Genesis

So, here it is. – Credit for whoever the guy I linked is.

There are already a lot of blogs that are talking about this. I just want to say that you shouldn’t buy one. You don’t need one. Phones are great, they serve a practical purpose by increasing the ability of people to communicate. This is a computer that serves all the purposes a computer already serves. You don’t need something to do what you already can do if you have a computer. It’s shiny, but it’s ultimately a piece of worthless crap. That I’m sure the Apple fanbase will put forward as some giant leap forward in technology will simply make it worse. It’s a tablet minus a keyboard. That’s not a leap. That’s a groan at best. We already tablets. They’re called tablet PCs. Enjoy spending your money on something worthwhile. Spend that $500 to pay off some small amount of debt surely accumulated elsewhere. Take a nap on the cash. Jump into a non-deep pool like Scrooge McDuck might. But please, please don’t spend it on this.

Demon’s Souls is a game by From Software, published by Atlus in the US. The game itself is somewhat anomalous, as no one really expected the game to be released in the United States and it was at least a little unexpected when Atlus decided to pick it up. The game would meet critical acclaim the likes of which few RPGs have seen before. None of this is particularly interesting or new to the gaming community at this point. What is interesting however is any individual playthrough of the game. There’s a remarkable ease with which the game feeds the player. You move through each level and attempt to be ever more undaunted by the inexplicably daunting task put before you.
Read the rest of this entry »

As much as I would like to continue working on the Magna Carta project, some problems have come up. I’m currently jobless and about to graduate college. So obviously there are bigger things at stake in my life right now. I will try to keep everyone updated but right now there are bigger matters I must attend to. I hope you will forgive my silence for so long, but my job search has not exactly been going well in our current economy. I hate to ask for your patience as I have done so many times in the past, but I’m afraid I must. That said, I will continue working on it as time allows.

Well, sorry that there’s not much to report at the moment. I haven’t had much time to work on the translation as work continues to stack up as finals approach. A couple twenty page reports coming down the tube that need to all be finished within a fairly short time frame of each other.

As Edward R. Murrows says, Good Night, and Good Luck.

Worked on about 20 files today for the Magna Carta project. This leaves the total needing to be worked on at about 230.

I’ve made some small progress in the Magna Carta project, I recently finished edits on about 50-60 text files, with about 250 left. Again, it will be done when it’s done, but mid-terms are currently driving me into a tizzy.

I’ve been playing The Last Remnant and it’s just… awful. I really want there to be something redeeming about this, but there’s just not. The combat is boring and indecisive (when you actually get to partake) and while it certainly looks pretty, there’s not really a whole lot of gameplay to be had. There’s also the problem of one mistake possibly costing you your life, which is good and bad, but since the general idea is almost to try and not do too much (keeping your battle rank down to avoid enemies from crushing you) it seems really limiting. The load times are also really bad, especially since there’s a load time for just about anything, battles, scenes, even going into the menu can be slow at times (I’m playing on PC). The story’s pretty standard “damsel in distress” stuff, the characters aren’t all that interesting other than the main one being irritably cheerful. I kind of want to choke him just hoping that he gets the idea that there’s something outside his little world. Then again, everyone seems to be twenty years old or younger and it’s one extreme or another for most of them. I like Torgal in that he seems to be somewhat level-headed, but the rest of them just seem over eager. I actually fell asleep because the game’s that slow. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen asleep to a videogame due to its pacing so… that’s a first. I want to play more to see if it’s really that bad or if I’m just missing something. The game just seems lacking in every way.

I’ve never been able to get past the first episode of Higurashi, I got way too bored. Then again, I don’t really watch horror films or even sub-horror films because I find them boring.

Just about all anime is based on light novels, my point was more that following the manga is stupid (as most directors of anime don’t) but on the other hand, people are also stupid, so it’s easy to figure that parallel stupidity probably results in money. It certainly worked for World of Warcraft (and every other MMO I guess).

I haven’t seen the new Kara no Kyoukai movie. Personally I’m waiting on Eden of the East and Canaan eagerly. I’ve also started watching Tears to Tiara, which I could either take or leave. It’s really just another typical fantasy romp, but the characters do some funny stuff and it’s light so I don’t have too many complaints. The animation is average and the fights aren’t bad (aren’t great either), so I would say if you’re a fan of fantasy or bad harem anime it might be enjoyable. I dropped Aoi Hana for unfortunately being far more boring than YKK even though I adore its animation style. Just another show killed by horrible pacing I guess.

Aoi Hana reminds me a lot of YKK though the characters have more character. This is sort of unfortunate because one of the main characters is likable and has a good deal of energy while the other is sort of the polar opposite. I might have more to say but I’ve only watched the first episode so far.

I’m really liking Bakemonogatari, though it reminds me quite a bit of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei in terms of art style, direction and jokes. This is not necessarily a bad thing since it doesn’t seem to be reaching nearly as much as SZS for jokes. The show seems more fluid and natural and I suspect that has something to do with the characters having focused personalities and reasons for interacting with each other.

If you will notice, quite a few animes use light poles as a sort of transitional effect for moving between one scene or another. This is a directorial choice in the same sense that shots in a movie are often filmed as panoramas when transitioning from one day to the next or one scene to the next. They are essentially presenting the cityscape. Some that do this include Canaan, Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Lain and more. This apparently was not started by NGE but more is a functional equivalent of camera downtime, somewhat similar to how a sweeping shot is used between cuts in your average movie.

I’ve been a gamer for decades now and I must say that few games really get me interested anymore. It’s because of a variety of things, but I somehow feel that primarily what is missing from games is the sort of childish soul that many games have lost in the new move towards what I like to call “nitty gritty” realism and has since been replaced with something that feels objectively shallow. It’s like somehow game creators have lost sight of what makes games interesting, which essentially comes along with the next point, challenge and perspective. I think for any game to really be good as a game it has to be challenging and there has to be a point where it gives you perspective about your challenge. Even when playing an old shooter, the more you played it the more you tended to think in this sort of whir of bullets (and it gave you perspective about your reactions and judgment). The problem to me then is that the whir that games once had has been replaced by a sort of silent roar, where problems tend to simply leap upon you and there’s much less build-up in games than there has really ever been (assuming a discussion of progressive rather than emergent gameplay). I would say games like Fallout 3 or the recent Final Fantasies are fairly indicative of this. One might argue that these games are purely build-up and that the ultimate goal is a culmination of all your actions in these games, but it’s not that you don’t establish a link with that character or with that story or even with that strategy (if it’s a top-down shooter or an RTS maybe), it’s that the link doesn’t seem as real because the obstacles feel paper thin. I think games need to be challenging in order to be enjoyable.

This is more of a personal thought, but this applies to old as well as new games. The entire good and evil divide has become a bit of a tired idea (or rather, was a tired idea from the start), yet it seems to be the idea that games are enthralled with almost preeminently. Essentially the entire idea of good and evil tends to create what I would term a non-solution, in that winning involves the failure of someone else. Yet we know that there are many games that can easily make this process or idea fuzzy. Victory in general is a fuzzy idea, as MMOs so generously show us with their “neverending” war scenarios. If stories are to progress further than they have in the past, starting someplace other than a battlefield might be a good way to go. At least, establishing motivation might be more understandable if we could get a character that actually responds to their past in some sense, instead of seemingly coming out of their situation with no real physical or emotional reaction at all.