Sunday, August 19, 2012
dis blug is nut ded

Though posts are about as common as me finishing art LOLOLOLOLOL

xxxHolic, read it a year or two ago, here's the piece I made for it. Finally finished. 


what up
Monday, May 02, 2011
Soooooo
Does anyone else other than me think it's a bit strange that Osama Bin Laden's body was dumped in the ocean? Not trying to be a bearer of bad news or anything, it all just seems rather secretive. When most renowned terrorists or enemy leaders were killed in the past pictures were taken and shown to the public, Hitler, Saddam, you name it, but there's nothing about Osama, just his listed death and a brief description of what happened during his final moments. Let's be honest here, there's a big election coming up and Obama's time in office has been... less than efficient, he hasn't done much at all. This kind of event is perfect as a solidification for him staying in office and will boast a huge gain in support for his second running, I like the guy and think he's tried to do as much as he plausibly can for this country, but most of his long term plans have been laid off or denied outright. This will certainly be convenient for him.

If that's not really the case, then good job I say. It may be one man but it's liable to create a ripple effect from the core to the farthest outreaches of terrorist branches, sometimes killing one man will save thousands. It's a brutal reality and you may look for another way but in this specific situation there was no alternative, while there may be a counterattack directed at us in retaliation we've made our message clear to them, and unfortunately for them the majority of the world is satisfied with justice being done and stands by our side against them.

Aside from all of that, many people from the Islamic faith are suggesting that the burial was unjust, and was not in line with the rules and practices of Islamic tradition. I have one thing to say to you all: eat a dick please. Do you think the thousands of people he had a hand in murdering were given a proper and traditional American burial? Yeah, I thought so. Religion honestly shouldn't even play a part here, when it comes down to it, the man was a murderer and was universally viewed as an epitome of evil. Before we die and transcend to whatever paradise or heaven we believe we're going to, we live here on Earth as humans. Our actions here dictate where we go when we die and if we will find peace, and on Earth, Osama was someone that did many wrongs that were unforgivable and in turn spread hatred and anger towards his people, in which most of them in no way contributed to his wrongdoings and ended up suffering anyways. He didn't give a shit about anyone but himself, he even used his own men as a shield to try and survive, I bet all of them were Islams too. So please eat a dick for telling us we didn't give him a proper burial and we must apologize for doing so, he'd kill you himself if he needed to do it in order to survive, and he wouldn't flinch for a second doing it. Think about that before you judge us, try judging the person responsible for causing these transgressions in the first place.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Guiseeeeeeeee
The blog is in desperate need of post ideas, we need to play some Steam and chillax, Jon needs a better dentistry school to accept him, Troy has a girlfriend and wants a job that doesn't suck. Give me ideas!
Thursday, January 27, 2011
stream
oh yeah, I have a stream now for RPGs.


I stream rarely; if I ever do, it's like on the weekend or weekday evenings from 8-10ish pm. Come join me.

Troy, this blog needs more activity.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Happy Birthday Troy!
zum Gebürtstag viel Glück!

Anyways, Troy is now an old man! Give it up for the geezer.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Random Story
So, I was watching my favorite stream on JTV by Michael_1985. He's this German guy who plays a lot of platforming/action games that tend to be pretty hard and screams lots of funny things when he dies. Not really raging but silly things - it's fun.

He was playing Metroid: Other M and while I had no real interest in the game, it did renew my desire to play Ninja Gaiden Black. After all, Team Ninja developed both games. So, I spent two or so hours redownloading it because I purchased it from XBL before and deleted it to free up space but kept my saves.

Lo and behold, I discover the save files become "damaged" if you put the HDD onto another Xbox machine. Apparently, it ties save files to the physical address of the Xbox and mine was sent in from RROD. Pretty much meant I lost all my progress... and I had completed Mission Mode and was on my Master Ninja playthrough (I think?).

Raging, I went to Amazon to get NG Sigma for the PS3 and ended up also getting Little Big Planet, Killzone 2, and Resident Evil (GC Remake). All for like $70. FOUR "like-new" used games for $70. Good stuff. It was all very compulsive and spontaneous but I think I'll have fun with each. Except Killzone 2. That was probably a mistake but I'll play it and have fun for a short time.

Oh well


weird
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
ROFL
Today was probably the most retarded day I've ever had in a long time, firstly I hardly got any sleep and my cat ended up puking on my blanket (FUN), so I had to throw it in the wash while being half awake from 4 hours of sleep.

Secondly today is maintenance day so I end up deciding to read Fairy Tail until WoW servers come up and I can do my weekly/daily quests. Fairy Tail is a lot like One Piece in the respect that it's nonstop action with little or no breaks between arcs, reading manga like this in bulk ALWAYS gives me a giant headache.

After finishing up to chapter 150 or so, it's finally 11 P.M and I can get on WoW only to find that the weekly is Marrowgar and I really don't want to do ICC nor raid anymore in WotLK, so I feel like I wasted a huge chunk of my day waiting on nothing, later on the dryer my blanket is in starts growling like a starving lion in the Sahara and I have to turn it off, STUPID!

Then lastly I get into a big fight with a friend of mine trying to tell me what I should do about a certain situation that they have no hold on, let's just say there was a lot of judgmental things said about how I act mixed in with plenty of obscenities from their side. Me being someone that avoids arguments just decided to actually fight back for once so I just ended up correcting what was being said to me in a bold... non-sugarcoated way.

So yeah I'm still pissed off about all of that, I really wish people didn't act like know-it-alls and make baseless assumptions about things they don't know of. For the first time ever I got called a weirdo too, and not in a nice 'you're weird and different from most people and you like/read anime and manga' way, screaming and yelling about something you only know what I've told the person about(thus being vague summaries, and far from the whole story)... hmm, that in itself is weird so I guess I'm not the only one here.

What about you guys?
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Panda's FFXII Review
Why am I doing this? I played FFXII like a year ago and am now playing through XIII. I guess I just thought of this one night when trying to fall asleep and wanted to jot down my notes somewhere. Hey yo! There's a blog here that needs more posts! Okay!

Final Fantasy XII was first introduced to me in various magazine previews, and I didn't really care for how the new battle system sounded. I unofficially tried it the first time when a demo came with a game my friend bought and again was not wow'd. For a good while, it was going to be the first FF game that I would completely pass up as I had very little interest in it. Thanks to some motivation from Evan and other sources, I decided to try it out.

The Good
Here are the top 3 things I like about FFXII

3) (Specific) Characters
I'm talking about Balthier and Fran primarily. Balthier just being stylish and Fran being cool but getting the shaft in character development were the only real pieces of the main party I liked. But there were others that I really enjoyed. Cid as a villain was pretty interesting. Various support characters like Vossler and Reddas were awesome. Gabranth was a pretty neat dude, uhh Larsa? was okay too. If I could swap my party for some of these characters, the game woulda been much cooler. Switch out wanna-be air pirate Vaan for real-pirate Reddas, Basch for Gabranth (duh), Penelo for Vossler (no connection), and maybe keep Ashe because she has actual hold in the story. Except swap out her model for that chick who is a part of Reddas's little crew thing. Make her look more like a slut lolz.

2) The World
FFXII takes place in the colorful world of Ivalice which is also fleshed out in the FF Tactics games. This is one of the reason I decided to make this list. I just randomly realized that the locales you visit throughout the game are pretty diverse and interesting. A lot of areas have a veil of mystery and the overall setting is just really awesome to me. There are fairly constrained areas with narrow, twisting turning pathways along with wide open areas full of exploration. There are a few really lame dungeons (*cough* end game, Pharos, Giruvegan) but the rest of the world really shines. It is this and Good Thing 1 that make me consider replaying the game (almost).

1) The Sidequests
Hunts! Espers! Awwwwww good stuff. Granted, some of the sidequests are really boring and dumb (fishing not being fun in a game? cmon). But the feeling of hunting down a mark and defeating it while your characters are massively underpowered is a fantastic feeling. Many require some specific strategies inorder to fell and others have special triggers to even get them to spawn. Maybe because I used a guide but it felt like the hunts weren't much of a chore and more of an extra fun task. Some specific hunts (Gilgamesh) were some of the coolest fights in any FF game. Esper fights were also pretty grand. Most of the Espers have cool designs in appearance and battle. Whether its protecting yourself from a multitude of status ailments or making your levels a specific number to resist overpowered spells, the Esper fights had something neat to bring to the field. Throw in non-mark rare spawns and optional equipment and the (side)quest becomes a done deal. These enjoyment I got from these sidequests harks back to the sides from FFVIII and helped distract me from the main game.


The Bad
That's the good; here's the not-so-good, bad, and flat out shitty.

3) The Battle System
At times, the battle system was really enjoyable for me. I think it was in the first few hours when I didn't have a bunch of gambit slots to make things auto and micro'd more. I could have continued to play like this but it would become more of a chore and a bigger handicap later on. Thus, I embraced the gambit system and the rest of the game became fairly auto-pilot. Yeah.... not that fun. The summoning system was also poorly executed and I only ever summoned the Ifrit-equivalent-dude that one time to unlock a big gate or whatever. Such a poor performance because the summons all seemed kinda neat but there was really no incentive to use them. Maybe I'll explore them a bit more next time. Quickenings/Limits were kinda cool and I definitely exploited them and save states to maximize my damage on hunts I really wasn't supposed to be fighting.
Another iffy point for me in the battle/overall system was the necessity to have characters do everything. I really like to have characters allocated to specific roles ala FFIX but that just doesn't work well for most of XII. Characters need heals, nonsensical weapon/armor proficiencies, and whatnot to get by. This brings me to the grid levelup system which was pretty damn free. At least in FFX and XIII there is incentive/restrictions in place to motivate you to stay with the specific roles for a good portion of the game. In XII, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of diversity. You can choose to make classes but it's too easy not to. Anyways, that's my gripe with it. Like I said, the system worked at times so this point is more of a neutral to neutral-bad aspect of the game, at least for me.

2) Sound
Okay I understand: There was SOO much audio, that they had to compress it all and the voice quality turned out really, really bad. I get it. Doesn't change the fact that they still did it, and it's still bad. I mean, whenever someone talks, it sounds like they are muffled, or there's a lot of background noise. The voice-acting is pretty good; it's just the quality is so bad that I don't want to listen. Also, the other FF's are known, at least to me, for having really memorable tracks and music. I don't remember anything from FFXII in terms of soundtracks. Either that means I have terribad memory, or nothing was that memorable anyway. This doesn't really have to do with the sound, but since this is the first time they used voices and pronounced some things, a lot of the names sound really dumb with how they pronounce them (huge emphasis on HA in Bahamut).

1) Cast and Plot
We have a tie for number 1! Besides the good characters, the rest of the cast was ughhhhhh.... I'm talking about you Vaan and Penelo. What kind of shit is Vaan for a main character? He has 0 relevance in the plot, is a dumb kid trying to be cool, and dresses like a douche. I mean Tidus was pushing it too, but Vaan's outfit goes over the edge for me. People argue that he has takes part in the plot, because his act of infiltrating the castle to pilfer stuff brought Balthier and Ashe to meet and thus catalyzes the rest of the plot. Uhhh yeah that's true but that doesn't make him anymore of a plot device - not an integral element of the plot. There's a huge difference. Even though he makes the effort in some scenes (and fails imo), I can easily say that Vaan is the weakest protagonist I have ever seen. His friend Penelo has even less reason to be there. She literally does NOTHING. Yeah, great Penelo. Go die. She's what? The commoner who brings in different perspective into the story. Not really, what does she ever say that's useful? Maybe I'm just blind but I consider her pretty goddamn useless.
Ashe and Basch are okay at times but still lean towards the negative for me. Ashe acts like a bitch and times - and not just the stuckup, naive princess bitch, like a real bitchy bitch who's out to get it for the rest. I dunno. Basch starts out strong but loses interest reaaaaal fast. And for me, his outfit just doesn't work; it doesn't seem to fit him but whatever. Eventually, he just seems to become a stone giant following the party. And we're not talking stone giant Shale in DA:O.

Then there's the plot. I remember very little of it - it just didn't seem coherent and interesting enough for me to grab my attention and feel like I had an actual stake in the story. I don't recall many specifics and that's a pretty big point for me. To me, story is a huge element for me in RPGs. Playing the entire game and not really caring about the plot is a huge detriment. I think it really failed for me when I was playing through on auto and randomly realized that I was watching a cutscene where Ashe is speaking with spirits/gods/aliens in some conversation. At that point, I was just like: wtf? The ending was also pretty weak in my opinion but lots of games have really poor endings, so it's not a huge deal. Not everything can end like FFIX : (

Anyways, that's my rant. Overall, FFXII is a bad game that I love to hate on but REALLY had a lot of fun with it. The bad ruins the game for me but I'd still play it for the good things. As it stands right now, FFXIII is a much much better game, but I've had more fun with XII. In the end, to me, XII ranks along/slightly below IV in my FF preferences which I know Evan would kill me for.
Friday, August 06, 2010
Frustrations
Man, why must the game I enjoy the most right now also be the game that frustrates the hell out of me?!?! I'm talkin' about that SSF4 yo.

Playing online is the easiest (though worst) way to play with others. But I always seem to do super shitty and lose to people I shouldn't. Granted, I still lose to people obviously better than me, and that doesn't bother me. It's when I lose to stupid ass scrubs that spam unsafe crap that's made magically safe by the wonders of XBL lag. Yet, it's my gosh darn fault that I can't adapt to these players and play really safe. Good lord.

My game relies too much on flow. I play Cammy and rush people down. That's not to say I don't know how to play defensively, but I have a really hard time forcing myself off an opponent if I'm feeling it - which is a good way to eat a fat shoryuken to the face.

I wish I was good v__v
Monday, July 19, 2010
Yayayayay
Today is a very good day as it is the 21st birthday of our resident panda also known as Jonathan Yih-san. Be sure to wrap any gift you send to him in bamboo and please, disregard the signs saying not to feed the panda, he is very hungry and would be obliged to eat anything you give him.

Happy birthday Jon!