| NMH2 script leak |
[06 Feb 2010|11:37pm] |
Interesting. A NeoGAF thread post links to what is claimed to be the original script to No More Heroes 2 as well as the altered script. Both have translations. The PDFs themselves are password protected, though the post does include the password.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=385367&page=35
If the scripts are legit, then it does verify some of the changes and removals from the game, and brings to light some others.
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| No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle |
[04 Feb 2010|10:35pm] |
First things first. If you intend to play No More Heroes 2, avoid spoilers. Even casual mentions can completely remove some of the "moments" of the game. I will try to avoid any such things in this posting. Inconsequential things or things that are revealed very early in the game, I won't be too careful about. In other cases, I will try to be vague. I do think it is worth spoiling the number of people you fight, though.
Overall, I think NMH2 is lacking a bit in heart. A good portion of the game feels phoned-in, with it only coming into its own in the latter half.
( The rest is behind the cut for space reasons. )
A GameFAQs thread tracked some of the changes during development and also posited the idea that the game may have been rushed for financial reasons. The thread does contain spoilers that I have avoided above, so read at your own risk.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=954479&topic=53292254
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[03 Feb 2010|07:24pm] |
Quick thoughts:
[Wii] No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle
Despite some improvements, No More Heroes 2 isn't as fun as the first. It just doesn't have the details and touches of the original. A GameFAQs thread questions how rushed development might have been.
[DVD] Outlander
Jim Caviezel is a futuristic soldier whose ship crashes on a Viking-era Earth. Along with him is the alien human-eating beast that he is trying to kill. Eventually tries to make a statement against alien genocide, but doesn't really do anything beyond "Genocide Bad". Okay movie.
[DVD] The Gene Generation
Bai Ling is an assassin in a futuristic world, killing criminals who steal the DNA of others. Science is a bit silly, even considering descriptions like "steal the DNA of others." (Why does stealing someone's DNA cause them to sprout tentacles and die?) Okay movie.
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[27 Jan 2010|09:48pm] |
I spent at least last of half year not finding much at all interesting in the world of new video games. Bored then, now I kind of miss that feeling.
[Wii] Tatsunoko vs Capcom
Only three attack buttons does make the game feel a lot simpler. While it doesn't matter from a gameplay standpoint, I do miss knowing in advance whether a button press is going to result in a punch or a kick. I've a feeling building money to buy things might be annoying. I also think it is silly that a 35 win streak in survival mode netted I think less than clearing arcade mode.
[DVD] The Princess Blade
Not bad. Not amazing. Mostly a solid average action flick, where nothing really stands out good or bad. ( Cut to short complaints... )
[DVD] Mongol
Entertaining, but not sure I'd ever watch it again. Mongol is, as its subtitle claims, "The Rise of Ghengis Khan". I would put emphasis on the "rise" part, as the movie ends before the main character takes that name. Poor Temudgin has a pretty rough life here before he conquers the Mongols. As a word of warning, don't bother watching if you don't like subtitles, as the only language track is in Mongolian.
[DVD] Immortal: Ad Vitam
This one is a weird one. ( Short cut... )
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[07 Jan 2010|11:00pm] |
Back to drawing again. I feel like I've made a bit of progress over the last time, but eyes still mess me up. A single eye, no problem. I can draw a mean single eye when I want to. What I can't for the life of me get is two eyes in sync on the same face. One is always a little too big, or out of line, or the viewing angle just looks wrong, or something. Always something. Maybe I should get a few hundred pictures and just lightbox eyes until the patterns burn into my hands. Then I can work on the other problems.
Got another idea for an image that I want to draw, as well. Unfortunately, my ideas always outstrip my talent too much to complete them. It doesn't help that I can't even work out the idea of the poses for this one. I know the general idea, but the way the heads tilt is a pretty big matter, as the wrong position on one will either block too much or not enough of the other. Plus I don't want something that looks too much like one of my other unfinished pics. (Particularly not an upward tilted face. That is part of the reason I dropped that Leona pic. I could never get the face right.)
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| Project 880 to Avatar |
[03 Jan 2010|06:37pm] |
James Cameron's Avatar was once known as Project 880. There is an article at Chud.com that compared the scripment for Project 880 to Avatar, and it is--
Basically, every issue I had with Avatar comes from deviating from the original Project 880 plan. Things that just don't work, make sense, or are just too convenient in Avatar? They make sense in Project 880. Project 880 even avoids the "What these people need is a white guy" aspect by making the main character less special and more just another guy.
Project 880 had a shot at being a classic. Sadly, all those aspects were streamlined away in the creation of Avatar, which will only be remembered for its special effects and 3D.
The article itself is rather long, but it does have a bullet point list in yellow near the top for anyone with a short attention span. And of course it has plenty of spoilers.
Project 880: The Avatar that Almost Was
EDIT: If Cameron was willing to gut his own idea so thoroughly, then I really don't want to see James Cameron's Gunnm/Battle Angle Alita.
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| Oh, that wacky Wii |
[31 Dec 2009|09:58pm] |
I haven't played Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth. From what I've read, if your Wii is in Widescreen mode, you will suffer a blurred screen with no actual gain, as the game itself displays a 4:3 (cropped if necessary) image regardless of setting. Set your Wii to Standard (4:3) mode, and you get crisper pixels.
I briefly wondered why, and then remembered that the Wii has no real widescreen resolution, instead stretching a 4:3 image to widescreen. The Wii's buffer handles 640x480. 16:9 480p is 720x480 (using non-square pixels). Right off the bat, you are filling 720 pixels with 640 pixels of information. But Rebirth goes further. It wants to display a 4:3 game space, so when set to Widescreen, it includes black bars on the sides of the image. If you include the black bars in the video buffer, then you no longer have 640 pixels available for game screen.
On the other hand, if you set the Wii to 4:3 mode, it will happily send out the full game image unmodified and your TV can figure out how to deal with it without wasting any real data space.
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| [DVD] Monsters vs Aliens |
[31 Dec 2009|08:39pm] |
Yeah, I'm not doing an "end of the year" post. I'm doing a regular "something I've watched/played/done recently" post.
[DVD] Monsters vs Aliens
Entertaining, despite some minor annoyances.
Annoyance #1: Something seems off in the humor.( Read more... )
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[20 Dec 2009|07:22pm] |
The CW was just showing Star Trek Generations, and I watched it. I'd forgotten how inane that movie was. Just...bleh...
( Read more... )
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| The Black Sun's Mary Sue |
[17 Dec 2009|01:12am] |
When I read M.L.N. Hanover's Unseen Spirits, I was struck by how much I disliked the main character. She was just so annoying. My brother just lent me the second book, Darker Angels, and now I know why.
The day before I started Darker Angels, I happened to read through the website Too Good to be True: 150 Years of Mary Sue. Main character Jayné is a freaking Mary Sue. When her uncle, who was a big tough guy in the spiritual world, is killed, she inherits all his wealth, his job, his friends, and finds that he'd also laid some serious magical protection on her. And isn't she just the most specialist girl in the whole wide world? She even gets a pronunciation guide for her name (zha-ney, not Jane).
The realization got more entertaining when I remembered something my brother said. Hanover's real name is Daniel Abraham. Abraham once had a fantasy. There is a comic called Hellblazer. In one issue, readers are briefly introduced to main character John Constantine's niece, Gemma. Abraham's fantasy was that he'd write Hellblazer, and the first thing he'd do would be to kill off Constantine in order to make Gemma the main character. That's what Unclean Spirits is. It is his freaking Hellblazer fanfic with the character names changed.
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[15 Dec 2009|03:56pm] |
It might take a little time to get used to a 1600 x 900 display. Funny, but XP's gigantic default window size almost makes sense at this resolution.
In related news, my old monitor died last night, so I had a forced upgrade to a cheap 20" LCD. And a display resolution upgrade from 1024x768 to 1600x900. Unfortunately, finances have continued to put off the complete computer replacement that I wanted to perform. (Note that mention of XP before?)
Sigh, now I'll have to look up all that old info about color, gamma, brightness, and contrast adjustment again, too. I've never been entirely happy with factory settings for all of those. And I'm going to have to find someplace to start dumping all the old computer junk that I'm building up, like old monitors and printers and the like.
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| been a while, again |
[03 Nov 2009|09:32pm] |
Yeah, a month since my last post and time to find an excuse to say something again. Why not manga this time?
So, Berserk is still averaging what? Around nine chapters a year? And several of the last year have been a textless string of splash pages. Guts is perhaps nearly to Elfheim, but then again, he's been heading there for the last nine or so years. (He sets off for Elfheim around the middle of Vol 22, and the chapter itself probably dates to around late 2000?)
For anyone who stopped reading Black Lagoon because of the El Baile De La Muerte storyline, that arc finally ended. What was probably supposed to be some epic event bringing many characters and plotlines into one big story devolved into never-ending suck. Even the writer apparently realized it was spiraling into nowhere, as the series was put on hiatus, then restarted with most of the characters and plotlines silently dropped. That was a very good idea, as the story wrapped up fairly quickly once it was jumped to outside the city and with only the key characters present. Plus Roberta was put back into her maid outfit and the modified rifle, originally played up as important before being forgotten entirely, returns to play a key part in the battle.
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| Ginchiyo |
[05 Oct 2009|07:40pm] |
I always felt Tachibana Ginchiyo was something of an aberration for Koei. Most of Koei's female characters suffer a combination of short range, low damage, weird attacks, and girlish outfits. When a female character turned out to be powerful, it seemed more accident than intention. Ginchiyo was the exception. Heavily armored, sporting a sword with attacks competitive to the male characters, and just all around pretty darn good in each incarnation.
So, is it just me, or has Koei made her girlish for her Samurai Warriors 3 incarnation?
Ginchiyo - Samurai Warriors 2
Ginchiyo - Samurai Warriors 3
Dark purple replaced by purplish pink? A lot of the armor detail and hard edges are removed, making it look softer? The torso/chest looks more like cloth than armor? The armor skirt replaced with something that looks more like cloth and is made more like an actual skirt?
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| Assorted opinions |
[03 Oct 2009|11:25pm] |
[DVD] SWAT -- More generic than the average generic cop movie. Best thing I noticed? Bad sign that the most entertainment I had was going to the Special Features, simply because it played the theme song to the old TV show there.
[DVD] Watchmen -- Not bad. Long. No giant squid, but including it would have likely have made the movie even longer. Hard movie to recommend, but that is due to the source material itself.
[DVD] Coraline -- Nice. Lots of strange departures from the book. With all the departures and relocating from England to America, it felt strange keeping the idea of shopping for a school uniform.
[Xbox Live Arcade] The Warriors -- Supports four players. Don't try it with four players. Playable characters all look alike. Hard to keep track of where you are and what is happening. Combat is kind of boring. Animation looks stiff.
[Xbox Indie Games] Streets of Fury -- Supports four players. Unlike Warriors, you can keep track of where you are with four players, even when playing identical guys. Looks like Pit Fighter was turned into a side-scrolling brawler. More entertaining than it looks. Fun enough with three or four people. Seems more fun than the more expensive Warriors game.
[Wii] Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga -- Entertaining so far. Character models look like a PSP game. Color palette consists of brown and shadows. Kind of Monster Hunter without visions of grandeur, considering two of the first field monsters are immobile life-size mushrooms and life-size leeches.
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| Nintendo update bricks Wiis? |
[02 Oct 2009|01:50am] |
So, Nintendo has released the 4.2 system update for the Wii. People have looked at the details of the update and the only thing it does (despite Nintendo's PR claims of improving performance) is to attempt to disable homebrew exploits and some piracy methods.
Oh, it does do one other thing. It risks bricking your Wii.
When the guys at hackmii.com were working on their HackMii installer, they tested Nintendo's code to update the boot2 firmware. They found Nintendo's code to be buggy, resulting in potentially incorrect ECC data being written for the updated boot2, which could brick a system.
Guess what Nintendo has decided to do for the first time? If your Wii has boot2v2 or boot2v3, the 4.2 update forces an update to boot2v4. And guess what the result is? People are posting about Wiis getting bricked.
Oh, for extra fun? The anti-homebrew part of the update:
1) Failed to address one of the currently known exploits to get code onto a Wii
2) Deleted existing homebrew programs by noticing their IDs, meaning said programs only needed an ID change to avoid deletion.
So even if you update your Wii regularly (and people who pirate games use other methods update methods anyway, if they update at all,) you were probably stopped from running homebrew code for roughly one night.
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| Muramasa - Shigurui difficulty |
[17 Sep 2009|11:54pm] |
Got Kisuke's 3rd ending to finish the game. Better than Momohime's 3rd, at least.
Started a new game just to see what Shigurui difficulty was. It's a one-hit kill mode, capping your life bar at 1 HP. And while you can switch freely between Muso and Shura difficulties, Shigurui removes that option (which is why you have to start a new game to switch to it.)
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| Muramasa, Oboro Muramasa |
[17 Sep 2009|10:42pm] |
Beat the bosses for the second time with both characters in Muramasa: The Demon Blade, which gave me the last sword needed to forge all the way to the Oboro Muramasa.
Wow, what a disappointment. Yes, it has the highest attack in the game, but the special is just... "Disturbance" is just a bunch of other lackluster specials combined into one chaotic, ugly, and arguably underpowered package. Sure, it hits full screen, but it tends to miss enemies and you can't even use it in the air.
I also beat one the end bosses on Shura difficulty so that I could unlock the next difficulty level, though I'll probably never play the game under it.
Now to just finish the game a third time with both characters to get their final endings. I wonder if it will be the second version boss again, the first, or a new boss? (EDIT: Only Kisuke left now. Preferred Momohime's 1st ending to her 3rd one. Yukinojyo is a jerk.)
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| Muramasa: The Demon Blade |
[05 Sep 2009|09:25pm] |
Started playing Muramasa today. Looks pretty like Odin Sphere.
I'm not sure what to think of the combat. Despite Muramasa having more options inside battle, the combat itself feels more shallow. Muramasa characters are larger than Odin Sphere characters, meaning you have less screen space in battle. Much more limiting is that, rather than Odin Sphere's free run of the entire stage, Muramasa locks battles to a screen-width. While it may be an illusion caused by the size difference and lack of free scrolling, the Muramasa characters feel more agile. Their attacks certainly seem more agile, but Momohime can also cross the width of the screen with a single air dash attack.
If anything, the characters feel too agile and too large for the confines of battle.
EDIT: Okay, not all battles are locked to the same screen size. That goes rather a way to improving things.
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| Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog |
[15 Aug 2009|04:12pm] |
[DVD] Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
When I talk about things here, I tend to come off as negative, even of things I like. So here's a review that should buck that trend.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a short (40 minute) musical starring Nathan Fillion, Neal Patrick Harris, and Felicia Day. Quite entertaining, it is available for low price in DVD form and for free viewing through Hulu, so if you haven't seen it, you don't have much of an excuse to not be watching it right now. If you have seen it, you can watch it again.
If you do pony up the minor sum for the DVD, you get the bonus commentary track musical "Commentary! The Musical". Yes, the DVD features two commentary tracks, one real and the other consisting of fourteen songs that vaguely relate to the kinds of things you'd find on a commentary track. You can learn the story of the writer's strike in "Strike," thrill to Nathan Fillion comparing himself to Neil Patrick Harris in "Better than Neil," and give a few minutes attention to the actress who played Groupie #2 when she pays director Joss Whedon ten dollars to sing the solo "$10 Solo".
Okay, you can probably find the entirety of Commentary! The Musical for free on places like YouTube, but if you like the show enough to listen to it, then why not throw a few dollars towards the people who created it? (The DVD also contains a three part "Making of" featurette, and also subtitles in many languages. But not Wiccan subtitles. The Wiccan subtitles option is just there to offer one of the DVD Easter egg clues.)
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