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On April 20, 2006, a GameBoy Advance game titled Mother 3 was released in Japan. I had been waiting 11 years for this game; imagine my disappointment when it was confirmed that Nintendo of America had no plans to localize and release it in the United States. While some devoted fans of the series soon announced that they would release an unofficial translation of the game, many people just elected to play the Japanese version with the aid of a translation guide. One year later, the translation team hadn't announced enough progress for my liking, so I decided to take the latter route as well.

Upon finishing the game, I came to the following conclusions: Mother 3 is my favorite videogame. I will go to drastic lengths to get my game-playing friends to play Mother 3. However, no one who plays videogames should allow him or herself to be spoiled with regards to Mother 3.

On Friday, Masahiro Sakurai announced that the Franklin Badge (an iconic item in the Mother series) would appear in Super Smash Brothers Brawl this December. This was fantastic news; while the previous Smash Brothers games have included elements from the Mother series, this was the first proof that the tradition had been continued. It also strongly suggested that we might get a Mother 3 character or reference in Brawl, which is so high-profile that Nintendo might be more inclined to localize Mother 3 afterward.

This remarkable turn of events put the translation in the forefront of my mind, so I went looking for the website. What I found was both good news and bad: Super Smash Brothers Brawl will include major references to Mother 3 which will spoil events in the latter game for anyone who has not played it yet. (That link is spoiler-free.) While the translation team would like to have their patch finished in November so fans of the series can play it before Brawl is released on December 3, they've still got a lot of work ahead of them.

If you have any affection for EarthBound or the Mother series and you haven't played this game yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so before December 3. This may mean grabbing the Japanese version and using one of the many translations to work your way through. Having done so myself, I can tell you that while it's challenging, it isn't as difficult as you might expect, and pretty much all the plot sequences are easy to figure out even without the accompanying translation.

One way or another, you really ought to play this game.

Say what you will about Tim Rogers's qualities as a journalist, a writer, or a human being: he had one hell of an arresting LiveJournal. I will say (after, admittedly, many minutes of hesitation) that reading Tim's journal was the best thing to happen to me in 2005. I am both telling the truth when I say that and very, very wrong.

Let me digress for a moment. Seven years ago, I graduated from high school, and my life changed utterly; five years ago, I flunked out of college, and it changed again. My gmail records tell me that three years ago yesterday I e-mailed Tim a long and rambling message that announced, among other things:

"If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then
revision is the sincerest form of imitation."

Revision, huh?

TIM ROGERS, I'M GOING TO REVISE YOU.

I never quite got around to that, unfortunately, and now, three years later, I'm going to simple imitation. Just as Tim had his "108 secrets about the number 108", I am going to 387 things about Jason Love, the first of which is: I attach great significance to the number 387.

It isn't coincidental that I'm writing this on 03/08/2007. (Although I guess I should repost this on August 3 for any non-Americans in my readership, huh?)

Forgive me as I skip back to what I was saying earlier: I know I'm wrong when I say that 108.livejournal.com was not the best thing to happen to me in 2005. That was two years ago, though, and without spending undue time reconstructing the events I know must have happened that year, I can't really recall anything else that happened. I worked, I went to school, and I spent a lot of time on the internet, much of it at insert credit reading Tim's essays. It galls me that I don't have better recollection--so I'm going to strive for more frequent updates, and the sort of stringent structure this project suggests seems as good a method as any for guaranteeing that.

I suppose I'd better mention why exactly the number 387 is so significant, before I end this first entry. So:

I'd memorized the first eight digits of pi early in elementary school; when I was in fourth grade or so, my friend Jared and I decided to make a contest of seeing who could memorize more. Then in sixth grade I finally found myself in the same class as this girl Jill that I had my first crush on, and when the whole class was put in alphabetical order, my name came right before hers--I was the seventh student, and she was the eighth. That was the same year I first tried making QBASIC programs with some sort of username/password functionality, and for my username I took the last five letters of my middle name (which happens to be Alexander) and combined it with it with the 3 from pi, Jill's 8, and my 7: "ander387". Four years later I'd use the same username when I made my GeoCities web page.

I still use that username for my alternate Yahoo! e-mail address, which may be why, as much as I've loved the number 387, it's starting to get a little old. I get a bit more thrill out of 329 these days, not least because it's the date of my birthday: March 29. Speaking of which, since this is March 8, 2007, what date do you think is 387 days from now...?