In the meantime, please do listen to the Incredible Podcast if you haven’t already. You will, as I have previously stated, enjoy it.

This list does not include Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton or The Abominable Charles Christopher by Karl Kerschl, not because they don’t belong here (they very much do), but because I’ve already interviewed them on this site before, Kate on the podcast, and Karl over here. Like all of the other comics on this list, please read them.

In no particular order:

-Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: XKCD if Randall could draw more than stick figures. Gags, often scientific in nature, often geeky, and very funny. The SMBC Theater live action shorts are also extremely well done for a site of this stature, and extremely funny as well. It’s amazing that this site isn’t bigger than Collegehumor or that ilk — it’s certainly more creative and funnier.

-Dead Winter: Zombies, bad guys, and cute chicks. And that art style! It’s amazing how far he’s come, both in terms of storytelling and design, but then again, that’s what happens when you really commit to a webcomic like this. It’s amazing that this shows up for free in my RSS reader every few days.

-Questionable Content: What’s amazing about this comic is that the content is never questionable — despite the fact that it updates so often (five days a week, without fail), the comic is always super true to these characters, to their lives, and often funny anyway (though the humor always comes from who these guys are, not some contrived punchline). Great comic — more touching and true than most TV shows I watch.

-Sailor Twain or, The Mermaid in the Hudson: This one’s pretty new to me but the style is terrific. Moody and Victorian and dark and beautiful.

-Overcompensating: Ok, so sometimes I do like the silly non sequiturs. This one’s got them, along with some weird art, but I like it. And it makes me laugh, even though I often have no idea why.

-Dinosaur Comics: This is on the list? Actually, it shouldn’t be — I did interview Ryan North as well a little while back. But it’s recently come to my attention that some people I know aren’t reading their Dinosaur Comics every day, and so hopefully including this here will rectify that situation. This is the most useful and entertaining clip art in the entire history of the universe ever.

-Gunshow: I think I’m late on this but oh man, Gunshow. It’s the best. Sometimes it makes no sense, but then you think about it for a bit later that day and it both makes sense and is very funny. I am a pro at explaining things, and this one leaves me trying to figure out a way to explain why it’s so good. Read this arc and maybe you’ll see why.

-Dresden Codak: Weird. Beautiful. It doesn’t update as often as some of these others, but it doesn’t have to. Each one of these is a gem, and as you look at it, it’s as if you’re seeing the light hit an idea in various ways and reflections.

-The Non-adventures of Wonderella: I’ve been reading this one almost since the very beginning. Like The Venture Brothers, it both skewers the genre it’s parodying, and yet still offers up a surprisingly solid mythos and backstory. Plus, Jokerella is the most adorably incompetent supervillian ever. She tries so hard!

-Nedroid Picture Diary: Reginald and Beartato have such wacky adventures. Like this one. “You just don’t understand cats.”

-NPC Comic: Considering my audience, you probably already know about Mary Varn’s comic, since I’ve talked it up in a few places already. But even if you’re not a gamer or a geek, it’s a great read, and it’s been really fun to see the comic and the site come into its own.

-Lucy Knisley’s Artjournal: So honest, so beautiful, so perfect. Lucy doesn’t update that often, either (I think she’s spending most of her time doing actual work, which is as it should be), but when she does, it’s always amazing. I wish I could express myself and my thoughts with my words with as much vibrance and honesty as she does with her pictures.

I think that’s more than ten, but calling it eleven webcomics would mess up the title, and I wanted to mention them all. Enjoy.

When you grow up, however, the foggy heroes of legend start to come into focus, and then you realize they’re just people, people with jobs and performance reviews and tempers and problems and so on. Not that they’re not great (nobody would argue that Hull and Ozzie weren’t greats), but they’re real, in a way you don’t realize when you’re a kid. I think the baseball strike was when I really started giving up on sports. I was still only 14, so I didn’t really understand the whole thing (and I still don’t, except that I can guess why any given strike tends to happen), but that was definitely the point that I remembered thinking sports weren’t that fun anymore. Coincidentally, that’s about when I started high school, where I joined the drama department, and figured out I wanted to work in broadcasting. So who knows — if baseball had never gone on strike, maybe I’d be a crazy jock dude instead of a guy who writes about tech and video games.

No, on second thought, I’d probably still be into the video games.

But this recent fascination with baseball for me is coming at a completely different angle. I’ve already explained (follow the link above) how I came to be a Cubs fan, despite living in St. Louis for so much of my life. But even then, I wasn’t sure if my “year with the Cubs” would be an ongoing thing, or just an in-the-moment experience. Watching all of those games last year could have just been a fad for me — I just happened to be living near Wrigley, I just happened to go to bars full of people discussing the games, and all of the team’s games just happened to be on my television. When baseball started up again (which is what’s happening this week in Arizona), would I still care? Or would I move on to follow something else?

If this week is any indication, I’ll still care. I’m surprised with myself — I’m pouring over news and rumors of who’s coming back with the team and what the lineup will be like, I’m following the old familiar faces on Twitter again, and I think I’m going to make the most serious investment in my baseball fandom yet: $100 to subscribe to the league’s Internet video service, which will offer me up video of all of this year’s baseball games in streaming HD whenever I want them. (I would kind of rather watch them on TV, but I think I’m going to hook my MacBook up to my TV with HDMI anyway, so hopefully I will get to watch the good Len and Bob broadcast in HD that way.) I’ve thrilled to the earliest news of the Cubs’ spring training games (we’ve won both so far — not that it matters, but I am excited anyway), and the thing I’m perhaps most excited about is that there’s every indication that my favorite player, Kosuke Fukudome (who I hear has been earning a great nickname around the clubhouse), is going to have a great year. He should, too — the Cubs could use it.

In other words, I’m in. I’m surprising even myself — I’m not a sports guy, and I don’t usually have the stamina to keep up with a whole season, much less start in on another one (my few attempts to join fantasy leagues usually have me forgetting to check the stats a week or two in). But for some reason, this is clicking with me now, and I’m really excited to be a fan again this year.

Why? It’s not the same as when I was a kid. Back then, I used to listen to Jack Buck with a reverence, and marvel at Ozzie and all of the other guys like they were larger than life. Nowadays, I feel much more equal. I know how a business works, and I know how the team works, and that they need to win X games to match a record, or X hits for a bonus. I know what the broadcast guys have been through during a long road trip, and I can hear what it’s like in their voices when they’re running on far too little sleep (because I’ve done the same thing myself). And sometimes I even feel more experienced than these guys, not in a bad way, but in a way that makes me realize what I’ve learned from my own life. Some of them are even younger than I am, and so when Zambrano throws a fit during a bad game, I think of the same kinds of frustrations I’ve dealt with in my life, and what might be the right way to deal with them.

The kid that was me didn’t think any of that stuff — he didn’t even realize, I think, that Hull was getting paid, or that he had a life outside of the rink (yes, like you were surprised when you saw your teacher at the grocery store). But the fact that I’ve learned so much about people, and that these young guys playing sports are real people, kind of makes me appreciate the whole circus more.

And to be honest, I have finally landed on one of the great truths of sports fanmanship — you feel good when your team wins. Sure, you feel bad when they lose (and c’mon, I chose the Cubs, I know what that feels like), but you could be having a terrible day when suddenly the bats start to light up, and your team wins by three. You step outside after that, and even though it’s raining and you’re in a hurry, you smile anyway. Because no matter what else happens, the Cubs won today.

• I like this Hearthstone pillow a lot. I bought a black leather couch just recently, and it seems a little plain without some Warcraft-related pillows on it. I don’t know when I’ll have the time or inclination to actually pick any up, but my birthday is coming up in early May. Also, I would have liked to see that mana strudel in a closeup. I wonder what mana actually tastes like.
• I actually wrote about World of Warcraft on Joystiq this week — Activision not only went nuts on Infinity Ward, but released their annual financial report, and WoW was mentioned quite a bit in there. It’s probably no surprise that Blizzard’s WoW subscriptions, and therefore revenue, are dropping pretty quickly. As I’ve said here before, Cataclysm is the key — if they can bring back that original swell of players by promising a return to the old glory days, they can probably get another few solid years out of this game, at least until Diablo III comes out. But if Cataclysm doesn’t attract enough attention or get players intrigued enough to come back (and bring their friends with them), then I think we’re looking at the long, slow end of the World of Warcraft. Not that it’s bad for Blizzard — this game is already legendary, obviously, and they’ve got StarCraft II and Diablo and plenty of other irons in the fire that haven’t even been announced yet. But if Cataclysm doesn’t explode for them, I don’t see the game growing any more, especially with threats like The Old Republic and all of the other games stealing free time in 2010.
• This is a pretty interesting discussion that’s been running through the blogs (you can follow all of Matticus’ links to see what people are saying there). I would say that if you get /gkicked from your guild for something that you blog about, then you probably shouldn’t be in that guild anyway. Remember, it’s a game — if something makes you angry enough to really rail on someone on your blog, then it’s probably not worth the effort. And if someone goes to the trouble of /gkicking you just because of something they read, again, it’s not worth the effort to stay with them. Of course, me and my guild almost never see each other these days — I tend to sign on late at night and tend to be one of the only players on — so you probably shouldn’t take my advice anyway. But I wouldn’t worry too much if you get /gkicked for something you write. Either you shouldn’t be there anyway, or it’s not your fault, it’s theirs.
• Facebook is still waiting for their Mario, Halo, or Sonic. This didn’t get reported on any of the WoW sites (that I know of — if you saw a WoW site that mentioned it, let me know, so I can start following them), but I think it’s intrinsic to what WoW was and is. Farmville, for all of its silliness and simplicity, is an extremely popular game, and in many ways, it’s the next World of Warcraft. It’s a game that’s pulling in people who aren’t game players, and that’s exactly why Warcraft got so big in the first place. For Facebook to say that they haven’t yet had their flagship game yet is kind of a big deal. When that game does come along, my guess is that it will dwarf what Blizzard has done with this game. Don’t believe me? How many players did World of Warcraft have at its peak? 12 million? Gee, that’s cute.
• There’s some whining going on about the “dumbing down” of stats in Cataclysm. Again, I don’t think that’s bad — Blizzard is going back to basics. The game has become complicated by necessity — to keep theorycrafters interested and keep the game mechanics solid, you naturally have to add a little complexity into the mix. But Cataclysm is the big return to the old days that Blizzard is trying to pull off. I’m looking forward to seeing if they can do it. I will say that they sound like they can, and the stat changes I’ve seen seem focused on making gear more straightforward, which makes it easier for everybody. But my big worry is if they’ll keep enough of the old world to remind people what early Warcraft was like — is it possible to create nostalgia by changing everything?
• Some cool desktop calendars to help you keep up on dates during March.
• It still surprises me that people wait so long to do instances. Seriously, they’re the best part of the game. Go do them!
• I saw this community team picture as well, and had the same thoughts (though you’ll have to go find it somewhere yourself. For a game with an audience that is so diverse and varied, I was a little surprised that the community team was still a bunch of dudes who look like they love to play CounterStrike. Not that there is anything wrong with dudes like that, but even on WoW Insider, we aimed to pick up writers that represented the community.
• Finally, I don’t have much to add to this, but I think it’s an interesting idea. Maybe the Facebook Mario game will do exactly that.

That is it! Happy raiding everybody — hope you’re enjoying all of your adventures, in and out of Warcraft.

And in the meantime, there’s also lots of me talking on the Incredible Podcast. Go listen to that and review/rate/subscribe the thing in iTunes if you haven’t yet as well. Please. I beg of you.

I ran my third 5k last Sunday, my first here in LA, over in Chinatown. I did pretty well, I think, but was probably a little overenthusiastic. Probably.

To: Michael Schramm
1523 XXXXXXXXXXX Ave.
West Los Angeles, CA 90025

From: Johnny Liu
Los Angeles Chinatown City Council
Los Angeles, CA 90313

Dear Mr. Schramm,

We are extremely pleased that you were able to attend our 32nd annual Firecracker 5/10k Run/Walk event this past Sunday. You certainly ran a respectable time, finishing the 3.1 mile course in just over half an hour, constantly running despite the multiple climbs we placed on the path from Chinatown up to Dodgers Stadium. We hope the event was fulfilling for you, and that you enjoyed your time in our historic and heritage-rich part of this great city.

However, we did want to bring up a few concerns with you in regard to your behavior at the race. While we make it a priority to make sure that everyone at our city’s events is able to enjoy themselves, we’re afraid that you seemed to do so to the detriment of our other guests’ experience.

For example, when you first showed up on Sunday morning, it was probably less than prudent for you to yell out, “All right I’m ready, let’s run this [expletive],” as you did upon arriving at the starting line. We spent a lot of time planning out a short opening ceremony, and both State Senator Carol Liu and special guest star James Hong were probably extremely disappointed when you suggested that they should “stuff this noise” because you were ready to “beat feet.” They were both too polite to say anything, but we could see it on their faces.

Likewise, once the race actually started, it was probably not appropriate that you proceeded to push not only women but also children out of your way in order to keep up your running pace. We are proud that you were able to hold such a solid pace (one of your personal best, we believe), but given that our event is clearly labeled as a “run/walk,” we don’t feel it’s right that you were so competitive. Mrs. Nancy Hodgson of Pasadena also shared with us that you asked her to “move it, Grandma” as you ran by, and we also agreed with her that it was considerably rude to do so.

We do admit that not all of your competitive spirit was directed at other participants of our race, but considering that there were in fact children on our run, we were troubled to hear that as you ran up the aforementioned course hills, you constantly berated our city’s geographic features. Telling our hills that you were “rocking” them “silly,” and that you were making them your “[expletive],” while admittedly true, was not the thing to do with young ears around. Likewise, asking our hills “what ya’ll think of that, [expletive]! That’s right!” after you’d crested the summit was not at all appropriate.

Finally, your behavior after the race was, in a word, shocking. If your interpretation of the Thriller dance after crossing the finish line had been slightly more accurate, we might have let it pass, but in its current state, we regret being there to see it. While your physical prowess is certainly significant, the women in attendance were made overly uncomfortable by your clumsy flexing and posing, and the table full of post-race smoothies that you overturned during your impromptu celebration had been set up by a group of volunteers who were very distraught to see their contribution destroyed in a short albeit spectacular flash.

In short, Mr. Schramm, while we do hope you are able to visit our city again, and we do hope to see you at the Firecracker run next year, you would do well to leave the competitiveness at home. We agree that you do indeed rock, but we sadly inform you that our Master of Ceremonies did not appreciate you grabbing his mic and saying so in front of the gathered crowd at the finish line.

Thank you,

Johnny Liu
Los Angeles Chinatown City Council
3/2/2010

The branch structure I’ve decided to explore (because man, you could spend your whole life learning how to cook, and maybe I will) is what you might call “quality easy” — lately, I’ve been trying to come up with some easier ways to make food that’s usually tougher to do. For example, instead of deep frying things like fries or buffalo wings, I’ve been working on baking them. I’ve been buying premade ingredients, and cooking and mixing them together in new ways. And I’ve been slowly incorporating and getting myself familiar with more actual chef’s tool: For a while there, I was on a stir fry kick — just a wok-style pan and some oil — but then I realized I had an oven in my kitchen, and started using that. I had lasagna tonight, and I’ve baked chicken, baked potatoes, cooked veggies, made some bacon wraps, and so on. I still don’t think I’ve fully explored the oven and all of the things it can do, but I think I’m ready to move on to another appliance.

And the one that I’ve landed on is the slow cooker. I’m kind of excited about it — I work from home but usually have my attention focused on work, so my plan is to wake up and add ingredients on the various times I take breaks throughout the day. I’m not quite sure what you cook in a slow cooker besides chili (which is what I’ll do first), but I’m sure I can come up with some things. Meatballs, right? Some kind of roast, I know that (though traditionally, I’m not that into roasts, but I’m open to ideas). Oh, and there’s probably some kind of awesome BBQ I can put together, no?

Clearly I’m taking my sweet time with this. I’m sure, just re-reading that last paragraph, that some of your are already pasting your favorite recipes into your email, thinking I’m crazy for not knowing 50 things I can make in a slow cooker. How can I be a meat eater and not know the paradise of slow-cooked BBQ pork, you’re thinking. And if you do send me recipes, I’ll appreciate it, and when I have a chance, I will try to cook what you send.

But really, I’m not too bothered. Cooking, for me, has become much less about the mastery and more about the experience. When I was younger, I would try to make cookies, and I would make a mistake somewhere in the mix, and when the batch was ruined, I would get discouraged and never make the same thing again. But lately, it’s much more about the iteration — I enjoy thinking about the recipe beforehand, and even as I do it, I think what else I could do with it. “This recipe is good, but next time I’ll try some oregano.” Half of my thoughts are on what I’ll do next, so when the final product comes out less than exactly perfect, it’s ok — I’m already thinking about what I’ll do differently the next time. And by the third or fourth try, I’m finding I can make stuff that’s really good. The iteration is the thing, not the instant mastery. Which is the way it should be, I think.

So that’s my plan with the slow cooker — take it easy, experiment a lot, and hopefully through some trial and error, come up with something I like that’s reasonably good for me. And then make that a few more times just for fun.

I’m no chef, obviously. But lately, I cook like the guy painting the sunset at the park with a canvas paints — the painting may not be very original or good, but I’m happy just to be out there watching the sun go down anyway.

• Hey hey, patch 3.3.5! Called it! So the Black Dragonflight is invading the Ruby Sanctum, and that’s the kickoff for Cataclysm. I’m down for sure — I said last week that I wasn’t sure whether or not Cataclysm held as much signficance for players as the Arthas story did, but one way Blizzard can make that happen is by bringing in the old lore early and often, and it looks like they’re going to do exactly that with this patch. Sounds good to me. There are a few other spoilers released so far, and they do make things interesting, I’ll say that. But I won’t reveal here what they are.
• One of the things about Warcraft I was actually most excited about this week wasn’t in Warcraft at all: it was the Starcraft II beta. I finally joined up a few days ago, and I have to say, not only am I impressed by the game, but I’m very impressed by the social connections made with the new Battle.net. Finding friends is super easy, and while you can tell the party matching system is definitely still in beta (I’m not even sure their netcode has been optimized yet), I like all the options available: You can leave notes for and about your friends, you can share replays with each other (and I’d imagine that there’ll be a web interface for doing just that eventually), and it looks like you’ll even be able to create and share maps. Very social, and very much the influence of Blizzard’s time spent on World of Warcraft. I’m interested to see what they come up with for Diablo 3 as well — I can’t wait to see new ways to share your character, or keep track of friends as they’re playing.
• Felicia Day at Farpoint last Saturday. With some good insight about creating media, and a funny story about Vork. Although how much of a WoW nerd is he really if he’s bragging about being 78? Hit 80 already, man!
• I guess there are going to be “overcloaks” added to the game in the future. I guess that’s cool — it’s actually a step away from the idea of “gear as identification.” We always used to talk about why you couldn’t customize your gear, or just change the look of your gear to, say, your favorite tier while keeping your stats the same: it’s because Blizzard wants your gear to be an identifier not only of who you are, but of what you are: which race, which faction, which spec, and so on. I guess covering up the cloak doesn’t change things too much (I can only ID one cloak by look, and then only because it’s “white and longer than your average cape”), and it does provide a little more graphical flair on the character.
• Is it possible that people are tired of the Dungeon Finder system already? I guess if you ran the thing day and night when it first came out, you might be a little burned out on it, but let’s not forget that we had five years, five years of “LFG Gundrak plzzzz need healer and tank” before this. Wait times have been a little longer, I’ll grant, but I think that’s just the state of the game at this point — we’re between patches and between expansions, and you have to admit, 2010 has had some terrific games so far. I would laugh if people are going after the Dungeon Finder already, though. We just got it — if you’re already tired of it, you’ve played too much. And speaking of the Dungeon Finder, this is a great move as well.
• Finally, this isn’t about WoW, but wow. I played Global Agenda at E3 last year and I liked it a lot. But it’s fine to have a differnet opinion of the game — assuming you’ve actually played it long enough to know.

That’s it — a little short this week, but in my defense, I cleared out the feed complete. There isn’t much going on, though I did let a few good drama stories slip by. If only there was a place where someone was collecting and posting those…

There’s only one problem (and no, it’s not that Vista isn’t bloated and slow). Craig Barth doesn’t actually exist. Turns out he was an alias of one Randall C. Kennedy, a pretty well-known guy who also works for InfoWorld as a commentator and columnist (usually also, probably not coincidentally, spouting off various controversial opinions about operating systems). Kennedy actually does own a company called Devil Mountain Software, and he claims that he started the alias simply to separate his blogging and his working personas. Which in and of itself might not have been a problem, except that he was blogging and working on the same things. Using a pen name is one thing, but actually hiding your identity while posing as a source for the exact same publication you’re writing for is really another. He never directly quoted “Barth” for his own stories, but he apparently did talk about the company in third-person without revealing the tie, and he was more than happy to be quoted elsewhere, including on the very site he worked for, under a fake name.

There is some confusion here — Kennedy actually claims that his editors and the writer who sourced him knew all about the dual identity, while they claim that they had no idea (and the publication has subsequently fired him). He also says that it was totally fine for him to use two identities — when he started up the company, “Craig Barth” was an alias that he came up with to keep his public and company personas separate, and it’s only when “Craig Barth” started getting quoted that trouble arose.

Whatever the truth (and Kennedy doesn’t actually seem to care anyway — he claims the whole identity reveal is an attack on him by Microsoft, and that he’s living out the rest of his days on the beach), this whole episode has me thinking about fake identities online. They’re so easy to create — signing up for a Gmail address, a domain with hosting, and a Paypal account is almost enough to make a company out of whole HTML these days — and they seem so easy to keep anonymous that when a situation presents itself where you might want to keep one reputation separate from another, why not be “Craig Barth” instead of Randall Kennedy?

But that’s the key here — your identity is your reputation, and while a fake identity may allow you to escape some of your own actions or words some of the time, I’d like to think that even on the Internet, you’ll eventually be held responsible. I can think of quite a few manufactured online identities — this kid who created an airline, Fake Steve, Ferrarro the WoW paladin, EA spouse, Belle du Jour, and so on — and in every single case, we eventually found out who was who. Sometimes, the revealed party was punished, sometimes rewarded with a book deal, but even online, the person hiding eventually had to face the light.

When I tweeted something to that effect yesterday, my colleague Eliah Hecht pointed out that we just haven’t heard about the ones who are still keeping their secrets, which is definitely true. But on a long enough scale, and especially when the identity really is used to circumvent ethical or legal constraints, I believe most major secrets come to light. We eventually found out who Deep Throat was — if a guy who can bring down the President anonymously can eventually be revealed, Joe Blogger who pretends to be as Jane Blogger doesn’t have a chance in the larger scheme of things.

That won’t stop guys like Randall Kennedy from thinking they can still get away with it. Your identity, even in this virtual age, is your reputation, and your reputation is everything. Can you keep your word? Can you be who you say that you are? Can you represent yourself in a worthwhile way, and do and post things online in a way that you’d want to be proud of, rather than hiding behind a secret identity and hoping no one finds out?

I know I’m moralizing here, and I know this could come back around in my face. Maybe someday in the future, I’ll be put in just such a situation where I think it’s easier to hide behind a fake name rather than live up to what I say and do, and I’ll eventually get caught, and someone will come back to this post and call me a hypocrite. I’d deserve it.

And so, while I hope that doesn’t ever happen, I will agree that sometimes, you need a fake identity. To use my examples from before, Fake Steve made his fortune with his, and EA Spouse and Belle du Jour probably would have never written what they’d written if not for anonymity. Brooke Magnanti, a.k.a. Belle, said that the anonymity she used “will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on.” I can’t argue with that — there are exceptions to every rule, and certainly there are times when names have to be left out if it, if not changed completely.

But I do think it’s best to try and avoid that situation if possible. Even Magnanti admits that once she came clean, it felt much better “not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about.” That’s what should keep guys like Kennedy from doing what they do — not the fear of being caught or the punishment of revelation, but the gnawing feeling that you’re failing your job as a writer to tell the truth whenever you put words down. Even the people who have to hide behind a fake name shouldn’t want to. And if you’re using a fake name to hide something you’re simply not proud of (or that you can get in trouble for doing or saying), you’ve got no excuse at all.

So Mike Schramm is my name, and hopefully everything I do and say, even online, will appear under it in the future. I’ve got enough trouble keeping this reputation going — hopefully the time won’t ever arise when I need to start up a whole new one.

On to today’s post:

Five Lessons Learned from Final Fantasy Tactics

Yes, one of the things I meant to talk about on the Incredible Podcast last weekend was the fact that I recently bought Final Fantasy Tactics to play on my Playstation 3. I’ve been jonesing, at various times, for a good old-school Final Fantasy game, a complicated strategy game, and a solid RPG, and FFT is supposed to be all three of those at once, so I figured I’d go back and give it a playthrough. There was only one problem: I am really, really bad at strategy games.

I don’t know what it is (and I don’t think it’s that I’m dumb, though you may disagree), but whenever video game choices get really hard and/or complicated, I stop paying attention. I do love me some Civ, and the factor with that seems to be that even though there’s a lot of things happening in that game, you’re really only making one choice at a time — you’re just moving a unit, adjusting a city, or setting a production queue. And there’s no time limit, obviously, so you can make choices as slow or as quick as you want. Real-time strategy games, however, have nothing but time limits — I just got into the Starcraft II beta tonight, and sure enough, I’m bad at it. Pressured to fight against an opponent, I can’t keep track of units and queues and tiers and all of the other things you need to keep an eye on when you’re playing that game.

But FFT (as well as the tactics genre in general) has elements of both — it’s basically turn-based, like Civ, but you are managing multiple units and queues at any given time. You need to control up to five characters on a tiled board, and you need to move them around in turns to variously attack enemies, heal themselves, or line up buff spells or other items or abilities. In short, I figured it was hard, but it was manageable. I would buy Final Fantasy Tactics, and learn how to strategize, even if it killed me.

And it turns out that I survived — after a weekend of playing the game, I think I have a pretty good grasp on how things work. It took me a lot of lost battles, and a lot of resetting the game, but at this point, I can survive almost anything. I’m still not great at the game — I can’t walk into a new battle and rock it unless I get really lucky — but even if things go wrong during one of the battles, I can make the right moves, use the right items and abilities, and make it out alive.

So I figured, since I spent last weekend learning as much about myself as I did about this game, that I would share some of the wisdom I gained with you. Here’s five things I learned from Final Fantasy Tactics.

1. Attacking is not always the right thing to do. Most of the winning conditions in this game are to “kill all the enemies,” so you’d think that diving in and taking them all out would be the way to go. But not at all — there are lots and lots of times in the game when it’s much wiser to make a move that doesn’t hurt the enemy. That was one of the things I learned right away — while I would see a wounded enemy and think that all I had to do to win was walk up and attack, that attack would miss, the enemy would return fire, and all of a sudden I’d be the one in danger. Once I wrapped my head around the idea that it was always better to consider my options before jumping into the fray, I got a lot better right away. Sure, it sounds obvious now, but lots of my early losses were because I went on the offensive way before I should have.

2. Let them come to you. This is a corollary to the first lesson. On some of the levels, you can see that there are actually waves of enemies — there are multiple groups of powerful, slow enemies that you’re meant to take on one group at a time, because as you’re fighting the first group, the other group will slowly be making its way toward you. If you attacked both at the same time, you’d be overwhelmed, but being patient and using the extra movement time can get you the win. Even on levels where there’s just one group, it’s almost always better to wait and buff up as the enemy comes to you rather than rush out there yourself. Allowing the enemy to try and move in first tends to put you in a much better position to react and return fire.

3. Heal up when you can. This was the other big thing I learned right away — healing makes the difference in a tactics game, because very often, your enemies don’t heal at all. So any time you can take a breather and heal up, you should probably take it. In all of the battles I’ve fought so far, there is no time limit, so taking an extra turn to finish the fight isn’t a problem (I’m sure there will be limits in the future, but first things first). Even if a character is only down a few points, those points could make the difference the next time they get attacked, so use the heal spell first, and then go in for the kill.

4. Strengths on strengths. This is actually something I learned before FFT (in other games, actually), but it’s especially applicable to a game like this: stacking strengths is often better than spreading yourself around. Especially in the case of a game where you have multiple characters with various roles, it’s better to buff up a knight’s strength with his armor and give him the sword that does extra damage (and maybe even throw a strength buff in there, too). Weaknesses are something to keep an eye on, but you can usually take care of weaknesses with other character’s strengths, so stacking in one direction as much as possible is usually more helpful.

5. Read the manual. For most of my life, I wasn’t a guy that reads manuals — whenever I got a new device or a new game, I just flipped it on and poked around until I found what I wanted. But for really complicated systems and games, I’ve learned that it pays to start at the beginning and read to the end. It takes much less time and effort to read the manual than to figure it out yourself or fix a mistake you’d otherwise make. Again, that sounds obvious to you, dear reader, because you’re smart. But it wasn’t until more recently that I figured out that’s the right thing to do, and going through the whole FFT manual and tutorial helped out a lot.

I’ve probably lost most of you by now — “Seriously Mike, you had that much trouble just playing a game?” And it’s not that I had trouble — until this weekend, I’d pick up a tactics game, play it for a few minutes, realize it was way more complicated than I wanted to deal with, and move on. But last weekend I sat down to conquer this complicated genre, and I really feel like I did. I’m about halfway done with the game now, and I already have my eye on Disgaea 3. I’m starting to see patterns in the gameplay, and as you’ve probably already figured out from this post, parallels in my life. By conquering this game, I feel like I’ve built up some new pathways in thinking, some new talents that weren’t developed before. By figuring out FFT, I’ve figured out another part of my life, and I feel like I’ve already been rewarded for it.

All that for $10 on PSN. Good deal.