My current state of gaming

(tags game, pre-order, purchase, failure)

Time is running short and my long sentences seem pretty boring even to my eyes. Let's try doing it briefly:

An #ic regular mentioned a kanji drill software for the Nintendo DS called (my trans.) Review and Remember - Adult Kanji Training (なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習), so I bought it. It wasn't at any of the shops but it was at Sofmap. Why is it so hard to find?

Today, my purpose was to get a Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings Nintendo DS bundle pre-order. I failed. Even after checking all the shops. I missed it. It's probably sold out. Yes, the pre-order for just the software was everywhere.

I played Sudoku after munching at the local eatery. I am still playing this game. I play it on the bus. I play it on the train.

Monster Hunter 2 PSP sold out in every game shop I visited. You could still get a new Champagne Gold PSP at some shops.

I finally saw a copy of WipeOut Pure for the PSP in my area. Maybe I'll buy a PSP soon. But I let the copy go because I didn't buy a PSP today.

Another game selling out was that Higurashi Naku no Koro ni for the PS2. I don't like slasher horror even when disguised as cutesy moe anime. No I suppose I don't really know what's going on.

I picked up that New Super Mario Bros Rubik's Cube at Toys 'R Us. This cube is interesting because it uses different colors for stickers (I am so tired of those Rubik's Cube colors) and the center pieces have orientation, which ups the difficulty just a bit. But what do I know, I just use the formulaic approach to solving it.

Toys 'R Us had the Nintendo DS Hard Cover with Animal Crossing characters but in the movie style. My new hobby is collecting Hard Covers.

There are 3 used boxes of the collector's edition IdolM@ster at Sofmap Kobe right now. The price was slashed from 28800 yen to 16800 yen. Me thinks that I missed my chance to send the special postcard to attend the buyer only concert. Oops.

I picked up my pre-ordered Triggerheart Exelica (トリガーハートエグゼリカ). The cover art and Sofmap Telephone card is for all the zettai ryoiki fans out there. Despite that, the game is ranked CERO A (all ages). I don't think I'm going to open this soon. In fact, I haven't opened Under Defeat yet. Now there's a Dreamcast shmup that needs luvin'.

Done!

Subversion eases the pain, Git just doesn't start

(tags work, version control, Subversion, Git, Windows, failure)

As I said I was working some abnormal hours last week at work fighting fires that I didn't start, for a change. My development area doesn't specify a software asset version control system (VCS). Well we do have a home-grown solution for binary releases, but that doesn't deal with the day to day workings. And we did have a group license for Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (gag!) and I remember using it, but even the developer/administrator of that system forgot his password! Oi oi, WTF. What do we usually do? Make LZH (ZIP-like) archives with dates and times, no branching at all. I suppose policy is left up to the groups.

So I took some initiative with my own projects, using the open-source Subversion on Debian and TortoiseSVN on Windows. No one minded. Then again no one noticed. Perhaps this is why we have lots of fires?

This current "fire", I was "pair" programming (but not Agile). Again, I reached for the VCS. My partner warmed up to the idea of source control after I showed him how easy it was to do comparison diffs and commit messages in Japanese, but I had to correct the mental damage done by VSS. "I thought when I check out something it exclusively locks it." Argh. This guy runs circles around me in analyzing source code. He is my "hero". Unlike him, normal grunts like me can't keep more than one idea in me head at a time, that why VCS is so attractive. He took every opportunity to shoot down the execution, though. "Oh you forgot to commit that?" Come on now, we're fighting a "fire" right now, I'm frazzled.

Anyway, though I've been using Subversion ever since the pre-1.0 days, I am feeling the "distributed VCS" pull. The current "fire" is not on our company LAN, so I am "offline" most of the development time. But I'm so used to the convenience of TortoiseSVN and Emacs mode psvn.el. The one DVCS system I'm keeping my eye on is called Git, which has been in use for the Linux Kernel development, so it's definately trustable. It has been out for almost 2 years, but a Windows port is just getting off the ground:

The above picture could be considered trollish because I don't have a full MinGW environment, which this implicitly requires, so I don't really know if it doesn't work or not. In fact the package producer doesn't know if it works or not. Great.

Since the concept behind Git is a "superset" of Subversion, I can convert my Subversion repositories to Git at any time. But I'll give it some more time before I consider it for normal use.

Ichigo Masimaro lives again! Anime purchase antics

(tags anime, Ichigo Masimaro, Sugar, purchase, DVD Region 2)

As a fanatic still fuming, I was looking forward to the Ichigo Masimaro Original Video Animation series (苺ましまろ OVA). I didn't pre-order it though, so I was worried that it would be out of stock or the omake ran out. To make matters worse I was doing a lot of overtime from Thursday till Saturday midnight. I kept on thinking of excuses to get away from work but I couldn't even execute the locker maneuvers (sneak away from work, buy something, stick in the locker, go back to work).

So work says I don't have to come in on Sunday. Still I waste a perfectly good morning waiting for the delivery guy. It turns out he delivers the Rozen Maiden ouverture DVD (ローゼンメイデンオーベルチューレ), which I forgot I ordered at Chara-Ani. I actually planned to buy it at a store today. Great stuff this senility. I'm not watching this until I finish watching Rozen Maiden Traumend. For some reason I'm stuck at episode 11.

I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing any omake, so I decided to first go to Sannomiya's anime-oriented stores like Animate and Gamers (not Joshin or Seiden/Tsutaya) before heading to the cheap Sofmap. Animate had a huge stack, Gamers had none, and Sofmap had some at their expected 10% off retail. But Animate's "Stamp Rally" promotion (帰ってきた「苺ましまろでショー」 in 豊島公会堂) won me over: Buy/pre-order the 3 OVA DVDs at Animate and get a chance to meet up with the voice actresses (along with other fans, of course).  A chance, not a sure thing, eh?

Since Animate always sells stuff at retail price, I double checked my point card to see if I could get a discount. When I asked one of the staff, they told me I have 240,000 points, where 1 point is usually equal to 1 yen spent (but there are times when you can get double points, but I have yet to encounter it). Given the current system for discounting, that means I could discount 12,000 yen on a purchase. Jeez. Senility in all matters.

He went on to explain the difference between the former point system (which they are phasing out the end of this fiscal year, e.g. 2007/3/31) and the current computerized system in transition: When you wanted to redeem your points for a discount, you would get 3000 yen off the current purchase, get a 1000 yen value voucher good on another purchase, and you would have to select an keihin tokuten (point prize) 1000 yen telephone or 500 yen library card at the time of purchase. This was not a computerized system, BTW. With the new system, the points and point prize redeeming can be separated, no need to buy something to get a point prize. The staffer emphasized the advantage: you can defer your point prize redemption until a card with the design you want appears. I didn't understand this new system until I had it explained to me, and now I'm all for it.

Okay, so I buy A Little Snow Fairy Sugar TV-DVD set 2 of 2 (RONDO ROBE COLLECTION ちっちゃな雪使いシュガー TV-BOX 2) along with the Ichigo Masimaro OVA 1. I tell the staffer that I want to use the points towards a discount. He assembles the omake stuff then swipes my card. Perhaps I threw him for a lurch because of the amount of points, but I only realized after getting home that I didn't get a "Stamp Rally" promotion card. I called up the store, and after just calmly explaining that I got a poster but not the card (which is the only reason to pay retail), the staffer puts me on hold probably to converse with colleague working the register, then comes back with an apology ("he forgot") and an offer to give me the card when I come back in the store. Yeah, I'll come in within the week because I have to build up the points again, right?

I already watched it, twice. The first time I was annoyed with over-white Macrovision, and I ROTFLOL'd with the liberal use of the scenes from the manga. The second time was with the audio commentary by Fumiko Orikasa (折笠富美子, "Miu") and Saeko Chiba (千葉紗子, "Chika"). I was annoyed with off-the-cuff, undirected banal dialogue. It's only 25 minutes, but it comes with a 2007/4-2008/3 black and white Barasui illustration calendar and a collection box. Proper.

I was hoping for truly new content, but this mix of undone manga snippets and new transitions makes me look forward to the next 2 DVDs.

Shoot the enemy: PlatineDispositif's Dandelion Starchild Journey

(tags game, Windows, doujin, mouse, shmup, puzzle)

I made my usual rounds on Wednesday to anime stores. I haven't visited Melon Books in a while, but I saw doujin game maker PlatineDispositif released another game called Dandelion Starchild Journey (だんでらいよん、MSCD-0024) for about 1500 yen. (Try the demo here). Anything that looks like a shmup by PlatineDispositif is an automatic buy for me, unfortunately I don't have the skill to complete their games. The back cover had some bullet patterns, but Melon Books classified it as a "action game" instead of "shooting". I thought, I'll buy it and figure it out at home.

So I got home, installed the game and gripped the gamepad controller. Nothing happened at the start up screen. My mind raced with "my controller's b0rken" until I bumped my mouse. Ugh, a mouse game! Then I jumped directly into the game without doing the tutorial. I don't get it. I click expecting to shoot something and nothing happens. I had to do the tutorial slowly, and it wasn't until the fifth or sixth chapter in the tutorial that things finally clicked.

Well hey the game play is different, not just another shmup. The bullets and bullet patterns were very PlatineDispositif. It was as hard, as expected. Whoa, my computer is slowing down when the screen scrolls, lame. Still, it didn't feel very exciting to me. The only thing that was fun to me was the voice telling you to "shoot the enemy" or "dodge the bullets". That and the starfield zooming in with a very interesting effect.

Yet again I play the game before checking the web site for a patch. I must be expecting PC games to be like console games, just insert and go.

Shmups approaching

(tags game, Dreamcast, shmup)

I decided to pre-order the "last" shmups for the Dreamcast: Triggerheart Exelica (トリガーハートエグゼリカ) and Karasu (カラス) game. I never did pick up Chaos Field (カオスフィールド) or Rajirugi (ラジルギ), so my waning days Dreamcast shmup collection is incomplete. Triggerheart has some omake goodies such as a soundtrack CD, and it better for 8000 yen. Karasu doesn't seem to have anything attached, but it at the normal 6000 yen price. I'm not really psyched to play these games. These are just going into my stack.

In other news, rumor has it that Konami is going to release a side scrolling shmup called Otomedius (オトメディウス), which by the name of it sounds like a Gradius Parodius follow up or off shoot. It says it will be filled with only girl characters. (女の子キャラのみの横シュー). This sounds "hot", what with the anime and gal-get fads. I don't think they're going to use anything from Tokimeki Memorial. But then again, if its going to be anything like Parodius (with a belly dance filling up the whole screen), it might be disappointing.

EDIT: I need to check the Internets one more time before I post. Impress Watch (via Joystiq) has the scoop at the AOU 2007 event (All Nippon Amusement Machine Operators' Union / 社団法人全日本アミューズメント施設業者協会連合会) going down now. There's not much detail other than the mock-up and doods playing demo units. That character art looks unattractive to me, but the "touch screen" interface coupled with the standard joystick setup is intriguing.

Zero no Tsukaima PS2, later

(tags game, anime, purchase, PlayStation 2)

Zero no Tsukaima (ゼロの使い魔) for the PlayStation 2 was calling me today, but I wised up and didn't buy it. Actually I figured out that my Sofmap didn't have the extra goodies I wanted like the telephone card and drama CD, so I let it go.

Ikaruga for the Xbox, o rly?

(tags game, Ikaruga, Xbox 360, rumor)

This was totally unexpected. Ikaruga for the Xbox 360! According to the rumor, it was being demo'd on the debug XBox Live network called "Partnernet". It's not officially confirmed, though, despite the breathless article titles and hundreds of comments. Hopefully out for the Japan market as well. As an Ikaruga dilletante it is my mission to collect them all!

Computer And Video Game broke the story, and Joystiq, Kotaku, and Game | Life linked. Eurogamer had some other details, which Retro Gaming with racketboy linked.

Speaking of Ikaruga, the freelance illustrator Yasushi Suzuki (鈴木康士) is releasing a illustration book called The Art of Yasushi Suzuki in the US (thanks insertcredit). He created the Ikaruga illustrations, as well as other Treasure related game illustrations. Just look at his CV. Hopefully I can get my mitts on this one too.

Reheating one 2004 leftover: Half-Life 2

(tags Half-Life 2, game, Windows)

Playing around with 31 bot Unreal Tournament Team Deathmatches made me think I was wasting time. I should be finishing games. So since I was in the FPS mood, I re-downloaded Half-Life 2 through Steam. Oh boy, I haven't seen this gravity gun thing in one and half years (last save was 2004/11/28). Don't ask me why I stopped playing it, I don't remember why. I must have reached an epithany leveling up my rotating barrel physics stats.

So I resumed my game at around 60% in, I think. It's pretty fun, and reloading feels cool. No problems with the LCD display. But I got to the prison looking area and now my video card is choking with all the bugs and thugs, even at XGA (800 x 600)!

Crap, I'm getting depressed about my rig, ha. But I must suck it up until Unreal Tournament 3 actually comes out. I checked out my upgrade schedule, and it seems I lasted about 3 years on my Pentium 3 500MHz computer (2000 to 2004) with multiple video card upgrades. This Project Sugar is probably going to be the same 3 years between changes, with no video card upgrades. I suppose buying the PC when the industry was changing from AGP to PCI-X or PCI-Express was a mistake. New rig in 2007!

I hope to finish Half-Life 2 on this Project Sugar, as well as that American McGee's Alice game from 2000. That older game better look pretty.

Dengeki Daioh 2007 Winter Premium DVD: Please buy animes

(tags anime, magazine, manga, DVD region 2, Shakugan no Shana, Ichigo Masimaro, Manabi Straight!, Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru, Kasimasi)

I picked up the manga magazine Dengeki Daioh 2007/02 (月刊コミック電撃大王2007年2月) about a month ago, but I finally got around to watching the special "2007 Winter Premium" DVD. Shana from Shakugan no Shana (灼眼のシャナ) adorns the thin DVD video case, in some kind of powered up pose. Isn't it kinda dangerous to hold a sword like that?

It's a basically a preview DVD showing clips or highlights from current and future anime. I saw for the first time the opening animation of the Ichigo Mashimaro OVA (苺ましまろOVA). It's coming out 2007/2/23 as a special DVD box with Barasui illustration. I'm there. I also took a look at Manabi Straight! (まなびストレート！), which looks pretty happy. With Yui Horie (堀江由衣) voicing super genki Manabi, this anime can't go wrong.

I already watched Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru (乙女はお姉さまに恋してる), Kasimasi (かしまし), and Yoakemae Yori Ruriiro na (夜明け前より瑠璃色な) so I didn't bother with the trailers. I'm not interested in the To Heart 2 OVA right now, so I skipped that too.

I did proceed to watch the Shakugan no Shana video thinking it was just an introduction, but it seems to be a full episode (without opening and ending animations). It was the (obligatory?!) "swimsuit" episode (number 9), obviously because they receive free tickets to a water amusement park. Since I still want to watch this series, I skipped it. I caught a small bit of Rie Kugimiya's (釘宮理恵) Shana voice. I was hoping it was close to her Louise voice from Zero no Tsukaima (ゼロの使い魔) but it's lower, which I actually found disappointing.

I'm pretty sure all of this content is already swiped into some Web 2.0 video service, but I'm pretty happy with this 680 yen manga magazine and DVD combo.

Can't move forward: Roboblitz Demo

(tags game, Steam, download, demo, Roboblitz, Unreal 3 engine, Unreal Tournament 3)

Steam is very convenient. Even though I forgot my password, Steam still recognizes my account and logs me in automatically. I did eventually figure out my password, though. (Backing that up to KeePass, now!)

On the Steam gaming area I saw an Unreal 3 Engine based game called Roboblitz, and what the hey, let's try it out. Unfortunately my Project Sugar computer made in 2004 is not proper:

The message is clear. Unreal Tournament 3 won't work on this computer, either. So much for buying that game and running it at QVGA (320 x 200).

DDR this isn't

(tag game, Unreal Tournament)

Dancing to the Unreal Tournament soundtrack while cleaning my room. No pictures for sure.

I have been playing Unreal Tournament recently. I am playing Team Deathmatch with 31 other bots with accuracy less that 90% and Masterful difficulty. So far my favorite map is David M's Pah (DM-Pah), one of the user maps bestowed the "CliffyB Ownage" props.

I was also dipping into Unreal Playground's extensive map collection, but so far I haven't been hitting anything good. The last time I logged in was 2005-07-10. I remember a similar 1 or 2 year gap logging in before that.

Refreshing!

Bonus round complete: Animate AV Fair Winter 2007 one last time

(tags telephone card, anime, Animate, ECsite, gift, PlayStation 2)

I thought it was over, but I still had some point cards. And I had some more point card luck. So why not reach for one more?

This last library card is from the anime "Yoakemae yori ruriiro na -Brighter than dawning blue-" 「夜明け前より瑠璃色な- Brighter than dawning blue -」, the PlayStation 2 adaptation. Feena-sama is so fine.

3, 3, 5, 2, 2, 2, and 2 points.

Let's do some statistics. 3 of the 4 cards I got through this point card system, thus requiring 120 points (3 * 40). From last time and this time, I got 41 points in 14 cards that had more than 1 point. That means I had at 79 other cards that totalled 1 point. I also kept a point card for each design (5 total). And as the picture above shows, I had one left over. Total: 99 cards. Crazy.

I got this last card before the end of the fair. So no more... until the next AV fair, haha.

Mouse at Tplus 2 months: Intellipoint Hacking

(tags Windows, hardware, mouse, Registry, customize)

I got fed up with setting the 5th button on my Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 to backspace via that Gaming Toggle feature. On a whim I 'net searched "intellipoint hacking", and I got the clue I needed at "The world according to Tim"'s post, "how to hack custom keystrokes in intellipoint". I extended what he blogged and I came up with this summary:

The Intellipoint software for version 5 and 6 stores its settings in the registry HKCU\Software\Microsoft\IntelliPoint. The really interesting sub-tree is the EventMapping branch, which defines the global actions when you press a mouse button. In it, the 5 mouse buttons are defined respectively:

Since my troublesome button is the "Right side button", I dove into the EventMapping\8 entry. There are 3 entries, Setting, Keystroke and KeystrokeText. Since the hack first involves setting the button to the Keystroke... command, subkey "Setting" is set to dword:0000019c which I guess means Keystroke action. The "Keystroke" subkey can be anything that corresponds to "Virtual Key Codes". These are the message events that Microsoft defines to represent keyboard input, and which by sweet fortune, the Intellipoint mouse driver exposes a user-settable registry entry for input injection.

So, I want to insert a Backspace every time I hit the "Right side button", therefore I use the VK_BACK virtual key code, 0x08. I figured out through experimentation that ALT, CONTROL, and SHIFT modifier keys can be specified as 0x400, 0x200, and 0x100, respectively. However it's not necessary for my setting.  Therefore "Keystroke" subkey should be set to dword:00000008. Finally, the "KeystrokeText" is user-oriented data that can be set to anything. I set it to "VK_BACK (Backspace)". These settings are effective immediately, and now my mouse acts like it did in Intellipoint 4.x software. Sweet! The final display is shown above.

My mouse has other input features, such as the wheel side rocking, presenter mode button, and on the bottom of the mouse, "PowerPoint slide forward", "PowerPoint slide back", Volume Decrease, "PowerPoint slide start/pause" and Volume Increase. Unfortunately I do not know how to hack these buttons, though.

This "hacking" stuff may not be able to be done in Windows Vista, though I don't know for sure. It all depends on the drivers.

On a related tip, I received the final message from the Mado Tsukai no Yuuutsu developer announcing the stopping of development. The announcement also mentioned that this key remapping tool probably won't work on Windows Vista due to the different driver model.

Playlist Name Sort Order on iPod G5.5

(tags iPod, iTunes, Ruby, programming)

I took the time to manually figure out the sort order of playlists names on the iPod G5.5. From left to right (with some ASCII values in hexadecimal):

Seems as if the iPod is pulling the ' (quote) and - (dash) higher up, while pushing the + (plus), < (left angle bracket), = (equal sign), > (right angle bracket), and \ (backslash) down. Then numbers and alphabet come later, respectively. Finally, any name prefixed with spaces are ignored, and hiragana comes before katakana, while finally kanji picks up the end. As far as I can tell, smart and manual playlists share the same order, regardless of type.

I used the following script to create the temporary manual playlists. If this looks like a straight copy and paste of the SDK provided script, you'd be pretty close.

# Ruby 1.8 script
require 'win32ole'

iTunesApp = WIN32OLE.new("iTunes.Application")
mainLibrary = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist
tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks

def createAllAscii( iTunesApp, foldername, track )
  source = iTunesApp.LibrarySource

  # if exist, add to that folder, else create
  unless (folder = source.Playlists.ItemByName( foldername ))
    folder = iTunesApp.CreateFolder( foldername )
  end

  # need a track so that playlist is synced to iPod
  0x20.upto(0x7e) do |chr|
    plname = yield chr
    # show some status
    print "creating playlist '#{plname}'..."
    albumPlaylist = folder.CreatePlaylist( plname )
    albumPlaylist.AddTrack( track )
    puts "done!"
  end
end

# any track is fine
atrack = tracks.ItemByName("Stage 4 - Assault! -")

createAllAscii( iTunesApp, "sortTest", atrack ) 
  { |ch| "#{ch.chr}sorttesting" }
createAllAscii( iTunesApp, "sortTest", atrack ) 
  { |ch| "a#{ch.chr}sorttesting" }

Now armed with this info, I'm gonna group my "Imported" and "Played", "Rated", "Not Rated", "Year" playlists with some funky symbols at the beginning. Happy joy.

(Not!) disappointing moe-ful shooting: Nanoha STG shooting

(tags game, shmup, doujin, Windows, failure, patch)

Still the Comic Market 71 stuff is trickling in. I stopped by the Tora no Ana shop and picked up the last visible copy of the Magic Artillery Girl Lyrical Nanoha Danmaku Shooting (魔砲少女リリカルなのは弾幕ＳＴＧ) by Cos-play Tea Room Girls (こすぷれ喫茶娘々). You know, shmups and Nanoha, finally. Go ahead and try the free demo.

It's a vertical shmup, power up by collecting dropped items. You have spread fire and bomb and some other homing thing. Pretty average setup.

I played it last night, but I was pretty disappointed with the frame rate and the slow bullet and player movement. But then I had the bright idea to check the homepage for a patch. I installed it and wow it plays much better. At full screen I get the 60 FPS goodness. It's a little more interesting now.

The bullet patterns are pretty easy, though. I also like the colorful pastel bullets, but it's a little too clean. I ignore the dramatic cut scenes because I still haven't watched this series yet!

Yeah, yesterday I cleared it on Normal, but the bullets were so slow that it was boring. Today it's the proper speed, and I can no longer clear the game. Hahah.

I have to tell you that there is some extra CGs in there, but they're not very good at all. The only good ones are the ones shown here. Also the music is in OGG. It's not bad. I thought the sound effects and voices were straight rips from the anime, but I suppose anybody can do a Nanoha voice.

I give the game 2.5 out of 5. There are 4 more levels of difficulty above Normal, so perhaps someone out there will be satisfied.

Back into Unreal Tournament?

(tags Unreal Tournament, Windows, PC, video)

I found that my Unreal Tournament (1999) music selection was incomplete, so I searched the Internet for another map pack with music in it. I found the "UT99 Enhanced Soundtrack" in OGG Vorbis form so I converted to MP3. I was missing "Godown", which is the DM-Deck17 music. In UT2004, it was remixed into KR-Hyperblast-Remix. Oh yeah! This pack seems to be all the music, plus some UT99 era user-mod music. I don't remember the names of the official music, so it's annoying to hear those other songs.

And finally the 4th installment of UT is coming out... Unreal Tournament 3! Joystiq brings the linkie to the GameTrailers hosted video Unreal Tournament 3 demo (Low, High Quality). Excellent. "In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep space miners..." Haaahah they are still using that intro? "From the studio that gave you Gears of War..." I'm just wondering where is Malcolm?

I don't like the way the Shock Rifle bubble and Link Gun plasma looks now. They're both kinda dark. Maps look interesting though. Well, I suppose they have to show the new stuff before bringing out the classic stuff that will attract the fanatics.