Picked up BlazBlue for cheap at my local MicroCenter store.  I had been interested in this game since it came out since it’s a spiritual successor to the Guilty Gear games that I loved.  I was hesitant to pay $60 for a fighting game though, since I don’t typically get as much mileage out of it that I do RPGs and even action games.  Seeing it drop to $25, though, gave me enough incentive to pick it up.

My initial impressions are that it’s somewhat of a weaker game than GG.  There are fewer characters, which I understood, but the move-list for each character has been reduced to only 3 moves in some cases, plus their overlimit/drive/burst attack, which depends on the ‘HEAT’ bar that gets filled up as you fight.  I was initially sort of disappointed by that, but, the more I thought about it, I tend to only use 3 moves from a character’s repertoire in a fighting game and ignore the rest.  So, maybe instead of it being a loss, it could be considered optimized to my play style, which is good.

The game also has an involved storyline, conducted in ‘Melty Blood’ style of screens of text mixed with voiced dialog between characters, and it’s totally incomprehensible.  This is a Guilty Gear tradition, though, so I’m not too surprised by that.  Art design is good and controls are decent, so neither of those detracts.

Ultimately, I just wasn’t wowed by this game the way I was about Guilty Gear XX, way back in 2003.  Maybe that will change when I put more time into it and start to piece together the story into something only half makes-no-sense as opposed to completely outside the realm of logic.

I’m positively slammed at work these days and it doesn’t look good that things are going to clear up enough in the near future for me to dedicate my whole lunch hour to writing a review.  Meanwhile things have gotten very slow around here over the past few weeks.

To remedy this, I’m going to try and cut a happy medium and force myself to write smaller posts that can be done in a few minutes, just some brief thoughts on things, so that at least I can keep up the stream of content I started in November.

Thus, I’ve made a new category called ‘Quick Blogs’ that will handle this for me.  Expect things larger than a Tweet or Facebook post, but smaller than the typical size of my diatribes.

Lets see how this works out.

I started playing Valkaryia Chronicles for the PS3 last week and since then I’ve only managed to get short bursts of about an hour or two in each night. Still, it’s been interesting and now that I’ve been introduced to all of the principal cast (including, finally, the villains) I have enough information to give my early opinions on this game.

First off, this game is from 2008.  I mentioned wanting to play this game way back when I did my Best of 2008 post and I really haven’t had the opportunity until now.  It wasn’t a runaway success here in the US, but it turned out enough interest that there is a sequel out in Japan now.  A sequel in a totally different genre, but, whatever.  Good IP, I guess is what they concluded. Continue reading »

Try not to pay too close attention to the way the website looks right now. I’m doing that annual thing where I update the design the website and given I have a tragically few number of people who actually read this site, I figured I’d just toss a few designs out and see how they look for a few days then change them if they end up being a pain.

The ultimate goal here is to keep Suffusion as the root theme, but to add as much customization as possible without breaking the theme (such that future updates can be installed without causing problems).   Suffusion is a very mutable theme framework so I think I can work within this pretty well, but we’ll see what happens.

I do think we need a REAL logo for Rogue-Penguin though.  Something made with vectors and something with a simple color scheme.  I’m not sure what this should really look like though.  Should I continue with the simple “RP” lettering as the logo with maybe some shapes behind it, or perhaps take a hand again at making a Penguin-looking icon.  Even then, if I make the icon, should the title be part of it or not?

If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

The current ‘theme’ is just a pair of simple graphics I made in an hour the other night.  The big blurry background is a photo I took in Sint Marteen with a blur applied, the logo at top is some cursive font that I’ve applied some glow effects to.  The background doesn’t repeat well right now because of how briefly I worked on it, hopefully I’ll be able to fix that tonight.  Alternatively, I’m thinking of getting rid of the background altogether and just keeping the glowly leters as a transparent PNG.

The new DC Animated film came out this week and once again it dips into the Justice League pool, although the only real similarities between this film and ‘New Frontier’ is that they are both good films, almost everything else is different.

Crisis on Two Earths is an original story that was written back during the Justice League TV series intended as a movie to bridge the first two seasons (titled ‘Justice League’) with the final three seasons (called ‘Justice League Unlimited’).  Those of you who watched the series know that in that gap the JL’s watchtower was rebuilt, and the membership in the LJ expanded from seven heroes to something like 50.  This movie, while not officially part of the old DC Animated Universe canon, keeps those links and hints it was originally meant to establish. Continue reading »

I actually got out to see a movie in theatres last weekend.  This has been something of an event for me since my son was born.  I don’t often get the chance to see films as the first come out both because of time constraints (my wife and I would have to find a sitter or go one at a time) and because of money (good GOD, how expensive is cinema today?  I paid $11 a ticket!).  But we were all visiting the extended family in Jersey and my parents offered to take care of my son while we went to see a movie with my sister, so, thus, I actually have an opinion on a movie in theatres now!

I wish my opinion was better, given all that. Continue reading »

I haven’t had much to post about here in a while, mostly because there hasn’t been much going on.  I’ve been making slow but steady progress on Mass Effect 2 every night, which takes up all the free time I have between work and tending to my son.

But I figure as long as that’s what I’m doing, I might as well talk a bit about the game and what I think.

Right now I’m a good way through the game, probably nearing the last pair of missions (ME1 also had a final ‘pair’ of missions that were intended to be played back-to-back, so I’m just assuming this game does the same).  I expect there are story twists to occur, but as far as how the bulk of the game itself is played I think I have a good handle on that.

When I approach a video game, I have two criteria that I look for that are somewhat generally defined:

• Are the questions raised by the game’s story interesting enough to encourage me to find out more?
• Is the gameplay non-obtrusive enough that I can feel mildly challenged but not end up ’stuck’ at a part that requires more effort than I expected (planning/leveling/raw skill)?

For Mass Effect 2, I feel like these two criteria are fully met. Continue reading »

I streamed this off Netflix onto my 360 and, well, it’s a good thing I did, because I probably would have felt a little upset that I couldn’t instantly trade it in for something else.

Lets back up a bit.

Charlie Kaufman gets a lot of press for making off-beat films.  He first came to the fore with ‘Being John Malkovich’ in 1999, and then followed it with ‘Adaptation’ in 2002, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ in 2004, and finally ‘Synecdoche, New York’ in 2008.  All of these films feature some pretty big name actors and all of the films are complimented for their intellectual quality.

Also, all of these films are weird.  Very weird.  Being John Malkovich is easily the most well known and most people can tell you it involves finding a small door, in a half-height office, that when entered allows someone to watch John Malkovich’s life through his eyes.  His films all involve strange twists like this.  Adaptation is about a screenwriter’s active imagination and at one point in the film all of the things he hates to see in movies start happening to him.  Spotless Mind involves characters who have had their memories selectively erased.

I don’t know if I really like Kaufman’s writing, in the end.  I like the strange twists, but they are always mired in some of the most depressingly pessimistic characters or situations.  People who, when faced with the fantastic, can only find the most puerile and demeaning ways of taking advantage of them.  I don’t like seeing that in film.  I think real life is so full of people out only for themselves and willing to damn everyone around and even their own descendants just to get a few more bucks or a few seconds more of pleasure.  I don’t want to see real life in movies.  I want to see people rise about human frailty to become something worthy of admiration. Continue reading »

Actually, the Harry Potter movie was called “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” but I was on a roll with colons there and didn’t want to break it.

Erm.

Anyway, much in the vein of the video game reviews I just posted, these are just quick reviews of my recent Netflix watchings. Continue reading »

Not much fanfare to speak of here, just wanted to get my final opinions on a couple of games I had mentioned briefly before and have recently completed.

Assassin’s Creed II

I got into this a little in my Best of 2009 post yesterday but, briefly, this game is a major improvement over the previous edition in the series, despite appearing quite similar.  The story is much more intriguing to me as well.  As much as there was to digest philosophically about Altair’s quest in AC1, ultimately, the lack of an initial connection between targets made the game seem a little disjointed.  Yes, he was picking off Templars during the Crusades, but that is just setting, the characters themselves were not very intriguing.

AC2, in comparison, makes the fight personal. It’s about revenge for Ezio and tradition for his family.  The targets are all connected to the framing of Ezio’s immediate family and slowly the scope of the story grows to bring the Piece of Eden back from the first game to give it a bit of cross-time relevance.  Then the ending…. well, the ending probably wins in the battle of all time story twists and cliffhangers.  M. Night Shyamalan should probably take lessons here.

All in all, very enjoyable, and the missions were very varied, which was much appreciated compared to the same three missions over and over again in AC1.  I can’t wait until AC3 comes out, though we’ll have to put up with this gaiden game coming out later in 2010 that is really just an expansion pack of assassin jobs that Ezio completes but isn’t really arc-relevant.

Bayonetta

Not much changed from my first impression to my last, to tell you the truth.  The story never coherently forms, at least to the point that anyone would ever care.  Bayonetta never becomes more interesting than her character design.  The combat continues to feel smooth and is really, really fun.  This is probably the pinnacle of gameplay design when it comes to these games.  If the next DMC doesn’t take it’s cues from this game I’ll be astonished.

So, fully recommended for a very pretty, very smooth, fighting game.  Completely NOT recommended if you like any sort of story.

…

That’s it right now for completed games.  Mass Effect 2 is currently in the 360 queue and already shaping up to be one of the better games I’ve ever played.