Baud Attitude

54 Minutes With Suda51

Posted on February 4, 2015 by baudattitude

A few years ago, I picked up a one-shot manga called A Farewell to Weapons, by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira and Roujin Z fame, that was translated into English by Epic Comics back when Marvel used to do really weird side projects.

It was a quirky (if bleak) story about a bunch of guys scrounging in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo who run into a still-functional war robot who didn’t get the memo that the war was over, and finding out that it had been animated was half the draw of importing the EU release of the Short Peace compilation disc.

The other half was, and I apologize for the implied slight directed at the other animation segments which I am simply glossing over, Ranko Tsukigime’s Longest Day, a short but intensely bizarre game from Grasshopper Studios / written by Suda51, whose works I have praised here from time to time.

“Short” doesn’t quite cover it, to be honest. It took me 54 minutes to complete its ten stages, most of which consist of running from left to right while platforming and fighting off enemies. A couple of the stages break the pattern – one has you platforming UP a narrow tower, fighting a pair of bosses while a massive gear chews up platforms below you, another is a 2D shooter sort of affair, and the final stage is a sort of retro, uh, it’s hard to describe but very retro, a sort of mix of Karate Champ and hopping from platform to platform, all in glorious 8-bit style graphics.

I died a lot on the tower boss fight – it took me a good ten+ tries and the first couple of those were just adapting to the change in perspective.

The platforming bits are interesting in a way that reminds me of the 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games – there are multiple paths through the levels, and skill and timing will allow you to keep to the very highest paths with the best rewards, while missing a jump will just drop you to a lower path to continue your run to the right. There’s a strong emphasis on keeping up momentum, because you are constantly being pursued by evil spirits who will kill you in a touch.

Well, that’s the first few levels anyway. Later in the game, when you’re being chased across the slopes of Mount Fuji by a screen-filling Pomeranian with an avowed taste for human flesh, you may find yourself, as I did, periodically needing to remind yourself to close your mouth, as it may be gaping open in a look of utter confusion.

To give a taste of the story, you play Ranko, a Perfectly Ordinary 17-year-old Japanese Schoolgirl who lives in a collection of shipping containers in an automated carpark and who, quite naturally, has to set off to avenge her mother’s death by killing her father, owner of the largest chain of automated carparks in the world and part-time luchadore. Along the way, she joins forces with a Kamen Rider knockoff and discovers that both of her best friends have mysterious secrets of the Dark and Deep variety.

Also she has a karaoke date that she simply must make, even if it means the end of the world.

To be honest, you could probably watch the cutscenes on Youtube and get 90% of the experience, but the bits of game that come between the noninteractive bits are fun, if (as mentioned above) occasionally frustrating. They’re also not above poking fun at the fact that you’ve been watching a movie for a while now and it’s about time to actually use the controller again.

…that said, it’s not something I’d pay the $39.95 that Sony laughably wants for the package on PSN. My copy was, as mentioned, the EU release, and it came delivered from amazon.co.uk for about $20 US, which seems fair. Wait for this one to go on sale, but don’t pass it up when it does.

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I Think I Can Maybe Live Without Half Life 3

Posted on February 3, 2015 by baudattitude

So, finished playing through Half Life 2 tonight, my fourth time through the game which says an awful lot for how much I like it.

It was my first time through since Valve patched in Achievements, which I found really did add something to the experience – and I’m saying that even as a person who usually has a pretty low opinion of cheevo hounds. I had never previously considered, for example, that I could grab manhacks with the gravity gun and throw them at Combine troops as weapons, so having an achievement pointing out that this was a Thing I Should Do was kind of neat. I actually wound up getting most of the optional achievements, though not the really rare ones like staying off the sand on the ant-lion beach or finding all of the lambda caches.

I wound up using the gravity gun a LOT, which was also new. The first time I played through HL2, it was just the weird gun I got about halfway through the game and then completely ignored until Our Benefactors, but this playthrough I was having a blast just throwing random junk at the assorted NPCs who were trying to kill me.

I did occasionally die from trying to be TOO clever, but that’s nothing new.

I also tried out Steam Streaming for the first time, though I feel sorry for the One Guy who actually joined my stream to watch me, because he came in just during the bit in the Combine Citadel where all you’re doing is riding around on a rail looking at things and then Doctor Breen talks at you for like an hour.

So, all in all, I don’t regret playing through HL2 again.

That being said, I think it may have cured me of wanting Valve to actually put out another entry in the series, because, well, HL2 was already a little dated in 2004 with its health packs and crosshair aiming and being able to carry ten guns at once, and it would at once be very weird for a modern shooter to come out with those kind of dated mechanics and even weirder if HL3 turned into a 2-guns-at-a-time regenerating-health iron-sights shooter.

I should probably get back to Demon Gaze now. You know, as a change of pace thing.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Well, This Should Keep Me Busy

Posted on February 1, 2015 by baudattitude

So, after a good five years of fussing around with ripping and encoding and tagging media, I’m done. There’s a DVD half-season of Teen Titans Go! and some opera or another still sitting in the living room unripped, and probably half a dozen DVDs that will live on as VIDEO_TS folders until such time as Handbrake starts being able to correctly interpret them, but I have successfully transferred two and a half decade’s worth of a video collection to the server and backed it up and can, basically, get on with the process of complaining that there’s nothing on worth watching.

In the end, it comes to 1,203 movies and 13,114 episodes of various TV shows, taking roughly 7.3 TB to store.

And, ironically enough, I spent most of the weekend catching up on “Sherlock” via Netflix and watching the 2008 Tinker Bell movie, also via Netflix.

I did watch Chinatown off the media server, so I feel I got 120% of my RDA of film noir in one go.

I am a little hesitant to watch the sequel to Tinker Bell, because one of the plot points of the first movie is that Ms. Bell introduces the concept of assembly-line-style efficiency to the daily tasks of the other fairies, and presumably the sequel deals with the crushing unemployment problems in Pixie Hollow as roughly ninety percent of her fellow fairies, rendered redundant, are forced to take low-paying service jobs and bemoan the loss of the Neverland Dream.

Sounds a bit bleak, really.

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The DVD Spec is Surprisingly Flexible

Posted on January 31, 2015 by baudattitude

Way back in June, I finished ripping the last of the DVDs that we own. This sounds like amazing progress, but the truth is that ripping is only the first step in getting them ready for our media server so they can be played back on our AppleTV or copied to a portable device for road trips, etc. After ripping, I have a VIDEO_TS folder and that needs to be converted, using Handbrake, to h.264 video in a nice m4v container, and then I need to properly tag that so it will import into iTunes properly etc.

This isn’t too bad usually. Movies, for the most part, are fire and forget. I will occasionally get tripped up by a movie that has one or two subtitled scenes, because I’ll have overlooked the part where I need to burn those subtitles into the picture. As an aside, you don’t properly appreciate how many languages Magneto speaks in “X-Men: First Class” until you watch it without subtitles.

Anime is… well, it can be a bit of a nightmare, because you run into lots of cases where there are multiple subtitle tracks and track 1 only has song and sign titles so you need to make sure that you’re burning the subtitles from track 2 into the picture.

Usually it’s not too bad, though. I load up the VIDEO_TS folder in VLC, select the appropriate language tracks from the DVD menu, start an episode and see what track it has selected. Oftentimes, sitting through the DVD menus and their ever-so-clever transitions and unskippable FBI warnings serves as a reminder of exactly WHY I’m doing this, because some of these DVDs are just painful.

Then there’s Funimation. I have a special hate for Funimation DVDs, which I’ve mentioned enough times that my wife just kind of rolls her eyes and finds somewhere else to be when I start going on about it.

I’ve ranted about Fruits Basket before, where the subtitle tracks are labeled according to the spoken language of the track and not the displayed language of the subtitles, so when I encoded the Japanese audio track and the English subtitles, I got the Japanese audio and subtitles of the English dialog. I didn’t notice this when I was spot-checking the subtitles, of course, because they’re generally close. It’s only when you start watching the series and get to, oh, the opening scene of the second episode where Tohru is in full panic mode about her new animal companions that you realize that what she’s saying in Japanese doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to the subtitles and then you curse a bit and re-encode the entire series.

Then I got to Fullmetal Alchemist, and suddenly I had a new level of Funimation-induced rage AND a respect for the flexibility of the DVD spec.

The first four discs of Fullmetal Alchemist have three subtitle tracks. The subtitles for the Japanese dialog are on track 2. It also has subtitles for the English dub, and those are usually on the third subtitle track. This isn’t so bad.

Discs five through thirteen, on the other hand, have two subtitle tracks. Track 2 looks to be the signs and songs track, and track 1 is… well, track 1 turns out to be interesting.

When I burned the subtitles from track 1, I got subtitles for the English dub.

When you watch the disc in a DVD player with the language set to Japanese, it shows that it is still playing subtitle track 1 and yet it is showing subtitles for the Japanese dialogue.

So apparently a single subtitle track in the DVD spec can be used to hold subtitles for multiple languages depending on the audio language selected, and this is probably what makes VLC explode and what was confusing the version of Handbrake I had been using to do my encodes.

Thankfully, Handbrake 0.10 appears to be smart enough to handle this. I’m in the process of encoding discs 5 through 13 for the third time and hopefully I’ll get what I want THIS time.

It occurs to me that I’d probably save a ton of time by just downloading these series off the internet, but I’m picky about how I want my encodes set up and I already own the DVDs anyway. I do try not to think about how much 13 discs of FMA cost, purchased 1 at a time as they were coming out, because that way lies madness.

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Netflix needs to work on its recommendation algorithm

Posted on January 25, 2015 by baudattitude

There is actually a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, but it did take me a minute or two to get over my look of utter disbelief:

Actually I think I might want to watch the Tinker Bell movie. Don’t judge me.

Oh, and the Perfectly Reasonably Explanation, as promised: apparently these recommendations are based on actors, and Chernobyl Diaries has a boy band member / Disney voice actor as part of its cast. It’s still a pretty big leap from killer mutants to Alvin and the Chipm… actually, never mind, that one kind of makes sense too.

Posted in movies & tv | Leave a comment

I still hate Ravenholm.

Posted on January 21, 2015 by baudattitude

I recently discovered that, according to the incredibly depressing steamleft.com, it would take me 184 days of continuous playing, without breaks for sleep or eating, to finish the unplayed games in my Steam library. That ignores all the console games lying around the house, of course.

In response, I am playing through Half Life 2 for the fourth time, because it’s still bloody amazing even ten years after it first came out.

I find that I still can’t stand Ravenholm. Goddamned poison headcrabs all up in my grill and what not, made worse because I was trying for the achievement where you don’t use any weapons but the gravity gun and for some reason thought that I could use the crowbar. That one’s on me, but it’s still a little annoying.

Oh well. Time for Fun With Ant Lions and The One Bit With The Bridge, which I quite like.

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Pony School Musical

Posted on January 15, 2015 by baudattitude

So, not many posts recently. Normally I blame MMO addiction, and I HAVE been spending too many hours in Everquest, but I actually had some excitement over the holidays that has had me somewhat distracted. The short version is that I wound up in the ER on Christmas Eve with some pains of unexplained origin and then wound up having surgery on New Year’s Eve to have misbehaving parts taken out.

I can’t actually say it was a thoroughly terrible experience. I have some serious hospital phobias, and my wife has frequently expressed concern that I would resist going to the hospital even if I was in dire straits. It turns out that pain is a fabulous motivator in overcoming phobias.

So that was a thing.

Now I will put that aside and talk about My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks, the awkwardly-titled sequel to last year’s Equestria Girls, itself an anthropomorphized movie tie-in to an animated series based on an updated version of a girl’s toy line from the 1980s.

Other guys get to say things like “I like football” and everyone knows what they’re talking about. I wouldn’t have a hobby you could explain in three words.

While Equestria Girls was somewhat divisive, I quite liked it, and I liked the sequel even more. It’s bizarrely continuity-heavy for a movie aimed at young girls, with a ton of references back to the first movie and to early seasons of the show, which is rewarding if you’re maybe just a little obsessed but which might make it kind of opaque if you haven’t got a head full of pony trivia.

It also carries on the Friendship Is Magic tradition of going deep into the Monster Manual for its villains. Really, this show is going to be responsible for girls having a surprising depth of knowledge re: mythological creatures of all sorts and sizes by the time it’s over.

The one concern I had going in was that, well, it’s a musical and I’ve been pretty disappointed with a lot of the music from seasons 3 and 4. It seemed like several episodes have had songs shoved in where they weren’t really needed, and not many of them have been up to the standards set in the first two season.

Given music-themed villains and a battle-of-the-bands plot, however, there’s no reason NOT to have roughly half the screen time taken up with musical numbers, and they’re pretty definitively in the category of “catchy”.

I liked it. 10/10, would watch again.

Now to really geek out. I’d recommend stopping here unless you want to see just how deep my personal rabbit hole goes.

So, in the first movie, Pinkie thinks she recognizes the humanized Twilight, but it’s one of those one-off lines that gets forgotten pretty quickly. In the post-credits scene of this one, we find out that there IS a Twilight in the human world and that she’s become aware of the weirdness happening at Canterlot.

Now, pony-Twilight has had a steadily-increasing power level over the last four years. She’s gone from getting winded by a simple teleportation spell to being able to, quite literally, level mountains. Her one vulnerability is that she’s not willing to risk her friends.

I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether Celestia’s sending her to Ponyville to make friends was a deliberate move to make sure that her faithful student would always have an Achilles heel – or at least some distractions.

Human-Twilight, on the other hand, is presumably just as good at science as pony-Twilight is at magic, and doesn’t have friends to protect or to temper her single-mindedness.

I am now REALLY looking forward to Equestria Girls 3: Twilight vs. Twilight.

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Plastic Heroes

Posted on December 23, 2014 by baudattitude

I’m still playing Demon Gaze, and it remains a terribly enjoyable game. The level of fan service has dropped off considerably as I’ve gotten further into the story and dungeon crawling, so I suspect that it may have been front-loaded for the sake of hooking lightly-pervy fanboys.

I’ve also finally cracked open the actual game that came with my small plastic Avengers figures and given that a shot, to admittedly mixed results. I am loving the ability to download user-created levels and mix up universes and characters, but the story mode is a little… Uninspired, thus far. The first level was a pretty straightforward romp through Avengers tower, but that’s the point where I got spit out onto the streets of Virtual New York to start a series of fetch and escort quests for Nick Fury.

On the plus side, the guy they got to voice Fury sounds surprisingly like Samuel L Jackson, so I half-wonder whether he actually did voice work for the game.

I’ll keep at it – and I have the Guardians story to play through as well – but it is not the main draw of the game for me as of just yet.

Now, downloading a fan-made level where you fight Chetauri in the streets of New York, and then dropping in an Elsa figure to blow them up with freeze rays, THAT is sheer cackle-inducing joy and the part I can quite thoroughly recommend, although it may be somewhat bad on the wallet if I let myself indulge in too many classic Disney characters.

Speaking of small plastic things that are bad on the wallet, I find myself quite grateful for being just a few years too old to have grown up with the NES, because it let me look at Amiibos a few days ago, admit that they were kind of neat, and walk away from the display without feeling compelled to actually buy any of them. I rather feel for the crowd for whom these characters represent their childhood, because they are getting hit by the absolute worst sort of scalpers.

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Song of Saya : Dear God, That’s Bleak

Posted on December 21, 2014 by baudattitude

I’m not the best person to talk about visual novels, because it’s a genre that I rarely have patience for. While it’s probably unfair, I associate them with the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, which were 99% horrific endings and painfully frustrating unless you cheated by, say, looking through the book until you found the good ending and then figuring out the chain of pages that would bring you to it.

I also used to take apart my Rubik’s Cube. So sue me.

On the other hand, I do enjoy a good horror game, and some of the most-highly-spoken-of are visual novels. I’ve been sitting on the Corpse Party games for a few months now, wanting to start them but not really wanting to go through all the nonsense of getting bad endings, reloading, making slightly different choices, getting a different bad ending and so forth.

Song of Saya, on the other hand, is both relatively short and only has two actual points where the player is asked to make any decision. I will admit that this somewhat stretches the definition of “interactivity”, since the actual bulk of the gameplay consists solely of tapping the enter key and reading.

And listening.

I strongly recommend headphones for this one, because the audio work is disturbingly effective at selling the narrative, which is about as bleak as you can get. The main character is a bright young lad, a medical student, who was unfortunately in a car accident and whose life was only saved by an experimental and dreadfully risky neurosurgical procedure.

He’s alive, which is great, but he doesn’t see the world properly any more. Everything is decayed and covered in gore, and people appear as gruesome shambling mounds who sound like they’re talking into one of those terribly annoying novelty voice changers.

For an extra twist of the knife, he’s smart enough to realize that the world hasn’t ACTUALLY changed into a heavy metal album cover, but he’s also painfully aware that letting on will earn him a trip directly to the nearest padded room.

The only thing providing any anchor to sanity is that there’s one person left who looks normal to him. She just has a few… quirks.

This is not a game you want to play while idly snacking, because many of the visuals are designed to put you off the concept of, well, eating anything ever again, and the makers have thoughtfully provided a filter that blurs out the more grotesque scenery if you’d like, and a second filter that blurs it AND darkens it.

I went for the “let’s blur that stuff” option and feel no shame in having done so. This is essentially TRIGGER WARNING: THE GAME.

My other warning is that you are very likely to wind up rooting for, well, bad things to happen to good people, just because the game makes you feel so sympathetic toward the bad guys in this particular scenario.

So with that aside, if you like a good horror story, I can’t help but recommend this one.

Posted in videogames, visual novels | Leave a comment

I have a new shiny thing

Posted on December 17, 2014 by baudattitude

So, like I mentioned the other night, I’ve been playing a Vita RPG called Demon Gaze. I have a portion of our house that I’ve set aside as a gaming station, so it has a nice comfy chair from Ikea, a couple of TVs and – of course – a nice collection of gaming consoles.

I was sitting in the nice comfy chair the other night playing Demon Gaze, and my wife walked in and asked why I wasn’t playing it on the TV instead of hunched over the Vita screen. She’s seen me use Remote Play to play PS4 games on the Vita, so assuming it worked the other was is quite honestly a reasonable assumption.

I explained that, for some reason, Sony hadn’t seen fit to enable that particular bit of functionality, but that they made a small box that was basically a screenless Vita, and that…

…and that’s about as far as I got before she told me to just order one and call it a Christmas present.

So, since I had a spare Vita memory card and DS4 around, I bought the basic PlayStation TV package.

It works pretty well for playing Demon Gaze!

I expected that, to be honest, since that’s a game really doesn’t muck around with the wackier features of the Vita. It’s really quite nice to be able to play it on a reasonably-sized screen and not having to constantly look down at my hands is much easier on my back.

The PSTV also supports a surprising number of my Vita titles, and of course the majority of PSP and PS1 titles. Again, all as expected.

What I DIDN’T expect was how tiny the thing is. For scale, I have attached a photo below of the device next to another popular Sony product:

At any rate, I’ve always had a soft spot for extreme niche products, and this definitely qualifies. 🙂

Posted in psp, videogames, vita | Leave a comment