In which Reuche makes an unadvised purchase Sunday, Dec 28 2008

I bought the independant PC game Eternal Eden this month. The game is really addictive since it’s a retro RPG and I spent as much time as I could throughout the 1990s playing games like that over and over again. Throughout the first handful of hours I was trying to decide whether or not it was really worth 20 USD or not but I didn’t regret my purchase. Then I started coming upon some glitches. And then I started wanting a drink. And then I wished that after I passed on getting the game the first time I’d have just stayed that way. Allegedly there will be updates eventually, possibly even a free “new game plus” expansion, and things will be fixed and everybody can be happy. Thank god I didn’t try and use it on a computer running Vista. However one way or another I’d have to say that the game feels more like it’s worth $10 at the most to me. And I ultimately can not recommend you purchase it.

To be fair the game is probably about as good as any random RPG aside from the visuals and audio which are what they are (somebody told me the game was made with RPGmaker). But being used to perfection in grammer and operations from professional works (aside from SRW which at least has gotten better about being buggy in the past couple installments) the small smattering of errors are glaring. And again bug addled early versions are common among PC games in the first place so this is more of an industry standards failing than a particular personal failing from Blossomsoft.

MEH! Well I dislike giving a full assessment until I’ve completed something but even under 10 hours into the game it’s obvious that it’s a game which only hardcore and/or “classic” (if it’s older than 15 years it’s a classic by default just like with rock music) RPG fans can really enjoy. I can actually think of a few people who I would recommend the game to but I doubt they would buy it. Conversely I heard that if you get the game from places aside from the publisher’s site (I’ve never used a game portal and likely never will) then it’s an easier version so you might consider doing that. The game is almost absurdly easy if you’re a completionist who isn’t a moron (you might want to make notes about things you see or places you can’t get to if you’re playing over a wider spread of time in case you forget) but I could see how skipping through some things would throw a person off.

If you’re playing the game and really sucking it up then I would advise you to abuse the wounded fairy (bounty hunt, found at Joelle’s place) for a while which is also supposed to be a glitch that will be ironed out later. heh… yeah I wonder if you can even get 100% on the bounty hunt? [edit: You can get 100% by beating the fairy the right way: feeding it a piece of bread]

As a roundabout the program runs as “project eden” rather than “eternal eden” and I think I actually prefer the former. I have to assume that both titles have been used before elsewhere and they’re somewhat melodramatic. If I had any dedicated readers they would recall that I am fond of more abstract titles. If you come up with something good then use it even if it has nothing to do with anything. Or failing that such as today I just went with the first thing that popped into my mind: what happened. So with that in mind a more absurd title would have been “Have an Eden” and a more descriptive title would have been “3 whiny boys try to save the world”…. Yeah I guess I can see why it ended out being “eternal eden”.

Favorite character: Joelle. Favorite part of the game: the finite amount of enemy encounters [FierroxJean]. Least favorite part of the game: tied between the byplay of Downey and Jean, and humping (walking along everything and occasionally having to hit the action key in the hopes of finding an item or hidden passage) everything in the game to get the myriad of possibly worthless items that are strewn about the world. Seeing as you spend the majority of the game doing the latter and fighting enemies it says something about how little I care for the characters. Maybe later on in the game the characters will all get it figured out through adversity and the dialogue will get better but I’m not holding my breath.

Wow one of these days I should do something about the categories I have eh? Did you know that people only say “one of these days” and “if only” and the likes when they have absolutely no intention of actualizing whatever it is? I sure as hell am not going to spend a day working out my categories. It would be nice if everything was magically worked out though.

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When people go to a blog they expect to see bitching Wednesday, Apr 16 2008

Just to get it out of the way, Q:”can you boil stew meat?” A: That’s kind of the point of buying low quality anonymously sourced and overpriced pre-cut stew meat isn’t it? In fact if you boil meat until it’s cooked through with a few vegetables in there and maybe a little bit of flour and corn starch (pre-dissolved and whisked in cold water) then you have pretty much got stew. Seriously speaking you generally want to “simmer” rather than “boil” meat when making a stew but that’s mincing hairs you know? It’s all about sanitation! You want to make sure that it’s cooked through and all the little bacterias are dead so even if you hardly get any nutrients, you won’t get sick. Lately there are even stories of raw produce making people really sick. This actually isn’t anything new, it’s just that it’s old enough that a lot of people forgot about it.

Well anyway my life never stopped sucking from my perspective I just try really hard to ignore it. Lately it’s been more persistent as I found out that I’m smart enough that I’m a moron yet not smart enough to be a genius however my output still isn’t much better than that of a moron.  Don’t worry, that doesn’t make sense to anybody but what it means is that I remain screwed as far as just about everything goes. And also that if I only have one thing it’s high standards: the 98th percentile isn’t good enough for me. My sole consolation is that the remaining two percentile who are theoretically smarter than me are even more screwed up than me. It’s not much but you read it here first: people who are smart are really fucked up. The smarter you are, the more fucked up. Unfortunately the opposite isn’t necessarily true, you can still be really fucked up even if you’re a moron. Being really fucked up can even cause you to be a moron.

Recently I discovered what the charm of the Canadian sitcom “Corner Gas” is; watching it while drinking hard alcohol. The cast of the show tries to give you this hint by frequently imbibing alcohol throughout the course of the episodes but they’re usually just drinking beer and that’s not hard enough to take the show from boring to funny. Canada is probably just too nice of a place to take in sober. I will say this for the show: it never makes me sad. That might not mean anything to anyone else, but it’s something to keep in mind if you get a chance to watch the show (which is time better spent doing almost anything else).

You know what else has me down? Cleaning. It might not be apparent but I’m somewhat of a perfectionist and this is most apparent during cleaning. All I can say about cleaning is that there is no such thing as clean, you just eventually reach a point that you have to admit is “clean enough”. Different people have a different threshold for clean enough. This is so that society can keep working in order to have someone provide me with factory sealed sponges, bleach, hard alcohol, and vinyl gloves. I would not necessarily recommend ingesting that combination. In fact I would recommend against doing so.

In my opinion life sucks in different ways for different people, including not sucking. And of course for some people it doesn’t suck because it’s too busy blowing. Sorry I couldn’t resist that one. This is beginning to sound like a bad comedy routine but that’s not a bad analogy for life. You throw your material out there and people don’t even bother to boo. If you can at least get people to boo you then you know they’re paying attention, but if you get nothing from the audience then they’re probably just there to drink overpriced imported beer after being fooled by the free admission. Which itself might be an analogy of life: you get in for free but you’re paying for every last damn thing after that.

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Opening Your Ribcage to Disappointment Tuesday, Nov 13 2007

Because no one bothers to read this unless I’m talking about anime series today I’ll say a few things about the new season of Shakugan no Shana 灼眼のシャナwhich is aptly titled Shakugan no Shana II (second).  The series is only 6 episodes in and I believe it will run for 24+ episodes so it is early to judge the whole work from under 1/4 of it. But nonetheless so far it’s just a step above sucking.  Seriously there has been less action or plot  in the first six episodes than there was in a single episode of the first season from what I remember. Of course that’s an exaggeration, and I seem to recall the first season (which ended fully a year and a half ago) starting out pretty slowly too before eventually picking up. But that was for entirely different reasons.

To cut straight to the heart  of the matter the problem with “Shana II” (is wordpress really slow and junky lately or is it just me?) is that  it has now become almost entirely a love comedy whereas before it was somewhat of a fantasy action series with love comedy elements. And to be honest I could hardly care less about that kind of anime at this point, I’ve seen a lot of series before that have done that better. In Shana II I’m just not believing anything. Like the introduction of a new female character who is so plainly just Hecate under a spell but  the cast decides that it’s not her after all and instead are entirely willing to just waste all of their time essentially baby-sitting her. Which is something else I don’t believe. It’s been a while since my school days but if a student who was totally inept at living had transferred into my school I’m pretty sure that we all would have just alternated between trying to ignore her because she was so damn annoying and teasing her rather than devoting all our time to making sure she was all right. And I was a regular student, in Shana we’re talking about characters who are part of some bizarre magical race of immortal inanimate objects or some crap like that. Seeing as I’ve just told you what happened in episodes 3-5 perhaps you can understand my lack of enthusiasm for the series so far.

From the preview for the 7th episode I can’t say that I’m expecting much in the immediate future and I may be tempted to give up the series since as much as I like Shana and Wilhelmina and Margery I dislike the worthless male protagonist almost as much. I mean seriously it’s like all of the sudden the kid has stumbled ass backwards into becoming a being of supreme power (almost the single bit of plot so far) but he’s still a total wuss and doesn’t take the situation very seriously and still winds up doing worthless stuff. Like say, going to school and blah blah blah.

Didn’t I say something about being done with fiction the other day? I should have stuck with that. Instead I’ve been watching about as much anime as usual. Another time I’ll write more about the few shows this season I’m deigning to watch and the pile of old anime that I’ve found myself watching lately. Until then.

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