Hero worship d00d huge

(tags game, design, creator, Unreal Tournament, Gears of War)

I don't know why Cliff Bleszinski is called Dude Huge by the Kotaku's editor. Maybe it's just a reaction from the man trying to disassociate himself from his old nickname CliffyB. Anyways, The New Yorker had a wordy interview with the Gears of War designer and long-time Epic Games employee. It's a pretty good read, even if I didn't get all the references. I always liked the man, especially when he introduced Gears of War with references to the old Bionic Commando.

At least my personal programming hero Tim Sweeney gets a line or two in, even though the spotlight is focused on Bleszinski. And yes, Unreal Tournament gets a mention, but only as "an uninspired but popular game". WTF, oh okay, so my vapid entertainment is uninspired. *fume* :-)

The last take-away quote was pretty good.

"You tell people what you do for a living," Bleszinski said later, "and they’re like, 'Oh, you play video games for a living.' No, I play a game that’s not as fun as it should be, that’s broken, until it’s no longer broken. Then I give it to other people to have fun with."

Great!

color blind man

(tags color, web, flash)

Well, not really. I was reading the blog of one of my favorite illustrators, Koge Donbo, and she said she passed this color test with flying colors (heh heh). It's called Munsell Hue Test (kindly translated into Japanese).

I tried it out myself, and I scored 8 out of 100 (lower scores are better, 0 is best!). I guess I have a problem distinguishing blue-greens. :-/

Eee PC and Unreal Tournament (1)

(tags game, Windows, Unreal Tournament)

My Project "Tama" is a Asus EeePC. (I'm going to keep backwards-introducing this computer I suspect.) A couple of days ago I tried out Doom. Now I have tried out Unreal Tournament 1. In a word, sweet. Except the space bar as jump is ass, because I hit the touchpad and that messes my aim. Still getting some Shock Arena on 31 bots all on a laptop is pretty sweet.

Ketsui makes me wish for the arcade version

(tags game, Dual Screen, shmup, Ketsui)

Hey so I bought Ketsui for the DS. Ketsui, official name Ketsui Death Label (ケツイ　デスレーベル, NTR-YKDJ-JPN) is a port of the arcade vertical scrolling shoot-em-up (shmup) of the same name from 2002. I think Arika is the publisher. I believe this is the first home port of the game, while it is rumored to get a Xbox 360 version pretty soon.

Usually shmup ports are pretty much the Arcade mode plus a remix and a high score table. This DS port is something different though, because it's not a complete port of the Arcade mode. Rather, the main gameplay is the boss fights only. Now my judgment is clouded because I'm thrilled for a Cave property on a DS, but this is plenty fine. There are enough bullets and boss patterns to memorize to get you going. The gameplay pace really captures the speed and terror of swarming bullets. Also the game has a bunch of extras that add some value.

The graphics are fricken noisy, no joke. The DS never chokes. Well I haven't seen the whole screen completely covered in bullets, but see there's this game mechanic where you collect Chips that fall from fallen enemies. These Chips are thankfully of muted color but there are too many. Plus they come right in front of your ship. As a Cave game, the bullet colors are the classic light blue, pink-red and violet (and green), so it really should be no problem once you get used to the screen. Actually you can adjust how long the Chip is visible, from Always to 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32 frames. I set it to 4 and they are barely visible.

So remember the DS has a 256 x 192 pixel display. An old school Cave game like Dodonpachi is 240x320, so we're only missing a few (tens of) pixels. Okay, so were missing a lot of pixels. You will need all of that space to get through the curtain fire (danmaku). Thankfully your hitbox is just one pixel. I have trouble remember which pixel on my ship is the right one so... :-/

The bullet patterns are classic. Actually I've played some of the famous Kenta Cho (aba games) freeware shmups that copy the bullet patterns so I feel right at home. The gaps are crisp and you will be travelling all over the screen.

Though Ketsui is supposed to be a skills game, there are a lot of beginner oriented boss mixes and gameplay settings. I would estimate Novice, Normal, Hard Mode 1, 2, 3 to be equivalent to a Normal difficulty up to level 3 of a 5 level shmup. Auto-bomb (get hit once and it bombs for you) is on by default, and after every cleared boss you get 3 bombs.

There is a Very Hard mode, an even more difficult mode I have not yet unlocked, and probably the hardest mode of all called Doom Mode.

Plus there is coffee-break, enriched drama mode called Oshiete IKD-san!! (おしえて! IKDさん!!) which is a dialogue between illustrated characters and IKD, real-life suit dude-sensei. Just imagine a contented straight-laced 30-something Japanese dude who doesn't act like he should in a suit, telling you non-obvious techniques for massive damage and BURNING PASSION. I like it.

What I like even more is that there is video and godlike replays in this mode as well. It's not limited to the DS but there are some videos of the Arcade version as well. Cave is beckoning to come join them in the game center for a round of arcade shmup. It's grand.

The gallery mode, called EVAC report, has pseudo-Achievements/Trophies with really easy ones such as "Auto-bomb activated 100 times" and "changed key config" :-/ There are 113 in total and assemble 9 or 16 of them for a complete picture of a CG rendered boss. Sexy.

You can save three of your replays (!) and send them to friends via Wifi (!). I don't think it's Internet. Also there is a Kizuna mode and other Wifi modes that let your tag-team on bosses and/or score battle.

Rounding it out, the game saves a lot of statistics like average bomb rate and pickup multiplier, etc. Key config is 1 key to a function setting, so multiple keys can be set to a function.

Finally there's a pack in DVD so you can see Ketsui the arcade version in all its glory. It doesn't fit in a regular DS case, rather it's a special, non-standard box.

The game is 5000 yen, a high price for even a DS game. If you eat up shmups then you will be elated, amused, and sated by this DS port. It's very competent for what it has (WTF no zako sections as PROMISED in teaser trailers), but I wish Cave/Arika put this on a more visually endowed portable like the PSP.

Gears of War, and 2

(tags game, Xbox 360, Gears of War)

The rumor that Gears of War 2 won't be released in Japan is annoying me. I am having so much fun with the first one's campaign. I beat the Hardcord difficulty. Now I gotta do Insane.

Sign into Web 2.0 (or 2.x?)

(tags web, networking)

My old college buddies ditched the old-school college mailing list and went 2.0 with Facebook. Actually in the interim we had other Web 1.x social networking but I never got into it (in fact I forgot even the names). Now I have a Facebook account but it doesn't have my real name on it. Robert Scoble noted that it was a closed garden like America Online, so I tried out Friends Feed. It's a ghost town for me. I might even try Twitter, har har.

I even tried out OpenID, or well I had to because I was posting at a programmer oriented site, Stack Overflow. The latter is pretty and web 2.0-ish, with up to the minute comments and corrections. I've learned a lot from the people posting over there, because correct answers with useful examples bubble up. Regarding OpenID, I like the idea but the implementation still is one click too many. I log in with "http://yahoo.com", which is pretty sweet. Still I want to put my own domain name as my login.

But yeah, I recently dug up my installation folder for the Doom series, using the open-source OpenGL-based PrBoom. It looks decent on my Asus EeePC "Project Tama". I have all the IWADs (Doom commercial assets) collected from my old purchases. I was nostalgic so I looked up Doom and Quake on Wikipedia. One thing led to another and now I'm joining Dennis "Thresh" Fong's new idea, a gamer-oriented Web 2.0 social networking site called Raptr.

This Raptr is PC visible, but collects information about your PC and console gaming. It automatically checks your games and status on Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. For example, by telling it my Xbox Live account info (no password), it showed that I have 40 games on the Xbox 360 (do I get Achievement Points that?!) and that I last played Gears of War 67 minutes ago. Now all I have to do is tell it my Steam account for PC games, etc. Of course World of Warcraft is linked in too. There's even a PC client that promises to update my PC games automatically (opt-in, of course), but I don't need that yet. I want to get one friend onto this network, so lets see how that goes.

Back in yer hole: Kumatanchi, Gears of War, Raiden IV

(tags game, Xbox 360, FPS, Gears of War, shmup Raiden, Kumatanchi)

I have been gaming but not blogging about it. Now that my Information Processing test is over (but probably not done with, boo hoo), I've got a little bit of free time.

I'm on my third week of Kumatanchi, but I'm supposed to commemorate the second week because that's when the casual gamer's ending appears. Now it's just collecting some stuff and treating Kumatan with lots of Habanero candy, tee hee. It really plays like a Tamagochi, but with more depth. I like it. I want to send it-off with a picture blog post, sometime.

Oh yeah, I finished Gears of War on Casual difficulty, now I'm working on Hardcore. I though it was going to be really hard because I was stuck, but I figured it out. Reloading is pretty cool. That last boss really really makes me angry, but now I know for sure the movie skip button is X, hahaha.

Um, I credit-feeded my Raiden IV playing, so I unlocked a bunch of undeserved Xbox 360 Achievements. I write this down so I don't forget my gamer score is a bunch of fail.

If the game was as good as the trailer: Prince of Persia (2008)

(tags game, Xbox 360, video)

I downloaded some sample videos from the Tokyo Game Show 2008 via the Xbox Live Dashboard. By far the best one that I keep playing over and over again is Prince of Persia. A search for "prince of persia tgs 2008 video" turns up downloadable versions. This game will come out 2008-12-18 for the Japan region. There's not much about the gameplay, but I love the scrolling backgrounds and cinematic camera. Plus the song "Breathe me" which probably has nothing to do with the soundtrack, just sets a great atmosphere.

Perhaps this is like Ace Combat 6's trailer vs gameplay.

WTB Macross Ace Frontier PSP

(tags game, PlayStation Portable, Macross, shooting, flight)

Acutally I want to buy that Macross Ace Frontier game for the PSP, but I'm waiting for two things. One is that I want to buy a new PSP so I can still keep my crackable PSP. However, all the PSP-2000s are gone, in preparation for the PSP-3000. Another thing is I'm waiting for a trusted online friend who like mecha more than moe to review it. I'm not sure if he finally got a PSP though.

I see that the infamous Famitsu cross review give it 8, 9, 9, 7 (issue 1035, 2008/10/17). No wonder Gamers Kobe had no stock left on a Friday night.

bye bye DS Lite accessories

(tags game, hardware, Dual Screen)

My reaction: I don't want the Nintendo DSi, yet. Wake me up when there's a Pokemon version.

So when this thing comes out in a little less than a month from now (in the Japan region), probably all the DS Lite accessories will be gone. It's like trying to find a USB-based power charging cable for the GBA Micro. Impossible. I had to use Yahoo Auctions JP for that.

I am going to hoard the screen protectors and faceplates and cases (edit: and connector cap replacements).