These things share two things in common. I can’t get enough of either of them, and there’s people who complain about how it looks.
Skyrim is getting a glut of informational write-ups on how to make the game look “better”. Admittedly, there’s a couple of instances of wishing the visual fidelity was questionable. I don’t always have a problem with how it looks. It would be extremely nitpicky of me to squish my character’s face against a rock slab and declare, “This kind of texture resolution is unacceptable!”. Quite frankly, I’m happy that it already feels less buggy than I anticipated. Some faggots think it’s incredibly buggy and broken with no recourse available to salvage what’s left of the game. Lucky for us they’re a relatively small minority (but still louder than ever). I think it’s a great game and it’d be a huge disservice to the game if your only reason not to play it was because someone else told you it was buggy. Besides, the game does eventually get fixed via official patches or through fan created fixes.
Haganai, otherwise known as Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai, has our male protagonist luckily not in Nordic skivvies. In fact, he looks rather dashing if you look at the top image. That is if you know nothing about Japanese culture and their silly nomenclature for guys who have lived 30 years and not experienced the warmth of a lover.
Actually, I’m not sure if there are people who complain about Haganai’s look. The show has taken a few dips in the art, but nothing nearly as notorious as some parts in the second season of Minami-ke. Oddly enough, there was one episode that had an entire segment that was decidedly animated by a highly skilled someone, and now the name escapes me. Perhaps I’ll rewatch that season to provide screencaps of the horrendous and the beautiful.
I’m personally rather happy to hear Misato Fukuen voicing Rika. Her role as Miyafuji Yoshika in Strike Witches was great, and puts her voice to great effect in Rika’s debut episode. Rika screaming “UNIVERSE!!!” was hilarious, and somehow arousing. I can gush about Marina Inoue and Kanae Itou too, but that’ll take up another entry.
Almost approaching 400 words, so I’ll shut up and save it for later.
yayskyrimohwhatit’salreadyfinalsohno.
-maserbeam
I decided to go JRPG hunting after gorging myself on Vindictus and other PC games, when I remembered a game from last year that competed with Final Fantasy 13 for sales — in the same month. Nearly a death sentence in this era of gaming, compounded by the fact that it was a game that experimented. Experimental games can always backfire in the gaming industry. Either the sales are inadequate, breaks even, or is a complete blockbuster.
But you didn’t come to read something about the gaming industry from an outsider’s view point. There’s a cheap game, and it’s Resonance of Fate. It’s currently on amazon.com for 17.03USD, a mighty fine price for a rather hefty amount of gaming. No point in convincing anyone to buy it because anyone who’s wanted to play it might have been waiting for it to become this cheap. I wouldn’t wait too long. Feels like they’d run out of copies at some point.
I bought my own copy just 10 minutes ago. You should too.
-maserbeam
There’s one glaring reason I hate the context sensitive button pressing that requires you to press something to correspond to an action on screen — most common during cutscenes to prevent players from relaxing. Console games use this same mechanic; they just shoved a little icon in your face without an intrinsic design behind it to indicate what button to press. When these prompts are given they are often shown below the focal point of the scene. And for some people, this unnecessarily diverts attention. The 360 and PS3 controllers are lucky since they’re both color-coded. See a blue colored button? Hit the blue button. See a triangle? Hit the triangle button. The God of War series improved on this. The face buttons were placed on the screen relative to their position to each other. This required less of “What button should I press? I have to avert my eyes for one second to find out!” and moved it to the “Time to react!” box, ultimately leading to my focus not swaying from the action. So what did PC gamers get?
PC gamers got the short end of the stick here for a long while. I remember playing ported games that had the same context sensitive button pressing.
But we got plain [gray] boxes with letters in them that realistically, could have been any button on the keyboard. For me, the biggest offender was Resident Evil 5. Anyone who’s played that understands how cheap some of those deaths are, which I’m blaming on shoulder buttons (bumpers for you 360 players). How did they forget keyboards don’t have shoulder buttons? Were shoulder buttons/bumpers used? I don’t know since I’ve never played RE5 on consoles. But damn, just give us a button sequence us WASD using players are naturally poised to hit. Maybe I’m just being picky, but just think about it. I’m not often asked by a game to hit Q and F at the same time to avoid a crocodile attack.
All of this leads to my exhilaration and jubilee upon seeing the screenshot I took above. It’s a freaking WASD icon with the needed input glowing in a shape I could only recognize as “HIT THE ‘S’ BUTTON RETARD!” I won’t even have to think. I’ve been asking for that exact representation of the WASD keymap with the highlighted buttons.
I can’t believe such a simple UI improvement has driven me to want Battlefield 3. But that’s all it took. DICE, you do us PC gamers proud by finally acknowledging us. I still hate context sensitive cutscene button pressing however.
The GDC trailer is freaking amazing for being in pre-alpha. Makes me wonder if DICE is going to license out the Frostbite 2.0 engine to anyone else. STALKER 2 + Frostbite Engine 2.0? Want.
-maserbeam
Since we felt that there was just too much gaming goodness to pass up, we’ve completely split the podcast into two. One for the gaming, and one for the anime. The one in this post is the gaming one! Have a look at the list of topics after the link.
This is where your fate lies!
私の運命を決定しないでください！
-maserbeam
