Miscellanous posts, shop talk.
Posts categoriezed as Banter
Gunsmith Cats: The Revised Edition (A One-Sentence Review)
You can see a 17-year-old who looks like a 14-year old masturbate to a picture of a 35-year-old in digitally remastered quality.
One last burst of obvious immaturity
So, I feel like I should apologize a little for how bitchy my last entry came off. Work is a good thing, and I do ultimately like doing freelance things.
That much done: time to get one more lump of saved Transformers ranting off my chest so I can get back to the usual here. I’ve pretty much got all the characters I wanted from the movie line already, which feels good considering the sheer girth of merchandise out there.
The Transformers Wiki article on Scale has been no end of amusement for me, especially in regards to the movie’s alleged attempts at realism not working out with the toy line at all. It’s nitpicky as hell, but it is kind of noticeable when it’s explicitly said that Blackout is the largest (assuming the shape of a transport chopper) and he manages to be one of the shortest in his particular weight class. And Bonecrusher, the dude who hated the spy who shagged me manages to look pretty massive with his huge arms and wide stance, until placed next to… well, anyone.
Bonecrusher wuvs you Thiiiis Much
I ended up siding with the smaller (Voyager-Class) Optimus since he was both more sleek looking, and half the cost of the Leader version. Another plus is that his truck cab features a tiny cowboy-hatted driver (who I hear is made to represent Peter Cullen, his voiceover actor) instead of a jumble of circuitry visible through the front windows. I guess having an upside down armpit cowboy is an acceptable tradeoff for everything else. His weaponry comes in the form of two long rifles instead of one stumpy arm blaster. The most common gripe most seem to have is with the giant backpack he ends up with, but that I really rather like. Heck, he even has (shortened) Mini-Con-compatible pegs on it. I guess the only thing that he loses in my eyes is sheer mass. He kind of loses his semi truck ‘oomph’ when he’s dwarfed by Ratchet. But at least he doesn’t make a bunch of noises every time I try to change him…
Which is kind of tricky, for the record. At least the part where the legs lock back into the truck cab.
STAYYYYY.
Ok! My freelancing and request pipeline is officially full for the while, so if there’s anything anyone was thinking about asking for, give me a week or two to catch up.
Somehow I imagine a significant number of ya’ll probably read that and thought “Comissions? You do those? I’ve been looking to-”
No. Not right now. That’s the point.
Addendum: There’s a freelance price table under ‘Info’ now. I’m not sure how it got there.
Odd, Y’see.
I don’t feel like doing a full-on review, but felt like Etrian Odyssey was worth commenting on at least in brief. In short, the game is something like a rudimentary Dungeons and Dragons campaign. And I mean, rudimentary. It’s like one of those sessions that begins with the Dungeon Master saying, “You’re at the entrance to a dungeon. What do you do you do?”
It’s fun, though, in a strange way. They let you create a party of any combination of classes, and offer four different ‘looks’ for each just in case you do feel like making multiples and still want to tell them apart. From there, you explore a forest-slash-dungeon, doing standard RPG things like fight monsters and gather stuff to sell in town. Which you will do a lot of, as monsters, for ONCE, don’t just happen to be carrying wallets or pouches of gold.
One of the game’s main gimmicks is that you’re required to draw your own maps as you progress, which surprisingly isn’t as annoying as it sounds. The game at least auto maps the spaces you’ve been on, leaving you to draw walls where appropriate. Other things like spots where you can gather wood or boobytraps can also be marked with appropriate icons, though I kind of overused the Monster icon early on before I realized the game even had random encounters. They give you a little radar thing in the corner of the screen, but it’s pretty useless for the most part. It goes from blue to red as you walk along, and I guess you’re supposed to be able to guess where a monster is approaching unseen accordingly, but it basically just means “You have x steps left until the next random encounter” since about 75% of the game is zig zagging corridors with no dodging room. Again, assuming that you CAN avoid battles somehow.
And who can forget the infamous F.O.E.’s? Essentially the game will randomly grab an enemy from way deeper in the dungeon and plop them into an earlier level to challenge you. I lucked out on my first one, personally and got some kind of mutant deer that kept attempting status effects that didn’t take rather than actually attacking until I killed it. They do get worse.
At least the game’s creators are aware of their own niche status, so at least it shows that they tried to make it as good a dungeon crawl as they could. It’s actually pretty forgiving, by say, Rogue or Izuna’s standards in that you just restart from a save point with your gathered map data, and your supplies are given back to you.
Biggest complaint though: the fact that ALL you do is explore the dungeon kind of lends it an MMO feel, especially when gathering hides for a quest or crap like that.