Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Tyranexx I've collected some songs, both licensed pre-existing music, and stuff from the score, for your listening convenience. They're all relatively calming, except for the final two songs, which are battle themes. If anyone else wishes to listen to some calming music from the game, please do so and give me your thoughts!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL86gtWP6Q84h4ribFkrGLkczxp...

Alright wow. Stardew Valley has become my 4th game to reach 400+ hours on Switch. And I just realized this is my 4th farm. I feel like there might be some hidden meaning here. lol

Anyway the 1.5 update really fixed my only real issue with the game - and that was that it used to feel like once you completed the community center/Joja stuff there was nothing really left to aim for besides big profits and a handful of magic buildings. But 1.5 (and somewhat 1.4) gave us so much more to do that the community center feels like a mid point now!

Stardew Valley really shows what a passion project can become. I'll never not be totally blown away that the game was made almost entirely by one person.

I've been playing online with my brother on the new beach farm and it's been fun. Can't wait to reach the new island.

I drew realistic style young man for Drawing lesson grade 4 yesterday.

Oh, yeah. Sorry for the shorter looking of his legs as i drew it on A4 paper, not F4 paper. 😅

I changed my avatar again into Beatmania IIDX 27 HEROIC VERSE.

I guess the Chit-Chat thread is Instagram or Facebook for some people.

@Zuljaras I wanted to begin a text wall with a longer post but having seen this I'm properly amused for sure! I doubt anyone has a marginally passionate interest in Beatmania on this thread, or even the forums at all.

Now onto the juice for today. Seems I make a daily post to @ThanosReXXX and @Tyranexx (sorry to @ you twice) not that that's bad at all!

@Tyranexx I started my spring break today and sure enough returned to some games I haven't managed to get into for a few weeks; Ghost of Tsushima and Kingdom Hearts III. I played KH3 this morning and the thing that sticks with me the most is just the unruly amount of lore that's thrown in your face in the first four hours or so. I'm six hours in, and have beaten Olympus and the Kingdom of Corona from Tangled, I can confirm this once again.

I'm a relatively fast player in general, and I'm not exactly incompetent with a controller, so those two combined factors mean I would be a bit faster than what's expected from a normal player. Another thing that becomes painfully obvious is the potentially repetitive combat, which isn't helped by the shoehorning of Heartless and Nobody enemies into every open space. As soon as Goofy says "Uh-yuh, sure glad there ain't no Heartless!" bam, they show up, almost as if the game is making fun of the script. It's fun though to visit worlds that I experienced as a child, and to in a way re-live some key moments from various films. Of course the animation isn't perfect and it really depends on which characters are being covered, but it's very solid for the original characters like Sora... and that's pretty much it for well-designed original characters.

I’ve also noticed that at times the writing and the story in general, are so contrived and confusing. It took me six hours to figure out the meanings of the following glossary terms; “Organisation XIII”, “Nobody”, “Heartless”, and “Keyblade”. I’m completely new to the franchise so of course jumping in near the end of the so-called “Xehanort Saga” will have pitfalls. It’s almost a basic expectation at this point to expect wonky writing from true Square Enix games, especially the games that have anything to do with Tetsuya Nomura.

Another element I’d associate with Tetsuya Nomura games is a crazily simple menu with a simple arrangement of the main theme; FF7, FFX, FFX-2, and pretty much every KH game in existence. The KH3 menu is strangely nice because of the concept artwork in the background, and the amazing rendition of “Dearly Beloved”.

Ghost of Tsushima I only played for an hour but really advanced the story. I finished Act I and took down so many Mongols in my quest to rescue my uncle. The combat is so smooth, and a nice challenge even on Easy Mode. It's also very violent, something I can appreciate because it's not gratuitous, and it honestly doesn't even look that realistic to begin with (it looks like dark mud). The graphics are gorgeous though, and some really stellar shots are used in game, and combined with the black-and-white filter makes for the ultimate Kurosawa film.

@ThanosReXXX I notice with Forza games that their HUDs are really asymmetrical and have a curved look, as if they're holograms projected onto the windscreen of the car. It has a very arcade-y feel when you look at it, but I imagine the track list and car physics (especially the damage model as you mentioned) are top-notch. As @Heavyarms55 says, Japanese development is much more unified, and I suppose makes for a tighter experience overall.

My father worked for a Korean construction company over twenty years ago, and he described it as extremely intense, and unforgiving environment. Granted this was in the mid-nineties but regardless he once witnessed a junior engineer get backhanded twice across the face because he made a slight miscalculation that forced the construction crew to scrape off a small amount of concrete.

I imagine it's similar in Japan, though companies such as Nintendo are willing to delay their games to avoid overworking their staff. Japanese employees tend to work at the same company for decades, so I also imagine the Gran Turismo games have at least a core group of employees that were involved in every game from 1997 onwards. While the Forza games have been released every two years between 2005 and 2017, the GT games have been inconsistently released. At first it was also one game every two years but the wait between GT5 and GT6 was huge (six years). And we haven't gotten a numbered GT game since 2013, when GT6 was released.

I was looking up the Forza series online when I saw a small but fascinating piece of info on the Turn 10 Wikipedia page; that they built a proprietary software to allow multiple artists to collaborate on 3D design in real time. To quote that moron Travis Northup in his Xenoblade Chronicles review; "that's crazy that this wasn't a thing already,". That must have sped things up dramatically, making for more detailed car and track models, finished in less time. I'd agree with your comparison between Japanese and Western protags too. Ghost of Tsushima really bridges this gap because it's a Japanese man, Jin Sakai, played in English by a Japanese actor, Daisuke Tsuji, in a game developed by a Western studio; Sucker Punch.

F1; none taken at all, I’d completely understand reasons against it. But for me there’s a nice magic that takes over the room whenever a Grand Prix weekend happens. Next week Sunday is actually the start of a new season, so naturally I’m very excited. The Bahrain International Circuit actually opened up to half capacity for residents, but I can’t go, because I’m not vaccinated… so it’s a punch to the gut for sure.

@TheJGG
I changed my avatar into IIDX 27 Heroic Verse.
What do you think ?

Just 8 or 10 more days to salary day so i can quickly buy Pop'n Music controller for PS2 and i will get Beatmania IIDX 9th style PS2 + Pop'n Music 8 PS2. 😀

My gaming world is completely opposite by majority users here. I'm very sure you have no idea what the heck is Beatmania IIDX, how to play them, what are the songlist, how does it sounds, how is the gameplay, etc. When i posted comment on "What are you listening right now", recently i typed any Beatmania IIDX songs that i listened almost everyday.

I still not good at playing Beatmania IIDX but i will practice during pandemic.

So I beat crash 4 now its time to 100%, but the thing is for me getting the flashback tape in Cortex castle is going to be hell but I feel like people talked the hell up with that level I died only like 20 times and it wasn't even that hard I only died bc I din't know what was coming next, it wasn't long it wasn't taxing on my lives All in all the level is hard if doing the flash back tape but is not to bad when doing it by itself.

As much as I love writing I will not do a text wall, the risk of having to start all over is like a Punch in the nuts, sooooo.

@Anti-Matter It's fascinating you change your profile picture. I thought about it myself but I can't think of anything that would represent me the best at the moment. The colours are quite nice and it reminded me of the gorgeous colour style of Life is Strange: True Colours,

And immediately after posting; I liked it so much that I ended up changing my picture for the first time. I saved the K_RAI image on my computer so it'll be a very liberal change that can be reverted at any time.

@TheJGG
Last time i changed into IIDX 15 DJ TROOPERS logo.
The color schemes was not my favorite (military colors) but the opening theme was great (Fang by DJ Yoshitaka)

Believe it or not, this Beatmania IIDX 16 EMPRESS (Also on DDR X2), Smooooch・∀・by kors k was a huge favorite and there were a lot of character swaps version made by fans.
Here are the comparison.

Original

Fan made

@Snatcher The last two text walls I've written took me six hours of on-off activity to finish, so I cut and pasted them into my Notes app. It's perfectly doable if you have loads to say and are able to articulate and organise your thoughts well.

@Anti-Matter can say it's the fire emblem awakening short leg style!

@TheJGG While Japanese and Korean culture do have certain similarities, lumping them together would be, generously speaking, about as accurate as saying German and Russian cultures can be lumped together because of proximity. Yeah Japan and Korea are in the same general region but remember that Japan and the Korean peninsula are separated by water. For much of their history only the wealthy could travel back and forth and they weren't really on friendly terms. (even today, even South Korea still holds some lingering resentment toward Japan for past issues) They both have very distinct cultures.

Though I would say they are much closer to each other than they would be toward American or British or German culture.

Insert derivative Zelda joke

@Snatcher Congrats on beating Crash 4, looking forward to playing it soon since my birthday is next month and hoping to get it. It's nice to see a new Crash game out. The remakes were cool, but it's nice to have a new one to play.

@Eel that was gold. Thank you

@Tyranexx I was actually deliberating about replacing "kidnapped" Wii with "hostaged", but having lived here for so long, I actually started doubting if this was correct English, and apparently I've been mulling that over for so long, that I ultimately forgot to edit my comment...

As for gardening: I'm SO very glad I have an empty, concrete and steel balcony, because I'm not good with plants and lawns, like not at ALL. I guess I'd better just stick to trimming my beard...

@ogo79 I dare you to tell that to the Chinese, who are about to take over your country by way of Mexican industry... (just saw that on the news today, as well as the "friendly" talks between the US and Chinese governments).

@TheJGG The HUD? As in the moving/rotating road map, or the speedometer? I never even noticed it in that great a detail. As any smart driver should, I keep my eyes on the road, young sir...

But yeah, Turn 10's history and track record is enormously interesting. Especially how fast they learned and became a team that's at the forefront of racing sim development. What's also exemplary for me, is that they go above and beyond with EVERYTHING, the cars, the tracks, the sounds, something that has also been of varying quality in the GT games. I still remember the previous iteration (or perhaps it was the one before that), where they bluntly told in an interview that they had only added (full) damage models to the main roster of cars, and not to the extras/unlockable ones.

That to me was something astounding. The way I see it is that you either MAKE a sim, or you don't, and doing something half-@ssed is something that I myself could also never do, so I couldn't understand that way of thinking/operating. But I guess they had their reasons.

As for Japanese work-ethos, I obviously don't know as much about it as @Heavyarms55 does (interesting comment about that, by the way, my friend), but I did have the pleasure of having worked with a couple of Japanese people (as well as people from China and India) when I used to work for Compaq and Hewlett Packard, back in 2000. It's a somewhat distant memory nowadays, but I definitely do remember them being team-spirited and VERY focused. The people from India and China as well, by the way, so perhaps it's something that most Asian countries share.

(edit: The word meticulous comes to mind. I've FINALLY found a better word instead of "clinical". Took me some time, aye? But that also finally nails the sentiment about the difference between GT and Forza for me: Forza cars get down and dirty, GT cars drive around as if they are still in the pristine environment of the factory, never a speck of dust on them. It's grit vs apparent perfect vision, but for me, grit is more realistic)

On a side note: I had to laugh a bit at @Snatcher's text wall-related comment. He probably still has nightmares about my previous "almost lost forever" text wall incident...

@ThanosReXXX Yeah I didn't mean to suggest they don't have things in common, but it's less than a lot of people who don't have experience with them might think. I do think it's accurate to say that many Asian cultures do tend to be more group minded/collective/team oriented than Euro-American cultures. At least in broad terms.