the-inbetween.com

Quick Stuff

Started a new full-time gig today. Got a dental appointment Wednesday. Moving this weekend. Busy.

Gradius V rocks. Katamari Damacy is everything I expected it to be, which rocks and rolls. Paintball on Saturday was fun, but I'm feeling the major muscle strains now. Bruised in about a dozen places too, but it's the muscles that are killing me.

Started testing out my newish phone's crappy phonecam. Figured it was a good time to put that old flickr account to use too, so I moblogged a photo to, er, here I think. "moblog" is a stupid word. Maybe I'll post some more there this week.

All six of the discounted Cowboy Bebop DVDs finally arrived last week, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes out... today. Maybe I'll grab that.

I have not played Fable yet, but from what I've seen of it -- the more evil you play, the more evil you look. You grow horns, get tattoos, and that typical biker-gang stuff. Yawn. So much for freedom. Why can't you have an evil person that looks quite unassuming?

Watching Anime, Reading Manga : 25 Years of Essays and Reviews might be an interesting, quick read.

So who are the "stoned slackers" watching Jon Stewart?.

Busy.

Nintendo DS ads

I can finally follow up on my ponderings of Nintendo DS' ad campaign as the ads have now hit Japan. No surprise there. Some sort of Japanese J-Pop idol with keyhole cleavage and the slogan "TOUCH!" Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that kind of advertising works in Japan, but it seems kinda pointless to me. Doesn't do much for the brand.

I hope that they'd be a little more original over here. If their latest campaigns are an indicator, they probably will be. They should be. They need to be, because prior to the sales battle between the DS and the PSP, there will be the brand battle for mind-share. Nintendo can't afford to cruise through that conflict.

30 minute impressions: Guilty Gear X2#Reload

2D fighters are a genre that I just can't, no matter how much I try, get good at. There was a time when I was quite above-average at Street Fighter 2 Turbo -- which no doubt had a lot to do with having plenty of *human* competition at the time -- but even then I wasn't that great. Even then, I could not for the life of me beat the Arcade mode in the SNES version at the top two difficulty levels (what was it? 7-8 stars?) The fact is, I pretty much suck at 2D fighters.

Knowing this fact, I bought Guilty Gear XX#Reload.

Yeah. So, without delay, the computer opponents proceeded to pummel the snot out of me. But, hey, at least it looked cool when they did it.

I knew about the Guilty Gear games beforehand and I knew of their 2D graphics, but I had never played the games nor seen them in action. Now that I have, I have to say that the game is a wonder of 2D art and character design. Even as I was flailing around mindlessly, completely lost in the nuances of the fighting system, I couldn't help but admire the characters and their original moves and the backgrounds and the animations.

Considering how bad I sucked at my first attempt, that was about all I could admire. Will need to spend more time learning the system before I can even begin to make a conclusion about the game as a whole.

EA+XBL UI

Holy fuck does Burnout 3 eat up time. The crash mode challenges only take half a minute, but they're such a blast to play that you get caught saying "just one more" forty times in a row. It'd be so much better if those quick crashes weren't interrupted by slow loading screens and annoying EA radio, but those can easily be ignored as you get yourself amped up for the next million dollar crash.

Many people have already complained about the EAized Live experience, and I have no doubt that they're correct, so I'll leave that at that. The one thing that really irks me -- as a web dev -- is EA's really broken and stupid EA-XBL tag link form. It is one of the most b0rked forms that I have seen live. Fields randomly disappear. Certain values are "invalid" with no reason given. Usernames are invalid for the password retrieval despite showing up as being taken already. And, when the form is finally executed, I get a useless non-descript server error... only to be greeted with an email telling me that I have registered.

ARGG. FUCK YOU EA.

Good game though.

PS: Woooooo (though, as I have said multiple times in many places, that new Gehry World Cup looks like a freaking flower vase. blah).

City and Mr. Horse

Sad as it is, my camera has been grossly neglected. To make up for a lack of crappy photography, here's a small sample of crappy photos from the small batch of crappy photos taken over the summer.

Also:

No sir, I don't like it.

New Releases This Week

Bear in mind that this list is for the following five days (via EB):

1. Dog's Life
2. Guilty Gear X2 #Reload
3. Syberia II
4. Gradius V
5. Call of Duty: United Offensive
6. Advance Guardian Heroes
7. ShellShock: Nam '67
8. Sly 2: Band of Thieves
9. Fable
10. The Sims 2
11. Gungrave: OD
12. F-Zero: GP Legend

That's not even the complete list.

To this day, I don't think I've ever seen a more loaded release day for games (September 14th). Such an overloaded release schedule makes me wonder why some of the lesser publishers even bother. Surely, their niche titles could have done just as well -- if not better -- in the off-season. The summer release schedule was dry beyond belief. Couldn't have some of these titles filled that void?

I don't know, I can't figure it out.

The only consolation to this torrent is the fact that many of these titles are budget priced. In what is a growing (very welcome) trend, the prices of a lot of games is dropping. Some are hitting the budget price mark of 20 USD, others are coming in at 30 USD -- including Gradius V -- but whatever the price, most are considerably less than the former standard of 40 to 50 USD. Of the games listed above, only two are at $50: Sims 2 and Nam '67. Thank god I'm interested in neither one of those.

One would hope that with increasing sales volumes, such prices will become more and more standard. They will make such release schedules more manageable.

Hunting

Apartment hunting is an annoying, annoying task. You spend time and money to get yourself half-way across the city to scope out an apartment... only to be greeted by a really stubborn lock that required a coating of WD40 to open. And if that wasn't enough, greeting you within that apartment is a nice dead mouse.

"Yeah, I don't think this place is for me."

Which was too kind of a thing to say.

By suburban standards, the area was ghetto. But by more urban standards, it had "character". It was an area of contrasts. An area right on the border between lower-income residences and hipster loft spaces. Granted, all big cities have such contrasts -- but having lived my life in the suburbs, I have not experienced such sudden changes in landscape. In the ten minute walk to the train station, I walked from a rat and roach infested apartment to a hip warehouse space containing new media companies and freaking Nelvana studios.

I really need to get out of the suburbs.

Treasure to Treasure

In the last week and a half, I have played through Astro Boy: The Omega Factor two and a half times. This is actually a fault of the game.

You have to go through everything twice -- and repeat certain parts some more in an annoying fetch quest -- before you can finally get to the true end of the game. There are some interesting variations in the second play-through, but they are all story related (it's done in a clever, if simple, way) as all the stages are identical (with a little bit of a difficulty increase). These fetch quests and forced repeats do not work for the for the type of game Astro Boy is.

Ignoring those annoyances, the game is a solid throw-back to classic gaming. Just some good old fashioned punching, kicking, flying, and shooting. Simple and very fluid, with a good challenge if you want it.

It definitely feels like a title that wouldn't have been out of place during Treasure's 16-bit heyday. This bodes well for Treasure's other (half) project, Gradius V, because upon hearing its soundtrack, my frothing demand has increased.

It's not the best soundtrack ever -- not even in the genre* -- but it builds anticipation well. The best in the genre would, arguably, be Hitoshi Sakimoto's other shooter score: Radient Silvergun, which I have neither played nor *fully* heard.

Curious as to what else he had scored, I searched for more information on Hitoshi Sakimoto (discography). I was suprised. Not only is he working on Final Fantasy XII now, be he also did the Final Fantasy Tactics games, Vagrant Story, and pretty much all of the Ogre Tactics games -- including a role as co-composer for one of my favourite SNES scores, the original Ogre Battle.

These facts I have likely encountered before, but for some reason his name never stuck with me. Not within the, er, namespace that contains Koshiro, Mitsuda, Iwata, Kondo, Yamamoto, and Tanaka at least.

/me takes note of "Sakimoto".

In related Treasureness: Treasure's latest, Guardian Heroes Advance, is scheduled to be released on the same day as Gradius V. odd.