August 2010 Archives

I’ve been chatting with my neighbor lately; turns out he’s into anime, so I’ve been lending him some shows. We started with Totoro and Paprika. He loved Paprika and his kid has become quite attached to the big fuzzy monster. Last night I brought over Berserk, Initial D, and Kaze no Yojimbo. We digressed onto the topic of personal audio, and it turns out he’s a pretty big audiophile. I don’t know if he’s like “$1800 ethernet cable” level audiophile or anything like that. Regardless, we talked a bit about what we look for in headphones and such. A bit later, totally unannounced, he brought over an impressive looking set of cans:

These are the AKG K271s. They’re not in production anymore, but it looks like you can still find’em online for about $150. I wore them most of the evening, while playing The Witcher and listening to music whilst photoshopping. I checked out Miles Davis, Metallica, a variety of hip-hop, and some other stuff on random shuffle. The headphones sound great. They’re closed ear, and wow do they do a great job of isolating. Fair sound range, too. Everything I threw at it sounded fabulous.

Just as importantly, they’re extraordinarily comfortable. I had to wear them for almost 6 hours straight get tired of them. First off, they don’t sit on your ears but rather around them. Better yet, the padding is very nice. What really makes’em work though, is the sizing contraption on top. Rather than selecting your size, you just put’em on. The headband shapes to your head easily and stays that way without putting any undue pressure on you while you wear them.

Onto some side features. First off, on the left ear there’s a little button, almost invisible. When you take the headphones off, the headband retracts and is supposed to push in the button which then shuts the headphones off. I’ll admit that this didn’t work on this particular pair, but just because the end of the headphone band didn’t actually make contact. If I pushed the button down with my finger it worked perfectly and it never triggered accidentally. As you can see in the image, the cord disconnects from the headphones. It’s a push button disconnect, and it’s cool to know that if say, a friendly, loving cat chewed through your headphone cord, you could potentially get a replacement. Hell, I’d probably buy one preemptively.

Overall, these are really spectacular headphones and while I don’t normally wear headphones at home I’m seriously thinking about finding a pair (or the current incarnation, anyway) when money is available.

Here’s the obligatory picture of a cute Asian girl wearing the headphones.

This week, anime director Satoshi Kon, aged 47, died of pancreatic cancer. Normally I don’t get all emo over something like this but Kon’s passing is truly an important and sad moment for anime. With so many shows and movies just repeating the same memes, Kon always managed to bring something new to what otherwise has felt, at times, like a tired medium.

It probably hit me the hardest when I read some of his last words:

With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen.

Well, I'll be leaving now.

Satoshi Kon

It’s hard to explain why the words affect me as much as they do. I think that if he hadn’t died he would’ve had much more to give to anime, but at the same time I think he was satisfied with what he’d given, and was at peace with himself. I hope that when it’s that time for me, I’ll be able to be half that cool.

In just a few minutes, I could be playing any of a few thousand Nintendo games ranging from the horrible Japanese Star Wars game to Super Mario Bros. 3, thanks to the magic of ROMs. But what about all those beautiful, seemingly indestructible (but always dusty) game cartridges from the heyday of 8 and 16-bit games that so many of us have stored in a plastic tote in our closets? I don’t know about you, but many of my consoles bit the dust years ago; some from the abuse that comes with overuse, others from neglect.

Here comes Hyperkin’s Retron3 to the rescue! In a long-past day, this gleaming, red and grey piece of electronics would’ve been smashed in a public ceremony, an abomination to be declared a harbinger of the end times. Sega and Nintendo fanboys alike would have shunned it for associating with the enemy (if licensing could’ve ever allowed its existence).

Check out the full article.

As years have passed by and I’ve gotten a bit older, piracy has become less and less interesting. Now, I’ll admit that some Japanese music that would be extraordinarily hard to find on disc has found its way to my computer, but even then I’ve purchased three or four CDs from Japan this year. Dear friends, keep going to Japan!

I have a Zune subscription for music, Netflix for movies, Gamefly for games—though admittedly I buy more of those than most other things—and a DVR for television that isn’t going to make it to DVD. There’s just no need for me to pirate stuff anymore; it’s too easy to get the stuff I want.

With that said, the market for used products is still alive and well, and has its place. While I don’t sell many of my games, I don’t mind buying used games. The ongoing argument about the role of retailers in game sales made me think about this a bit. While I prefer to buy games new, I think that the used market is absolutely necessary. Many gamers wouldn’t game if it weren’t for GameStop and the like.

Each time one of these developers goes off about the used market cannibalizing sales, I want to ask if they’ve ever bought a used car, an older house, a DVD from a bargain bin, or a book from Half Price Books. Buying things new is best when possible. If everyone only bought used, no one would make anything new. But if no one ever bought used, no one would buy anything. Except rich people. I would totally buy rich people.

Wait a second, that’s not what I meant.

Anyway, games have a limited life-span. Except StarCraft, apparently. And the great thing about console games is that they’re easy as heck to sell. Sure you could laze it up and go to GameStop (lazing it up has nothing to do with lasers), but if you’re a real savvy entrepreneur you could hit half.com or Gamefly’s used-game service and get more for your game. You could also visit Goozex and barter your way into new games, neither contributing nor taking away from the economy. Win-win!

Without those used game sales, you can bet that developers would be fretting that much more about new game sales.

My good pal Joel Windels and I put our heads together and thought, how can we piss off a bunch of people? Take the piss out of JRPGs! I’m kidding. We were discussing the definition of roleplaying and decided to approach it as a co-operative article. But you wouldn’t know that from the way people are reacting on N4G.

Genres in video games are already confusing mazes of definitions: action games, adventure games, platformers. As gaming technology develops, some genres slowly become obsolete, such as top-down racers and on-rails shooters, yet we as an industry cling to ancient terminology and archaic descriptors for modern games. This leads us to ask what exactly is a role-playing game, and how can Western and Japanese versions of the same genre differ so dramatically?

Traditionally an RPG would have taken the form of a pen and paper game, like the timeless Dungeons and Dragons. It may also be live action - known as LARPing - yet no matter where you look, the basis for such games will be individuals assuming the role of an imagined or pre-created character.

If this is the sole prerequisite for a game to be considered to be an RPG, then almost every video game is one, as players have been assuming avatars for the past thirty years, from Pac-Man to Mario. Instead of having a human game master, however, the actual game environment and rule-set become the limiters and directors of the role playing. We no longer bother to classify a film if it has sound or color as practically all of them do, so what on Earth is the point of having a genre called RPG within a field almost entirely made up of them?

Check out the full article.

I watched the first episode of the anime adaptation of the manga High School of the Dead. It has the potential for greatness, but we’ll have to see if it can reach those heights. And when I say greatness I mean “being lots of fun to watch.”

First off, it’s about zombies. Second, it has gorgeous animation. Third, the characters seem interesting.

The thing that will act as a barrier for the most people, I think, is the character designs and their origin. Just about every girl in the show is massively boobtastic. There’s a reason for this. Reason, not excuse.

The artist, Shouji Satou, is better known as Inazuma, a fairly prolific author of hentai doujin. The cover to the left is one of the few that is safe enough to post here. It’s easy to see in the female characters. They’re walking fantasies – schoolgirls with high stockings, a big-breasted school nurse, a girl with twin ponytails and glasses (not to mention she’s a full-on tsundere stereotype).

So, the show is heavy on fanservice. Now, it seems to subscribe to the Queen’s Blade school of service, where the people in the show aren’t aware of the jiggling and flashing going on. They’re just going about their day killing zombies with baseball bats and wooden swords. That’s enough for me to balance it out, but I know a lot of people will find it off-putting.

I want to go on a tirade here for people disrespecting my wife for liking shows with boobs in them, but I’ll save that for another post.

Anyway, just to make sure this is THE most boobtastic post in the brief history of 60fps.net, here’s a promotional image from the show. Also, I’ve used boobtastic, including that use there, three times. So enjoy!

I guess it makes sense that you’d eventually run out of clothes in a zombie-infested high school. You can only narrowly escape a zombie grab so many times.

Last week, Kombo’s Joey Davidson and I had the opportunity to interview Wei Hwa Huang, the spokesperson for Nintendo DS’ Picross 3D.

Wei-Hwa Huang is a four-time individual winner of the World Puzzle Championship and winner of the 2008 Sudoku National Championship.  He has co-written two books of handcrafted Sudoku variants, one book on the Rubik's Cube and related puzzles, and was a key organizer for the first World Sudoku Championship held in the United States.  When he isn't working on puzzles he develops and designs games, and has been playing on Nintendo consoles since 1984.

1. Of the 350-plus puzzles in the game, how many did you create?
I wish I was involved in the Picross 3D puzzle creation, but all the puzzles were created by the developer (HAL Laboratory). I've personally created a few puzzles using their built-in editor and if you can find me and my Nintendo DS I'd be happy to share them with you!

2. How long does it take to make one of these puzzles?
Designing the puzzle is pretty easy and is as simple as building something out of colored bricks; it's the creativity that's difficult. Of course, this assumes that you have a good puzzle-generation engine, and Picross 3D definitely has one, so you don't have to be good at the puzzles to be able to make a good one.

Check out the full article.

The Cloud is The Future!

That’s what everyone’s saying, right? Everyone over at OnLive, anyway. So, what is the future like?

I’ve been checking out the much-hyped service for the last few days from home, and the claims made by OnLive are surprisingly pretty accurate.

Check out the full article here.

It seems that Berserk writer and artist Kentaro Miura has moved to a 12-month release schedule, or something close to that. The newest volume, 31, releases stateside on September 7th, while it hit Japan last September 25th. The last hit before that in October 2008 and then in November 2007. There’s no note on the official Japanese page about Berserk 25. I’m starting to get really concerned that the guy’s never going to finish the series.

That said, every time I pick up a new volume it’s easy to see just why it takes so long to release a new book. There’s more detail in each page than most artists could be bothered to put into a single piece of work.

Berserk, Volume 27, Page 2

Thinking about how much time Miura must spend on each image is enough to just about drive me mad. And he’s been working on this series since 1991. 34 volumes, 200+ pages each; The guy’s done something like 7,500 pages of this.

Somewhere in the middle, I started to get worried; it felt like he’d moved over to Monster of the Week, and the crew following Guts feels a lot like a D&D party (Druid, ranger, rogue, healer, and of course the Berserker). That said, the last few volumes have felt a lot more like the story I’m used to. Guts is getting beaten senseless on every page, interesting character interaction is everywhere, and again that detail.

Berserk vol. 31, page 1

I just wish it could move a little faster. I’m going to be sitting in the old folks’ home with my friends, reading the newest volume of Berserk (probably volume 42 or so!).