I got this game in seventh grade and quickly beat it. I love it, but found like most JRPGs it was impossible for me to replay since I hate grinding.

A few years ago I moved to a large apartment that had two walk in closets (about four by four feet). The one downstairs was surplus, so I came up with the idea of hooking an outlet into the lightbulb on top, buying a bean bag chair along with a small table on which to put my ancient 20" TV and SNES and turning it into a classic game room. I'm not sure what gave me the inclination (maybe the hype for Mother 3, which had already been out in Japan for a few years) but somehow I started playing Earthbound one day and found myself completely enthralled by it.

I had recreated the perfect environment for replaying SNES games, but the tiny covey seemed made for Earthbound in particular. I remarked to a friend that the graphics honestly looked really nice an old TV, and he responded to me the way I might respond to someone claiming vinyl sounded better. I get that, I really do, but so much of the SNES's appeal just gets lost when you look at the images digitally, with their unnatural rectangular pixels squished into squares.

The best part though was the sound. I piped the SNES into two old computer speakers which for an SNES is impressive. The music in Earthbound is maybe its best feature, which makes sense when you find out the authors sampled and highjacked sources from everywhere - the game is the medium's best case for relaxed copyright restrictions.

As a kid I hated having to level up. I waited forever to buy items and always seemed to have inventory problems. I noticed as an adult these problems were gone- I discovered it was easier to get XP from chasing down fleeing enemies and instantly winning battles than I remembered, and the “for sale” sign (one of the most brilliant features in any RPG ever made) alleviated most inventory problems (maybe as an adult I just found it easier to let go of stuff).

With the incredible amount of attention Earthbound still gets I can see how a lot of people could be turned off to it by now. Honestly I had begun to think it was overrated myself, but after replaying it I honestly appreciate it more now than I did as a kid. Its hard to really articulate what the appeal is, except that Earthbound has a definite sense of place, like its a real world you're inhabiting. Videogames are naturally violent, since there has to be something to fight, and RPGs with their roaming monsters are no exception. However Earthbound still manages to exude warmth, like the Andy Griffith show. Most characters you meet are rooting for you, and even when characters are portrayed as weak, stupid or wicked the game still has empathy for them.

Unfortunately the primary feature of Earthbound which overshadows everything else to people who haven't played today it is how unavailable it is. I'm afraid this, combined with the unrelenting praise of its acolytes, may make the game seem phony and overrated. As someone who vehemently hates piracy, I think this is a game that should be pirated recklessly. Nintendo has pretty much closed the door on ever releasing it in the US again thanks to various infringement issues, so its hard to think who it would harm (there is an argument that by stealing a game you'd be less inclined to pay for a modern RPG, but I'm not sure I've played an RPG in the past ten years that's been worth the hours of my life I put into it, so maybe that's for the best). I also suggest playing it someplace cozy and quite, though if you can't spring for your own game room and real hardware at least use an emulator with a good full-screen NTSC filter and appropriate volume.

Check this out: Winston's Numbers.

Anyone who doesn't get the joke is no longer officially a Chicken Ranger. p_p

Well looks like the new implementation of Border Town, written using the cool Play! framework, just isn't cutting it.

Its sad because I really enjoyed experimenting with the Play! framework and the code that I've written so far in Scala is like a dream. I worked for nearly two years on a professional web site which used the JVM and came to really appreciate the technologies and was looking forward to utilizing that experience with my personal site.

Ultimately, however, I don't have the time or the computer to treat BT like its a professional job. I'm currently using a laptop that was white-hot in 2005; these days its fast enough for anything I do, except for Scala. This project made me realize that Scala is just too slow. I love it to death, I really do, but when you switch Play! (a Java framework whose claim to fame is the quick turn-around time) from Java to Scala page refreshes go from taking a second or two to in some cases half a minute and more if the JVM crashes due to lack of memory. I started the new version of Border Town in a Vagrant backed VM and had a good time hooking all the disparate components together with Bash scripts, but when I integrated Play! I had to start developing it on my host machine instead and only use the VM for infrequent tests. Even then, refreshing a page using Play! with Scala on my host machine with 2GB of RAM took longer than simple Java files hooked directly into Tomcat in my VM.

Its sad because Play! with Scala is otherwise so frickin' cool. The template language is based on Scala which means you get 100% type-safety in your views, which is amazing. Plus Scala is just a beautiful language which I've never had a chance to really dive into, and I was hopeful Border Town would present such an opportunity.

In the end though the overhead of setting all the garbage up to play with the site meant I never touched it. Silly errors that were one-line fixes got noticed, and then put off for several weeks as maintenance required a free morning during the weekend where I could turn on the Border Town VM, then turn on Play! on my host, and then remember how it all worked. Play! also used its own version of everything including its build system (i.e. no Maven or Ant) which was another layer to remember, and then when I went to deploy it on Tomcat I often found it broke due to typical Java issues such as a Jar getting included twice. If this had been my job or even something I worked on as often as I could in my free time I think I could've figured it all out and the time spent would've justified the productivity gains, but since that isn't the case eventually I just came to dread messing with the thing.

I'm not 100% sure what I'll do for the next version. PHP of course will have to be there. I hate PHP and never have “learned” it the idomatic, right way (assuming such a thing exists) but I'll be damned if the apps written for it like PhpBB and Wordpress aren't impressive. I'll start simple and see where I can go from there.

I played a PS Vita yesterday at a demo kiosk for a while, and the first thought I had was “oh no, these buttons are too small.”

I don't own a smart phone, a tablet, an e-reader, a 3DS, or any other current high priced portable. I've thought a lot about getting an iPhone or at least an iPod touch, but the lack of buttons and a d-pad really bothers me. What I want is an iPhone with buttons and the Vita seemed poised to hit the spot.

But it hit me as soon as I held it what a let-down the controls are. The buttons seem tinier than the ones on the Gameboy Advance, and they're cramped. They actually make the DS buttons seem graciously large and spacious.

The D-pad is also novel for a Sony product in that the center of it isn't submerged under the plastic like usual; its so tiny that this wouldn't have been possible. Amusingly enough that may make it better than a typical PS d-pad.

The analog sticks are the second problem. You have no idea how tiny they actually are until you hold the device in your hand, but the sensation is ridiculous. Normally with an analog stick your thumb should be able to comfortably and assuredly rest on top of it to move it around, but since this one is too small for that it felt as if my thumb was always slipping off a bit and pushing it from the sides. It was far different than the 3DS circle pad, which is concave and captures the base of the thumb. The analog nub feel like some cute, non-functioning miniature made for a craft fair. I lack the experience to say they were uncomfortable or unusable, but the feel was discombobulating.

The nubs are also so close to the buttons that it seems difficult to avoid hitting them while pressing the buttons or the d-pad. Its as if Sony didn't give a damn about people with large hands (perhaps moving the elements apart would have affected the look). I can literally lay the top half of my thumb down across the analog stick and press all four face buttons simultaneously.

The irony of it all is the Vita otherwise felt satisfyingly large and substantial in my hands. The screen is wonderful. It's bigger than an iPhone- I'm not sure if I'd want to browse the web or read on it for long hours compared to a tablet but it probably has the nicest screen of any portable game system ever made. The touch controls on both the front and back are wonderful. The triggers were also nice.

But man its a shame that the traditional controls aren't rock-solid when the rest of the package is this expensive. How it is that two decades after the SNES and Saturn giant companies still have trouble with d-pads and face buttons?

Finally, after using my wife's iPhone for the past six months I can't help but notice how zippy it is to switch and start up apps compared to the PS3. Since the Vita has more system RAM than the PS3 I hoped that Sony would have focused on making the transitions quicker, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Every application took what felt like ten or so seconds to load before it even showed loading screens, and even then it was half a minute (at least) of credits and menus before the game started. For some reason the demo kiosk had sound disabled, which was really stupid, because if I'd at least heard music or something when the games were loading it would've made it seem more responsive. To be fair maybe the games I tried all took a bit longer to load than will be the norm (just like Infinity Blade takes longer than normal to load on an iPhone). Going back to the home screen from within an app was at least quicker than accessing the PS3's OS menu from within an app.