Belated, but still here
On this week.
Playing: Ghost Trick (Nintendo DS, 2010)
Listening: “Hot Flame (Original mix),” DJ Dextrous & H-Pee (1995)
Hello again! This has been quite a week. I started it in Seattle, where I spent a couple days visiting friends and at least one game studio. But man, I spent a ton of time in airports and on planes this week.
Like on Sunday I spent about 10 hours in JFK — two and a half of them on the airplane on the tarmac — before the airline saw fit to cancel and then rebook the flight. When we finally made it off the runway on Monday, everyone clapped1.
All of it meant that I had quite a bit of time to fill. And I filled it by playing Chrono Trigger, a game I had somehow never picked up before. If I had to review it in a line, I’d say: god damn, what a game. It’s so good!
Here’s the setup. You play as Crono, a kid who lives in a village in the year 1000 AD. The day the game starts you go to something called the Millennium Fair, a celebration in honor of the vanquishing of an evil wizard 1000 years prior. You bump into Marle, a random lady, and spend the day hanging out — doing fair games, checking out the wares, etc. Eventually you run into your friend Lucca, who has built a teleportation device; your new friend jumps in to try it out, and something goes wrong. She disappears, but her pendant is left behind.
You, being the gallant proto-hero that all young men are convinced they are, grab the pendant and follow her. As it turns out, you’ve gone hundreds of years into the past.
Here I should mention that Chrono Trigger is a sprawling RPG released for the Super Nintendo in 1995; it was made by Square, during what many consider to be their peak creative years. I spent my entire delay playing the game on the Anbernic handheld emulator2 I brought; the hours flew by. Seriously, I didn’t realize I’d been waiting for so long because I was entirely absorbed by the world Square built.
The plot of the game involves a ton of time travel, to the distant past and to the far future; you’re saving the same place many different times from an enemy that lurks in the Earth itself. Which is a very neat trick: time traveling to the same place means that the world is expansive but familiar. You hear legends in one time period, and then meet those people in the next. Also, the music is 100/10, the characters are funny (and drawn by Toriyama, lol), and the story is at once mythic and poignant. More importantly: because it’s so old, you can get the game basically anywhere for any system3.
I haven’t finished the game yet, but I’m obsessed. At this point in my ~gaming career~* it’s wild to feel like I’m still discovering new favorites; Chrono Trigger has already made it onto that very short list. If you’re a fan of classic roleplaying games and you haven’t played it, consider this your kick in the ass to grab it. If you’re not a game person and you want to be, let this be your invitation to play one of the greatest games of all time.
Bottom line: there are definitely worse ways to pass the time at an airport. Don’t get stuck without Chrono Trigger, imo.
ANYWAY. Other things I did on an airplane this week include watching Confess, Fletch! and Weekend at Bernie’s. It made for an excellent double feature, tbh. I’m back in Brooklyn now, just in time for the actual heat of the summer to hit. The humidity is no joke, either. Going outside has felt awful, like being inside a mouth the size of NYC. Eugh.
I hope your weekends are looking fun,
Bijan
Honestly: I wasn’t mad at it. At the gate next to us, I saw a ton of people waiting for a flight with the same number as our canceled one; I am not totally sure if they made it out. They were incredibly delayed. It felt like seeing an instant replay of Sunday.
This isn’t quite the model I have — because I couldn’t find it on their site anymore — but the one I’ve linked is basically the same thing, minus a joystick.
Here, for example, is an iOS version. Although I don’t necessarily recommend getting it there, just because touch controls kinda suck. I appreciated the tactility of my handheld.