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.

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!

So I discovered this game called Genetos while reading my RSS feed from Shoot The Core, a site dedicated to shoot-em-ups (or shmups for short).

Genetos brings you, the player, through the history of shumps. You first start off playing some Space Invaders, and well, it goes on from there. I’ll let the gameplay video do the talking.

Download YouTube Video To MP4

It’s currently still under development, so if those three stages aren’t enough (and it certainly wasn’t enough for me), then wait a while – apparently they’re working on more stuff, like moving backgrounds and homing lasers.

Definitely hope to see more!

Co-op finished last Friday. The week included a farewell lunch at Himalayan Peak, the Indian restaurant on campus, as well as four classroom visits in one day, which was quite exhausting to do. No matter how hard I tried, it was a struggle to get work done during that last week.

Outside of work during that week was Anto’s going away dinner because he’s going off to Waterloo to work at RIM for four months. After dinner, our group of people headed over to CHQ to play around in the arcade, which included playing some vertical shooter (never caught the name) with Anto, Initial D with Amy, Time Crisis 4, Taiko: Drum Master with Amy, some other rhythm game involving three buttons with several people, House of the Dead 4 with Anto, and Ghost Squad with Tadashi. Turns out I’m really bad with rhythm games. I also tried out that tank driving game based on World War II. I ended up calling an air strike on myself because I’m such a noob >_<, but it was fun nonetheless.

Once I got home on Friday, I found a Steam message from Dan telling me that Civilization IV was 33% off on Steam. And so, I bought the Civilization IV Complete Pack for USD $39.95.

However, I could not really get any rest for that weekend. That is because on Sunday, we had the 12th Annual General Meeting and Anniversary Dinner for the 99th Saint Francis Xavier Scout Group. Being the project coordinator for this meant that I was pretty much running all over the place on both Saturday (to rehearse and prepare) and Sunday (to oversee everything to ensure that the event ran smoothly and assist if something did explode in our faces). Surprisingly enough, the event ran quite smoothly, despite the last-minute nature of many things in the planning and preparation process. I did not really start the planning process until a month or so before the actual event, things got delayed and pushed back (mainly due to poor management from yours truly), and various other things.

Mom left for her pilgrimage on Monday, so I basically did the driving for the day. Woke up early, drove out to Richmond, had breakfast, saw her off at the airport, then dropped off dad for work and went home. Pretty much, the day was a maintenance day. Fixed up my bike so I could actually use it, then I started to try to fix that computer that was mentioned in the to-do list post. That in itself was a challenge because it’s got Chinese Windows XP installed, and I don’t really read Chinese all that well, even though I am Chinese. Basically, the problems with the computer mainly revolve around errors popping up when the system boots up (and from the looks of it, these are the application encountered an error and crashed type messages). Usage history from the users states that the errors started when they tried to install the TELUS eProtect software. I think I am going to toss it out and install AVG instead. Might as well go with what you know works for things like security. They are also using Spybot Search & Destroy for their anti-spyware needs, which I will keep around because it works. Haven’t done that yet because I wanted to actually spend the week enjoying life and taking a break from things.

Started getting lazy on Tuesday and lounged around for a quite a bit. Had a meeting at night though for more program planning for the next two months of Scouts. Not going to post details here because I know some of them read this blog. You’ll find out tomorrow what to expect!

There was a SFU Open House meeting on Wednesday that I went to because I am coordinating stuff there for Computing Science. Since my bike is ready to be used, I took the bike out for a spin. Good weather out too, but I just am not in good enough shape to bike much, which kind of sucks considering how I could actually do the distance from school to home (a 45 minute commute by bus/foot) back in high school by bike. As a result, I cheated quite a bit, and only biked the distance from home to Commercial Skytrain Station and from SFU to Sperling/Burnaby Lake Skytrain Station. Turns out it’s really beautiful at Burnaby Mountain Park. I should head over to that field more often – it doesn’t take long to get to from campus.

Went out to Havana for dinner with a few people from the co-op job on Thursday, which was pretty good. We then went all the way across town to Sweet Obsession for dessert. Very, very yummy cake (I had the White Chocolate Raspberry Mousse). They also have an interesting tea blend called the Sweet Obsession tea blend, which is basically an Earl Gray with jasmine.

After I got home, I finally started to play my recently purchased Civilization 4 with expansions. My God is that game addicting. I ended up playing from 9-10 PM until 4 in the morning because I did not look at the clock. >_>

Not really looking forward to going back to school so soon, but the time is coming. At least I’m only there for two days a week. I should get some golfing into the week at the nearby pitch & putt course at Kensington Park..

I just wish I had a longer break.

Well, it isn’t Archmage because MARI Telecommunications, who created the game, went bankrupt years ago.

But The Reincarnation is a fairly true clone of the original Archmage. Some positive changes from the original gameplay (such as passive research) and new units to use make for an interesting game.

I started playing last week on the Beta server with Amy, Anto, Michelle, and Min, currently in the process of researching my off-color spells. We have a guild too, so if you are interested, let me know.

Like exception, this is something else that kind of slipped the cracks.

So what is 黄昏酒場～Uwabami Breakers～? (the kanji says たそがれさかば, which means something like “twilight bar room” from looking at some places online about the game). It is yet another 弾幕 (danmaku) game, but this one is about a pub crawl, where your player goes from one bar to another without getting kicked out of the establishment by running out of time.

But enough of background stories for a shooting game – the important thing really is the whole challenge of these games. On that: this is not easy, but there is one thing that makes life easier. There are no lives; instead, you have a clock to race, and every time you die, the time gets moved up. So don’t die too much, or you will lose.

However, one of the most frustrating part about the game is that there are no continues. If you die (by running out of time by either not reaching the boss before the last order time or dying at the boss when it is already last order time, therefore kicking you out), then you will have to start again from the very beginning. Luckily, the game is only three stages, but still, it’s not an easy game.

Uwabami Breakers was made by a 同人 (doujin) circle known as 呑んべぇ会 (のんべぇかい), which roughly translates as “The Drinking Party”, again from various sources online. The group includes ZUN, who is part of (or the only member of) Team Shanghai Alice that makes the 東方 (Touhou) series. But basically, the game, and the circle, was conceived in a bar while drunk.

Kind of funny how some of the best ideas usually come from bars and drunkenness, like the CSSS Frosh Week theme for 2006.

One day, while looking around for anime/manga updates on Tokyo Toshokan, I spotted a game known as exception. Apparently the full version was posted around a month ago, but tagged as something that I have not set my filters to see, so it was ignored.

So what is exception exactly? Well, it is yet another doujin shmup game, this one produced by primitive and is the third game they released. But what makes exception special?

Well, first off, it seems to be inspired by programming, which may or may not make it appeal to people in CS like myself. Bosses are named after common things like constructors, functions, iterators, threads, and more. I would be listing off more, but the game is pretty challenging and I only got up to level 4 (with thread as the boss) before I got the game over.

The visual theme is 3D abstract, which is reminiscent of noiz2sa. However, some of the concepts are different.

For one, the control scheme is different. Players can have their ship face any direction they want, shooting at blocks on a 2D plane, so as a result, using the mouse for aiming and keyboard for movement makes gameplay quite natural.

As well, the concept of dealing damage is quite different as well. Players can dish out damage the usual way with a normal shot, which is a blue stream. You can also do a massive lock-on shot which you can hold onto to aim at enemies, then release to shoot out a lot of blue lasers to kill the enemy. Now, depending on the difficulty level, when you destroy an enemy, they leave a bunch of blocks floating around in space. The third way to deal damage, which is by far the most effective thing to do in exception, is to propel blocks at enemies at a fairly reasonable speed. However, this attack requires a charge up, which does so automatically, but is increased faster when you destroy more stuff.

The thing that really makes this game stand out is that it is something you can play with friends. exception has a co-op multiplayer mode, where a group of players can take on the game together, because, you know, Japanese shmups are insanely hard.

And here’s obligatory videos – these are the same ones that are on the exception website.

Basically, a mash-up post covering what happened over the past while. I’ve been busy with other things and it makes everything just kinda crazy.

Dine Out Vancouver 2008

Dine Out went through quite well this year. I went to four different places this year.

First up with J.J.’s Fine Dining. This is located at the VCC Downtown Vancouver campus and is actually ran as part of the culinary arts program VCC has. I have gone there in the past for their buffet on Fridays and it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the dine out experience. The thing that stood out strongly was the fact that I was never asked for how I wanted my steak done, which left everyone who ordered the steak entree with well done steak. Even those who stated how well they wanted their steak done never got their requests made either. I can not exactly blame them though; the restaurant is a training facility for up and coming chefs and servers after all.

After that came a trip to The Cannery Restaurant. This restaurant is located within the Vancouver Port and one will need to go through port security to get to the place. At $35 per person for dine out, it was a worthwhile experience. The food was absolutely delicious and they do something new as well, which was quite interesting. Most restaurants would give you bread and butter. Others would give you bread and a mix of balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Here, they give you a mix of balsamic vinegar and lobster oil, which is quite good. Definitely going to be going again next year if possible.

A camp later (which will be talked about below) and before the snowstorm that saw SFU closed for two days, I found myself at Horizons Restaurant on Burnaby Mountain, a short bus ride (and if I did what I was planning to do, a hike up) from SFU. The food was quite delicious and the night view of the city was beautiful.

Finally, I went to Gramercy Grill. This small-ish West side eatery on Arbutus had a pretty good dine out menu. Usually, you cannot get quite full from the various dine out experiences, but the portions served up were quite large and I left fairly full. Maybe that was why they charged extra for extra bread..

All in all, the whole dine out experience this year was quite good and I look forward to next year’s Dine Out Vancouver!

Winter Camping

When my co-workers found out that I was going camping in the snow in late January, they were in disbelief and going on about how cold it is and all that stuff. Some were curious about winter camping too.

To be honest, before heading off, I was quite nervous myself. Ever since I became a Scout leader, the winter camping component of the program was done with a winter camp at the Mount Seymour group campsite, which usually would not have too much snow. The campsite we went to this time around was the Cambie Creek site at Manning Park, home of the annual Rovent camp for Venturers and Rovers. Usually, what the site would look like is a big open field full of snow, several feet deep, providing good opportunities to do very awesome stuff like snow caving, snowball fights, tobogganing/sledding, snow sculpting, and, of course, camping in the snow.

Of course, the Manning Park campsite itself is a lot colder than what the Seymour site is, so various safety concerns were going though my head as the date loomed closer. “Would the kids get frostbite? Would they be warm enough? Did we prepare them well enough?” The list went on.

Thankfully, the camp itself was one organized on an Area level (so various Scout groups together at once) and with everyone’s joint efforts, the kids were well prepared and the camp went without incident.

I guess the biggest highlight of the entire camp itself happened on Friday night before everyone else got in. After going in and setting up the various shelters for first aid and stuff, I took some time to shut off my headlight and just look up. The skies were clear and you could just see all the stars in the sky. It was really beautiful and made me wish I had a camera that would be able to take such detailed pictures.

五月雨 ~samidare~

Astute readers would perhaps recall a previous post that mentioned that I wanted to try out a game called 五月雨 ~samidare~. Well, I found the game and holy crap is it hard. But like all shooting games of the variety, 五月雨 ~samidare~ is all about observing and understanding the various shot patterns to dodge them effectively; however, the game makes that somewhat easier with a rechargeable shield that absorbs the shots to temporarily increase your firepower as opposed to a finite number of screen clearing bombs.

However, despite the shield and all that, the game itself is still not easy. Just give it a go; you can see why I say that for yourself.

ねこみみのかけら (Nekomimi no Kakera) released DieFeen, which is a shooting game (like most other games I have been talking about these past couple of days). Unfortunately, there are no trailers and there are no gameplay videos to leech, so I will have to provide screenshots instead, which fortunately enough for me are available on the website.

It is a very pretty-looking game and quite different from the general STG. For starters, your two characters have three different firing modes, just like Ether Vapor.

Both player controlled characters have four Feens (at least, that’s what I think they are in-game; the general term are satelites or options I think). Depending on what firing mode you choose, they form a different formation. It appears that they do take damage if hit with enemy fire, but I don’t know if they actually can die. I never tried it but you, the reader, can and let me know afterwards.

Ariel, the 猫耳少女 (nekomimi shoujo) is a catgirl that flies on a broom. She can put her Feens out in front of her (front), get them to follow her around, like Marisa’s first choice in Mountain of Faith (follow), or fly around her with the shots going around like a windmill (rolling).

Nebel, the うさみみ少年 (usamimi shounen – not really sure what it means although Gjiten says sad-earred boy, which does not make any sense) is a boy with dark rabbit ears that has little wings on his back, which are used to fly around. His firing modes have him putting his Feens to the side (side), facking backwards (back) or overlapping himself to get a wide firing arch (hide).

Personally, I like using Nebel more, since the side and back formations are really effective in taking out enemies in the front and back respectively.

Another thing that makes DieFeen a bit different is the fact that you have a ridiculous number of bombs. In this game, Feens are also your bombs, although they are inside a bag and you start off with 16 inside.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the Feens get replaced by the ones inside your bag if they die…

Oh well, like I said, you readers can find out and let me know.