voxelation/BLOG

Consoles?

2010-02-26T00:25:31Z

I've been long beholden to the idea that PCs are simply superior in just about every applicable way in gaming to consoles - really since the Xbox began to blur the lines between consoles and PCs. With the state of the industry as it is, though, getting a console might not be such a bad idea from an objective standpoint.

Setting aside for now the more idealistic debates between the virtues of PC gaming vs. that of console gaming, in the grand scheme of things, a PS3 isn't that expensive anymore. At $300-ish, it's the price of a really good video card. For this, there would still need to be some console-exclusive game that's worth that price of admission.

I also came to the realization recently, that I basically have a Wii (it's my mother's). There haven't been any games on the Wii that I really care about, but Metroid: Other M, and Muramasa have caught my attention, and might be worth getting on the system -- a concept that never really occured to me before.

Ubisoft, who I used to like quite a bit, is joining Activision in my "massive dislike" group of publishers with their new absolutely crap DRM that they plan on implementing in every PC game from now on. I have to register a Ubisoft account, and stay connected online at all times in order to play their games - whether single player or multiplayer? No way, no thanks.

Sure, everyone has an internet connection now - so do I... but sometimes the 'net is slow, or it simply doesn't work. During those times, I <3 single player games ... but now they want those to phone home constantly? Even Steam has an offline mode that works just fine in unexpected circumstances. Ubisoft is blaming pirates. That's okay, but it doesn't make this not a dick move. Nor does it make me want to buy their crap.

If anything worth anything comes out from Ubisoft, I'm going to play it at a friend's place. They lose a PC sale, I get to play their games, and they don't get to blame piracy.

Game Watch 2010: Year of Excitement Conservation

2010-01-12T19:45:20Z

There isn't a whole lot on the horizon that appeals, but that's alright - I'm glad to not be enthralled by games!

(1/27/10) edit: Oh dear. Some more interesting games have appeared.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 - I did enjoy BF2. I wonder how this will be.
Dragon Age: Origins: Awakening - Expansion pack. I loved DA:O.

Considering a new graphics card, and wanting an HD 5770 - but there seems to be a lot of issues with the card and drivers right now. Best to wait, anyway. I had finally come away from being engrossed in games only to get drawn back in. It'd be a pity, right?

Lost Planet 2 - Sometime later 2010. Seems to expand on co-op and RPG options. Uses MT-Framework 2.0
Mass Effect 2 - January of 2010. Seems like an improvement, but it can wait until Dragon Age is done.
Splinter Cell: Conviction

And that's all I can think of at the moment. I'll amend it later if something else cool comes up.

Retro Game Watch 2009

A-List

~~Resident Evil 5~~ - Released for PC in late 2009. It's awesome, and still fun.
~~Borderlands~~ - Released late 2009. It was fun for some time, but ultimately lacking in depth.
Lost Planet 2 - Not yet released. Delayed to avoid early 2010 competition.
Starcraft II - No update.
~~Dragon Age: Origins~~ - Released late 2009. I enjoyed the little bit I played, then I went to Taiwan.
Mass Effect 2 - Not yet released.

B-List

Global Agenda - February 2010 release. Limited to 10v10 battles, disappointing news.
Max Payne 3 - No news.
~~KOF 12~~ - Released. Not much to say. Played it for about 3 days, then never again.
~~L4D2~~ - Released late 2009. Not interested.

Distant Future Games

APB - No update
Jumpgate Evolution - No update
Diablo III - No update
Deus Ex 3 - No update
Tomb Raider - No update
The Agency - No update

Of everything that was on the list for 2009, five games have been released. Of those five, three were disappointments, and two were amazing. Since the time of the last Game Watch, I didn't imagine that I'd feel so apathetic. It's good though - I'm excited to start learning guitar! And I came up with some cool grandiose chords for the chorus of Mighty to Save. Just the chorus though ...

D4 D4/E Dsus/F# G2

It's a mess. haha. It's basically the same thing on top, playing a repeating motif of 4315 downwards on D scale, with the bottom chords moving up... D, E, F#, G. It kind of works with the chorus melody, but I have no idea how to connect it to the verses. Just a bit of fun!

New Year's: Back from Taiwan

2010-01-02T16:59:49Z

I got back from Taiwan at around 1PM yesterday. It was such a blast! Leaving for Taiwan on the 17th, I felt like the trip might be a waste of money, and that I'd just come back after a long vacation feeling like it was just a long weekend.

But... it's been the best trip back to Taiwan I've had. I've come to really love and appreciate my family back there. I'm well rested (sort of. Jet lagged and sleepy-but-can't-sleep right now), and ready to live out loud, so that I can りっぱな人になる and bring back good stories for them next time (and a girlfriend, since I kind of promised like, 3 different people).

On the flip side, now that I'm back here... I feel like I'm in a fugue. The only game that's even vaguely interesting to me anymore is RE5, but games in general aren't attractive at the moment. I want to actually start getting done all the stuff I've wanted to.

This isn't a New Year's Resolution, because it isn't caused by the coming of a New Year. Seeing how warm my family in Taiwan has been, I want to experience that here in the US. These things will take time.

I brought back an Erhu. I'm going to learn how to play it.

I'm going to build up EFCA's Music Ministry.

I'm going to write Type 37.

I'm going to look good.

I'm going to learn to take care of my home.

I'm going to build up Voxelation.

I'm going to get photos of the trip from Betty and Thourn, then possibly create a section of Voxelation dedicated to it. =] I've written the events of most of the trip on a notebook, which I'll expand into blog posts - the exception being the last 3 days in Taipei, as the notebook was packed away by then.

DA:O and RE5

2009-12-06T05:16:35Z

Okay, so due to extenuating circumstances, I now own both of these games.

Dragon Age: Origins is still waiting... it's on the queue, because I'm not touching it until next year after I come back from Taiwan. RE5 is... omg, fun. Even after beating it with Jon/Josh on the PS3, it was still really fun for me to play through again on the PC. I never actually ran out of ammo (though I used the 92FS, so ammo was fairly common), but it didn't feel limitless, and there were times when I had to conserve. It's a nice feeling.

Even after beating it on the PC, I'm still having tons of fun... RE5 has struck some kind of chord in me that makes it one of my favorite games ever. I enjoyed it a lot on the PS3, but experiencing it again on the PC has basically reinforced the notion that it deserves a spot among my favorites.

I don't expect it to be great fun for everyone -- even the gamer house friends put it down when we couldn't manage to unlock any characters in Mercenaries mode -- but then again, in my experience, most of my favorite games are the ones that appeal to some quirk within me.

They are -

Day of Defeat: Source - good times with OYWA
Street Fighter III: Third Strike - an acquired taste, but once acquired, it's destined to stay
Infantry (CTF and Skirmish) - Quite possibly the deepest Team vs. Team game out there, skill and persistent RPG elements combine with a very deep class-based system on large-scale battlefields
Resident Evil 5 - best Co-Op experience... possibly rivalled only by Duke Nukem 3D

.... I now realize I'm fond of making lists. I keep making lists of my favorite games here and there.

Dragon Age: Origins

2009-11-04T05:29:04Z

I've been interested in this since I first heard about it, as a fan of BioWare since NWN rocked my world. It's finally out! And it seems like they weren't just spouting PR stuff when they said they were going back to their Baldur's Gate roots.

It's got some of the slick presentation that they learned from Mass Effect - though not quite as cinematic. However, the world setting seems to be very well crafted and fleshed out better than any other game I've seen. Animations might not be as smooth as the latest cinematics, but they're plenty good enough, and the voice acting and story content more than makes up for it.

I'm definitely buying this at some point. Pastor Liao was talking to me about being a consumer, and he had a very interesting point. It's strange how it's so hard to part with some money to buy something you really want, but that same money could be spent in an instant on other things without any thought.

I can't justify buying Dragon Age right now... but just yesterday, I spent $100 on new lenses, and got a $50 parking ticket for forgetting my car overnight. That's three Dragon Ages right there, friends.

Borderlands.... release! Rant -- (But it has a happy ending!)

2009-10-27T15:18:40Z

I mean, it's better than ports that have come out recently from EA, who honestly just don't care - at least you can adjust some video settings manually (I mean, wtf- NFS:Shift even tried to simplify Resolutions into a numerical scale!), but it's pretty obvious that the main platform Borderlands was built for is the Xbox360.

Mouse movement felt completely wrong, and sensitivity was WAY too high by default -- sliders are everywhere in the options without visible or editable numeric feedback (not to mention, you can't even drag those sliders around! Arrow keys to adjust). It's not just the options either.

The In-game HUD is animated at 30FPS ... this is probably not noticeable for most things that don't have smooth movement anyway, but it looks really bad with the compass at the bottom of the screen. You can get away with this on consoles where the FPS is hardlocked at 30 max, but this doesn't fly on PCs. The Halo PC port (also by Gearbox, btw) is terribly guilty of this. All the animations in that game were done at 30FPS, including the guns and the enemies. The game could be running at 60FPS (so movement and mouse-looking was smooth), but the firing and reloading animations as well as the death animations of the enemies was terribly choppy in comparison.

Consolitis.

I though Halo PC was just a bad example - I mean, Bungie was made to develop for the Xbox, right? But seeing a relic of that in Borderlands is rather disappointing.

None of these things are game-breakers, but they all point to a developer that's gone little beyond what's absolutely necessary for a PC port; which is disappointing particularly because the developers themselves had stated that the PC version would feel like a PC game, and delayed it for a week.

But at least they left the guts of the game open to modification.

Following some forum posts for Borderlands, I went and disabled some specific graphical options to boost frame-rate on my computer (which has an aging 9600GT mobile), as well as disable Mouse Smoothing and removing the long list of unskippable intro movies. I tried out everything at once, and now the performance of the game is WAY smooth.

Slick framerates all the way, and it feels right ... like a PC game. I don't know which tweak or tweaks were responsible, but I don't really want to mess with it either. I'll log what I can remember, and upload the tweaked .ini here.

I used nhancer.com's software to try to force AA (the black outlines at low resolutions are terribly thick and jagged), but I didn't notice any difference in-game, so I don't think that worked.

I edited .inis in Documents/My Games/Borderlands... etc. ... in particular, WillowEngine and WillowInput.

Disabled Dynamic Shadows - there's an option for this in-game, too... but I think there are actually two of them in the .ini. Disabling it in-game only turns one of them off.

Disabled Mouse Smoothing - I don't know what this does in particular, but someone mentioned that it made it feel like a PC game.

Added -DX9 to the command line - Dunno if this helped either, but someone posted a thread about this on Steam, so I tried it out.

So there it is.

Before these tweaks, Borderlands was around a 7.1/10 for me... co-op was a bit more fun but the game didn't really feel so right. Literally, after the tweaks with a significantly smoother frame rate and feel, I feel like rating the game a 9/10.

See you in the Borderlands. =)

Borderlands PC - T-Minus 1 Week!

2009-10-19T03:06:06Z

I ended up not getting Resident Evil (waiting for a Steam sale - also waiting for a sale on Mirror's Edge).

NFS:Shift is still arcadey. It's better than GRID, but not quite there to the (Gran Turismo) level that I'm wanting. The crappy low-level cars in these quasi-realistic racing games handle "sluggish" and heavy, but they feel like they have a nice weight. But as you get faster and better cars, I feel the handling diverges further and further from the feel I'm looking for.

i.e. the Mustang is a tank in GT (it's worse than the BMW in that it really only goes in one direction), but in GRID, it handled pretty nicely, and I could use inertial drifts fairly nicely.

With Borderlands a week away, I'm playing some Ace Attorney and Scribblenauts. =]

Ace Attorney is really good. I had only played part of the first one before (I can't remember if I beat the original Phoenix Wright), but now I'm starting with Apollo Justice. I'll move backwards from there.

Games Money

2009-10-03T23:31:04Z

Borderlands has been pre-ordered!

I regret Mini-Ninjas. It was a very impulse buy, and the game wasn't worth the $30 at all. It was a neat experience, but had shallow story and no replayability. ;_; I like my games to last!

L4D2 is available for Pre-Order. L4D1 came about when I was starved for a good co-op game. I've played a few since then, and it seems there are now many options out in the market for co-op games (of the 4-player variety). I have the feeling the Borderlands should have basically everything covered that L4D2 has to offer, other than awesome voice acting.

Killing Floor was a similar concept that was put together with far less resources than Valve had for L4D, but at its core, the game play appealed to me more. Borderlands will most likely have everything KF has to offer and yet more.

-- of course, this is discounting L4D's competitive Versus mode. But if your Co-op game makes a better Versus game than it does a Co-op game, then you've missed a mark somewhere.

GRID was a pretty neat game, though it wasn't a Gran Turismo replacement like I had hoped. Still, if I wanted to speed down roads with a semblance of a car that had weight, it was okay. Graphics were beautiful! (if not all nuked yellow). Need for Speed: Shift is out now. I'm curious to see how it stacks up against GRID.

Street Fighter 4 is basically the other "big purchase" I made this year. My original plan was to wait until the price dropped from $40 to pick it up, but I kept thinking about the game day and night, and eventually bought it anyway. I did play the game a lot, even though I didn't like it -- I want to like Street Fighter 4 because it's the newest Street Fighter game that's not 10 years old. I hope the future (Super Street Fighter 4) sees improvements.

Street Fighter 4 is just Street Fighter 4. I've been playing SF3 some more recently, and the flow of that game just draws me back to it every time.

But... that's okay. Hopefully Borderlands is good. Should be fun stuff-- other than that, I'm looking forward to Dragon Age: Origins, and.... uh. Resident Evil 5's price to drop, or go on sale.

Playing with EWQL

2009-09-25T01:29:27Z

test01.mp3

I wanted to hear Voices of Passion in some sort of context, so I played around with it and recorded this short thing.

More naming business

2009-09-15T06:20:39Z

In addition to musical names, I'm also kind of interested in homophones between Japanese and English. I just stumbled by this one: Eureka = Yurika

Other ones, Cry = Kurai and Sonata = Sonata.

Apparently, Soarer = Sora, which was the name of a car, the Solara.

Elena Wallpaper

2009-09-14T22:49:58Z

Three years ago, I drew an Elena wallpaper that ripped-off the slick iPod silhouette ads at the time. The proportions were kinda really off and it bugged me. I woke up this morning to no-internet, so I randomly decided to try to make corrections to the original art.

Future of (my) Computers

2009-09-03T02:57:08Z

I currently have a desktop PC and a MacBook Pro, both of which I use extensively. I might be moving back to Arcadia, which will probably affect how I use my computers.

I've always been a single-computer person up until recently, and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with the roles each of my computers should play. I want to create things on one machine, and play games on another with as little overlap as possible, because otherwise it feels like things become a mess.

If I'm writing story ideas on both computers, I'll need to sync the folders between both computers, and in more complicated projects, this syncing becomes even more impractical. Likewise, games take up quite a bit of space and so, if unnecessary, I'd like to avoid having redundant copies of every game on both computers. Things like internet usage and such on the other hand are pretty easy to accomplish using whatever computer is handy, so that's alright.

Right now, the MacBook Pro is my gaming computer, and creating-stuff computer. In fact, because my desktop had been having PSU issues (causing frequent blue-screens), my MBP became my primary computer. I have to boot into Windows to play games (though in both Vista and 7, browsing the internet always felt risky because my MBP is prone to random system freezes when browsing), but it's something I've become more used to. My desktop, however, still holds copies of my games, music and stories that I've written. It became somewhat like a dusty warehouse that I stopped paying attention to.

Now that the PSU has been replaced, it's working just fine, and is comfortable to use -- I can browse the internet and play games on one machine without worries, the way it should be, right? With a video card upgrade, it should become superior to my MBP for gaming, and so will most likely become my main gaming platform again.

As for writing music and documents, the laptop will most likely be responsible for those tasks. Logic Pro is an OSX program, so I have to use the laptop for it. It's also mobile, so it'd be what I take to school all the time. This is probably what bugs me.

Ideally, it'd be nice to have a lightweight laptop that I don't feel like I need to coddle to take to school and do all my text writing on, while my home PC becomes the heavyweight that I play games and write music on. Unfortunately, I don't think that's possible at the moment. ... maybe in the next generation. When I'm done with school, the MBP can probably stay at home and not be carried around quite so much. The power adapter on it is starting to come apart for some reason -- the insulation is shrinking or something, and exposing wire. It should still be on warranty, though- so I'll try to get a new one. It'd help put me at ease.

So, I will want:

New Magsafe Adapter

Graphics Card for desktop (most likely a GTX 260)

Later: a new monitor for desktop -- preferrably one that goes up to 120Hz.

CSULB 09/10

2009-08-31T22:09:54Z

New school year begins today! Today's class was cancelled due to furlough, though. I've been trying to duplicate a bike key that I lost... been to four different places that either weren't there, or weren't able to do it. =\

I ordered the Complete Composer's Collection from Eastwest -- it should come some time this week or next week. I'm excited! Even though I haven't written any music with just Logic Pro =\ I can't wrap my head around how to tweak electronic sounds. >.<

I'm excited to write music!

SF4 vs. SF3 - Study

2009-07-28T06:27:33Z

So, in the wake of the LAN party, I've been playing around in Training Mode to try to better understand the engine of SF4 and how it's been tweaked compared to SF3. I noticed two things that were really messing me up - (during Sakura vs. Ryu matches, as well as some Ryu mirror-matches).

1) Throws
2) Cross-overs

SF3 is a pretty smooth game, but I think it runs at something akin to 24FPS. SF4 runs at 60, so there are far more frames and the spacing is really tight.

1) In SF3, jabs beat out throws (most of the time). This isn't the case in SF4, as throws will beat out jabs just about every time. I eat throws especially when I expect to punish an opponent landing from a jump (or a whiffed Shoryu). The window for punishing these feels smaller in SF4 than before... however that's probably a matter of practice (since I get punished for those all the time). This, coupled with the fact that quick-stand/ukemi isn't allowed on throws leads to #2.

2) Cross-overs are particularly deadly to me, because they almost always lead into a combo. I've lost entire matches in KOF, SF3 and now SF4 to cross-overs. A perfectly executed cross-over (in an experiment with Sakura), shuts down almost every single one of her wake-up options.

The only counters are: EX Shouou (either punishes, or whiffs- allowing her to escape), Super, Ultra and Focus Attack (possibly the best counter... looks cool, too). Cancelling the FA into a back-dash may be the safest option.

With Ryu, a good cross-over will stuff his Shoryuken (which I didn't know at the party). EX Shoryu may whiff. His definitive counter could be EX Tatsumaki. (Worked 100% of the time on my recorded cross-over, but that cross-over may not have been perfectly executed).

Cammy seems to have even less options. If the cross-over isn't perfectly executed, back-dashing is a possible escape. Her Cannon Spike gets stuffed by cross-overs, and her EX-Cannon Spike may whiff.

All of these counters require either strict timing or Reversal attacks. I suppose it's a matter of muscle memory, as is the motion of performing a good cross-over.

Wake-up attacks WILL keep you on the ground, allowing you to be comboed again - it's not plausible to hold jump on wake-up to eat an attack and expect to be popped off the ground. I can't remember if this was the case in SF3 or not. I remember Makoto could trap you on the ground after a Hayate, though.

Related - I can't wait for the modding community to figure out how to easily swap character models in SF4 without messing up the faces. Rufus would be the first to get replaced.

Transcription

2009-07-21T07:49:06Z

Transcribing stuff is fun, but very tedious. The end result makes me happy, though- and it's neat to see conversations or things we normally only hear written down word-for-word. I'll be transcribing a Focus on the Family presentation the next couple of days. Will post when done.

Couple of hours, and I'm 10 minutes in.