RSS | karakuri babble http://i360.com/editorials/flash/ A lightly textured daily babble from the editors of i360.com en-US A review of something impossible. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/265 Ibara instead, a shooting game by CAVE CO, LTD. "We make our clever plans and the gods kick them to pieces."

I think that's a George R. R. Martin quote, but I can't seem to find it. Anyway. Ibara. As you might have guessed, I like games that are serious and hardcore. (I play other games, and even enjoy them, but I always feel kind of depressed afterwards.) Ibara. . . is probably about as hardcore as it gets, even by the standards of shooting games, which is outright ludicrous. It's the spiritual successor to Battle Garegga, which one can still watch people play at Hey in Akihabara, nearly 20 years after its release. (As far as I can tell, no one plays Battle Garegga casually. If you go to Hey and put a quarter in the machine, you're very, very good.)

In Ibara nothing is casual, nothing is accidental. It's got rank, which means that every action you take makes the game harder. Every bullet fired, every item picked up, every enemy destroyed. It's got medal chaining. It's got drops that depend on whether you shoot or bomb. (And a pattern of enemy drops that you want to watch and exploit, giving us in effect a chaining system.) Your powerups do different things depending on what angle you hit them at. (And they increase rank differently, don't forget.) There are ways of triggering certain powerups by letting other items go past. You can milk bosses. And you have to make all these decisions while dodging the traditional bullet curtain.

Needless to say, I'm terrible at it, but it's actually still fun, which might be its most impressive accomplishment.

And it's deep, with mechanics that you could play a long time without ever noticing.. For example, if you've got enough bomb, you can hold down the button and fire the wave motion gun -- and there's a momentary flash of invincibility right when it charges up. Not when it fires -- that happens when you let go, and you can hold the button down as long as you want -- but just for an instant about a half-second after you've started holding down the button.

It is, in short, a hard and immersive game. The fact that it's also ridiculously cosplayable is just gravy.]]> Spring. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/264
Of course, as an incorrigible Touhou fan, I couldn't help thinking of an album by 回路~kairo~ -- and, I wake up under the cherry blossoms tonight. It's a good album, but my favorite thing about it is actually the track list. The song titles are meant to be read together:

舞い散る夢は
遠い音に乗せて
繋がる糸の様に
小さな温もりと、
懐かしい場所と、
君の声と、
在るべき世界を
此処に紡ぐ


my translation:

dreams flutter earthward
with faint sounds
tying together
a small warmth,
a nostalgic place,
your voice,
an ideal world,
woven right here.
]]> Machines are people too. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/263
Yeah.

I had one of those the other day while listening to Eager Love Revenge, the 「恋は戦争」 remix compilation album. There's a moment where Miku sings offhandedly:
泣いてなんかないんだからね
It's just a perfect moment, and each mix handles it a little differently. Some are bouncy. Some aggressive. Some are genuinely sad, Just a little lost robot, insisting that she isn't crying.]]> Sometimes the old ways are best. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/262 ZiGGURAT. It's ridiculous, an atavism, a thing that has no earthly business existing. It's like a casual version of Ikaruga. Or, if you're not into that genre, think the classic arcade beat-em-ups. Streets of Rage, maybe. Think Tetris or Contra. It's got that way of taking over your attention completely, so that your field of view shrinks to a tiny circle around your character that you're trying to keep clear of everything trying to kill you, and when it's over your vision gradually widens out and you realize as the fog clears that you haven't really been devoting as much attention to breathing as you should have been, those last 30 seconds.

It's like that, but a "casual game." It is hardcore. I'm told it has a true last boss, which like all true last bosses I'll probably never be good enough to see.

(For those of you unaware, a True Last Boss is an extra, impossible boss that comes as a bonus after you think the game's done, if you've performed certain impossible tasks first. Hibachi from DoDonPachi is the canonical example. The idea of putting one in an iOS game is downright absurd.)

Anyway. I paid a dollar for it, which is a rarity in itself, and I've spent a few hours playing it, and it's something you should buy if you like games. I don't mean, like to pick up a game when you have a moment. I'm talking about the sort of like where you pick up the game and play it until your eyes no longer focus, and only put it down because it doesn't seem likely that you'll beat your high score until your vision recovers.

Let's put it this way: it doesn't have a pause button. Yes, you can pause by leaving the app, but if you're far enough along for it to matter, you're pretty much guaranteed to die five seconds after you come back. It's that kind of game. It demands concentration.]]> Usurper of the Sun is a great title. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/261 Usurper of the Sun, by NOJIRI Housuke. (I try to read novels in Japanese, but it's slow and taxing. . . so I cheat a lot.)

The book's been sitting in my pile of stuff to talk about ever since. It's a bit of a problem for me -- I like it, but the prose is terrible. It's got an evocative title, a neat premise, and an elegant minimum of character development. It's a pretty good book. But the style made it a difficult slog.

I'm not claiming to have perfect taste in prose style -- I have strong tastes, with which reasonable people may disagree. But the writing here -- and, to be clear, I blame the translator entirely -- is leaden. Ponderous, slow, inelegant. And somehow the dialogue is even worse. Stilted and unnatural, even in the most emotional moments.

But, you know, it's a hard thing they set out to do. Dialogue takes practice. Translation is difficult. I couldn't have done it, so I shouldn't judge John WUNDERLEY so stringently. I did read the book, and I genuinely enjoyed it. And maybe the style is a perfect translation of the original, in which case I redirect all my criticism accordingly.

It reminds me of something Jeff mentioned to me once. He was talking about the most famous translator in Hong Kong, a legend in his field, who said that he never read the original. He worked from detailed summaries and wrote afresh what he perceived the author intended. They said that he captured the spirit of the work -- that a person reading one of his translations would be affected just as one who read the original. And I think that's really the most you can ask.]]> It's magic because it doesn't obey physical laws. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/260
But I don't believe it's perfect, and in particular there's one theme in the spinoff "A Different Story" manga that drives me crazy: why did they decide that scarcity and resource competition would be the driving force of their world? I don't mean internally, I'm not saying there are plot holes (there might be, but that's really not how I operate.) I mean that the creators, having been given the opportunity to build anything they wanted, the sort of beautiful and clean blank slate that we only have in media like anime, immediately deciding that they'll have their characters fight and die for the moral equivalent of a tank of gas. Outrageous. It feels cheap, more so because the rest of the frame is so grand, so awesome and terrible. They've got reasons to fight already. There's no need for them to go to war over a handful of grief seeds.

I don't know. Partly I have a bad visceral reaction to it because we know what scarcity is. It's unpleasant, and I have a suspicion that it's dehumanizing. Yes, you can do things with it that you couldn't do otherwise -- but not in MadoMagi. The most powerful moments would lose none of their power, none of their internal logic, if they weren't fighting for a MacGuffin.

I don't know. Or maybe they would. Why else have Kyoko and Sayaka fight? I can come up with other reasons, but do they fit in a 3-volume manga, or even a 12-episode series? Don't know. I just wish they'd done something a little different, that's all.]]> More Touhou. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/259

Spring is here! (In best Lily White voice.)

And therefore, an excellent time to link to an animated version of Perfect Cherry Blossom, a game about the seasons' changing.

The striking thing about this animated version is how polished it is, how gratuitously professional and well-animated. (Definitely not the one-man project that the original game was, though. The credit sequence is impressive in its own right.)

That's another element that strikes me about this video -- the massive amount of cooperation and coordination that must have been necessary to make it happen. I've always been amazed at the sheer breadth and scale of the Touhou fan community, and this is just another of those colossal projects that it seems to produce nonchalantly every few months.

And of course it's great fun. Very faithful to the original, but of course one doesn't really have time to focus on the plot in a shooting game. Seeing it like this, at a distance, makes it work better. Gives it more texture and detail. Yes, one whispers, clearly this was what ZUN intended.]]> I laugh in the general direction of user-friendliness. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/258
So I guess this means it's time to work on some kind of editing interface, so that uploading pictures isn't some kind of Herculean task. ("Actually, Hercules would find this difficult.")

And, of course, because I basically swore off working with web interfaces, the most likely outcome here is that it'll be based on SCPing stuff to a shared folder with a text file that gets parsed and causes a server-side process to update the database, process images, und so weiter, &c.]]> Once upon a time. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/257
The origin of the phrase, as a very quick web search will show, is in a cover blurb for the game Ikaruga, provided by IGN and for some unfathomable reason used by the publisher. "Our frothing demand for this game increases."

It's a piece of ephemera better forgotten, I suppose, but I still like it.

(Also, this column is short and pointless because my actual purpose here was to fix a truly stunning bug in my input form. You know how every program, no matter how small, can be shortened by at least one line and has at least one bug? This is like some kind of classroom demo of the principle.)]]> Wow, a round number. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/256
Not that I let such questions trouble me most of the time, of course. It's been an exciting year -- we attended conventions, travelled unreservedly, gorged on pretension and suffered comeuppance. (At least, that's how I remember things. There's some narrative smudging at work, to be sure.)

And, with all that, I really haven't been writing very much at all. Too busy, I guess. Too busy at times, too tired at others, sometimes depressed or perhaps just lazy. But whatever. It's another year soon, and what better time to kick out some of the stuff we've got half-written, and see if maybe it's worth reading anyway?

Plus, I think we'll feel better just getting rid of some of the stuff we're blocking on. Inbox Zero. A festivus resolution.]]> internet <3 cosplayers http://i360.com/editorials/flash/255
Let's find these roots, courtesy of a lead from @scruffyrebel, and a little bit of searching around to figure out what seems to have happened. It starts with Tony Harris, comic artist for a multitude of series. His Facebook rant (this link as a backup in case), regardless of agreement, was certainly poorly written, if not downright "dickish".

A contemporary of his takes the role of his nemesis: Gail Simone, a writer closely attached with DC and their line of comics. Her disgust with the rant led to a tweet with her impromptu declaration of today as Cosplay Appreciation Day. Her relative visibility helped spread the idea. I guess sometimes, it's good to have 25k+ followers on Twitter.

This outpouring has been interesting as it has spread throughout social media. Some people reacting with love, others with cynicism toward the whole thing. Though in general, no one reacting with a whole lot of defense for poorly chosen words.

Of course, this all follows the media's love of the narrative that good can conquer evil, and that social media is a tool for doing so. While I'm not one to like the narrative all that much, it's hard today to argue that there are times when social media can be a positive. We on staff have always been appreciative of cosplayers both for the hard work they've done to entertain and make dreams come true for others, as well as their friendship to us and others over many years. Regardless of my feelings of the idea of needing a day for something like this, the sentiment is at least in the right place.

So today's to you, cosplayers. Happy Cosplayer Appreciation Day!]]> More penguins. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/254
I'm not finished by any means.  I'm still not sure where the endgame is, or even how the pieces are laid out.  But I've seen enough to take this seriously.

Nothing I've seen dispels my interpretation of this as Utena 3.  The details, I'm still working out.  For a while I suspected that this was a means to justify Akio's behavior -- the Paradise Lost of Ikuhara's eschatology, if you like.  I'm not abandoning that.  I'm not even halfway through.  Theories grow like mushrooms in the night.  For now, I can believe whatever I want to believe.

And I love the Ringo x Shoma plot.  The whole thing works perfectly -- so much so that I might suspect Ikuhara himself of never having grown up.

And -- one last thing -- the idea that Ikuhara could have let MURAKAMI Haruki define his world to this extent is almost beyond belief.  How far back does it go?
]]> Initial impressions. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/253
But initial impression, from one episode?  Utena 3.  I wonder if SAITO Chiho's involved, informally.]]> A note after Fanime. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/252
And here we are, two weeks later.  I went to Fanime.  It was fun, as always.  I attended a few panels, followed YAMAGA Hiroyuki around a little bit.  He's always entertaining.  Drank perhaps as much as I should, but probably not more.  Marveled at how well they've managed to adapt, after all these years.

And I'll write more on that later.  But for now, I'm just amused at how badly I misjudged the role of the column in relation to conventions.
]]> There's pansies, that's for thoughts. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/251