Hey people unfortunate enough to find their way on this thread, it’s time for another blog entry about things including but not limited to porn games! This week was crazy in the real life department, but no-one cares about all of my sensitive white girl problems, it’s time for the things that really matter! You know; porn games... and other stuff!

Back To The Future

I bought Telltale’s Back To The Future series, or whatever, as soon as the first episode was released. This was probably due to a combination of just finishing Monkey Island at the time, and being super hyped from it being more Back To The Future greatness. Well the final episode was released a few days ago, and the story so far has been good enough for me to pretty much drop everything and play the proceeding part as soon as it’s released.

So I really enjoyed this one, I felt the story arc wrapped up pretty nicely, the puzzles were well thought out and rather varied, and the cameo from Michael Fox as Marty’s great grandfather is a great touch. This is also, however, the most videogame of the entire series, and this is where I think the whole thing sort of breaks down. I really like Back To The Future, as a movie series. These games do an amazing and faithful job at continuing that story, but this is at the expense of forcing Marty to solve puzzles instead of, say, being on a skateboard with Tannen and troupe in tow, luring them into some kind of humorous manure filled situation.

Having said that the story goes in rather interesting directions, and concludes in an amazingly silly way. It’s like they looked at the ending to Back To The Future 1 and thought to themselves “yeah let’s do this, but let’s make it a billionty times crazier”, so much so in fact, that the last shot before the credits is the Delorean flying away from the camera, turning and going straight for the camera. Cue ‘Back In Time’ starting and the result is me throwing my hands in the air with a rather definitive “AWW YEAH”.

Turntable.fm

What do you mean it’s not a game, well fuck you, I’m not making any more banners probably.

So Turntable is pretty awesome. I was introduced via the whiskey media twitter feed and have since spent most of my time there listening to good, bad and sometimes terrible music. To the point in which I’d spent hours in the Giant Bomb room in the afternoon and love it, and then go back in at night and quickly back out from all the shitty rock that gets played. Rather predictably I’ve spent most of my time in the anime centric rooms, where Ana sometimes is and being considerably awesome playing Panty & Stocking songs or whatnot. Or, you know, in the Anime Vice room; that somehow can degrade from anime songs to playing the vocal tracks from Sonic Adventure 2 and the Pokémon 2BA Master CD in under an hour. This got to the point that I made a ridiculous Pokémon and Nicki Minaj mashup just for a quick laugh one night.

But it looks like I’ll never be able to use it ever again! Due to the music industry absolutely hating anything that helps them sell music, looks like it’s blocked for any non-US residents. Oh well, looks like I’ll be going back to playing shitty mashups on iTunes instead.

Misc.

I went to Rufi ‘I ask stupid questions on live shows and somehow get them asked’ 91’s place to do our usual thing. While there we found some time to play videogames. Magicka was first up due to the new PvP patch, and that was alright. Admittedly it would have been a lot better if I wasn’t stuck with the controller while he was mashing away on the keyboard, not cool bro. I got my revenge with Super Street Fighter IV though, as we played a bunch of matches on all random and I beat him pretty much whenever I wasn’t Gen. I also had the pleasure of being in the presence of the most intense Mass Effect argument ever, and only being able to nod and not know entirely what the hell was going on. So that was pretty dope. Oh and I played a little bit of Team Fortress 2 which was cool, the new Soldier weapons seem pretty fun. I also got the most impressive kill I’ve ever gotten after 600 hours of playing but I can’t work the new replay controls so I ended up losing it.

Sengoku Rance

Hot holy DAMN do I love this game, like oh man it’s so much fun. Ok, to start off, to me Sengoku Rance is one of those games that, if I’m extremely bored, I could easily load up and immediately start having fun. I’d be having so much fun, in fact, that if I was to start playing on Saturday morning, I’d check the clock and realise “oh god it’s so late I have to write that stupid blog and post it in like an hour fuck.”

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

So what can I say about the story of this game. I can say GAHAHAHA, what I just linked you to there dear readers is the porn music. That’s right! The porn music. In almost every other visual novel, the sex scene will have a delicate piano piece to set up a passionate scene between the characters. But not Sengoku Rance, instead it plays this jaunty piece. I love it!

But for real, the story is rather great. The main character is Rance, who comes to Japan with the goal to conquer the entire country, while concurrently getting it on with as much woman as humanly possible. As he conquers a few territories, rather unsurprisingly other territories will not take too kindly to that and declare war. Meaning you’ll have to be careful about which ones to take over and try not to have too many clans against you at any one time. While this is happening, the leader of the Oda family (the family you are secretly controlling) gets possessed by a demon and resurrects the Demon Army. And then at that point you best try to take them down as fast as possible.

This is only the main story; however, there are a ton of different things to do here. Once you complete the game there are three other non-canon storylines that completely change the entire story. On top of that there is a route in which you can stop Oda from being possessed, meaning you can play freely without the pressure of the Demon Army looming, and a free for all mode, where you can start as any of the families and try to rule Japan as any of them.

The gameplay is turn based, almost Risk like in design. You start with 2 actions per round (that can be upgraded to I think 5) which can be used for a lot of stuff. In any territory you own you can search for a dungeon for items, talk to named generals in your army to advance a character specific story, hire new generals of increase that territory’s power. In neighbouring territory’s you can declare war or prepare to battle in that specific territory. In territories you’re warring with, you can attack them, once all of their buildings are under your control (each battle won gets you one building) you control that territory. Most of these actions cost points in either search; construction or negotiation. You can assign up to 5 generals to reach the desired number of points. When choosing to battle you can select up to 6 generals to fight. Once a general is used, they cannot be used again until the next round. After your turn is finished, the opposing families can move, advance some story elements or attack your territories, in which you have to defend with your remaining generals. Once all the families have moved, the next round starts; and the process is repeated.

The battle system is reminiscent of jRPG battles. Your army can have up to 6 generals, each of whom has their own army. These armies count as both that general’s health and their attack power, so for instance attacking with a small army will be rather pointless. Generals are divided into different classes; you can get warriors, tanks, musketeers, archers, monks, mages, ninjas, and a bunch of others. Battles last for 24 turns or until one team has been completely defeated. Any defeated generals on the opposing side can either die or be captured, where they can be recruited as generals. Most territories will have the main story characters be captured automatically when that territory is defeated.

I think that covers all the basics of the game, and if you take anything away from this week’s blog it’s you should at the very least try this game out. It’s a lot of fun with a wide interesting cast of characters, interesting story beats, and one hundred porn scenes. I don’t like bringing up the porn aspect of porn games but dude there is a lot, if that’s your thing.

Oh look at that I actually watched an anime this week, how bizarre.

To Love-Ru

So after threatening myself with this prospect last week, I got around to watching To Love-Ru. This anime is weird. Whether it’s good weird or bad weird, however, I still haven’t decided yet. There are some amazing parts but these are coupled with, and I can’t believe I’m complaining about this, with gratuitous amounts of fan service. I don’t mind the odd part here or there, but I can only handle so many aliens that conveniently eat away at clothes and also conveniently only seem to target females before I get fed up.

Maybe I should back peddle just a little tad here. In this anime you follow the adventures of Rito Yuuki, a generic high school student with a crush on a girl in his class. But uh oh! Every time he tries to confess his love he always finds himself in rather stick slapping situations that keep preventing him from doing so. The anime starts with one such event, in which uh oh! A flying saucer crashes down right in front of him. Later on an alien called Lala shows up and uh oh! He accidently proposes to her, and she just happens to be the goddamn princess of the universe. Now this bland generic high school student has to balance his high school life and becoming king of the universe. I’m sure I don’t have to explicitly say it but hilarity does in fact, ensue. In fact the entire first half of the series features almost any female who happens to have a voice actor be succumbed to the ever so potent power of love, whether they like it or not. The second half then feature said girls being all anime and whatnot. The last 3 episodes, however, someone accidently flips the plot switch and shit gets real for a while.

As far as character arcs go they looked in the generic stereotype barrel and picked out a few here and there, and slapped some with “also an alien” to be all original or something. I will admit, however, my favourite character arc was in fact for a guy. But suddenly! The guy is an alien, and whenever he sneezes, he turns into a girl! I’m going to go on record and say the male version of the character is the best member of the harem which makes the latter half super frustrating, when he only ever shows up for comic relief, and the female counterpart is the main focus. Why won’t any harem anime just have the guts to have a male character in the harem for some interesting and forbidden love? Ugh, maybe I should just go re-watch Gravitation... again.

Speaking of not being gay, the fan service as previously stated, is rather prominent throughout the entire show. Now don’t get me wrong, I like boobs, but there is a limit. Lala first shows up via teleporting into Rito’s bath, completely naked, because her teleporter can’t teleport clothes. In one battle against a giant frog, the spit doesn’t damage people, but rather erodes clothes. I’m not an expert on fighting but I don’t think that’s going to be that effective in battle. Even tentacle having enemies that... well, you get the idea. You get all of this, most of them resulting in some if not all the girls completely naked on the screen, yet the accidental kiss between Ren and Rito cuts away before contact is made FUCK SAKE ANIME WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING.

I’ve also seemed to overlook a huge part of this anime; yo, aliens. So there are quite a lot of aliens in this anime, some number of them conveniently look exactly like humans. But somehow, the human characters are surprisingly fine with all of this. For instance when Rito’s sister Mikan finds out Rito is marrying an alien princess she seems to take it rather well and becomes fast friends with Lala, instead of, you know, freaking out. Similarly when the girls at school find out Lala is an alien princess they pretty much all go “yeah we figured”.

Yet I still enjoyed watching it, there are some really funny parts and just a competent well rounded harem comedy anime, if a little generic. But who knows, maybe the sequel will completely change that! I’m guessing not.

And that brings us to the end of another week! I’m still programming that game of mine; I encountered a super small bug and my solution way to completely rewrite 2 month of work to be more compact. Short version is decimals are the devil, long version, well, will be a story for another week.

Hey! Back again for another incoherent mess of loosely tied paragraphs that vaguely detail just what the hell I’ve been doing this past week. This week has been rather busy for me personally, but who cares about that? I still managed to find time for porn games, you know, the things that really matter. One of these weeks I’ll come up with better ways to start the blog, but for now you get what you give, I guess.

Look how terribly that link was put in! Get used to it, I’m rapidly running out of ideas over here!

Beat Hazard Ultra

So I loved Beat Hazard, so much so that I wrote a terribly written review about it when it came out. The game recently went through a rather substantial makeover due to the new Beat Hazard Ultra DLC, the new updates are in two parts; one, the main game has been changed a lot, and two, the paid DLC Ultra adds more enemies and online play.

So first, the new basic game. The game has been updates to include perks, because not enough games have utilised this oft overlooked gameplay feature. The new perks mirror how the old game works rather directly. Before, as you levelled up in rank, you’d start the game with a higher power and volume bar, and your multiplier would start higher and stuff like that. Instead, every time you level up you get an unlock option to unlock a perk. Then, using money that is dropped by enemies in game, you can buy and upgrade these perks. The perks in the base game are rather limited and end up being, when fully upgraded, direct parallels to the original game’s rank up boosters. It’s a pretty good compromise that lets users who don’t buy this new DLC, get a similar experience to before, while still incorporating the new mechanics. There’s even an option when you load the game to launch Beat Hazard Classic, which is just the original game, if you hate fun.

The new DLC pack adds a bunch of new stuff, so much more in fact that it makes the game feel like a sequel, and makes it incredibly hard to go back to the classic mode. There are more perks, perks that make the game even crazier! Some small stuff like score multipliers, extra lives and whatnot, but also 3 new weapons to compliment the super bomb. There is a super laser that it a more powerful gun, mini rockets that are mini versions of the homing rockets that are fired at you, and a shield that can deflect projectiles away. These new weapons are amazing and add a lot more strategy to the game; it also makes the later difficulties a lot more manageable if you’re good at managing these new additions. Also new is a lot new enemies, and when I say a lot I mean A LOT. The enemy type count has almost tripled, and that includes bosses. The new enemies are super crazy, and makes the original game look like a cakewalk. New enemies that drop bombs that, on collision, stop you from shooting. Enemies that when they die spawn 20 homing rockets that aim at you. New guns on enemies and bosses that can pull you toward or repel you away from them. A new snake type enemy, and new snake boss and octopus boss that has guns on their bodies. The new enemies add a lot to the game, and make the game a lot crazier that it used to be. New enemy combinations make the game a lot harsher. Imagine having 50+ homing missiles aiming at you while being bombarded by mines that stop you from destroying them, absolute chaos on the higher difficulties. And I love every second of it.

There’s also online play but I don’t have any friends so I couldn’t test it out.

HinataBokko

Translated as ‘Which Girl Should I Choose?’ HinataBokko is a rather visual novel ass visual novel. You know how Excitebots can pretty much be described as a ‘videogame ass videogame’, in the sense that it doesn’t care about story or immersion or trying to make you as a player connect with the characters, it’s just “fuck yeah I’m a videogame let’s do this.” In the same sense, this is visual novel does not have that enticing a storyline, there is no gameplay to break apart the story, and there isn’t a single thread story tying each arc together to form any interesting conclusion. No, this game, rather appropriately given its name, is just “fuck yeah I’m a visual novel, there are six girls here which one do you like the best let’s do this.” While there are some visual novels that can get away with this, this one just feels lazy. It’s hampered by its story pacing and worst of all, its official translation.

In terms of story there’s not much to talk about. There are two main story branches, one has two heroines and the other has four. And finally, this visual novel is the one that breaks me and makes me actually talk about the girls and not just talking around it with the story. So, throughout the visual novel you’ll encounter the main character’s female best friend and her little sister, the main character’s own little sister, your male best friend and his little sister, and finally your previous teacher, her twin sister, and their little sister. So as you can see the cast of this visual novel is rather skewed to one gender, but then SUDDENLY PLOT TWIST, your male best friend is actually female. Yes, that’s right, according to this visual novel; the main character is the only human male in existence. I’d just like to point out how stupid that is, but whatever. The main character, Natsuki, decides to look for a job. One day he stumbles onto his old teacher’s twin sister, and finds out they own a coffee shop, and would luck have it they’re looking for workers. Renovation means Natsuki and his sister have to move out of their place and live at the coffee shop with his old teacher, and hilarious antics ensue! Or at least they would, if that wasn’t the entire plot. The only think I didn’t mention is that from there you make a few choices and get with one of the six available girls in the game.

This is where most visual novels, or at least most good visual novels, would split off into generic characters arcs. You know, things like “waah Senpai my breasts are too small” or “waah Senpai please try my cooking” or “waah Senpai I’m a generic clumsy sports girl who likes steak”. But no, instead in this game decides to keep it classy. You choose a girl, you make the sweet loving with her, and suddenly credits roll epilogue “my life is so amazing ever since I boned that girl all those years ago”, I mean, in that case it’s true to life, but still.

And that is where I get really depressed about this visual novel. If they had some kind of elaboration on the relationships and their time together it could have been great. Well maybe not great but at least better than how the stories wrap up as is. I mean, some of the characters had potential, I would’ve liked there to be at least I little bit of conflict. Probably the most annoying one is your ‘male’ best friend. That route is pretty much ends with ‘she started wearing more girly clothes hooray happy ever after.’ They even make references to people giving them funny looks when they started dating because the school perception was that she was a boy. I’d want to see that conflict! I want to see them balance having their relationship while trying to disguise it from the school due to its apparent homosexual tenancies. I could see that being an interesting arc, but no they just brush it under the rug like it’s nothing. I guess I shouldn’t’ve had high hopes for a game called ‘Which Girl Should I Choose?’ But still, some homosexual content would be interesting, even if it’s a super cop out from the beginning.

I’m surprised it took me three weeks to talk about something gay; I guess it’s all the Supernatural I’ve been watching.

Also, the translation is bad. Like I know I’m not one to judge bad writing but oh my god this is a terrible translation through and through. The visual novel feels like it was translated by three different people who all hate each other. And therefore didn’t talk to each other about how things should be structured. Some scenes are in 1st person while others are in 3rd; characters are called different things later on in the game than the beginning. The punctuation is almost non-existent in some parts of the story; there is a section of the game that’s been translated twice. But worst of all, there’s a section is which I’m sure they just did a find and replace of “im” to “I’m”, “ill” to “I’ll”, and stuff like that. Which leads to words like “times” being spelled as “tI’mes”... yeah, it’s pretty bad. In fact, here’s a screenshot to further prove my point, and with that I’ll bring an end to giving this visual novel any of my time.

PEOPLE GOT PAID FOR THIS TRANSLATION, ugh.

I’ve always believed that there are two kinds of programmers. The good programmer, who sees a glitch and does their best to fix it, and the great programmer, who sees a glitch and codes around it, ensuring the user will ever encounter the glitch. The reason I think this is that great programmers can always come up with different ways to achieve the same goal, and by trying to come at a problem in multiple ways they can come up with super interesting solutions. This has been my philosophy for programming, for better or worse, since I started coding about 7 years ago. This brings me up to now, and my recent project, and the glitch that took a whole week to fix.

I was ignoring this mentality for the majority of this project, mostly due to how out of my element this project is. Without revealing too much about this silly project, it has a level creator, due to the entire game using a grid system. In fact, most of the game is finished, the only this missing is the actual levels. My plan at the beginning was to make the rest of the game first, and then use the level creator to make the actual game content. But I digress. Making a level creator meant I couldn’t utilise my ‘coding around problems’ strategy, because I can’t regulate how players will use those tools. I haven’t added a bar saying “oh when this is filled up you can’t add anymore things to the level uh oh” or anything stupid like that, and instead made sure every item can work in any situation, which is probably why it’s been in the works since September last year.

The problem showed itself when I only let enemies by placed on top of ground. Before I had a check when the level starting playing to see if the enemy was above ground. If so, move the enemy to the ground, if not delete the enemy from the level. This worked and there was no real reason to change it. That was, however, my friend tested it and told me you can place several enemies on top of each other and everything breaks. This quick floor check as the enemies are placed down in the creator fixed that, but unfortunately when combined with one other option, brought around the most annoying glitch I’ve encountered in this game.

So, because this game uses a grid system, I added add and delete columns a while back. This made a lot of sense, since some things you can add to the level are multiple grid spaces wide. When you add a column obviously the rest of the level forward moves up, but that for some reason, completely breaks everything related to hit detection. I hope this makes sense because it’s a weird thing to describe. So, you can have four different kinds of platforms; one, two, three and four grid width platforms. When the four width platform moves one to the right, the three leftmost positions would be detected as ground, but the rightmost won’t. Same with the rest, the rightmost grid position of that respective platform would not exist in relation to hit detection. I’ve made an image to better explain what’s going on. Blue rectangles with black borders are platforms, and red parts are parts that aren’t being detected as a platform.

So how did I manage to break this crazy bug? Rather annoyingly simple, just don’t check on the frame they move. This originally meant some enemies would float in the air, because at that time if you tried to add a column in the middle of a platform, the enemies would move but the platform would not. From this point, the next system was to break apart the platforms. As I said previously, there are 4 different widths of platforms. I added a bunch of logic to break platforms based on where you add the new column. So for instance, if you add a column in the middle of a four width platform, they’ll break into two two width platforms, and the rightmost one will move along with the rest of the level.

As I said, great programmers code around problems, and as a result they will come across much better ways to deal with their problems. The glitch I encountered was something that would have been near impossible for me at least to fix, and by coding around it, instead of fixing the hit detection make sure the game never has to check hit detection, allowed me to find a much better way to deal with adding and deleting columns from the level. At the end of the day, the user never encounters that bug, and will remain blissfully unaware on how annoying it was to make it work. Unless, of course, they happen to read this.

And that brings an end to another poorly written blog! I also bought Yostuba& volume 8 and 9 recently, because Yotsuba& is pretty amazing. I think it’s physically impossible to read Yotsuba& and be in a bad mood. Again no anime this week, which I sorta feel bad about. Though I have finished my Supernatural marathon and I really enjoyed that. So hopefully with that out of the way I’ll have time for some real shows like To Love-Ru, aww yeah.

So if you excuse me, SparklyKiss said she’d help me become a teddy bear, whatever that means.

Welcome back to my poorly written blog! I got enough comments on my previous blog to warrant another run at this, and to my surprise some of them were even on topic! Also yeah, this is going to be the name of the blog from here on out, even if I don’t play any visual novels every week. This will probably attract a lot more off-topic conversations that I’d prefer, but fuck it; it’s the nineties, who cares?! On with the show!

E3

So yeah, E3 happened. Which meant I spent a lot more time looking at people playing games (or rather, looking at people talking about previously playing games) that actually playing games. So with that said here’s a quick rundown on my E3 opinions.

Microsoft

I’m going to preface this by saying I really don’t enjoy playing first or third person shooters. There’s a very short list of games in these genres that I will actually play and enjoy. So having said that, when Microsoft’s press conference pretty much went “Hey hardcore gamers we’ve got just what you want! A first person shooter, a trailer for a first person shooter, and a third person shooter!” I pretty much shut off. I did, however, think Tomb Raider looked alright, and the Kinect labs stuff was very interesting to me as a programmer.

Electronic Arts

Mass Effect 3 looks so good it almost convinced me to actually play the Mass Effect series, so I’ll get around to that at some point. Need for Speed could be great, SSX could be amazing. Overstrike looks interesting, and finally for reasons I’ve already said, I don’t care about Battlefield 3.

Ubisoft

Sony

I really want Uncharted 3, and the more I see of Saints Row: The Third the more I want it. Bioshock Infinite puts me in the same position as Mass Effect 3, in which it makes me wants to play Bioshock. The only difference is that I’ve actually bought Bioshock, cursed Steam sales. PSVita also looks like it has quite a bit of potential, so it’ll be interesting to see what developers can do with it.

Nintendo

I am VERY excited about everything Nintendo was showing. I want a WiiU and I want a 3DS, I loved almost every game they showed on stage. I even loved the look of all the games they decided to not show at the conference proper, Paper Mario and Kirby being the main subjects. Though admittedly it’s kind of weird that the WiiU can’t upscale Wii games, when the dolphin emulator is able to do just that, and do it surprisingly well.

No One Man Should Have All That Power

Oh man, this week has been amazing! Allow me to show you with some hyperlinks!

So, last week I mentioned the Saints Row: The Third trailer, and made the offhand comment that, and I quote:

“Also every trailer should feature Kanye West, just saying.”

This was something Rufi and I have been joking around since Saints Row, calling Power the ultimate trailer song, little did we know E3 and later the entire Giant Bomb community would back us up on that opinion.

After that, the Microsoft conference showed the Forza 4 trailer, complete with Kanye West’s Power. To which I made another offhand remark on twitter. The actually catalyst, however, would be the Ubisoft conference. Once the Assassin’s Creed Revelations trailer was shown, everyone’s favourite SparklyKiss said on twitter that the music was incredible. I rebutted saying it’d be better with Kanye West’s Power, and after threatening to mix them together, I ended up doing just that.

The joke was over, I got a laugh out of SparklyKiss, and some other people said it was funny. That was enough for me.

The next night, however, completely unbeknownst to me Rufi took it upon himself to repeatedly post the link in the Giant Bomb chat during one of the E3 podcasts. Here he managed to fool Vinny into thinking it was the original trailer. I’m pretty sure that due to this Vinny started pairing the song with random trailers. Admittedly I’m taking his word for this point, since I wasn’t in the chat at the time.

The next day Ryan Davis tweeted a link to said video, I’ll confess this was after I sent him the link, which was in response to him saying he’d ‘blast that fucking Kanye song’ on his speakers. Maybe even due to Vinny talking about it the night before. He then insisted someone mash it with Super 8, and then someone mashed it with Uncharted 3. And then it just sort of exploded from there.

To be honest, I’d be incredibly arrogant to suggest I started this whole thing, but I’d also be incredibly naïve to think I had no part in this either. The dots join up way too conveniently to suggest otherwise. So in that case, I just want to thank Ryan Davis for liking my silly Assassin’s Creed Revelations + Power video so much that he’d show it off, so thanks a bunch for that!

And thank you to everyone who made their own Power mash up trailers, you turned an in joke my friend and I had by ourselves into something completely amazing, so again, thank you! I really love this community sometimes.

Ryan, quite clearly, deserves all that power.

Well it's time for the part all of you have all been waiting for!

Tsundere Imouto wa Haramase Kibou no Hatsujouki!? ~Sekinin Totte Naka ni Dashite yo ne! Hentai Onii!~

Roughly translated as “Moody Little Sister Wants To Be Pregnant With Your Baby!? ~ Be a Man and Shoot It Inside! Perverted Brother! ~”

Be thankful that I’m not being serious here. I mean, the translation is serious, but… you know.

Tears To Tiara

So I played Tears To Tiara again this week, I had originally played this about a year ago and kept it installed just in case I wanted to replay it. Now usually with visual novels there is no point in keeping it installed unless it has a really good story, and I mean really good. Even last week’s Devil on G-String was uninstalled after the story concluded. If this is giving the impression that this game has an amazing story then hah, you have been fooled good sir! The story here is alright, the main draw, however, is the gameplay. This is a videogame through and through, with the typical visual novel style conversations and character interactions interwoven with gameplay.

So, the gameplay. This game is an isometric tactical role playing real time strategy game. If you’re now sitting there being all “oh word?” then let me answer your completely hypothetical ‘only here to make a Beastie Boys reference’ late 90’s slang with “word."

I admit I’m not very well versed in this genre so everything I say about it could be complete crap, but that’s the problem with voicing your opinions on videogames I guess. Each battle starts with you being able to place your units down onto the battlefield within a certain distance from a pre-determined starting point. From here you tell each unit who to attack, or what magic to use, who to heal. You know all that awesome stuff. Each battle only contains 1 to 8 or so units, as each main character is a standalone unit, and there are no grouped units. This makes the game rather simple to control, as there are never too many characters to control. Even so, right clicking you can tell all units to attack, heal each other or just generally do whatever. This combined with 5 difficulty levels means if you hate videogames like me, this game can pretty much play itself. Each character also gains experience in each fight, which is rather par for the course. Experience is gained after every attack, even if they don’t kill the enemy. A little cool thing though is that if you die in a battle, you get an option to load your last save or restart the battle. If you restart the battle, you get to keep all the experience you had before you died, however, you have a counter in your save file of ‘total losses’, which only increases if you restart. I’m the kind of guy that played through GTA IV with getting no arrests and no deaths, so rather obviously, I loaded the save file every time.

The story itself is rather good, if a little stretched out. A commander called Drwc appears from ‘The Holy Empire’ to kidnap a girl called Riannon. Riannon is the daughter of the Gael tribe’s chief, who is deceased. As a result of this the next chief of the Gael tribe will be the man Riannon decides to marry. She was captured in order to sacrifice her to summon the demon king called Arawn. Only the blood of the Elf king can summon him, and rather conveniently Riannon is a direct descendant. Arawn is summoned from his coffin and is offered Riannon as a sacrifice; however, suddenly Arthur appears to save the day! Arthur just so happens to be Riannon’s brother and as a result the first soldier of the Gael tribe. However, Arawn decides to kill Drwc instead, and rescues Riannon. Arthur, however, is still angry are Arawn, and threatens to kill him. After bickering back and forth, Riannon shocks both of them by proclaiming to marry the demon king, thus making Arawn the new chief of the Gael tribe, and consequently in command of Arthur. You play the game as the unfortunate Arawn, who was unexpectedly woken up way too early and thrust into this tribe as their leader without his consent. Through-out your adventure you acquire yourself a group of warriors to fight against ‘The Holy Empire’ and save the world.

Rather early on you find yourself a castle. In the castle you can but items, weapons, or talk to characters in your castle. You can also recruit and train new characters to fight, however, these are all generic characters, and do not factor into the story. Those characters can be trained outside of battle and can also change classes, for a fee of course. From your castle you can access the world map, and go to the free plains for a little grinding, or select the place with the big ‘?’ to continue the story.

Unfortunately this game is not without its faults. The first problem I had was the character movement speed is way too slow. Like, horrendously slow. Luckily you can hold the ctrl key, or press the shift key, to go into skip mode. Skip mode is par for the course in visual novels, allowing people to skip text they’ve already read (or any text depending in the setting). In battle this allows all movement and attacks to greatly increase in speed. However, skip mode is turned off after every action, which is just silly! In the dialogue scenes this makes sense, allowing you to quickly switch back to being able to read the text, however, in gameplay it’s incredibly annoying.

The story goes in rather interesting directions, but doesn’t really live up to its own potential. The back story for the main characters, Arawn and Arthur, are rather amazing. But the rest of the characters for the most part are just there, and don’t add much to the overall narrative. This is even weirder considering this is a very linear game, even for a visual novel there are no story branches at all. Usually this would mean the story they did tell was well fleshed out and exciting, but even though all the set up is amazing, the ending feels rushed and extremely dissatisfying.

Overall this visual novel is rather average. It tries to combine both visual novel story telling with tactical role playing, but this just makes both aspects seem rather average, and unfortunately it’s not greater than the sun of its parts.

If this sounds intriguing by all means give it a shot, but there are a few ways you can experience this story. The first way is the PC game, rather straight forward. This is the way that I went, as I prefer not to go down the adaptation routes wherever possible (which is to say, the only adaptations I’m ok with is anime adaptations of manga or light novels). Another way game wise is the PS3 version. This version, while only in Japanese, completely changes everything about this game. The 2D isometric real time gameplay is thrown away in favour of 3D turn based strategy. All of the characters are overhauled with new art, and new scenarios are added near the end of the game, to make the story feel more complete. The last way is the Tears To Tiara anime. The same story but in anime form, hell there’s even an English version licensed by FUNimation if you really hate yourself!

I don’t know for how many weeks I’ll be able to write this amount of sheer stupidity, I mean seriously this blog entry is longer than some end of year reports I’ve submitted. I’ve realized I haven’t been talking about anime here yet. Hopefully I’ll have some to talk about next week, but all of my TV watching time has been taken up by watching every season of Supernatural. Apparently there’s a Supernatural anime somewhere, so that’s pretty stupid. I mean, of course I’ll watch it in Japanese, but I won’t be happy about it.

Hey there, and thank you for probably accidently stumbling onto this page. I thought it’d be funny to write myself a blog, and who knows, maybe this will be a thing I do. I did spend far too long making these stupid banners. It’d be a shame if they went to waste.

Here I’ll be talking about videogames, anime, programming and visual novels. So if you want to read about one guy’s incredibly incoherent ramblings on one or more of those topics you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking for amazing insight into a social life of a person you don’t know then tough luck, I keep my personal life bottled away, like a real man.

So videogames, I’ve played quite a few this week, and I have opinions on them:

Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now

So, the announcement of a new Carmageddon game is quite possibly the most exciting announcement for me personally in a good long time. When I was a more innocent young child, Carmageddon II was one of the games I played with my Dad all the time. So I figured installing it again would be rather entertaining. My only fear was it wouldn’t live up to my memory of it.

It totally does.

I love this game so much, like, unapologetically so. I played it all day for about 3 days before finishing it, a feat I never actually accomplished as a child. Speaking of as a child, I never realised how dirty this game is. I do remember my mum never wanting to see me play this game, and hot damn do I realise why now. It’s also so corny it’s unreal, characters like Su Borg and Sylvester Stallion, also every name I read was followed by a groan due to its sheer stupidity. However, I’m apparently a lot more innocent than I thought! A certain character called Jenny Taylia taught me that, because I didn’t even notice the obvious joke until I cursed her name as loud as I can for killing me in a race, and even then it took me a few seconds to go “...wait a minute.” So yeah, loving this game, and I really REALLY hope the new game is good! And especially that the soundtrack is good. Now, because I’m an amazing upstanding citizen of the world, the soundtrack doesn’t play when I’m playing, so instead I came up with this amazing diverse iTunes playlist for all of my Carmageddon music needs.

I couldn’t find a way to segway into this but I also made this image.

I won’t say the only reason this blog exists is to have some place to put this image, but I also won’t deny it either.

SSX Tricky and SSX 3

So I went over to my partner in crime’s place recently to play a bunch of awesome fighting games and PS2 games. After talking about Carmageddon I decided to bring over the AMAZING car combat game WWE Crush Hour. But besides that; and besides me beating him at every fighting game he owns, we played a bunch of SSX Tricky and SSX 3.

Not really much to talk about here though. I’ve been cautiously looking forward to the new SSX game; I don’t know if it will be better that all the rest.

Saints Row 2 I guess

Played a little Saints Row 2 also, it’s a very stupid game.

I only brought it up because of the new trailer and the whole SPINNING DDT THROUGH A GLASS TABLE.

BA GAWD!

I was never interested in Saints Row but still that’s pretty sick, yo.

Also every trailer should feature Kanye West, just saying.

Devil on G-String

I played Devil on G-String rather recently, a rather cleverly done title when you think about it. Combining Der Erlkönig, an incredibly pivotal part of the story, with Air on the G String, a pretty dope classical song. But then at the same time yo, G Strings, because porn game.

The game was made by Akabeisoft2, the studio responsible for Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo. I had high hopes because of this, as Himawari no Shoujo in my opinion was an amazing visual novel. It had a great world, great character arcs and best of all plot twists after plot twists after oh no there’s no help for the characters now OH WAIT PLOT TWIST OH GOD. So I was hoping this one would be just as good.

Good thing is it was even better. I don’t want to talk too much about the story beats, because I think it’s really good and if you also want to play porn games for the story then I highly recommend trying to track it down. In the visual novel you play as Kyousuke, the adopted son of a yakusa boss, who is his right hand man in all the wheeling and dealing of the yakusa business. Because this is a visual novel Kyousuke also go to high school and have a lot more female friends than male friends at his beck and call, a group in which conveniently includes Kyousuke’s sister-in-law Kanon, because it’s a visual novel and yo, Japan. Kyousuke receives an e-mail from a sender only known as ‘Maou’, with quotes from Der Erlkönig. As it turns out, this Maou character has a history with Usami, another member of your posse so to speak, and the story revolves around Maou’s plots to torture Usami and Kyousuke’s group of friends.

The story was great, with a cast of interesting characters and, as expected, a bunch of interesting plot twists. Unfortunately the plot twists in this game, as opposed to Himawari no Shoujo, makes some of the earlier stuff in the game a little too coincidental for my liking. The main character Kyousuke suffers from headaches through-out the story, and has no memory of what happens after said headaches. These headaches seem to happen at the worst of times because then Maou suddenly appears and messes everything up. Now if you can connect the dots then you can quite clearly see how the story will end up playing out. Unfortunately, when divulging into the side stories with each of the different heroines, these headaches somehow manage to suddenly stop! And by chance, Maou suddenly has a change of heart and calls off his huge master plan! A small gripe, but a gripe nonetheless, other than that the story is really well thought out and I recommend it for people who like a good story.

Another interesting point is that the majority of the music is redone classical pieces, which fits well with the whole theme of the story, as Kyousuke is a rampant classical music fan. I personally found this to be a great little nod, and on more than one occasion I’d just let the game sit for a bit to admire the remixes. This one was among my favourites:

A really great touch that convinced me to also get the soundtrack for the game, which doesn’t happen all that often.

Vague overview

So I also make bad games. If you don’t know, which is very likely, I have a website that I haven’t updated in almost a year, called Psy City. I’ve got a bunch of flash movies and flash games there that I’ve made over the last 7 or so years. So feel free to check them out and tell me how bad they are.

I am working on a new project, but I haven’t revealed what it is yet. To be fair I don’t think my games deserve any kind of grand announcement but I felt I should not talk about it until I have even a vague idea of when it’s coming out. I’ve been working on the game since September of last year, and I’m really hoping I can get it finished within the next month or so, though that’s provided my awesome composer friend can also finish the soundtrack before then.

I usually post small updates about the game on my twitter account, with the hash tag #supersecretprojectshh, which a few friends of mine stole from me. When I do get around to announcing the game this will be the place I’ll share amusing anecdotes about the world of bad programming, but now is not that time.

And that’s really it! This is the first proper blog I’ve written so feel free to mock me about how terribly written it is. I might make this a weekly thing, provided I can come up with enough things to talk about. But until then, goodbye.

I realised I don't really post my mash-ups anywhere, so I figured here will do. :3 
 

Instrumentals:
Smashing Pumpkins - Today
Professor Green ft. Lily Allen - Just Be Good To Green

Acapellas:
Lil' Wayne - Go DJ
50 Cent - In Da Club
Ludacris - Stand Up
Jay-Z - Dirt Off Your Shoulder
Soul II Soul - Back To Life
Jay Sean ft. Sean Paul & Lil' Jon - Do You Remember
Ol' Dirty Bastard - Baby I Got Your Money
Black Eyed Peas - Imma Be
Prodigy - Firestarter
Timbaland ft. Justin Timberlake - Carry Out
Rihanna - Rude Boy
Tinie Tempah ft. Labrinth - Frisky

•  RainbowHud: This is the time and date in the top right corner, I couldn't get the weather code working so instead I changed that part to a clock, the text changes from Nighttime, Early Morning, Morning, Lunchtime, Afternoon, After School and Evening, depending on the time. The format is Day/Month, to change this, just open the .ini and near the bottom in [MeterDate], change Text="%1/%2" to Text="%2/%1"

• Boxhud: This is where the locations would be in the game's HUD, here I've changed it to display iTunes information, song title, album, artist and progress.

• RecyclerHud: This is the loading graphic, repurposed into a recycle bin, the card will glow yellow whenever there is something in the recycle bin.

• HealthHud: This is the HP/SP display within battles. Here there are a few different things to display.

1. CPURam - Health is CPU usage, SP is Ram usage
2. DriveSpace- Health is the amount of space left in the C drive, SP is total space
3. Battery- Health is the lifetime of the battery (when plugged in, this will read 99:59), SP is the percentage of the battery.
4. Drive&Battery- Simply combines the previous two, Health is the amount of space left in the C drive, SP is the percentage of the battery.

I was bored so I made a Parappa the Rapper mashup album.  

Download link:   http://bit.ly/cxsfCy 

Hope you guys like it!  
 
  

 Been messing around with the mod editor and here's what I've come up with! 
 

After a few hours of dying over and over I finally achieved my life long dream of getting rank 1 in Beat Hazard! 
 

 So after the quick look of VVVVVV, I convinced myself to get it. I first beat the game in about two hours, getting 18 out of 20 shiny trinkets, and a grand ol' death count of 1149. Man I'm pretty addicted to this game.  
 
Since I beat it in two hours, part of my brain went off convincing me to try to speed run the game. Now I'm one of those crazy Mirror's Edge "I can shave 0.2 seconds off my time here" kind of guys, so I buckled down and did my best. After a few tries and remembering exactly where each level is I got down to a time of 25:06.  
So has anyone else tried speed running this game? I'm still getting 100+ deaths on each run so I know my time is far from impressive. I'm probably gonna keep at it and try to get my time down to about 20 minutes. I was hoping to get it so fast I could beat the game faster than the quick look, but I doubt I have the skill to manage something like that.