Thoughts: First Day of School
My whole life I've loved the first day back to school (context: I work at a university). The slightly cool September breeze, the electric energy of excitement and nervousness,
the fresh school supplies and just an overall feeling of high potential.
I've long since passed my epiphanic "I never have to go to school again" moment, but working at a university I still get to experience the nervous
anticipation vicariously through students during their "frosh days" as they galavant around a campus that still seems a labyrinth on scavanger hunts
and nerf-gun wars.
In two weeks' time they'll be struggling through workloads and drama and life in general, but today the world is new.
I work mostly remote these days, but I'd never miss the first day of the fall term just to soak in the excitement.
Game Thoughts: Digimon Survive
I've just finished with Digimon Survive after completing the Moral and True endings.
Despite a lackluster battle system and some points where the story got too repetitive or awkward or slow, I really
enjoyed my time with the first playthrough -- Enough to watch 2 more endings online (in ultra-fast-forward) and play
through the true ending myself.
The true ending featured some additional party members I ended up really liking, but dragged on far too long.
While I'm glad I played the extra ending for closure and for the warm fuzzies in the final scene, the true route
really lacked any additional character development in chapters 10-13 -- in a story about the characters developing.
Since the whole visual-novel half of the game is built around talking to people and raising affinities, this results in
several additional hours of repeatedly telling Kaito he's a good brother and telling Aoi she "has really grown" while being force-fed
a bunch of not-really-canon digimon lore.
The 3 non-true endings are definitely the more interesting routes, though they have a lot of overlap (and don't feature my
favorite character!).
But enough about the story, I came here for the Digimon!
There's quite a few Digimon to collect via recruitment in random battles and via your party 'mons evolving.
Those attached to humans evolve with the story or once your affinity with that human is high enough, while
recruited digimon are evolved with items
The recruiting mechanic is absolutely stupid, but once I started using a guide it was fun collecting
and evolving lots of 'mons. I used another guide to minimize overlap, as many of your party's
fixed final forms can be obtained through random recruits.
I did find it odd that many party and story digimon could be obtained through random encounters (+ evolving).
It's a bit awkward when the story has a powerful digimon appear and threaten the fabric of reality... and
you've already got the same 'mon in your party.
Likewise, it's a bit weird to have WarGreymon show up in a random battle and be recruitable by responding
correctly to a query about nap preferences... There's lots of questionable decisions on the recruit mechanic.
Complaining aside, if you grew up loving digimon and enjoy the occasional visual novel, this is one of the best-looking
visual novels I've played. While the story is about as deep as a kids-show about digital monsters, it's worth
at least one playthough for nostalgia's sake.
Thoughts: Chronically Occupied
I've just returned from a brief 4-day vacation to find my mind in shambles. This always tends to happen -- I keep so many small
threads of ideas and plans and micro-projects going on a regular basis that brief inattention turns the whole thing into a useless knot.
When in this state I find my mind begins to wander and reach out like hundreds of tentacles, grasping for any interesting
avenue to do something. Should I take a university course? Build a DIY virtual pet with a Raspberry Pi?
Work on designing that board game I always meant to build? So many new threads to begin! Of course, those old ones are hopelessly
entagled and must be abandoned.
And so the cycle of the chronically occupied continues.
On my list of interesting roads I'd like to stroll down is the video series from 10 Minute Physics, by one Matthias Müller. According to the HackerNews thread I found the link on he's a very smart guy who developed some useful computer physics concepts which I'm very interested to learn about.
The tutorials are each done in a single HTML file which is handy. The first few videos are fairly basic implementations of bouncing balls, but it looks like it gets pretty meaty 6-7 videos in!
Browsing the internet recently I saw an artistic rendition of the silhouette of Spike from Cowboy Bebop.
Suddenly a realization came crashing home -- the most memorable game / comic characters I can think of are all
recognizable by their outline alone!
Feeling like I had stumbled across a secret, I shared my observation with my wife who informed me this is very
common knowledge amongst designers. I likely could have picked it up by reading any guide on character design...
That said, the things you discover yourself always stick the longest -- I'll be keeping this in mind from now on
while doodling characters for my ideas!
My brother recently expressed interest in remotely watching me play some of my older games (after a weekend
of PS2 gaming together).
I grabbed an HDMI-capture dongle for the dual purpose of recording gameplay (for personal use) and enabling
him to watch.
Now the dilemma: what platform do I use for streaming? I'm not entirely keen on Twitch/Youtube because I'm
hippie trash,
so I've been looking at open source alternatives like Owncast instead.
It is taking all my willpower to restrain myself from using this an excuse to learn Elixir and build my own
shitty streaming platform...
I'm a sucker for nostalgia. As such, I've been very excited for the Digimon Survive game that
recently released.
So excited that I not only accidentally pre-ordered a physical copy twice, but spent time playing some older
Digimon titles
while I awaited the fated day to arrive.
I must say, the series hasn't generated many good games. I recall Digimon World [PS1] being nigh
indecipherable as a child,
and that holds true now. It seems that the games were always caught between being a tamagatchi-style
monster-raising affair
and a coherent RPG, while never really landing on either. In my excitement I revisited Cyber Sleuth and
Digimon World DS,
which stand as the highest-rated entries in the franchise.
Cyber Sleuth had rave reviews from Digi-fans, but I couldn't play for more than 2 hours without cringing
myself
into a fetal position. The story, character design and dialogue was offensively bad, and the digimon
raising system
wasn't strong enough to make up for it. (No gameplay system would have been, I fear)
The DS game on the other hand had a great Digimon raising system with a cute little farm on the DS
top-screen, and
clear evolution routes. The story was just about the driest thing I've ever played, however. Essentially just
a basic
excuse to go and battle with your Digimon. I can usually stomach random RPG battles but this game bored me to
tears.
Despite this I've got high hopes for Digimon Survive! The game thankfully takes a very different direction
than its predecessors and I've
already managed to put in a handful of hours without throwing away the cartridge in disgust.
I guess this technically makes it the best Digimon game I've played to date!
Thoughts: On Seniority and Fuckups
Seniority can be inferred by the number of large fuck-ups a person has made (and retained their position).
Being trusted enough to be given enough rope to hang by, then doing a little accidental hanging before
getting yourself free is a guarantee a person has learned some valuable lessons.
Since I'm a lowly unwashed peasant without access to OpenAI's DALL-E 2 I've been entertaining myself with Craiyon instead.
It isn't nearly as good as DALL-E (I have friends with access, and DALL-E is too good), but it's
still a tonne of fun and I've found it fairly useful as a creative tool.
If I'm not feeling particularly inventive or creative but still want to doodle I'll generate a couple of
prompts for inspiration. The results are always a little wonky, but more than good enough to work with as
rough concept art:
Look at those deformed goblins work! There's a lot of great little ideas to pick up from these: clothing,
scenes, poses -- lots of details I probably wouldn't have thought of. It's great for doodle exercises!
Why spend time looking at reference art when an AI model has already looked at ALL the reference art?
Another excellent use case is generating horrific imagery from seemingly innocent prompts:
How is this free!?
Game Thoughts: Death's Door
I completed Death's Door (Switch Version) by Acid Nerve last night. By completed here I mean defeated the
final boss and am done with the game;
I did some research and it seems there's considerable post-game things to do, but many sound tedious and I've
spent a satisfactory amount of
time with it.
There were a lot of things I didn't like about Death's Door. I found the combat to be lacking in
variety, the alternate weapons
very useless, and the non-powerup-collectables a little pointless (though some do play into end-game content).
The music was also very bland throughout, and had not one memorable piece.
That said, I did very much like the game as a whole! The tiny world they made is full of fun, the art and
style were fantastic, and they managed
to make every character lovable. This last point is something I'm still trying to figure out how to
do -- games like Death's Door and Undertale manage
to do something that brings characters to life, even when a character has only one or two lines.
Compare this with a game like Eastward that
had all the right ingredients but many of its characters just fell flat.
The humor in the game was excellent, and I now want a "Worlds Best Lord" mug. The boss fights were also
spectacular, and in some cases very
frustrating-in-the-good-way. The puzzling was quite fun, although some of the dungeons definitely outstayed
their welcome. I would have liked to trade
the second halves of the first and third dungeons (lab and rooftop) for a separate dungeon locale with an
extra boss,
then make the spell powerups a bit more useful and required for the final dungeon (as they stand the spell
powerups were very underwhelming)
I've heard many say that the game is too short, but I thought it was a great length for what it is. A short,
funny indie game with a tinge of sadness about
a crow with a sword and a big ol' black door.
Comic Thoughts: Berserk
I finished reading the Berserk series, a manga that spans 41 volumes released over 30 years.
I'd tried reading the series several times in the past but never got past volume 3 -- I decided give it
another go now that the author passed away and the series is therefore essentially "finished".
It gets SO much better after volume 3.
It's a lot. The series is drenched in the 80's/90's sex & hyper-violence that seems to have
died out in the medium in recent years.
I don't think I'd be comfortable openly recommending the series to everyone I know, as there's a lot of
problematic content in there some might be upset by,
but there's certainly something special about the series. There's a reason it's inspired so many other works
and characters. It's got teeth.
The author manages to paint this bleak work full of pain, and fills it with some seriously horrific and
grotesque scenes. Body horror, psychological horror and
sexual horror are all leveraged here. This is definitely done partially for shock value, but it's also to
build up the the sense of dread and evil baked into the story's world.
The author wants things to feel hopeless and irredeemable as set up for later events.
In between the scenes of hyper-violent gore-soaked action and more cartoon nipples than entirely necessary the
series contemplates the values and costs of friendship, the ability
to depend on others weaker than one's self, and Guts' conflicting driving forces and goals. The comic relief
and emotional scenes contrasted against the brutal backdrop
makes it easy to love supporting characters in both the "Golden Age" and "Millenium Falcon" arcs. This also
sets the stage for one of the most brutal betrayals I've read in any medium
which kicks off the plotline for the rest of the series.
Guts as a character is interesting -- a gentle soul (bear with me) forged by continuous cruelties into a
monster. His lack of trust runs deep, making scenes where
he opens up to other characters all the more powerful. By the Conviction Arc we see and understand a man
driven by self-destructive fury,
an unstoppable force of heavy steel and violence who in the following arc needs to protect a fragile thing,
having only said steel and violence
as his tools.
Guts is a thoroughly broken man (at points he converses with a black dog within him) who must slowly re-learn
how to rely on the people around him, and in turn be reliable.
Though he fears (literally) hurting them, he does eventually finally let his guard down to his rag-tag band of
misfits. This is difficult
for him -- letting his guard down has hurt him so many times before, and his internal struggle plays out in
some of the most consistent and intricate
artwork I've seen in a manga series.
The story itself is fantastic and sucks you in once you're into the Golden Age arc. It makes for an
unforgettable journey that though left incomplete,
ends on a satisfactory note while still bringing up many thought-provoking possibilities. It would have been a
tragedy to leave it at volume 40!
The rest of the story and implications of the final panel is, for now, left to the imaginations of decades of
fans. I find myself relived,
to be honest, as I'm sure had the story continued, Guts would be forced to survive more tragedies still for
the sake of the plot.
For now, at least, the poor tortured soul can rest, restless as he may be.
