forget there’s a whole lot of weirdos on the internet, and a lot of them find their way to my blog.  Not you though.  You’re cool.  But let’s celebrate the changing of the year by taking a look back at some of the more unusual search terms that drove people here.

yandere simulator porn

Fun fact: the most popular post on my site last year was not anything you might think.  It wasn’t the Dark Souls runthrough, the Saints Row retrospectives that seem to have real staying power, or anything else that I’ve devoted a lot of time, energy, and words to.  It was freaking Yandere-chan.  And it seems there are two types of people who find the Yandere-chan post, people who are actually looking for Yandere Simulator and people who are actually looking for porn of Yandere Simulator.  Which might make me a little sad, that my most popular post is just people winding up in the wrong part of the internet, but matching the stats up, it looks like around one out of every six people who check the post go on to the Yandere-chan writer’s site.  So hey, hopefully I’ve helped these people grow their lives a bit by introducing them to a freeware visual novel that’s not half bad.

Also, if you’re still looking for Yandere Simulator, find that here.

undead attack dog

It surprises me not that people are searching for this, but that so many people are searching for this.  This was my third highest search term for last year.  Was there some sort of sale I wasn’t aware of?

saints row twins fat

What?  And also, why?  Did I stumble on to another sex thing?

dark souls welcoming committee

“Hello, we’d like to thank you very much for being a part of this!  You can go ahead and leave your dignity at the coat check, and we’ll have someone along to provide your complementary serving of pain shortly.  Feel free to chat with some of our other residents while you’re waiting, confident knowing that some of them probably won’t kill you for your Humanity the moment you turn your back. Unfortunately, not all of you will make it through the full selection of our services, but we know that those who do will have really, really, really, really, really earned it.”

aether sex vidoe

Nice try.  But I’ve made sure that’s buried well and far away.  You’re going to have to get a bit more tricky than that if you want to find it.

is 4 leaf studios doing anything

This isn’t a question you’d normally find an answer for here, but hey, I’m a giving guy.  Gamewise, no.  Just minor updates and support for new languages for Katawa Shoujo, and even that’s been officially ended.  If you’re big on the con circuit, you might see them around, however, peddling some related wares or other.

how can i write a novel, topic: ‘innocent sin’

Somebody thought the internet would tell them this.  Somebody went into the Googs, typed in these exact words, and expected an answer.  Then they got distracted and started reading the words of the worlds sexiest blogger as he talked about video games.  Like so many novel ideas, nothing ever came of it.

agnes oblige boob

It is becoming slightly distressing to me how many people are reading my blog with their dicks in their hands.

outlast main character face

I have never written about Outlast WHY WOULD THIS TAKE YOU HERE?

which of the following elements from freytag’s pyramid just before the denouement

Looks like somebody had some homework but wasn’t paying attention in class.  How naughty.

aether plays dark souls

Look at this.  Just, take a moment, and look at this.  Do you know what this means?  There are people out there in the world who actually made the effort to find and read the stuff I wrote.  That’s a good feeling.

buliwhde aekther sex videos

Well, see, now you’re trying.  You’re not trying very well, but you’re trying.  Still miles off.

real hand cut in with name alvina

There’s something wrong with people.  I really hope the government has you on a list, somewhere.

athear man sex video

Nope.  Still not.

stalker loner

Some search engine somewhere took a look at these terms, ran it through all its big computery process, and decided “Yep, sounds like this guy Aether!”  I hate the world.

Gotdommit, that just made it worse, didn’t it?

priscilla the crossbreed is a liar this world is peaceful, its inhabitants kind

This guy gets it.  Did she not see just how many corpses littered her peaceful world?  Many of them were mine!  I really should have fought her, just for that.

will konami ever make another hybrid heaven

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