Kenogu Labz
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Posts posted by Kenogu Labz
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Sooo, I recently read Ender's Game for the first time, and the connection between the Rachni and the 'Buggers' became pretty obvious. The hive-mind mentality of the Rachni isn't the same as the Hive Queen's biological extensions, but certainly ends up being very similar in practice. The lone remaining queens, the races' ability to communicate instantly (via ansible or otherwise); hey, you could even say that the Rachni Queen has her own...
Speakers in the Dead.
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a gigant hit me and im in the air and i cant get back down hlp plzzzzzz!!!!!
The Elder Scrolls always felt like they'd be really fun as co-op games - imagine semi-competent followers, but better. But an MMO? Ugh. Not sure I can see that working at all. Wandering the wilderness would turn into mad dashes to get the resources you can before everyone else takes them all. Storming dungeons? Gotta wait for everyone to respawn. That guy you thought was a vampire and killed? Don't worry, he'll be alive in a few minutes, you didn't do any lasting harm. The paradigm shift just doesn't match.
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I hope you all stayed long enough to see the scene after the real credits ended.
That was classic. They did a great job of setting up future one-liners and paying them off at unexpected times.
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I'm gonna dump a few thoughts here, since I've started playing:
- Loading times are some of the shortest I've seen. I can't remember a load time of longer than a second, and that's a huge boost from ME2's mediocre performance.
- What is with the control scheme? That one-button-does-all really doesn't belong. I understand that was probably necessary for console controls, but for PC, it really doesn't cut it. It's one of my primary frustrations right now, as it makes it very, very difficult to maneuver in even simple combat. Cornered by a Brute? "Sorry, can't jump over the ledge behind you. We'll assume you were trying to roll instead... oh, that's too bad, the Brute's in the way. Oh well, I guess you'll just have to try again."
- Enemy squad tactics are downright ruthless. I'm playing hardcore, and I may just have to tone it down a bit, 'cuz the sheer numbers of the enemy is sometimes pretty overwhelming for a three-man squad.
- What happened to all the interaction, the things to find in corners of the Citadel, the fantastic humour from ME2? I understand the darker tone doesn't leave much room for humor, but even then, I expect to be able to talk to more people or read more things than those that are directly related to me and the missions I'm on. It feels like they spent so much time wrapping up the writing from the previous games that they missed the opportunity to continue world-building and adding things to be discovered in this one. I can't even talk to EDI, which makes me fairly disappointed. Hoping some of these show up as the game continues.
- What happened to the hacking minigames? I really liked those!
Still fun, but at the same time it feels like there's something... missing. And I can't quite pick out what it is yet.
EDIT: Hah, never mind about EDI! Some humor is definitely coming through, now that I'm past the first few missions. And I guess they decided to make a lot of the 'discoverable' points passive instead of active.
- Loading times are some of the shortest I've seen. I can't remember a load time of longer than a second, and that's a huge boost from ME2's mediocre performance.
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You sell out when you run out of all possible valid keys accepted by your key generation algorithm. Sounded like they planned to have some more up soon, though.
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Well, at least these suggestions are from scenes placed in Africa...
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Correction: Pre-purchased. Only people who have paid for the game in full are guaranteed spots in BWEs. Everyone else, including people who did that traditional pre-order method of putting no or little money down and reserving a copy, have to cross their fingers and hope they get an invite.
Correct, sorry. Wrong terminology.
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Man, my last MMO was Guild Wars, I'm thinking about getting this...
Is the beta out yet? and how does it compare to the first one?
I'm sitting on the fence right now about getting this, if you guys can give a good argument I just might join you guys.
The upcoming beta weekend (Friday 27th - Sunday 29th) is open to any and all who have pre-purchased the game. They just sent out instructions for client downloads, but if you pre-purchased, you'd have time to jump in.
All the news concerning this has been overwhelmingly positive. They had a lot of basic design principles that helped form the game into an MMO that brings out spontaneous group play, and drops of many of the major issues found in other MMOs. Can't necessarily attest to how good it is, seeing as I haven't played it, but a quick search for videos and articles should help give you a good picture of how it plays, and what makes it unique. The official site has a lot of articles as well: that should help see what some of their major goals are, and whet your palate for more.
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ArenaNet posted a list of available worlds. We could try coordinating which world we all enter, since it seems to attach an entire account to one world. It'll save on having to transfer characters if we didn't coordinate. Any preferences?
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A friend recommended me to Trigun. Am I going to be wasting my time watching 25 episodes of this?
Naw, it's a good romp. A little oddball and rough around the edges sometimes, but still good.
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Yeah. Still can't agree with Aerith's theme as being up on that list very high, but I'd bet it's the only one you could get a solid number of votes for, thanks to the broad fanbase.
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Been using an old Zune for a few years. Things's built like a brick, even if the control scheme isn't the best. Certainly reliable, though. The software's okay for the most part, and tends to be less intrusive than iTunes. Too bad the Zune's fading out.
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Yeah, I would classify it as an ensemble, or instrumentation. It's similiar to a big band in jazz: you've got your set instruments, and the specific genre (swing, funk, latin, etc.) is left blank for the artist to fill in. What they choose to do with the set of sounds is their choice. Rather than saying 'big band' is a genre, because you've got everything from Count Basie to Maria Schneider, and the difference between them is the difference between Koji Kondo and Sam when it comes to chiptunes.
Makes sense. I guess a tangential question would be: Is there actually a genre that chiptunes alone can fill?
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But is "chiptune" a GENRE or a production style? I know plenty of people who make chiptunes and hate when they are referred to as a genre. You can have jazz chiptunes, funk chiptunes, rock chiptunes, dance chiptunes, etc. Hard to argue that, right? So what you're really asking is for us to have different production standards for different production styles. And that gets a little harder. Where do you draw the line? Like if someone made a crappy dance mix with basic saw & square synths mixed with lame drums, I don't think anyone would want us to give that a pass just because it has an intentionally basic style.
Personally, I'd argue it is indeed a genre, though one that is certainly strongly coupled with a specific production style. My reasoning is that, like any other genre, it is closely related to a specific set of instruments, and relies on compositional elements that are unique to itself. Using the FX albums as an example, where else do you find such meticulous and rapid-fire runs of notes? Sure, Jake based it off of thrash metal, but thanks to its placement within the chiptune genre, the composition has shifted to use runs that I suspect are tighter than many metal songs out there. (But don't quote me on that, haha...)
And that's just one example. There are many techniques chiptunes use which really have become unique to that genre, perhaps because attempts to mimic that style with higher-level instruments lose a lot of the precision that raw waveforms have, or turn the composition muddy. So I guess my argument boils down to this: Chiptunes have the capacity to do things other genres either can not or would not benefit from doing.
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Does dropping the resolution help any? Could be a cache-stomping type of issue.
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The basic problem people have with on-disc DLC: The content is already on the disc, so why do the consumers still get charged extra to be able to use it? This follows the line of thought that DLC should be used for post-release expansion only. If the content is available at release, there should be no reason to withhold it.
EDIT: Ninja'd by Stevo!
DOUBLE EDIT: And Fishy!!
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On my very first run, I let my entire crew die (minus Doc Chakwas obv) to do the loyalty missions because I jumped on the Reaper IFF mission (and didn't look up what would happen), but still wanted to do the loyalty missions.
Pretty much the same here. I went in without guides, and boy did that take me by surprise. And, quite honestly, it was way better that way, and made that part all-the-more potent.
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Well Bleck that's the ultimate logical conclusion but we haven't gotten there yet. Baby steps.
Dr. Bleck, you can help me! For the first time in my life, I feel like there's hope
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Happy birthday, Jillian, and hope your next year's even more awesome than this last one!
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Haha, yeah, it's always like that. It took many listenings to fully wrap my head around the intricate lines of FX3, and this is gonna be no different. So. GOOD.
And man, those melodic lines in 'Weapon' are just too sweet. You know, the kind of memorable, hum-able lines you find in 'Across Rooftops.'
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actually what happened was that the team working on it was incredibly emotionally drained, and i believe they lost the support of whoever was sponsoring them. so they had to find a way to end it. sucks but sometimes that's the way the cookie crumbles
Yeah, I'd heard they had budget issues several episodes before completion. But that still doesn't wholly excuse the fact that the writers didn't plan a basic arc beforehand. The problem I see is that, unlike most American shows, which run with the intention of serializing over many years without much forward planning, many anime are designed to operate in smaller arcs, with a solid ending after 25-50 episodes. The fact that many of them don't seem to at least have sketched out the entire arc is what surprises and somewhat frustrates me.
This issue isn't just present in serial anime, either. Miyazaki's work is beautiful, and I love it as much as many other people, but there's always something missing from his endings. Oftentimes, loose ends are simply either made irrelevant (without being resolved), or are resolved almost deus ex machina. Those films are aimed toward a younger audience, so I can understand that decision, but still, it's another example of the same pattern.
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That ending theme is still one of the most gorgeous out of any I've heard. Don't know what it is about it. 'Aura's Theme' is also a potent theme, IMO. There's a quiet bitterness to it that makes it quite potent. Most of the vocal tracks are excellent in their own way, but what else do you expect from Kajiura?
The show itself is okay. I remember enjoying it, but wishing they'd take the setting a lot farther. The basic premise of the .Hack series really could be used for a whole lot more, but what we got was still enjoyable.
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Evangelion was a great setup. They did a pretty great job... right up until the end, when it did the equivalent of ding-dong-ditch and threw any good ending ideas out with the trash. Pretty disappointing to me, and I suspect it may be either part of the cause or just following the trend of animes that try to have overly philosophical endings.
Darker than Black did something similar; despite the superb quality of the rest of the series, and all the conclusions they could have given it, they chose to go a route that didn't really tie up loose ends that well, and instead trying to sound profound. Those types of endings just usually don't end up that deep; it's like jumping into the 13-foot end of a pool only to find out the water's only 3 feet deep. Perhaps it's because they don't take the time to write the endings beforehand, or because they're forced to write an ending for an ongoing manga.
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I need to go back and follow/comment on a bunch of music from the last few months of poking around on Soundcloud, instead of just lurking.
Aperture Science buys out Black Mesa
in General Discussion
Posted
I think it ties into Portal 2's "Perpetual Testing Initiative". It sounds like the user-made tests send test subjects to a parallel universe, so it wouldn't be surprising if Cave somehow managed to buy Black Mesa in one of those parallel instances. It's awesome to have more Cave quotes to brandish, though!