|
PSN
Gamercard
|
Guy Blade---17:40 |
Seldom Used
Looking up something tangentially related, I ended up looking at the list of images types for an id3v2 imbedded picture. Most of the types are straightforward 0x03 is a front cover image, 0x13 is a Band Logo, etc. What drew my attention was the fact that 0x11 is defined by the standard as "A bright coloured fish". Somehow, I suspect that particular type is rarely used.
Published by XPostcurses
Com/0 |
|
|
Guy Blade---14:40 |
In other words, hold my hand
On Sunday, I finished up my playthrough of Bayonetta. The game initially caught my attention when I found out that it was the most recent game to score prefectly in Famitsu. I picked it up after Christmas, but I had been distracted by Dragon Age, Bioshock 2, and Mass Effect 2 and so hadn't played more than just a bit of it. I finally started playing again in earnest last week.
The game itself plays very much like Devil May Cry which should make sense due to the fact that they share a director. The game is thus made of fast combat, huge combos, and rapid action. I would classify the game as more forgiving the Devil May Cry, however, due to its inclusion of a "dodge" button. Although the DMC games include the ability to dodge, it tends to be more finicky and can fail. In Bayonetta, a successfully engaged dodge always works, and if timed properly, grants a bonus in the form of "witch time"--a sort of bullet time. Regardless, most of the DMC skills will transfer over successfully.
The term "hyper-sexualized" seems to float about when describing this game and perhaps not without warrant. The main character speaks almost always provocatively and almost all of her attacks emphasize her sexuality--at least one even ends with her in a pose and the game performing a "camera shot" by producing a shutter sound and a quick shutter graphical effect. The deapth of it doesn't really sink in until you realize that the character is essentially always naked. It seems to be implied quite heavily that Bayonetta's outfit is just her hair being strategically arranged via magical powers.
Storywise, the game also overlaps with Devil May Cry. There exists two groups--sages and witches--which previously kept some sort of balance and watched over history. Eventually, a witch and a sage had a child against all of the rules of their orders and led to the ultimate near destruction of both sides. Skip ahead a few hundred years and we have Bayonetta waking up from a coffin at the bottom of a lake. She is, of course, the cross-breed, but seems uninterested in dealing with any of the old problems. Instead, she starts taking jobs fighting angels. The exact reasons for this aren't really clear nor important, but the various "holy" types are mostly just jerks who are more than willing to wantonly destroy part of the human world to reach their objectives. Your character eventually gets ambushed by a more concerted pack than usual and decides to figure out what's going on. That's where the plot more or less starts.
I think the game makes a lot of good decisions in design. For instance, at the beginning of the game, there is a long explanatory cutscene where they explain the back story of the witches and sages. Most games would simply subject you to it, but Bayonetta instead has the dialog playing in the background while you take the role of a fully powered character with infinite health fighting enemies in a huge battle. In the closing of the game, after the final boss, they roll credits with various little scenes playing in the background. Two of those scenes zoom in and become player-controlled battles. They didn't even want the credits to be boring. It's that sort of care that sorts the great games and the good games apart.
There is one other thing that is worth noting: the game makes very heavy use of the song "Fly Me to the Moon". In a sense, it is the game's theme song. It shows up several times as battle music complete with lyrics, several of the battle themes are direct remixes, and even the other songs will occasionally throw in just enough notes in a row to evoke some part of the song. The reasons for this are never made terribly clear, but the continual use of the song does provide some level of unity to the entire audio score.
Overall, I'd say the game is quite good. In a sense, it is better at being Devil May Cry than Devil May Cry is. I picked it up at MSRP and don't really consider that to be a bad thing. I should note that I played the XBox 360 version rather than the PS3 version. Supposedly, the PS3 version had framerate issues, but I have no first-hand evidence on that. Either way, where else are you going to find a game that allows you to weild a katana while wearing ice skates or lets you simultaneously use four rocket launchers?
Published by XPostcurses
Com/0 |
|
|
Guy Blade---02:23 |
Pulling Data
So, last night one of my fraternity brothers asked me to for a copy of a document that I made in college (for reference, that would be my proposed IFC revisions related to budgeting and dues). Now, I know that I had made those after my last laptop disk failure, but shortly after graduating, I formatted my laptop and installed linux on it. Before doing that, however, I made a disk image and saved it on one of my big storage arrays in case I needed anything on it in the future. Unfortuantely, I made a whole disk image rather than just saving the specific partition that I needed. Turns out that linux doesn't provide an easy way to treat a disk image with a partition table as a virtual disk with appropriate virtual moutable partitions.
I ended up pulling the data out of the image by using parted to find the beginning of the NTFS partition and then using dd to make a file of just the partition. Then, I was able to use mount with the loop option to actually mount the partition.
Now that I've pulled what I need most immediately, I think I'll copy over the "My Documents" folder so that I won't need to do this again, though I do have a perfectly fine partition image that could serve a similar purpose.
Published by XPostGTK+
Com/0 |
|
|
Guy Blade---17:30 |
Daft Club
I ordered the album Daft Club after I found out that it was mostly remixes of Discovery songs. Honestly, I can't say it is very good. I paid less than $6 for it after shipping and am not sure that it was worth even that. I suspect that the strength of Discovery itself makes creating similar quality remixes tricky. I'll probably give it another listen just to see if it grows on me--Coldplay's X&Y was like that for me. For now though, I just can't say that I'm impressed in the least.
Published by XPostcurses
Com/0 |
|
|
Guy Blade---11:28 |
Craftsmanship
The thing that I think I like most about the recent arc of PPG Doujinshi (which updated today by the way) is the writing of Gir. Although the comic as a whole is generally fun and certainly has high production values, it is hard to beat a green dog-robot looking up at another character and yelling "Call me Ishmael!" for no discernable reason (unless he's calling Bell fat...).
Published by XPostcurses
Com/0 |
|
|
Guy Blade---14:12 |
How's a dwarf come to be named Shepard?
Earlier this week, I finished up Mass Effect 2. As it is a sequel, I should note that I may include spoilers about the previous game as they are necessary to give even a brief outline of the plot of the second game.
Mass Effect 2 picks up two years after the end of the first game. Shepard, soon after the events of the first game, had been sent out on a patrol looking for Geth and had her ship shot down by unknown hostile forces. She was spaced and fell through the atmosphere onto the surface of the planet that she'd been investigating. Needless to say, this killed her. However, being the protagonist has certain advantages, and a fervently pro-human organization that had been mentioned a few times in the first game manages to find your corpse and spend the next two years putting you back together. This is the reason for both your inventory of spilling and your lack of knowledge of what has progressed since the last game.
Shepard quickly discovers that the universe destroying evil from the previous game has been dismissed as an advanced battle machine of a less dangerous race and now is basically alone in her fight against it save the people from the organization that ressurected her. Added on to that, human colonies outside the jurisdiction of the human government have been "disappearing". In every case, the entirety of the population simply vanishes leaving the buildings, factories, and fields undamaged. Your organization finds this problematic.
The game mostly centers around building up your party to face whatever evil is behind the disappearances and to gain more information about the universe destroying evil. In terms of plot centric content, it is probably similar in size to the previous game, but it feels much smaller. I think this is due almost entirely to the removal of the "screw around in the Mako" sections that the first game had. For those unaware, the first game had a mechanic wherein you could wander to various uncharted star systems and scan planets. On a fraction of these worlds, you could land your multi-wheeled all-terrain vehicle and wander the surface looking for various useful things such as equipment, money, or upgrades. The second game replaces this with a "resource gathering" minigame when you scan planets and has short missions on some planets to pursue. What's important to note is that the "some planets" with missions here translates to roughly 0-2 planets per star cluster with a strong trend toward the lower end of the scale.
Gameplay wise, there has been one other large change. In the first game, you could generally always go back to locations that you'd visited previously. In this game, most areas (with a very small number of exceptions) are treated as "missions" which have a mostly one-way progression. Periodically, doors will close behind you preventing backtracking and forcing you to go forward. Once a mission is complete, you generally cannot return to the area in which it took place, so anything missed will be lost forever. This mission-centric vision has another effect: experience is based almost entirely on mission completion. Killing enemies doesn't grant any XP. Instead, fixed rewards are given for completing each mission. Periodically, a sidequest will give a small XP bonus, but those are somewhat rare with the game preferring to give money as its reward.
As long as we are speaking of experience, I should note that the leveling system has been entirely revamped. Rather than having nearly a dozen skills with upwards of 10 possible levels in each skill, the choices have been cut down substantially. Most characters have 4 skill tracks each of which has four levels costing one additional skill point per level (i.e., level one costs 1 point, level two costs 2 points or 3 total, etc). This of course also means a dramatic cut in skill points. My rough estimate is that Shepard could max out four skills while everyone else could max out 3. Of course, maxing out those skills would mean that they reached level 30 which is something that I was unable to do even though I completed everything in my journal, the two DLC missions that came with my version of the game, and visited and scanned every world accessible. I ended up reaching level 28 after beating the final boss.
I found the game to be somewhat conservative in its scope. Most of the ground here has been tread before, but remains solid and at relatively high quality. Perhaps learning from the fiasco surround the "hardcore lesbian sex" allegations in the first game, all of the romantic choices are strictly heterosexual (well, you can romance one Asari, but doing so will kill you regardless of gender and lead to a non-standard game over). It seems a bit strange given the relative diversity of possible romantic entanglements available in Dragon Age, but I can understand their desire to not draw more negative press with one of their more successful series. Since I had imported my character from the first game and all of the possible romantic options for a female in the second game were uninteresting, I suppose I ended up sticking with Liara.
My hope is that they get more ambitious for the third game.
Two other notes before I finish: firstly, if you buy the collector's edition of the game, DO NOT OPEN THE ARTBOOK until you've beaten it. It has artist's sketches of the final boss as well as all of the new PC characters. I luckily didn't look at it until after I'd finished the game, but I can imagine the irritating of having a major revelation spoiled by a CE "bonus". Secondly, despite being released after Dragon Age, the game doesn't seem to be integrated with Bioware's social networking site. This means that although Bioware have their own achievement system and the game has achievements, those aren't recorded anywhere. I'm having increasing difficulty understanding what Bioware is trying to accomplish with their social networking site. If they aren't going to support what is obviously their biggest game of the year, but are still going to have it waste 2-3 minutes connecting to their servers whenever it starts up, what are gamers supposed to think? To me it just looks like another piece of irritating copy-protection without any benefit at all.
Published by XPostcurses
Com/0 |
|
|
