Burrowowl

Continuing on with the DotHack series, I’ve gone along a little ways, spent some quality time with a system administrator, and acquired the email addresses of two additional Blademasters, another Wavemaster, a new Long Arm, and yet another Twin Blade. For the uninitiated, this is how you gain additional party members: NPCs (other players in The World) give you their email addresses so you can contact them in-game and enlist their aid.

As reported elsewhere, the game mechanics have hardly changed at all from .Hack//Infection, but the plotline really is starting to come into its own. The ability of the Project Dothack folks to dole out information at such a conservative pace serves not to alienate the player, but to intrigue instead. Having watched .Hack//Sign, two episodes of .Hack//Liminality, and an episode of the silly superdeformed Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on.

You may want to chalk that up to stupidity or thick-headedness on my part (I must admit I zoned out occassionally on Sign), though. With about 40 hours logged on this game (total, with Mutation unfinished) I unreservedly recommend purchasing this game.

After many hours mindlessly downloading from some promising Bit Torrents over the past week or so, I finally had a chance to sit down an watch a couple. My findings:

Scrapped Princess

Scrapped Princess, as translated by the fine folks at AnimeJunkies is one of the best new anime I’ve seen in quite a while. Brought to us by the same people who made Cowboy Bebop, this show demonstates what a made-for-television animated story can do. It has a dabbling of D&D genre cliches. There are dramatic (and well-excuted) fight scenes with swords, sorcery, and the occasional giant monster. There is a hint of romance. There is a healthy dose of comedy, which instead of overriding the story actually seems to help “ground” the protagonists in their comraderie.

The story follows three characters (each of whom is multidimensional without falling into the “woe is I” angst-trap) as they alternately flee and fight the oppressive forces around them. They are faced with a prophecy which fortells that Pacifica, a naive and goodhearted 15-year-old, will destroy the world. Her adoptive brother and sister protect and guide her on a journey to who-knows-what. As the story oscillates from the tragic to the absurd and back again, they face commoners, soldiers, and priests, almost all of whom simply want to do the right thing and save the world from its fated doom at Pacifica’s hands. Scrapped Princess is exceptionally well-crafted, never lingering upon a mood or specific plot mechanism long enough to become tiresome or heavy-handed. The voice acting suits the characters well (I am not fluent in Japanese, so take that as you will). The animation is outstanding for a television series, which makes me wonder if it was exceptionally well-funded, completely done before they aired the first episode, or if something is horribly wrong with the rest of the television animation industry.

Thus far, only 13 episodes have been released, 12 of which have already made it to the fansub-consuming public in English. So far, it is leaning towards “classic” status for me. Let’s see how far they go, shall we?

Narue no Sekai

Narue no Sekai has proven to be a cute, if not-terribly remarkable romantic comedy. If features a lovable loser and a cute alien high school girl. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I went through a handful of episodes and skipped over to some other titles. Not bad, but I don’t think I’ll be buying the DVD.

Divergence Eve

Divergence Eve was something I spotted in a recent issue of Newtype, and it looked like a somewhat-promising sci-fi epic. Alas, it’s heavy on the melodrama, melodramatically heavy on the CG spaceships and space opera catchphrases, and morbidly overdone on the boobage. It displays an Amazing Nurse Nanako aptitude for placing gigantic hooters on any female in the story that’s over 12 years old, which would be over 3/4 of the cast. I’ve only seen the first episode, so it may yet improve. The closing credits (a somewhat masturbatory “dress up the female lead” sequence that clashed in mood horribly with the melodrama) were the high point of episode one. In light of what preceded it, the credits were hilarious.

Sure, it is default behavior from Movable Type, but in my twittering and tweaking of templates and default behaviors in this lovely editor, I had turned the sucker off at some point. But those days are now gone. I present to you my RSS 0.91 and 1.0 feeds: index.xml and index.rdf respectively.

This should help people who are simultaneously interested in reading this site, but unwilling to come back here every couple of days to see if there’s anything new, only to be disappointed when I’ve been lazy. With tools such as Firebird RSS Reader Panel you can now be really freaking lazy and still keep on top of everything.

Now if only Privateer Press were to roll one like WoTC did for Dungeons & Dragons…

I finally bit the bullet and purchased the second installment in the .Hack videogame series. The fine folks at Project .Hack quite promptly dump you back into the mix, sending Kite and Blackrose back to investigate the aftermath of Infection’s climax. This time the System Administrators start taking a visible interest in the disturbing recent events, and Kite is put in the rather unfortunate position of being some hacker’s pawn and the sysadmins’ lapdog at the same time.

I’ve only been able to sit down for part of an evening with this game, but as all the game review sites have already said before, there aren’t any dramatic changes in the graphics or interface. For the sake of continuity, this is a good thing. Game reviewers sometimes miss out on big-picture issues such as those that cropped up when the Star Wars franchise of movies switched over from miniature modelling to CG: they don’t look like they all belong in the same series.

Previous games have handled the technological upgrades in their sequels by dramatically shifting the timeline, totally disregarding the previous game, and/or waiting years between releases. All told, I’m happy with the new release simply for expanding my opportunities to carry on my email conversations with BlackRose, Mistral, Piro, and the rest of the gang, even though I haven’t met any new party members. Importing your old save file is a big plus, as I worked hard to get that desktop image and mailspool, darnit!

This time around I hope to actually get myself to use the Data Drain (and its new variant) ability enough to actually see my infection reading increase (I used it quite sparingly in Infection).

Somehow I have yet to tire of the crusade for the widespread adoption of web standards, no matter how many times I see folks rant on and on (and on and on and on) about it. I fear that this may also be the case with Information Architecture literature, such as that found at boxesandarrows.com, but this is a newer topic of study for me (older in some ways, as arranging data is something we do from birth).

File under “reasonably good propaganda piece on standards:”

Zeldman plugging his book on Meet the Makers