Cidera shut down the satellite news feed yesterday. The announcement included this haiku:

Softly like a Leaf
The Autumn of Cidera
Dishes fall silent

Curse that Albert!

Thus far, my Infection experience had been quite smooth. The handful of times when poor Kite & BlackRose fell in combat, it was always due to an obvious, stupid mistake (the Health Drinks are so nice to have around, I tell ya). Then it changed…

Once you’ve completed three games of tag, you may think that you’ve got .Hack//Infection in the bag. Don’t be mislead. If the fourth game of tag is representative of the difficulty of the rest of this game, I’m not sure I’ll be capable of beating it.

.Hack//Infection has been going nicely for me now, and I am pleased to say that after a weekend of play it holds up nicely.

Transitions between dungeons, fields, towns, the message boards, and email make for a nice staggered pace for gameplay.

Combats have been sufficiently unpredictable to maintain an air of controlled panic. When approaching a magic portal, you don’t know if you’ll be facing four mimics, a pair of hobgobs and a swordsmanoid, or what. This prompts rapid, reactive decisionmaking, which I’ve always found enjoyable for video games in general.

If there’s anything that I have a serious problem with it is the lack of custom keyword combinations that aren’t plot-related in the message boards. You can be assured that (with the exception of Goblin Tag, which hasn’t connected to the overarching plot in a way I can recognize) any premade keyword combo will have a plot element to it. After eight hours of play (not counting time spent after saving, then dying) I’ve come to rely on being able to exhaust my list of premade keywords, then return to my mail and the message board to get a new crop that pushes the story along.

Just one or two red herrings amongst them, resulting in no discernable plot point, would serve to increase the illusion of a non-linear plotline. Of course, an interesting, truely non-linear plotline is somewhat of a Holy Grail amongst game makers, so I shouldn’t hold my hopes out too far.

On a side note, the option to have the original Japanese voice actors instead of the English version is very handy for atmosphere reasons. I always play RPGs with the subtitles on (so I can turn the volume off if need be), and having English subtitles for English dialogue has always seemed… odd to me. Thanks for the choice, Bandai.

Overall Grade so far:

A

I have yet to watch .Hack//Liminality Ep1, as my viewing of .Hack//Sign is not yet complete. My Hong Kong translation of Sign is quite poor (they call Tsukasa “Zea” and Subaru “Une” and Ginkan “Enhan” for reasons passing human understanding, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). At least they were able to get the names “BT,” “Mimiru,” and “Bear” correct. A review of .Hack//Sign should be upcoming.

Ok, cats & kittens, the comment entry popups take advantage of the styleswitcher cookies now. I have no good reason for why it took so long, other than the paucity of comments that this site generates. There is about a 1:3 ratio of comments to posts on this site, so I doubt this has been noticed by more than a small handful of folks.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

A coworker of mine has finally put the wheels in motion for his Mac Help Desk website. It’s looking really swizzy on my Netscape 7, but has a little bit of fine tuning for WinIE6 and WinOpera7. I’ll be sure to pester him about that tonight, though.