<3 Gaming

So in an effort to consolidate all my various web presences back under one host you will notice I have redirected my old blogger site to this one. I rather like the very small theme. It keeps things nice and tidy! Also a list of my projects will end up on the projects page eventually as they are completed.

Just some food for thought…

According to this WoW.com article. Blizzard is in the works of potentially mandating authenticators on all World of Warcraft accounts. To be honest, I really like the authenticator idea. I even have the app on my iPhone and use it.  I find it to be a great extra measure of security for protecting my account info regardless of my amazing ability to not navigate to every fishing website messaged to me in game.  The only issue I see with a mandatory authenticator is that they do not soley bind to a WoW account, but it is something that your battle.net account uses as well.  What about all those people who are going to buy Starcraft 2/Diablo 3 that don’t play World of Warcraft?

Perhaps they will give a free authenticator away with the purchase of each game, and pray that it doesn’t get lost.  Hopefully Blizzard will make a strong attempt to get the authenticator application on more mobile platforms before they make a move to do this since in my humble opinion it seems to be the most reliable method of not having it stolen by the dresser goblins who also steal my socks.  After all, my iPhone never leaves my sight!

Lots of neat things have been eating up my time lately, just thought I would share a bit of the progress I have been making on them since it has been rather quiet around here lately.

PARPG:
I  may not have mentioned this here yet, but I recently became a full fledged developer on the open source indie game, PARPG (working title). It is an isometric 2d RPG set on a post apocalyptic earth. It is currently in super early development stages, and I really do mean super early. Mostly tons of back-end decisions and coding are in the works. Probably the two biggest undertakings (in the programming department) at the moment are the design and implementation of our questing engine as well as the restructuring of the limited GUI code we have right now so that its more modular. If anyone is interested in checking it out we should hopefully be releasing a tech demo of the game in late December I would guess, but depending on development speed it should be out this winter at the least.

I joined the project back in August of this year and it has been quite a learning experience so far. Who advancing your python skills through game development would be so enjoyable?

Subcreation:
Subcreation is also in the process of a bit of change. Currently I am working on getting us a blog up an running and fully integrated with our forum software. Currently I am working on translating the design of the forums over to the blog so that it is a seamless end-user experience and that should hopefully be up and running in another week or two.

The idea behind it is to get some of our more prominent community members to start blogging about their gaming experience’s from a Subcreation PoV, you know the whole “better gaming through intelligence” motif. Perhaps it will be successful, perhaps it will flop. Who knows until we try!

Kingdom Hearts 2:
Holy marvelous mickey batman! I started playing KH2 over this last weekend and so far after a couple hours of play time I have to say I have been completely sucked in by this series. Square may have been slacking off on the story end of the Final Fantasy franchise, but I would say that KH is picking that slack up and piling on even more awesome. Granted I am only a few hours into the game, but so far the setting is excellent, the mystery is fantastic, and the longing to keep playing even after you should have retired for the night is very high. Its almost like a great book you just can’t put down. (/me makes a mental note to go out and pick up the 358 2 days, and RE: Chain of Memories installments of the series.)

I should also be posting the Cowboy Bebop update soon to the anime guide as well, I just have been too preoccupied to sit and watch the movie myself! All in due time.

So over the last couple weeks or so Aion was released to much anticipation. I myself having vowed to not play another MMO ended up succumbing to my darkest desires of social gaming and bought a copy. Why oh why dear gaming gods did you let me do this? Blagh!

Anywho, after purchasing and installing the game, I have hardly done much else besides play the game in my spare “alone” time. Which by the way has also been drastically wtfpwn’d by the addition of a new family member seen here. Bringing the total dog count up to two, and the total amount of time spent being mauled by love filled puppies, to double whatever it was, surely a large amount of time though. <3 Puppies!

Back to Aion! So of course I pick a cleric as my class, healing archetypes are always my poison and why should this game be any exception? The first thing I notice is that Aion is AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL! Its tons of eye candy around every corner and the musical score to back it up is surprisingly refreshing for a fantasy based nerdgasm… er, game. At one point I believe I even made the comment to a friend that the combat music in a particular zone sounded distinctly like Sonic the Hedgehog which was completely unexpected and pleasant. Other than that the game feels very much like the now ingrained MMO experience I had playing WoW and the WAR beta. You have zones, you gain levels, you collect boar intestines for rewards and money. Pretty much anything you have done in a previous MMO you do here now. There are a lot of neat little things that are fun, such as each spell having its own unique and very distinct animation that make the game enjoyable but there are the annoying things as well. Such as gathering, something that starts out as fun and interesting and then quickly turns into boring and monotonous. Level 25 as it stands is essentially the stepping stone from the game being largely PvE and quest based to becoming more of a PvP run world. The grind (and yes its a grind at times) to 25 is almost too much of a chore if you are doing the content solo, but if you manage to pick up a leveling buddy along the way, or you have lots of patience (that one is me) then content just flies right by. The following should be used as a summary of the 1-25 levling experience:

1-10: Fun new and learning.
10-20: Wings!!!! Also questing is fairly fun and the landscape even though small is diverse.
20-25: Definitely a bit grindy at this point. You are basically holding on for the PvP which starts at level 25.

Overall though the game has been rather fun. It is nice to have something fresh to play, after five years of World of Warcraft one tends to tire of the same content over and over. Another great thing to note is that due to the Korean release a year before then coming to the North American continent definitely helped squash out the defects in game. I can’t say I have had anything really just bug out on me in my total time clocked, though I have had a couple random game crashes to the desktop. Very very few and far between though. Anywho at last it is time to try out this PvP stuff and hope that the game remains and becomes even more fun than it is on my way from 25-50. Be back on a report of me getting owned in the Abyss!

Anime: Ghost in the Shell
Newbness Level: Moderate Newb

Greetings greetings, welcome to part two of the newbie guide. By now you should have watch Ghost in the Shell. If not well then shame on you since this post is terribly late! Ghost in the Shell (GitS from here on out) is a prime sample of what to expect from science fiction in anime. It mixes all the right elements of weird, existentialism, robots, and violence. I don’t think you can really say that there is a direct American movie that would be a similar style, but lets put it this way. If you were to recommend a Sci-Fi movie for someone to watch for the first time to get them into the genre, you would probably suggest something like The Matrix. GitS is similar to The Matrix in that it acts as a standard bearer for the genre. In fact the Wachowski brothers have been cited as claiming that Ghost in the Shell was a major influence on their creation of The Matrix.

I have realized the little synopsis’ are quite probably counter productive since any follower of this guide will have watched the show before reading this post. So I will probably keep this section a little more brief and touch on key parts of the story that were most likely not picked up on one pass through. Or items that are just particularly interesting.

In the case of most of these newbie level movies, there isn’t a whole lot you can misunderstand or not catch. The types of technology can be a bit confusing particularly in GitS but this is actually what the movie boils down to. What is humanity and individualism? With cyborgs on the loose, various prosthetic implants that both accommodate and enhance natural human ability how do we distinguish the blurring lines of what is human and what is not? Just a little food for thought.

For our next part in the guide we will be watching the Cowboy Bebop movie, Knocking on Heavan’s Door. Cowboy Bebop is actually a fairly popular series of anime that has been around a while (as have all the previous anime’s on the list) But its movie works as a great stand alone film and will introduce us to the other side of science fiction in anime, space operas. So find it, watch it, and love it.

Yeah, it took me nearly seven years to get a copy of this game and play it from start to finish. Besides being Johnny Come-lately to every video game ever I still can’t help but be impressed at how good of a game it actually is. Though at least twenty people have told me so before. Here is hoping that the sequel holds true to the first in quality, but with a Tron based world how can it not be even more amazing?

Also speaking of Tron. Watch this and find a towel to mop up the drool:

Anime: Princess Mononoke
Newbness Level: Total Newb

Welcome to part one of The Newbies Guide to Anime. The goal of this string of blog posts is to introduce those who are new to anime to the medium and give them a good footing to be able to judge an anime by more than its audience. On my last post I mentioned that we would start with Princess Mononoke and as you can see from the first line of this post I intend to hold true to that.

Before getting straight into why this is a good newbie film let me first make mention of the film’s director and writer, Hayao Miyazaki. This is a name that you will probably hear quite a bit about when first getting into anime. The reason is that Miyazaki has a string of incredibly famous movies. To list a few: Laputa:Castle in the Sky, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Spirited Away. If any of those ring a bell, you will now be able to recognize the creator and realize why his name is a big deal. We will probably go through many of his films as well but to keep things diverse we are not going to just plow through it all right away. That would ruin your ability to appreciate it later for the first time as a more experienced viewer! Mononoke is a great adventure, however a word of warning though to any parents or those with younsters, due to the violence in the film I would probably stick to the PG-13 standards the film rating suggests.

Now on to Mononoke. A quick run down of the plot is as follows. The movie is about a young prince of a dwindling clan who happens to be cursed by a forest god (in this case a boar) while defending his village. His only option to remove the curse and live is to abandon his clan and seek out the source of why the forest god was overcome by evil. The setting takes place in historical Japan. To be filled in more without viewing the movie here is the wikipedia link.

Mononoke is a great introduction into anime. First and foremost is that this is actually a movie and not a series. That means the entirety can be viewed in just a couple hours and its over. Down the road you will realize that a large portion of animes tend to last a season or two, or even more. Meaning episodes of approximately twenty-five minutes+ ranging in number from thirteen to over 100. Granted I will never cover anything over more than fortyish episodes due to the fact that long running anime tends to fall out of the scope of this entire exercise. Newbies are just not going to care about catching up to the 146th episode of Naruto.

Princess Mononoke also tends to fall into the realm of what Americans would probably call “normal”, besides a few fantasy elements nothing crosses into that border of “wtf is this crazy stuff?”. If you watch this movie, and find yourself actually disliking the fantasy elements contained therein, have no fears. Anyone who tends to like movies similar to Lord of the Rings should feel right at home here, but if that is not your cup of tea then just hold out for the next few weeks when we dip into other genres. One thing I will note though is that a there is a lot of anime that falls into this general category of historical fantasy and alternate reality.

When you pick up the box you also may notice a few well known actors and actresses names appear. Billy Bob Thorton, Gillian Anderson, Claire Danes, and Billy Crudup to name a few of the more popular. The english voice acting is fairly decent, and there are only a couple moments when the translation seems to come off in an awkward sense. The biggest offender happens to be the point where Jigo (Billy Bob Thorton) first meets Ashitaka (Crudup) and share dinner. If you are feeling brave enough to go the subtitles route, more power to you and I hope you enjoy the original since it is of excellent quality.

From here we will be moving into science fiction, namely Ghost in the Shell. Go ahead and grab a copy and meet up here, same bat time, same bat channel. As a little heads up Ghost in the Shell does have some brief nudity and is fairly violent as well, it is not for youngsters at all.

So yesterday I spent a good portion of my evening compiling a huge list of anime. A list of all the anime currently available for my immediate viewing pleasure that is. The grand total is… large to say the least, and I am ashamed to say that probably close to half of it I have not sat down to watch yet (think of it as an inheritance of sorts that I haven’t looked through yet). So I have now made it my mission to make it through all of this video, and to help me along I will share with you my completely biased opinions in review form! Hurray!

The format is going to be somewhat of a tutorial for new anime viewers. I may introduce some sort of rating system, but since I have fanboi tendencies I like to stay away from over-inflating an objective score. Instead the goal is to slowly turn the newbie viewer into someone who can truly appreciate and judge an anime to be crazy or not based solely on the show itself, and not just on the body of its viewers.

A few notes if you are an anime newbie. If you have no idea what this stuff is, you may want to read up to understand what you are getting yourself into. You should strive to educate yourself in any subject and this art form is no different than learning about painting. Wikipedia presents a sufficient starting point, if you are curious beyond that I suggest the Google search bar… And now if you want to avoid a bit of preaching, skip past the appropriate tags.

[preaching]

If you passed on reading up on anime and think you know enough to dive right in, I must insist on throwing a few warnings at you.

Adult Cartoons:
Not all anime is targeted at children. In fact, a large portion of it is aimed at adults. This is the same stuff that we will be watching… mostly. In fact when I make a post about an anime, expect at least two indicators to appear at the start of the review. First, the average viewer age (as recommended by the box), and secondly the target. This could be a simple genre indicator, but often times with anime you will find yourself crossing multiple genres, from romance to science fiction to giant robots killing things… you get the point.

Reading is often Required:
Anime comes in subtitles for a reason. There are those of you who will argue that if TV isn’t in English, it isn’t worth watching. Unfortunately you are terribly wrong, and anime is probably the best example of all. But since you supposedly have not seen any, I will use another example. Classic martial arts movies were often times dubbed to the point of hilarity. The original voicing in those movies has been distorted so badly that its almost a part of the genre now. Yet this is not how foreign films should be experienced. What really happens when a film is dubbed is that any of the original emotion conveyed tends to be lost or muddled in translation. My wife tells me (when listening to me watching anime) that Japanese people always sound so angry. Its all about ear training. The more you watch and listen, the more you will understand what is actually happening and being felt by the characters. Please don’t cheapen a movie by listening to a dubbed version. Go with subtitles whenever you can. As a side note, there are some dubbed animes that are worth watching in English, I will note them as we go along, and most likely these will be among the first we watch to ease us all into it.

Finally, something that is rather important to realize as well about anime is that this is not culture defining. If you think every last person in Japan watches this stuff all the time you are sorely mistaken. Anime is just like any other pass time, such as baseball or stamp collection. Do not become this guy in the comic!

I will personally hunt you down and slap you with a salmon if I hear of anyone becoming this guy. Its the most annoying anime fan there is.
[/preaching]

So if you made it past all my subtitle propaganda, or just skipped down here and are ready to venture into the world of anime prepare to hopefully be amazed… or something like that in the weeks to come! To start out with we are going to be watching Princess Mononoke, why? Well firstly because you can watch, and enjoy, this movie without subtitles. In fact the english voice cast consists of well known actors/actresses Billy Bob Thorton and Gillian Anderson, among a couple others. It is also a relatively mild anime. Which only requires a couple hours of your time, and finally it is written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, possibly one of the most brilliant anime creators ever. So put it in your netflix queue, rent it from somewhere, watch it, and meet me back here in a week.

For those of you who I speak to regularly you have probably already seen this but for everyone else (yeah I’m talking to you mom woo woo, go audience of one!) I have been participating in an experimental blog/class. The teacher, Ian Schreiber, happens to be a co-author on a recent text book for starting out game design students as well as a former video game programmer and game designer and is now moving into the education world. Long story short, Ian is helping introduce many people into the world and process of game design.

Admittedly, I have to say the class has been really fun, though largely non-digital in essence you can apply the same rules to ditigal games as well. The “homeplays” (aka homework) are challenging and fun, and the feedback on the forums has been excellent (sorry they are private unless you registered for the class otherwise i would post the link). I really feel like I am learning something useful! Another interesting thing, at least personally, is that so far a lot of the concepts behind game design have already been fairly obvious to me as a gamer. What is new to me is the organization behind the process. Normally if I have ever had an idea for a game the process is very cluttered and I tend to mix themes into mechanics and objectives. Ian has helped me essentially to organize my thought process. In fact recently we had to make a board game version of one of our favorite video games, and I feel I had a fairly successful idea with Super Smash Brothers. When I think about making a game now its not “oooo lets have an MMO world, but with Sims like character customization” instead the games are becoming more precisely defined such as: “oooooo let’s make an MMO world where players have the goal of X, Y, and Z. Then build some core concepts of mechanics that allow players to achieve those goals, and lets put it to this kind of theme”.

For anyone who is interested in following along in the blog definitely feel free to do so and even if you are not registered if you feel like participating in the challenges at all feel free to send me an email and I would be more than happy to work with you on them. I am sure that in the future more of my homeplays will appear here as well.

If you look out the window of your vehicle on your way into work today you may notice that there are in fact pigs flying. It all started on Friday the 19th when my wife and I decided to stop by the local AT&T store to check out the iPhone that had recently gone on sale. After about an hour in of some healthy debating, figuring, and some decent salesmanship on the part of the guy helping us, we left the store with an iPhone each and a huge phone bill for next month. It was around this time that we also saw the first delicious piece of bacon flutter off into the great blue yonder. Since then the number of flying mammals has only increased as my attachment the iPhone strengthens.

Here is a short list of reasons why this phone is now the coolest thing in my pocket.
1. A mobile SSH client
2. I now own an mp3 player
3. I pretend to wave a lightsaber around whenever the urge strikes me
5. I can check my email/weather/time of day/schedule/shop on amazon/learn Japanese
6. I can do any of the above anywhere I get cell phone reception on a tiny device that fits comfortably in my pocket.

You may guess that this is my first time owning a phone that has a feature other than just calling people and storing phone numbers, and you would be right. However I think that I held out for the appropriate length of time since the iPhone is now affordable and has basically taken the place of the Dell mini I was hoping to purchase for my new mobile computing needs (sorry Dell). With the added bonus of using cell towers for data if needed, being smaller, and having the same amount of storage… it’s definitely better.

As for the drawbacks, besides the huge cell phone bill we will have every month people are sure to call me an Apple’s consumer bitch… Also my thumbs get sore from playing tap tap revenge 2 for too long.