Wednesday, 23 September 2009
spirit dreams inside
We’re on a L’arc en Ciel kick. Not having male vocals is a problem, and getting the vocaloids right is too much trouble especially since we’re the really spontaneous type (pranks notwithstanding).
My current favourite is Blurry Eyes, while the girls prefer the more upbeat Spirit Dreams Inside.
遠くの風を身にまとう 貴方には
届かない言葉並べてみても
また視線は何処か窓の向こう
変わらない頼ｴは続いている
あの日々さえ曇って…
籠の中の鳥のような 虚ろな目に
触れている午後の日差しはまるで
貴方を外ヘ誘う光
変わらない頼ｴは続いている
あの日々さえ曇ってしまう
めぐり来る時に
約束を奪われそう
この両手差しのべても心は離れて
Why do you stare at the sky
with your blurry eyes？
めぐり来る季節に
約束を奪われそう
この両手差しのべても心は離れて
めぐり来る季節に
大切な人はもう…
振り向いたその瞳に 小さな溜息
…心は離れてゆく
All’s quiet on the front. Not really been playing much lately, been spending a lot of time practising some of our more exotic instruments. We’re copycat musicians, that’s true, but we pride ourselves on getting that studio sound live. As I said before, technical musicians. So what if we don’t have an audience, in fact we like it that way.
Just like how some artists draw or authors write stuff for the simple goal of getting it out of their system, that’s exactly the case with us. Why climb the mountain… because it’s there. Why play that piece… because it’s interesting. An audience is just a distraction. I won’t kid you, having people gawk at your skill, being admired / envied can be nice feelings, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna perform on command. It’s liberating to just play with the others, to keep polishing our skills.
But what’s the point you say. Exactly! Why should there be a point? Who says there needs to be one? It’s all about scratching that itch. Some people collect random “friends” on yet another pointless networking website-flavour-of-the-moment, some people embarrass themselves on YouTube, some people get plastered at bars… we lose ourselves in the music. Nothing compares to the feeling of being blindfolded, soaked with sweat and amped after hours of continuous jamming and still feeling invincible, and just going with the music. It’s just us, the instruments, and the all-encompassing sound.
We bring out the worst in each other.
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
the savior of those on earth
Replaying Lufia 2 currently. It’s one of the rare few RPGs that have the bonus dungeon early in the game, instead of right before the final battle.
That always bugged me. You slog through the entire game with crap stuff, then gind mindlessly at the secret dungeon to get cool stuff, but you only get to use all that bling in the last few fights. What use is an epic weapon when you only get to wield it at the final 1% of the game?
Of course, getting Cool Shit ™ too early on can be balancing to the point of game-breaking, but that’s another story. After all if your game was balanced well a bunch of powerups should be merely “nice boosters” instead of “omghax”. In games with linear item progressions (wood sword -> iron sword -> gold sword) of course you’ll overpower the player but then again that’s your own freaking fault for sticking slavishly to decades-old RPG tradition. It’s not just about the damage, god damn it. That’s the problem with you young people, you don’t fucking think.
“B-b-but DPS!”. Bullshit. This is why your games sink into the sea of anonymity along with the bajillions of other no-name bargain-bin titles. The problem with damage-oriented games is you kill creativity by making everything else unimportant. Why cast boosts / buffs / debuffs when enemies die in 1-2 rounds? Exactly. This is also a failing in Lufia 2 btw, so even though I do like that game it still cheeses me off that many things can simply be dismissed as useless even though in theory they should enjoy good situational uses.
Btw the title of this blog is in reference to a song that only gets a brief showing in the game before another track replaces it. This song is fucking epic. I mean Hiraga Saito charging into certain death one-man-army style against an army of 7 million kind of epic. This is the kind of music that plays when the spotlight unexpectedly falls on the surprise hero, who nobody takes any notice of before. The hero who’s just one of the few minor characters in the party, the one nobody pays attention to because he doesn’t act like a dick, the one who always does the menial jobs because the other heroes are too busy being drama queens in center stage, the one who always gets stuck with the blame because he never complains when the party needs a convenient scapegoat for their hare-brained scheme of the day, the one who never fails to let the brat / tag-along / guest take the last available room at the inn and sleeps in the ditch outside because nobody cared to take a recount of the increased party size, the one who always suffers in silence and volunteers to do all the dangerous diversions because the main heroes are more important to the plot, the one who actually has the worst of it all but nobody notices because he’s not the focus of the story, the one who gets left behind to face the authorities while the heroes make their umpteenth escape, the one who bankrupts his small inheritance helping the party entertain other factions because we need their political strength, the one who loses it all for the sake of helping the main heroes.
This is the kind of music that’s seared into your brain when you consider this unsung hero as he makes his final stand against overwhelming odds. Left behind to garrison a side path while the main heroes forge forward along the obvious route, this guy discovers that they’ve been suckered and that the main party is only facing a token force – while the real army moves to strike at the flank… the flank that he’s been left to protect. What to do? It’s too late to call for reinforcements. To fall back would allow the enemy to flank the armies of the forces of good and destroy them. The only responsible thing to do then would be to send the tiny garrison away to spread the word of warning to as many friendly forces as possible, while he remains behind to prevent the enemy from overrunning the single lone fortress standing between victory and defeat.
Imagine this song playing as our valiant hero prepares to meet the enemy, knowing that it will be the last thing he can do for the heroes, the only people who ever believed in him and called him friend. He turns the fortress into a deathtrap and collapses the exits, then marches forward to fulfill his final duty. Imagine this song playing as he marches resolutely forward to meet the enemy, even as his brain rebels, remembering all the pain, the shame, and the humiliation he endured growing up as an unwanted war orphan. The only thing keeping him moving forward is loyalty – loyalty to the only people who ever cared and who in turn earned his eternal gratitude. Gratitude that he is going to pay for with his very life.
He has lived gladly in the shadow of his heroic companions, lending them his quiet strength, and now that very strength will both work for and against him. He has enough reserves to give the enemy a very nasty surprise – he will actually take on the entire fucking army and carve huge bloody swathes through them. This also guarantees that they will not be content to simply crush this lone insect that blocks their way, that they will capture him and take him apart slowly piece by painful piece, and since they count necromancers and demons among their number he knows death will not end his torment. They will simply chain his soul, bind it with their unholy magicks, and raise him and kill him again and again and again.
This is the kind of fucking epic music that unnamed heroes like that deserve. The goddamn main heroes don’t do everything on their own, dammit. Everyone plays a part. This is my woefully inadequate tribute to the underdogs whom nobody pays attention to, who deserve some fucking respect for all they’ve gone through, all the sacrifices they made.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
e = mc hammer
Mmm recent update. Just wanted to share something about intellectual property and copyrights.
You guys probably heard about the recent selling out of The Pirate Bay. Wasn’t really unexpected; all the hypocrites moaning about it are living in lala land – if YOU get sued by Big Media, wouldn’t you jump when someone offers to bail you out? Let’s face us, many of us were just freeloaders along for the ride. I don’t get all the self-righteous bullshit. Sure it was nice having someone large (relatively) sticking it to The Man, but if you didn’t think a smackdown wasn’t in the pipes then you’re incredibly naive.
Here are some of the more interesting quotes from arstechnica which I got down. You’ll probably notice a trend here but why not just read for yourself and find out?
(1)
“And why is taking and giving IP that isn’t yours not “stealing”, but only infringement; when you are removing the owners chances of monetizing their work?”
Because, you, like the rest of the uneducated don’t understand that copyright isn’t a product. It protects the right for you to be able to own and distribute a product. There is no stealing in infringement because there is nothing to steal. In order to steal a copyright I would have to have that copyright redone in my name. That is where you and all the other ass hats can’t get. When I download a song, I do not steal the song. I infringe on someones rights to distribute that song. You assume that anyone that has a copyright would charge for the product. This isn’t necessarily true. In cases where someone is charging for a product the rights holder can use civil proceedings to receive damages for what they have lost through someone else assuming control of their protected product and also for the jury to charge punitively to punish for deterrence.
The RIAA and others want to equate downloading to stealing because then it is view by all as a crime and treated as such. The true “crime” is rights infringement. Which is not defined as a crime by the judicial system.
That is what makes the Thomas-Rasett case so interesting. Did she infringe, hell yeah. But no one has been able to accurately quantify how much she infringed. Her damages do not equate to what the rights holder actually lost. It is also so high because the jurors seem to have wanted to punish her.
The laws that were written are based on large scale commercial infringement, not individual non-profit infringement. It’s like being charged as a corporation that dumps toxic waste when all you did was throw a wrapper out your car window.
What really scares me about the ACTA is that so many people are not bothered by the fact the government wants to create laws that govern you, and are completely binding, with punishments allowing no legal recourse, simply catering to business, with no public scrutiny or input, in total secrecy. It amazes me that more people aren’t pissed or downright scared about this. Read what little is known about ACTA and comment then, not from the ignorant standpoint in your current post. Earl Grey you are a tool. You are the type of sheep the recording industry is banking on.
Idiocracy, America’s future. We are getting dumber as a country every day.
- – - – -
(2)
Secondly, no people “gave” me my rights. The right to profit from and control that I did is not a grant by the people or the government. It is fundamental to life.
Uh, I’m glad you feel that way, but out here in the real world (or the vast majority of First World nations, anyway) that simply isn’t true. Copyright is an artificial construct that isn’t at all fundamental. The reason for this should be self-evident: in the vast majority of circumstances, when you sell an object, you lose any rights at all to that object. We the people chose to change the rules when it came to intellectual property (inasmuch as we’ve agreed that ideas can even be property), in order to convince the creators of such material to create more of it. Should we come to the conclusion that this was a bad deal, then we the people can take away this artificial construct we’ve made for you.
This right here is an important distinction. Its not just “how” but also “if” you wish to distribute. While I do feel sympathy for the Australians and those in Mexico who cannot get Battlestar Galactica, at the same time it is the choice of the rights holders to not distribute to those markets, regardless of whether there is someone there who wants the media. There can be many reasons for withhold distribution, from corporate branding to declining to do the marketing and support for a market they do not feel will recoup the expense. Regardless, it is their right and that does not grant others the right to simply steal the content.
This highlights a change that I really think we need to see in copyright law: the concept of abandonment, somewhat similar to how it exists in trademark law, and on a regional level. Offer to the public the product we’ve allowed you to copyright, or lose the copyright. If you can’t be bothered to reasonably offer a piece of intellectual property in a given country, you should have no recourse to complain when the people in that country choose to make copies (which cost you nothing) from available sources. After all, what reason does that country have to uphold your copyright? You’re not enriching it, which is the primary purpose of copyright.
- – - – -
(3)
If I cannot pay for the product in any way then me getting it for free has no monetary implications for them. If it has caused no monetary loss then it is not unethical. Nor can you stretch the truth and claim it is stealing if it has caused NO loss of product or money.
- – - – -
(4)
Secondly, no people “gave” me my rights. The right to profit from and control that I did is not a grant by the people or the government. It is fundamental to life.
hahaha, this is funny, you wouldn’t be able to protect your imaginary property (some people call it intellectual property) without people signing on the legislation.
Copyright is not a fundamental, God given, immutable way of life.
Also, what you said exactly was “Copyright exists to protect creative works and the people who create them”. Which is false, it exists, as stated in the US Constitution, to promote Arts and Sciences, period. Context is King, copyright is not here so that artist can make money, it is here to serve the public.
- – - – -
(5)
Copyright answers the following question:
How are we, as a people, suppose to promote the progress of Science and Arts?
The answer: Lets give an exclusive limited monopoly to authors and inventors.
For someone that prides himself for being “in the biz” you have no fucking clue how the rights the people gave you work, or even why the people decided to give them to you.
Greater and smarter men then you or I have also opposed copyright to an extent
Thomas Jefferson said:
“Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Louis Brandeis said:
“The general rule of law is, that noblest of human productions-knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions and ideas — become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”
- – - – -
(6)
Second, no, there isn’t any ethical difference. You don’t have a right to it. If you can’t get it, that sucks, I’m sorry you can’t enjoy whatever entertainment you like, but that doesn’t give you a right to take it anyway.
What right do the media corporations have to lock up content that should have been in the public domain years ago? Copyrights were supposed to be for a limited time, not life plus 70-90 years. Through their lobbying, they have stolen the public’s right to have access to older works. In many cases, they don’t even do anything with those works, they just sit in the corporate vaults rotting away because the company doesn’t see any value in releasing them.
How is that in any way ethical?
- – - – -
(7)
First, I was refering to the “I don’t want to wait three months or import it from somewhere else” argument, so I am not lying and it is possible to aquire the product.
Import it from somewhere else? Maybe for music, but how is that practical for video, when every DVD and Blu-Ray disc is hobbled with a region code to make sure that even if you buy a 100% legal copy from another country, you can’t play it? And don’t bother bringing up region-free players, because the average person wouldn’t know where to buy one. Hell, most average people don’t even know what a region code is, let alone how to bypass it.
Is it ethical behavior on the part of these companies to prevent people from doing something that is 100% legal, just because they want the luxury of deciding what products should be available to what countries and when?
- – - – -
Heh.
One thing I’d like to point out about copyright hardliners, they always turn the blame on YOU when you want to acquire something but it isn’t available in your area. “You’re not entitled to it,” they say. So when you live in usa you’re magically “entitled” to buy stuff, even if the guy who doesn’t live there is equally willing to pay for it? This isn’t a question of entitlement, you fuckwits. Big Media can handle simultaneous worldwide releases… so what the fuck is the holdup everywhere else?
I’ll leave you with one last item.
(8)
Gandhi once said something that has become a famous quote:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
I interpret the current situation as a definite shift to phase three. That mainstream existing MPs for the largest party in government pick up and fight for our ideas is a huge legitimizer. Our ideas are not out on the fringe, we were just a little bit ahead of time.
What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy – forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance – realized they were under a serious attack, and mounted every piece of defense they could muster. For the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle.
And it was… nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is “thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief”. And shove some poor artists in front of them to deliver the message. Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding.
So now we know what the enemy has, and that they have absolutely nothing in terms of intellectual capital to bring to the battle. They do, however, have their bedside connections with the current establishment. That’s the major threat to us at this point.
Monday, 29 June 2009
slave to the grind
It’s been a while (as usual), and I’ve come to bitch some more 
I’ve been playing some ROSE Online, a bit. Actually one of the private servers iirc, AruaROSE. I knew it was going to be a grindfest, but I thought I might dig something worthwhile out of it.
Guess I was wrong.
ROSE Online is apparently published by the same guys who gave us Ragnarok Online. Not the same developer I think, but it shares so many features. For one, every character starts in a newbie class (“Visitor”), and you select a class at level 10 (1 of 4), which branches off further into 2 classes (“2nd job”) at level 70. Which pretty much reflects the same growth in many other grindfest MMOs. Yawn.
So why did I play this thing? Honestly, I don’t have anything better to do at the moment. Re: online gaming, at least. I really seriously considered going back to MateriaMagica, but MUDding solo is kind of boring. Oh yeah, you can dual in AruaROSE, it’s got the devs’ official sanction, so that alleviated the boredom some. A little. Went for a fast-melee type + FS type combo. Works fairly well, although it’s coming quite close to Flyff territory at the moment, while offering less in the way of variety.
See, ROSE Online exhibits all the same braindead noncreative approaches all these generic grindfests display. The same superficial classes and arbitrary divisions, pathetic customisation, and mindless adherence to type. There’s very little need to even consult guides, since the game features so few stats and skills that with a little reading you can judge for yourself how to build a decent character.
Fucking lame.
The problem with so little stats and skills is that it results in exactly the kind of thinking that there must exist a build X that is “the best” for that class. Any deviation from it will result in a gimped character, gimped because there’s so few ways to play them that trying to be different will result in a substandard character. I don’t know why the hell designers are so scared to go beyond the bounds. Even upgrades like add a few pathetic stats to your items, hardly enough to support building differently.
Even playing on an accelerated rate server (6x experience I believe) the whole thing is already starting to feel more like a chore than a game, and this even under strict restrictions to play for only an hour a day (I’m trying not to burn out too fast here). Imagine how fast a college gamer on holiday will blow through this thing. Bet you guys will get bored out of your skulls in under a week.
Even the FS type is freaking lame, you get like 3 buffs, faster walk, + to-hit and + dmg. Second job adds like + crit rate and amps up the others. Meh. Flyff’s assists do this during their goddamn first job days and still have more buffs. Not to mention you don’t seem to regen in this game unless you sit down, which translates into FS types needing to hit the mp bottle pretty fast unless you’ve got an understanding partner who doesn’t rush stupidly into battle hoping you’ll save his ass all the time.
The game’s background story is as forgettable as any, although you do have a choice of which faction to join, where you can do faction-specific quests to obtain points which you can redeem for faction-specific items. This is good, but barely expanded on. The quests are also pretty typical fetchquest fare. I don’t get it; how hard would it be to code a random quest generator? It doesn’t have to be totally fucking random of course, but it shouldn’t be hard to code some parameters to follow. Look at MateriaMagica; the quests aren’t random, but the few website guides for it mention that the game has like over 2,000 quests in the roster. TWO FUCKING THOUSAND. Compared to, like, 30 quests at most in the average grindfest.
The game isn’t even particularly inspired presentation-wise. The music is forgettable, although there may be interesting tunes in later areas. I just couldn’t stand the mindless elevator music what passes for the first few area bgm. Graphically it pasts muster, but you all know I have a pretty low bar for that kind of thing anyway.
Don’t really know how long I intend to drag this thing out. As it is I’ve come close to just uninstalling it and walking away several times already. I had more fun with dualling in Flyff, crap exp rate aside.
Friday, 22 May 2009
dungeon diving
Reinstalled Avernum 3 recently, but got sidetracked after designing my party and playing for all of 10 minutes, heh. I love the Exile / Avernum series, one of the few shareware titles which I actually shelled out money for, but they’re somewhat of a heavy investment in time.
Oh, nothing’s stopping you from playing them in lunch-break 10-minute sized bites; their turn-based Ultima-like nature pretty much lends them to being played in chunks. But it’s hard to stop once you get rolling. You discover something, which reminds you of another thing, and before you know it you’ve got a chain of clues begging to be investigated. It’s pretty cool actually, especially if you’ve got the time to burn. Like say if you’re a college kid with no classes for the day.
As I was saying, I got sidetracked. It happened to be Sudeki‘s turn to be resurrected, I think I last hit it 3 years ago or so. The PC version. Originally it was StarForced (yuck), and the cracks unfortunately never got around to update for the patch (v1.0 to v1.1 of the game). Minor bugs actually, most of them being external controller issues – however, the main bug was the speeded up sound. Sound effects, music, and speech sound like they were done in chipmunk style. Extremely annoying, and a near-turnoff from playing the game. The game itself is pretty generic as stories go, and the dialog is bland, uninteresting, and the tale never really builds up. You just go here and there from one quest to another until whammo, endgame. The only saving grace is the combat gameplay, and it speaks volumes about gameplay that this single element alone is good enough to make you consider playing something that you’d normally avoid touching with a barge pole.
Unfortunately Sudeki also falls into the same equipment trap, i.e. little variety, and endgame weapons pretty much outshining everything else. Armor’s even worse; it doesn’t show up in your inventory, you just have what you wear at the moment – and at certain points in the story it’s upgraded for you. Can’t get any more hands-off than that. Actually most weapons are also given to you only after certain points in the game too.
I’d like to touch on equipment – specifically weapons and armor – for a bit. For far too long, in far too many games, we get very little variety, and what there is can usually be laid out in a linear progressive manner: crap wooden/stone stuff you start the game with, moving slowly up the scale through the usual suspects: iron, mithril, magical, then finally some ultimate weapon. Most weapons pretty much make previous weapons in the same category obsolete. That’s pretty fucking stupid. You don’t need a database of 10 swords to keep track of 10 swords if they’re all going to simply be upgraded versions of previous swords. All you need is a variable to hold ONE sword, and upgrade it’s stats to pretend you get a new sword when you find the next better one.
Seriously. I’m sick of the stupid linearity. Wood sword, stone sword, iron sword, gold sword, ultimate sword. Jesus. This kind of unimaginative crap probably sufficed back in the day of 8-bit console RPGs, where memory space on the game cartridges was at a premium. Nowadays computers have like fucking gigabytes of hard drive space - a simple excel-type list of 100 items doesn’t even fill a one-thousandth of this. Sure, graphics take space, but you don’t store the fucking item graphics in the same database.
It’s way past time RPGs used the equipment system pioneered by games like Diablo, where lower-tier items could have useful mods on them, like inflicting status effects, elemental damage, inflicting curses, etc etc. Even the Diablo games didn’t quite get it right, since they had mods like +1 hp. Christ… if you’re going to put mods on, at least make them have a noticeable effect, hey? In the game, you can eventually end up with 5-digit hp on your character, so a mod that changes that value by 0.01% is fucking useless.
Only one game does this right so far, from what I’ve seen: Fate. It’s a somewhat mindless dungeon crawler of a PC game, with a forgettable story. It’s quite like the first Diablo game: there’s a town, and there’s a dungeon underneath it. You delve into the deeps, kill stuff, and get better loot. The thing about Fate though is that items can sport multiple mods, unlike Diablo and most clones. These games usually have things like “prefix {item} of the suffix” – example: sly sword of blight (I’m making this up). The prefix “sly” would stand for something like +5 intelligence (usually a prefix has a range, so “sly” items may add anything from 1 to 5 points of int, not necessarily fixed). Ditto for the suffix. Some games get this wrong, and have fixed values for the affixes (so for example in those games, “sly” will always give 5 points of int).
However Fate treats mods as lists, not affixes. So instead of being confined to a “prefix-item-suffix” model, Fate goes like item-mod,mod,mod,mod… For clarity’s sake, you only see the base item name, e.g. “broadsword”. It’ll usually be coloured though, and the colour can be used to indicate mod quantity/quality (say, white for basic items, yellow for items with 1-2 mods, green for items with 3-4 mods, purple for items with 1-2 very high level mods, etc). And you simply mouseover the item to see a popup of the mods on it, like in most games.
Not only does Fate break out of the 2-affix mould, the game’s mods are also actually useful. No measly +1 hp modifiers here. Fixed modifiers are pretty limited anyway, 100hp might seem a lot to a starting character whereas a seasoned end-game one might not even blink at being hit for that much damage. Yep, you guessed it, Fate sports mods with percentage differences. Like +25% life drain. No lame pussy +1 damage mods in this badass game.
This immediately ups the enjoyment factor by a lot. Suddenly everything can be useful. Of course, the trick is NOT to drop so much stuff – that only results in a Monty Haul situation – oldschool RPGers might recognise this term, referring to players who get jaded because they keep finding so many good items. No, the trick is to drop quality stuff. It shouldn’t be like in, say, Titan Quest, where the vast majority of drops are immediately throwaway material, and the player quickly learns to only scrutinize special drops (yellow-name quality or better), while everything else either gets left on the ground or sold in town.
Fate‘s dungeons aren’t particularly large, so you don’t really get too much mileage out of it – even though the game is an enjoyable romp. Still, it’s quite sad that a pretty-much unknown game in the huge RPG genre seems to be the only one which does equipment right. I’m goddamned tired of seeing RPGs with only like a selection of 5 weapons that don’t suck, and $5 says that 4 out of 5 best weapons will – naturally – be swords. What is it with swords anyway? Polearms are fucking cool weapons too. Hell, daggers ought to feature more prominently as well, seeing as how lots of fantasy stories usually have the bad guy sporting a wicked dagger. Bows are almost universally neglected too, and blunt weapons almost always get the shaft for being stuck with the “slow, heavy” stereotype. You almost always find powerful swords that deal as much damage as the supposedly stronger mace-types, and naturally they’re “better” for the player since swords have a faster aspd (attack speed), which naturally results in a higher dps. And speaking of dps, I find that catch-all term too simplistic. Especially because it puts too much fucking emphasis on plain old damage, as if modifiers like stun don’t mean anything. Oh, they don’t, in most crap games, which is why relying on dps isn’t too bad most of the time. Still, even plain damage doesn’t take into account stuff like hit rates – it doesn’t matter if you can deal over 9,000 damage at 5 strikes a second if your hit rate is like 0.01%.
I just bailed out of re-playing Freelancer too, but that’s another rant. I think I’m actually going to be playing Avernum 3 for a while – a pretty damning testimony to the crap state of games nowadays that I’d avoid most of the junk out there in favour of a years-old shareware game. Heh. Well, like Sudeki showed, gameplay is important. I fucking hate games that keep pushing the graphics envelope. Oh please. A shiny turd is still a turd. Movies are in fucking HD nowadays too but it hasn’t made me want to watch them more.
Sunday, 5 April 2009
Jinkou Shoujo 3
…or, in other words, Artificial Girl 3. Yep, just picked up this little gem from Illusion recently, with all three expansions. Showed it to one of my friends, who was, naturally, skeptical – “Where’s the story? Where’s the action? What’s the point?”. Naturally, she misses the point entirely. Like their earlier offering, RapeLay, there’s no concrete goals per se, except what you set up for yourself.
It’s like a sim, only it’s an adult one. I mean, hey – take a look at your average popular mindless FPS game. Shooters, despite their long and torturous roots, still consist of the same tired AI – bots who basically bum-rush you. What’s the difference between the latest shiny 3,000 polygon alien and the ultra-simplistic single-texture enemies of Wolfenstein 3D? They both come charging at you in a fucking straight line. Now, bear in mind that these games are virtually generations apart (and that’s not considering the hardware they run on, either), surely we can programme better enemies than that?
Where are the monsters who split up and flank you? Break down walls, take advantage of terrain, attempt to get through your blind spots? But no, decades later and we still have enemy AI that charges down that hallway to get at you, nevermind the fact that you’ll rip them to shreds.
Obligatory dig against mindless FPSes done, let’s take a look at AG3. What can I say? It’s gorgeous. Sure, it’s nothing like real porn – but unlike porn, which is static (unless you count in those sad camwhore encounters), games like these are interactive. That’s the whole point. None of the stupid online chat crap either. This is custom-tailored you-in-the-driver-seat kind of porn.
AG3 is basically a sandbox which consists of two parts; a 3D dream girl designer, and then the actual gameplay module. In the design module, you get to create and edit girls as well as the clothes that they wear. Character creation is so detailed it evokes memories of the first time you came across Oblivion‘s character editor:
The character editor in action
You’d think that MMOs, being home to thousands of players, would have this kind of customization as standard already. 5-choice templates are so damn 1990, yet look at all those loser Korean MMOs. All of them have absolutely shit options, resulting in you creating a character who immediately looks like a clone of 20% of the population. It’s not like they even have to store the goddamn 3D data on the server – all they need is the data you used in your design, i.e. the options you selected – like, I don’t know, “eyes option N, height X, iris colour Y” etc. Because it’s not the server’s fucking job to render it, it’s your client computer which bears that particular load. I mean, goddamn. This is so trivial. Programming common sense 101. It’s up to the players whether they want to render everything at max detail, or lower the quality so that even piece of shit computers can run at an acceptable pace. The server doesn’t need to care about this shit.
I still don’t get why the fucking gooks still churn out crap MMOs which are cookie-cutter stat build grindfests. Just look at them: 95% of them will have something like 4 stats total ever, being the generic “strength, intelligence, vitality, dexterity” kind of crap which has come down to us through the ages from the Stone Ages of 8-bit console RPGs. FOR FUCK’S SAKE! We have the computing power now; we should be playing characters with more detail than that.
After all, this is all mere looks, and aren’t these developers all concerned about looks primarily? Aren’t they still producing the same shit games year after year, the only difference being how much more shinier the newer versions look? Name me a new MMO, anything recently released, and I am willing to bet money there’s an older game which has similar features, if not more of them. Fuck, most of these korean knockoffs don’t even have proper social controls, which chat programs have already taken for granted since the fucking 1990s, like /ignore.
Ah, screw it. I don’t really want to write a full review of AG3. After all, as I said, it’s more of a sandbox thing. Of course, if the girls just wander around randomly in it, there’d be no point. This is where Illusion’s perverted genius kicks in. When you design a girl, you can set their personalities and traits – refer to the editor picture above, see the last two tabs there? Now, when you create a world, you get to load from 1 to a maximum of 5 girls in it. Depending on their personalities, moods, and current stats versus you (there’s settings for friendship, love, and jealousy, while the other settings have to do with their needs such as sleep requirement, hunger, bath, pee, etc), they’ll actually interact live, ON THE FLY.
No joke. Walk in on a timid girl in the bath, and she’ll probably scream and run out, and her friendship rating to you may drop. Interrupt a tomboy type while she’s masturbating, and she may yell at you. Or even hang back, and watch as the girls interact with each other, not just react to your actions.
This, my friends, is what AI is supposed to be about. If those stupid shooting games had any AI, you can be sure magazines and websites all over the world would be boasting of the game which did that far and wide. But do we hear of such things? No. All we ever hear of those fucking games are how many more polygons it renders per frame compared to it’s competitors/predecessors, or how many more special effects it can abuse. FUCKING SPECIAL EFFECTS!. Special effects, my friends, is what Hollywood throws to the masses to distract them from the fact that the movie you are currently watching is pure recycled shit. They have absolutely nothing to do with how smart the AI in those games are, or how good the actual gameplay is.
Let’s not forget multiplayer. It’s an even bigger con job. You know why programmers love multiplayer? Because other players provide free AI! They don’t even have to go to the hassle of pretending to code an AI which will, inevitably, be dismissed by the stereotypical online FPS gamer (invariably a 12-year old) as shit – and sadly, they’re usually right. That’s also why I’m not a large fan of multiplayer. The developer has exactly nothing to invest in developing a multiplayer AI (because it doesn’t fucking exist; other players automatically bring it with them). All they need to do is throw up a random level, make sure it doesn’t suck too much like too easy camping or some such shit, let players in, then sit back and relax while the money rolls in. Pffft.
Jun-chan, I love you!
Take a look at that sweat-shiny skin! Don’t mind the yellow text in the upper left, that’s just the subtitle mod in action. Of course it isn’t perfect, but AG3 kicks the hell out of lame western porn “games”. Eat your heart out, Leisure Suit Larry!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some virtual sisters to… attend to (yes, you can even designate the girls’ initial relationship towards you, whether they are your siblings, friends, or not). After all, that Brother of the Year Award isn’t going to win itself.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Kareshi Kanojou no Jijou
Just finished wading through this story (“His and her circumstances”).
At 101+ chapters, I’d say Kare Kano was pretty decent (I like long stories). I’ve read quite a few longer stories that have a similar theme though (high school romances). Like Hanazakari no Kimi tachi e (“HanaKimi” @ “For you in full blossom”) and Suzuka. HanaKimi‘s around 150 chapters more or less, and I think Suzuka‘s pretty hefty at 300+ (I hope I’m not confusing it with a different story, haha).
HanaKimi maintains a consistent pace throughout, and I guess this is what leant it to easily get more than one live action series written for it (I haven’t watched any of them, I’m more of a reader). I remember being vaguely disappointed in the ending though. To be fair, it did have the advantage of being able to pretty much endlessly draw on the main premise of “gender bendering” and use it to spice up even bland, regular school life happenings.
Suzuka had no such advantage, and it was a pretty much centered on the main couple. I remember slogging through it – not that it was difficult to read, I guess I was just annoyed at how insecure the guy was and how the girl kept alternating between hot and cold. Ending was ok; I mean, at 300+ chapters the dragginess pretty much meant you could see it coming from miles away (although there were a couple of close calls with plot twists towards the end). I guess this is one of those stories you read for the atmosphere, and not the story – it was mostly predictable, and since it had so many chapters I have no doubt that those of you who read lots of manga will have noticed more than a few familiar high school life plot devices (a jealous rival, vacation outing, etc).
Back to Kare Kano…
I still don’t feel particularly interested in watching the anime now that I’ve finished reading the manga. Especially since it doesn’t look like the anime’s going to get any more episodes. Also, I don’t quite see the slower/darker tone of the latter part of Kare Kano working in anime format. It’s no School Days, but the pace isn’t quite like the first half of Kare Kano.
I’m sure people who watched the anime and then read the manga felt differently about the later chapters too. It’s unfortunate the anime ended where it was, but I really don’t see how they’re gonna cram the second half of the manga into another season of anime unless they really want to butcher Soichiro’s past and how he comes to grips with it. It’ll be like trying to write a 2-hour movie “continuation” of a 26-episode show.
Oh well. It was a good read. I suppose many people would enjoy the neat wrapping up at the end, especially since this is one of those stories which have a “xxx years later peek into the future” thing, although personally I don’t believe that all stories should get this treatment. I mean, I guess it’s nice to know what happens to everyone, but then it’s basically setting their lives in stone. It’s like, that’s it, the end, close the book, move on… and never turn back.
Sometimes it’s nice to have a not-so-finalized ending, you know what I mean? Like for example, endings which resolve the plot threads (at least most of the important ones), and then stop at a convenient point, like say the high school graduation. So after that it’s up to the readers to fantasize for themselves how the characters might do in college, or later in life. It gives the readers a chance to exercise their imaginations a bit. You’d move on, since the story has “officially” ended… but every once in a while you can dream about the characters and wonder where they’d go on after the end of the story. There’s happiness in being able to do that too, as opposed to endings set in stone.
I guess I’m just rambling at this point… :p
- – - – -
Not much on the musical front. Did I mention we agreed to silently drop the “Club” from out band name? Oh, it’s still the t3mdc, but formally we don’t mention the last word. A “club” kinda sounds like just any random person can join, doesn’t it? On the other hand, the Tokyo-3 Middle Daughters sounds more… exclusive :p
We’ve been covering some Stratovarius songs; actually just the few instrumental ones they have, as well as some of the more interesting guitar/keyboard neo-classical dual solos. As cheesy as the tag “power” or “symphonic” metal sounds, it takes real skill to play the better passages. I mean, the good ones. Not those random “wall of notes” riffs from the lower-tier metal bands — who are, perhaps, largely responsible for the perception that speed metal is “just random fast strumming with little skill”. Feh.
Monday, 23 February 2009
hier kommt alex
My German isn’t that good, plus we don’t normally do punk rock, but whatever. Also, we couldn’t find a male vocalist plus this isn’t the sort of thing vocaloids do well, so we had to wing it. Pretty hilarious if I do say so myself.
In a world where the point of living
Is to go roboting all your life
The only excitement that is given
Comes from the tv’s lies.
Like in a clockwork, every word
Is programmed, computerlike
The only protest that is ever heard
Is when the youths come strike.
When in the sky the sun has sunk
The day starts for the droogs
They assemble and go out to hunt
Marching in small groups.
Hey! Here comes Alex
Curtains up – for his horrorshow
Hey! Here comes Alex
Curtains up – for a little horrorshow
Crusading against society
And an establishment out of line
Their religion is brutality
And violence is divine.
Satisfaction is only down the path
Of making victims hurt
Nothing stops their endless wrath
Nothing on this earth.
Hey! Here comes Alex
Curtains up – for his horrorshow
Hey! Here comes Alex
Curtains up – for a little horrorshow
Twenty versus one
Until blood is spilt their way
Perhaps by stick or else by stone
Every head must burst some day.
The next victim is already slain
While you’re still calling out
Were our prayers all in vain
To turn this earth around?
Hey! Here comes Alex
Curtains up – for his horrorshow
Hey! Here comes Alex
Curtains up – for a little horrorshow
As usual, you can listen to the original song on YouTube, here. Shinju was wearing ice gray cat eye contacts, and for some reason it was turning me on something fierce. Also, I wished she’d stop licking her lips like that.
On a totally unrelated note 115.133.x.x totally fucken’ blows, and TMnut should just go die. Here I am perched in a 3-storey high treetop on wifi @ 60.54.x.x and pulling 3 pages a minute from mangafox – it’s not that I read slow, it’s that I’m loading, reading, and saving each page as I go – whereas on 115.133.x.x line I’ll be doing something like 1 page per 10 minutes. Wtf. Oh sure, the pages themselves load fast enough, but the picture redirect takes goddamn forever. What is the fucking problem?
I mean, shit, it can only BE an ISP problem when you consistently have trouble with certain IP ranges and none when you use others. It should be pretty goddamn obvious by now to anyone who uses their service. Problem is they’re pretty much the only game in town, not to mention all the smaller ISPs need to go through them anyway seeing as how they are the ex-national carrier now turned private (semi govt).
…what am I doing in a tree? Good question. Let’s say I like various climbing activities, and coupled with some obscure martial arts and meditational philosophy crap, I have weird hobbies. No, I don’t usually bring my laptop along. Now excuse me, my left foot is starting to fall asleep.
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
defective by design
Got into a bit of an argument today regarding everyone’s favourite loved/hated software giant, Microsoft. I was just bitching about IE’s broken downloads, where it will happily truncate a file partway and say it’s done, despite knowing it’s not, and if you delete the broken file and redownload it to the same filename/location, it’ll immediately give you a copy of the broken file again (unless you purged IE’s cache before the retry).
Anyway, this dude started on a generic “M$ sux” rant, which I found to be naive and, frankly, stupid. He talked about broken code, to which I pointed out it’s peoples’ fault if by now – nearly 2010 – they want to rely on automated tools that are known not to produce elegant code (to put it mildly) and call themselves programmers. If people are stupid how is that some company’s fault for taking advantage of the fact? It’s not even exactly a con job: people who use drag-and-drop stuff don’t want to worry about the goddamn programming, they want to push out something that works. And if your oh-so-much-better open source community isn’t exactly pushing it’s own tools then why complain?
It’s not like people haven’t already heard the tired refrain “big corps are greedy”, yeah yeah. They’re in there to make money. And if it wasn’t MS at the top of the heap, it’d be another company. And if MS were really crap, do you think they’d still be in fucking business? Don’t give me that shit about market share and junk either – there are plenty of has-been large monopolies in many other industries, who all but dominated their markets, but were then dethroned and faded into obscurity. MS is still around after all these years, obviously they’ve been doing some things right, despite the uninformed opinions of couch potatoes everywhere.
It’s not like I’m a huge fan of MS. Hardly. I use what works. I’m a mercenary, I admit it. If I could find a free replacement for what I’m currently pirating, I’d switch in a heartbeat. Provided, of course, it at least works just as well or suits me better. That’s the fucking problem with these open source lunatics, half the battle getting any open source project to run is just… getting it to fucking run. Do you need to tell some windows user that xyz library is out of date, or requires some recompile, or fuck around with the makefile? Say it with me, Fuck No.
Windows runs on all kinds of junk, and the numerous errors you get from it can usually be attributed to fucked third-party drivers. It’s not like the ‘nixes have a stellar record here either. Go to some download repository, and check out a random download. Chances are you’ll a see a single windows binary downloadable (maybe an additional one for 64bit windows), whereas for the ‘nixes you’ll be confronted by a staggering array of choices. Hell, not until this decade, back in windows everything had like one major version number, version x, or version y, or z, or whatever. On the other hand, linux stuff has always been shit like version x.x1.x2, and god help you if one of the digits don’t match. I mean, just look at the fucking manuals for Sendmail. There are books written for it that deal with specific three-digit versions. Ha.
That’s it. He doesn’t even have specifics, nothing beyond bad code (usually cobbled from automated codewriting programs), and even then how is MS responsible for peoples’ lousy coding practises? If you had half a fucking brain nowadays, you’d go online and search FAQs and forums on how to do something like programming. Books just don’t cut it, unless they’re about the fundamentals. Of course the stores will be “full of crap books” like he says, those authors don’t write them just for shits and giggles, duh – they write to make money. And if people will just buy any old thing, then wa-la, who fucking cares what you write about? Hell, I’d love to have been the author of a random “XYZ for Dummies”, those fucking sell. I bet YOU’d write any old shit book too if people were to pay you for it. So of course bookstores are gonna carry them. Why the fuck don’t people write books for open source titles then? (There are a few afaik, but obviously not enough.) The main reason would probably be that most open source junkies would rather just go online, from the source so to speak, rather than buy an actual book. It helps that most of them are penniless students too. And I see plenty of .edu sources from ebook torrents. So yeah. Not that books are bad, per se, it’s just that it’s easier to just look online. Fuck, it’s free, too. How the fuck would you beat that? So, obviously, unless you have a huge product with a large market share, writing books wouldn’t exactly be the best thing to do. Someone could just throw together a FAQ or something. Or you could just trawl some forums. That’s how I pick up stuff, and why not? So dissing bookstores for carrying “crap” is stupid, to put it bluntly.
It’s not that I particularly care about his opinion on this topic, but it’s a particularly moronic position to take. I don’t “like” Microsoft, but I don’t particularly dislike it either. I use what works, and if it happens to be MS stuff, then what the heck. YOU try selling your boss on the merits of open source – yeah right, when he discovers that it’s a new learning curve on each different project he’ll drop it so fast your head will spin. Open source is free, yeah, but you get what you pay for, especially in terms of support. Try getting an answer Right Fucking Now when your boss is breathing down your neck asking what the problem is.
I’d be surprised if 10% of college students who graduate end up using any flavour of ‘nix as their main deployment at work. You’d be surprised (…or maybe not) at how fast their tunes change when they turn into 9-to-5 wage slaves and they need to get actual work done, instead of having all day to fuck around with the computer.
Then too, I’m a gamer, and so I won’t be using ‘nix any time soon. My bro’s got a bunch of ‘nix machines up anyway, I could always use those if I needed to do something. I’ve been saying this for years. But you know what, I don’t. People write open source for windows as well.
We’re not kids anymore, who have the time to waste on a new reinstall every other fucking day. I want to get home and fire up the machines and play something, not fuck around scrabbling for the latest version driver of whatever. Until the ‘nixes can play all the games I want to, forget it. Shit, it’s not like you guys didn’t have the time to prepare. DOS emulators aren’t new, and the windows architecture has been around for decades. Yet virtual machines are still fucking basic pieces of crap with rudimentary video and sound support. Pfft. DirectX is already sitting on the OS, can’t you treat the VM as an app which uses the DX services you need? Yeah I know it’s not that cut and dried, but you could fork the code – a VM that is totally isolated from the host machine, and a games-oriented VM that takes shortcuts or something, for performance’s sake. Function over form, not form over function.
Blah. Need to go brush up on my Judy and Mary.
Thursday, 5 February 2009
a cascade of memories
I might’ve mentioned mangafox.com in my previous post. Found quite a few of my previously unfinished reads there. Looks like I’ll be stuck there for quite some time, there’s so much to read xD
Think about it… volumes and volumes of manga… whee. This merits another xD.
xD
Alright.
Anyway, not much news on the t3mdc front. Having some trouble arranging sections for our Laharl-sama no Sanbika attempt. It’s always a matter of timing. There’s only 5 of us, and we can only play one instrument at a time – keyboard programming notwithstanding – so playing this particular piece live isn’t gonna be an option.
Meh, I couldn’t find it on YouTube to show you guys either – at least, all I got from the search results were bastardized AMVs or, ugh, other people singing it. Honestly, I say my band is pretty damn good, but even then I don’t care to put us on YouTube. Not that the others would agree anyway. You’d have to reply to other people and get tied up dealing with all kinds of crap, bah, waste of time. Hm, I suppose I could simply disable commenting. Haha. Nothing like a concrete wall to stop all those faster-than-thought comments. (I say “faster than thought” since, quite obviously, many people post comments there without using their brains. Have you read the average YouTube user comment? Sigh.)
Anyway, just search “laharl sanbika” on YouTube, and try to ignore the ones which have other people singing. You’ll probably end up looking at one that’s being used for some anime video thingy, just ignore the pictures and listen to the song. It’s a pretty nice song. Funny, too.
Trucidation’s been pretty quiet lately. Said he was writing something though, maybe I can pester him enough to put it up somewhere.
Right.
Going back to reading more manga. Oh yeah, I finished reading Aishiteruze Baby after all these years. So SAD. T_T. Well okay, what kind of ending was I expecting anyway? It seemed a little, I dunno, abrupt. Not gonna spoil it for you, if you guy wanna find out feel free to head over to mangafox. It’s only 33 chapters.
Using too much distortion on the electric violin kinda makes it sound like an electric guitar. So please, Jun-chan, let’s go back to practising the classics, ne? Speed metal guitar, flamenco style. Oh hells yeah! The operative word for next weekend’s outing is twintails.
xD
