So back a super-long time ago (almost four months), I sent an email to Vivendi because my key for World in Conflict did not work and I wanted to go play on Massgate. Things got held up because I needed to have proof of purchase of the game (ie. receipt), but that was nearly impossible to find, since I bought the game back in December on Boxing Day.

However, doing some cleanup in my room has let me find my receipts, so I got back to them three months later.

I heard back from them and they asked me for an email address with which to use for Massgate, and I have not heard from them since. It’s been nearly a month since I last heard from them.

Now I realize that this ridiculous delay might be a result of the Activision and Vivendi merger that took place a while ago, but still! 28 days (with two follow-up emails) and still no reply is a bit ridiculous.

The Team Fortress 2 Heavy update surfaced yesterday.

As a result, I decided to try out one of those achievement servers yesterday just to see how they worked. Essentially, (at least on the public servers anyway) it’s a killfest. Players just constantly shoot, because they essentially give you unlimited ammo, and as a result, you die frequently. That’s fine and dandy and all, but not when you managed to somehow get out of the death circle.

As a result of me doing so, if you look at my stats for the game, I have a ridiculous score for pyro. 88 kills and 113 points.

I don’t know how many people have heard of Pandora.

The gist of the site is that it is a music discovery service. You create stations by typing in songs or artists that you like, and using the work done by the Music Genome Project, it finds songs that are similar and plays them. It is a really great way to discover new music.

However, since its conception, it has just been running into various roadblocks, mainly financial ones.

Since I’ve discovered it a few years ago and was happily listening to really interesting and new music that I have never discovered before, the service has been blocked to be accessed by just those in the US due to licensing issues, which means that if I am to go and listen to Pandora, I’ll need to make use of proxy servers in the US.

Now apparently the US has doubled the cost of Internet-based royalties and Pandora is reportedly close to having to pull the plug on the service soon.

Really unfortunate situation here, because Pandora is a really awesome service that I am pretty sure helps expose people to new music that they would actually like instead of all that mainstream crap on the media nowadays.

I just hope that Pandora doesn’t have to shut down. However, if it does, that’s just another stab in the foot of the music industry, done so by those organizations like the RIAA who claim to represent these artists. Pandora getting killed off is essentially killing off ways for obscure, yet potentially talented, musicians to be exposed to a fairly large audience, which would simply mean less exposure for these struggling artists and more exposure (to fill in the gaps) for the crap that’s out there nowadays.

It’s just a few days before C74 happens, so just a short listing of things to look out for. All links are to Japanese sites unless otherwise stated, considering.. you know…. Comiket happens in Japan.. and what happens in Japan is usually catered towards the Japanese.

Magical Battle Arena

Category: Arena Fighter

Website: http://fly-system.net/product/mba/chara.htm

Although I am not really much of a fan of fighting games (because I’m terrible at them for the most part), they usually do not come up. MBA is a bit different because it features characters from the Nanoha series. Besides, who doesn’t want to befriend other people by beating the crap out of them with maximum power? =P

Note: This game has been mentioned previously on this blog.

Magical Cannon Girl 2

Category: Shoot ‘em Up

Website: http://www.kit-station.com/mcg2/

The fairly well-done (and challenging) shooter Magical Cannon Girl, which has been blogged about before, from KIT-Station has a sequel! I will be looking forward to this, considering how much I enjoyed the first one.

Patriot Dark

Category: Shoot ‘em Up (Bullet Hell)

Website: http://temperancelance.orz.hm/download.html

A game from TEMPERANCE LANCE. I downloaded the demo a month or two ago and played. You have two types of ships to control (straight fire or fanned-out). Quite intense and highly recommended if you enjoy bullet hell shooters.

RefleX

Category: Shoot ‘em Up

Website: http://www.siterskain.com/reflex/index.html

This game from SITER SKAIN looks quite retro-y and arcade-y. Downloading the demo as we speak. Apparently, Shoot The Core puts it as the star of the show for them.

RefRain ~prism memories~

Category: Shoot ‘em Up (Bullet Hell)

Website: http://www.rebrank.org/products/r2/

An intense vertical shooter from RebRank, people behind the wonderful 五月雨 ~samidare~. On posting on this a while back, Curtis comments that it “was both visually stunning and fucking insane.” I only hope that it continues to be like that because there aren’t enough hard games out there anymore.

Note: This game has been mentioned previously on this blog.

東方地霊殿 ~ Subterranean Animism

Category: Shoot ‘em up

Website: http://www16.big.or.jp/~zun/html/th11top.html

The latest installment to the very awesome 東方 (Touhou) series, this making it the 11th game of the series. Demo, which has been released for quite some time, features the first three stages of the game. Play as either Reimu or Marisa, paired up with one of three partners.

TWilight refrAIN

Category: Shoot ‘em Up

Website: http://blue.sakura.ne.jp/~loop/twain.html

A sequel (quite a few of these making appearances, aren’t there?) to TWilight INSanity. One thing that I definitely enjoy already about this one compared to TWINS is that it follows standard shmup key mappings by default (and for some reason, no matter what I did, I couldn’t set up TWINS’ controls). It plays like TWINS: you pick a pairing and you can swtich around between the two. It plays quite well.

Expect more about these games this weekend!