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About Me

Once upon a time, back in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, I was a "hard-core" gamer. Since that time, a variety of factors ranging from money to college to real life significantly cut into my video game time. Nonetheless, I have always retained my love and interest in video games, although to a lesser extent.

At present, my video game time is generally monopolized by World of Warcraft. I play a troll mage named Moor (WoW Armory profile here) on the Nathrezim server where I am a happy member of the guild Sanity.

Current-generation consoles I own include an XBox 360, a Ps3, a Wii, a Nintendo DS, a PsP, and a PC.

I am a huge fan of video game music. In fact, I confess that many of the games I own, such as the Halo games and Rygar: The Legendary Adventure are in my collection solely because I love their incredible musical scores. I have only been able to attend one VGM event, Video Game Live's New York concert on April 26, 2008 which was an amazing experience.

During middle school and high school, I was inspired to attempt music composition after hearing the reprise of Shadow's theme that appears in the ending of Final Fantasy VI by Nobuo Uematsu and "Angel's Fear" from Secret of Mana by Hiroki Kikuta, an attempt that quickly ended due to my lack of talent with little more to show than a crappy five-song musical. The highlight of my musical career as well as my journey through video game geekdom came during an impromptu musician meet-up at the Otakon anime convention in 2003 in which I had the honor of performing the violin solo in Yasunori Mitsuda's incredible "Scars of Time" from Chrono Cross.

I have been a lurker on Destructoid for some time. I am an especially huge fan of Destructoid's three excellent podcasts, which are not only the best video game podcasts I have heard but amongst my favorite podcasts of all time. I give much credit to these podcasts for bringing about a resurgence in my interest in video games and inspiring me to think more about video games. I also give them special credit for entertaining me during a series of hospitalizations in which the only thing I had for entertainment were these podcasts saved on my Zune.

I was particularly inspired by Podtoid and randombullseye and ended up composing the music to randombullseye's game Bonerquest, my first and last foray into video game composing as I quickly came to realize, as I did back in high school, that I lacked the training and talent for the art. Nonetheless, I am grateful to randombullseye for the opportunity to have contributed to a part of an actual finished product as opposed to the unfinished sketches that populate my desk and computer hard drive.

I love writing and I often find myself discussing and writing about video games on a variety of subjects and contexts. As a high school student, I had great difficulty writing long papers or long articles and so I began to force myself to write as much as possible. By the time I was in college, writing huge amounts of text for both school and school-unrelated purposes became not only easy but rather relaxing and unenjoyable. I therefore apologize in advance because I know that a great deal of my writing will probably be far far longer than what is probably necessary or appropriate. In the past, my writings on video games found themselves in a variety of places ranging from the WoW forums, a text file on my desktop, to my friends' Xanga and MySpace pages and for some time, I have thought about consolidating my video game writing at one place, which is why I am happy that I discovered Destructoid. The Destructoid staff and community have greatly influenced my thoughts on video games and opened my eyes to things that I never saw. I hope that many writing can give a fraction of that inspiration (or at the very least some entertainment) back to the Destructoid community.

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"It looks like a video game!" Tascar | 2:11 PM on 08.20.2009 11 comments

The teaser trailer for James Cameron's latest film Avatar debuted today and I was really impressed and look forward to seeing the film this December. Granted, I have been looking forward to this film ever since I read the treatment of the film that had been floating around the net for a few years now. I love the look of the alien planet, which is pretty much what I would expect an unexplored and untouched alien world to look like. I was a little surprised about the look of the Na'vi aliens although I do confess that I obviously have no real-life Na'vi to judge against in order to evaluate the CGI on that level. However, when looking at the responses to the teaser trailer, I was surprised at the number of comments that bashed the special effects by saying "it looks like a video game." Whenever I see that line or something similar written about a special effects film, I get a little bit confused. On one hand, I know that statements like this are made by people like Roger Ebert as a backhanded insult to video games. On the other hand, shouldn't it be a badge of honor for a film's special effects to be compared to video games considering how much of the fantastical images we now see and take for granted in movies were pioneered first in video games? While Square Soft was busy trying to tell mature stories and express a wide variety of complex emotions in their video games (and yes, even in the bomb that is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within), Pixar was having fun making buddy comedy after buddy comedy. Audiences are celebrating the originality of District 9. Yet the alien weaponry and the entire climax of the film owes a great deal to first-person-shooters, Halo included, contributing to and developing the imagery and lore of alien weapons. If you know anything about the MASSIVE software used by Weta to create the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings, it is obvious that the software is essentially a giant automatic video game that plays itself. Of course, the height of video game influence on movies is without a doubt John Woo's two-part film Red Cliff, a retelling of one section of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story. It is hard for anyone to watch this film and not see how directly Woo and his team were influenced by the look and style of the Dynasty Warriors games. In this case, not only do we have a film that is influenced by a video game, but we have a historical story from several thousand years ago whose telling has now been permanently altered through the influence of a video game. In conclusion, all of these fantastical images in Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and other films that Hollywood pats itself on the back on were pretty much old news if you played video games. Video games have been providing people with the magical images and unbelievable sights far before any filmmaker successfully put it on the big screen. As such, I am both shocked, surprised, and confused when I hear "bad" special effects compared to a video game. Perhaps we ought to do the opposite from now on. Perhaps when us gamers see a game with horrible graphics, we ought to make fun of it by saying that it "looks like a movie." I don't expect Hollywood to stop looking down on video games any time soon. However, for now, I am going to change my mindset so that whenever I hear a film described as "looking like a video game," I'll smile and take it as a compliment. Filmmakers pride themselves on bringing magic to the masses and while they may have done it for over a decade, I say that video games have taken the crown in the recent years. Attached photos: