Plenty of Nerdery
Hey there, LiveJournal; I haven't posted in a while and I've been doing nerdy things, so here's a recap.
First off, ye olde local anime con, Animazement, was last weekend. Started off with a bang as I drove over Friday afternoon in a torrential downpour. Much cursing as one of Raleigh's newfangled street parking meters took like a minute to validate my credit card in the rain. But after that all was good. Saw plenty of fun cosplay and pulled out my traditional Jigen Daisuke getup for Saturday. Did one shift at the COUp-run video room to make the weekend pass cheap. Saw Phil run a good Hell. Oh, and went to an interesting panel on Gankutsuou with the voice actor for the Count and the character design and animation director, that was fun.
Also, of course, bought things at the dealers room. Toys: tiny Lum (Urusei Yatsura) figure, little scene from Galaxy Express 999, cool Myria (Macross) figure with interchangeable flight-suit and wedding costumes and heads, awesome statue of Lucca fixing Robo in a scene that's familiar to anyone who knows the Chrono Trigger concept art, and this completely insane Jigen Daisuke revoltech figure that came with a wall, a chair, four heads, nine hands, bullet special effects, two guns, bullets, a lighter, and a teeny tiny to-scale single cigarette. Not toys: Macross Frontier art book with some nice posters in, set of three Pochiyama Pharmacy doujinshi *signed* by Yoshitoshi Abe (of Serial Experiments Lain, etc), a surprisingly affordable cel from You're Under Arrest, and a wonderfully ridiculous fanart of Lee from Tekken riding the Cyborg Rainbow Attack Unicorn that I got for akiko.
Some pictures, mostly of cosplay and toys, behind this finely-crafted link.
Meanwhile, for the first time since like January, I actually finished some video games, so I'll talk about them a bit.
Okamiden (NDS) - So this is essentially what it looks like on the tin, which is to say More Okami. I really liked Okami, so this is for the most part a good thing. It certainly doesn't top its predecessor, but it's a good game. It operates in the FFX-2 style of keeping the previous game's overworld while adding new dungeons and side areas - the degree to which they were able to mimic the PS2 game's art style on the small screen is really pretty impressive. There's a few new mechanics, mostly centered around having various partners for most of the game, as well as a home town you can build up a bit, and a couple new skills (the magnet brush is interesting, if not frequently used).
The one downside to the game is the cut-scenes, which tend to move frustratingly slowly (they're skippable, but not speed-up-able, so sucks if you actually want to see the plot), and really last way too long for a handheld game which ought to be playable in short bursts. Aside from that, though, everything is pretty competent, the dungeons are of manageable length, etc. Also, the premise has you controlling a puppy, so there's also child versions of all the brush gods and generally everything is really frikkin' adorable. Though the plot doesn't use that as an excuse to pull punches, which I guess is admirable, even if it's nothing particularly special.
Little Big Planet 2 (PS3) - *Technically* I "beat" this, in that I got to the end of Story Mode and saw the credits, but of course there's tons more to the game. I recently finished up all the level creator tutorials, and holy crap have they given us powerful tools this time around. In the previous game, particularly clever people rigged up substitute logic gates using various levers and pistons and detectors - Media Molecule was paying attention, and this time they've included straight-up AND, OR, XOR, and NOT gates that you can pump signals from switches through, and even more intricate things like combiners and splitters, constant signal sources, count-down timers, randomizers, and so on. Also an entire reasonably robust-looking music sequencer, and even a level event sequencer that can lay out complex strings of actions. Oh, and sack-bot characters that you can operate like marionettes or give a wide variety of independent player-triggered behaviors. People are going to do *amazing* things with this. I haven't really gotten inspired for a new level concept yet, but we'll see.
And for people who aren't so into creation, the Story Mode is pretty good too. Maybe a little shorter than the first one, but I think they've done a better job of playing up the strengths and downplaying the weaknesses of their physics engine this time around - less frustrating bits overall, I'm pretty sure. The new bounce pad object does a good job of keeping things moving and getting you where you need to go in a lot of levels. And the new story characters are fun.
And of course there's already a jillion user-created levels around, with good ones rising to the top of the built-in review mechanisms. And it plays all the old LBP1 levels too. So, lots and lots of content for your dollar.
Okay, that's it for now - gonna see about getting some biking in since even though it's sunny out there it's supposed to be less oppressively hot today than any other day for a week in either direction.
First off, ye olde local anime con, Animazement, was last weekend. Started off with a bang as I drove over Friday afternoon in a torrential downpour. Much cursing as one of Raleigh's newfangled street parking meters took like a minute to validate my credit card in the rain. But after that all was good. Saw plenty of fun cosplay and pulled out my traditional Jigen Daisuke getup for Saturday. Did one shift at the COUp-run video room to make the weekend pass cheap. Saw Phil run a good Hell. Oh, and went to an interesting panel on Gankutsuou with the voice actor for the Count and the character design and animation director, that was fun.
Also, of course, bought things at the dealers room. Toys: tiny Lum (Urusei Yatsura) figure, little scene from Galaxy Express 999, cool Myria (Macross) figure with interchangeable flight-suit and wedding costumes and heads, awesome statue of Lucca fixing Robo in a scene that's familiar to anyone who knows the Chrono Trigger concept art, and this completely insane Jigen Daisuke revoltech figure that came with a wall, a chair, four heads, nine hands, bullet special effects, two guns, bullets, a lighter, and a teeny tiny to-scale single cigarette. Not toys: Macross Frontier art book with some nice posters in, set of three Pochiyama Pharmacy doujinshi *signed* by Yoshitoshi Abe (of Serial Experiments Lain, etc), a surprisingly affordable cel from You're Under Arrest, and a wonderfully ridiculous fanart of Lee from Tekken riding the Cyborg Rainbow Attack Unicorn that I got for akiko.
Some pictures, mostly of cosplay and toys, behind this finely-crafted link.
Meanwhile, for the first time since like January, I actually finished some video games, so I'll talk about them a bit.
Okamiden (NDS) - So this is essentially what it looks like on the tin, which is to say More Okami. I really liked Okami, so this is for the most part a good thing. It certainly doesn't top its predecessor, but it's a good game. It operates in the FFX-2 style of keeping the previous game's overworld while adding new dungeons and side areas - the degree to which they were able to mimic the PS2 game's art style on the small screen is really pretty impressive. There's a few new mechanics, mostly centered around having various partners for most of the game, as well as a home town you can build up a bit, and a couple new skills (the magnet brush is interesting, if not frequently used).
The one downside to the game is the cut-scenes, which tend to move frustratingly slowly (they're skippable, but not speed-up-able, so sucks if you actually want to see the plot), and really last way too long for a handheld game which ought to be playable in short bursts. Aside from that, though, everything is pretty competent, the dungeons are of manageable length, etc. Also, the premise has you controlling a puppy, so there's also child versions of all the brush gods and generally everything is really frikkin' adorable. Though the plot doesn't use that as an excuse to pull punches, which I guess is admirable, even if it's nothing particularly special.
Little Big Planet 2 (PS3) - *Technically* I "beat" this, in that I got to the end of Story Mode and saw the credits, but of course there's tons more to the game. I recently finished up all the level creator tutorials, and holy crap have they given us powerful tools this time around. In the previous game, particularly clever people rigged up substitute logic gates using various levers and pistons and detectors - Media Molecule was paying attention, and this time they've included straight-up AND, OR, XOR, and NOT gates that you can pump signals from switches through, and even more intricate things like combiners and splitters, constant signal sources, count-down timers, randomizers, and so on. Also an entire reasonably robust-looking music sequencer, and even a level event sequencer that can lay out complex strings of actions. Oh, and sack-bot characters that you can operate like marionettes or give a wide variety of independent player-triggered behaviors. People are going to do *amazing* things with this. I haven't really gotten inspired for a new level concept yet, but we'll see.
And for people who aren't so into creation, the Story Mode is pretty good too. Maybe a little shorter than the first one, but I think they've done a better job of playing up the strengths and downplaying the weaknesses of their physics engine this time around - less frustrating bits overall, I'm pretty sure. The new bounce pad object does a good job of keeping things moving and getting you where you need to go in a lot of levels. And the new story characters are fun.
And of course there's already a jillion user-created levels around, with good ones rising to the top of the built-in review mechanisms. And it plays all the old LBP1 levels too. So, lots and lots of content for your dollar.
Okay, that's it for now - gonna see about getting some biking in since even though it's sunny out there it's supposed to be less oppressively hot today than any other day for a week in either direction.