Eras, ending and so on.

Posted on August 16, 2008 by baudattitude

I can blame a lot of things on my anime habit.

For example, when I was first introduced to anime back in 1990 or so, I had a 13″ Thomson monitor, with a composite input, that I had a Sega Genesis hooked up to, and I had the audio out from the Genesis going through an all-in-one record player / dual cassette deck / AM/FM tuner unit.  I also had a CD player.  That was the extent of my home entertainment center.

I was content.

Then came the start of the anime habit, and I realized very quickly that borrowing or renting VCRs was just not going to cut it.  Also, I got some VERY odd looks at work when I’d use the TV/VCR in the break area.

So I bought my first VCR in the summer of 1991.  It was somewhere around $250 for a mono 4-head Samsung VCR, and it had problems playing back certain brands of tape, but damnit, it was mine and I could now watch anime in the privacy of my own home.

Of course, once I had a VCR, I started accumulating videotapes.

Then, a year or so later – after banks had been foolish enough to issue me credit cards – I bought a laserdisc player, and I started collecting laserdiscs.  This wasn’t the best idea ever, really, but they were the best thing going at the time.

The problems with having a whole lot of videotapes and LDs around are many.  They’re bulky.  They’re prone to degradation, they’re sensitive to heat and – for videotapes – magnetic fields, and it’s kind of annoying to have to keep players around for them.

So, several years ago, I set myself a goal of getting everything converted to, or replaced with, digital versions.

The majority of the tapes and LDs had been reissued in DVD format.  Those weren’t too bad.  Expensive, sure, but not too hard to replace.

The remaining analog media presented a bit of a problem.  Even getting as much as I could on DVD, I still had over 200 tapes and LDs that I couldn’t easily replace.

I bought an Adaptec VideOH! capture board, and very quickly learned some of the hassles of video capturing and format conversion and transcoding and compression and blah blah blah and on and on.

Honestly, it’s been a pain in the arse, and I’ve put it aside on several occasions because it’s been such a huge project to get through.

I finished converting the laserdiscs last August, but the tapes were just not getting done, so a few months ago, I decided I needed a way to set myself a deadline.

I get cold very easily, so I took all the remaining videotapes and stacked them up on the heater in the computer room.

Then I taped the heater control in the “off” position so I couldn’t accidentally turn it on.

And I shivered a whole bunch in the first few months of the year.

But, it did the trick.  Faced with an impending return to Fall weather, I finally managed to get myself back on task, and today I encoded the last bloody tape to MPEG-2 format and the last batch of MPEG-2 to divx conversions is running as I type this.

I am DONE.

Life is good.

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At last, the lava level.

Posted on August 12, 2008 by baudattitude

When I haven’t been sucked into Everquest, I’ve been playing a GBA platformer I brought back on my last trip to Japan. The game, “Densetsu no Stafi 3”, is part of what I’m told is a very popular series in Japan, but one which hasn’t yet been localized for whatever reason.

It does have an awful lot of text for a platformer, which might be part of it.

Anyway, I’m not done with it, I’ll talk more about the game proper once I finish it.

I don’t know how soon that will be, to be honest. Right around the time I was working through World 5, I was thinking to myself that the game wouldn’t end until – since I’d already played through an ice level and a jungle level – at least until I hit the lava level.

World six was, by the way, the lava level.

So now I’m on world 7, lava level behind me, and feeling like the game COULD end at any moment.

But, I’m betting it stretches to an 8th level. I will go one step further and say that I will fight the guy who I THINK is the ultimate enemy in world 8-4, and then fight the REAL ultimate enemy in world 8-5.

I’ll let you all know how that turns out.

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A Tale of Swords and Souls and Pleated Skirts

Posted on August 3, 2008 by baudattitude

I confess, I have in the past looked at “Create your own character” options in fighting games as, well, fluff.

I’d rather choose a fighting game based on its having strong characters created by, well, professional artists.

I have to choose fighting games based on their characters because, being crap at them, it’s not like I can choose a fighting game based on depth or strategy or anything like that.

At this point I will admit to owning Dead or Alive 1, 2, 3, 4 and both volleyball games.

So I appear to equate “strong characters” with huge jubblies.

But basically I like a fighting game where I can mash buttons and watch my onscreen avatar get beat around until the CPU relents and lets me win a match.

Anyway, back to character creation options, and specifically Soul Calibur IV, which I purchased yesterday after a friend brought over his copy to show me.

I bought the “It’s got Yoda in it!” version, because I didn’t see any real advantage to either and most of my friends have 360s and very few of them have PS3s.

Also I bought the deluxe version in the tin and, uh, the strategy guide. So, even with Game Crazy’s “20% off the strategy guide!” thing, I still dropped $104 on this game.

But.

I can make a custom character that looks like this.

And after I have created a pink-haired glasses-wearing pleated-skirted fighter, I can face her off against a goth-loli dojikko.

And somehow, it all seems worth it.

On a less “creepy guy drooling over virtual women” note, this game also features my favorite Soul Calibur character of all time, that being Lizardman.

Yes, I actually DO occasionally like characters who don’t feature huge jubblies. Lizardman’s cool, OK?

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

Ben & Jerry’s Needs To Fire A Marketing Guy

Posted on July 31, 2008 by baudattitude

I’m not usually an ice cream snob; I like cookies & cream and mint chocolate chip, and I like pumpkin ice cream when I can get it, which is unfortunately only a couple months of the year. All of these flavors are available in quite inexpensive versions from Dreyer’s and the like. I don’t ever feel the urge to explore the less… pedestrian brands, which are sold in smaller tubs with higher price tags. Cheap has been good enough for me up until now.

But, I was in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago and noticed that Ben & Jerry’s has a “Crème brûlée” ice cream.

This I had to try, and upon trying it, it was very good, and well worth the premium cost.

If you like, you know, custard and caramelized sugar, it is way yummy.

The little tub of Crème brûlée ice cream lasted me about a week, and when I went back to the grocery store today, I found myself drawn once again to the once-forbidden premium ice creams.

I was shuffling through the mixed-up tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, with every intention of purchasing another one, when I ran across a flavor, the contents of which I do not know because they are not important.

What was important was the name.

It was called “Chubby Hubby.”

It made me stop, and think a second, and say to myself, “On second thought, I really don’t NEED to buy another tub of Crème brûlée ice cream. Maybe I’ll just take my other groceries and be on my way.”

So, whatever marketing genius came up with “Chubby Hubby”, my waistline thanks you for the reminder that, if I want to maintain my weight in the “healthy” category, NOT buying your products would be a good thing to do.

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Ontamarama

Posted on July 25, 2008 by baudattitude

Amazon’s wish list feature is an awfully handy thing.

I don’t really use it for its intended purpose, though – I’m not pimping it around to friends and relatives as a “gosh, if you ever needed a gift idea”.

What I mostly use it for, instead, is watching stuff that I’d like to buy but don’t really want to pay full price for – I don’t pretend to understand how Amazon’s pricing and inventory work, but they DO have a tendency to occasionally discount something heavily for a day or two and then put it back up to full price.

One of the things on my wish list was a DS game called Ontamarama, which I’d seen in the stores last fall and filed under the “music based puzzle game with cute characters; I will probably like it” category.

But it WAS thirty bucks, and for some reason it didn’t seem like a $30 game.

It stayed at full price for several months, and then for some reason Amazon priced it down to $10.04. I saw that as a sign.

Not, you know, a really IMPRESSIVE sign. We’re not talking meteor showers, ethereal voices telling me to take my family to high ground, burning bush kinds of signs. Just, you know, a sign that I should probably buy the dang thing so I could see if it was as cute as the case implied.

And yeah, it’s pretty cute. It’s got a plot which can charitably be described as wafer-thin: there’s a Bad Guy who’s collecting helpless innocent creatures to use their energy to become the Ultimate Bad Guy, and you’re the plucky young pigtailed schoolgirl who’s got to stop him.

Oh, there’s a guy character too. If they’d put HIM in a plaid skirt, I might have played through his story.


But probably not.

It is MOST regrettable that you cannot play as the third of the main characters, that being the music instructor who helps you through the training levels; she’s got the quiet-type-with-glasses thing going on and I’m completely helpless in the face of a cute girl with glasses.

Leaving the main characters aside, there’s a handful of enemies to battle on your quest to defeat the Bad Guy and free all the helpless innocent creatures. Most of them are either under the Evil Mind Control of the Bad Guy, or fighting you because they mistakenly think that you are, in fact, working FOR the Bad Guy.

The enemy character designs are pretty decent. None of them wear glasses, though.

Considering that your opponents are mostly innocents, it’s a good thing that you’re not actually subjecting them to any harm. You meet them, you have a short conversation which consists of either 1) your character denying any culpability in the Evil Events Unfolding, or 2) your character telling them that she won’t let them get away with their evil plans, and then you have a musical battle.

Afterwards, you either make up (if they were being controlled, have mistaken you for a bad guy, etc) or they tell you that you were stronger than they expected but it doesn’t matter because the Bad Guy is INVINCIBLE Muha ha haha ahaha hah ahah ah…

hah?

So, summing up: Nice character designs, not much plot, uh, I’m missing something.

Oh, yes.

How it plays.

If you can run your left and right hands out of sync – the pat your head, rub your belly thing – you can play this game. You use one hand to burst bubbles on the touch pad, you use the other hand to select notes from a scrolling bar as they pass a particular point. While you’re doing this, your character and your opponent engage in a cute animated battle which you won’t be able to watch because you’re basically focusing all your attention on the upper left 1/16th of the DS’s bottom screen.

This is Ontamarama’s biggest flaw, in my view; there’s stuff going on that you would love to see because you can tell that it’s probably funny to watch, but at the same time you can’t watch it because you have to be ready for the next note. Ouendan has the same problem, but at least it includes a replay mode so you CAN watch all the animations after a song ends.

Another complaint, less important, is that because the two actions you have to perform – bubble popping and note selection – aren’t really synced up, there’s not a feeling of playing along WITH the music, like you get in Ouendan or, say, Guitar Hero. It doesn’t really feel like a rhythm game when all is said and done, despite all its musical trappings.

After you play through the story mode, which takes an hour or so, you unlock the ability to buy new songs, play in harder difficulty levels, play 2-player vs games, blah blah blah. If you feel the need to squeeze more life out of the game, they give you plenty of ways to do it.

Final verdict: I like cute games with lots of charm, and this has that going for it. I don’t regret having picked this one up cheap. If I’d paid full price or it, I think I’d have been a bit disappointed.

Posted in meganekko, nds, videogames | Leave a comment

Resuscitating Gameworlds

Posted on July 23, 2008 by baudattitude

So yeah, Sony sucked me back into Everquest; I should change the about page to remove the “recovering addict” part.

In fairness, they did a good job of coming back from a very bad situation.

From an outsider’s point of view, the game was rapidly heading towards collapse: They’d already had to shut down half the servers, and a good portion of the remaining player base was hoping they’d shut down half of the ones they still had running, just to consolidate people a little more.

There’s not a lot of point in a massively multiplayer game where there’s nobody to play with, after all. Everquest has always been designed to strongly discourage solo play – while most classes can do it, to some extent, it’s generally a tedious affair consisting of carefully picking your fights and then suffering significant downtime between the fights, where you get to watch your character sit in one place and not move.

There’s also the problem that items in Everquest are hideously important to your success – the majority of your in-game persona’s power comes from the gear they’re wearing, and the power difference between a character with average gear and a character with top-tier gear is exponential.

Of course, you can’t get better gear by yourself – you need to loot it from enemies who are designed to require more than one player to defeat.

So, to sum up: To get most stuff done, you need other people, or you need to be playing multiple characters, at $15 a month apiece.

Of course, this leads to a perception that, in order to progress, you NEED to have multiple accounts and play multiple characters at once. This tends to make people who can’t afford to go down that path – or who don’t want to – simply quit, which means less people to play with, and so the cycle continues.

There was, of course, a small percentage of the population that swore that nothing was going wrong, that the game was perfectly healthy, that there were plenty of people to play with, and that they were only running six accounts at once because they didn’t want to inconvenience anyone else.

So, in a remarkable display of Getting It, Sony started backing down from some of their long-standing design philosophies. They made it easier for people to solo and they made it much easier to obtain gear – they didn’t hand out top-tier gear, mind you, but they raised the “average” level to the point where a player in average gear was maybe one-fourth as effective as someone in top-tier gear, as opposed to one-tenth as effective. They made leveling faster, so people who were behind the curve had a chance to catch up, and they eliminated a lot of the sitting around that used to exist in the game.

They also unlocked a lot of content that used to require raiding to access. This made a certain percentage of the playerbase – think of them as the grumpy old guys who had to walk uphill both ways to school – complain. So, they unlocked some more just to make their point.

Oh, and then they gave it away for two months, free, to anyone who’d ever played in the past, and made a point of advertising this.

The end result: Lots of people who’d stopped playing years ago logged in to say hello again, and the existing player base realized that, hey, having more people around wasn’t such a bad thing.

The free promotion period ends later this week, so it’s up in the air what the long term effect might be, but it’s just possible that Sony may have given their game a little more time to live.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Kuru Kuru Chameleon

Posted on July 22, 2008 by baudattitude

It’s good to be married to a woman who understands your basic needs for things like weird Japanese puzzle games.

A couple of weeks ago, she was visiting family in San Jose when she went into an import computer parts & video games shop. Of her own volition, I will point out.

Apparently, they had some import DS games on clearance, because she brought me home an odd little puzzle game called Kuru Kuru Chameleon.

It’s a interesting twist on the whole “match colors” genre – basically, it’s a versus game where you’re facing off against an opponent across a playfield made up of hexagons, each of which can be any of seven colors. You start off controlling one piece, and whenever it’s your turn, you can select from five of the seven colors to change it to – you can’t change to your current color, and you can’t change to your opponent’s color. Knowing this, you can deny your opponent moves by changing to a particular color.

After you’ve changed color, any uncontrolled pieces adjacent to yours that are the same color as your new color become part of your territory. You can also enclose spaces, which changes all the pieces you enclose to one color and incorporates them into your territory.

There are also some blocking hexes on the board – you can’t control them, but you can use them as barriers. Some of the characters have the ability to destroy or add blocking pieces, which adds to the strategy.

The game very quickly becomes a mix of trying to control the board and at the same time deny your opponent moves. It’s kept fresh by having random objectives – sometimes you just need to get 50% of the board under your control, sometimes you need to capture a particular hex to win, sometimes you need to enclose specific oversized pieces.

It’s pretty challenging; the CPU opponents don’t cut you a lot of slack, and the final boss can bust out some special attacks that will leave you frothing.

The downside is that, while this is decidely in the category of “color based puzzle games with cute characters”, they kind of skimped on the actual characters. You get a ditzy pink-haired girl, a violent-but-amply-chested jungle woman, and two boy characters who are so shotacon that it made me cringe to play through the game as them. If you like ’em young and weepy, though, this is the game for you.

Oh, and there’s a boss, who’s your standard ojou-sama type with a chameleon hat.

I guess I’m mostly annoyed by the characters because I don’t feel like I’m being pandered to enough. The developers didn’t even have the decency to put in a maid, or anything.

Because there are only four characters, playing through the story mode consists of selecting one of the four characters, meeting the other three, and finding reasons to challenge them to matches. After beating the other three characters, you fight the boss, lose a few times, swear mightily and eventually get a congratulations screen. Matches are pretty fast-paced, so even if you get stuck for a while the whole procedure shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.

On clearance, it was 10 bucks and well worth it. Its characters don’t manage to have any particular charms, but the game itself is fun.

Also, you can turn off the annoying little-boy voices from the options menu, and that is a good thing.

Note: After writing this, I did some searching, and apparently this has been released in the US as “Chameleon” on the PSP, with the cutesy boy characters getting a quick gender swap. Either that, or I’m drastically misinterpreting the characters in the original.

Neither option is all that appealing – on one hand, you have cute boy characters with exaggerated feminine traits who pout and cry a lot, on the other you have slightly boyish girls who pout and cry a lot.

Posted in nds, videogames | 1 Comment

Teriyaki McBurger, Ebi Filet-O

Posted on June 21, 2008 by baudattitude

In Narita Airport, on the way to the gates for flights to the US, there is a small sushi restaurant.  It has a sign which bills it as your “last chance to enjoy good sushi and sake before you leave!!”

This sign is a lie.  I fell for it on my last trip.  The sushi was of questionable quality, and the prices were exhorbitant – they would only have been slightly above average if they were the price for a pair of pieces of sushi, which is the way that sushi is normally priced, but they go the extra step in fleecing you – they’re priced by the single piece.

On the other hand, there’s also a McDonald’s restaurant in Narita airport, and they serve both sandwiches that I had mentioned to me the other day – the Teriyaki McBurger and the Ebi Filet-O.

How could I pass up this last chance to subject myself to potential intestinal discomfort?

Neither one is particularly complex in construction, so I’ll skip the bulleted list format for them.


The Teriyaki McBurger is made up of a bun, a hamburger patty, some lettuce and some teriyaki sauce.  I think there may also have been some sesame dressing in there.

It’s the work of a few bites to finish off, and reasonably tasty – not something I’d get hooked on, but inoffensive.

The Ebi Filet-O doesn’t mess with the bun + patty + lettuce + dressing formula, though the dressing is mayonnaise-based (I think, perhaps, Thousand Island dressing, a choice I have no complaints with) and the
patty is, well, it’s shrimp covered with breading and deep-fried.  Presumably, it’s lots of shrimp mushed together into each patty, unless there actually ARE shrimp that flatten out to be a circle roughly 3 inches in diameter.  I guess that’s not huge, and I don’t know much about shrimp.

It’s nice and crunchy and shrimpy; it wouldn’t be out of place on an American Skipper’s or Long John Silver’s menu really.  For McDonalds, though, I suspect it will remain a uniquely Japanese offering.

Actually, in America I’d expect cocktail sauce, which sounds quite good on this thing now that I think about it.

Overall verdict: If you like shrimp, you won’t be done wrong by the Ebi Filet-O.  If you like Teriyaki, there are worse choices than the Teriyaki McBurger.

Posted in food, Japan, vacation | 2 Comments

A 41 hour birthday…

Posted on June 21, 2008 by baudattitude

I keep saying to people that I’m doing the Louis Wu thing for my birthday, and thus far nobody has gotten it.

For the benefit of, well, everyone who hasn’t read Ringworld, and for those people who HAVE read Ringworld and don’t get the reference anyway, the book opens with the main character trying to make the most of his birthday, literally, by using a teleportation transport system to move ahead of the coming midnight and stretch it out as long as possible.

I don’t have access to Puppeteer teleportation discs, and so far I haven’t been pressganged into running off to explore any ancient alien artifacts.  Apart from that, though, I’m doing pretty well at it.

If I’ve got my math right, I had 17 hours of birthday until my flight left Tokyo at roughly 5 PM, 9 more hours of birthday on the flight over, and I’ll have another 15 hours of birthday until the clock ticks over to midnight on June 22.

41 hours of one’s birthday is pretty good.

June 21 also marked the opening of the public days of the Tokyo Toy Show at Big Sight.  Doors were set to open at 9AM and I had to catch a bus to the airport at 11:40.

I had the option of getting up early, hopping the Yurikamome to Big Sight, trying to get in the door right at 9, getting maybe 90 minutes of frenzied looking around at all the Cool Stuff, and then making a mad dash back to the hotel and hoping to catch my bus,

In what I think is a sign of Impending Maturity, I elected instead to sleep in, have an early lunch at my favorite Tokyo katsudon restaurant, wait paitiently for my bus, and enjoy a well-rested ride to the airport.

Posted in Japan, vacation | Leave a comment

Akihabara – One Last Time

Posted on June 20, 2008 by baudattitude

I’m in that “I’m packed up and don’t want to try to squeeze anything more in” state of things, so I really didn’t need to go back to Akihabara. In truth, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had a directive to go there, but it was also nice to take a last look at it for the trip.

When you leave Akihabara Station, you have to pass through the Maid Gauntlet. This is where girls in maid outfits try to hand you fliers and pretend they’re not thoroughly creeped out by their prospective customers. I guess the girls on flier duty have it easier, really, they’re not the ones who are giving out the massages and reflexology “treatments” and eye exams and guide services and so on. I turned around after I passed the last one and took this shot, facing back down the gauntlet. Unfortunately, apart from the one in foreground, you really don’t get the effect – maybe you can see a frilly headband here and there, but the mass of people kind of obscures the whole thing.

Those guide services I mentioned, that’s taken directly from a flier that got handed me. For Y2000 every 30 minutes, you can have your own personal maid to go on a “date” with you – she’ll go shopping with you, do karaoke, have dinner with you “and so forth”.

I’m guessing that the “and so forth” stops well within the realm of the tame, at least, for those prices. I saw a couple of guys who obviously considered it a reasonable fee to have a girl in a maid outfit hanging off their arm, and they looked happy enough; who am I to criticize?

I wound up in an arcade because I wanted to find an Otomedius machine. This is a shooter that’s gotten plenty of coverage on western game sites, because it combines Gradius gameplay with Yoshizaki Mine character designs.

Two minute’s googling would turn you up plenty of examples, but I went to the trouble of ignoring a clearly posted – in clear, correct English, even – NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign to give you this picture of an advertising standee:

I played through the first three stages before getting a game over sort of screen – I suspect it’s because I had to use a continue to get through the third stage and that if I’d managed it without continues I would have gotten more stages, or something.

Ignoring the cute girl factor for the moment, it’s a lot of fun, a 2.5D sort of horizontal shooter affair with lots of 3D characters that move between the backgrounds and the foreground play. The enemies trend towards the weird – lots of penguins, for some reason – and the bosses are appropriately massive screen-filling affairs with glowing weak points that shout “shoot here!”

It’s coming out for the Xbox 360, at least in Japan. It had better see a US release, damnit.

I had a guy hanging over my shoulder waiting for a go at the machine, so i bid it a sad farewell and went off in search of small things that I could stuff into niches in my suitcase and use up my small change on.

I happened across a bank of capsule toy vending machines; these are evil soul-sucking devices that take your yen and give you pretty much exactly every possible toy except the one you want. The first time I was in Japan, I sunk probably twenty bucks into one that had Gainax characters in it, trying for a Noriko from Gunbuster with no luck. After I gave up, my wife – who had no vested interest in ANY of the characters, an important point – put money into the same machine and a Noriko popped out, first try.

I digress. The particular capsule toy vending machine that caught my eye was a Haruhi-characters-in-nekomimi capsule toy vending machine.

I have some simple rules about nekomimi: They’re a simple way to add moe factor to an anime or game character, and it’s generally successful. When a real, live human tries to pull off the look, though, it has something of the effect that a bright red patch has on a frog: It says, “Poison here. Avoid.”

This doesn’t apply to the hard-working staff at Cafe With Cat, however.

But there I go digressing again. Anyway, I saw this machine, and it offered up the option of Haruhi, Nagato, Mikuru, or Tsuraya-san figures in nekomimi.

Assuming I’d get a Tsuruya-san, I put in my Y300.

Out popped a Haruhi. Not bad, I thought to myself, and here I have Y900 left in Y100 coins, let’s see what else comes out.

The second and third were also Haruhis.

While I guess that’s better than three Tsuruya-sans, a man only needs one of these. Arguably he does not even need one, but that goes down that whole road that leads to admitting that I don’t NEED ninety percent of the stuff I own:

Anyway, I had Y300 left and was thinking very unkind thoughts towards the evil machine by this point. Fortunately the fourth round popped out a different character; a Nagato this time, and I beat a hasty retreat.

On the way back to the hotel, there was a nice fog effect around Tokyo Tower, so here’s a shot of that. They’ll be turning off the lights on Tokyo Tower and several other big tourist attractions from tomorrow through the 7th of July, so tonight was the last night that it’ll be lit up for a while.

Thus endeth my final night in Tokyo.

Posted in anime, haruhi, Japan, nekomimi, vacation | 2 Comments