I made another of these music mixing things awhile back. Loop 3 is like playing Very Hard in this WiiWare title. Or it means I beat the game a bunch of times and it’s getting all super-the-hardest-y. No miss, 1 Life Clear as usual. Enjoy the music and the playing.

High Quality button is your friend. Super-play will let you download this, place it on your USB drive, plug it into your xbox or PS3 for upscaled layback entertainment. Or you can always watch it in the tiny youtube window. Here’s an auto playlist or use the other option, provided your browser likes it.

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I’ve never really talked too much about it here on the Robot Panic, but I’m a pretty huge fan of Lost. My love for the show turned to an out and out obsession as soon as they added one of my favorite conventions, time travel, to the series in force this last season. Something about the idea of time traveling has always grabbed me. Blame Back to the Future and the impressionable age I was in when I first viewed it for that one. At any rate, my obsession with Lost led me to few writers who many consider to be “scholars” on the subject of the ABC hit. Go ahead and laugh if you will, but these guys dig deep into this stuff. While I see these episodes as a fun hour long escapism session, these guys are finding allusions to Greek Mythology and parallels to the religious rites of passage found in ancient Mayan culture. I’m serious. So it was that while reading one of these Lost authoritarians, I was directed to the book Replay by Ken Grimwood.

Published in 1987, Replay tells the story of a 43 year old radio news director named Jeff Winston. One day at work, Jeff dies of a heart attack and rather than finding himself in the “great beyond”, he awakens in his college dorm room in 1963. Not just a dream or a twisted afterlife, Jeff realizes that he is again 19 years old and has his whole life to live over again. Jeff then proceeds on a journey of reliving or “replaying” his life from 1963 to his death in 1988 over and over again. Each time he dies and lives again, he carries with him all the memories from each of his former lives. During the perpetual cycle that his life has become, Jeff tries everything from being with the women he never married to becoming a wealthy billionaire. All the while, Jeff is trying to figure out just what the meaning and purpose of these replays are.

While Replay is a story of time travel, what makes the book stand apart is how the convention is used to tell a much bigger tale of the lives we all lead and what exactly matters. Like all great works of fiction, it’s not so much the tools or the “gimmick” that’s used but how that device is used to tell a much broader story that gives us some great character insight. While the idea of living your life over and over again may make you think of the Harold Ramis classic “Groundhog Day”, the reality is that Replay was written well before that classic film. In fact, many believe that “Groundhog Day” took many of it’s cues from Grimwood’s book. The character of Jeff Winston is a typical American who feared to take the risks necessary to make his dreams come true. In all honestly, his first life may have been lived with his dreams and direction undefined. This is something we all feel and can understand. As Jeff tries his life over and over again, his attempts at taking more risks lead to both success and heartbreak. In the process, his discovery of what his life is about and what matters most becomes more and more apparent.

The book has garnered some rave reviews, including the World Fantasy Award in 1988. Critic Daniel D. Shade encapsulated the themes of the book in his 2001 review:

“Yet in spite of all the pain and anguish we go through as we follow Jeff through his search for an understanding of why he is replaying his life, the book has some important things to say to the reader. First, life is full of endless happenings that we have little control over. We should live our lives with our eyes set upon the horizon and never look back, controlling those things we can and giving no second thought to those events out of our hands. Second, given that we only have one life to live (Jeff is never sure he will replay again with each heart attack) we should live it to the fullest extent possible and with the least regret for our actions. Everybody makes mistakes; the point is not to dwell on them but to pick ourselves up and keep on going. Keep moving ahead. Third, choices must be made—we cannot avoid them. The only failure is to live a life without risks. In fact, I believe Jeff Winston would advise risking everything for those you love and for the life you want for them and with them. To not experience risk is to fail. And what does Replay have to say to a poor, old man like me who is still going though his mid-life crisis? Just this—that every year will be new. Every day a new chance to begin again. There can be no mid-life crisis when we are living each day to the fullest extent possible. From what Jeff Winston has taught me, I would define mid-life crisis as a period of selfishness when we turn inward and think only of ourselves. Jeff inspires us to look outward toward others and think less of ourselves.”

Replay is a fantastic read and one that makes you really think about the direction of your life and the implications of only getting to live it once. For anyone at that point in your life where you’re looking at what direction to take and weighing the risks of a bold new step, I recommend you check this one out. The perspective gained may well be worth the time. Even if you’re settled into a steady life of safety, this book gives a new point of view on which to look at your life. A highly recommended read, and one that’s available for fairly cheap at your local bookstore.

Why hello again. This is a perfect run of Gekirindan for Arcade and Saturn. It’s on Taito Legends 2 collections so I’m using that version. One Life Clear no miss, all that legitimate business. I think I’m using Type-C with the Dietza guy. Nobody knows what that means, do they. It’s a’ight. If it interests you, this game is about time traveling, so every stage is set in a different year. I went too much out of my way to include music from the year of the stage I’m playing on. I’m also so hip and trendy I know exactly what all the cool kinds will be listening to in the year 4580. P-P-P-Prophet, yo! Here, look at some videos.

I have more things to tell you.
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From Comments of DGR: 02.27.2009

Your comments on Flower are pretty interesting, John, in light of the podcast I heard right before this week’s episode. I was listening to a recent episode of The Geekbox in which Ryan Scott was discussing R-Type Dimensions. His take on the game was essentially this:

“It’s good, it’s really hard… Thank God they put in Infinite Mode because it’s too hard for me to get through otherwise. But the game’s really short– I mean, you can blow through it in 45 minutes.”

While this is technically true, as shmup fans, we get a [i]lot[/i] more out of the R-Type experience than this guy did. Perhaps the same is true for Flower. Obviously, you can’t directly compare Flower with a shmup– DJ Incompetent is likely to vomit upon reading this, in fact– but for many folks, the experience that they get from playing through Flower is good enough that the length isn’t a concern.

- M.C.

I hear what you’re saying. Flower is a “flight-ish” game for certain, reminding me almost of Nights.

I have no problem with short games. Hell, I wish a lot of games were much shorter than they are. I just don’t have time for it anymore. But it wasn’t just the length of Flower that gave me pause. It was just the feeling of, “They could have done so much more with this” that I had when it was done. But like I said, I sort of go back and forth with it. The experience I had playing it was mostly great and often unlike any other game I’ve played. That itself is worth the price. But when I finished it I just had this sort of unfulfilled feeling.

- John

As far as I’m concerned, short games are fine, but I put a lot of value in games that offer options and alternate ways to play through the content. That is what earns the timeless replayable triple-A award for me. Did you know one of the bigger complaints expert players have on Gradius V is that it’s too long? This game clocks in at about an hour, but the ideal time STG players (myself included) want to spend on a one-credit session is roughly 30-something minutes. This is a large complaint for many Compile games as well (Aleste series, Zanac series, etc.), being long stages are a fault and not a feature, especially when they have dead zones of no on-screen enemies for several seconds. An ideal way to maximize content of a single shmup title is to have several different ‘courses’ of 5 stages instead of one massive 8-stage trek. Developers have not thought to include this option besides the compilation multi-game packages. Raycrisis explored this by allowing users to plot a course of five stages out of a selectable eight.

But what’s the issue here with the semi-controversial Flower and FlOw?
They’re great stand-alone games, but players complain not enough is done with it.

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