Christmas Break

Well I was too busy playing with all my new toys to write recently, but alot has happened in the last week or so.

For Christmas I got Hellsing and Rozen Maiden manga, Valkyria Chronicles and Left 4 Dead (pc).

Left 4 Dead is pretty awesome, played it non-stop for a whole day or so.  Played through all the campaigns, and then did Versus quite a bit.  Pretty fun.  Boomer makes funny noises.  I can’t seem to get the tongue to stick when I play as Smoker, I donno, probably just suck at it.

I think this kid was in one of my tech classes

I would say that The Witch is hot and I’d tap that, but she’s just a little too teary.  If she was laughing she would instantly be promoted to “tappable.”

Damn right I'm going to hit that

Valkyria Chronicles… I didn’t quite know what to think at first.  It has a very interesting art style, but it’s pretty fun game.  Story heavy though, so if you like run and gun this might not be for you.

I was rather disappointed, even though the game case makes it clear, but the chick at the top of the cover is a bad guy girl.  The very first time you see her in game is in a meeting with the big bads of the story, but it was pretty clear before.  All the ‘good guys’ have pretty normal hair and eye color but on the cover she has red eyes and blue hair (silverish in game) as well as being centered and the main focus of the cover.  But since she’s not the main character, obvious bad girl.  Which is kinda sad, I mean, red eyes ==  awesome.

Brown hair, Brown eyes. Red hair, hazleish eyes. Silver hair, red eyes. Guess who the bad guy is.

Hellsing is pretty awesome, read it all, left wanting more.  Luckly just a few days ago, DemonRin finished his Hellsing OVA 5 subs, so I had more to watch.  Honestly, if you like blood, vampires, awesome or cool, you should go watch Hellsing.  Not the TV series, that sucked.  Look for Hellsing Ultimate or Hellsing OVAs.  So far there are 5 50ish minute episodes.

kukuku

Haven’t started Rozen Maiden manga yet, but the anime was pretty good so we’ll see how awesome the manga is.

Non-Christmas related stuffs:

Well the fall anime season is pretty much over.  All the quarter year anime have finished.  So I watched one, Chaos;Head.   Holycrap freaking awesome.  It’s kinda like Paranoia Agent + Mai HiME.  Well, if Paranoia Agent had paranoia in it, it would be at least.  Paranoia Agent sucked, Chaos;Head is awesome.  You should watch it.

If you are God, and the delusion becomes reality...

The story of an Otaku semi-hikikomori.  He spends his time playing MMOs and watching anime.  To maximize his time in game, he’s created his minimum attendance chart, showing the least amount of time he has to spend at school in order to graduate.  However, his calm life gets interrupted when he sees one of the ‘new gen’ crimes.

That’s all the preview you get from me.  I highly recomend Chaos;Head.  And yes, the semicolon is intentional.

Finals suck and Higurashi

Freshman in college.  Finals are unfun as usual, although honestly, so far they’re not much harder than high school, so either I had a really hard high school life, really easy college experience or things just haven’t gotten hard yet.

Either way, I still had alot of stuff to do, and my game/anime time was limited.  Of course, that didn’t stop me from watching anything completely, but I didn’t write anything mostly because I felt that if I was writing something, it should be on my essay.

So anwyay, I’m writing today and I think I’ll talk about a longtime favorite series of mine, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.  Before I get into that, I should add a note so that you know where I’m coming from.  When I was 9 years old I first saw The Ring, I think it was in 1999 or I might have been 10 and saw it in 2000, either way I wasn’t very old, and the movie creeped me out alot, pretty much ruined the horror genre for a few years after, before I slowly started getting back into it.  Even then I still got scared pretty easily and couldn’t sleep the night I saw some movies.

(tl;dr Your Mileage May Vary)

Anyway, back to Higurashi; I first watched it back in May of this year (2008), one of the first few series I watched, as I only started anime back in April of the same year.

I sought it out for one reason, this picture: (since it’s technically a spoiler the thumbnail is not the actual image)

HA HA HA indeed!

The picture just looked so awesome.. I had to find it.  And find it I did, it’s a fairly prestegious anime and wasn’t hard to find at all.  So, I started watching it, not really knowing much more than what the picture told me.  And man, it was really pretty cool.  At the start I couldn’t watch more than a few episodes at one time, not going to lie, its kind of a creepy show.  With it’s heavy paranoia themes, my naturally paranoid self looked over my shoulder more than once while watching it.

The intro of the first episode gives a clear impression of what kind of anime you are watching.  But by the time it swung back around to that, I thought I was watching some comedy slice-of-life, which just made much more fascinating.

The second season was alot more infodump than I would have liked, but it definately explained alot of what was going on..  and since it is adapted from a series of visual novels, they didn’t have much like the first season left to work with.  But still pretty decent

Anyway, I’d definately recomend Higurashi as a must see for all anime fans.

Red Alert 3 and Outlaw Star

Well, that Tuesday/Thursday plan fell apart pretty quickly.. ah well, I’ll just talk about both RA3 and Outlaw Star

What a guy

Red Alert 3 came out at the same time Fallout 3 did, so it’s been pretty overshadowed..  But it’s not by any means a bad game.  As far as the game goes, it plays much like the older games.  Campaign mode adds a co-commander that helps out a bit.  Co op with a friend is interesting, unfortunately it cannot be done over LAN yet..

A main difference between this game and the other RTS games is it’s focus on micro management.  Especially with the Japanese faction.

The women of Red Alert 3

Single player was ok, the co-commander is both helpful and annoying depending on how you use him.  Cut scenes were full of women and Tim Curry, so can’t complain too much.  The overall storyline is about the same as the others in Red Alert.  Faction has power, tries to take over the world.  Nothing we haven’t seen before.

I’ve been playing LAN skirmishes with/against a friend of mine.  We’re having quite a bit of fun with it.  Definately a fun multiplayer game, if you’ve got friends who enjoy RTS games this might be one to look into.

Anyway, on to Outlaw Star

The Crew of the Outlaw Star

Pretty good show, seemed like alot of the episodes didn’t flow very well.. but I enjoyed it.

It had a good cast of characters with many funny parts but also a good mix of serious business.  The serious business was mostly in the form of “can androids dream of electric sheep” revolving around Melfina.

I'd tap that

All in all, good show, I’d recomend it again.

Fallout 3 and Blogging

Well it’s been like half a year since my last post, but I think I’m going to try to post on a regular basis, maybe every tuesday an thursday or something.  The content will probably vary, but it’ll mostly deal with anime, games, and sometimes tech news or just stuff I find interesting.  Today will fall under the games category.

A review for the recently released game: Fallout 3

I got the game on it’s release date about a week or so ago.  I was a little worried at first, every time I’ve tried to play Oblivion I get bored of the game after I get so far.  Despite starting that game many times, I’ve yet to finish it, or even get further in the main quest line than bringing the prince to the castle thingy.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent many hours having fun on Oblivion, becoming leader of the Dark Brotherhood, the Grey Fox, exploring, it’s just I always get bored, and since Fallout 3 is by the same group that brought us Oblivion I was a little worried I’d never finish it.

That turned out to not being a problem, since I got it, I have pretty much not stopped playing.  I put about 30 hours in before I finished the main quest line and yet I reloaded an older save and I’m still going, simply exploring and finding all the little things.  I feel Bethesda has really improved since Oblivion.  The faces while still aren’t that great looking are much better than Oblivion, which is one of my problems.  Also the scaled leveling system has improved.  In unmodded Oblivion, if you’ve never played it, everyone and everything would level up with you so the difficulty was always the same.  The simple bandits you see right out of the tutorial would be wearing the best armor when you were higher level.  However, in Fallout, the lowly raiders will never be in Power Armor.  A couple of them (maybe a single raider in a group of them) will find a Laser pistol lying around, but when you’re level 20 with your plasma rifle and Power Armor, you won’t find them much problem.

Up ’til now, I’ve been comparing the game to Oblivion, rather than the previous Fallout games.  But as Bethesda created this game with the Oblivion engine, it’s an excellent comparison game.  But this game definitely fits under the Fallout title.  Just emerging from the Vault and seeing the real world can be awesome and depressing at the same time, at a level the previous Fallout games were unable to reach, not because they failed at post apocalyptic setting, but because of technological limitations of the time.  Fallout and Fallout 2 definitely had more emphasis on stats than Fallout 3, but I’m not the kind of person to freak out about that.  I’m not playing the game for stats, I’m playing the game for Post-apocalyptic atmosphere, and Fallout 3 definitely hits that nail on the head.

Washington DC

Of course, some people are still whining that it’s just Oblivion with guns.  But I say it’s much more than that.  Overall more engaging and just all around fun than Oblivion, however you’d have to play it for yourself to see.  Weather or not you had fun with Oblivion or if you liked the old Fallout games, this is definately a game worth the $50 (USD) they’re asking for.

Shishkabob -- One of my favorites

Yeah, that’s my review.  Didn’t mention anything about graphics, sound, or any of that other stuff normal reviews mention.  Oh well.  I plan on saying something about Red Alert 3, Dead Space and Outlaw Star sometime in the near future as well.  Until then, Later!

~

Aelphais

Yarrr

Haven’t written in a while, there’s a high probability that few people care, but that doesn’t matter, I’m bored at the moment and feel like writing down some thoughts of mine.

First of all, quit WoW about a month ago again.  It got boring… again.  Until about two weeks ago, I hadn’t really picked up anything in it’s place.  Games in general have gotten really boring for some reason.  Not sure why. Surfed around a few games, played them for anywhere between 2 hours and 3 days..

So after playing around for about two weeks, I did something I never thought I’d do.  I watched an anime.  What was more surprising, I watched it in Japanese with English subs… and I enjoyed it.  I’m a different kid, I never watched many cartoons in my younger years (I’m 18 now), and so this was kinda a spur of the moment kinda thing.. Just bored enough to go find the episodes.

The thing that influenced me to watch this anime was an AMV I first saw a good number of years ago..

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0Fu9CZ6jyqk

I thought that the scenes in the video were pretty amusing, and I’d always been curious as to how the story went.  So I went to good old Veoh.com and watched the entire OVAs, was enthralled by it and then went on to find Tenchi Universe and the movies.

After that was done, I went on to find more.  Came across this video, which inspired me to watch Death Note.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C65oaIHsdYM

And I must say, Death Note is a pretty freaking awesome anime, the story is great, it’s pretty dark and sinister, which I enjoyed, and I was constantly looking forward to that laugh.

Now I’ve got a couple queued up that I want to watch. Serial Experiments Lain, Ergo Proxy, Elfen Lied, and Bubblegum Crisis are all ones I’ve been recommended.

Currently I’m at about episode 30 of 167 in the InuYasha series, not too sure how I feel about this one. It’s amusing enough, but I donno, It’s good enough to keep me watching.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say today.  If anyone has any really good anime they’d recommend, comment here please!

Two warlocks and a rant on AV and World PvP

So my Human warlock got to level 31, enchanted gold bloodrobe is pretty pro.  But didn’t work on him last night because of the super lag.  Played brawl until like 10:00, then just did AV a bunch on my gnome warlock.

I think I’m going to make my gnome a  PvP warlock (because of escape artist) and my Human a PvE guy.

Now, what the eff is with AV now-a-days?  Blizzard really screwed up.  So, like, AV was created with the intent of large scale Horde vs Alliance battles.  And that’s how it was, with large, 40 vs 40, 4+ hour battles, until some noob (probably Kalgan) decided to make the guards non-elite.  Now the object of AV is to avoid the opposing faction at all costs.  Run past and kill the leader.  Honestly that’s insanely gay.  I loved the long huge battles.  They were fun.  Now it’s all about honor.

Last night I had the best AV since they removed those guards.  Normally, at the start, Alliance and Horde rush to the opposing faction’s first commander and kill him.  This time though, Alliance was like “LOL SCREW YOU HORDE” and just sat in our commander’s base.   After that we pushed the horde back in a big ball-o-players and capped all the graveyards on the way down.  The horde kept the frostwolf relief hut, just because alliance wouldn’t cap it.  It was real PvP the way AV was intended.  Probably wouldn’t have even ended that fast if it wasn’t for the reinforcement points..  We won, and it was incredibly awesome.

And another thing, World PvP..  Pre-BC blizz tried to encourage it with objectives.  And they failed.   Blizzard just doesn’t get the objective of PvP.  PvP is for fighting players, not killing mobs to collect dust or capping towers or .  And the continued failing in BC in same manner, their slight redemption was the addition of buffs and the daily objectives.

My favorite kind of world PvP though, was the random encounters.  I mean coming across some noob horde riding along in Winterspring and roflpwning them.   Blizzard killed that in Outlands though, with the addition of Flying Mounts.  Now it’s 3-5 level 70’s dropping in on single level 60-67s.. which is pretty lame.

And I think I’ve written enough for now.  LATER DUDE.

Brawl interferes with WoW

So, missed all raid this week, not really on purpose.. Karazhan I said to bring less geared people instead of me, because I don’t take anything other than badges out. This is true, but really I just wanted to play brawl.

On saturday, we were raiding Gruul’s Lair, at about 3:00 I was like “eh got two hours before time to raid” so I decided to spend the time playing brawl. Not much longer I glanced at the clock and OMG It’s already 8:00. Flip, missed the raid. I kinda wanted to go too, because I want the t4 shoulders.

So, didn’t play much WoW this week, my new warlock alt would probably be 45 if I had been playing. Instead he’s only 30. But he’s pretty awesome. RAWR.

And here’s a random gif of Wolf’s intro:

That’s about all I got today, LATER DUDE

Olimar’s a pretty cool guy

He uses pikmin and doesn’t afraid of anything.

New UI (and Super Smash Bros. Brawl!)

Starting with Brawl:  It’s pretty freaking pro.  Going to have to put WoW on hold a bit.

Anyone who had any doubt about it’s awesomeness should go play it.  And I’ve barely even played it, still have the whole Subspace Emissary, Stage Creator, the whole online thing, all the stuff to unlock, FLIP too much awesome for you imo.

And also I got a new UI, previously my UI was extremely cluttered, and didn’t give me much viewing space of the actual game.

This new one is pretty sleek, same functionality (since I had most of my skills keybound), and gives me alot more viewing space.  The name of this is something that I can’t remember, but if anyone cares for it, I could look it up I guess.

And that’s about all I got for today, LATER DUDE!

Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, Pre-BC raids and Life Tap

So about two weeks ago, I applied to- and joined a raiding guild. This raiding guild is right where First Legion was when I quit the game about a year ago. So it works out pretty well.

Of course, First Legion is very near killing Illidan now, but meh..

My new guild is named Asylum (and I kinda want to redo their website, it’s very functional.. but it looks terrible. We should at least move the forums to normal forums.), and we’ve cleared Karazhan, downed High King and are pretty close on Gruul, might kill him this weekend, next weekend for sure.

But anyway Karazhan–Back with First Legion, it was like a brand new instance, no one knew all the little secrets to kill the bosses easy and stuff. Back then, Kara was actually pretty hard. Now with Asylum, we just blow threw it all very quickly. Down bosses way different than I remember (and a lot easier too).

Gruul’s Lair–Only did this one like, twice with First Legion, never killed High King back then. Now, first lets just refresh: I’m a warlock, and during the high king fight, warlocks actually have to do something. Olm the Summoner summons Felhunters that rape people. So Warlocks enslave the felhunters and rape Olm with his own pets. With First Legion, we did all this by hand. Now a year later, there’s this leet little macro–just click it, if you don’t have a felhunter already enslaved, it targets one that’s hostile to me (if none exist, it doesn’t do anything), automatically starts enslaving it. Clicking it again with a felhunter enslaved will cause the felhunter to go attack Olm. So it’s pretty nifty.

Naxx, AQ40, BWL, MC–First: Zul’gurub is the worst instance in the game.

But I really enjoyed all those old raids. Nothing like 40 noobs running around killing giant things. Most of all, AQ40–First couple of bosses are annoying, and there’s a bit of trash.. but the Twin Emps and C’thun have got to be the funnest boss fights in WoW. Last week, made a post on the Dunemaul forums asking how many people would actually care to go back to AQ40. Got like 3 replys saying that even C’thun is pretty noob at level 70.. which was fairly disappointing. Meh, oh well, guess I’m never going to get that last 500 rep to be exalted with Brood of Nozdormu.

Life Tap: The other day, I told people I had talked with a GM, and he said I could keep the old version of life tap. I thought this was just because I’m pretty pro.. apparently it’s just because they’ve gone and reverted the changes. So no lame life tap after all. Oh, and the flame tongue mortal strike thing got reverted as well.

So, probably no one cares to read this, it’s kinda a lot to read, but oh well, read it anyway.

I’m going to try to have more pictures in my blogs from now on, just need to start taking more screenshots.  Maybe that will make it more interesting and seem like less to read.