Arcade: Dark vs Light and July 15, 2014

Arcade Project 03: Dark vs Light

(based on my post at my  gaming blog)

This is the "classic" game room from the 90's.

This is one of the more bright of the "Dark" room style.  I can totally understand people wanting to have this.  THIS is visually what they remember as younger people.  If I was planning on having a detached garage room, or a full basement conversion, THIS is what I'd aim for as well.  The idea for the concept I'm doing now though is turning an extra room into an arcade room.  The room can't be too outlandish, like you're stepping back into the 80's or 90's, it has to be a room that "belongs" with the home.  I looked at some home theater rooms that did not look "dark" to me.  I came across gold and red rooms that looked like old theaters, and I realized why people like that.  They look great when they're lit up.   So I found myself an easily paintshopped room, and did a series of concepts:

The first one is the room done in dark, and dammit if I don't like it.  Still, like I said, too dark, too otherworldly.  I want to cover those walls in galaxy artwork, I want that ceiling to have a LED star field.  The second one I liked better.   Gold is a bit gaudy for me, and red hurts my eyes in abundance, so I toned both down to wood color and maroon.  Ignore the carpet, its just there for color reasons, I have other carpets I want to try that are not suited for painting into something like this.  Anyway, the 3rd one is my favorite concept and may end up being much more what the room will look like.  I put the accessories down there so I could get a mental image of how they'd look, and it led to me wanting more white in the room.

I have one last room concept I want to try, but it will take a lot of time to do and probably look horrible, but I found a "dark" movie room that I'm obsessed with how nice it looks for how "simple" it actually is.  I want to try and get the concept done in the lighter red/wood/white color scheme.  You may see it.. if it doesn't look like complete garbage.

July 15, 2014

Final Fnatasy 6 has a famous opera scene.  While the game has only a couple of scenes of it, the opera was finished in its entirety by Uematsu(the sound guy), and is thus the first full opera ever written for an interactive medium such as video games.  I remember thinking it was very neat when I first played through the game, but as the years went by, I got "used" to it.  I remember over half a decade back when I played through the game last that I was not very impressed and kind of let down that time hadn't been kind to it.  This time though... this time, when she starts walking up the tower, I lost it.  I saw for the first time what the Opera scene was foreshadowing, and I realized how it was telling me how Maria was NOT Celes, and how their stories contrasted.  I can't go further into it because someone that reads these has not played through FF6 yet.  Its just sad that it may take a 2nd time playing it for anyone to realize how touching and emotional the scene really is.

The EVO Street Fighter 4 champion won with a PS1 controller.  Two of the finalists were controller based players, which is the most ever to get into the top 8.  This year was interesting.  Before EVO, there was a new version of Street Fighter out.  There was a huge fuss over the Japanese players(the primary tournament winners all over the world) calling a lot of characters low tier while Euro and American players were ranking them high.  There was a lot of "Japanese know what they're talking about" stuff going on... and then the Japanese players got knocked out very early... like Daigo, the greatest ever, got 48th.  So the Japanese players got put out by people playing characters they never play against in Japan(literal Japanese Syndrome), and then controller based players make a huge set of gains for their "art".  Unfortunately this means all the news out EVO was not about amazing fights.

I figured I'd take advantage of Netflix having a handful of anime series and so while writing or cleaning, I've had some first episodes playing in the background.  I am not an anime die hard, I'm picky.  Netflix bought "Knights of Sidonia" to be a Netflix "original" to go with its other original programming.  I was disappointed in this show from the start.  The animation is terrible, and the overused CGI is stuttery.  The story is your run of the mill alien invasion story with a boy protagonist who is the only hope to save humanity blah.  The show is very inanimate with no motion a lot of times, or stiff motion, and it just ends up not being very exciting.