Much like Music March of last month, I'm getting nothing done. Unlike last month, I actually have been working since the beginning of the month. I thought it'd be fun to draw a large picture of a bunch of League of Legends characters reflecting my friends and myself within as a warm-up for the month. What was supposed to be a small project has turned into a 3 week long task I have yet to finish. It's turning out pretty good, but it wasn't the objective I had in mind this month. I'm hoping to finish it up today and move onto other projects, mainly cover art for the music I need to upload for my portfolio. It's been a peaceful month for me otherwise. Sadly, it hasn't been for those at the Boston Marathon and those relating or knowing those who were there. In short, there was a bombing attack at a marathon where 3 fatalities and over 100 injuries were done. The police officials said they got a suspect in custody, but it really shocked many people to see how young the suspect was. It's frightening.
I haven't been completing as many games as I thought I would this month. I'm at 37 right now, but I'm hoping to reach 40 by the end of the month. I have a few arcade-like games that I could probably finish up. I've been playing a bit more League of Legends again this month as more of my friends are on it this month. If not, I'm still playing DotA 2. Seeing my games pile up, I'm thinking of having May a month of working on submitting job applications and building my portfolio while June will be spent working through some of those games to shorten the list a bit. I've gotten into a Rogue-Like RPG called Eternal League of Nefia (Elona) by recommendation from a friend. I've known about the game for years, but never really tried it out. There's a chance I might have played it before, but don't remember and I probably didn't know what to do. In any case, I had a bit of help going through some parts of the game from my friend and I got hooked.
In Elona, there's a lot of customization for your character. Lots of random encounters happen throughout playing that favor the player or screw them over. Certain dungeons randomly generate each time you go in while other randomly generate once per character. It's difficult to describe what makes Rogue-likes fun, and they usually look boring in gameplay videos. I actually didn't like Rogue-likes too much in the beginning, but once I started to understand how they worked, it got a lot more entertaining. Rogue-likes are rarely made in main-stream gaming, but a lot of indie games seem to fall back on the mechanics of Rogue-likes lately. One Rogue-like that's coming to consoles is The Guided Fate Paradox for the PS3; I'm looking forward to that game. I don't really have that much to report in terms of games other than that I've been playing Elona. I highly doubt I'll finish the game and will probably resort to cheating to complete it. But for now, I'm just enjoying the game as it is and experiencing the open-world gameplay as much as I can before I do so.
I've actually been music hunting this month and have found a lot of videogame music that I like. I played some of my fighting games last Sunday and realized that new characters were unlocked on Tekken Tag Tournament 2 on its own. I also remembered that I like the music in the game and decided to find and listen to them. A friend of mine was talking about the special arranged tracks that came with the limited edition of Zone of the Enders HD pack and how he hated how all the songs from the game were "Dubstep-ified". I was curious so I went onto Youtube to listen to some of them to compare to the originals. Sadly for him, I really liked the remix for Beyond the Bounds. It holds the essence of the original song, has a lot of energy, and accentuates all the right parts for a dramatic effect.
The other tracks were okay, some were pretty good, while a few really were terrible. This one just stood out so much though. It's an amazing remix. Oh, I forgot to mention that Dynasty Warriors 8 is coming out this July. It made me really excited and a bit worried. DW7 was absolutely phenomenal within the DW series, so I'm not sure if DW8 will live up to it. It seems that a lot of other artists helped with the music, which worries me a bit as well. The only other DW I know that MASA had other contributing artists work on the music was DW6, which wasn't as great. The music for DW7 was amazing as well, so high expectations are made. I'll be giving the soundtrack to DW8 a listen and see for myself, but I won't be able to play the game until July (I'm probably getting it first day). I guess there isn't much else to update this month. I didn't watch a single episode of Sword Art Online or any other animé either. I'm hoping to get more art and music projects done in the following month.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Music March, what happened!?
This month passed by so quickly! I felt like I accomplished very little in what I wanted to do. So this month, I was planning to work really hard on music, but the first 15 days of March was mostly taken up by doing sound effects for Camera Obscura, going over to my grandma's to check up on her after her accident (check last post), and by getting sidetracked I suppose. I actually uploaded my Street Fighter Medley mix on facebook 2 days after last month's post and decided to be done with it and move onto other projects. Half way through this month, I buckled down and worked on the Mach Rider remix I had planned out ever since Jr. College about 5-6 years ago. I had always planned to make it a rock/electronic remix, but over the last 1.5 years I decided I wanted to make it into a Bass 'n Drum remix. I finished it and was really happy with "what" it sounded like but was dissatisfied with "how" it sounded. Mostly, I wasn't happy with how weak the beat sounded and how quiet it was. So I finally decided to learn how to do post mastering and realized I could easily do it in Audacity, which is free and something I already had. So after a day of listening to ambiguous videos and tips from the internet, I messed around with the settings on Audacity and finally grasped the very basics of equalizing, compression and amplify allowing me to raise the volume, bass, treble, and overall quality of a track without making it sound distorted. I also found out that I've been exporting MP3s at half the quality I could have been. Furthermore, high quality audio takes up a ridiculous amount of hard drive space! I tried to keep my audio files in the highest quality and realized it can take up 300-700 MB just for a few minutes of audio! Still, it was good to know I can make my songs sound even better. The problem is that I have the obligation to return to all my previous songs and rework them so they sound all just as good. So in the end, the Mach Rider turned out really great (though it could probably be even better if I knew what I was doing). Still, that's just 1 song out of the entire month and now I'm scrambling to work on more these next 2 days before I start "Art April" and switch over to drawing. Today is seriously a busy day for me: change bed sheets, writing this, working on an art project, reworking my older songs, experimenting with a new VST I got, etc. I'm really disappointed in myself as I hoped to get at the very least 5-6 type of music projects done this month (I was actually thinking more of 12, but I have to be realistic here). Still, I'm really happy I looked into mastering and learned how to handle the basics now.
So in terms of gaming, I'm actually making good progress...in a way. I jumped from last months 21 completed games up to 34 completed games as of last night. I'm actually hoping to make even faster progress of this after learning something scary about my back log of games. In the middle of the month, I decided to count up all the games I haven't completed yet and shared it with my friends since I usually complain to them about my backlog. There's a slight difference in numbers since I completed a few games in the past few weeks, but here it is:
Gameboy DS: 1 (Pokémon SoulSilver)
Gameboy 3DS: 1 (Etrian Odyssey IV)
Gamecube: 8
Nintendo Wii: 13
Playstation 3: 22
Playstation 2: 29
PC: 150
As you can see, my list of PC games have grown into a sort of monstrosity that needs to be put down. Despite the large number of PC games I had (it was 148 when I counted), I have bought 7 games for super cheat because of spring sales and completed 5 games in the past 2 weeks. Thus I ended up with a count of 150 games at the moment.
I had completed Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D since my last post after 28 hours of playing it. I mostly enjoyed it, but there were many groan-worthy moments throughout the game where I wasn't having as much fun. Still, I rushed through it so I could start playing Code of Princess. It took around 4-5 hours to complete the game the first time around, and I was able to play through story mode 3 more times with different characters. At first, there were many things I didn't like about the game: graphics lagged when the 3D was on and lots of things were going on (explosions, lots of enemies, etc.), voice acting were sometimes pretty bad, attack variance were limited, and no branching story paths. I guess I was comparing it a bit too much to Guardian Heroes (Code of Princess is developed by 2 of the guys who worked on Guardian Heroes) when I first started playing. But the more I played Code of Princess, the more I loved it. The game felt pretty easy for the most part, but was a big challenge during boss battles and later in additional quests. I fell in love with the light-hearted humor and the animé styled character designs. The music is absolutely amazing and reminds me of how older games were like. I think I might like it more than Guardian Heroes!
I ended up playing the game up to 20 hours while acquiring all the characters, finishing all the additional quests, and beating the game a few times with several characters out of the 50+ that was selectable before I decided to set it down and start playing Etrian Odyssey IV. Code of Princess was totally worth buying and worth my time. It's one of the games I'll consider a classic for the 3DS. In between completing Code of Princess and now, I was able to complete Garshasp: The Monster Slayer, Torchlight 2, Inside a Star-Filled Sky, Dead Pixel, 007 Goldeneye, and Titan Attacks. To make a short run through of them:
-Garshasp was pretty good/bad at the same time but made for a good study game
-Torchlight 2 was really fun and significantly better than the first one
-Inside a Star-Filled Sky was dumb in which I gave up really quickly after understanding how the game worked
-Dead Pixel was short but fairly entertaining
-007 Goldeneye is an interesting take on the original N64 game and I mostly enjoyed it other than the ending part of the game where it had a VIP/Escort mission, quick-time event boss fight, and an annoying problem with graphics lag due to the explosions which made aiming and seeing anything clearly difficult
-Titan Attacks is reminiscent of Space Invaders with influences from Galaga, Asteroids, and other classic Arcade games. It was an okay game, but I didn't feel like playing it anymore after beating it one time through.
So now, I'm mostly focusing on Etrian Odyssey IV which I'm really enjoying. Other than that, I'm slowly taking on all the other games I have while resisting buying any more games. I have no updates on Animé since I haven't been watching any at all. I think I watched one episode of Sword Art Online since my last post. I really need to finish that series. I suppose that's it for now. Hopefully I'll be a lot more productive in April with Art than I was in March.
So in terms of gaming, I'm actually making good progress...in a way. I jumped from last months 21 completed games up to 34 completed games as of last night. I'm actually hoping to make even faster progress of this after learning something scary about my back log of games. In the middle of the month, I decided to count up all the games I haven't completed yet and shared it with my friends since I usually complain to them about my backlog. There's a slight difference in numbers since I completed a few games in the past few weeks, but here it is:
Gameboy DS: 1 (Pokémon SoulSilver)
Gameboy 3DS: 1 (Etrian Odyssey IV)
Gamecube: 8
Nintendo Wii: 13
Playstation 3: 22
Playstation 2: 29
PC: 150
As you can see, my list of PC games have grown into a sort of monstrosity that needs to be put down. Despite the large number of PC games I had (it was 148 when I counted), I have bought 7 games for super cheat because of spring sales and completed 5 games in the past 2 weeks. Thus I ended up with a count of 150 games at the moment.
I had completed Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D since my last post after 28 hours of playing it. I mostly enjoyed it, but there were many groan-worthy moments throughout the game where I wasn't having as much fun. Still, I rushed through it so I could start playing Code of Princess. It took around 4-5 hours to complete the game the first time around, and I was able to play through story mode 3 more times with different characters. At first, there were many things I didn't like about the game: graphics lagged when the 3D was on and lots of things were going on (explosions, lots of enemies, etc.), voice acting were sometimes pretty bad, attack variance were limited, and no branching story paths. I guess I was comparing it a bit too much to Guardian Heroes (Code of Princess is developed by 2 of the guys who worked on Guardian Heroes) when I first started playing. But the more I played Code of Princess, the more I loved it. The game felt pretty easy for the most part, but was a big challenge during boss battles and later in additional quests. I fell in love with the light-hearted humor and the animé styled character designs. The music is absolutely amazing and reminds me of how older games were like. I think I might like it more than Guardian Heroes!
I ended up playing the game up to 20 hours while acquiring all the characters, finishing all the additional quests, and beating the game a few times with several characters out of the 50+ that was selectable before I decided to set it down and start playing Etrian Odyssey IV. Code of Princess was totally worth buying and worth my time. It's one of the games I'll consider a classic for the 3DS. In between completing Code of Princess and now, I was able to complete Garshasp: The Monster Slayer, Torchlight 2, Inside a Star-Filled Sky, Dead Pixel, 007 Goldeneye, and Titan Attacks. To make a short run through of them:
-Garshasp was pretty good/bad at the same time but made for a good study game
-Torchlight 2 was really fun and significantly better than the first one
-Inside a Star-Filled Sky was dumb in which I gave up really quickly after understanding how the game worked
-Dead Pixel was short but fairly entertaining
-007 Goldeneye is an interesting take on the original N64 game and I mostly enjoyed it other than the ending part of the game where it had a VIP/Escort mission, quick-time event boss fight, and an annoying problem with graphics lag due to the explosions which made aiming and seeing anything clearly difficult
-Titan Attacks is reminiscent of Space Invaders with influences from Galaga, Asteroids, and other classic Arcade games. It was an okay game, but I didn't feel like playing it anymore after beating it one time through.
So now, I'm mostly focusing on Etrian Odyssey IV which I'm really enjoying. Other than that, I'm slowly taking on all the other games I have while resisting buying any more games. I have no updates on Animé since I haven't been watching any at all. I think I watched one episode of Sword Art Online since my last post. I really need to finish that series. I suppose that's it for now. Hopefully I'll be a lot more productive in April with Art than I was in March.
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