I rarely blog about games here, but sometimes, there some games that just deserve a permanent place here for me.

First, a bit of background info. Bastion is the first indie game production by Supergiant Studios and released for the Xbox and PC. It’s pretty much Diablo-style action RPG game where you control the main character, The Kid, as he finds his world destroyed one day and sets to search for other survivors and find out what really happened.

Bastion’s trademark feature is the dynamic narrative, done by Logan Cunningham (what a manly voice he has!), at first to guide you in to playing the game, but later on as the main vehicle the story is told. Instead of having to go back to town and talk to people in order to know the story, Bastion uses the narration to do it, slowly revealing what has truly transpired in the broken world The Kid wakes up to, leaving you able to concentrate on the action without long stops.

Indeed, thanks to that, Bastion can be finished very fast, but you never get to feel that pace slackening as the story unfolds AS you play, truly and literally, with the only reason to stop at the “town” for resupply, upgrades, new powers and moving on to the next levels. Bastion’s narrative is extremely well done and it almost feels like a proper, professional production done by a big-name publisher. Actually, scratch that. The Supergiant team beats those damned “big-name publishers” any time, considering what passes for story-telling in games these days.

This is further supplemented by the big and immersive world that Bastion is set in. One really can see that the creative team has truly crafted not just a story, but an entire world, complete with its own history, technology, flora and fauna. It’s amazingly impressive, the level of detail Bastion’s world and how you discover it step-by-step as you fight through the broken world it’s set it. It almost makes me feel sad it all went to ruin. The occasional narration that describes the glory of the original world also really makes me want to see it as well. The extremely beautiful art style, bordering on scenery porn, also helps too.

Behind it all though, the beautiful facade you glimpse through the broken world hides a lot of ugliness as well. Bastion slowly but surely shows the ugliness of the world and how nothing is as it seems. In fact, towards the end, you would be harbouring a feeling of pity of how that beautiful world was built upon a foundation of bad decisions and humanity’s evil side. I’ll not elaborate more here, but Bastion is truly a masterpiece of story-telling. Hell, I would’ve paid a proper game’s price for this game just for the experience through it.

Of course, a good story and storyteller does not solely make a gaming masterpiece. Bastion’s gameplay is extremely simple to learn but hard to master. The control scheme is very tight and responsive (the Mouse scheme at least) and veterans of Diablo will feel very at home here. In fact, Bastion plays better than Diablo really. You also get to effortlessly use two weapons, block and evade easily with the game and it never does get repetitive or “clicky”.

Your fighting style is based on your choice of two out of ten weapons, which makes a lot of different combos possible. The ten include an eclectic mix of melee weapons, bows, guns and some rather more.. exotic types too, so mixing and matching the weapons to try them all out will take a lot time. You also get to upgrade them and go though practice areas to master their usage, which makes even more combos possible. That’s not even throwing in the Special Skills in to the mix yet. Definitely very replayable too.

To round it up, Bastion comes with one of the best game soundtracks I’ve had the fortune to experience. Composed by Darren Korb, Almost every area gets a track that fits it very nicely and really draws you in to the game. Not to mention it also comes with vocal songs too. When the first insert song in the game played, I literally slowed down to enjoy it a little.

Okay, I’ve really went quite a bit with this? Suffice to say, Bastion is a great game and worth way more than the USD 15 it costs. In fact, this is probably going to be the game I’ve enjoyed the most this year… and I haven’t even started on Atelier Totori yet :P.

Bastion’s available on the Xbox 360 (bleh) and on the PC via Steam. There’s a demo available on Steam as well for those who want to try it out before they buy it, but trust me, you’re getting more than your money’s worth back.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Earlier this month, I finally splurged and bought myself a PS3. While I mainly wanted it to watch my Blu-Ray orders *coughmadokacough*, I’ll admit it’s also almost 40% because I have been dying to play the Alchemist of Arland games and since then I’ve been spending any time not working, watching anime or reading the news playing Rorona.

While there’s so much one can read from reviews, nothing really beats actually sitting down and playing the game itself. To be honest, Rorona really plays like Recettear, mainly due to the time limit system that kinda does force one to plan ahead properly on time… or use a walkthrough. Yes, guilty as accused here. :P

But, the cool thing about games like these are that walkthroughs can’t essentially destroy the experience of actually watching the character interaction events and conveying Rorona’s cuteness. I’m so happy that Rorona isn’t as big a ditz as some friends describe her, and she’s just all around a really good girl who’s earnest at her work although a little oblivious towards things. Kadowaki Mai’s voice really suits her quite well in that aspect. I definitely enjoyed the events where her friends and the characters made fun of her airheadedness, most notably when Astrid goes “Oh you’ll never find such a talented idiot like Rorona in a hundred years!” … while she is just a few paces away doing her work saving Astrid’s Atelier. And everytime Rorona has an event with Hagel… it never fails to be funny. Drunk Tiffani was unforgettable too XD.

Even the gameplay starts to get quite engrossing after a while, since the alchemy system is, while quite simple, starts becoming pretty addictive as I tried to mix the right ingredients with the right traits and quality to get the final item I wanted. Thankfully, it’s not super hard to get good items… although hitting the basket limit during gathering sessions started to get a bit annoying lol. Overall though, it’s a fun system to play about with, just to get the right outputs from it.

Anyways, I just finished the first year of the game, which means I’ve still got about 2/3rds of the game to go through. Hopefully the second year will go as smooth as my first year, and there’s still a few more characters to meet yet!

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I’m just busy helping a little girl from having to live with only two internal organs by selling overpriced wooden bows to pensioners (it’s the “in” thing right now!), candies to little girls, swords and armor to budding adventurers and recipe ingredients to housewives.

No, I’m pretty sure you’ll be dead with only two organs, Recette.

It’s seriously addictive and Recettear is worth all the 20 USD I paid for it from Steam. Capitalism, ho!

Of course, if you’re in to socialism, it’s okay to do so, but if you really like this game, and maybe hope to see more like this, SUPPORT THE INDUSTRY! Or wait till the Steam weekend promotions, which I’ll certainly highlight here.

Regular blogging will probably resume in another week or so. Hopefully.

P.S. Euria needs to fucking die. That Combo-breaking bitch.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

>>The zombies are powered up.

Yes, they aren’t one-hit-kills anymore, unless you go RE-style and SHOOT FOR THE HEADS. Shotguns are so nerfed it’s not fun anymore. Back in L4D, shotguns were the way to go (yes, they were overpowered admittedly), but nerfing shotguns to take 2-3 shots for one NORMAL zombie to die, with 30% less ammo capacity sure sucks. Even the rifles are pretty hard to headshot with, with the recoil and shit. L4D2 is now more “accuracy” than “raw power”. Not necessarily bad, but it takes the fun out of it a bit.

>>The Special Infected are powered up.

Jockeys are annoying as fuck and pretty much the second most powerful Special in the game after the Hunter due to their small size (which makes them hard to spot as fuck) and annoying ability (dragging you AWAY from the team). They should consider nerfing the damage Jockey does a lil’ bit…
Chargers and Spitters are rather more easier to deal with.

>>The maps are powered up.

They are pretty big. And full of nooks and crannies. I’ll have to give praise to the level designers. I kept having more fun exploring around the map than actually finding for the safe room.

>>And the events are powered up.

They provide a fresh change after the formulaic events in L4D. Admittedly though, Scavenger mode is annoying.

>>the AI stupidity uselessness index is powered up

God damn it. The AI fucking retarded. Even a Twinkie (to present to Tallahasse) would be ten orders of magnitude more useful than them. They don’t really know how to deal with getting horded or saving human players properly. I really feel like punching the AI guys. My friend even exploded to the point he just shot the down in the safe room and went ahead. I chose not to revive them.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Yes I know it’s not rhyming (hell don’t fucking sing this out please). Yes I know the second half of the song is rather unoriginal. Yes I know Steam sucks. Yes I know their ‘update’ system needs to be fucking fixed. Yes I know America’s Army 3 is kinda repetitive. Yes I know that Agentcy is kinda empty lately.

…. but for god’s sake, I FUCKING MISS MY TF2 FRAGGING MOMENTS.

Here’s to a big ‘Fuck You’ to Steam for their crappy SEA servers. Thank you for your time. Do not waste it any more further.

UPDATE: So I finally got my Steam to update its client properly after 3 days. Guess what’s the first thing I see when I get in? “Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 & 2, and Portal Update Released”.

.
..
…

FUCKING RAGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome to patch hell.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

God… that must count as one of the most LOL’est things I’ve done in TF2 so far.

We actually got the tower to 7 people later but didn’t got a SS of it. 5 scouts, and 2 soldiers on top of each other was pretty hillarious LOL.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Well, first of all, I’m happy to be in a Guinness World Record, at least until it’s broken. The official record is 274 gamers playing for 40 hours, btw. I’m pretty sure Nvidia might try to top it off, considering Cyberfusion was a AMD-ATI event. I managed to get myself a Phenom X4 9150e and an Orange Box (thanks a lot FatCatLim) from the event so I’m even more happier. Disappointed about the certificate we got though. It’s a copy-pasta, fill-up-yer-own-name kinda cert. I really wished we got a proper and named ones instead.

I do have a few nitpicks about the event though, mostly related to the ambience of the event. It apparently seems that the organizers think that gamers are rave pub goers, which might be true overseas, but it sure isn’t over here. Frankly speaking, I am quite surprised I managed to weather 40 hours of disco lights, crappy trance/classical trance/rave music and fake smog (yeah, smog) to set the record. At one point I was suffering from overexposure thanks to that unhealthy combination of lights, sound and smell. Yeah, smell. Because that fake smog they used smells poisonous and STINKS to high heaven. Even my hair smells like it still… eww. Whoever decided on making the whole event like a rave/trance party ought to be shot, whipped and have a glowing hot rod stuck up his back.

Which brings to me to the second nitpick of the event, mainly the committees. Some are pretty clueless, and some are rather rude. But my biggest complaint about them is not setting up their network earlier so that they could diagnose any problems. We were all required to be in the venue by 9pm Friday to be briefed and get ready, but instead they kinda wasted about 2 hours showing some people’s DotA matches and stuff. The LAN was only set up around 11:10pm and a LOT. I repeat. A LOT of problems popped up immediately.

First of all, they used a pretty fucking fail router which couldn’t support nearly 300 machines connecting to it. Hell, at one point, pinging the ROUTER from my PC actually timed out. Yeah, the router couldn’t respond to my pings. I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover a WRT in the router room, trying to slave away at routing 300 PCs. Of course the Internet was a no-go too, since the router kept dying on us.

In the end, we had to go on for about 4-5 hours with no Internet AND LAN too, since the router was so unstable that even LAN games couldn’t work as they kept timing out. Be reminded that this is a LAN party for god’s sake. Thank god as the morning of Saturday arrived, they managed to change the routers and everyone had the Internet back up, although some idiots actually went to torrent stuff after that and earned a well-deserved lashing from the emcee. And as expected, a virus made its rounds around the PC’s too, causing a lot of people to have downtime as they tried to remove it. Thank god I didn’t have the problem. Vista is surprisingly secure at everything on default settings but then I didn’t install any antivirus on it so I might not be so sure. I’ll still have to scan that install first though. Thankfully I used another HDD and Vista install for the event.

After the networking issues were resolved, everything else went on pretty smoothly. The food they provided pretty much sucked though, all throughout the three days, but it’s better that way. Kinda cut off the need to go for long toilet breaks, ahahaha. Eventually though, the need of sleep really became a pressing issue. There was this one guy who was pretty awesome since he was very obviously sleeping, but his car (he was playing a racing game) was actually still moving on screen. More awesomely, as I passed him, the VIP’s of the event went past met and saw him as well. After that, emcee made the mickey out of him, LOLOLOLOL.

Ahh, so now that’s out of the way, expect normal blogging to resume after this. Got a full backlog of anime to watch now. I need my Felli fix.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

UPDATE 8: These guys are mad. So yeah, we’re adding in another two hours to the record to make it 40 hours even. Another two hours…. problem now would be finding good enough servers on TF2….

UPDATE 7: Just past 36 hours and we’ve officially kicked the ass of the NVISION LAN party back in August. Another 2 hours or so till we reach our target of 38 hours with over 250 participants.

UPDATE 6: 3 hours and 50 mins to 38 hours. Let’s do this people!

UPDATE 5: Took a short 30 min nap around 30th hour. Feeling much better now. I shall continue my war against Russia by fielding my newly built Tanks against their Crossbowmen. Another 6 hours and 20 mins to go.

UPDATE 4: Oh god, nearly 9 hours left, but I am feeling so sleepy. I have nearly 2 hours worth of rest time stored up but I dare not use them as I’m scared I won’t come back after that. Maybe I’ll just steal a few winks in between turns/loading screens. God I so hope that the promise of free Orange Box for all the record-breakers is true as well.

UPDATE 3: Even Civ IV got boring. Currently completing my game of The Last Remnant. Glad to know that there is so many time sinks that I have. Nearly 40 hours w/o sleep… well discounting some nod-offs I had while playing Civ IV. Another 12 hours to go.

UPDATE 2: 20 hours now. Another 18 left. Oh god, I am so collapsing after this. Even L4D and TF2 get boring after nearly 18 hours of it, so the past two hours has been me playing Civ IV, the ultimate time sink game. I expect it to get me through at least another 6 hours. God bless Sid Meier and Firaxis Games.

UPDATE 1: 14 hours in. It’s lunch time now. L4D and TF2 are the only things keeping my consciousness awake. Whoever wants to try and do a L4D game with me can add me, ‘Kurogane-Cyberfusion’ on Steam. Hopefully the internet holds.

Blogging live from Cyberfusion 2009, the largest (and probably the first of its kind) LAN party in Malaysia with the aim of breaking the Guinness World Record for the longest LAN party recorded.

Lots of teething issues to start with, heck we all couldn’t even get decent Internet connection until now. Four hours in to the party now with another 34 hours to hang on, and I bloody hope they’re giving us Phenom II X4′s at the end of this.

Anyways, no anime probably for the weekend, but I’ll be updating myself throughout the event.

Currently finished a crazy bout of L4D with townberry and FatCatLim, probably gonna do some Steam gaming later on. Man I sure hope I can survive.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

First thoughts, this game is definitely as gruesome as advertised, but surprisingly, I wasn’t too disgusted by much of the game. Possibly because I’ve already been spoiled to certain parts of the story. It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted or with loose stomaches though, but I certainly think most people who are will avoid it, or at least dive in to it, properly warned.

The story is still pretty unnerving though, especially if you finish it fully by going through all three endings. The theory behind Saya’s true origin is especially disturbing as well as the lengths that Fuminori goes in order to protect his life with Saya. A plunge in to madness, as many would say, but surprisingly, Fuminori’s actions come off as… understandable to me, which is quite a dangerous thing to say, but speaks volumes of how good the writers portray Fuminori’s character.

Saya is surprisingly lacking of screen time though, but it’s a good move since we mostly see her in the “angelic” light that Fuminori paints her in, which enhances further on how dangerous she really is to the reader. Undoubtedly, she is cute… really cute. Nitroplus’s character designs are really quite attractive.

It’s really been a… dream(?) come true to be able to read one of the critically acclaimed VN’s released this decade, from the venerable Nitroplus team. Saya no Uta is really a great experience and I’m really thankful for Moogy from TLWiki who put in his effort to make this game accessible to a wider audience.

Now I gotta finish up Princess Waltz…. orz

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.

So satisfying I’ve been playing it non-stop for the past 3-4 days. My exams this semester is doomed again… sigh.

©2012 Kurogane's Anime Blog. All Rights Reserved.