Sometimes if you play too many games, you’ll end up burnt out like the girl in the above picture. There’s only one way to cure that: play a crappy game so you’re happy with the stuff you do have on hand. I can’t say that I’ve personally purchased or owned a game that was absolute suck. I can, however, remember how much some NES games I might have loved were actually fairly bad. Even that kind of logic fails, as I’ve found myself enjoying those games for sucking the way they do. Most of this feeling is due to nostalgia. This tends to apply to anime as well. I often opt to watch some anime I could consider bad, but end up enjoying it to a degree.

Completely ignoring what I just said, here are the contents of today’s podcast: FFXI and it’s forthcoming mini-expansions, Supreme Commander 2, Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, Omamori Himari, Ookami Kakushi, fansub drama, Durarara!!, Sora no Woto, and Johnny Yong Bosch.

Once in a while you just have to press F5. So here’s another refreshing update from yours truly, baked in the oven. This podcast is so crisp and burnt, it might as well be carbon. And we all know humans are carbon-based life forms, so eat up, dammit.

As a small note, the quality of the mp3 for this podcast was increased to 160kbps bitrate. I didn’t like the dithery sound produced in previous podcasts. I can go back to 128kbps if a smaller file is more desirable than audio quality. I also forgot links again.

Music Insert – Artist: Pinback — Album: Autumn of the Seraph — Song: Devil You Know

Image taken from danbooru, artist: tomioka jirou

http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=272

It’s the most pleasantly awkward webcomic that will stroke your hair like you were a cat that has a habit of making Portal references in cat-binary-speak while you play your Xbox 360.

For once, I think I’ll use an image that’s straight forward and relates to what’s in the podcast. And yes, I’ve finally got a new podcast up. Sometimes you just get random downtime you can’t get around. Besides that, we’re getting used to the format, and now focusing on few topics to improve podcast runtime and reduce the noise. But no less trainwrecks and derails.

I think it’s become obvious that we’re very excited for Bad Company 2. We’ve mentioned this game nearly every podcast (I think). But we managed to squeeze in Street Fighter IV and fighting games, the L.U.R.K Mod for STALKER, and various anime tidbits including Hanamaru Kindergarden, Sora no Woto, K-ON!! (2nd Season), Queen’s Blade, Bakemonogatari and something else within our maser sights.

The LURK Mod got a recent status update, which makes me think we’ll be seeing version 1.1 soon. I hope.

Music Insert
Artist: Botch
Album: We Are The Romans
Song: Transitions From Persona to Object

Here’s a youtube link to Dan’s Silly Taunt that we were talking about during the podcast.

I think most people would understand that the post title of this entry is referring to Final Fantasy 13.  It’s been lambasted for being a linear experience. But why is it suddenly reasonable to judge a game on it’s linearity? I think about the games that were purposely linear, and those that simply end up as being linear. There isn’t much of a difference between the two ideas. One is done on purpose and the other one is accidental.

So which one is FF13?

In any case, FF13 looks like it’s combat is okay. The story is always up for interpretation, debate, and nerd-rage. And the graphics are alright. Any of the silly short phrases a gamer would spout to defend or lambaste this game are as follows:

• Gameplay is king.
• Graphics aren’t everything.
• I played it just for the story.

Talking like that just tells me they’re pricks that don’t like gaming discourse. In particular, the three main facets of gaming we seem to stress upon so much can bring down the enjoyment of the rest of the game. It doesn’t matter if the story is great; a shitty gameplay system and horrible graphics would have me burn the disc in disappointment and anger.

I side-stepped the question “Is FF13 linear on purpose, or accidental?” because I haven’t played the game. But it’s safe to say FF13 is linear on purpose. And at this point, we can’t do anything about that. None of the Final Fantasy games were ever non-linear. Having additional side-quests doesn’t make a game open world. A story is an even bigger obstacle to game design that prevents a game from being non-linear, especially if the developer(s) in charge has a specific vision.

Two games I can think of at the moment that are linear on accident are Infamous and Red Faction Guerrilla. Both games focus on free-roaming and emergent gameplay. The desired result is that no gamer would have the same experiences as the other. Infamous and RFG get pretty close to letting a player progress through the story out of order simply by having an explorable world that doesn’t try to hamstring the player for deviating, but fall short. In the end, these games were linear. Why are these games linear? It’s because there’s a clear intended goal for the player. But even that as criteria would dig up other games that would have to be stamped as exceptions. There’s an intended goal for the player in Morrowind. But that doesn’t stop a player from jumping directly to end-game and beating it in less than 5 minutes. Sure, that’s going from Point A to Point B. That alone still doesn’t stop us from tagging Morrowind as being non-linear.

Any of the games I’ve mentioned all have good graphics. To reiterate that in a more interesting fashion: Games with good, great, or excellent graphics have a presentable image and informative visual system for the player to enjoy the game, and do not detract from the experience. Graphics alone don’t make a game good, but graphics alone can make a game unplayable, despite gameplay and story.

I don’t really remember where I was going with this, and I’m just going to say that a lot of gamers liked Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a linear game.

So what’s your experience? Do you play the game because of it’s characters, even if the story is shitty? Have you played a game with sub-par gameplay, but has great graphics? Was the story so truly great, that even horrible collision detection wouldn’t deter you?

* Screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, a game that’s better than FF13.

This category of games is rather filled to the brim if you know where to look. Many of these games are just like Yume Nikki, where an easy and simple platform of content generation is the main drive behind it. Yume Nikki was made with RPGMaker. It didn’t even use most of the functions that RPGMaker is for. Yume Nikki is mostly ignoring the functionality of the software it was made on, bearing no resemblance to an RPG. But the more interesting aspect of these types of games is that they are made by a very small group, if not a single person. One example today is Eskil Steenburg, the creator and sole person working on Love. Doesn’t need massive amounts of people behind it; talking to gamers about this concept would be preaching to the choir. All modern day gamers that grew up on the 8-bit era would like to think that a game only needs to be fun.

The way I use experimental might be a misnomer. But I’ll be damned if the games I mention here didn’t correctly execute some strange aspect or function that is either still not working in other games, or no one really hasn’t done it in the same scope. Here’s an old one for you all.

Hardwar is one of those games. I find it odd that amongst the free-roam games that we now see today, none of them have NPC AI where each one is given an agenda to deal with. This is how Hardwar dealt with it; all npcs you encounter are seen trading, scavenging, pirating, and policing on Titan – a small mining moon orbiting Saturn. It’s a rather limited environment. But the size of the world in Hardwar, from a technical standpoint was all that was needed to have the AI happily slave away at their coded goals and priorities. Pirates targeted anything with a filled cargo pod and engage with missile fire. The trader would release chaff and attempt to run away, sometimes dropping the cargo. Police would send an enforcer to defend the trader. Scavengers would get into fights over scrap metal and leftover trade goods from blown up pilots. This also occasionally prompts a scavenger to fight a pirate over the loot, but only rarely.

If you intervene, or find yourself in a different fight altogether, you’ll notice that any action is almost attributed to the four simple roles of Hardwar: piracy, trading, scavenging, or policing. However, doing your own policing is kinda dubious. At best, you’re just defending yourself from other pilots who want your money. These four main activities are what percolate through the flight lanes of Hardwar. The simplicity of design makes it rather dynamic, but the legacy design of the system also means that not as many ships were seen as feasible. Imagine if a game today manages the same level of dynamics with more self-minded AI running around. It’d be a little more than hectic to be honest. Maybe that’s why if I play the game now, I’d think that there aren’t enough ships flying around. But do I really want that?

This game was released in 1998 by Software Refinery (now defunct), published by Gremlin Interactive and Interplay.

Fans of this game nowadays find themselves in other games like EVE Online, where the level of random activity and events exceed the range and scope of Hardwar. But it’s been 12 years and I still haven’t seen anything to oust Hardwar from it’s position as having a dyanmic system, where NPCs actually lined up at the trade centers like normal players, trying to grab that trade deal of the century – only to be met with pirates firing at them, scavengers stealing the dropped goods, and police firing away at the pirates.

It’s surprising to this day that there actually are people who still remember this game. In particular, there’s a reboot being made over at Hardwar.org. Go give it a visit and show your support if you were one of the few people who played this gem of a game.

Oh, and there’s factions. That was one thing Hardwar didn’t really get right. Meh.

Vocaloid art done by Masuneko. Crappy writing by yours truly.

It’s a Toshiba M750. I might have been lucky in getting the pressure sensitivity working from Day 1. It’s thanks to the wonderful forum belonging to Tablet PC Review.com. Go give it a visit if you’re looking for a digital sketchbook companion more reliable than a person named Amara-san. (No offense meant to anyone actually named Amara.)

Should the M750 be the tablet pc you’re aiming to get, visit this site for instructions: http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/showthread.php?t=26662

In general, the driver you need is labeled as the Bamboo series of drivers. Install those, and you’re good to go!