April 18, 2007 - We’ll never officially see Mother 3
The Mother series is a brilliant yet mishandled RPG series. Like many English speaking RPG gamers, my first experience with this series was Earthbound for the SNES. It was obviously something different- coming in a huge box with a disgusting scratch and sniff card. Nothing about it appealed to typical North American gamers. We’re generally hypnotized by flashy graphics and/or namesake notoriety. That’s why games like Final Fantasy X-2 sell. Despite its underwhelming appearance, Earthbound was a game that made me think. That’s what games should do. That’s what everything in life should do- or else it isn’t worth experiencing.

Like a handful of people, one of the things I most looked forward to about the Nintendo 64 was a new Earthbound game (which had been talked about). Since the internet was really just finding its legs, I’d check magazines for updates about the Nintendo 64 based Earthbound game frequently. It was to be released on some magnetic disc drive add-on for the N64. Eventually, that peripheral was canned- taking the potential “Earthbound 64” with it.

Flash forward several years….Mother 3 is released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan. I’m, of course, excited to hear about this thinking that it’ll eventually find its way to the US. Except that nothing could be found about future plans for the game other than dead silence. There were no plans to translate the game in English. There ARE no plans to officially translate the game in English. This is a shame- but after all, I guess that’s a fitting end to a series that was brilliant yet poorly handled.

There is, at least, a nice alternative in the works. The people at Mother3.org are translating the game for those of us whom are only English speakers. I thank them greatly for attempting this task.

April 6, 2007 - Gottaplay - Scam or incompetent?
Online rental services are a pretty neat concept. I've had Blockbuster Online for about 2 years now. It's worked out very well. They don't, however, have a game rental program. That's a whole separate business (or so it seems). While DVD rentals have 2 widely reputable companies (Blockbuster and Netflix), game rentals don't have that type of service. Sure there's Gamefly. A lot of people use that. I used that for months too. They eventually accused me of losing games that I sent back to them and cancelled my subscription. That's my only major gripe with them.

My girlfriend found an offer for a one dollar trial subscription to Gottaplay. Gottaplay is similar to Gamefly, but they have a smaller customer base. She signed up for it. It seemed like a pretty good deal, barring that they don't screw us like some companies try to do over trial subscriptions.

Well...

That's where everything started to go wrong. She rented 1 game and it arrived fine, played fine, and was sent back promptly during the trial period. She then tried to cancel her account within the trial. Their site had been redesigned and missing the ever important ability to cancel one's account. How do you go live with a redesign of a website like this (dealing with people's bank accounts) and have vital functionality missing? So, at this point, I'm thinking that there was some sort of communication error and they had just had forgotten to include that- which, as baffling as it is, would have made the most sense. No. They actually commented out, in their web code, the function that would allow a member to cancel their account. They made it "hidden". I decided to follow the link anyway only to run across broken MySQL queries. Lilly then writes a letter to Gottaplay explaining the situation. They respond and say that they'll take care of it. Problem solved. The end.

No. Not the end.

Their response was just some BS. Maybe they just threw her problem aside and forgot about it. Maybe they were just saying whatever she wanted to hear without actually planning to do something about it. I'm not sure. The only thing I know is that they charged her account 50 dollars for a "missing" game. They claimed that the game that she sent back- the one that the site showed had been received- was missing. Nice. So she calls up the company (first greeted by busy signals and answering machines for about 10 minutes) explaining that the game was sent back and that she shouldn't be charged $62.95 for a "one dollar trial". They agree with all of this and said the situation will be resolved within 24-36 hours and that they'll notify her when it's taken care of.

That was- I'll guess about 100 hours ago. The charges are still there. Nobody has contacted her. They've been contacted again by her and now me. So I'm wondering what the deal with them is. Are they a scam, or are they just stupid?

March 21, 2007 - FYI
Some people like to market. I personally like to bark. Carmen Sandiego taught me Qi. Then she killed me for laughing about pelicans.

March 1, 2007 - A Free Ride to Nowhere
I've finished A Free Ride to Nowhere. My music section for more song information for that album. Also, contact me if you are interested in obtaining a copy of it. I'll give more details (including lyrics) in weeks to follow.

February 27, 2007 - Live... sort of
The new Lullaway redesign is now live, although I'm not through tweaking it. The XSPF music player seems to be working now. I'm unsure about its layout. Ideally, it's viewed with a small resolution. With larger resolutions, however, use of the scrollbar may be required to use the music player. I'll think that one over.

February 23, 2007 - Adding the XSPF player
I'm working on adding the XSPF music player to the site. The Lacy Morrow edition. This will hopefully allow for streaming my music while browsing my site. Give me feedback on it if there are any issues.

February 21, 2007 - Scrollbars
If you're using Internet Explorer, you may notice black and blue scrollbars on this site. I, like many people, prefer to use Firefox. I'd like to have the colored scrollbars display on Firefox browsers, but I'm not sure if I can do that. Does anybody know if that's possible?

February 9, 2007 - Really... Without a Sound
I'm writing updates before I've even actually uploaded this redesign. Almost like a journal. Actually, it's really not as bizarre as I initially thought that it may have been.

February 8, 2007 - Unveiled Without a Sound
To coincide with the final release of A Free Ride To Nowhere, I've redesigned my lullaway website. In an effort to put a little more consistency into what I'm doing, I will manage this site on a much more regular basis than I have in the past. The actual music will accompany this redesign. I'll even attempt to add a streaming music player with A Free Ride To Nowhere in its entirety as a playlist. I will have to tap into my mad, mad, mad, angry web programming skills to do so... but I will.