I’ve given up on making any more puzzles. I don’t have enough CPU usage whilst I am doing homework and other stuff. I’ve given up on reviews. They’re just too tedious to do RL comes back every 5 seconds to bug me to oblivion. So I guess all that I’ve been doing is DLing anime, and playing games.

Speaking of games, I’ve fallen in love with 2 games. Imagine Online was a failure to me. The gameplay was too slow for anyone that plays decent MMOs nowadays. I could walk faster in Maple Story. And although I find that having an actual story in an MMO to be interesting, it doesn’t live up to the Shin Megami Tensei name, and deserves to die in hell (pun not intended).

Anyways, where was I? Ah yes, the two games that I have fallen in love with. Both of them are MMOs again, but I know that these games are not as slow as Imagine. First up, I have Granado Espada, on in the Western Hemisphere, The Sword in the New World. The Western name sound gay and it’s too long, so I’ll stick with Granado Espada, or GE. Granado Espada is what you can expect from a nicely designed Korean MMO. Lots of grind-tastic fun. Thankfully, almost everything about it is different. The background is not wholly some fantasy world, like what we have seen with DOMO and MS and WoW. The game mixes regular fantasy world with French Renaissance period together. NO LONGER DO WE HAVE KNAVES BUT MADAMOISELLES AND MONSIEURS!!!! The music is amazing. A lot of it mixes up classical with techno/trance/house; two to four of my favorite genres of music. And probably the most defining difference in Granado Espada is the three characters system. Instead of the measly single character that you control in a lot of games, GE lets you control three characters at the same time. They could be two tanks and a spellcaster in the back, for a wall formation, or your regular noob formation, a scout for healing, a long-ranged, and a short-ranged characters. Of course, this game still has its quirks, it is refreshing with the change of scenery and battle system. Ahh, change….

The second game is Survival Project. Just the name of it enough to make my mouth foaming with happiness and ecstasy. If anyone knows one of my other internet personas, then this is where the name had sprung forth from. All the English servers were shut down because the rights were sold to some other company, but thankfully the Korean servers are still up. I know what you’re all thinking. Korea = KSSN. BUT NO!!!! NOT WITH SURVIVAL PROJECT!!! At least not since November of 2008… One no longer needs a KSSN to make an account. One does need one for cash and trading, but you can play without. Of course I have my own KSSN, but I only just recently found out that the game is still up. I love the internet and Korea right now. Well, I guess that’s it for now. CYA.

I’ve got to start working on this place. Ever since I’ve got my external hard drive, I’ve been downloading an average of 10 anime series a month, which means I have plenty of material to write about, but then again, RL comes and kicks me in the head, and leaves me with piles of work to do. I worry about high school life, I can’t wait for college then. ‘shudders’

Well, I’ll defintely be doing some game reviews. Ever since I’ve been playing Megaten (or Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, for that care about the entire name), I’ve rekindled the fire I’ve had for MMOs, the spark I had before the consoles brainwashed me. Game reviews, defintely, more so that anime reviews, because game reviews are A LOT more easier to do.

But I’ve more that tripled that amount of content I can work on for anime reviews as compared to game reviews (most MMOs I can’t play because I have a computer from the Stone Age), so I’ll defintely try reviewing some anime reviews.

Anyways, it’s great to be back.

What I’m not happy is that my parents decided to use my birthday as an excuse to also host a pre-christmas party with their friends, thus reducing the capability of my birthday. God, that sounded so confusing just now.

Fortunately, I already got my birthday presents on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. They were: an empty Ministack v.3 external enclosure, and a Seagate 1TB HD. So now I am free of all my anime on my computer, so now I can download anime again!!! YAY SEAGATE!!!

Oh, if anyone does plan on buying a external hard drive enclosure, and want ultra fast speeds, I recommend the Ministack v.3. Sure it has the regular USB port, but it also has FireWire 400 and 800, and eSATA, which is the fastest so far. MUCH MORE FASTER THAN USB.

Also, I had planned on writing two anime reviews and two game reviews. However, for high school seniors and possibly some juniors, it’s college applications time, so I have no time at all. A regular person applies to about 5-10 schools. I’m applying to 16, so yeah… Screwed.

So that’s it.

BYE!!!!

The Touhou games is a series of rather unknown series of curtain fire shmups, also known as bullet hell shmups. The games are made by Team Shanghai, which is deceptively a single Taito employee nicknamed ZUN. The official games are released at Comiket occasionally, and the demos for the game are available at the official Touhou site, but I just find it easier to find a free full version of the games along with the translation patch.

The graphics of this game are nothing short of spectacular, although the background does repeat itself quite forever-ish. The manga-ish feel of the characters, along with well-drawn extremely repetitve background and the colorful attacks of both your attacks and the enemies’ attacks make for an eye-gasm, exclusive for certain people only.

The avatar you control is a girl that can shoot out magic pellets of energy. Like many other bullet hull/curetin fire shmups, the hit box is about half the size of your character, intended to trick the player into overexerting himself/herself. The enemies… are also girls, very dangerous girls who also have magical powers. There are other enemies, like pieces of flying magical paper, white birds that look like pieces of flying magical paper, and shuriken-like stars, but the majority of the enemies look like girls.

The music is very VERY good, if not almost perfect, for the game. It’s colorful. It’s fun to listen to. It complements whatever level you are playing. If you really like the music, there is often a music room mode that allows one to listen to the music, while reading an extremely brief explanation of what was going through the creator’s head while he was making the song.

There usually is a plot for each of the games, all in the land of Gensokyo. Like in Touhou #6, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, there’s a scarlet mist that was so strong that the affected areas became cold and dark. Reimu Hakurei, a shrine maiden, goes out to find out what is causing this problem. Another girl, Marisa Kirisame, hopes that the person casting this spell has some interesting items and sets out looking for that person to steal them. This is the basic plot of all the shmup games. Something bad happens in Gensokyo, and Reimu/Marisa/??? goes looking for the source of the problem, with the exception of Touhou #7.5, Immaterial and Missing Power(which isn’t a shmup at all; it is rather a fighting game), and #9.5, Shoot the Bullet (which is a different kind of shmup; you defeat bosses, as this one is a boss-only game, by taking pictures of them; think Fatal Frame shmup in a more fantasy-like world with enemies that can do more or less easy damage to you).

Now for gameplay, there is a lot to talk about. From the beginning, all four difficulties, from the pushover Easy to the extreme-hard-to-even-beat-the-first-stage Lunatic, are available for play. You can choose between two or three characters, each having two or three styles of play. They are moved using the arrow keys. They shoot by holding Z and they use bombs by pressing X. And starting from Touhou #7, by holding Shift while shooting, the character shoots a heavier, more damage-inflicting shot while sacrificing a bit of her speed.

While first-time players should start with Normal or Easy mode, Hard and Lunatic mode is where all the fun and frustration lies. As one can see above, each wave of enemies literally cover the screen with bullets. There is usually a very brief moment before the next wave comes. Now, when enemies are defeated, they drop red or blue squares. Collecting enough red squares will increase your rate of fire. However, I myself am still unclear on what the blue squares do. They may be Score Items. Also, in Touhou #7, Perfect Cherry Blossom, a Cherry score system is implemented. Defeating enemies will give you points, while using bombs or die with decrease points. And by getting 50,000+, the player is given a temporary shield. Also by having more points, the score items supposively give you more points, but I haven’t been paying much attention.

Each stage usually has two bosses, a miniboss and then the real boss. You can clearly see their Hit points on the top. You don’t really have to beat the miniboss (as it is timed), although by doing so, you may get either an extra bomb, or an extra item. During each boss battle, the timer will also start ticking. If you can survive the main boss’s attack until the end of the timer, you wil absorb all the energy balls/ lasers/ enemy projectiles on the screen as points, and the main boss will start a new attack.

Now, if Lunatic wasn’t hard enough, there is an extra mode called….. Extra Start. LOL. Extra Start is a lot more shorter than the regular Start mode, about the length of a regular stage or two, I think. HOWEVER, you are given only 1 life and no continues. Not only that, you will also be playing at about the difficulty of Lunatic mode. Biut if you do defeat Lunatic mode, you should play Extra Start because plotiwise, Extra Start is the continuation to the end of normal Start mode.

There is also a Practice Start mode, for those that want to “practice” for that extremely-high score without dying. This mode is recommended for those that play Hard and Lunatic diffiulty because it is near impossible to play those modes without losing a life or using a continue without predicting this attack beforehand, thus letting you get into position.

I almost forgot to mention. The games also allow one to record your plays. However, the set back is that one must not use their continues. One can also download replays of other people from the internet and play them, learning how one should play this game.

ZE FINAL STAND:

Play it. It’s fun for the first few hours, but most people play not for the fun, but for the feeling one gets for beating Lunatic or Extra mode without losing. If you are easily frustrated, do not play this game. If you like shmups, play this game. If you find controlling a magical girl instead of the usually airplane or spaceship weird, do not play this game.

Toribash is a turn-based fighting game utilizing ragdoll physics. It was released on March 2, 2006 and developed by Hampus Söderström AKA Hampa. It is currently shareware for the PC, Mac, and Linux. However, a Wiiware version of the game is rumored to be coming out soon, as the developer had playtested and compared the hardware.

The graphics of the game could use a bit of work. You are usually playing in a completely white surrounding, which can of course be customized. The characters themselves can use a bit of work too. For the average computers, the head, while in a spherical shape, will still have the usual cracks and obviously pixels sticking out on various sections of the head. The same goes for the rest of the body. And of course, your character is also customizable. How can a character not be customizable in a game like this?

The drawback is that there is no music in the game, You can play some music on a separate music player, but there is no music in the game itself. (I really think that some techno music would have done this game a little bit of good.)

Now for the gameplay, The way of playing this game is rather confusing, although the basics are extremely simple. On your character’s body, there are these spherical pieces called joints. By clicking these joints, you are able to either relax, hold, rotate, extend or contract, thus allowing you to control the way your character moves and perform rather complex attacks on your opponent. After selecting what the joints should be doing, you press the space button to start time, only to have it stop after 10 seconds. Now, as I have said before, this process can get rather confusing, but there is also a ghost that shows you what will happen in the next ten seconds with the current joint configuration. A REALLY BIG help. And if a certain part of your opponent’s body is hit enough, it will start turning red and eventually dismember and spew blood everywhere. SWEET. (Although even after dismembering something, if there are joints on the dismembered part, those joints can still be controlled.)

The goal of the game is to amass points by landing blows on the opponent. Another way of winning is if you are able to disqualify your opponents. I’m still not sure how that works. However, most of the time while one plays this game, the point system is almost never used and all the matched end up being won by forcing a body part of the opponent’s onto the ground.

You can play single player or multiplayer, Single player is great for practice, as your opponent is literally as still as a statue. But, because the opponents are still, all the epic moves that you have thought of trying out can now be exectued properly, and if they are done right, you can record them by presing F8 for a recorder and F7 for a camera.

Multiplayer is extremely unpredicatble, which is why some people tend to stray away from it. Almost everytime someone does play multiplayer, the result is usually a clusterfuck. Two characters all crunched up together, in a ball or in some other compact shape, making sweet love with… wait, sorry, Back to the topic. If they aren’t in a clusterfuck, then it usually one pwning the other, or neither of them really touching each other.

ZE FINALE STAND:

Try it out. It’s an interesting style of play, and it certainly will last for days. Everyone that I’ve known that played this game, but hasn’t previous had a hell load of trouble when they started, but they had fun after getting used to it. If you are willing to learn how moving this joint will make this kind of a movement and all that crap, then by all, play the game. If you are patient, then play this game. If you aren’t any of the above, then try it for about 30 minutes, then dump it into your digital recycling bin like the miserable piece of shit that you think it is.

I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game is a freeware adventure platformer game for the PC that was released October 2007 by Mike O’Reilly, who is better known by his alias, Kayin Nasaki. It, like the many games that it parodies, is 8-bit. Apparently this game is in it beta version. When the real version will come out (which most people do not want), no one will know.

The plot is simple, but it hard to type it out because it, once again like the many games that it parodies, is based on the crappy translations from Japan to the US. Here’s the plot, quoted from Wikipedia:

In the year 200x on his 15th birthday… a child left home on his dangerous and epic quest to become The Guy! Many years ago, “The Guy” left world and retreat to “Dungeon of Doom”. Now “Young Boy” goes to defeat “The Guy” and become “The Guy” with his gun pass handed down by former “Grandfather the Guy”. Go find the “8 units”. Now become “The Guy”.

The plot does not have any affect on the game. Even without the plot, the game would still be intact…. without the plot, that is.

The music is fun to listen to, but it’s nothing special. It revisited the songs of many old games, and the song perfectly matches wherever you are playing. It can be loud sometimes though.

Finally, the gameplay….. ugh, the gameplay. In this game, you control the “Young Guy”, or as I would like to call him, “The KId”. The arrow keys for moving, Shift for jump, and Z to shoot, but if you would like, the controls are changeable, so yay for the people that don’t like those controls!!! That’s basically it for the gameplay, Sounds pretty boring so far, right?

What has attracted many people , like me, to play this game (and also why many people have stopped playing this game) is how difficult the game is, even in it’s easiest mode. The Kid basically has a total of 1 HP, so if get hit by something or if you crash into something, you have to play your way all the way back from the savepoint (which can be used by shooting at them) or from the beginning, depending on which difficulty the game is played on, which is very hard to do because there are traps at every step that you take, literally. Most people that do play this game, will usually stop after the first three screens because it’s just that hard, so expect the unexpected….

ZE FINAL STAND:
As long as I talked about how fucking hard this game is, then I am satisfied. So if you want a free game, try this game. If you’re looking for a challenge, play this game. If you’re just bored and want to have something to really concentrate on other than the games that you already have, then play this game.

Well, for anyone that uses VLC player of Windows Media Player or any other player that isn’t compatible with what I am going to announce, please just stop using whatever you are using.

Instead, start using the Combined Community Codec Pack, or more well known as the CCCP. As the name implies. it’s a big pack of codecs for video players. However, this specific pack was made specifically for fansubbed anime. When downloaded, it comes with an altered form of Windows Player Classic that is called WPC Home Cinema, and it also comes with another video player called ZoomPlayer (I haven’t gotten ZoomPlayer to work yet, but I am assuming that ZP was made to play Quicktime files).

And I have to say, this is the greatest thing related to anime that I have found. While this may be something rather old to many people, then what would it be to the person that claims he knows all there is to basic technology when he actually doesn’t? It would be a myraid of flowers that only he can see, an arrangement of all the delicacy for him to eat, a cornucopia of gifts for only him to enjoy. Yes, this player is something I can say makes me happy. No lag, even in fullscreen. Able to play those high quality h264 encoded files with no problems at all. No pixels. Indeed, I have found MY anime salvation. And for those that I have yet to find this salvation, I recommend you download the CCCP for yourself and immerse yourself in it. And if you don’t….. well I’ll just have to terminate you.

Studio Rikka, DIRECTIONS (2006)

Synopsis

In a dark dystopic future, the environment of the Earth has been destroyed by its human inhabitants. The remainder of mankind lives in a dark physical “gap” between what is known as the lower level, and the unknown sky above. In this dreary and mechanical existence, the melancholy Ura works to restore the memories of the past, as part of the Archive Excavation Department. Along with Riko, his sole companion, Ura will soon discover a mysterious remnant of the past which may prove that there is more to their existance than meets the eye.

REVIEW

Story

I find that many people seem to be comparing this 22 minute OVA with Hoshi no Koe, or also known as Voices of a Distant Star. So I also decided to try watching that, and now I can see why it is so easy to campare these two OVAs. They both have great and well-used CGI, and even more so, they both use science fiction motifs to tell their tale of the melancholic dystopic future as it is.

Of course, they have their differences. While Hoshi no Koe is very heart-wretching and emotional, Pale Cocoon is complex and thought-provoking. But no. Pale Cocoon does more than just being some tidbit that questions our abuse of the Earth and shows us what will happened to the world if the environment is continually treated the way it is now. It presents us with a question, a question that cannot be expressed directly or succintly due to the unique nature of this OVA. What we do know is that this question merely ponders about our actions, about what we are currently doing, and how what we are doing will affect what we do later. Yes, the anime looks at us and sighs with grief, concerned with our society that has been engulfed by greed and want, and tainted with the unwillingness to stop and examine what we have been doing wrong. At the end, Pale Cocoon shows how that information, the information containing society’s sins, is actually the greatest information man can have.

Animation

This OVA was able to do something that most anime do in several episodes in only 20 minutes. That is brilliant. If so, then how does one portray how bad and grim a world has become with only about 20 minutes of screentime? Through animation. Through the animation, Yasuhiro Toshiura has portrayed just how dark, how mechanical, how artificial the world has become. Almost the entire duration of Pale Cocoon is set in some dark metallic surrounding, most likely under the ground. There are no signs of any other kinds of life, no plants, no animals, nothing but people, all surrounded by a metal enclosure or the “pale cocoon”. CGI does a tremendous job making the backround more artificially realistic, and it does not hinder the OVA at all.

Sound

This is a very minimalistic anime, in terms of sound, but the sound is still used well. Most of the time, the only thing heard is the combination of computer sounds and dialogue. The little music there is in this OVA is short and repetitive, yet I feel that it says something like, “Even in the deepest and darkest of holes, light can still be seen.” The music, when it’s playing, just sound that way to me. The OVA climaxes marvelously with a  J-Pop music video (animated, of course) that just jumps out of nowhere and makes one awe as he or she watches.

Characters

A normal anime series, maybe at least 13 episodes long, can do character development. Why? Simply because there is enough allotted time to do so. But then what if one were talking about a one-episode OVA that was only 22 minutes long? Then would there be any character development? No, maybe just a name and occupation, but that probably it. Not that character developement really matters in Pale Cocoon, because there isn’t any of it, because the physical manifestation of the character was not important. DIRECTIONS could have used someone else as the past-interested, memory-searching protagonist and it most likely would stay the same, because what made this OVA work, what made Pale Cocoon work was not the character itself, but the ideas and values the character had represented.

Conclusion

This is amazing, almost perfect in all aspects. I would like to recommend this to all science fiction lovers who have the patience to watch something without the action of mechas and explosions. Pale Cocoon and Hoshi no Koe (which I may review later) have proved the validity of independent short anime films. They say that perfection is better achieved through smaller things. And I have to say, I’d have to agree with that statement.

BUT…. if anyone else would like to make some contributions with to this site, then please contact me via your traitor, Ted, or Tim, or Steve, whatever the hell you want to call that douche.