indigozeal

What the hell is going on with Ghaleon's shoulder armor in this fanart? It reminds of that one Rob Liefeld Captain America illustration. You know the one.

(It used to be that Pixiv was the undisputed king of fanart, and you can still find some great pieces for the larger fandoms, but I think outside sources have lapped them qualitywise at this point.)
.

No, I don't mean that way - it's obviously fake. I mean questions that the creators should have asked themselves in order to ensure they were creating a convincing illusion:

- How did a title with only 5,000 copies, some of them presumably not in English, achieve "fast & furious" "dissemination" on college campuses? There are tons of college campuses with more than 5,000 *students.* There are barely enough copies for the game to achieve fast & furious dissemination on *one* campus.
- How did an impoverished little game company afford to translate part of their paltry 5,000-copy game release from Czech into English?
- How is this a game a predecessor to Myst in any way?
- Are the creators of the video familiar with why graphics on older games are blocky? They know about resolutions, right? 'Cause there're about four different max resolutions suggested between the background and the characters and the interface elements. (The glowing ghost orb in subsequent videos is a particularly impossible effect in the era.)
- How would stabbing your workers in their joints increase production? Surely, even cardboard Communist officials would realize that tactic would be detrimental?
- Is the narrator a native speaker of English?
- Regardless of the answer to the above, how did he pronounce everything else correctly and then decide that that one word at 4:24 was pronounced "suh-creed"?
- If the narrator isn't a native speaker, then has the whole "I'm a British person" narration trope become so ingrained in U.S. culture that it's now being exported to the English-speaking citizenry of other nations?
- If the coal mining machines are so huge that a single cog can't be shown on a screen where a person is only about 1/4 of a screen high, then how did this failing coal-mining operation perform maintenance on them?
- The Porto character was knocked into a chasm by a "grief-stricken machine"? Really?
- "Players can't allow another to play" the game? Really? The copyright protection extended to identifying who was sitting behind the keyboard?
- How can outcry be "enormous" if there were only 5,000 copies, particularly with the mythic copyright protection that locked people other than disk owners from playing the game?
- A copyright protection system from *1989* can't be cracked?
- Is the story such an unsolvable enigma that it would drive people mad? I mean, the fume-demons rose up in defense of the oppressed workers, the playable fume-demon is stated to be Porto's beloved, Porto worked at the mine, Porto eats coal (???) to escape but the screen fades to white at the conclusion, so the fume-demons are the fallen workers and Porto becomes one at the end. That basically solves it, right? There are ZX Spectrum games out there with bigger unsolved mysteries.
- You guys didn't bother to find out whether "Ryuichi" or "Yamamoto" was the family name, did you?
- How is this scary, exactly? The revelations about the plot don't dovetail at all with the supposed "scary" aspect of the game, which is...its unwinnable scenario*, I guess, since that's what the climax is about? There's no build-up to the climax, and the climax is pat & flat. It's poorly written even from a fifth-grade creepypasta angle.

* - And it's totally not unwinnable, BTW - you can see where your character's moving just fine from the light source, and we live in a world where people have under-two-houred that "invisible zombies" mode from the Resident Evil remake. I mean, come on.
.

Found this other doc, which offers up some interesting info on 7th Saga partner betrayals: what happens when you get a Rune, and your partner turns on you to take the party's Runes for himself. (This can happen only when you get the Water, Moon, or Light Runes, apparently, which is interesting in itself; you get Water & Moon in nonviolent settings, but Light you get after defeating Doros. It'd be heck to have to deal with an apprentice battle after a dungeon & a big boss fight; it might have been fairer to switch this event instance to the Wind Rune instead.) With Lejes, of course, there's a relatively high chance of this happening, 1/8; with Wilme, 1/16. Next come Kamil & Olvan, at 1/32, with Valsu & his holy morals far behind at 1/128.

Interesting thing, though: The document claims that Esuna & Lux can't betray you at all. Now, it's rationalized that neither Esuna nor Lux can be the Patrof apprentice because the generitext refers to that apprentice as "he," which lets out Esuna, and because the apprentice's spiel is normally capitalized, whereas Lux speaks in all caps. This, however, suggests that there might be a character-based reason behind them not being the Patrof apprentice. Lux, of course, is a robot, and though Lux has desires & motivations - he wants to find out what happened to his people - the pettiness of greed & betrayal might be a bit beyond him.

What's up with Esuna, though? Could it be a crisis of confidence? At the start, when the apprentices first split up, she voices confidence that she'll doesn't need help and will be all right by herself with her magic. (This cocky attitude is underlined by her initial rebuff of Lemele in favor of boozing it up at a bar in the opening.) If you come across her later, though, one of her possible messages is a dejected "This journey has taught me how little I truly know. Back to the beginning. I must start all over again.".

So does Esuna's brash exterior cover up a lack of self-assurance? Does she not try to steal Runes because she's not confident that she could win in a mano-a-mano battle? She's one of the biggest damage engines in the game!

(And this Japanese script dump indeed doesn't have a betrayal message for Esuna (just a bug message in its place) - but it does have one for Lux! What the heck?)
.

Browsing tonight through a T-shirt shop offering game shirts and found the usual suspects - Mario, FF7, Chrono Trigger - but I also found, of all things, a Legend of Dragoon shirt. I haven't played the game and can't speak for its quality, but whenever I see it brought up these days, it's near-always in the perjorative sense, so even though the design looks nice, I'm shocked that it got greenlit for the store. Baten Kaitos shirt coming soon?

P.S. I love the idea of an FF4 Dragoon shirt, but I wish the art were stronger.

P.P.S. Likewise, this Silent Hill 2 shirt would be a great idea if it were rendered in a more appropriate style.

P.P.P.S. That's a nice Five Nights at Freddy's shirt, but considering the game's been out for only about a month and it's an indie title done by one guy, isn't it a bit gauche to infringe on his copyright like that so soon? I mean, couldn't you have just hit him up and collaborated?
.

Apparently, Swery has confirmed that Forrest Kaysen will be in his upcoming D4 as well.

Is he Swery's Randall Flagg, then?
.

Man, some of these people have really big foreheads.  And long necks.



Also, I haven't even started gameplay proper yet, and I already have one damn schedule shaping up. Visit the Queen every 28 days, visit the land I'm developing on Saturday...what the heck, Angelique?  What's the deal with going and being an actual game on me?
.

Why does apparently no one in Marble Hornets own a vacuum cleaner?

I'm at the first real boss.

It primarily attacks initially by draining your magic-equivalent points, so you can't restore yourself with spells.

Your inventory space is severely limited, so you have room for about 5 healing items.

You have to maintain 3/4 full health at all times; failure to do so will result in an instant KO.

Is this game a complete fucking troll?
.

I recently read a story pinning Other M's flat vocal performance for Samus on Yoshio Sakamoto's decision to direct the English voice acting personally, even though he supposedly wasn't that fluent in the language himself. I'm reminded of the voice acting in Spy Fiction, which features mostly the same voice actors on either side of the Pacific...but their intonations are frequently quite different. Compare the Japanese with the U.S. release. An idea: do they have the English voice actors enunciate slowly for the Japanese release so that students of the language in the country can more easily understand them?
.

I am fourteen hours into Glory of Heracles and still waiting for the plot to arrive. The festivities were kicked off by my JRPG young knight tromping around ancient Greece in full plate armor and getting hurled off a cliff together with a thief who, in battle at least, looks, fights, and talks like Giovanni from Angelique: Six Knights of Dark Love. Both survive the fall, from which Giovanni concludes that they're both immortal and have amnesia (well, she must've concluded the latter from previous experience or lack thereof, but anyway) and therefore must journey to Mount Olympus to discover their true identity and purpose and what the hey. Shortly afterward, JRPG Knight is informed by some nymphs that he's actually the great hero Heracles, but we later meet a strapping Johnny Bravo-type who also claims to be Heracles and, admittedly, looks, fights, and acts much more like the real deal. More Plausible Heracles soon joins up, so we have two characters with the same name in the party.* In my last play session, a third Heracles showed up, this one an older general, and I'm wondering at this point if we're going to end up like one of those FF6 playthroughs where some smart aleck decides to name all of the playable characters "Kefka." Were the game reasonably clever, I'd expect these to be three aspects of Heracles in different stages of life, separated through some manner of Olympian trickery. I have no expectation that this will be the case.

But back to the lack of plot: while the amnesia thing is mildly puzzling, there seems to be no conflict that needs my party's intervention or pressing peril from which the heroes must extricate themselves. Mount Olympus itself offered no answers, merely branding our merry band as "unforgivable" and sending us on our aimless way, but that pronouncement seemed to be because we couldn't remember who we were, not because of any horrible unknown deeds from our past. The compatriots we've collected seemed perfectly happy in their presumed ignorance of their origins, leading comfortable, unquestioning lives womanizing and dine-and-dashing and what have you, yet throw in with our aimless non-quest nigh-instantly upon our arrival without a query or moment of doubt. There is a heck of a lot of urgency and a heck of a lot of going out of one's way expended in our continuing effort to go nowhere and accomplish nothing.

Meanwhile, there's an anime Trojan War going on, and my group is currently escorting a princess to a meeting with Achilles, though Achilles didn't really make it clear what he wanted or planned to do with the princess once he met her. My party's full of Greeks, I assume we're on the Greek side, but we've also come in conflict with a villainous General Nestor, who is using glowing Companion Cubes to bring the dead back to life and create a zombie army. That seems inarguably evil, but the mythical Nestor was a Greek, and this game isn't exactly complex enough to deal with the horrors of war as fought even by pseudo-sympathetic combatants. My party's charging relentlessly forward with the utmost confidence despite its complete and utter ignorance of where it stands in this world, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to feel, think, or do about anything. But there's a giant mecha Trojan Horse, so that in part makes up for it.

* - To their credit, both guys seem pretty laid-back about the whole imbroglio. The others do, however, insist on giving Main Hero a temporary nickname for sanity's sake, and one suggests "Pit," which is rebuffed for being not suitably Hellenic. Then I get to the ENTER YOUR NAME screen and discover any attempt actually to name my main man "Pit" is auto-rejected. C'mon, Nintendo.
.