when you become so smart that you seem stupid Monday, Aug 25 2008

Last week I was talking with a foreigner who did not know any of the languages that I know properly but could speak some english. I was trying to explain the meaning of a word, I think it was “argument” to this person. I could not do it. Apparently my vocabulary is too advanced, reading pretentious novels all the time will do that I guess. Anyway as a result I seemed like just a total moron at the time.

Even more startling was just a little while ago when I found someone standing outside my door who was quite apparently impaired. I am not an expert on some things, I think this might have just been an autistic person, or perhaps merely someone with a severe speech impediment, and not a truly mentally retarded person. But I could not tell, and I could not tell whether my fake academic words were being understood or not. Truly I could hardly understand what this person was saying anyway. This seems to be a bizarre problem I’m having in any case, I’m sure my hearing is as good as ever because I still listen to my music player on the lowest volume and can hear it just fine. In any case it was quite an adventure as I was trying to get at one thing, where the hell this person lived, and this person seemed to have no agenda whatsoever. It occurred to me afterwards that perhaps this person was not impaired at all and it was just a cover but considering the total package I doubt that. It is a little hard to explain, but it’s like the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction”. People’s imaginations are ultimately limited by their knowledge, so if you’re trying to act a certain way you can only do so to the best of your knowledge and ultimately if you’re surprised by something the act will break down. However people who are a certain way will continue to act that way whether they want to or not, even if they are surprised by something outside of their expectations. This is not something that everyone would pick up on, a lot of people who are good at deception will go a long way with it to avoid the sorts of surprises that might defeat their act, and really I can’t pretend like I’m especially good at detecting such things. But if you pay attention in a detached sort of way certain thoughts and observations will come to you, and that is something that I am good at, so sometimes I notice these things about people. Although ultimately the trick is to think about it. To really think about it. People neglect conscious thinking quite a bit, relying instead on subconscious thought to carry them along.

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when injuries lie chronic Wednesday, Jul 23 2008

Since I beat Minesweeper the other day I had not played it seriously until now. I have already lost my touch. Similarly math that I had mastered a month ago has fled my mind. Anime I watched earlier in the day I could not name the characters from. Such is the color of my life, that which I do not hold fast to my breast disappears.

Oh well.

Over the past few days I’ve been watching the Shion no Ou anime series which is basically about a little mute girl playing shougi. Similarly the 81 diver live action drama series has now ended, it took a different route compared to the manga series… probably. Honestly I haven’t watched the whole thing it just seemed that way, I do not disapprove. 81 diver is also about shougi but it’s a lot whackier, I prefer it frankly.

It is unclear to me whether or not the Shion no Ou manga has ended or not. I’m pretty sure that it has indeed ended at 8 volumes but the last chapter of the manga in the 8th volume didn’t seem explicit to me. Then again I just glanced at so perhaps when I review it fully it will be clear. It seems like the manga and the anime have almost exactly the same plot but I am not positive about that.

Let me take this opportunity to restate that I do not know how to play Shougi. Both Shion no Ou and 81 Diver are probably poor introductory works to the game as you have protagonists that are supposed to be really good at it. As opposed to Hikaru no Go where you learn about Go with Hikaru and quite likely any number of other manga works out there about asian games including go, mahjong, and shogi. Umm I think there’s another game that japanese people play that starts with an R but I don’t recall it right now and it’s inconsequential.

Anyway I had been under the impression that Shion no Ou was a series more along the lines of “Ayatsuri Sakon” (can’t recall the full title, possibly “karakuri zoushi ayatsuri sakon) where you had a wonky protagonist who was a genius and solved murders. That is not it at all, there is a murder case at the heart of the story in Shion no Ou but it doesn’t seem like Shion solves it herself. If anything she is the main obstacle to solving the case. So that said the series has dark overtones but this is usually washed out by how insipidly sweet it is most of the time.

In the end I would say that most elements of the plot obsolete themselves as they end out being totally pointless in the end. The murderer is exactly who you thought it was in the first episode, having a male character cross dressing just to give shion a love interest that is in her day to day life was also pointless. I would have preferred if Ayumi would have just been a “bad bitch” character with a soft spot for Shion. Or what the hell why not shoujo ai? this is the 00s after all.

So, since I don’t know shougi it isn’t easy for me to follow along with the games but it often seems like they breeze through them as well. I am uncertain how many moves there are in a typical shougi game, I thought 1-200 and that would surely take longer than 20 minutes to show while interspersed with melodramatic inner dialogue so that’s understandable but… I just never have any idea how it’s going aside from the comments from the “gallery”. Which is a low point for this series as it is for any “sports” series but since I find it necessary it does not grate on me. Maybe I only understand go because all the pieces are the same and you just have 2 different colors, who the hell knows and that is neither here nor there.

Well I will give a review on the show after I finish watching it, I will check out the manga in more depth as well, at least the 8th volume. I might have heard the manga would get released in america but that seems unlikely.

Some other time I will speculate on the qualities one needs to possess in order to be a master of games like shougi and other such games which might give you an idea why you suck at chess so much. Actually I might have all but 2 of the qualities needed to be a chess master but I am so deficient in those 2 that I can’t seem to beat anybody at it. Playing a chess game on the lowest difficulty and always having to give up is pretty demoralizing too. Yeah I may have never beaten anyone at chess in my life. At least I’ve beaten a couple of people online at Go… though it has been a long time. Oh well.

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You can only listen to Big Sky so much before getting totally fuckinng sick of it Friday, Jul 18 2008

Although I would have to say that in general you can only listen to trance and house and techno music so much before you want to smash whatever the sound of it is coming from. Ah 230 minutes of Armin van Buuren and Minesweeper is a dastardly combination.

Well I was thinking of something that I forgot about Dearly Devoted Dexter. I think this happened the other day with Darkly Dreaming Dexter as well. In any case during the course of this book when Dexter starts to ponder whether or not he will end out living a normal life without killing people anymore while he’s under surveillance and going over to Rita’s house almost every day I was reminded of Koroshiya Ichi. 殺し屋1 (ichi means 1 in japanese) Koroshiya approximately means assassin but “professional killer” is a bit closer to it, literally the kanji mean “killer store” if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen it used just to refer to killers, aside from the likes of “satsujinsha” and “satsujinki” and “hitogoroshi” hmm… Well that’s unimportant. But the plot of “Ichi” is pretty bizarre with the premise being that this crazy guy perverse guy who is retardedly strong gets hired to kill a bunch of yakuza. He accomplishes this mostly using karate kicks that make use of the blades he has built into special shoes he made himself. When fighting he gets an erection and if he doesn’t orgasm while killing someone he always masturbates and leaves semen at the scenes of his crimes. So yeah it’s pretty fucked up. Comparatively I’d say that Koroshiya Ichi is a lot more fucked up than Dexter because Dexter doesn’t really have the same sexual angle. Speaking of which it is relatively rare for a serial killer to not have some sort of sexual motivation, to get at least that kind of thrill from their acts.

The thing in Dexter that reminded me of Ichi was this aspect of immersion into normal life almost washing the killer out of someone. In the Ichi manga series (there was a film directed by Takashi Miike which might be more famous among non-otaku) that was pretty much the ending. Ichi got swallowed up by the city. There was a certain question as to whether the whole thing might not have been the delusion of an old man but that doesn’t matter. One can not see this kind of end for Dexter, instead one must see a violent end for him but whether or not Jeff Lindsay will have those kinds of guts is unknown.

Another similarity between Dexter and Ichi would be the vigilante angle. The difference is that Dexter “makes sure” that his victims are guilty where as Ichi is merely manipulated to believe that his targets are the same sort of people as the kids who bullied him (some of whom he killed anyway) growing up. Although almost all of the people Ichi was paid to kill (eventually he escalates and kills other people as well) were hardened Yakuza that had committed all sorts of crimes anyway, few of them had killed. Part of that I would say is the difference between Japan (Ichi) and Miami (Dexter). I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are killed in Miami every year than the entire country of japan. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Miami gets killed every day.

Also of note is that both Ichi and Dexter were made into the sort of killers they are. Dexter was probably encouraged and instructed more than actually made into a killer though, as a sociopath we are to believe he would have killed eventually even without encouragement, he just might not have been as successful. Ichi on the other hand was an incidental killer (I think he killed a kid with a chunk of concrete or something like that) that got molded into the type of killer he was by this older guy.

Hmm on the whole I thought Ichi was more interesting but Dexter is ongoing so who knows. As to which is actually better I can not say since it has been many years now since I read Ichi and as a manga series rather than a novel series like Dexter it has different strengths and weaknesses. It probably makes even less sense than Dexter though. Ichi as I already said is a lot more fucked up, however there isn’t a lot about the work that I would say is particularly frightening or cause for despair. You have strange people living in their own little strange world killing each other off. On the other hand you have Dexter out in our world among us making plans to create another of himself in Cody. Which is another thing that seemed extremely unlikely to me but that doesn’t really matter that much at all. At. All.

So in the end, if you like one would you like the other? Who the fuck knows? If you’re interested in one you’d probably be interested in the other though, that’s a safe bet. Which is just the kind of bet I like, though I am not a betting person of course. Maybe that’s why it takes me so fucking long when I play Minesweeper?

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At the moment my time would probably be better spent learning how to fish successfully than understand what NPC is Friday, Jul 18 2008

As promised I read the second Dexter novel Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay and it was a big pile of addictive crap just like the first book. On the whole there seemed to be less tension in this book, probably because of all the mundane (typical, regular, average, normal, Dexter not killing or stalking people, etc.) scenes involving Dexter and other people that seemed to fill the book. And of course like in any shitty book series there was recap information interspersed which is nice when you haven’t read the last book for two years but really annoying when it hasn’t even been a week since you read the previous book. So I was once again unable to suspend my disbelief but I found this book to be more amusing in many ways than the first. I suppose it was also more disturbing in some of its implications but books like this don’t really bother me. I am not a sociopath like Dexter, it has been certifiably checked that I am not in fact, but I am a similarly broken person from a combination of trauma, poisoning, and genetics. And so when Dexter laughs and his sister is losing it I find myself at least smirking. The most hilarious part to me was when Dexter was ready to move on from the case even though it wasn’t solved because as far as he was concerned his part was done and no one could believe that he thought this way. Really it was perfectly logical, which also means totally inhuman. It took me a long time to understand that logic and humanity go against each other but I did get it, which apparently is part of what makes me not a sociopath.

To touch on that for a moment, sociopaths that is, apparently the key is that sociopaths are egotistical and anti-social with an utter lack of empathy. You do not necessarily have to be a sociopath to be a serial killer nor does being a sociopath mean you are or will be a serial killer. But it is alleged that the two frequently coincide. I would posit that the reason that a lot of sociopaths give the impression of being more clever at least if not necessarily smarter or better problem solvers is that their brain doesn’t waste space on social understanding similar to people with autism (this is not to say that people with autism are sociopaths or serial killers either, as far as I know almost no autistic people end out as murderers in spite of being outsiders). A lot of sociopaths are good at blending in, charming, and charismatic, but this is because they do not feel shame and annoyance the same way that normal people do, if at all. hm mhm well I would say that in general from the sociopaths that I’ve known they generally aren’t good for anything in general although they usually are quite skilled at their jobs There’s a place for everybody you know.

Well back to the book, the big “there’s no fucking way” moment for me was when Dexter left his clothes sitting on the toilet seat at Rita’s house about halfway through. Although Dexter is not shown to be obsessive about germs in spite of his desire for neatness and distaste for blood, you would think that from his attention to detail and fastidiousness he would have set the clothes somewhere that they were unlikely to be disturbed. Even on top of the toilet tank would be a much more likely area for him to place them. This ended out being used as a plot device, and the method of that implementation was also a bit skewed, but I could easily imagine other more likely ways for the clothes to be disturbed thus triggering the plot device.

And for that matter I don’t think anyone named Rita who also has a son named Cody would have a daughter named Astor. Then again I’m not familiar with the US south east (lots of cubans and rednecks) so perhaps it is a more common name in that region.

So in the end the book was just a way to pass the time in between math and Minesweeper. I seem to have become obsessed with Minesweeper but I am unable to achieve victory on the largest board. So I finally resorted to reading about the game, which only offered one insight and a couple of ideas for me to try. However I did find out that Minesweeper is NP-complete which is sometimes written as NPC. The only NPC I’m familiar with is “non-player character” which is a term that I believe originated in role-playing games and should be familiar to anyone that’s played a console RPG (Final Fantasy XII) or MMORPG (Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Maple Story, Ragnarok, etc.) which will usually feature a variety of NPCs. Anyway I’ve already forgotten what the NP stands for in NP-complete but the idea is that an NPC is something that you can’t create an efficient algorithm to solve. Or perhaps put another way, it is something that is harder to prove you can solve it than it is to solve it. I am not qualified to give an example of this in Minesweeper but if I understand correctly part of this has to do with the fact that you don’t know what the first tile in a game will be before you click on it. You can guess that it will be one of 9 things: a mineor a tile numbered 1-8, at least I assume there is an 8 tile though I have personally only seen 1-7, but until you click on it you do not know. And further in the game (versions that have patterns that make you guess, like the ones on most standard editions of windows) you will also reach points where you have to guess whether or not any number of tiles may or may not be mines, notably early and late in games. And there is just no apparent way to verify what these tiles are until you click on them. And at that rate when you click on a mine it shows you where all of the other mines are so the fastest way to find all the mines is to lose!

I wonder to myself at this moment whether it is Minesweeper or Tetris that is the most evil game of all time. In theory Minesweeper is solvable and Tetris is infinite so that should count for something. There must be a game of tetris that hasn’t stopped running for some time out there somewhere, people trading off and keeping the game alive. At least as far as I know Tetris blocks can only fall so fast… I don’t really want to think too deeply about that.

Anyway if you have any interest in Minesweeper and NP-complete you can check out this page by the guy who came up with the proof of Minesweeper being NPC over here. It is a bit illuminating, and put in a pretty simple manner which I think even people that are not familiar with the fields involved, but have played Minesweeper (which has got to be the majority of people in industrialized nations) will be able to understand. The most interesting thing he said was that if a person could solve P=NP then it might be more beneficial to them to keep the information to themselves than to collect the million dollar prize for doing so as they could break any code out there. Or perhaps that was if you could prove NP, I am not sure if there is a difference there or not. I can say that if anyone ever solves it, that person will not be me. My mind doesn’t work in the right way for that kind of thing. My mind is much better at picking out fault. Which does make me wonder, if I could learn enough advanced math properly I might be good at being a math critic. Who knows, maybe that’s what it would take. It has been said that at times the fool knows more than the wise man.

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Waiting on those young americans Sunday, Jul 13 2008

Well I happened to be pointed towards an article with interesting implications earlier. You can read it here. What is interesting about this is that if it is possible to do emergency surgery on a fetus, return it to the womb, and then have it be born later, it means that if techniques can be perfected it would be possible to make enhancement modifications to a fetus and return it to the womb. I guess that I’m talking about transhumanism/human enhancement here. Until now I had assumed that to create enhanced children you would have to do just that in a synthetic environment, or you would have to transfer a fetus to an artificial environment for the enhancement and leave it there. And I have indeed seen fiction that had such a procedure (remove fetus and leave it out) before (yeah I’m just talking about gundam seed). But perhaps this does not have to be the case. It does not seem to me like there would necessarily be great advantages to doing so from the enhancement side, but any given creature is more likely to survive in its natural environment and of course for the fetus that means the womb.

I would be a little interested in hearing more about surgeries of this kind but it is not my area of interest so I will not seek anything out. I will say quickly about transhumanism that it usually strikes me that those who are its greatest advocates are those who feel the most socially (especially people who are autistic) and/or physically deficient. And as a result they envision either being transformed into perfection themselves or a race of near perfect beings as a following generation. But it occurred to me lately that it would be easier to induce specific “flaws” that seem to lead to other benefits than to basically try and recreate humanity, or even to isolate and correct potential flaws. Actually the thing I was thinking about was intentionally creating children that have “high functioning autism” known commonly as “asperger’s syndrome” in the hopes of creating a genius generation. This thought came about because I used to discuss transhumanism with a variety of people online who identified themselves as being “aspies” and it seemed like each of them were obsessed with it to varying degrees. I often thought that almost any of these people had the intelligence to achieve such ends but they had totally lost sight of the fact that they were geniuses now in the midst of their feelings of isolation.

It isn’t easy being different, and it might be worse when you are different in ways that you will not be rewarded for socially. For example a lot of professional athletes  (mostly distended looking basketball players) actually have freakish physiques in some ways and are known for not being the smartest people in the world. But because professional sports are a worldwide obsession they are rewarded and idolized for these differences instead of being penalized. Not so for a person who might have a 140+ IQ but also has Asperger’s syndrome. At best they can possibly hope for academic renown or professional esteem among colleagues, but they are very unlikely to become renowned and beloved within their country let alone the world.

Well allegedly the incidence rate of autism keeps increasing yearly but whether it’s genetic, which would imply that it is an evolutionary trait (less emphasis on the physical and social, more emphasis on the intellectual, not that people with autism are necessarily deficient physically), or environmental (polution, vaccination, stress on the mother during pregnancy, etc.) which would imply that it’s some sort of unnatural mutation is unknown. I personally suspect a combination, maybe genetic mutation was caused by something people did but now that the trait is there it is within the population. Hell who knows maybe even depression is an evolutionary trait for population control…

But back to what I was saying, with the decline of physical requirements on daily life it makes more sense to head in an intellectual direction. And it occurs to me that it would be a lot easier to figure out how to induce a trade-off condition like asperger’s and possibly even more beneficial in the long run. Of course what I’m talking about it is a perversion of nature and a giant human rights violation.

So let’s be clear on something, I am not advocating this at all. This is merely my impression from various information that I have gleaned over the years. Personally I think that if the human race really will (re)turn to sludge without transhumanism that is fine. I actually do think that the future is very dark for living beings in the world and it is all each of our faults. So it is only right that after making such colossal mistakes and not uniting to change anything that we would have to pay the price. What that is remains to be seen. I would actually prefer to live until the end of humanity if at all possible but if I do not it won’t exactly be a regret.

I will let you judge for yourself whether these thoughts are delusional, cynical, anxious, or just pessimistic.

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When the hits stop coming Sunday, Jun 29 2008

Well in the midst of nothing, such as riding the bus or watching football, I read the novel The Treatment by Mo Hayder, which is the third book of hers that I’ve read but apparently the second book of hers that was released. In a sense it establishes a series for Jack Caffery the protagonist from her first novel Birdman since he once again features. Like her other works I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone I know, there is probably plenty there for people as fucked up as me or the perverts out there though. Which raises the age old question of whether the work is admonishing, discouraging, or encouraging. The main theme of this work is “paedophilia” (sic, wordpress prefers pedophilia) as opposed to, let’s say the target of the first book was a serial killer. This book was set up quite a bit by Jack Caffery’s back story in the first book, he joined the police in the hopes of finding his brother, or his corpse, who disappeared when he was a child (brother was 9). He always suspected his old polish  neighbor “Penderecki” but he could never pin him down for it. Upon joining the police he found out the guy had old pedo jackets (arrests) and that only convinced him the more that the guy did it. But no proof and so our tortured fucked up fairytale hero goes on.

So when a couple is found bound up in their home and their son is missing the case hits Caffery close to home. Other themes involve the strange relationship he has with his girlfriend as a result of the fallout from the Birdman case. There was pretty much only one major new character, Caffery’s new boss “Danni” a self-described “old dyke”. And other than Jack and his Lady only minor characters; the medical examiner, the head secretary, a crime scene investigator, a minor detective, make a return.

Overall the story flows in an interesting manner and Hayder remains as seemingly inventive with her criminals and their perversions as ever, doubtless to the shocked horror of readers. I felt like even though the crimes in this book are worse on the whole than in Birdman, though not Tokyo/devil of nanking, the intensity level is a lot lower. I had heard that Birdman was criticized for its intensity so that probably has something to do with it. Unfortunately the result is a decreased focus on the theoretical plot of the story as relates to the crime.

Something that struck me is that even though the book was written in a way that could have yielded multiple outcomes which was good because it created suspense and drama, the way that the conclusion was reached seemed out of sync with the story as well as somewhat anti-climatic. I am not interested in going back and checking the story again but when I got to the end it seemed like things didn’t quite add up. I will concede that this impression could have resulted from the fragmented way I read the work, stopping randomly and picking up again when I had the chance. But in particular it seemed like the acts of the person who ultimately turned out to be the perpetrator did not add up. Then again he (it’s always a he in Hayder’s work it seems) was supposed to be crazy but that isn’t quite good enough for me. He was crazy but in a methodical and ritualistic sort of way, and the camera and its pictures didn’t add up.

The one thing I would laud Hayder for is how poorly the investigations are carried out. You always have someone dropping the ball or intentionally fucking things up through complacency or oversight and if it weren’t for that things could have been figured out a lot faster. On the other hand she has set up a pattern whereby the suspects are right under the noses, in this book literally, of the detectives and the solutions and clues that should lead them to a solution are just missed. I am not an expert on police procedure but from what I do know things very rarely fall into place as neatly as an episode of Law & Order or Murder, She Wrote where something just occurs to someone or some piece of evidence or a witness just pops out. Although in this book compared to birdman things ended out being rather contrived as what was going on for Jack outside the case ended out leading him to the solution of it. So, failing the impossible genius of a drug addled Sherlock Holmes (though the detectives always drinking might tie-in with that) investigators are left with only their resource advantages (a city, region, or country against a criminal entity) and methodical perseverance to solve cases.

I would make a footnote that the thing about Hayder’s works is that if she didn’t write repeat offenders then the crimes likely would not be solved as the perpetrators end out somewhat caught in the act in both works. Of course the thing about sexually motivated criminals is that they can’t stop, and similarly without that kind of drive people wouldn’t commit crimes like that anyway. I am merely pointing it out as something to consider because on the whole people usually “get away” with crimes.

I’m talking about averaging all crimes there, murder is something that people get apprehended for more often than other crimes to be sure. Especially now that forensic technology has become so comprehensive. Speaking of which I remember a certain controversy in england recently, earlier in the year perhaps, when either fingerprints or DNA were collected for some sort of purpose on a large scale, perhaps in public school or a region, and after that purpose the prime minister, who is a creep in the shed if ever I saw one, refused to clear this information from data bases. I have no idea what has happened since then, whether now all UKers are going to be forced to submit to identification programs or whether the initiative has been abandoned. But it is a pretty scary thing what governments can do to people now, what can happen with a little data…

By the way the argument is that if you don’t commit crimes or have nothing to hide then there isn’t a problem with being identified. The problem with that is that everyone DOES commit crimes and have things to hide and wants to keep it that way. I’m sure there isn’t a single person on the planet that hasn’t committed a crime, it might be excessively petty but it’s there. Or other than that, do you really want people listening to you being an idiot on the phone? To see you taking a shit? Just think about that for a minute? I suppose that in a generation everyone would get used to it but these are ideas that are hard to swallow for me.

I guess I would sum up the current political situation in the world is that governments are now committing acts upon their own citizens which have previously been inflicted on them only by enemies. Like what the chinese government does to its own people, like the british and american governments running over the liberties of their citizens under the premise of controlling the spread of terrorism. Don’t get me started on what’s going on in the french government now. A lot of stuff goes back to what the nazis were doing. You hear people saying that less and less now, I guess I can’t blame people who weren’t born 60 years ago for not knowing what it was like but at what point did things which were horribly bad ideas become good policy? Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that.

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Call Gespenst (a no good whore) Monday, Jun 2 2008

Well as promised I played Mugen no Frontier (endless frontier) Super Robot Taisen (wars) OG (original generation) Saga for the DS until I got the first mecha unit and thought my arm was going to fall off. The DS is really below ideal for marathon gaming sessions. Of course at this point in my life I might be the one that’s below ideal for it.

Anyway you fill out your party with Kos-Mos (version 4) before you get your first mecha “Phantom” the “gespenst” (which you could arguably translate from german to english for phantom and is as good of a fit as any literary alternative, they can’t call it ghost or specter you know?). It’s actually called a few different things in the game, like every thing and every one else therein. I almost think that they put names so many different ways to pander to international players, especially people who know english as Harken uses “katakana english” almost every time he gets a text window. Anyway the mecha in this game are a more practical size at over 3 meters tall instead of the usual over 20 meters tall. Weight isn’t mentioned. By the time you get your gespenst you see some data and the characters theorize it’s that size to fit in with the size of the dolls like Suzuka’s Jyakigunou. And probably it is for scaling purposes as opposed to for instance Xenosaga where your characters would just get into typical really large mecha. Although the main difference is actually that instead of the mecha being piloted vehicles they’re AI controlled robots. In spite of the fact that you have two androids in your party though the mecha don’t communicate at all. They probably went this route because if they were intelligent then there’d be no reason for them not to be full members of the party and they didn’t want to do that.

So as the manual states you are only allowed to have the mecha in the “back” of your party which means that they are inactive in battle and can only be used for support attacks. There are a couple of quirks to that which were probably also in the manual but I didn’t understand it at the time. First of all your mecha are fixed into the 5th (of 8) party slot which means that they’ll always be the first support used regardless of anything else. Second when you get the Gespenst Harken unlocks a waza {technique} (flying gespenst kick, Kai Kitamura’s signature attack from OG 2 onwards) that targets two enemies and is basically a combination attack between him and the gespenst where the gespenst uses its normal single character attack that it hits you with when you fight it. Oddly I think the single target support attack is its group attack when you fight it but I wasn’t paying that much attention.

According to the manual you learn new wazas featuring the mecha as you level up. I don’t know whether different characters other than Harken eventually get these combination wazas or not, and whether different characters get different wazas for the different (apparently just 3, the gespy, the alt, and the weissy) mecha. Like let’s say that harken gets the gespy, kaguya gets the weiss, and aschen gets the alt. Since Reiji and Xiaomu combine their moves with each other it doesn’t seem likely that they’d make use of the mecha. Suzuka already has her Jyakigunou, and KOS-MOS is no stranger to getting left out of using mecha. But I wouldn’t be surprised if only Harken gets wazas for the mecha, wouldn’t be surprised at all. Although I thought the manual said “level up” and not “progress through the game”.

I am not yet clear whether when you have additional mecha you will get to use them 2 or 3 times in a row to each support in random order, whether only one is randomly chosen to support a single time (which I’m pretty sure is what the manual is saying), or whether it’s decided at the start of the battle which unit it will be and you’re stuck with that. Of the 3 the last would actually be more convenient. It’s hard enough to chain in support attacks with your regular attacks without even knowing what you’re going to get until it’s out there. On the other hand also you have to imagine that the Alteisen is the strongest of the 3 if only because the other two show up sooner. I’m not quite sure what was up with the gespy being stronger in your second encounter with it than the weiss was in your first encounter with it even though the one follows the other in the order of boss battles. At that rate I think Kaldina (W06) was stronger than it in that enounter too.

Well once again I’ll write more when I find out. The one point I want to reiterate is that as the game wears on the flaws wear on you. The main thing that I noticed today is that as you progress and boss fights get tougher and tougher you are more or less required to make more and more use of the battle menu if you want to survive. And this would have really benefited from letting you use the stylus because the controls are pretty sluggish. The regular party menu navigation isn’t great either as regardless of what the option is you have to cycle through your party in its order rather than just being able to do what they did in RPGs for 20 years (and in Xenosaga I think) and first select the option (like status) and then the character. They also could have used a button and stylus combination for the menus like in the Code Geass game. I know the games were developed by different companies even though they’re both published under bandai namco but still, you’d think that someone would be around to say or realize something about that. As it is I suspect that the game is on the DS rather than the PS2 because of budget and possibly the size of the prospective audience. More PS2s have been sold, overall but more DSes have been sold in the world than japanese PS2 so that means more ds owners can play MnF “naturally”. But that’s not that important. I’ll gripe about other things and the differences between MnF and Namco X Capcom later.

But really quick let me tell you my “boss party”: Harken (luck for twice money, the group fighting spirit to increase everyone’s critical rate), Suzuka (cheer to let everyone get double experience), Kaguya (for love to heal everyone and prayer to cure status effects), and KOS-MOS (revive, prayer) or Reiji (friendship for healing and soul for damage). Until I got the gespenst I liked Xiaomu in the first support and Reiji in the second with Aschen in the third. In reality I would often get caught unawares by bosses and have weak parties where Xiaomu ended out being the star (she’s probably the most versatile character and the easiest to chain together all 5 of her attacks with two support attacks and still lead in to another character) and if it was the all female party before getting KOS-MOS (really only two and a half dungeons) then Aschen ended out being the hammer. So my regular party is Aschen, Reiji, Xiaomu and whoever from the remaining 4 is furthest or closest to leveling up. Because characters join you needing the full exp for their level to level up I had KOS-MOS in my party for a long time since when I got her most of my characters were a battle away from leveling up.

General hints I have are to stock up on the weakest items that don’t require any com% to be used in battle and that the bonus percentage effects typically outweigh slightly stronger stats. Look for equipment that increases critical percentage and evade percentage, for some reason with +25% crit Harken seems to critical almost every attack (according to the manual the chances are one in ten to critical) and ends out doing by far the most damage. And not to bother making a concerted effort to level. If you don’t run from fights and you use luck and cheer (have to use it on each character, wait until you only have one enemy left so you don’t have to re-cast it, luck effects the whole party so as long as one person is left alive it will always remain even after reviving a character) in the boss battles (you almost don’t get enough EXP to level up otherwise) you’ll have enough of everything to get through. The boss battles are just made to be annoyingly long anyway. The regular battles are pretty even (techniques and support attacks add to the time with their cut-ins) but the boss fights just get longer and longer. Conversely speed is the most important stat, for regular battles you want to have all 4 characters faster than the enemies, I think Reiji, Kaguya, and KOS-MOS are the slowest. On the other hand in the boss battles you’re better off if your order is staggered because the single target boss attacks nearly wipe most of your characters out in one go, and typically if one attacks that way the other will use a group attack and you’ll lose a character if they go right after each other. Fortunately you rarely fight more than one actual boss (although they always have at least two grunts those have more endurance than power) up to the point you get the gespenst but I imagine that will change going forward.

The thing I’m grateful for after getting the gespenst is that you summon it for a support the normal way. Listening to Professor Marion’s description when she said “call gespenst” I thought you were going to have to try and use the crappy microphone and actually do it. Fortunately you just press the left button and the characters do the calling for you. Suddenly I feel like the Gespenst resembles Pegas from Tekkaman Blade, it’s probably the “ear” antennas that they share. Don’t they?

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It’s never great to hear the police sirens Sunday, Jun 1 2008

Well apparently a lot of people are confused about Endless Frontier SRW OG saga, personally I’m more concerned about the gun shots and sirens in the distance but this is as good of a time as any.

Since my last post on the subject I put in a fair amount of time with the game, so far I’ve gotten 6 of the 7 characters shown in the manual but have yet to get a mecha. I was initially confused because one character’s “mecha” is in fact a puppet that they manipulate so it doesn’t actually count as one of your mecha. If I’m not mistaken the mecha might only be usable for support attacks but I’ll save that speculation since I’m probably close to reaching them for myself.

Apparently a lot of people are confused about the controls. Probably these are people who have no japanese ability whatsoever. The controls of the game are pretty simple, although I think the game would have benefited from making ANY use of the stylus. As far as I can tell you can’t use it for anything in the game which is just stupid. I have often considered that in standard games the stylus has an ease of use for menu navigation which of course an RPG like this game is filled with.

So in addition to the questionable gameplay and shoddy graphics (a lot of it really looks like SNES quality aside from the battle sprites and portraits which are probably more like PSone quality) the game has a pretty steep difficulty curve. I ended out having to use up almost all of my items in the desperate first fight against W06 (I can’t recall her name) right after getting Reiji and Xiaomu and having not saved for a while. This game could have been really improved by being able to switch out characters while in battle as it turned out that Harken, Reiji, Xiaomu, and Suzuka was a horrible boss fighting party (you need Kaguya for healing even though she’s offensively handicapped) and I had to blow through almost all my rare items to avoid game over. I kind of wish you’d have a little more indication than a save point 3 screens and likely an experience level back that boss fights are looming in this game. I also wish I had any idea what the algorithms are for damage calculation or that you’d be given any indication when an enemy is going to break off your attack or break it off and counter. It seems somewhat random although against W06 she seemed more apt to do it after support and continuous (combination) attacks. It really pissed me off because she kept doing it when I wanted to use a hisatsu waza so I ended out sitting on a full gauge until she was almost dead.

Yeah so anyway, the fact that your characters in the “back” don’t get full experience doesn’t help with the sudden difficulty increase at all. You probably aren’t likely to be forced to use specific characters in this game but you kind of want to use the different ones at different times but being forced to trade them out to keep their levels even isn’t great.

Of all things as much as the game is similar to Namco X Capcom a lot of things about it remind me of the Code Geass DS game. Mostly how in that game after you reached a certain point you pretty much had to combo attack enemies in order to take out one enemy a turn. You get better economy in this game (probably due in large part to having 4 characters instead of 3) but as it has gone on it becomes rarer and rarer to be able to beat an enemy with just a single characters own attacks. You have to add spells, use combos and/or supports in order to take out grunts. And damn it I have no idea why the normal enemies that accompany bosses are so strong. You seriously end out fighting grunts that are almost more durable than the last boss you faced. That’s not too damn fun. Back to the Geass comparison, at least you don’t have to shout out character names to do supports or something. The voice recognition in Geass is horrible and I would find myself basically blowing syllables straight into the mic to try and get things to go. I’ll write about that some other time. But at least the stylus comes in pretty handy in geass and they made fair use of the dual screens. Outside of battle the duo screens are nearly wasted. It is nice to be able to look down and see your current status and how much exp you need to level up but I think they could have squeezed a map into there too. Then again dungeons are so small in this game they probably didn’t think you’d need one. hm

Initially I had said that the character humor was the redeeming quality of the game but it kind of grates on you after a while that all the characters are constantly either insulting each other and/or calling characters nearly random names in different languages and there’s almost no acknowledgment of this whatsoever. I can’t even tell you how many times cracks are made about Kaguya’s breasts but mostly she gets called some sort of cow all the time (thinking about it her white and black outfit doesn’t help) and she almost never acknowledges this at all. In fact almost the only times that there’s back and forth between characters is when it’s Aschen (especially in her wonky acting DTD form) making comments about people or of course the “classic” back and forth of Reiji and Xiaomu. To be fair it remains amusing even as it becomes annoying but that the vast majority of the dialog in the game is pointless crap really says something about how shallow it is.

By the way to those of you who didn’t get the bonus CD with the game, it’s not really anything that special. In my case I probably really pushed it with how late I let it go before putting down the pre-order on it but that’s why I ordered it from a japanese shop. In the end I had to pay about 1.5 times the price of the game between a lousy markup (although not as bad as I thought, apparently the game was about 6,000 yen in the first place and I was charged about 7,000) and a really really horrible shipping rate (like 2,000 yen). On the bright side I got the game as soon as it came out but I frankly wasn’t in any hurry. So if there’s something you have to have as an otaku then you have to be willing to basically throw away money to get it. For me it was the bonus cd with this game. I wouldn’t have cared if I hadn’t gotten screwed on the namco x capcom bonus cd when that game came out (and I didn’t pre-order from a japanese shop but instead the cheapest and closest place I could find) but I wasn’t going to let that happen again. Even though that meant paying 1.5 times as much for it. Anyway for those that are curious what’s on it, even though it was touted as a drama cd there are only 3 drama tracks but there are 10 music tracks which seem to feature the majority of the “more or less original” music in the game. A lot of the music sounds really familiar to me and I can only assume it’s some cross between music from past SRW games and the stuff from Monolith Soft (I swear they’re playing the music they used for the xenosaga characters early on as background) but I might be imagining that. Well actually I know that some stuff is re-used, like the music for the original characters from NxC. But that isn’t on the bonus cd anyway if I recall correctly (and I might not).

Well you can expect me to continue to write more about this as the game goes on. If I figure out what the deal is with the mecha before I get close to beating the game then that will be the next “thing” (everyone knows I’ll write all kinds of other crap with it too) I write about in relation to the game. I suppose if people really wanted it I could write about the controls.

I’m not going to try and translate the game but to give you a basic plot synopsis: “what the hell is going on? let’s jump from world to world from cross gates that required incredibly powerful psychics to activate in SRWAlpha3 but any moron can use now while making new friends and enemies and fun of each other as we go along to figure it out while the girls wear skimpy outfits. So saying the line between “girl power” and “fan service” when there are 5 female protagonists, a majority of female antagonists, and only 2 male protagonists, is drawn with the outfits (lot of cleavage and leg) and dialogue suche as Kaguya being called “twin bombs” by Harken. Yeah

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Turn arou nd Thursday, Dec 13 2007

I went for a walk in the snow today and I noticed something curious. Although people of both sexes had cars that didn’t have built up snow on them for whatever reasons, all of the cars that did have snow on them were driven by women. Now along my walk I probably only saw about 100 cars out of the thousands that must be around the city so it’s questionable whether I had a representative sample. But nonetheless, sweep your cars off my sisters.

When I got home I made an American Omelette with ham and cheese in it. What “american omelette” means for those that don’t know is that I got distracted and botched what was supposed to be a French Omelette. Now you know where that term came from.

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Between Your Breasts Saturday, Nov 10 2007

I watch sports. That has been known to surprise some people if for no other reason than my main pastime happns to be reading. For example at the moment I just finished reading “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro which is essentially (unenjoyable nonsense) about the ethics of human cloning in an alternate world where that sort of thing was allowed and I’m in the middle of a book on criminal justice. Yet I watch sports on TV almost daily. Frankly I feel like supposed intellectuals sneer at sports and all those associated a bit too much. But to be honest I’m not necessarily a “sports fan” and it had even puzzled me that after ignoring sports for much of my life I seemingly became an avid watcher overnight a few years back.

So as with all things I gave due consideration to the issue and finally I realized what it was the other day after the innocuous comment of someone who is not a sports watcher. “well someone has to win and someone has to lose” that really is what I like about sports. The rules are set, the objectives are set, and there can be clear winners or losers (of course there are ties in some sports but I don’t watch those as much). On the other hand I view life in general as entirely unclear, subjective. Society has rules but what really are the rules of living? What is the goal? How do you win? I have no idea. Such thoughts no longer consume me as they once did, perhaps on some level I have given up (some might say “accepted my lot in life”) and that’s why I just “waste time” watching sports. Well whatever the case, if you want to pay proper attention you can learn a lot watching sports, seeing ads in the process, and so on. Most people aren’t paying attention though and that includes me. Nonetheless, if you want to learn something about the culture of the average people of a country watching one of their sporting events can indicate various things. What those things are I’ll leave up to your speculation.

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