Eff-Three-Arr

Posted on March 25, 2012 by baudattitude

Last June, a friend of mine who happens to work for Warner Brothers in Canada sent me a big care package full of their latest games & movies.

It was a pretty classy care package and I didn’t do it much justice when it arrives.

I did, however, INSTALL F.E.A.R. 3, or F3AR as the title screen describes it, and then I spent several months playing MMORPGs rather than playing anything in single player.

Having finally decided to get down to business and find out once and for all what’s up with Alma and her kids, I’ll say that I ought to have played it earlier, because it’s pretty good.  It doesn’t have quite the same enemy variety of earlier entries in the series and it rather suffers from Ugly First Level Syndrome, but it has plenty of creepy atmosphere, a good number of jump scares and the pacing is much improved over earlier entries.

That last is kind of code for “It’s an awfully short game”.  I’m not a very skilled FPS guy and it took me all of two evenings to play through.  Of course, it does have some multiplayer modes and there’s a co-op option for the campaign so there’s lots of options to extend that out, but if you just want to get in, play through the story and be done with things it won’t suck up too much of your life.

I will say, however, that it would be a shame to rush through, guns a-blazin’.  Much like FEAR 2 and the Reborn DLC, they put a lot of effort into the environments you’re running through, and it’s worth the occasional pause to appreciate the details.  Furthermore, getting off the main path and exploring a little tends to come with rewards, generally in the form of ordinance.

One thing that I WILL gripe about, however, is the game’s leveling system.  As you play, you co-incidentally complete certain challenges, which come with point rewards.  When you’ve gathered enough points, you level up and get benefits – for example, you may get to carry an extra clip for weapons or get a little more health.  Basic stuff in modern shooters, really.

What’s a bit annoying about it is that you’re constantly getting pop-up messages about these challenges and your progress towards completing them, and this tends to kill the mood just a bit.  For a game like F3AR, where being immersed in a horror world is part of the draw, it’s a pretty glaring sin to have these “You got 5 kills with the shotgun!  only 15 more kills for the get 20 kills with the shotgun achievement!” messages pop up.

It’s not an unforgivable sin, however, and I will admit that it encourages you to experiment a bit.  I’ve never been much for the melee attacks in the FEAR series, for example, but having the challenge system in-place got me to finally give them a go and I found myself quite enjoying myself as I punched, kicked, and knifed random bloodthirsty cultists and demonic hound-thingies.

Overall, well, if you’ve played through the first couple of games, it’s a satisfying conclusion to the series and you’ve probably already played it.  If you haven’t played the first couple, it probably wouldn’t make a lick of sense.  If you haven’t played the first couple of games, however, this represents an excellent excuse to go and do so.

 

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Nowhere near Tomobiki-cho

Posted on March 24, 2012 by baudattitude

Back in the mid 90s, I was driving through Washington with my wife.  It was actually our honeymoon trip, and we were a couple of geeks who had just been given a bunch of gift certificates and cash, so we were stopping at pretty much every toy store we passed looking for Cool Stuff.

Anyway, at one point, we drove down Lum Road, and I thought that was a pretty neat name for a street but didn’t have a camera with me and neglected to note where we’d been at the time.

It’s been one of those things floating around in my head since.

To drag out my word count a little bit more, I took a couple of days off this last week and drove up to Seattle to go to the Kinokuniya bookstore and Uwajimaya and Daiso and all sorts of cool places we don’t have where I’m living now.  I also took the opportunity to spend the evening with an old friend that I hadn’t seen in about 8 years.

It was an excellent trip.

While I was driving south afterwards, I had a crazy notion.  What would happen, I wondered, if I entered “Lum Road” into my iPhone and told it to look for places nearby?

For the record: It’s in Centralia, Washington.  Sadly, though it’s out in an industrial district, I don’t think there are actually any electrical substations nearby which is a dreadful pity.

 

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Great Moments in Marketing

Posted on March 21, 2012 by baudattitude

A few weeks ago, my wife and I decided to take a drive through southern Oregon, stopping in small towns along the way to sightsee.

We went out of our way to, for instance, see a covered bridge.  It wasn’t a very big bridge, but by god it was covered.

Anyway, we were driving to go see the covered bridge when we drove past this Dairy Queen.  Afterwards, I had to go back so I could get a picture of the sign.

After taking the photo, I asked my wife, “So, would you like a chicken salad?”

And she hit me.

So, I judge this a marketing failure.

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ノーラスへようこそ

Posted on March 13, 2012 by baudattitude

I am really quite fickle when it comes to free MMOs. Less than a week after trying out Perfect World International for a bit, I’m back in Sony’s pockets.

I had been getting a little burned out on eq2 at level cap, and the guild I’d been in had exploded in a beautiful starburst of drama, meaning that it was either start the interview process with a new guild or try something completely different.

This is how I wound up starting a new character on Sebilis, the Japanese-localized eq2 server.

It was a bit of a harsh awakening at first. See, eq2 has this mechanic where every max level character you have gives all your other characters an experience boost. With 3 level 90s, that meant that any new character got 60% more experience for free.

This normally works even for characters on other servers.

It does NOT work cross-region.

I also don’t have any way to transfer money or items to Sebilis, though that wasn’t a surprise. It was, however, a little weird to actually be poor. That’s a sensation I haven’t had in eq2 for quite a long time.

Fortunately, my account has all of its expansions and veteran rewards unlocked on Sebilis. That lets me take advantage of a couple of features from the latest expansion that are making the whole process much easier. I’ve been making use of a mercenary since I was able to scrape together the money to hire one, and, even if the upkeep on it is actually a bit of a drain at my level, it is making the grind much more palatable. I’ve also been making use of the Dungeon Maker – this is a feature from the most recent expansion where you play one of a handful of premade avatars through player created dungeons, and it’s been widely panned because most people would like to use their actual characters instead.

My “actual character” is an undergeared pauper made of tissue paper, so the avatars are actually quite nice from my perspective.

So, with the mechanics of leveling sorted out, I am cheerily grinding up through the levels and actually progressing very quickly. I hit level 51 this morning with about 20 hours played and I’m heading into some content that is famously good for getting XP in a hurry. Level 90 – the cap for now – shouldn’t be too difficult to reach, which is good inasmuch as that’s where the rest of the community is.

Speaking of community, Sebilis is pretty quiet. It doesn’t help that I am playing in the evenings on US time which means that it’s the middle of the work day in Japan, but I get the feeling that it’s a pretty dead server with a few die-hard players remaining.

That’s actually a good thing from my perspective. Anyone left on this server is likely to be more mature, which is going to be good since I expect that I will be fighting a heck of a language barrier to find groups etc.

As an aside, figuring out how to do kanji input in eq2 was its own special challenge. I will leave it at that because the alternative is a rant of inchoate rage.

I have had one fairly long chat with a Sebilis native and they seemed pretty bemused to have an American on their server. I’ve heard horror stories in the past about non-Japanese players on Japanese servers in MMOs, so “bemused” is a pretty good start. 🙂

Posted in Gaming, 日本語 | Leave a comment

So, about that Perfect World thing.

Posted on March 8, 2012 by baudattitude

As I was saying yesterday, I reasoned that, since I’d quite enjoyed the 5 hours I’d played of Perfect World’s “Rusty Hearts” MMOBrawler, it wouldn’t be entirely outside the realm of reason to download their “Perfect World International” MMORPG.

No, seriously, that’s the name of it.  The “International” in this case stands for English, I suppose, and it’s reasonably good English for a free MMO from China.  There’s the occasional bit of awkwardness in the in-game text but nothing unforgivable, and there are some delightful word choices.

For example:  I’m playing a pet class, and I have to monitor my pet’s happiness level which is closely tied to his hunger level.  One of the hunger states is “Peckish”, one of those words that will evoke a giggle from anyone who’s ever memorized the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch.

Said pet class is called a “Venomancer”, by the way, which is a very odd word.  It’s apparently often referred to as a “Werefox”, for reasons which should become immediately obvious:

Yes, I have fox ears and a tail.  I could have had bunny ears and bat wings if I’d wanted, just so you know.

I’ve also got little butterflies flying around me because I completed an armor set and am getting a buff from it, I think.  There’s a lot of sparkly stuff in this game.

The Venomancer is notorious for being the super-easy-to-level Class Of Noobs, which means that it’s perfect for me.  It’s also probably a good idea if I don’t play a tank class as I tend to take games a little too seriously if I’m playing a tank.

I got sucked in for about four hours on the first play session, which is always a good sign/bad sign thing with an MMO.  Good in that it’s a lot of fun so far and is ticking all the right boxes as far as sending me for quests and giving me rewards and encouraging me to roam further and further afield to find the next quest hub and so on, bad in that getting deep into a new MMO is never a really good idea.

The cash shop is a little more front-and-center than some other f2p games I’ve tried but I’ve been mostly able to ignore it.  There seems to be a lot of in-game-currency to cash shop trading which goes on, which means that in theory I can earn enough in-game currency to get stuff out of the cash shop without spending, well, cash.

IF I keep playing long enough to care about that, that is.  🙂

It’s obviously far too early to give it a definitive thumbs up/thumbs down, but it’s pretty and seems to have an active community.  I’ll be logging back in again for sure..

 

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In Which I Fail At Consuming Media And Talk About Free MMOs

Posted on March 8, 2012 by baudattitude

I’m usually a pretty optimistic guy, but I think there are some occasions when you just have to go to bed and declare a do-over on the day.

I tried watching FLCL tonight.  This is my third time trying to watch it, and I really WANT to watch it because it’s part of the canon, it’s something that you Should See and I’ve had lots of people speak very highly of it, even people who aren’t normally anime fans.  It’s also from Gainax and you’re kind of supposed to worship Gainax if you’re a fan of a certain age.

The first time I tried to watch it, however, I’d been up for well north of 24 hours and I’d packed a transatlantic flight into the middle of my day and I was trying to watch it so I could actually stay awake.

I fell asleep about five minutes in, as you might expect.

I tried again a couple of days later, made it to the first eyecatch, and put it down intending to get back to it.

That didn’t happen.

Tonight, though, I had several hours free and I was going to watch the whole thing.  Only six episodes, after all, less than three hours to finally know what all the hype was about.  I made it through Harmageddon, for crying out loud, and if I can watch that beginning to end I can probably watch anything.

So I thought.

2 episodes in, I was forced to conclude that, well, this simply wasn’t going to be for me.  I think I’m getting old, I just need a little more linearity in my storylines.  🙂

Well, I said to myself, that didn’t turn out well but I still have about 2.5 hours before I should really head to bed, let’s look through this folder of movies that I haven’t watched yet.

I will confess here that I’m a bad person. I tend to get the netflix envelope in the mail, rip it so I can watch it later, and send the disc back.  If I was good at remembering to send discs back, this would probably be kind of abusive, but I’m terrible at remembering to send discs back so I’ll often rip something and find the disc still sitting in my backpack a week later.

Anyway, I decided that I would finally watch District 9 as I’d heard many good things about it and it was from that guy, you know, the one with all the hobbit movies.

It’s kind of an icky movie, but I was getting into it when I found myself coming to a rather unsettling conclusion.

See, early on in the movie there’s some human-alien interactions where the humans are talking english and the aliens are kind of gurgling at the humans and I’m kind of getting the sense of the conversation from the human side of things and I’d assumed that we weren’t supposed to understand the aliens so much as we were supposed to get the conversations from context.

It’s a fair ways into the movie before you start seeing fairly involved conversations with the aliens, and that’s about the point where I realized that something might have been awry.

A quick google search revealed that, well, the movie was SUPPOSED to have subtitles but that I hadn’t actually encoded them in.

So, that was pretty much that for my media consumption attempts.  I went to wikipedia and read the synopsis for the rest of the movie and it sounded pretty neat, so maybe I’ll give it another try sometime when I feel like I can make it through the icky bits.

I’ve also been looking for a new F2P kind of game, something that I can pick up and play for an hour or two at a time.  EQ2 is a great game, and I’m subscribed for the next year, but I’m at the point where getting something accomplished needs 11 to 23 other players and involves a fair time commitment.

I went back to Lucent Heart a week or so ago and found that it was just as incredibly cute as when I’d left it. I was level 30 and 90% into level so I killed a bunch of bees and anthropomorphic corn monsters and got to level 31.

Then I looked at my quest tracker, realized that I had no idea where any of these quests were trying to send me to, and further remembered that I’d quit playing in the first place because the process of getting new armor and weapons after level 25 involved doing crafting and/or group dungeons… and then I decided to call it quits and camp out for good.

It IS a really sweet game, though, I just don’t have the patience it takes to get very far in.

After that, I gave Rusty Hearts a try and had a good bit of fun with that.  It’s not really a MMORPG so much as a sort of persistant-world brawler or diablo thing, you choose a Character (of four) and then you can give that character a name and level them up and get new gear and so forth.

This lead to an odd conversation with my wife, where she asked me what class my on-screen avatar was and I told her “I’m an Angela” which lead to “no, that’s not my name, my name is X, I’m an Angela, and that person over there is also an Angela” and so on and so forth.

It falls down a little on the character customization is what I’m saying I guess.

Anyway, I strongly recommend it if you are the type of person who likes hitting your controller’s “A” button a lot and making things fall down.

So that was good but wasn’t QUITE what I was looking for.  It’s from a company called Perfect World, who does a bunch of different F2P games, and I figured that I’d already made an account with them to play Rusty Hearts, so trying out another of their games probably wouldn’t be too much of a hassle…

So now I’m downloading the inventively-named Perfect World International.  I’ll let you know how that goes – from the art I’ve seen, it’s super pretty and that’s a good start to things.

But for now, time for bed.

Posted in anime, MMORPG | Leave a comment

Wow, Five Years Blog

Posted on March 6, 2012 by baudattitude

Posts have been a bit sporadic of late, which I’m going to blame on a slip back into MMO addiction and a job that doesn’t give me a lot of time for on-the-clock navel gazing, but I noticed that this thing has actually been up and running for five years now and that I’m pushing the 200,000 page view mark – both of which I’m pretty stoked about.

I’m in a bit of an MMO lull right now and have a ton of projects going on right now that I’m quite enthused about, so I’m going to try to get a little more content up here before the inevitable backslide.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by and reading.  Unless you’re a spambot, of course, in which case thanks for stopping by and letting me know about good places to get male enhancement products and knockoff Coach bags.

 

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The Problem With Magical Girls

Posted on March 6, 2012 by baudattitude

Let me begin by saying that I have a soft spot in my heart for most magical girl anime.

I originally typed “soft spot in my head” there, which may have been a Freudian slip.

Anyway. I was introduced to the genre through a friend in Japan who used to send me off-air tapes of various anime, and who decided that I should see this “Sailor Moon” thing that had just started airing.

I quite liked that, so he introduced me to some of the Pierrot anime from the early 80s and, well, one thing lead to another and I wound up owning an awful lot of laserdiscs of various magical girl anime.

Anyway, it struck me that, starting around the time of Card Captor Sakura and Fancy Lala, the characters in these shows were getting to be pretty self-aware. Rather than the oh-my-god-it’s-a-talking-cat characters of older shows, these girls knew that a talking plushie showing up and blabbing on and on about their destiny meant that it was time to make with the frilly outfits and transformation scenes.

So why, really, is this a problem? Let’s be up-front here, it’s probably a good thing to be prepared for the possibility of being turned into a magical warrior for love and/or justice. It gives you a better chance of negotiating, say, appropriate skirt length, less embarrassing magical chants, avoiding winding up in Wedding Peach, that sort of thing.

I’m going to get hate mail from Wedding Peach fans for that last comment, I just know it.

So, to be fair, I had thought that it was a Good Thing that Japanese girls were being prepped for the possibility from a very young age.

Then I started watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica and was forced to re-think this position.

I had been warned that this show was a little darker than your average magical girl show.

Around the time the first happy frilly-skirted warrior for love and justice got her head bitten off by a large clown-faced snake thingy, I came to realize that that may have been a bit of an understatement.

I’m not quite done with the show yet – I watched the first nine episodes in a bit of a marathon session last night – but, so far, every character save two has either been killed horribly, driven insane, or driven insane and THEN killed horribly, with the Adorable with-a-capital A mascot talking plushie looking on happily at the results.

So, girls of Japan, a caution: if an Adorable Fluffy Animal shows up at your bedroom window in the middle of the night saying that it’s your destiny/responsibility/just a really good idea to step into the High Heels Of Justice…

…close the window, draw the blinds, and maybe ask your parents if they wouldn’t mind moving.

Posted in anime | 3 Comments

Twilight Sparkle is best headdesk pony

Posted on February 27, 2012 by baudattitude

I’m not a Pinkie Pie fan, so the wait for the upcoming Fluttershy and Twilight-centric episodes was only made more painful by an all-Pinkie-all-the-time episode last week.

That being said, it did have epic Twilight headdesk moment and someone went and made an animated GIF out of it which I can just watch loop over and over.  It doesn’t seem to play when it’s embedded in a post, however, so you’ll need to click the image to enjoy.

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How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Ponies

Posted on January 6, 2012 by baudattitude

I am no stranger to buying embarrassing things.

Back in the 90s, I became quite used to being the only non-Asian guy in the local Japanese bookstore and the only guy, period, in the shojo manga section.  I’ve been the guy who got to the Software, Etc early on release day to pick up his copy of “Dead Or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball” and I will defend the cinematic glory of “Super Mario Brothers: The Movie” to anyone who will stand still to listen before they suddenly remember that they have somewhere to be.

I have no taste, no class, and (most importantly) NO SHAME.

It was therefore an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation to find myself walking past the “My Little Pony” aisle in my local toy store trying not to look like I was looking down the aisle.

Here’s what brought me to that sad state: I spent the week after Christmas sick as a dog.  With little energy or ambition in me, I spent most of that time on the couch in front of the TV.

At one point, I decided that I would see what all the hype was about “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic”.

(This is the sort of decision I make when I’m hopped up on cold medication, you see.)

After three episodes, I wasn’t really seeing the reason for all the online enthusiasm surrounding the show, but I was also too addled to think of anything else to watch.

After a few more episodes, I couldn’t stop watching.

After 37 episodes, I found myself haunting the toy aisle looking for pony merch to make my own.

I am buying this for my niece, I decided, that’s what I would tell the cashier. She has a birthday in January, I would say if asked, an excellent reason to explain why a grown man might be shopping for his alleged niece after Christmas.

The cashier did not ask questions, so my elaborate fiction was unnecessary. She simply rang up the cotton-candy-pink box without question or comment. Perhaps she’d seen it all before, perhaps she simply didn’t want answers to the questions gnawing on her mind.

Once my new treasures were home, freed from their suffocating plastic shells to join a shelf of figurines dominated largely by catgirls and maids and catgirl maids and other figurines of dubious standing, I had time to reflect on what I had done and why a show about, well, magical ponies had kept me so glued to the television.

My first answer was, well, it’s a fantastically funny show. It has a good mix of slapstick and subtle humor – if you want to see a unicorn getting hit with an anvil, it’s got that (yes, really an anvil, always good to see an old Looney Tunes classic brought back for a modern cartoon), but it also rewards careful attention to dialogue and has enough background detail to reward judicious use of the pause and slow advance buttons.

It also has a lot of horse related puns, so your enjoyment may be directly tied to how many of those you can tolerate. Some of them are subtle enough that they will fly right past someone not raised in a pun-friendly household, anyway.

That was a start, but not really a complete explanation.

My next explanation was that it was, simply put, a change of pace.  I’m a bit of a cynic on my best days and I can get downright gloomy given half a chance, so by all rights I should be writing off a show like this as a unabashed cash grab, designed to separate the parents of little girls from their hard-earned dollars.

And, well, it kind of is a cash grab, but it’s also an unrelentingly optimistic and positive show with a good message, something it somehow pulls off without crossing the line into preaching.  There are a couple of early episodes where the obligatory moral of the show is hammered in with a lack of subtlety – and generally with a new character whose only purpose is to be a bad example – but those stand out because they are exceptions.

Tl;dr version: even if – especially if – you’re fundamentally bitter and cynical, sometimes it’s nice to watch something upbeat.

And then we have the online fandom, the “bronies” as it were, who stand out in online fandoms as being, well, nice. Downright civil, even, though I confess that I haven’t delved deep into the murky depths of the community and I’m sure that it has a few jerks scattered around.

Much of this general civility can be tied, I think, to the absurdity of it all.  It’s hard to take things too seriously when you’re expressing your admiration for the exploits of a character named Fluttershy after all.

Just so we’re clear, though: Twilight Sparkle IS Best Pony.

Posted in mlp:fim, movies & tv | 5 Comments