awesome wonderful

Started playing Persona 4 yesterday. Great fun. Well-written dialogue which is quite serious when it needs to be, and quite funny when it doesn’t; found myself bursting into laughter quite a bit, especially at the few bits of absurd humor in it, although the un-bear-able puns are a little much. Kudos to the original writers, and the translators/editors too. The voice acting is a bit on the lackluster side, though the lack of subtitles will probably make playing an undub pointless.

How enjoyable the game would be came as a complete surprise to me, since I absolutely hated Persona 3/FES. The story, scenario, characters and dialogue I found much to be much more interesting and much improved over p3. The story which is a basic supernatural murder mystery is actually intriguing and compelling, with “solving the mystery” as an actual game-driver, rather then whatever non-memorable crap it was in p3. The dialogue-pathing and subquests are mostly the same as in p3, so expect to need a FAQ (or the excellent doublejump guide) if you want to get 100%.

Oh, and the combat system has been revamped so that you can take direct control of the other characters in combat now, which makes combat much more tolerable now, too. Haven’t really played enough to say whether or not the actual gameplay has improved much, but, if the first couple bosses are any indication, the game will probably not disappoint me.

Saw this web game on Go Cross Campus over at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

It seems like one of those online turn-based risk-style strategy games (warfish, anyone?), except that it’s massively-multiplayer and it’s for charity (well, at least, the linked game is). The site calls itself a “team-based social game”, and there are a couple different games ongoing, but it seems that new game creation is limited to schools or other organizations, so there’s not much to do on the site unless you want to join a random game or the linked game. Turns in the game last for 24 hours, so you can pretty much log in whenever to take your turn, although it looks like there are also ‘lightning’ games on the site with 3 minute turns as well.

Anyway, the charity that wins gets 50¢ for each player on the winning team, so hurry up and join!
(Although, the prominently featured bottle of Diet Pills on the in-game map is kinda disturbing. Doesn’t anyone think of the anorexics out there?)

I know the guy who wrote this game, so I’m gonna plug it. :D

Eversion is this random little platformer made by Zaratustra (who has a bunch of other indie games to his name already) made for TIGSource’s Commonplace Book Competition. The concept behind Eversion is that to get past certain obstacles you have to press the ‘everse’ button at certain spots in the game causing the entire game to change with everything getting progressively darker, initially starting from a happy cheerful platformer to ending up eventually at oh-god-why-is-everything-trying-to-kill-me. The entire game transforms as you go, with enemies (and the scenery!) getting replaced with more dangerous versions, entire levels taking on gloomier feels, including the nice touch of the cheerful music from world 1 (gleefully ripped from Cocoron) just turning downright grim as you go through the game.

The first couple levels mostly ease you into the various ways the game expects you to solve puzzles and navigate obstacles with the eversion mechanic, with the game getting harder as it goes on (along with a near-pixel-perfect jump in world 4 that people have complained about). The last couple levels are great platforming action though and going through the game again to collect all the gems for the real ending (which is great, btw) gives it an extra bit of replayability.

The TIGForums post for the game is here, if you want to leave feedback for Zara.

(click on the excerpt above or the link – http://www.xkcd.com/513/ – for the full comic)
I thought the comic was particular poignant. Saw it intially via this neogaf thread, and the various posters over there had mixed opinions on the strip and on xkcd in general. I myself have this thing with xkcd, where I don’t read it on a daily basis or even have it bookmarked, but, I see the comic linked often enough (slashdot, dailywtf, etc.) that I somehow manage to catch it regularly. But, this strip, I probably couldn’t gone without seeing. Some of the comments make me think that I’m probably doin’ things all wrong myself too. *laugh* :(

Saw Fat Cat (flash game) over on MetaFilter (also, a writeup on jayisgames, which I haven’t read yet.).

It’s actually quite fun. Enthralling even. You play this Owl, who’s apparently been tasked to protect a Cat of questionable stature. Hold down the mouse button to shoot enemies down, while the difficulty comes in using Owl to rescue Cat from harm’s way (literally, dragging Cat out of the way or walking right into bullets to stop them, while Owl is impervious to damage, and Cat can only take three hits). Scrambling to feed Cat to power up Cat’s ‘burp’ attack is required to get through certain parts (or, just use it take out swarms of enemies at once! - Although, sometimes trying to get it to trigger in the heat of battle is kinda hard).

The interesting part is that most of the levels are broken down into individual segments which serve mostly as puzzles. Most of the puzzles are the twitchy-action kind, but, they are certainly puzzling/interesting enough to make the game worth playing. Some stages will take multiple tries, as the puzzles will need to be solved by trial-and-error occasionally. There are also epic boss fights that are strangely reminiscent of japanese bullet-hell shooters (Touhou, anyone?), where Cat invariably dies almost immediately, until at least you figure out where to stash him while Owl takes down the boss.

Anyway, it’s a good way to waste an afternoon (or a night, if you can’t go to sleep for some bizarre reason, and I can’t think of anything better to do right now anyway). (Lemme go hold down that mouse button some more – *pew*pew*pew* – Oh, the music and the sound effects are great too, especially, when Cat gets hit, and you hear that meow!-i-got-hit-meow! :)

Does anyone read this blog? Well, google analytics doesn’t seem to think so, I think it’s probably safe to start using this site as a public outlet for some random stuff I wanted to stick on the Internet, off in a corner somewhere.

Just some quick housekeeping, just to get some stuff out of the way first:

Who thunk up the stupid name for the domain/blog/whatever anyway?

This comment here on MetaFilter is the origin of the name. Awesomebizarrewonderful was too long, but awesome wonderful sounded just about right. Might still be a little long, but, hey, who cares. Nowadays, it’s all about memorable names, not short names. Right? One can dream at least. :( Although, if rock paper shotgun can get away with a 16-letter-name, I can probably get away with “awesome wonderful”, I’d bet. (Is “awesome wonderful” even memorable? I don’t know. *shrug* Sounds purtty at least.)

But, why?

Randomly found this deal for unlimited disk/unlimited bandwidth on dreamhost, and I jumped on it. I figured out I wanted that domain name a couple days earlier, and figured, hey, why not. Sure dreamhost has some maybe-not-so-minor problems, but, I have this tendency to impulse-buy stuff, y’know. Well, paid a year in advance, so it’s too late to back out now. Can always walk away or move on later, if needed, though, I guess. 

And once I had hosting, it seemed like just a matter of getting some content on there. And, being as incredibly lazy as I am, I went one of the prebuilt packages on dreamhost. It was either WordPress or Joomla, and well, you can probably guess which I went with. And once I had a blog, I started sticking random crap on it. (Most of which got deleted for this restart. Trust me, it wasn’t very interesting stuff to begin with. Lame childish crap for the most part. Good riddance!)

But, that doesn’t actually answer the question “why did you start a blog?”..

God if I know. With a crappy name like “awesome wonderful”, I can’t really do a video game blog (which is really the only thing I have any real exposure to or knowledge of), so I’m kinda limited in terms of options. Anyway, I had this blog on Vox, where I was posting my deepest innermost secrets (and nobody was reading that either! but, mostly because all of the interesting posts were set to private), so I figured I might stick them on an actual real blog (and get some ad revenue out of it! ha ha .. who am I kidding. *sob*).

So, what now?

I post about random stuff, some of it being personal, some of it being awesome, some of it being wonderful, but most of it just random awful crap. Probably just random stuff I find on MetaFilter or various game blogs/forums or design blogs/forums. But really, listen, I don’t care if you read this blog or not. Shoo. Go away. Except you; you know who you are. (And, if you‘re reading this blog, let me know so I can start purging the embarrassing stuff.)

Anyway, hopefully whoever is reading this will find something interesting in the random the stuff I stick on here. Maybe, maybe not.
The blog goes on.