Alright, the SRO Europe patch I've been waiting for is finally coming. The website says July 24. I'm getting excited. Although I won't be at home at that time, and I won't be until around August 10 I think. But the good news about that is that it'll be past the download rush, so I'll be able to download the client easily by then.

In other news, DW4 is still addictive and exciting.

Well I got Dynasty Warriors 4 Hyper for the PC a few days ago and I've been playing it like an idiot whenever I have spare time. The game is mad fun. Jumping into a mindless swarm of enemies and just slashing like there's no tomorrow makes for good fun. Also the characters are pretty cool. It's one of those games where I don't have to use just the female characters, because even some (most) of the male characters are very likeable (and fun to use).

But my favorite character still turns out to be Yue Ying, as I'd always thought she was attractive from the character designs Koei made of her.

Initially I was worried that maybe the PC version of the game may not be so well-translated from a console game. The PS2 was built for games like this, but when you think about it, most PCs aren't. So I was worried it would either have lag problems or some other weird problems with controls, camera angling or whatnot. But it turned out quite well (though the camera control may take some getting used to at first, if you're used to always-face-forward 3rd person games).

My main complaint would be the translation job they did with the English version. The PC version comes with the original Japanese voices, but with subtitles/speech frames. Many of the dialogues, especially early on, are so poorly translated. The effect is alright, where generals sound like they're giving you orders rather than just saying "We won't die!", and that's probably what they were aiming for. But they should've at least tried to make the translation have the same flow as the original dialogue.

Probably linked to the translation problem is the fact that sometimes the wrong face sprites and characters are shown talking, mismatched with the voice. Like sometimes a young woman's voice would come out and they're showing the portrait of one of the old male generals. Hmm. o_o

But it's still lots of fun. I try not to read the translations because they're wrong anyway, and I try to just listen to the voices. It's a little hard though because they keep pronouncing Chinese names, and apparently, the way they say Chinese names (even of places) is different from the way they seem to be written in English. For example, Xiahou Dun sounds something like Dou Shou (something or others) in the Japanese voice. I'm thinking it may be linked to how the kanji (or Chinese characters) are read in Japanese, rather than just saying Xiahou Dun in katakana.

I've noticed that the majority of characters that I like in anime turn out to be the tsukkomi characters. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's from Japanese comedy. Tsukkomi usually refers to the one [of a manzai duo] who isn't goofy, and points out the mistakes of the boke (literally: idiot) by making quips or retorts.

Tsukkomi characters are almost always level-headed and somewhat serious in anime. Such characters that I've found to like the most in recent anime I've watched include:

Kagami from Lucky Star
Nagi from Hayate no Gotoku
Yomi from Azumanga Daioh
Nenene from R.O.D. the TV (though not really a comedy, her role was still a tsukkomi)

:D

Dance Concert today. We'll be getting ready to go in a little while. I haven't had a dancing day in a long time. I haven't been to Urban Hope in well over a month (and prior to that one time sometime last month that I did go, I was absent for a month as well). There were no chances to practice either, so I figure I'm pretty rusty. I've been doing handstand push-ups and my arms still seem okay. But I don't know if I'll lose my breath too quickly when doing floorworks and toprocks/uprocks. It's possible, since endurance is lost quickly when you don't exercise it. D:

This Saturday will hold an evangelistic dance concert, organized by the JZone Youth Ministry of CCF, with their dance ministry We Dance 4 Jesus (WD4J). The title of the event will be "Arise". I'm looking forward to it. They usually hold the dance concert a little later in the year than this, but it's a welcome earliness.

Starting Monday I'll be undergoing training for the upcoming Korean summer camp, where I'm supposed to be an English teacher. I'm also looking forward to that.

Today was a rainy day; one of the rainiest I've seen in months. Though it didn't change the humidity issue too much, I'm hoping to see more rainy days, though less violent to avoid flooding.

Here's the link to one of the most annoying games you'll ever play. D: Click, load, play, and keep coming back trying to figure it out.

I'm watching Azumanga Daioh for the first time ever, and I can't believe I didn't watch this before. It's hilarious. But it has a bit of a slower pace than Lucky Star (though it has the same style; 4komas turned animation). The characters are all fun, though, and even if there's a lot of characters, they're all pretty unique and interesting.

Haven't played GE Japan seriously for about a week now. I only logged in recently to put some stuff up in the market for selling.

Also, I found and got the entire Granado Espada OST. It's so awesome. I love how most of the music kinda blends into each other. Put them in a playlist and leave them running (shuffled or not) and it sounds like just a long blissful techno/trance/dance track.