Sept 3rd 2014 and World Inspirations

(Christope Vacher, Untouched Garden)

Yesterday I talked about my Dungeons and Dragons world I am working on.  I said that I get to lean on the crutch that is "classic fantasy" cliches because it was meant to be a typical D&D fantasy world.  I did not intend to make it sound boring.  I do have some features added in.  One of those are the Floating Isles that might define the setting.  These large floating stones are scattered around the planet with no explanation of what they are.  Even the gods refuse to speak about them.  Much of the History I wrote pertains to what these stones really are, and it is something the players will not know, but may find out if they adventure in the world long enough.  Anyway, these stones have existed since before recorded time and even oral traditions that survive to today.  They are as part of the world as The Moon.  There are songs sung about them, legends attributed to them, even an Astrology like study of them for scrying, fortune telling and moral advisory.  Its not weird for their world, they have simply always been.  Recent scientific study of them has proved they move without traveling, that they have a forcefield about them that prevents dirt from accumulating or harm to come to them(except for the famous Halfling "living" stone that supports grass and has celebrated picnics upon it).  There's lots of little details and let me tell you they ALL have meaning, they ALL have history, they ALL have reasons to them and explanations.  That's part of the reason why there is so many pages dedicated to this stuff despite the players never seeing or knowing it.  While I want the players have mysteries, NOTHING is left a mystery to me, nothing is added in "just because", it is all known to me so that I'm prepared to have answers if I need them.

(Christope Vacher, The Sentinels)

It was the work of Christophe Vacher that inspired me in this new world.  I have known his work for over a decade now, and it has influenced some of my D&D ideas here and there, but never on the massive scale that this new world takes it.  His amazing paintings featuring floating isles near land were always so fascinating to me, and actually played a part in me calling "floating blocks" in Minecraft to be good luck omens.  Other works of fiction,  from Magic The Gathering to Ni No Kuni have inspired parts of the world also, but in my head it is Vacher's landscapes that have me visualizing the world as I type.  Brendon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss have equal parts to do with how magic goes, while Ni No Kuni added a bit of Shinto to the primal nature of "nature magic".  Slayn's shop in Lodoss War and the Hootiques in Ni No Kuni inspired me to add the first "magic shops" I have ever put in a home-brew campaign world of my making.  Of course you'll see Tolkien influence with the Elves.  Its just hard to not do a "split Elven" kingdom, which EVERYONE seems to do since Tolkien did it, I will just strike this up as homage to Tolkien and ease my creative conscience :P  I'm doing this for a small group of friends after all, I"m not making money or profiting by it, so what does it hurt.

(Chrstophe Vacher, The Frontier)

September 3rd, 2014

I was almost snarky yesterday.  I had such Nerd-peen and correction fever that I almost signed up for an account at a certain game news forum just so I could call their "Lead Tech" guy out on not knowing shit.  People go to this guy for purchasing advice, after all.  He did a mid-range PC build and almost none of his choices make any sort of sense.  His reasons made just enough sense or sounded just good enough that people that don't know any better would nod and agree  I can deal with that, I"m fine with people making computer choices that I don't agree with.  What got me riled up though was that he chose a computer case that pretty notoriously does not have space for a CD-Rom drive, and yet with his list was an entire page detailing that he personally still needs a drive and that this one was worth its expense.  I WAS NOT going to call him an idiot or threaten his life, I was simply going to post "and where are you going to fit that drive?" and see if he changed his article.  That's his job, he's a tech guy for a website on the internet.  A couple of times a week he writes a few paragraphs.  While I don't expect him to know everything, he could at least research what he's writing about.  I realized though that it wasn't the end of the world, and it wasn't worth the effort just for me to be a smart ass... at least not this time.

I watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the feature film recently.  There was actually a set of cartoons just called Star Wars: Clone Wars before the 3rd movie came out.  It was done by Genndy Tartakovsky, the guy behind Samurai Jack.  It is a cartoon, where as the newest one is computer animated.  This new one was done by a different team altogether, and actually seems like it might be great.  The Tartakovsky series seems like something George Lucas had more a hand in, or rather the development team felt they needed to stay very close to Attack of the Clones.  I can not watch all of the Tartakovsky series because Anakin is his whiney self, just like in Attack of the Clones.  No effort was put forth to make him a more likable character, the person doing the voice is immitates his whine.  In the newer "Star Wars THE Clone Wars" it feels like the crew really attempted to fix Anakin Skywalker and make him something people would like.  It feels like the team really wanted to try and correct how bad the prequels were, and from what I hear from people that watched the whole thing, they succeed to an extent.  Give the movie a shot and decide for yourself if the show might be worth taking a look at.  

Milkyway in its Super-cluster

If I had a true appreciation of mathematics, I would have been an astronomer, plain and simple.  From my first book of astronomy to the opening scenes of Star Trek Next Gen, I have always loved the universe and craved new sights and new photos of it.  I have probably still not recovered from the heartbreaking realization that I do not like math enough to devote my life to finding these things out.  You can even read in that article that scientists had to subtract the expansion of the universe and map the flow of galaxies.  They did not do this using photos, they did this by analyzing thousands of pages of printed data.  The same goes for finding planets.  People think they take pictures and maybe squint their eyes... but no, all planets found so far have been found by math, and only a few have been imaged in visual light AFTER being found using math.  My next love would be history.  History I could do, history played to my strengths.  When I ran out of resources to find out new information about our world(my elementary days were pre-internet access after all), I made up my own histories for role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. 

Sep 2nd, 2014

September 2nd, 2014

(Christophe Vacher, The Messengers)

Interview after interview of the creator of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, seems to come out lately and a clear fact comes out:  Final Fantasy 6 was his masterpiece and the poor guy does not even realize it.  I have thought for many a year that Final Fantasy 6 was sort of a black sheep in Japan.  When you read that Famitsu, the biggest name in gaming magazines in Japan(which still make bank there), does polls and asks opinions, it seems Final Fantasy 5 is the favored one over there in the SNES era.  In two interviews recently he has expressed surprise at the gaming blog "reporter" asking so many questions about FF6 instead of FF7.  He sees FF6 as a sort of failure in the west because it did not sell well.  He claims that one of the reasons they went "big" with FF7 and did away with 2D sprites, and spent $100 million on advertising was because FF6, according to Sakaguchi, didn't sell well here.

The other day I posted about all the new technologies converging in computers.  The stuff is still so new that they would add way over $1000 for the components that are first gen of their tech, which means they aren't hugely more powerful.  What it really means is that we're coming to an end to "patch in just a little more power" to an older system.  A Z77/Z87 platform computer will need to resort to extreme measures to keep up with Z97 and newer platforms.  Pushing DDR3 to DDR4 speeds will involve high voltage overclocking.  Non-G sync video cards will require overclocking as they still try to draw as many frames per second as possible instead of only drawing what is needed.  Many mid and lower CPU's were not created with the idea of PCI-E channels being used for things like Hard drives, and if you're rocking dual or quad videocards trying to keep up graphical power you probably will not have the lanes for a new SSD.  All this overclocking and extra stress put on the motherboard is going to reduce the computer's life for only marginal power upgrades.  I speak from experience.   I played Fallout 3 and Mass Effect on a system that was maxed out SDRAM(non-DDR!), a super overclocked single core processor, a IDE connected Velociraptor Hard drive, a PCI-E videocard re-engineered to fit in an AGP slot, power cable adapters to work with the new SATA and 6/8 pin connectors.  All these "patches" individually were more expensive than the better working upgrades, but could be done one at a time instead of a whole upgrade.  It gave this computer about 1 extra year of life before it burned down and melted.

On the D&D world building side of things, I have completed the World History notes portion of my planning.  It clocked in at 25 pages of single spaced, size 8 font.  If you are potentially one of my players, do not let this scare you.  This is a lot of information and notes that players will never have to know.  It is part of the equation in the world that gives reason to many of the current events.  I would say that 50% of it is stuff that no one living in the game world knows.  Later I will take World History, Magic Theory, Government profiles, Class Write ups etc and trim each of them down, combining them into a small "player knowledge packet" with only a couple of paragraphs per page and some artwork to set the mood correctly.  Its not my first rodeo, and I would classify the amount of information for this world to be "medium" in size.  Its a take on the "classic" fantasy D&D world, leaning on cliche is ok because people want it to feel like D&D, so its easy to fill the world out.   Why do so much work if only I will ever know what it contains?  Well sometimes weird shit happens.  Sometimes you have a player cast some sort of lore finding spell on a statue that has nothing to do with the story, but I will want to be able to talk about where it came from, who made it, why its there, and why it is important/unimportant.  Also I find it fun.  In fact, world building is my favorite part of the D&D experience.  The more world I build, the more "open" and "sandbox" the game can be.

Experience Points 04: Quad and September 1st, 2014

Experience Points 04: Side Story

The Gaia/Blazer/Creation Series

(original larger post here)

Quintet was Enix's "go to" developer near the early days of the SNES.  Soul Blazer is the least amazing looking of the 3, but it probably has my favorite gameplay "gimmick".  In Soul Blazer you are given the task of finding and liberating a soul that is important to an area, and after liberating it, you start seeing the town grow and mature over time.  Illusion of Gaia was made a bit differently than most action RPG's.  There is a linearity to it, leaving previously visited areas of the game unreachable for the rest of the game, this gets rid of the traditional "sandbox" style of gameplay that is expected with this genre. The masterpiece of the series and Quintet's crowning achievement was Terranigma.  Again the protagonist rescues a dying world that has been devastated by a war between 2 gods, and instead of rescuing towns like in Soul Blazer, you're reviving entire sections of a world.  Until I saw the "chip" enhanced games Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean, I chose Terranigma as the most impressive 2-D achievement on the SNES, the game is beautiful.

 The "series" has its own Enigma, one I had not realized despite it being a personal favorite of mine.  There is a game called Granstream Saga, a game I rented and later had to own myself.  In the early days of the Playstation, many games were 3-D-kinda-sorta, but not.  One of the first fully polygon RPG's I played was Granstream Saga, and it had beautiful anime cutscenes to help the story along.  If you are a fan of overhead Legend of Zelda and Secret of Mana games, this series is a must play.  While they fall short at various points to being as good as those series, they all have enough great gameplay and awe inspiring(for the era) sequences.  By the time you get to Terranigma, they are doing some things that just aren't seen in some games, and by then were pros at using the hardware.  The Trilogy is only a loose one, so you do not need to start at the beginning, you can choose where you want to start and go from there.

The reason why less is known about the series is that Soul Blazer was released in very little numbers here, and Terranigma was left in Europe, as Enix was not finding as much success in North America and thought the cost of marketing in our stores would not lead to enough profit, if any.  Its a loss and a rather large hole in our gaming knowledge that should be revisited as these types of games are given new life in the indie scene of today.

September 1st, 2014

Starting out with something light hearted.  Never let anyone tell you that Europe has a more progressive tax set up(keep with me, this is neat/silly).  They have what is called a V.A.T. which stands for Value Added Tax, and if you have ever dealt with shipping things to the European Union(of which I did quite a bit of), you have to deal with this.  In the EU, things frquently travel across boarders to finish assembly elsewhere.  Europe has a Tax set up so that at every part of the creation process where value is added, they tax it.  Add paint, V.A.T.  Add two separate pieces together, V.A.T.  Ok, this leads to some pricey taxes that businesses like to get around.  Enter the GREAT BISCUIT/CAKE WAR.  Biscuits of course being "cookies" to us in the U.S.  See, there is this thing called a Jaffa Cake that is popular in Britain.  The catcj is, Cakes do not get V.A.T., causing them to be cheaper.  Cookies, however, do get V.A.T.  The makers of Jaffas consider their product a cake, the European Union sued them, saying that the name didn't mean jack, it was a cookie.  They went to court, where it was decided that a definition of a cookie and a cake was needed.  In the end, the Jaffa was indeed classified as the less taxable cake.  Why?  Because if you leave a cookie on a counter, it gets softer as it grows stale.  If you leave a cake on a counter top, it gets hard as time passes.  They left a pack of Jaffa Cakes out on a table, and after a few days examined:  they grew hard like a cake.  Jaffa Cakes are not subject to the V.A.T. fees.

Ok.  So the decision for Nintendo to market their newest console as the Wii U was not the smartest of decisions.  Understand it or not, the truth is a high % of their Wii gamer base though the Wii U was an add on, and they had already been conditioned to ignore upgrades throughout the Wii life cycle.  You would think that with the upper management at Nintendo admitting it was a mistake, they would stop making decisions to confuse the hell out of their customers.  Enter the new 3DSLL.  Let's look at the past.  The Nintendo DS came out, and then there was the DSi and DSXL, both were just shape and style changes, but played the same games.  Then we got the 3DS, then a 3DSXL and the 2DS, both were just shape and style changes, they all played the same games.  Now we have the 3DSLL.  The 3DSLL looks like a larger 3DS, but has been upgraded, so now games made for the 3DSLL will only be usable by the 3DSLL.  The system looks the same.  There is no "3DS ADVANCE" name, there's ONE letter different in the name, the cartridges look the same.  How is this not going to confuse people?  They are literally splitting their market without having the balls to do a real new system.

Half a decade.  You all have had half a decade of consumer/enthusiast grade parity on PC tech, and I honestly do not think this has happened in my life time, let alone the past 20 years.  For half a decade your ram, CPU and GPU options have pretty much stayed similar.  The same slots, the same motherboards, the same tech in hard drives, and even GPU architecture is largely the same.  If you created a top of the line consumer PC 5 years ago, it would all look similar to the best you can get last week.  The end to this era starts this week.  Usually new tech trickles in fairly singularly, but we're having a converging storm of technology releases in the next year.  A new standard of RAM is being implemented that is not backwards compatible.  Monitors are going to need upgraded as videocards adopt "Active" and "G-Sync" refresh. Solid State Drive tech is set to plummet, and having 1 TB of SS storage is not going to break the bank.  Then there comes the new hard drive war for your PCI-E slots, with M-2, SATA Express, and a couple of other tech vying to win an update war to the SATA connect.  Not only motherboard layouts are changing, but cases are as well.  Both leaders of the gaming case market, Corsair and NZXT, are now releasing cases that do away with 5.25 inch drive bays(where your CD roms go).  They're using that space for radiators and hard drives..  Does this mean if you are building a high quality computer now that you should wait?  I would say no.   I know I rarely do 2 part posts in the bottom area, but this is getting long.  So tomorrow I'll explain what this means and why it doesn't make sense to spend so much to "future proof" your computer right now.

Experience Points OUTWest: 90-93 and August 27th, 2014

Experience Points: Once Upon a Time in the West 90-93

(Original, longer post here)

(I am not super knowedgeable about this era of PC gaming.  Most of these I am relating in context to the JRPG genre or are important culturally in video games as a whole, there are far too many games to talk about all of them here)

The RPG scene in the West in the 1980's was transcendental.  The start of JRPG's is rooted firmly in Ultima and Wizardry, influenced by Dungeons and Dragons, and fed by J. R. R. Tolkien.  The Western RPG scene of the early 90's has largely been... forgotten.  In Japan, the descendants of Ultima's overhead movement style were reigning supreme with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest(Warrior) adopting this style.  In the West, at this time, it was Wizardry's first person dungeon experience that took hold.

By this era, we are getting into the 2nd and 3rd generation of the Wizardry descendants.  Earlier titles practically required you to have a sheet of graph paper and a notebook to write down important information and map data while you played.  Popular releases in the Might and Magic series were released in this time, but Eye of the Beholder is one of the standout titles of this era that was ported to other systems such as the SNES.  Many consider it the pinnacle of the style in its era.  It used the multiple window view to have first person, tactical, and cutscene presentation.  It also used the Dungeons and Dragons license to base its gameplay on.  The Nintendo Entertrainment System also got a pretty popular title in this genre with the release of Swords and Serpents, a very scaled down version of this type of gameplay.

That is not to say that non-First person RPG's did not have some big releases.  Ultima 6 is arguably one of the biggest overhauls to PC RPG's outside of transitioning to 3D.  Its detailed overhead graphics caused many of its competitors to look dated and go back to the drawing board.  The "Gold Box" set of games were in full swing as well.  They began in 1988 with Pool of Radiance, but in this era that were more than 8 titles using the game engine to create adventures with the Dungeons and Dragon licenses and various worlds including Forgotten Realms, DragonLance, and Dark Sun.

In the end, it was Technology and the rise of the JRPG that caused this era of gaming to be largely "forgotten".  With real time tactical overhead/Isometric/3D combat, and first person shooters, making the gameplay of these titles seem very old and clunky, the genre took a nose dive in a short amount of time.  What's more is that the gameplay still feels clunky and is hard for new players to pick up and become fans.  There have been a few revivals(including the critically acclaimed Grimrock), but few successful attempts have been made to bring back this era.

August 27th, 2014

So Hello Kitty is not a cat.  There's a 40th Anniversary celebration going on in Japan and with it there's a lot of new articles about the... cartoon character.  SO brace yourself, you're about to get schooled:  Hello Kitty is a cartoon character of a little girl.  Her name is Kitty White, and she's British.  Seriously, she lives outside of London.  She has a twin sister named Mimmy that does own a cat that looks exactly like her... so... there's that.  She has never been officially depicted on all 4's, and never shown with a tail.  It is said she started showing up in the asian areas of San Francisco in the 70's, where she is seen as very important to the kids that grew up there, as they saw her as "their Mickey mouse".

Shigeru Miyamoto is the "grandfather" of Japanese video games.  He's the creator of Mario, Zelda, and so many other games and is a major reason for Nintendo(and videogames) being successful today.  The Wii was one of those "flukes" of history, just like World of Warcraft, it did numbers that no one expected and no one can replicate in today's market, even though they spend millions and millions trying.  I, and many others, have said that the Wii "boom" was populated by the buying power of non-gamers.  Like the NES of old, it was the "it" thing for people to gift to other people, and it was cheap enough that people could impulse buy it.  The Wii, the Iphone, and Facebook became the driving force of the cash cow known as "casual" gamers.  Recently the gaming industry has gotten fed up with that group for a number of reasons.  First, they do not want to play above 99 cents even for full games(this is part the dev's fault for pushing so many free to play and then pay-but-still-pay-more scams), and then they get confused about the Wii U, and also do not purchase it as an "upgrade", leaving Nintendo is a very deep hole.  Miyamoto recently made comments lamenting the lack of motivation for "casual" players to buy new things, and experience gaming rather than watching a movie.  Pop-culture is fickle, and favor can turn on a dime(ask the Xbox team), Nintendo has a faithful crowd and they need to make sure that crowd is served before the others, because you're going to turn around and those others are going to be on to the next big thing.  For all the faults and hoops you have to jump through to make a "core" gamer happy, the one thing that is for certain is that they are consistant.  The "core" gamer that spent money on you in the past will be there to spend it on you in the future and will influence their friend's purchasing habits.

(I refuse that "core" is short for Hardcore when its used for gaming, most industry people that matter mean it as the middle, the focus audience that gives you the backbone to develop the rest of your business off of)

Still having a blast in Ni No Kuni.  One of the striking things about this game is how different all the towns are.  I look back at a lot of games in the PS2 and SNES era, and really the towns reused a lot of the same assets(the PS1 era's static pre-rendered screens actually had a lot of variety).  I find myself not only wanting to advance the story, but also I want to see what the next town's culture, leaders, and architecture is like.  There is a silliness to it that so few game companies get right, and yet even though they are based in silly, they are very magnificent to see.  Again I find myself wanting to be able to take screenshots while I play because it feels like I"m on an adventure and I want to share my travels with people.

August 26, 2014

August 26, 2014

Studio Ghibli has tried very hard to increase its pool of directors, and especially groom younger directors so that it would have a future if its main directors were to retire.  Ghibli has had 2 main directors over the years, the wonderfully fanciful Hayao Miyazaki and the more serious Isai Takahata.  Takahata creates much less successful, but very important films about serious subjects and dramas with very little fantasy.  In the middle between these was a man named Yoshifumi Kondo.  He had worked with Ghibli for a long while, and headed up the animation departments on works going all the way back to Lupin III before Ghibli was officially created.  He also did some work for Western studios, doing key animation for The Wuzzles and Little Nemo.  The Ghibli curse struck after his first movie as a director was released, he died of a heart attack which is blamed on his intense work ethic.  A claim that would cause Miyzaki to persue a  more relaxed release schedule for his movies.  Whisper of the Heart was his only movie as a director, and its a light hearted drama that reminds me in parts of Kiki's Delivery Service, but all the fanciful parts take place in the main character's mind as she thinks of wonderful stories she would like to write.  As an homage to Kondo, Studio Ghibli would turn the story the protagonist thinks of into its own movie a few years later with "The Cat Returns".

There is some confusion as to the Bucky Ball "Ban" that has elicited outrage from the internet as of late.  People seem to think the government banned the product altogether and that now people with them have illegal property or some such.  The truth is, the marketing of these magnets as toys has been banned.  Bucky Ball shut down the factory in a fit of rage as places like Toys'R'Us and ThinkGeek decided that selling something no longer sellable as "toys" would not fit into their plans.  You can still buy their competitor's versions on science websites, Sharper-Image type stores, and Amazon.  Why can't they be sold as toys?  These are "rare earth" magnets that are about the size of a marble, and are sold in blocks of several dozen. These magnets are also called Neodymium magnets and they are VERY strong.  I have giant ones in my super light bass amp cabinets, that allow my single 12 inch, 25 pound cabinet to sound stronger than the 99 pound 4 speaker cabinets I had before.  I once saw a photo of when someone kept 2 magnets of several pounds each within 10 foot of each other, they collided and smashed his hand.  These are powerful magnets... and people are swallowing them.  In all instances, 100% of the people who have swallowed more than one has had to have extreme invasive emergency surgery.  These magnets are so strong, they pull the iron out of your blood.  Remember X-men 2 where Magneto does that?  These little ball magnets are strong enough to do that when inside you.  People that swallow more than one have them rip their intestines, LITERALLY to shreads as they pass through and just break the walls apart.  I'm not one to be all "nanny" state, but the horrific consequences of accidental ingestion is just too terrible.  So I can understand the ban on them being sold as toys.  Again, they aren't banned in general, and the government didn't force the company to stop making them.

I'm posting this on my Facebook feed later, so sorry if you are tired of hearing about it.  Nintendo made a GENIUS move with the newest Smash Bros. game.  If you know me, I dislike the franchise immensely.  Its the fighting game all my friends would rather play than get good at actual fighting games.  Anyway.  The newest roster was leaked and one of the final reveals, probably the last planned reveal as its a hell of a "kicker", is the dog from Duck Hunt.  Yes.  The dog everyone tried to shoot and many people have hated for years and years is going to be in a fighting game.  How had this not happened before?  I would be tempted to get tournament level proficient with it just to troll my casual fighting game friends.  If I'm going to be miserable while everyone plays a shitty game, I might as well be able to have fun... making them miserable too :P

Experience Points 02 MiJ 90-93 and August 25, 2014

Experience Points: 02 Meanwhile in Japan 1990-93

(Experience Points 01 Prime 90-93 here)

(Longer version of this post here)

One of the things you have to realize when we talk about RPG's from Japan is that their release schedules are extremely fast in their homeland.  While we have to have translations and deals made with publishers and sometimes marketing and store shelf negotiations, Japan is still making the games.  During these years, a new Final Fantasy was a once in a 3-4 year event, something that was celebrated by the gaming community as a milestone.  In Japan, they were getting them almost yearly.  Many franchises had 2-4 releases in a 3 year period.  The word "churned" is used a lot about the JRPG industry in Japan at this time.  Not all releases were quality.

Speaking of Final Fantasy games, Japan had 3 titles get released during this time.  I already talked about Final Fantasy IV(2) in the American section, but Japan also got Final Fantasy 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and before the era was over they also got Final Fantasy 5.  Final Fantasy 1, 3 and 5 all follow a trend of having a small cast that you keep through most of the game, and allowing you to choose how the cast fights by changing or choosing their "class".  Final Fantasy 2, 4, and 6 all had a very large cast of characters, and their classes were set in stone, a part of their personality.  There are a couple of reasons we never did not get a quick translation and import of the games here in the West.  First, the class change systems were thought too complex for our little Western minds, second, Final Fantasy 3 in particular was seen as a ripoff of Dragon Warrior 3, and Final Fantasy 5 was not seen as a large enough "leap" in style and content; they assumed we would be bored of the "same old same old"

Other JRPG's of the era include those in the Megami Tensei franchise.  This series is known for its multiple releases and spinoffs a year.  Many times the spinoffs propel the franchise to even greater fame, one of the few franchises that actually thrives off spinoffs.   The original, Digtial Devil Story: Megami Tensei, got its sequel in this era.  The spinoff Shin Megami Tensei started its run, and grew more popular than the original series.  On the Gameboy, Megami Tensei: Last Bible parts 1 AND 2 were released.  Dragon Quest became a culture phenom in Japan with part 3, but that ended a trilogy.  So the new trilogy got started with Dragon Warrior 4 AND 5 getting releases in this span of 3 years.

On the Tactical side of things, Japan has a MASSIVE boom of tactical RPG's.  Langrisser continued in popularity, but many franchises started that added more regular RPG elements, forcing Langrisser to follow suit.  Shining Force got FOUR releases as the premier Sega developed TRPG.  Fire Emblem also got its start, staying close to Nintendo's side.  It was seen more simple than Langrisser, but also more approachable.  Super Robot Wars is another franchise popular in Japan that we never got.  This time it was due to the copyright issues outside of Japan.  You see, Super Robot Wars is a mash up TRPG about pitting popular anime mecha from television and movies, against each other.  It would not be until the team made a completely original game for the Game Boy Advance that we would see them.

This era is knee deep in an era described as a being full of mediocre RPG's that were probably best left in Japan.  There are dozens I have not listed here, as I am trying to keep them relevant to us here in the West, I am sticking with series that will one day affect us.  Next time on Experience Points I will talk about Western Developed RPG's of this time.

August 25, 2014

Ni No Kuni has an ancient, magical alphabet that was used by a previous civilization.  It has a couple of "complication" in its rules for translating, but in general it is pretty easy to utilize.  The game also does not automatically translate it for you.  The book has several pieces of it, and you'll find it all around the world as well.  My first translation was for the "old stick" you get at the beginning of the game.  I can go online and just see the translation myself, but I've already said that Ni No Kuni is a kind of "experience", and just going online would cheapen it.  I want to do it as Ollie would, so I sit down and write out the words and translate them by hand.  It is like a puzzle as well, since there are no spaces or punctuation, and some letters are combined or lost when going to English.  It is really fun, and I would suggest you all experience the fun of doing it yourself as well.

Can't decide if Twitch being bought by Amazon instead of Google is... better?  I am glad that Youtube will still have a competitor, and the team in charge of Youtube can't seem to stop screwing up, so maybe some good competition will have them fire some idiots and stop being such idiots.  The two biggest problems at Google these days is that while G+ has one of the best dev teams ever assembled, they got idiots pulling the strings and forcing it down everyone's throats... and the 2nd problem is that the Youtube team can't stop being assholes.  Seriously, like Google moving into any industry is one of the happiest things I can think of, I'm just a Google-fanboy I guess... but damn did they screw up G+ by forcing people to do things and forcing changes people didn't want for the sake of propping up Youtube.  I'm just worried because Amazon doesn't have anything really to handle this... but then again maybe that means they'll let Twitch stay more independent but with better resources to handle its stuff?  Really I just want G+ and Youtube to be as good as they could be.

As I've said several posts before, we're watching Lodoss Wars.  Something about the show feels so familiar and so nostalgic... but that's weird because I was probably around 22 when I first saw it.  So I was thinking about it, and I realize now what it was.  When it was animated and adapted for release over here in the States, the cartoons of my childhood were very popular.  This means that they used many of the voice actors from those shows, particularly Thundercats, the cast is FULL of people that did voices in Thundercats, from the Knight of Hook Mountain to Wiley Kit, and several of the "bad guys" of the show too.  On top of that, the sound recordings are about the same quality, and even uses a lot of the "royalty free" sounds and music that they used to fill out parts of the show that in Japan they just left silent.  One last, weird nostalgic thing; I prefer the worse quality, low resolution version lol.  Its for the same reason I prefer the older versions of "Legend".  The fuzziness that surrounds things, the bloom that light effects have, is more "fairy tale" and "magical" to me than the hard, crisp lines of HD transfers.  It is NOT a common decision for me, that's literally the two I can think of off the top of my head.  Legend and Lodoss War... SD preferred.

Weekend of August 22nd, 2014

Weekend of August 22nd, 2014

I was very skeptical about about this "spaghetti squash" thing.  You see, I hate pumpkin.  Anything that smells like a candle heating a rotting pumpkin is going to churn my stomach.  This also means that I can't stand butternut squash.  Still, looking for good, new foods, I decided to try my hand at one.  It started out... bad, because you have to open it up and scoop out the seeds, which look and smell a lot like the "guts" in a pumpkin.  After it was roasted and scooped into a bowl though, the pumpkin smell was gone and what was left was delicious.  Its a slightly sweet, but still nutty flavor, and it does surprisingly well with savory ingredients.  In this case I used butter, black pepper, and Parmesan cheese, which was really really good.  I could see this stuff doing great with saffron or Rice-a-roni seasonings.

I was very disappointed in what I finally saw presented as "Thornwatch" from Penny Arcade.  I understand that the artist's first RPG was Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed, and I know he's not very happy about the change to 5th(you're not a D&D fan until you are pissed over an edition change), but I was hoping his concept would somehow end up something I would care to play.  His concept was that your character was a deck of cards, built and played like that of a Magic: The Gathering deck, and that you would play a role playing game using card draws to decide how you fight and do things.  Sounds great.  Well unfortunately the main people helping him with his game are hardcore tactical wargaming people, people that see RPG's as "winning or losing" and so combine that with his love of 4th D&D, and you basically get a board game, complete with strict "square by square" movement, and preset challenges and obstacles.  I suddenly don't care that it has taken him almost half a decade to really get down and work on it.  The lore is certainly great though, and the artwork is good too, I may get the main game just so I can play in the world with a different system.  Maybe, just maybe I can get past my disappointment and find the game itself enjoyable... but if I want a collectible card game adventure I have Lord of the Rings and Pathfinder Card Adventures to choose from already.

I love the Windows Phone UI.  I have an android phone and I wouldn't trade the Android app store for anything, but I love the user interface of Windows Phone, so I have a UI skin.  The problems with Windows Phone is the lack of apps made for it, because no one buys apps, so no one makes them.  Well, some genius at Microsoft decided that the amount of apps they can advertise is more important than the actual apps.  To drive up those numbers they can advertise, they now give anyone $100 for any app, whatsoever, that is put in the Microsoft store, up to $2000.  This has caused there to be a glut of apps with misleading names that are literally links to other apps or websites.  You download Swiftkey for Windows Phone, and all the app is, is a link to Swiftkey's website.  Someone made $100 dollars doing that.  There are thousands of wallpapers that auto-install to the background that cost $1.  So for a few hours of work, you make $2000, unmoderated, from Microsoft just so they can inflate their numbers.  Microsoft has yet to show any initiative to clear apps from their store that are scams, people track this stuff, if 20,000 apps were removed from the store because they are $1 wallpapers or link-scams, people would know.  That would deflate their app number advertisement campaigns though.