Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica

I’ll admit that I’ve been putting off watching this anime. This is an anime about Magical Girls, prominently featuring tons of Lolis. That’s typically a good sign for me to stay away. BUT, I heard from several places that it was an amazing anime, probably one of the top three from 2011. AND I saw that it was created by SHAFT (the studio that did Bakemonogatari, Ef, and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei to name a few) which I have a studio boner for. SO I decided I might as well get over the Loli and watch it anyway.

This anime is no fucking joke. Based on all the reviews, I expected it to be awesome and it was. I watched all 12 episodes in about a week, which means it was so good that it even surpassed video games in the bid for my free time.

The story takes a typically happy and cheerful genre of Magical Girls and applies a super dark, twisted look on it. It provides a very interesting and unique perspective; something fresh that I haven’t come across in a long time. In terms of spoilers, I will say that I sort of predicted a lot of the twists and turns, but that may be because I went into it with the knowledge that this would be a dark anime. However, even if I kind of knew what was going to happen, it still didn’t make it any less exciting to watch.

The pacing of this anime is spectacular. The short 12 episode style means each episode is straight to the point and doesn’t dilly dally around for no reason. I will say I didn’t really connect with any of the characters very well, but that might just be because I’m not a 13 year old girl.

Ultimately, what won me over was the amazing animation styles that SHAFT tends to put in. During dialogue, anime tends to switch to pans of nearby scenery or objects, while the characters continue to talk. This was originally used as a way to save on animation costs, but SHAFT goes way past this and shows the most random things possible. Characters will be talking in a room, the scene will shift to water falling down a drain, and then the scene shifts back to the characters in the room, with seemingly no reason for that switch. SHAFT also makes boring, everyday environments look absolutely ridiculous. Yet, somehow it ends up looking great. How awesome would it be if you got to brush your teeth in this bathroom?

Overall, this is definitely one of the better animes of the last few years (on par with Steins;Gate) and is worth a watch from any anime fan. It also reaffirmed my belief that SHAFT is my favorite studio.

Dark Souls

I finally finished playing Dark Souls yesterday.

First of all, it plays exactly the same as Demon’s Souls. It could have picked up at the end of Demon’s souls and I wouldn’t have noticed I was playing a new game. Outside of a few minor tweaks (such as healing flasks), it is the same game. So I’m going to assume you know about Demon’s Souls (http://baconfriedrice.com/2010/12/more-video-games/).

The Good
Boss Fights: There are less stupid boss fights where you can glitch out the Boss AI and basically get a free win. One of the “multiplayer” features of Demon’s/Dark Souls is that other players can leave messages on the floor. In Demon’s Souls, most boss rooms has a “safe” spot which would be marked with a message. This spot was usally behind a rock or in a nook where the boss would try to futilely attack but be blocked. Then you just shoot 200 arrows and watch the boss slowly die, which was 100% safe. Dark Souls seemed to fix this problem well, as I actually had to fight all the bosses head on in the way intended. Plus, I think there were more overall mechanics. For example, there is one boss that is completely invisible and you have to hit her based on her footprints.

Level layout: One of my favorite things about this game is the way the different sections are interlinked. There is clearly one or two expected paths where the difficulty scales approximately with your character. However, you can pretty much go to any zone in the game from the starting hub if you chose, although they are typically guarded by a monster that serves as a gear/skill check to prevent you from entering areas that are too strong for you.

What’s amazing is that playing through the expected path, you will often go down a path or staircase and encounter an entrance to a zone that is too high level for you and get your ass handed to you by this gear check monster. Later on, after you’ve progressed on the expected path, you will find yourself in the high level zone and come across this same monster but from the opposite direction. It really causes you to go “ohhhhh, so that’s where this staircase always led!” All of the zones are so different feeling, but each is connected through real paths. This is different from Demon’s Souls, where each world was accessed through portals in a central hub. Having to actually walk to each place makes it feel that much cooler.

The Bad
Stupid narrow bridges: Unlike many games, Dark Souls has no concept of boundaries. If you walk off the edge you fall to your death. You have to pay attention when just running around, because you often have to cross narrow bridges or ledges, where pushing the control stick a little bit too hard results in death. I won’t say that it’s unfair, because everything is doable without dying. It’s just a huge pain in the ass and doesn’t really add anything to the game, especially when you have to travel over it dozens of times.

The Ugly
Targetting System: One of the annoying things about this game is how the targeting system works. You tap down on the right joystick to “target” a unit in front of you, which locks your camera onto it and prevents you from looking around. This is pretty crucial to keep an enemy in sight, particularly when they are jumping back and forth. The problem is that there is a maximum distance that you can lock on, so if the enemy jumps away or up high, it breaks the lock. Then you have to keep pressing down to relock, and sometimes it won’t lock onto the same enemy.

Camera: Most of the bosses in this game are big. Most are several times larger than your character. So when you hit them, you end up hitting their ankle. This means you are up in their face, and the camera gets blocked or clips through the boss/wall and you can’t see anything. Similarly, when you lock on you tend to lock on to to the center of their body, which is way to high to hit. So your camera is pointed up at them but you’re hitting much lower. In one fight, I spend most of the time just watching a boss’s feet and spanning this homing spell because the room was too small and I couldn’t see shit.

Overall
Play this game. Buy Demon’s Souls and play that first if you haven’t already. Both of these games are some of the best things to come out in recent years. If it’s too hard look up stuff to help you through it, but there is absolutely no reason to not finish it at least once.

Steins;Gate

This anime is good. I’ve heard a lot of good comments about it throughout the internet and I have to say the anime lived up to the hype.

The plot centers around a scientist who accidentally discovers he created a way to send text messages to the past. They initially start changing the past which results in a bunch of crap happening and a quest to return things back to normal. It’s not a particularly unique concept, but they do approach it very well and leave some nice twists in turns in there to keep viewers on their toes. There are a few doubts about the way they executed everything in the end (it seemed like kind of a cop out) but overall, it was well done.

The characters are the focal point of the anime, with the time traveling just acting as the plot driver. The main protagonist Okabe, is voice by none other than Mamoru Miyano, who is responsible for Light in Death Note, Tamaki in Ouran High School Host Club, and Masaomi Kida in Durarara (also Setsuna F. Seiei from Gundam 00 but Setsuna is an emo, quiet bitch in that so I don’t really care for him). He gives an outstanding performance and really helps to add a lot more emotion to the series.

But really I like dthis series because of Makise Kurisu. She is such a well designed character, from her overall display and style, to her slightly arrogant yet caring personality. She has a touch of tsundere in her, but it’s pulled off in the “right” way. Animes tend to milk the “tsun” part to death, making for some very unnatural and exaggerated situations. Makise behaves like a real person would, acting initially annoyed by Okabe’s strange mannerisms but slowly getting used to it over time. After they work together and accomplish some things, they grow to enjoy each other’s company. However, there is always a hint of “tsun” left in there, manifesting in minor teasing or scolding. The banter between Makise and Okabe is extremely well written, and it’s wonderful to see their relationship develop throughout the series, without any kind of stupid situations coming between it. The moments when they are talking together are much more memorable and interesting to me than all the rest of the time traveling science fiction.

I highly recommend this series and anything more I say will just spoil it more. It is one of the best anime I’ve seen in recent years and definitely deserves a watch.

Renoki: Making An Android Game (part 14)

I wanted to finally fix some lingering issues with Renoki and get the final version up on the market. This will be version 4.0 and I believe that this will be my final version for now.

I have been struggling with tablet resolutions for a while now. When I was first designing the graphics, I made a stupid decision and created them for a 480×854 resolution, because I thought that would be the largest resolution I would support. Unfortunately, a bunch of other phones came out with enormous resolutions (1280×720) and I realized that my app was still showing up for tablets.

Supporting Tablet Resolutions
One of the annoying things I ran into was that I set Renoki to have a minimum Android API level of 7 (froyo). This means that any device with froyo or newer can download it. Given that ~25% of phones are still running froyo (, I felt this was a good decision to make. Unfortunately, if you do not want to support tablet resolutions, there is no way to make your app not show up,). There are some things in the Android Manifest you can do (support-screens, compatible-screens) but the useful mechanism were not introduced until API level 9. This means it is IMPOSSIBLE to prevent a level 7 app from appearing on tablets.

The next best thing I could do is run the app in screen compatibility mode. What this would do is create the smaller resolution game in the middle of the screen and surround it with a black border for all the unused pixels. While this doesn’t offer a full experience, it would at least prevent the game from crashing. The problem was that the view the game was in was still the entire screen size (e.g. 1280×720), but I was only drawing within my original 960×540. I had a few things based on the screen width which were screwed up by this, and images I had go “offscreen” didn’t really go offscreen and instead just drew on the black border. It was in general a very screwed up thing.

The solution I realized was to hardcode my base view to a specific height and width, and use the view width to do my calculations. This basically solved all my problems and allowed it to run correctly on any resolution.

My app has 1 FrameLayout (@id=frameLayout) that contains a single custom SurfaceView. By creating a set of LayoutParams and setting the width, height, and gravity, I made that root FrameLayout conform to the size I wanted. Then, my app always thinks it is running on the correct resolution, regardless of the actual device resolution. I also made sure to multiply by the pixel density “dip” to make sure it works on all devices.

So now I have an app that “works” on all resolutions, although it is extra tiny on big tablets. However, this is good enough for me and I definitely don’t want to spend the time creating all the images for this game at bigger resolutions.

Game of Thrones

I finished watching Season 1 of Game of Thrones. And yes, I have never read the books, so my opinions of this are solely based off the TV series.

So it’s not bad. I enjoyed myself while watching it, but I may have enjoyed it solely because it’s a dark fantasy world filled with blood, stabbing, and naked women. I think they did a reasonable job at creating all the characters. You really come to like the Stark family and their struggle for justice, while hating all the ruthless, political schemers. There’s a good amount of development for the main characters, and you get to really see them change as time progresses.

The story lines are solid. They are interesting and filled with twists to keep you guessing. I will say the story of the Black Watch was completely pointless, but my guess is that they will play a bigger role in future seasons. Right now, they just seem like a huge waste of time. But otherwise, everything was definitely entertaining and kept me wanting to watch the next episode.

The one thing I did have a problem with is the sheer number of characters and the difficult of keeping track of their long, difficult to pronounce names. I’m still not sure exactly who everyone is and the relations between them, particularly for the non-major characters. I feel like I need to keep the wiki page open while watching so I don’t miss anything.

Establishing The Boundaries of the World
Spoilers by the way

When you create a fantasy world, you need to quickly establish what is valid and what is impossible. While a fantasy world can contain magic, dragons, and super human abilities, it still needs to follow rules. Otherwise, everything quickly loses meaning and it’s impossible to build tension in a scene. For example, everyone understands physics and what is impossible in the real world. If you have a normal man fighting a dragon, you expect the man to get instantly crushed because a real human could not hope to compete with the sheer size and speed of a dragon. So in bad movies (e.g. Transformers) you would have the man impossibly dodge and evade the dragon’s firebreath, claws, and tail. Then somehow they manage to run up without getting blown to smithereens and slice off it’s head (or put some stupid allspark in their chest). Watching something like that is frustrating, stupid, and constantly has you asking “Did that really just happen?”

However, if in the first 10 minutes you show that the man can dodge, jump, and shoot magic bolts, then you’ve established that in this world, the laws of physics do not apply. This world has magic, dragons, super powerful men and that’s just the way it is. You don’t need to explain how anything works or how it came to be. It’s just accepted.

For most of the series, everyone is pretty normal. People fight like real, clumsy humans in heavy armor. They get easily hurt and die to single sword slashes. There is mention of some zombie like people called “white walkers” in the first episode, but they never really reveal them so we don’t know if they are truly zombies or just a bunch of savage people who pretend to be ghosts to scare you. There is no signs of magic or supernatural beings, outside of some legends and superstitions mentioned in passing. You get the feeling that this world generally follows the laws of physics and is realistic enough.

But towards the end of season 1, things start getting weirder and weirder. The white walkers are revealed as being real zombies who rise from the dead. A woman uses “blood magic” to save someone from death. A woman walks into a fire and is unburned. Even dragons show up in the final scene. You have this radical switch where the world goes from the middle ages to Dragon Age the video game.

The problem I have with this is that for the entire season, people have been established as normal humans, struggling with mortal issues in a real world. As soon as you introduce dragons and magic into the mix, it shatters everything you thought you knew and trivializes everything you’ve already seen. Imagine a movie about World War II, where a platoon of soldiers is fighting on the street. They use teamwork, courage, and ingenuity with the tools at their disposal to slowly work their way towards a goal, maybe killing some machine gun nests or tanks along the way and losing some men. Then all of a sudden a Gundam shows up and blows everything to smithereens. That’s how I felt at the ending of Season 1.

Maybe all of this supernatural stuff won’t matter much and the dragons (which are still babies) are just there for symbolism or something. I hope that the series will continue to focus only on men fighting men, and never bring dragons or magic into the picture again. And despite how well done most of the series is, all I can think about is the ending and how stupid it is.

Dragon Age 2

This game came out a year ago but I just finished it now, so here goes:

It’s like Dragon Age 1 except more boring, a worse story, a worse battle system, and worse characters. That basically sums up everything.

Story
You start the game running away from the Blight (a bunch of demons called Darkspawn) that has ravaged your homeland. Some tragedies happen and you somehow end up in a new city called Kirkwall, hoping to start a new life. Now in Dragon Age 1, you quickly learn from the start of the game that the Blight is coming, the world is in danger, and it’s your job to fight it. The evil force is clearly defined and constantly reinforced throughout every quest in the entire game. NPC’s constantly talk about the threat of Darkspawn. You fight hordes of Darkspawn at every corner. Even though there are unrelated side quests, you’re ultimate goal of stopping the Blight is always the main focus.

In DA2, the game is broken into 3 acts, each separated by multiple years. So what epic adventures do you encounter in DA2? Act 1 consists of you doing random jobs to make money so you can buy a nicer house for your mom and elevate your social status. I’m not even joking here. You literally get a bunch of letters of people asking you to help them collect goods, capture escaped criminals, retrieve an item in a cave, etc.

Act 2 begins after you’ve found some treasure and are now rich. Note that 1/3 of the game has passed (probably 10-20 hours of game play) and there still isn’t a clear, endgame goal or even any significant threats. The Blight (you know that thing that raped and pillaged your homeland) is never mentioned again and is apparently never going to reach Kirkwall. You still wander around doing unrelated fetch quests. The only real tension is some racism conflict between the humans and these stupid looking horned people called the Qunari. Eventually a revolt breaks out and lots of people die and you are tasked with settling the conflict and killing all the Qunari.


Who are you and why do I care?

Act 3 begins and now everyone refers to you as the “Champion” because you saved Kirkwall from the Qunari. There still isn’t a clear purpose to the game and nobody is really a true evil force you have to fight against. Once again, you wander around doing menial quests until another conflict between mages and templars breaks out and you’re forced to choose one side. Oh, by the way the head templar is possessed and wants to try and take control of the city. So you end up banding together and killing her. Game over…

How do you even put together this pile of crap? It’s not until Act 3 where the final boss is even introduced, and it turns out to just be some woman trying to use the revolt in Act 2 to cover her ascent to power. In Dragon Age 1, you’re fighting against an army of Darkspawn, led by a dragon, threatening to destroy the entire world and exterminate humanity. In DA2, you fight one corrupt woman yearning for political power, who just happens to be possessed by demons. Imagine Lord of the Rings where you learn about Sauron trying to take over Middle Earth. But then the book decides to ignore that and just talks about the steward in Gondor trying to unjustly take the throne.

There’s no impact or purpose to anything you do in DA2. In DA1, you travel across the world and make decisions that affect entire civilizations and cities of thousands. DA2 mostly involves individual people, and whether you should kill them or spare them. It completely lacks impact and purpose, and makes the entire game feel like a grind.

Characters
The characters in this game weren’t nearly as interesting as DA1. Anders is a whiny, annoying character who’s constantly asking for help and approval. Varric is just kind of annoying in general. Fenris and Carver are constantly just being asses. Merrill is constantly making mistakes and then being like “Oh! I didn’t mean for it to happen like this!” Isabela is only likable because she’s a selfish woman who wants to have sex all the time, but she’s really nothing more than a generic “I only care about myself but now I like you so I’ll come back and help!” The thing that was really good about Morrigan from DA1 is that even though she was a selfish woman, you also got to see her pragmatic, ends-justify-the means attitude which gave her more character. I think the only character I really liked in DA2 was Aveline. She tries to be a beacon of order, justic and discipline but ultimately she still falls in love with one of her guardsman and is reduced to being a shy, nervous girl. Her companion quests actually had character development to them, while everyone else’s companion quests were usually asking you to do some errand for them.


You’re all boring

Battle System
The battle system is pretty much the same as DA1, except for some unknown reason they actually increased the cooldowns of spells and reduced how many are available. Instead, now you just spam the X button to do auto-attacks while you wait for spells to cool down. For some reason, I prefer healing in Dragon Age as opposed to DPS or tanks. I think this is because I like managing my team with tactics and ensuring they all stay alive. So when I started DA2, I naturally went down the Spirit Healer path, thinking it might be similar to DA1.

The main strategy behind DA combat is similar to any MMO, where you have a tank, a healer, and some DPS. The tank draws aggro of all monsters, forcing them to attack them while the healer heals the tank and the DPS slowly kills everything. So I typically have one character who focuses solely on defense, one character solely focus on healing, and 2 characters focus solely on DPS. It’s generally better to highly specialize in one task, rather than build a bunch of balanced people. It’s basically exactly how you would setup a party in World of Warcraft or any other mmo.

The problem is there are only 2 true heal spells on long cooldowns, that heal a large percentage of health. In DA1, heals were weaker and on a much shorter cooldown, meaning you had to constantly spam them. In DA2, due to the lack of heals, they are not meant to be spammed but used only when a character is very low on health. It also means that characters don’t take nearly as much damage as they did in DA1. On normal trash mobs, I would kill everything before even needing to heal. So when I played my healer, I did nothing except spam X to autoattack, while waiting to heal a tank that never lost health. It got so boring that I just permanently switched to playing my rogue or mage, because it gave me more to do during the fights.

Now from a rogue or mage standpoint, the battle system is alright. Unfortunately, they failed big time by making the mana/stamina pools so small. As a mage, I would cast all my spells once and be out of mana, resorting to spamming X the rest of the fight. As a rogue, you literally don’t have enough spells to use, so they are always on cooldown and you’re stuck auto-attacking.


90% of my battles were just me staring at this ring

My guess is that they wanted to place more emphasis on the strategy of controlling all 4 characters, rather than just 1. I understand where they were going with this, but I think it’s a little too much for an RPG. Basically, when you open the radial menu to cast a spell, the entire game pauses. This let’s you slowly select and aim all your spells for optimal damage. I played on hard and some fights were literally impossible unless you controlled every action for all 4 characters. You would pause the game and assign an action for each character. Then immediately pause again to assign the next set of actions. It meant pausing every 1-2 seconds and while it did make it much more challenging and strategical, it became really tedious. Especially when you have to do this on trash mobs that you just want to pound your way through.

I think they needed to strike a better balance between the slow, menu driven combat of the radial menu and the fast, real-time combat where you just spam every spell and monsters die. I think there was a little too much emphasis on using the radial menu. The one really positive thing they added was the ability to set rally points for characters to run to. Nothing frustrated me more in DA1 than moving a ranged character far away, only to have the AI run them through fire to stand in front of the dragon. There was also 1 or 2 boss fights that were actually fun and reasonably well thought out (the elemental spirit in the Deep Roads).

Overall
I’m not even going to go into detail about the other problems with the game, like the constant copy/pasted level design, crashes, graphical bugs during dialogue, and other weird bugs like having to repeat the same dialogue scene multiple times. Overall this game just feels like BioWare had to pump out a sequel to DA1 before EA came knocking at their door. Everything about it just feels rushed and incomplete. While I won’t complain because I got it for only $20, it definitely doesn’t live up to such big names as Dragon Age or BioWare.

Chaos;Head

I’ve recently been hearing a lot of hype about Steins;Gate. Based on that, I figured I would first watch Chaos;Head because they both originate from the same visual novel publisher and they both use semi-colons in their names. In retrospect, it was probably a waste of my time considering Chaos;Head is basically a harem with sword wielding schoolgirls and Steins;Gate is (as far as I understand it) some sort of time traveling/warping thing. Anyway…

The main character of Chaos;Head is probably one of the most annoying characters I’ve ever seen. Typically the male protagonist of a harem is either extremely clueless, or passive and indecisive about choosing what girl he wants. I mean, that’s the only way you can get away with 13-26 episodes of filler episodes. Unfortunately, this character is just awkward at everything he does and constantly whines about his social problems. Instead of doing something about them, he just sits around waiting for someone to help him.

The girls cover pretty much every standard stereotype (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when voiced right). None of them were particularly annoying, but none of them left any substantial impact. Animation overall was clean and good looking and the actual character designs looked fine.

The plot was kind of boring and the ending was so anti-climatic that I can’t even remember what happened despite just watching it a few weeks ago. Something about a machine that can control what people perceive as reality, thus allowing you to control them. Of course the guy who designs it is trying to take over the world with it and our hero goes to fight him and rescue the princess, supported by the rest of them. Despite all the focus on the magical swords, fighting was pretty non-existent throughout the series. Any fighting that did occur was short and clumsy looking. There wasn’t a very good amount of character development as far as I’m concerned, which may have been due to the 13 episode limit. Everyone had some stupid, tragic back story explained in 5 minutes.

Overall, extremely mediocre and not worth the time to watch. Onward to Steins;Gate.

Renoki Version 2.0

Renoki has been on the market for a while and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the game. Here are some of the improvements I’ve made so far.

Improving the Shop

People didn’t know what the items did. In particular, nobody had any idea what the wings did (which is pretty understandable). Anyway, I added a pop up box when you select the item and you have to press “BUY” in order to actually make the purchase. The pop up box has a short description of what the item does, hopefully eliminating all question.

Improving StartScreens

Having the informative picture on the start screen tended to be completely ignored. I’m not sure if it’s because the picture itself is unintuitive, or people don’t even realize that it has information on it. Anyway, I added some text to the start screens to make it painfully obvious what you are supposed to do. I really wanted to avoid using text but I couldn’t see any better way of doing it with the limited space I had.

Improving Number Monsters

Nobody understands the number monsters (correction, one person from work understood it). Anyway, I added text explaining what to do and also the first level with number monsters have the numbers painted on the door. This “should” make it painfully obvious what the point of this monster is.

Adding More Feedback
Someone brought up a good point that if sound is off, there is no feedback on good or bad hits. At first I thought of using the vibration feedback that Android already has built in for keypresses, but realized this might be too intrusive for users. Plus, it requires an explicit permission and I’m trying to keep my app permission free right now. So instead I have the entire gameboard briefly flash red when a bad press occurs. I think this worked out very well as it clearly stands out and indicates that something went wrong.

Enclyopedia
From an early stage of development, I wanted to add a Renoki Encyclopedia where I could list every Renoki along with funny descriptions/flavor text. I stumbled upon ViewPager, a brilliant little thing for Android that allows you to automatically do horizontal swiping of pages (similar to the current Android market). All you need to do is drop in some images to each page, and the user can easily swipe through each one. Now I just need to think up funny back stories for each Renoki.

Balance Tweaks
I think the game is too hard for people. I toned down the speeds for Normal and lowered shop prices. I realized that people actually mess up a lot so they have to buy hearts quite frequently. Someone mentioned that they got far in the game but were never able to save up enough to buy a hammer. I needed to amend this, as the later levels get really hard without the upgrades.