First off, the concept seemed very similar to Netgame's Hero Online. I liked Hero, except that it was fairly lonely and didn't have so many features yet, being a new game at the time I played it. So I thought maybe I'd like 12Sky too. First thing that hit me was this glaring fact: 12Sky's graphics are outdated.

Supporting screenshots:
This is me running the game at its highest possible graphics settings. Highest possible. Including their idea of shaders and lighting effects, and filter. What's with the filter anyway? It looks like a 2D game given a filter to look like a 3D game. o_O I mean, considering the technology we have these days, why does the game look like it was made for Windows 98? Why didn't they use the normal 3D engines we have in most other games? This was probably much cheaper, but it's certainly uglier.

My character, up-close. The poor graphical quality does her no justice. Notice the strange blocky blur they have, which may have been their idea of cool. o_o

The highlight of the graphical advancement is how their shaders/lighting effects work. I mean, look at how majestic that glow on the brazier is! I've never seen light so splendid and realistic in a game! You see the rings of light (for some reason). And no, it's not just because it's close up. See, the brazier in the distance has it too. Oh and the scrawny guys on the left side just standing around (literally) are the low level enemies.

On the topic of just standing around, non-aggressive enemies have some of the worst AI I've ever seen in any game. It's not that they make stupid decisions or anything. It's that they make no decisions. They literally just stand around the entire time. They spawn (by sprouting out from the ground, seriously), stand around for hours until somebody kills them, then die where they stand. They never move around. They're just... there. Even the aggressive monsters have nothing better to do than stand around until something comes close enough for them to attack. It's not all that bad, but it gives the game a feeling of being dead, if your enemies are just standing around like twigs planted into the ground, only to spring right back up in a few seconds.

Next point:
Notice "katana". Since when was a kris ever a katana? Even the way they're used is different. Even the place they're from is different. It doesn't even look anything remotely like a katana. I mean, if it were a straight or even curved sword like a thin scimitar or something, I'd have been more forgiving. Or rather, I'd be even more forgiving if not for this:

Okay... If they were planning on putting in a katana weapon, why didn't they name this one the katana instead? Could it be a translation error? I doubt it. I mean, a katana is a world-famous weapon. I'm sure even in Korea or China or wherever the heck this game was made in, they know what a katana is. Even if they didn't know what to call the kris, they should've put the name katana on the actual katana, and just named the kris "wave blade" or something obvious like that.

Also, their newbie help is the most annoying thing ever: It's nice that they have such detailed information, in case the player is completely new to this sort of thing. But that big message box on the left hand side of the screen can not be closed, can not be toggled off, and blocks off your already small view due to the non-adjustable resolution. Yeah, it can't be closed. You have to wait for it to go down in like 2 or 5 minutes or whatever.

Lastly among the bad parts, the sound effects and music; an aspect I always stress about. Counter-immersive and downright annoying at some points. Everytime some system message pops up, you hear the sound of those big war drums or something banging, and considering the frequency of such system messages... The music inexplicably stops looping sometimes, which is clearly a bug, but actually quite welcome, since the music isn't much to talk about anyway. May be best to just turn the thing off the entire game so you aren't sometimes annoyed when it decides to randomly play.


Now, to be fair, the good parts, though few as they are. I liked the game's level system. It gives huge rewards for levelling up, pretty much allowing you freedom for what kind of build you can make. You get 5 free points to distribute freely among any of the four stats, and each point increases the stat a great deal depending on your clan/class. I also liked how they promoted party play, by giving big bonuses for having 5 or more members in your party. Also, you get exp per hit on your enemies, so even if somebody kill steals from you, if you did most of the damage, you get most of the exp. It may have become a grind game, but with such things in place it may not have been that tedious in comparison with other MMORPGs (except for the ugly graphics and terrible monotonous AI).

All in all, it could've been way better. I also wish they didn't hype it up as being like some super awesome martial arts MMORPG on the website. There's barely anything about martial arts in it (especially in comparison to the superior martial arts game Hero Online). If they think having Asian weapons makes it a martial arts game, then almost every Asian-based game is a martial arts game, and almost every Asian-based game is superior to it in that.

I give the game a score of 15/100.

So, given the realistic timescale, I had the luxury of traveling around and visiting taverns. Let's just say, I was a little bored one Oblivion day, and looking for some comedy. So I saved and closed the game, set it up to open in a smaller window, and popped up my list of NPC form IDs for summoning via the console on the side.

I found myself a nice tavern in Leyawiin (I think it was Leyawiin? I don't even remember lol), locked the doors via the console, so no one comes in, no one goes out. With tweaks to their HP (giving them each 65535 hp, though you really can give them more than that), I started a tavern brawl, as seen below:


At first it was just me and the innkeeper punching each other, while the other NPCs just watched in horror. That alone was already funny. But I felt it would be funnier if somebody else knocked the innkeeper at the back of the head while we were fighting, like you often see in mindless bar fights in movies. So I popped in a few more NPCs. Random ones. As you see in the image, there's three Argonians, there's a Fallen Knight of the Thorn, a Genghis (never even run into one in the game yet), and a bandit. The innkeeper might be one of the Argonians. The bald dude on the right and the other Argonians were probably the others in the bar when it started.

So anyway, the NPCs started rumbling, and I had nobody to fight, suddenly. So I stood back and took that screenshot, laughing along the way. Though I did feel rather lonely since they completely ignored me.

So I decided it's time to add more NPCs!

Into the fray, I tossed in a nun (a Sister Phebe Jeanard; top middle), another bandit and some random NPC (both not seen in this screenshot, or any other screenshot). It was pretty chaotic, and I regret not taking more screenshots, especially in flying camera mode.

So finally in the chaos, whilst I still laughed, I decided to toss in a guard. Surely, a man of the law could break up this insanity!

(Unfortunately I had no screenshot of after I summoned him.)

Instead of bringing peace to this insane tavern, the guard jumped right in and started attacking the nun. Of all the people lol. After about 20 minutes of me watching the whole mess, sitting back, I checked on their HPs, and nobody even had any HP lower than 55,000 yet. Wow they did slow damage lol. I guess they were more in it for the thrill of the fight rather than just putting their enemies down.

So yeah, after that big brawl, I reloaded and went about my way content.

Several years ago, an insanely popular game called Morrowind hit the markets, and pretty much everybody I knew that was into PC games, especially RPGs, was raving about it, except me. I never got to play it. I didn't even have a computer good enough (at the time) to play it.

Suddenly I find myself with the new Elder Scrolls game called Oblivion. And I can safely say that I really missed out. Oblivion is so much fun, and yet some people say that Morrowind was better in some aspects. Though I don't intend on playing Morrowind soon, I'm still enjoying myself in Oblivion. This is a true open-ended RPG, and especially with the addition of the right mods, you can do almost anything you want.

I can't explain too much of what makes it fun, except that it's pretty much a fantasy world where you can do stuff you wouldn't dare or are otherwise impossible in real life. Want to go into a dark, watery cave and fight goblins? Go ahead. Want to run into a pack of bandits on a dark forest trail and single-handedly take them all down? Sure! Want to go hunting for deer or bears with a bow and arrow? What's stopping you?

I'll probably be playing this game for a long time until I'm able to get a lifetime subscription to LotR Online or something.

Abby just got home last Friday from Hong Kong, and with her, she brought hom a 6x8 Wacom tablet. She doesn't bring it to work, so while she's out, I get to use it. And it's fun. Lots of fun. Takes a lot of getting used to, though. Right now I'm still learning to use the stroke pressure properly, and to continue my strokes. I'm too used to a mouse for on-screen drawings. I also have to learn to stop repeated stroking like I do with a pencil, because it doesn't look so good when you draw outlines directly. You can clean it up with the eraser, but it takes too much time to do that.

I'll see if I can draw a decent front-view face by the end of the day.

PS3を買う理由があれば、このゲームだよ。「真・三国無双５」

キャラデサインはニコニコに見えた。超カッコいいなんだ！

Really, if there's any reason for me to get a PS3, this is absolutely it. The creators of the wonderful action fighting game Dynasty Warriors have redesigned pretty much every character in Shin Sangoku Musou 5, and some characters in more ways than others. I found a video that shows pages from the artbook for the game, and I have to say everybody's changed. Some characters even had their weapons and overall appearance change, for the first time in the entire history of the game.

Here's some examples, screenshots from the video itself:

First thing I saw was a red-haired chick with a really sexy costume. Then I noticed the bow. I nodded and said, this looks like an awesome character. Then I saw the 月英. That's right, it's Yue Ying. If I were drinking something at the moment, I'm pretty sure I would've spit it out at my monitor. Yue Ying was already cool in all the previous games. Her redesign is bringing out mixed feelings for me. First off, obviously I'm even more turned on by her now. But I'm really going to miss her scythe-wielding former self. :( I wonder what this archer-based new style will be like. By the way, if anybody asks, I am Zhuge Liang, her husband.

This is Sun Jian. In previous games, I really couldn't see him as being the head of the Sun family. He just didn't look big and commanding enough. He didn't even look old enough. He looked to be only about 10 years older than his sons and daughter, much compliment to him, but unrealistic. According to the story he's supposed to be an old general by the time his children take over for him. And I really see that now with his re-design. He looks like a respectable old general, without being so old that he looks like some geezer. Also of note is that now he's wielding a Chinese wide-blade sword. I wonder if this means a change in his fighting style, too?

Wei Yan. One of my favorites from Dynasty Warriors 4. He was cool in many aspects, but he's even more cool now. He used to look like some kind of barbaric warrior who wants nothing more than fight. Now he looks like a barbaric warrior who wants nothing more than fight BUT at the same time, he looks so badass. And look at that weapon! I wonder how he plays.


Oh man I want a PS3 so badly now. At the very least, I need to get my hands on this artbook...

First off, NWN2 is very interesting. I have the expansion with me, but I figure I'll finish the main game story first before I play the expansion.

So I picked an elven monk as my main character. I actually started with a rogue, and tried a bunch of other classes, too. But the elven monk was so interesting as I kept playing that I stuck with it, and now it's the only one that's progressed enough.

So anyway, first off, NWN2 wasn't really what I expected. I have to say at first I found it to be rather boring and somewhat annoying. I was a little frustrated and lonely because I got too used to MMORPGs where you have a lot of buttons to press while fighting. NWN2, being a D&D game, relies more on passive effects and luck (dice rolls, after all). You don't actively dodge that trap, you have reflex saves for that. I mean, there's definitely buttons to press in D&D, especially if you choose classes that have micromanagement, such as warlock or even druids. But, it's still not the same as MMORPGs, in a way that I can't seem to properly explain through words. I guess it's just that you don't feel much of the combat action here in NWN, like you're just watching two ants fighting each other...

... That is, until you get the more awesome equipment in the game. When I got my hands on some of those unidentified things I found in some dungeons, I wasn't sure if I wanted to have them identified. I was very poor, after all, only having something like 400-something gold due to my neutral lawful alignment. So I decided to save the game and have 1 or 2 items identified, for 100 gold each. Lo and behold some of them turned out to be pretty valuable. Amongst some of the items I got were a hammer called Storm +1 and other elemental equipment, which do extra damage and have flashy effects.

Suddenly battles became more interesting. And it's not really just because of the flashy effects and stuff. I'm an oldschool RPGer, and I used to play pen & paper and chat RPGs where you actually have character sheets and have to roll dice and stuff. But I never really appreciated the value of equipping the right items in such a thing until I saw how effective the Storm +1 was against all those undeads. So suddenly I'm excited to collect different kinds of equipment for different occasions, and I want to see all of that pre-battle preparation work out.

All in all, so far, despite quite a few bugs, I'm really happy with NWN2. Is there room for improvement? Lots. But it's still fun. I can't wait to finish the story and see just how open-ended it really is.

No rating yet until I get to try out some more stuff.

Okay first off, Abby, my beloved sister, is in Hong Kong now on a business trip. Because of that, we ended up buying a bunch of stuff for the PC, including a webcam and a mic. And I also bought for myself a PS2-style gamepad. I'm pretty happy about all these little upgrades to my PC. :D I was thinking of buying a new keyboard to make the whole thing look cool, but I couldn't find a good keyboard that wasn't expensive. At least, I didn't look too hard, cuz I might find something I really like and find out it's really expensive or something. o_o

So anyway, because of the new gamepad, I've been looking around for games that I already have that can use it. Currently it's just Madden NFL '08, which plays awesomely better with a gamepad (heck even my punting/kicking is lots more accurate), and Dynasty Warriors 4.

In other news, I also finally started playing Neverwinter Nights 2. It's a pretty cool game. I'm enjoying it a lot, but it's hard to get the hang of it because I'm too used to MMORPGs. For example, I'm not used to reading it like a MUD/oldschool tabletop RPG, where you're talking about die rolls instead of percentages, and waiting for your turn to happen instead of just attacking whenever you can.

Anyway I'm thinking of getting a flight sim or something to make use of the gamepad's sticks. I feel like some of its features are wasted on fighting games and Madden. I bet even a driving game would benefit from the subtleness of the control sticks.