The only ones who are allowed to shoot are those who are prepared to be shot themselves.

Lelouch Lamperouge, Code Geass

Hello, Hola, Konnichiwa and Grüß Gott!

It’s been quite some time since I last posted something here on my little blog. There were various things that I did or had to do besides blogging. I’m gonna tell you a few of these things here:

Age of Conan
I longed for so long for this game. It was hailed as the true alternative to World of Warcraft. It had stunning graphics and an innovative combat system (at least on paper). It had storytelling (at least for the first 20 out of 80 levels). It had a PVP focus with sieges and mounted combat and whatnot (at least it was planned). But what truly happened was this:

May - the game comes out and 1 million players subscribe. Magazines give it the highest rankings. It is a blast to play the first 20 levels, with voice acting for every quest. As players realize that after level 20 all the voice acting is gone they are really disappointed though they cope with it. I for one didn’t really expect to have voice acting after the “tutorial” that was the first 20 levels.

June - players have to grind a lot, an aweful lot to get to the maximum level of 80. From level 50 onwards there were practically 5-10 quests per 10 levels that would give you 2, maybe 3 levels. The rest was pure, unfun, grinding.
Players at or close to level 80 want to do what Age of Conan was focused on: PVP. Yet there is no reward, no nothing, for doing PVP. Plus sieges are buggy as hell, world PVP is practially dead with every zone being instanced. Funcom says “dudes, we will get the big PVP patch out in june!”. Players wait.

July - while at the start healers seemed completely imbalanced, with having high dps and survivability through heals and tank classes couldn’t kill anything because of low dps, things changed when players discovered gems. Soldiers who socketed only +damage gems could one-to-two-shot everything in the game bar other soldiers. I had fun with my soldier for a few days doing this but it got boring pretty fast. PVP patch is still to be seen. Funcom says, early August is the new release date.

August - no PVP patch, no fix for the completely unbalanced gems. Players start to cancel their accounts. I do so too.

September - I only read the forums for this one but it seems sieges are still buggy as hell, PVP is unbalanced for healers again with gems being completely nerfed, all damage cut by 40% in pvp, but heals stayed the same. Plus raids are broken because tanks needed the gems to survive.

October: I am back to playing World of Warcraft and enjoy it a lot. Although I don’t want to raid anymore, I now focus on having fun with reallife friends in the game, doing the occasional 5 man instance, and a lot of PVP.

Work
Got a lot of programming to do with the new project. About 2 weeks every month I work for 50 instead of the normal 40 hours. Although that is most of the time only because I go home early most of the time in the first 2 weeks of each month, so I have to do the minus hours on the last two weeks so I will be at +/- 0 hours at the end of each month. The joy and pain of flextime.

Anime
I have been watching a freaking lot of anime in the last half year. Too much to count actually. Lucky Star, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Monster and some I forgot to mention (damn short term memory!). Especially Code Geass is the best thing since… a freaking long time. The storytelling is at the same level as Lord of the Rings and Babylon 5. I will write a post about the anime next probably.

Other stuff
I have been reviewing anime for Anifreak for some time now also.

You can count on more (more or less) interesting posts from now on again on this blog.

Sayonara!

Last week I finally got Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 for the PlayStation 2. Alas, my PS3 doesn’t have the backwards compatibility that the first models had, so I had to dust off the old PS2 for the game.
But what an awesome game it is.

Today a lot of games are entitled RPGs, Roleplaying games, but few really deserve it. Morrowind was a true roleplaying game, where you only controled your alter ego, and saw everything through his eyes alone.

But almost every so-called “Japano-RPG” (like the Final Fantasy franchise) lets you take full control over a whole party of characters. I don’t see much roleplaying in that. In the same vein, one could call StarCraft a roleplaying game, because you order a few heros around in it. Nothing could be further from the truth though.

So back to Persona 3: It’s the first true RPG I have played since ages, and the first truly astonishing one since Morrowind. While the combat system is fast but tactical and there are around 100 different monsters (Personae) you can summon to your aid, the game truly shines with its storytelling and atmosphere. It’s the little details that (at least to me) make this a true roleplaying game:
Not only do you not control your whole party during combat, but to equip them, and see their status, etc. you have to talk to them and ask them how they feel. If you want them to only concentrate on healing in battle, you tell them again through dialog. While other games have cascaded menus for such things, being able to talk to a party member and tell him/her what to do, makes the game so much more realistic.
Another detail is, why do I, as the player, always hear music in the game? Simple, because the main character has a Portable Music Player equipped which even shows up as an item.

Little details such as this, combined with an awesome and fresh combat system, make this game truly a Milestone in “Japano-RPGs”.

Yesterday I rented another movie from my local videostore and planned to have a nice evening watching it. But I didn’t. Because, as all movies nowadays, it had one of those annoying anti-piracy ads before the main menu turned up. Usually they don’t let you hit the (top-)menu button while those ads are playing so you cannot skip them. Annoying enough. But the last one I’ve seen even topped that annoyance - you couldn’t even fast forward it, that button was locked out too. What. The. Hell?

I can understand the notion of putting those ads on rental disks, because franky, those are probably the disks that are copied the most (leaving bootlegs and camera recordings of movies not even on DVD out of the picture, because those don’t have those ads in front of them anyway). What I don’t quite get is why they have to lock out all of the buttons to forward/skip the ad. I mean seriously, is that going to stop anyone who wants to copy the disk anyway? Not at all.

Which leads me to my next and more important point:
Why in [whatever-you-believe-in]’s name do they put those annoying ads on every buyable DVD? Of the about 200 DVDs I own I’d say 190 have the ads, 180 have unskippable-but-fast-forwardable ads, and 10 have ads that can’t even be fast-forwarded.

So why the hell is it like that? I take pride in my collection, and if I like a movie I will gladly spend the few bucks to own it and all the specials that come with it on the disk. But I’d rather pay 5$ more to skip that damn anti-piracy ad. Not only are they awefully bad most of the time, they also really insult the paying customer which has to spend his or her time watching the ad all the time the DVD is put into the player.
Do they really think that some rediculous ad is going to stop anyone who wants to burn a disk, to do it? If they burn it, you can be sure that they will remove the ad from the disk anyway, so it really serves no purpose at all. Well maybe its purpose is just to be damn annoying.

The following image sums up my opinion on that pretty much:

Just found that masterpiece of cabaret linked in a forum and couldn’t help but post it here. That’s the german cabaret artist Volker Pispers and his program “History of the USA and terrorism”. The audio is german but someone very thoughtful subtitled it in english:

No one can deny that first person shooters (FPS for short) have evolved greatly from their ancestors like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Of course graphics get better from year to year and the gameplay changes depending on the focus of the title (e.g. Hero-against-everyone-else or a tactical team shooter). But for a long time, the story told, and especially how it is told, was stagnant.

At the start, Doom had only a few screens of text mentioning why you were thrown onto a demon-infested Mars. Then came prerendered cutscenes and around the same time, ingame cutscenes that the 3D engine rendered. But if you wanted to tell a story good, back then you had to use cutscenes because the graphics engine couldn’t handle things like lip-syncing, detailed models and animations.
Half-Life was the first game to use ingame cutscenes, and to not change the viewpoint in them. Before that in most cutscenes you would see your own character through a camera, like on film. But Half-Life changed the way a story in an FPS was told. I think there was not a single moment in the game where you would see your character through others eyes. That was really an experience, to see the whole story through the protagonists eyes, without a cut.

Flash forwards a few years and the change of a century. First Person cutscenes are pretty much given now in shooters to let you identify more with your character. For me, there were 2 games in the last year that really stood out with their story telling: BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Warning: huge spoilers for BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare up ahead!
If you haven’t played one or both of these, and plan to do so… then read on if you like but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

While both of them are excellent games on their own, BioShock had a more fascinating story and Call of Duty was more of your regular War-Against-Terror story, there were two points in those games that made me, even as an old school gamer, take a breath and ponder what just happened:

In BioShock it was the scene where Ryan makes you kill him by using the phrase “Would you kindly?”. It’s not that I havent killed countless thugs and bosses in first person, but the intensity of the scene - first you cannot do anything about it because you are brainwashed to respond to that particular phrase. And second it is a really gruesome death being strangled. After that scene I was vexed.

The scene in Call of Duty, while on a grander scale, felt even more personal to me: After heroically rescuing a female pilot from a downed Apache, you fly out with her and your crew, the city behind you. Then the unspeakable happens - a big missile explodes in the middle of the city, and the mushroom cloud it leaves makes it clear that it was a nuclear head. Your helicopter goes down and the screen goes black.
While the nuclear explosion surely was shocking, so far it didn’t me bother too much. The debriefing of the mission showed a board with dead and missing Marines, and listed your name on it. It wasn’t so much irritating that your character died because so far in the story you played 3 characters so you still had the others.
But when I started the next mission I was vexed again, and at the end of it, disgusted: The screen fades in from black, and you find yourself in the downed helicopter. Corpses around you. You cannot walk you can only crawl or kneel. You get out of the helicopter and look at your devastated surroundings, everything is reddish still, and on the horizon you can still se the big mushroom cloud. And then finally, after a few minutes in the debris, you fall to the ground, everything goes white, and you die.

Gulp.

That realy took me by surprise. A whole level just so you can experience your own last few minutes. As far as I know that is a game-first and has not been done before. And while it is shocking, disgusting and irritating, it is non the less - superb storytelling. After that scene I played through the rest of the game in one fell swoop because I was so pissed at the Terrorist who planted that bomb and I just wanted to get rid of him.

And that’s what good stories do: They move you.

I hope we will see much more bravely and oddly told stories in the future. Because a really good gameplay also deserves a really good story.

Since the advent of Hollywood action blockbusters we’ve been pretty accustomed to characters dying on screen in various gruesome ways; sometimes crushed, sometimes slashed, sometimes shot, but always fatally injured. There aren’t many movies, especially those targeted for the mass market where the main character of the story dies. But so-called sidekicks (which, by the way are often the real character actors opposite the big and muscular action hero) pretty regularly bite the virtual dust. And more often than not they die in order to save the hero/heroine of the story.

And if the sidekick happens to be male and saves a heroine from the brink of death (or vice versa) they usually breath with their last words something akin to “I love you”, which according to Hollywood laws the hero/heroine has to respond to with “I will always love you” or something kitschy like that.
While this surely is a nice gesture for the dying person, it is all too often used in movies, and fiction in general. When grave danger awaits the protagonist, someone has to step up and sacrifice him- or herself for the greater good. Yada yada. Obi Wan did it in Star Wars to get Luke and the others an escape route, Bruce Willis did it in Armageddon for his daughter and her fiance, Boromir did it for Merry and Pip in the Lord of the Rings, and countless others did it too.
So, apparently, the story-act of a character sacrificing him- or herself for a more relevant character is often employed and people are kinda used to it. But here I have to add that especially in Hollywood movies the sacrifice normally happens all of a sudden when the to-be-saved character wouldn’t expect it; i.e. the sacrificee jumps around the corner to catch a bullet for the protagonist or some such thing. Getting shot, stabbed, etc. - things movies and stories often employ. Getting beaten to a bloody pulp is not often seen, because it is much more gruesome. And exactly that (and much more cruel things) happen to the sacrificial character I want to write about in this post:

This is Judeo from the manga Berserk, after getting his hand chewed, his back whipped and his chest stabbed by demons, while trying to save the love of the main protagonist (Guts), Casca. And although one as a reader could have picked up that Judeo himself was interested in more than just friendship and camaraderie with Casca, he did never say such a thing.
Why there are demons attacking and devouring them doesn’t matter to make my point, and it would spoil the story too much too (knowing that Judeo will die is a big enough spoiler already). It are the two very last pages of his life that matter only:
As I said before, at least I am pretty used to see characters die as a sacrifice to save others, and I have seen a lot of horror and splatter movies, mangas and animes where people die gruesome deaths. But never before has the death of a character touched me more, emotionally, than Judeo’s. That is because it is the most personal death I have ever seen. How much more personal can it get, than to watch something through the characters eyes?

“Are those my last words?”, “I’m glad to see - you cry”“; Just reading and writing these very two lines makes me shiver again. It is so very honest, personal, human. The last thoughts of a dying man, as seen through his own eyes. To me, this death scene is more gruesome and touching at the same time, than every on-screen death I have ever seen. Sure, the medic in Saving Private Ryan died a tragic death as did lots of others, but never before could you see the last moments through a dying ones eyes.


And the saddest thing is perhaps that she would never know that he was in love with her. Because only in Hollywood have the dying a chance to say “I love you” as their last words before they close their eyes. Life (and mangas) are another matter:

Those two pages I have to say are the most touching (to me) thing I have ever seen or read in fiction. Can’t get anymore personal than that scene.


Phew, what a long post, but at least I got time again to post my thoughts here… and I hope that I got you interested in Berserk, if so, you should try out The Hawks and Evil Genius if you can’t get your hands on the manga (because, as in germany, older volumes may not be available anymore, and newer volumes take their time to come out).

“When goblins blow themselves up, it’s called stupidity.
When humans do it, it’s called heroism.”

Shock Troops [Magic: the Gathering Card] flavor text

P.S. All work and no play make me go… something… something…

Found on the great webcomic “Ctrl+Alt+Del”:

And it’s true, Windows Vista does that kind of things to you!

“The Secretary-General of the UN can be distinguished from the General-Secretary of the UN in that whilst one is in charge of the entire world, the other types letters and answers phone calls.”

from Wikipedia, “Ye olde Badd Giokes and other deleetid Nonsense” [sic]

Just a terrific still frame from Berserk.

(click the above image for a wallpaper-quality version)

“To better understand this thing we call ‘the bluff’, I did what any creditable researcher would do and I Googled the hell out of it. I gave the word an unmerciful Googling, the kind of Googling you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. From my intensive research, I learned that “bluff” is a verb that means roughly ‘to deceive by pretending to be something you aren’t,’ a noun that means ‘an act of bluffing’ […]”

Chris Millar, “Rough, Tough, Etc.” [mtg.com]

Browse through all the Fraud of the Rings comics at Tolkien Gateway.