More SPACE

I stretched out my template for more space. HOORAY ME!

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Never let it be said I'm deaf to requests

It's really amazing. 100% of my readers hunted me down today and requested a final review of Doki Doki Majo Shinpan. Amazing! Clearly by influencing 100% of my audience I could get cats and dogs to live together, furfags to shake hands with Xbox 360 gamers, and bring peace to the middle east. You know, major shit.

Unfortunately 100% of my readership is male. What a sausagefest.

Anyway, here we go.

DDMS as a game is about average. The big how-do-ya-do about touching little girls aka. witches isn't too scandalous and all a relatively small percentage of actual gameplay. I can't read Japanese, but I'm used to dating sims enough that I can pretty much tell what's going on. That said, I didn't read much of the text at all. From a scale of 1 to 12, I'm easily pre-embryonic with my Japanese.

You'll notice I'm not much of a weeaboo. That's because I don't like mixing my languages and I don't like romanji since that's simply not how they read or write over there. Like those English lessons for Spanish speakers that spell words phonetically, if it helps YOU learn that's great. But it wouldn't help me learn which is fine since those spellings are just wrong anyways.

So the plot, as I gather, is that you run into an apprentice angel and have to track down these witches at your school. Why? I dunno. If you put a gun to my head I'd say it's because the queen angel asked them to be gathered up. Why? Just think about any anime and you'll be three steps away from figuring out how nefarious the plot can be.

Anyway, a lot of the early game involves catching your target in certain locations on the map. Locations lock and unlock themselves throughout the course of the game, difference of which is either gray or in color respectively. Each of those locations has "rooms" which also may lock or unlock, except that unlocked rooms have circles on them and locked ones simply don't show up. Unlocked circles can either have a character face on it for an event or just a ! to look around and collect pandas.

Pandas? Yeah, I don't know either. There's a whole bunch of them hidden in the game. I assume something good happens when you find them all but I'm only about 65% collected. After you finish the game you can restart it with your same panda counts and find the other ones. I could have sworn that ones are around that I would have gotten before so many it's intentionally to get to you replay it. If it is intentional, BAD DEVELOPERS, BAD BAD DEVELOPERS!

Now, there's pretty much the bulk of the game. Follow clues and wander the school and township to find events and catch damning evidence against the witches. To my disappointment not one piece of evidence is a flying broomstick. If you have a fetish about witches and broomsticks and witchcraft and that sort of thing: black nail polish, sultry bodies of evil, sitting on a broomstick in oh-so-unladylike-a-manner, you'll be sorely disappointed. Closest I saw was a demon circle etched into a desk. How, uh, subtle.

Anyway, like games of this type, the core mechanic is finding those event spots. But there really isn't a lot of attention paid to when things open. There ought to be some kind of eyecatch to let you know, for example, the shopping center opens up. Sometimes, also, two events are available but once you do one the other no longer is. Typical fare for the type of game, yes, but I'm also used to having a metric fuckton of save game slots to do a tree-comb* of the game. DDMS only includes three. Then some non-event spots can turn into an event. I assume the text provides hints as to what happens where, but you've got that panda quest to worry about too. Sometimes if you get into a non-event spot to investigate the event markers will disappear.

* Tree-comb is what I call the technique of finding everything in a game of this kind. Imagine a tree (mathematical tree) where the root is where your first decision lays. You save (set a bookmark) there and take the top choice. Then you keep playing the game selecting top choices for all decisions, saving before each. When the game finishes, load up your saved games in reverse order and hit the next save. So, if the game had three decisions of two options each, your game would go: Save A, #1, Save B, #1, Save C, #1, End, Load C, #2, End, Load B, #2, Save D, #1, End, Load D, #2, End, Load A, #2, Save E, #1, Save F, #1, End, Load F, #2, End, Load E, #2, Save G, #1, End, Load G, #2, End. Complicated? Not really, it's perfectly logical. I'll leave the math to you... but it does get more complicated since a lot of times each path has a different number of decisions and you'll need a LOT more than just three decisions to make a good game. And with a game mechanic like this, it's usually a good idea to mix it up a little bit with some stuff that breaks the rules, like minigames. Although minigames shouldn't accomplish anything that the natural branching can't since you can't use a sub-mechanic to overthrow the main mechanic as that indicates broken gameplay. But all that's left for a bigger discussion on games.

Another annoyance with the room-to-room stuff is that as you gain allies each person has the potential of investigating a room. In practical terms, though, most of the time they're grayed out so it's not very frequently. And when you do have all people available a lot of times there's a room puzzle that for some reason only one person can solve. It makes room exploring pretty tedious at times and, like tree-combing, makes you wish you can just back up a little and try it again with someone else in case you stumble upon the solution early.

Back to the game. Between the general game and the touching there's a fight with a witch. In Megaman style you get to use prior level's witches to join your fight and use their abilities to help you. And, much like Megaman, when you've got their abilities you don't get access to the overwhemingly powerful ones. The fight is pretty action packed (and could be pointed to as a minigame that breaks up the main mechanic with molesting the "reward" for that level of the difficulty curve). For most moves, the stylus is dragged a small length to swing a sword or claw and that usually reflects enemy attacks. Other enemy attacks need a few hits. It's nice that the slash actually follows the motion so if you have, say, two energy beams flying at you, you could slash a line marginally longer than the minimum line between the beams and reflect both. You can also tap and hold to charge up for your secondary attack.

Most of the moves are pretty basic: slash, projectiles, and that's about it. Each one has different traits to make one more useful than others. There's a fire-shooting mode that hits the enemy over and over in quick succession and keeps them stunned as long as you have magical energy left. There's a projectile attack that curves severely like hitting a golf ball off center to get around barriers. There's a weaker but faster slash attack and even a supreme meteor raining terror down on your foe. TAKE THAT! SUBMIT! SUBMIT! SO I CAN TOUCH YOUR JUBBLIES!

So after you've beat them down now you gotta make them join your harem. Touching mode is pretty disappointing, but as expected for a CERO C game. Where a Z game would clearly have you touching all her goodies to get her to expose her witch mark and, hence, take her as an ally. It's got it naughty moments like bouncing the witches boobs or touching her in quasi-sexual places like just below the bottom edge of a tiny skirt, backs of her hands, shoulders, cheeks, ears. The combination of spots are occasionally a little weird: I had a friend looking over my shoulder while I was touching Maho, the first suspected witch, and I wound up touching in succession her ears, arms, shoulders, and legs.

Can't touch the same place in a row and have it count so you gotta move around a lot to do things. There's a lot of dead spots of non-interactivity that don't help your score but don't hurt it. There's also negative spots that squelch your progress: if you manhandle some boobies most of the witches immediately raise their guard and you lose a lot of progress... meaning that catchy boob bounce you can do by flipping the stylus over a bust usually costs in points for the round. It's easy to know when you're doing well, though, as a little heart will float up from where you touched her. Even if you don't know what you're doing you'll stumble through all the witches except for one or two that are kinda hard figuring out what their focus points are.

There are multiple tools but it's a joke. That's the biggest disappointment. You can touch, "stare" at a spot, or blow on a spot. They all function the same way in the game except the blowing is done by blowing on the microphone. Aside from the input, all the control points are the same! I thought things like "oh, the lips, I could try pointing at her lips and using it" only to find that it doesn't help and acts exactly the same as the other tools. So much potential squandered. The only mixups are as the witches get certain levels of excitement they change positions. This does change the control points in a physical sense but not a logical sense: you still have to tap an earlobe but now it's over there on the screen. It's all lead by the witch's excitement level: you can't just decide to flip her around and try the back, for example. I'm curious how much is the development team's fault and how much is self-censorship to make sure they didn't get a Z rating.

There's also a "flirt" command which raises her excitement a lot for relatively little work (just tap the button). Much like all-or-nothing magics in Final Fantasy, it usually works in the beginning but becomes a useless gesture all the time in late game. You can also present your physical evidence in this mode and it seems to make your poking and prodding more effective... I guess because they get demoralized trying to deny their witch marks.

Aside from the briefly mentioned booby bounce, there's not much dirtiness to it: I'd feel ok handing it over to a 12 year old to mess around with. It's a little dirty but really not much different from a Gainax bounce... although clearly not as powerful as the famous G-Bounce. There were some cheeky moments, like picking a crystal shard out from between the nurse's ample busom. And some moments I wish I could forget like wiping the sweat off of the little sick boy (bleh).

Artwork though is top-tier, as expected for a well funded game. There's not much in the way of animation, though, so it would have to be good or else it would lose all credibility. Audio is unremarkable. When they announced a soundtrack was to be released a month after launch, I figured, wow, the music must be pretty good. There are two great songs and the rest is just filler. Audio acting is very nice, but it gets repetitive which is why I always say you can't catch-phrase audio clips in games because they're always irritating. (Navi: "HEY")

All in all: average. Going in I knew it wasn't going to be all filth so I'm not disappointed. 3800 Yen is fine, but after currency conversion and shipping it wasn't a great value. Then again, that price didn't break me or make me alter my life in any way so I don't think of it.

There. That's my LAST Majo post. This time I promise. Unless I start getting some chicks in my readership. Then whatever they want me to do I will do. <3

In other news, I didn't know I was someone people should be afraid of:
Anonymous on FOX11

(noteworthy video replies: This one (despite shitty watermarking) and Trap getting scolded by security LOL.)

More Audition

The other day I did my personal best in Audition and I wanted to share it with you.

It's not so much a "personal best" since I tend to think in terms of percentage of perfects but it's the highest score I've gotten when there's pros at levels 20+ playing against me. Since I got lucky with some chains, yah yah.

Audition scoring is very generous to those who chain well and occasionally I do. Then again, the more perfects you get, statistically speaking, the better your odds of chaining. Why?

If I'm getting 50% perfects in a song, then that means the odds of getting a chain of 6 is .5^6, or 0.015625, or 1.5%. Suppose I get 80% perfects. Then the odds of getting a chain of 6 shoots upwards to 0.262144, or 25% chance I can get a chain of 6. And even with the way scoring gives bonuses for chains, x5 is still pretty good even if I don't make it to x6. The best I've ever gotten was x9. I nearly cried real tears when that happened.

If I didn't already seal up my tear ducts with spackle.

It's not only statistics, mind you. You still gotta get the arrow sequence. But I still see improvement in my game and it's exciting.

Kind of like how I blazed through from Light to Heavy in DDR. Those were the days... constant improvement so I know my practice is going somewhere. Nowadays I'm limited more by physical ability than reading and moving ability. The learning curve hit a pretty high slope for me. But Audition? Still shallow enough to keep me truckin' along.

Then again, it helps that there are other human players, many of which are worse than me, since it helps me keep top ranks and encourages me to stick around and play more. Nobody likes to constantly lose, after all.

So, yeah, here it is.
 

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Your money is now our money

I hit 20 pounds lost today. Actually, this is the third time I've hit my "20 pounds lost" marker. Ha ha. Did I mention I like yo-yos? I feel good, yes I do, even though I've essentially been eating out of cans and bags for the last 6 weeks*.

* Not entirely true. I've also been adding fresh fruits and veggies and skim milk and bread and peanut butter. Hooray peanut butter!

Been playing Final Fantasy XII lately. The game engine? Playable, I guess. It's very MMORPG-ish, which is too bad since they didn't take it that far.

Well, no, I DON'T want an MMORPG Final Fantasy. There are things called "ego" and "uniqueness" and "universal influences" that make console RPGs so cool. The world hangs in the balance, for example. The continent of blah blah is destroyed and it's not part of a GM event or a patch but as a result of something YOU did.

MMORPG land: Frogloks have taken over Grobb. It just happened one day overnight with a patch. Maybe it was (all of a sudden) overwhelming force. Maybe it was some powerful ally or mysterious item that "somehow" got into their hands. Contrived. The move was made by design of the developers and players did not influence it one iota.

Console RPG land: Frogloks have taken over Grobb. You finished a quest for the Froglok factions giving them a powerful item. It was in exchange for the war with the Trolls to end but they double-crossed you and your people and have used the power of the item to turn the tide of power. Betrayal! The move was made by design of the developers and triggered exactly when you did it.

What I would LOVE to see is a true MMORPG/Console RPG hybrid. It can work, too. Ask me how. *WINK*

Lets just say that if I had the time or the money to support myself on this endeavor for the years it would take, I could completely design an RPG engine with all the dynamics and fun of a MMORPG raid along with the "instanced yet still dynamic" world of a console RPG. I hesitate to give it away because it really will be next-generation MMORPG technology. 9 million WoW players? Ha.

Enough dick-waving. No, wait, I'm not done. *wave wave wave* There, that should do it.

Sorry about that, lady, must have had some semen still dripping out of it. Damn my mutant ability of shooting seed across a room. My best has been an impressive 12 feet, btw. Fuck TMI.

Anyway, this is funny. It's begging for In The Groove steps. I'm totally cereal.
(And before you get cute, I've got lossless audio of it, so, don't make them without consulting me first to get an .ogg authored.)

The Old Switcheroo

My favorite part about some asshole that runs Subeta stealing my bandwidth by directly linking to files on my server through his?

Replacing the file with Goatse's hello.jpg. Enjoy, furfags!

Manx: 1
Furfag: 0

this means WAR

This is pretty funny. People are awesome sometimes. ^^-b

Poem

Just a quick poem for you because I'm bored out of my mind.

Don't blame me
If now it hurts when you pee.

Thank you, thank you, you're a terrific audience.

Last DokiMajo post, honest!

I considered putting together a video of some gameplay, but, nah, I knew someone else would do it.

It's kind of like open source software. Sure you could open it up and fix bugs and implement new things... but, if you wait long enough, someone else will do it.

I'm not lazy: I just value my time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=137JpVe9lSY

Of course, the game isn't all molestation. It's got dating game elements pretty much all over it. There are a bunch of predefined locations on campus (and town) that get unlocked due to various events and you can find people at certain times in certain locations. One of the tricks is to find evidence of witchcraft: a book of spells, shards of a crystal ball, animals that recognize their friend regardless of what shape they take. Well, the stereotypical witch paraphernalia is what I recognize anyway. It's definitely hard to play in Japanese if you don't know it. Thankfully this exists in a pinch, especially when all I have to go on is a stroke count because I'm such a n00b.

I'm about 2:40 hours into the game, not reading any text, so I'm guessing I'd be 4:10 into it if I could read it. I'm stuck now, after a series of answer trees so I wonder if I got myself stuck and if there's anything I can do to get out of where I am. So far, it's an amusement.

There, that's it. I promise no more talk about this stuff. Ultimately it really isn't THAT interesting or relevant. I just like this for a blog theme of late.

IT'S HERE

Well, sort of. I gotta run out to the post office and pick it up. If my lazy vacationing goober-of-parents would have opened the door for the mailman I would have had it a full 3 days in advance of street date. (I simply must remember to import from Play-Asia again in the future... maybe I should join their affiliate program and trick convince my friends to buy from there.) Meanwhile I've got to lie, cheat, and steal my way out of work to do the deed.

What am I talking about?

DUH

In other news, there is no other news.

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Corrections and Apologies

• In this post back in late May I suggested that MCSD is killing my soul. Well, it's killing something alright: my will to finish it. My correction is that, as a minister, I should know that a soul is eternal. Sorry folks... 40 whacks with a wet noodle for me.


• In this post also from May, I used an awkward sentence structure at the end of the post: "So, if you've been consciously trying to convince yourself that you don't, don't feel guilty that you had dreams about me, ladies. XD" As it turns out, that was me trying to overly manipulate a sentence to achieve maximum Funny. Generally, for comedy writing, your punchline should be as close to the end of a sentence in a block of speech or text as possible. I won't go into WHY (maybe some other time), but I did it badly. The sentence was then confusing and didn't flow well at all. Henceforth: I hereby apologize to women everywhere for being so damn sexy.

(See? Told you the end is the best place for the punchline. Since I'm mostly self-taught in comedy writing, I've call it a "pivot" but no more posts about writing today.)
 

• Way back in December of '05 I made a speech claiming that the Holocaust is a myth. In no way did I mean to belittle the death of six-million Jews world-wide at the hands of the Nazi regime. It was all just a big misunderstanding. I was to give a speech about kittens but some joker replaced it. The crowd's reaction, though, was so awesome I just ran with it. I hope you all understand.