This is a big rofl episode. First of all... the story is awesome. I got scared towards the end when Yumi was kidnapped, but it turned out okay. Yumi in panda suit is win.

Second, there's a bonus audio track that came with the original Japanese raw. Guess what's on it... It's the seiyuu for Marimite! Ever wanted to hear Sachiko talking girly and saying funny things? It's entertaining enough just to hear the voices, and imagine the Marimite characters being out-of-character and talking, instead of the seiyuu.

Yeah this is a short entry.

Yo man, I'm still not done with my yet-untitled story. I had to rewrite the first chapter several times because of elements I'd forgotten while writing. But I think I have chapter 1 down now finally. I'm writing chapter 2, and I'm having a little trouble, but it's not as big as the problems I had with chapter 1. I was also experimenting with and practicing drawing small, and researching on possible simple coloring techniques. I've decided to further simplify my drawing style by drawing no eyes when the characters are zoomed out to a certain level, and drawing the eyes larger than my regular drawing style, in order to be able to show expressions and where they're looking, even when they're drawn small. Hairstyles were also simplified without losing the "shoujo" factor. I won't meet the quota I set at the start of the month, but I've made progress in other areas so I'm not bummed out.

Space Cowboy Online is still awesome. I got shot down three times by the same person in the last 3 days (twice today). It's kinda made me want to level my character up ASAP. When I get to the 70's, where most of the regulars seem to be, I'll be happy. Seems like you can be useful in PVP when you're at that level. Additionally, I also like how the two factions in the story seem to be serious enemies. Even the player base tends to become loyal to whichever side their main characters are on. The two sides (BCU and ANI) have opposing ideals, role play wise, and though not a lot of people pay attention to the ideals, I think most people think of the other side as being pretty bad, so when a battle for a map starts, things can get pretty bitter, just like a real war.

On the side, I'm downloading another GPotato game called Rappelz. Despite the Z in the name, it's a medieval (?) fantasy game looks pretty awesome. As the website described, you have fairly wide customization options as far as skills go. And the character designs are awesome. I don't care what some snobs say, that visuals are for suckers and that real hardcore gamers shouldn't care about visuals. Frankly I'm drawn to eye-candy first, then I check if the game is worth playing. I think most people are, in reality. I'm not going to play a game that looks like crap, even if it's awesome. To be honest, even Ultima Online, which was one of the most awesome MMO's in terms of gameplay, actually didn't look like crap, even by today's standards. Sure, it looked old, but it never looked ugly. Now there are games out there that really just look plain friggen ugly, and that's what I can't stand. Anyway the Rappelz installer is like 1.3++ GB. Been downloading it all day and I have about 8-10 hours more before the download finishes (depends on if I pause it to play SCO later or not).

Now, a few notes on one of my favorite b-boys, b-boy Puzzles. I have the highlight video from Style2Ouf.com, but I wanted to see more of him, so I searched on YouTube for some videos. Unfortunately, there just weren't too many, but the ones they did have were pretty cool. I really love this guy's style, and he's inspired me to work on my styles a lot more now. So I've been experimenting with styles in my head and on what limited floorspace I have in my room.

Finally, I had an awesome dream (wow this is a long blog post). I'll keep this one short. I had a dream that left me in tears; the dream was just that awesome. In my dream, which looked like a music video, there was this one guy who was bragging to his friend about his money, his cars, his guns and his women, and how he had it good in life. Then in the second verse, his friend said some deep stuff, like how everything he had was useless (or something like that; to be honest I don't remember this part of the dream too well). Then in the third verse, the bragging guy ended up realizing what his friend said was true. So he was crying in the verse while rapping. Too bad I don't remember the lyrics of the rap, because when I woke up, my pillow was soaked in tears. But at least it gave me enough inspiration for a rap to write. I'll write it in my spare time this week.

Dude. Space Cowboy Online rocks so much. It was worth the 30 hour download absolutely. This is quite possibly the best online game I've ever played.

See, what they call "grinding" is still fun, because you're shooting stuff down. Quests are interesting. And you get to spend a lot of time in newbie quests learning to control your Gear. I've pretty much gotten the hang of my controls now as an A-Gear, which is a tank that works better on the ground, but I know how to fly it well. If I had homing missiles I'd be more effective in the air, but the A-Gear was really better designed for being on the ground. I can't wait to get to level 20 so I can use Siege Mode. :D

Surprisingly the game isn't as graphically hardware-intensive as I'd originally imagined it to be. o_O For a full-3D flight sim, I thought I'd be in chop city. But they probably optimized everything so that it runs smoothly, even when there's a lot of players or monsters in the screen. Additionally, this game is designed in a way that lag doesn't interfere too much. I think even dial-up players can enjoy this game. I think it registers everything client-side first, then sends it to the server-side. Unlike in most normal FPS, where if you aim late because of lag, you miss completely, if your client says you hit, the server will recognize, even if according to the server, the target has already moved out of your target area. That is just smart thinking.

A little added bonus that I'm sure a lot of people appreciate, myself included, is the music player thing. You can put your own music into the game's music folder, and it'll put them in a playlist in-game. So you can listen to whatever you want to without having to possibly lag your game by running WinAmp or WMP in the background to listen. Flawless victory.

Mad propz to the developers of this truly awesome game. Looks like I've found my "hang-out" game for a while.

I was trying to hold off posting until I'd actually gotten to play the other game, but I downloaded two games from GPotato.com, a MMO company (the people responsible for FlyFF). The games I downloaded are Corum Online, and Space Cowboy Online. Let me talk about each in this post.

Again, on my quest to find a decent hang-out MMORPG, I decided to visit the makers of FlyFF. I enjoyed FlyFF to an extent, except that the Filipino community, to which I'm limited since we're IP Banned from FlyFF International, is really bad. So upon visiting the GPotato website, I saw that they're also the makers of a game called Corum, of which I'd heard before.

Corum is a new game in its early stages. It doesn't use the same engine as FlyFF, to my surprise. It has nice unique graphics, which aren't quite realistic, but aren't necessarily cutesy either. Let me list what I don't like about Corum first, because there's only a few.

1. ) Fixed Resolution and Graphical Options
You can't edit it, as far as I know. The game doesn't run too poorly even on my crappy machine, but in towns when there are a lot of people sitting around, it gets a little choppy, and I can feel my CPU grinding. An option to run it at a lower resolution or with less detail would've been nice.

2.) NOT NEWBIE FRIENDLY
This game isn't the most unfriendly game there is, but it kinda leaves new players, especially those with little or no experience with MMORPGs with little room to learn about the world. There isn't an intuitive tutorial, or guide NPC, or even a help menu. They do, however give you quests all throughout the game, which should help you figure out what monsters to fight and where. But they don't tell you where to find the next quest after the first few, so I found myself running around the two starter cities looking for quests at one point.

3.) Ugly Melee Attack Control/Monster Selection System
This is its major downfall for me. I started out with a Ranger, which is a melee character (oldschool Ranger definition; like a thief/assassin). When you point to a monster, you see its name and its HP bar at the top of your screen. When you click it, you move to where it was when you clicked. This is a bad thing, because the monsters are moving around like 95% of the time. So to chase a monster down, you kinda have to keep clicking on it, or guess where it's going and beat it to that spot. Then when you're within melee range, if you click it, that's when you start attacking. Sometimes, probably because of lag, the client won't recognize that you're in range. So the monster is attacking you, but you're doing nothing, as if you're out of range. This has caused my death on more than one occasion. This problem is notably reduced when you're using the Arcus (an archer; the only ranged character in the game), or a mage character that can spam spells (via right-click). All in all, it can get frustrating having to chase your enemy down.


With that aside, let's talk about what's cool about this game.

1.) Game Design is Nice
When you start the game, you're in a world map. You can see the beginner village and a few dungeons, including player-occupied dungeons in your screen. This seems like an offline kind of thing, because you won't ever see anybody else on the world map. This gives it a feeling of being an offline RPG, which is cool to me.

2.) Music is Nice
Yeah the music also adds to the feeling of an oldschool RPG. They're always subtle and non-intrusive, but certainly noticeable enough to make you feel nostalgic in a way (at least it did that for me).

3.) Item System
The item system is pretty interesting. From the way I see things right now, weapons are important, but they're set in a way that you can be using the same weapon for 30 or 40 levels and it would still be pretty strong. This causes you to invest in a great weapon, like upgrading it and adding stats and stuff. I'm using the weapon you get in one of the low level quests, and from what I've read on the forums, this'll be the strongest weapon I get until the level 35 (?) quest, unless somebody's really spent a lot of time making a better weapon (like +10 with many many added stats on a generic wepaon). Quests will get you some pretty awesome gear (usually in sets with set bonuses) even at high levels.

4.) PVP
PVP seems like the highlight of this game, which I like. I haven't tried PVP yet, but I'd like to. From reading stories on the forums, PVP is very rich in this game, because of the uniqueness of the strengths and weaknesses of each class, and even the variety of which you can build each class.

I'll play Corum a little more. I don't have much time to do so, but I'm hoping I can get my character to a decent level (60-70 sounds fine). I'd also like to try their PVP sometime soon.


Now, on to Space Cowboy. As I told my sister: if you like 70's style mecha anime/manga, or if you like flight sims (both first or third person) or shooting stuff down, or if you want to be a geek of something this is probably the game for you. I haven't played this game yet, but judging from screenshots and forum posts, it sounds like an awesome game. There's so much information, like what weapons to put on your ship or "Gear", what engine, etc. There are even formations and strategies. The game client available on the website right now is about 900+ MB, but after that you have to download another 800 MB or so of patches, which replace most of what you've downloaded from the original installer (gah...). They really need to update the installer. I've been downloading and patching for about 30+ hours now (and I still have about 600 MB to go I think). My DSL isn't the fastest, but still, no patching should EVER take this long. Just think if I were on dial-up! D: D: D:


B-boy news: I learned a lot of things. Members of Battle Crew (J-Masta and a B-boy called Jessie [or however you spell it; sorry dude]) were at Urban Hope last Monday, and taught us some fundamentals of some power moves (in my case, I learned a little about how to make my swipes better, and how to do turtle floats). I also got some tips on my styles to make them more dope. Props to those guys. I think I levelled up like 15 levels in that one night. I'm still feeling the muscle pain from that time.

Here's my final analysis on Rakion. Rakion is a fun game in essence, but your enemy, aside from foul-mouthing, ill-mannered Filipinos, is really lag. This game is best played over a LAN, where you get pings of under 100, which would probably make it one of the most kickass cyber cafe games. Or you should get a super fast connection like 512 DSL or T1 or something (128 just doesn't cut it unless they're in the same area).

Overall, the fun is being hampered by the inability to kill, and the unfriendliness of the players in the game, always thinking that even if you're a newbie still learning the game (and trying to play even with lag), that you're some kind of long-time player who's just stupid. I try to ignore the players but it's hard when you spend most of the time dead, or running away trying to stay alive.

On a side note, I'm actually considering just going back to playing a MMORPG... I dunno. I'll keep searching.

Uhh yeah. Probably from some stuff I signed up for long ago, my old e-mail address (takuya_hanakoganei-at-yahoo-dot-com) was being flooded with various spam, including Rolx (fake Rolex watches), mortgage, credit card and penis enlargement-related mail. So I had to get a new e-mail address. I'll keep that old e-mail address for when I sign up for forums, game websites, etc. But I'll advise my friends and business partners to e-mail me at my new e-mail address isntead (won't post it here to be safe from web crawlers).

Rakion online still fun. Community is a bunch of annoying Filipinos, but it usually doesn't take away from the fun, especially since you can just leave the room if you get annoyed enough. The problem is that it's hard to find a room with people from the same area (for minimum latency).

I've realized something. I've been doing it wrong all this time. I've been spending too much time looking for a MMORPG that's fun, but doesn't force me to play or otherwise be addicted to it, when what I should've been doing was looking for an online [i]action game[/i]!

Hence, enter Rakion (SEA server link; International server link). Rakion is an online fighting game that can be compared to something like Dynasty Warriors or Tenchu in terms of style, where you control your character in 3rd person, and beat up monsters and/or other players in 3D environments. You get exp by killing players or accomplishing map objectives, and you can use the exp to strengthen your character. You also get gold, to get equipment with. It's really fun, and there's no obligation to play because it's not a MMORPG. My main concern, though, is that because of the nature of the game, it works via P2P connection (peer-to-peer), and it's kinda hard to find somebody with a decent connection speed. I'm not sure why, because even I'm able to host a game with minimal ping, and I'm only on a 128 Kbps DSL connection. I'm sure there's lots of people with better connections than me...

Anyway, I've finished some principle character design sketches for all the main characters, but I saw something while browsing the internet last night. I won't explain it now because I might feel silly if I'm wrong, but let's just say I'll post here if I make any changes.

Playing a new MMORPG called Last Chaos (USA Server). The look of the game reminds me a lot of Lineage, except that the classes are character-specific. That means, you pick a character and it can only become a single class. But that's okay. The game is fun. I think one of the more interesting features is the personal dungeon, where you can enter alone and fight swarms of monsters at a time, without anybody to interfere. It's challenging if you enter the dungeon at the lowest possible level, then it becomes insane carnage when you're strong enough to actually survive the swarms. The boss at the end [of the easiest personal dungeon level] is disappointingly easy, but that's still okay. The fun lies in the swarms, then.

There are only two things that I find bothersome about this game right now. One is that it's so hardware intensive. Even at the lowest settings, my PC still can't handle it smoothly (I may be running at below 10 FPS; probably only around 5 FPS), so I have to play it on my sister's PC, which is only slightly better. It runs smoothly on her PC, except that I still have to run at low settings. It lags especially when there are a lot of characters on the screen (just player characters; monsters and NPCs seem to be fine). Many people have complained about this, as well. So it's either they simplify some things (or allow better, more efficient settings), or everybody has to upgrade their PCs.

Second bothersome thing is that the server is LAGGY. It seems to be a constant kind of lag rather than the lag spike kind. But hopefully, a lot of people buy from their Item Mall so they can afford a better server.

Other news: Kanon episode 23 fan sub was released yesterday. I haven't finished downloading yet (it'll be done soon), so now while I'm typing this, I'm wondering, maybe I should've watched it first before mentioning it here. Hmm...

Still other news: I've written the first two chapters of the story I'm going to use for my manga. I got some help from my sister, who's a good writer herself, especially with the confusingly dramatic chapter 2. Man I can't wait to start this thing. I posted on my DeviantArt journal, I've set for myself a deadline. Character designs for all main characters have to be complete by Monday, and 10 pages of the manga by the end of the month. Also (this wasn't mentioned in my DA journal), I have to decide whether or not I should ink my manga. Pencil style can be cool if I do it cleanly, and that's where I'm leaning toward right now. I'll have to make a sample of that first to see how it looks.

I downloaded a less-popular MMORPG called FungWan Online, to continue my quest in search of a good "hang-out" MMORPG. After playing for about 2 hours, there's a few very obvious things that I noticed about this game.

1. It's very lonely. I dunno if it's just a bad time (conflict of time zones), or there really just aren't any low-level people anymore or what. I seem to be playing on the English server, though. Probably everybody is on the Malaysian server. Like I said, it's not so popular. It's probably marketed better in Malaysia.

2. The graphics are oldschool. By today's standards when it comes to 3D games, this game doesn't look stunning at all. I'd say it would've looked cool about 10 years ago. But that's not a very big issue really. I mean, who cares about graphics if the game is fun anyway, right? Also, this way, even a low-end machine can run very smoothly.

3. The server lags. It's odd, but even if they seem to be very considerate for dial-up users and users on low-end machines, the server really just lags. It's most obvious when trying to attack a monster or pick up items. It takes a while for the game to register that you'd actually done anything.

4. The game plays like a 3D MUD. MUD as in Multi-User Dungeon, you know those oldschool text-based network/online RPGs. I've been playing on MUDs for years and years, so I know what I'm talking about. This game has text explanations for everything that happens, it seems. For example, how much damage you do, and whether you miss or not, they're all displayed and logged into the system screen. Usually they'll just tell you what items and how much exp you got. This thing tells you even when you're getting ready to attack, and which monster/NPC you've selected.

5. The game obviously revolves around PVP. They have various PVP modes and events. This is good, but...

6. It seems that getting to a high enough level to be of any use in PVP takes a long, long time. It took me about half an hour to get from level 2 to level 3.

7. Related to how it plays like a MUD, I like how you can customize your character's growth. There are trade skills and other support skills that don't really help in battle, and you can choose which to develop and when. Stats are straightforward and easy to distribute. And if you don't like it, you can reset your stats via NPC (you may have to pay or do a quest or something; never tried).

All in all, my rating of this game so far is about 2/5. Lag and loneliness weigh a lot here. I bet this game would've been way more fun if you had a bunch of people in a party. I'll play it a bit more to a higher level before I completely discard it.


In other news, I learned how to do front flip suicides. :D I haven't tried it without a matress yet, but I think I can do it. About my manga, I'm going through my final character design phase, where I'm drawing all the main characters. After this, I'll start writing the manga itself.