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Carmell Dansen: It’s A Slow Friday

Unlike most anime series that eventually make it to the West, Xamdou is exclusively being distributed via the Playstation Network.

Using an online gaming network in this manner is quite interesting, as it’s a very highly focused distribution concept that targets the niche consumer that’s more likely to appreciate anime.

I’ve seen the first season (13 episodes) so far and despite the plot and setting that has shades of Eureka 7 in it,  I’m finding Xamdou enjoyable and engrossing.

I’m overdue for my anime write-ups so I’ll be covering Xamdou, Kannagi, Ga-Rei Zero and Kannagi.

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Xam’d (Xamdou)

At just $119 USD, even amateur animators can afford this:

You can specify virtual facial landmarks and don’t necessarily have to apply reference stickers to the actor’s face.

While adjustment is still necessary once a captured facial animation is applied, this can be a tremendous time savings since it does all the rough-in animation work for you.

But I think I’d find it hard to “act” in front of my webcam though.

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Poser Gets A Face Lift

Is MS Igloo 2, Episode 1, we find the Earth Federation forces in an all-out retreat in multiple theaters around the world as the Zeon forces launch their global invasion on multiple fronts.

Anti-Mobile Suit Specialist Commander Lt. Ben Barberry is among the thousands of Federation soldiers in retreat when he’s handed a seemingly impossible mission:  Bring down three Zaku Mobile Suits who’re threatening the retreating forces with nothing more than some missiles and the surviving members of his battle-weary infantry squad.

The motion capture and facial animation is exaggerated to the point where it almost shifts the episode into comedic territory and the dose of Uncanny Valley doesn’t help things either.

The distorted visage of the characters are sure to become Internet meme.  Seriously… Look at these screen shots!

It’s funny that I was criticizing other Japanese CG animated productions, Appleseed and Vexel,  for a lack of character facial animation.  But MS Igloo 2 has too much of it.

Honestly, I’m still trying to decide whether this level of camp is actually intentional or not.

Minovsky Particles: Barberry says that there is a level-6 Minovsky particle field density.  If you’re familiar with Gundam lore, Minovsky particles create an I-field which interferes with all radar and radio communitions, yet the squad is communicating with each other using field radios.

Minovsky Particles are long-lived and sufficiently powerful to prevent MS and capital ship-class radar and EM communications systems from working in the deployment area for up to 29 days after they’re deployed.  Yet, these field radios can somehow cut through that?

Poor Tactics: Going up against three Zaks is bad enough but to do so in an open field from behind waist-high crumbling stone wall is just plain stupid.  It’s made even more foolish when you consider the fact that the squad drove through a deserted town just a short distance away from their ambush point, with plenty of stone buildings they could have used for cover and concealment.

Sexy Grim Reaper: In the beginning, a female Death God appears.  Yeah, that’s right.  I’m not kidding.  Straight out of left field, some sexy chick in armour lands on Earth during the war and it’s apparent, she’s there partly for Barberry.  I’m guessing she’s supposed to make an appearance in every episode and be the common thread that ties all of them together because she’s featured prominently in the end credits sequence.

One of the things that made the original Gundam popular was its realistic portrayal of space colonization and mecha weaponry during a time in anime when more improbable God Mecha ruled.   And yet they throw in this supernatural, straight-from-Final Fantasy character into it.  Utter silliness…

Conclusion

Despite the camp, the melodrama, over-acting and high school drama class script that must have taken about 5 minutes to write, the fact that this is Gundam material from the original continuity (minus the sexy Death God), and it’s realized with some decent CG actually makes this kinda watchable.

If you’re neither a Gundam nor computer animation fan, I doubt you’d get much mileage about of MS Igloo 2— although the facial expressions might be good for a laugh.

But Bandai really needs to avoid the CG studio that specializes in the creepy, rubber-faced character animation and hire some real writers for a change too!

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Gundam: MS Igloo 2

Sadly, the gameplay is heavily recycled and despite the interesting set-up that explains why all the races have gathered in the Kaurava planetary system,  there’s only the thinnest of plot threads connecting everything together.

Quite frankly, the story seems to just fade into irrelevance amidst the string of battles.  If I was in Relic’s/Iron Lore’s shoes, I think it  would have been better to shore up the “more of the same” game play with a decent story to lay down the foundation for Dawn of War 2’s plot.

If they couldn’t do anything new with the game play, they could have at least done something more with the story.

The battles had been growing in scope.  Dark Crusade introduced a continent-wide campaign and the now Soulstorm has scaled it up to an entire solar system.  Unfortunately, this expanded scope is by and large, cosmetic.

The amount of territories you have to capture is still the same as in Dark Crusade (31), except movement occurs on a solar system map instead of a planetary one.  The expanded scope really has no significant effect on game play when it comes down to it.

The highlight of Soulstorm is really the two new factions:

The Adepta Sororitas (Sisters of Battle).  They are the warrior nuns of the Imperium and bring a fanatical religious zeal to the battlefield.  Their duty is to root out corruption and Heresy (basically the Spanish Inquisition in space) even if it involves cleansing other forces of the Imperium; Space Marine and Imperial Guard included.

Though not genetically altered and in the same class of super-soldier as their Space Marine brethren,  the fanaticism of the Sisters of Battle makes them no less deadly.  Their belief in the God-Emperor allows them to utilize special battlefield abilities called “Acts of Faith”.

Dark Eldar - Basically, the Chaos-tainted and very sadistic version of the Eldar.  They harvest a unique resource in the form of the souls of the war-fallen and their tactics rely mainly on speed and unit debuffing poisons and stuns as well as calling upon the favour of Chaos.

A lengthy bug list with some pretty significant bugs (E.g. trainers/cheats worked in multiplayer!) and the delay in bringing out the latest patch for the game didn’t help the lackluster ratings that Soulstorm earned from some critics.

Despite the problems with Soulstorm, the fascinating and highly detailed units, excellent presentation, all backed by deep Warhammer lore are still able to hold the player’s interest.

If you enjoyed Dawn of War, or more concisely Dark Crusade, it’s possible you may still get some enjoyment out of Soulstorm because of the two new factions— but judgin from the gripes I’ve read, even that’s not enough for some players.

Ultimately, it’s just more of the same and it isn’t exactly the kind of blockbuster finale expansion one would expect that would cap off the series until Dawn of War 2 comes out in Spring 2009.

Just make sure to get the latest patch!  The “fixes” list is quite lengthy!

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SoulStorm

Lately I’ve been receiving an increasing number of these spammer group invitations and I’m reluctant to mark them as junk mail since it’ll poison the Bayesian database and probably flag legitimate Yahoo Group invitations as junk as well.

I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people just delete these spam invitations and move on and no one is bothering to report them.   In the past, I’ve done the same.   It’s quick, it’s easy.

However, this time I’ve been making the small effort to report every single spam invitation I’ve received.  I was expecting days before they took action (or no action at all) but I was surprised at the responsiveness of Yahoo’s abuse department.

Within just a few hours (and even sooner in some cases), the spam group and its connected user account was deleted.

In contrast,  I reported a site that carried a virus/malware payload to its host’s abuse department.  That was back in September…  Two months later, the site is still there and injecting its payload into hapless visitors.

But like all scumbags, spammers count on user— and sometimes host/sysadmin— apathy to help them continue to do their dirty work.

Has this experienced changed my outlook?  Hmmm… maybe it shifted it just a little over to the positive side even though I acknowledge the fact that it can be a futile battle to fight.  The spammers simply create another user, another group (probably by the hundreds) and send out invitations again.

One person submitting an abuse report may not amount to much.  But many people doing that could get some results.

It’s something to consider…

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Yahoo Group Invitation Spam

Cute ’splayed legs’ action going on there too.

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Self-Packaging Cat

I’m impressed by both the birds’ vocalizations, and the fact that the voice recog software inside Tom Clancy’s EndWar game can understand them.

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Tom Clancy’s EndWar is for the Birds

My hit list in no particular order:

Dead Space: Was on my hit list, now I’m playing it!  (Thanks kivrin!) Creepy sci-fi survival horror which is a nice change-over from the flood of zombie survival horror games.

Tom Clancy’s EndWar: When I heard about it, I thought it was just another RTS that I was going to pass up, even though I’ve liked the Tom Clancy line of games. I.e Rainbow Six et al.  But apparently this game has a lot going for it including a decent voice command feature with accurate voice recognition.

Fallout 3: Large post-apocalyptic world, plenty of characters to interact with, visceral combat and a natural choice for those feeling nostalgic about the Fallout series.  I’m more interested in getting the PC version for this as I’m hoping that it’ll have mods, much like Oblivion did.

Gears of War 2: I loved Gears of War and I’d like to see where the story is heading. They actually hired a professional writer for this one too!I loved Gears of War but didn’t play it much online. However, I’m thinking that this might be the time to jump into GoW multiplayer with the new online game types and maps.

Left 4 Dead: My comments about Dead Space being a nice change from the usual zombie-based survival horror might leave the impression that I’m bored with that genre.  Far from it!

I saw the cinematic trailer for this game online and I was blown way!A fast-paced ‘multiplayer + zombie survival horror’ mix and the fact that it’s by Valve is surely a winning combination. If this was an Xbox 360 exclusive, chances are that I would have passed on it because Xbox Live has too many jerks that ruin the online gaming experience. Thank God this’ll be on the PC.

Everything in Moderation

While I’d love to jump in wholeheartedly into these games, that really is just way too much gaming goodness.  There are far more important things I should be taking care of and working towards and time is of the essence.

So I’ll probably hold off on Fallout 3 since that requires more substantial time investment.  I still might be able to do Gears of War 2’s multiplayer and Left 4 Dead on occasion since it’s possible to play quick pick-upgames instead of being tied up for hours on end.

It’s certainly a great time to be a gamer!

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Too Many Games!

Except for Thursdays, I usually play solo so most of the time which means I have to make do with PUGs (player user groups).  PUGs usually aren’t as organized as this and the quality of player tends to vary greatly.  Thus, it can sometimes be a little frustrating, with defeat being far more likely.

However, this bunch was well organized, well lead and it was a very enjoyable to participate even though I didn’t get any loot.

We took all the battlefield objectives and keeps in BlackFire Pass, The Badlands, High Pass and Talabecland.  It was a non-stop assault.

There was virtually no resistance.  There was this one humorous incident where the Order assault arrived at a tavern that’s one of the battlefield objectives.  We rushed to the door and just as I got there, the door opened and there was this one lone Destruction player.

He must have received the shock of his life when he opened that tavern door and saw a full warband right in front of him.  He closed the door on us but we rushed in and he lasted about half a second.

Stoneclaw Castle in High Pass proved to be more of a problem.  Some Destruction players managed to cobble together a defence in time to meet Order’s assault and we were met with cannon and hot oil.  But we had the advantage in numbers and in variety of character classes.  I.e. We had plenty of healers and ranged DPS (damage per second) classes like Bright Wizards and Shadow Warriors on hand to take out the castle’s weaponry on the battlements.

If you’re a Witch Hunter, good gear is absolutely vital. and unfortunately I didn’t get any good gear out of this.  But I did earn quite a bit of experience, Reknown points and I got the killing blows on at least 4 Destruction players which took a bit of doing considering how many other Order players were attacking the same targets.

All in all, it was a fun evening!

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Awesome Keep Raid Last Night

The study, conducted by researcher Craig Anderson, looked at children from Japan and United States and found an increase in violent behavior and aggressiveness that lasted up to five to six months after exposure.  The fact that the effects transcended cultural differences supposedly makes a powerful statement.

But the study is plagued with problems as GamePolitics.com reports.   According to their report, Texas A&M International University researcher Christopher Ferguson openly disputes the study, stating that it failed to take into account other variables such as genetics, family violence exposure, peer group influences and other media such as music and movies.

The study also didn’t look at actual violent behavior but made its conclusions based on test subjects’ hypothetical responses to aggressive situations presented to them by researchers.

Oh that’s good!  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that what people say they’ll do and what they will actually do, or be capable of doing, can be very different things— especially when you ask children!

In Ferguson’s own words, the researchers of the study  “simply ignore a wide body of research which conflicts with their views…”

The parents are the single most significant influence in a child’s life.   You don’t need a PhD to figure that out.  Yet these kinds of studies seem hell bent on laying the blame on everything else but the parents for the behavior of their children.

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Study “Conclusively” Links Video Games with Violent Behavior

I’ve started watching Casshern: Sins, a new series from the Fall 2008 line-up.  It’s a bleak rewrite of the original Casshern story that started out as a serial  Kodansha’s “Terebi Magazine” and Akita Shoten’s “Boken Oh”  and was given the animation treatment in 1973 wTwNjzVFVU

Taking a page out of the “Gundam Guide to Writing for Animation”, “Casshern: Sins” completely discards the established continuity.  In the original story, Casshern (aka Tetsuya Azuma) is a human-turned-cyborg superhero who teams up with a beautiful girl named Luna and a robot dog named Friender to rid the world of rampaging robots lead by the villainous Braiking Boss.

These robots were originally created for the betterment of the world and humankind by Casshern’s late father, Dr. Azama.  But the robots came to the conclusion that in order to restore the Earth’s ecosystems and to make the world a better place, humankind must be destroyed.  (Hard to argue with that logical conclusion. ;-)  Together with Luna and Friender, Casshern defends humanity against the robots and fights to stop Braiking Boss once and fo rall.

However, in Casshern: Sins, things aren’t so rosy.  The world has been destroyed.  Humankind is on the very brink of extinction thanks to the robots.  But Robotkind itself is dying due to an “affliction” called “The Ruin” which rapidly breaks down their components.

And it’s all Casshern’s fault… or so he’s been told.  But Casshern has absolutely no memory of his identity, let alone what had happened to the world.    All he knows is that everyone, everywhere is out to kill him (partly due to a rumour that his body will stop “The Ruin” in any robot or android that ‘devours’ him) and that he may have been responsible for the murder of a young woman who might have been able to stop the cataclysm.

So how the hell did things go so wrong?

If the first few episodes are any indication, the producers of Casshern: Sins are going to take their own sweet time answering that question, with each episode revealing a few meagre pieces of the puzzle a little at a time.

One thing that should be pointed out is that despite the post apocalyptic setting populated with killer robots, Casshern: Sins isn’t really action-oriented.  The pacing is slower than what most people would expect and each episode tends to focus more on exploring certain ideas about the human condition.  However, the writers do appear to try include at least some action in every episode.

As a result, Casshern: Sins is generally very bleak and often tragic, hence the “Grab your Prozac” line.   With its somewhat depressing atmosphere and slower, cerebral approach, this series isn’t going to appeal to the masses.

But Casshern can pique one’s curiosity by revealing clues here and there that sheds some light on how things came to be.   It also explores themes of the human condition by way of introducing interesting characters and settings.  Some of these characters leave you with the distinct impression that they’ll figure very prominently as the story progresses.   Others, you hope to see again, like Sophita, the android who only feels most alive and passionate only when she’s killing something.

The visual design of Casshern: Sins is very much in keeping with that retro “Tatsunoko 1970’s” animation style look, but the animation can have a more contemporary abstract approach at times.  Casshern: Sins generally utilizies a very subdued, monochromatic palette and the line work is given this slightly diffused appearance, as if they ran each frame through a Gaussian blur filter before adding colour.

On the whole, the production values of Casshern: Sins is relatively good, although I expect the animation quality to differ from episode to episode.   For example, episode 4’s animation certainly wasn’t as polished as the previous episodes.

If you’re checking it out, I’d suggest watching at least the first 4 or 5 episodes before passing judgment on whether to drop the series or follow it because the first episode doesn’t give you much to go on and feels somewhat unfocused.

Casshern: Sins isn’t light fare so it’s not a series I could easily recommend to everyone but I would say it’s worth checking out!

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Casshern: Sins - Grab Your Prozac!

When I saw the Flame Thrower as a choice, I (like many players I’m sure) had visions of stalking the halls of the USG Ishimura all bad-ass a la Ripley from ALIENS.

I was set to purchase the flame thrower until I read this humorous reply on one of IGN’s forums:

“I was about to purchase the flamethrower, until I realized that the only thing worse then a crazed necromorph lunging at me screaming would be a crazed necromorph lunging at me screaming while on fire…”

LOL!  Instead, I purchased the Line Gun and Pulse Rifle; the Line Gun for its wide cutting beam, timed mines and devastating short range damage, and the Pulse Rifle for its high rate of fire, efficient ammunition use and ranged engagements.

Schofield IM-822 Line Cutter

SWS Motorized Pulse Rifle

So far, the Line Cutter has proven to be very effective on clustered enemies if you hit them with Stasis first, then plant one of the Line Cutter’s timed mines right in the middle of them.

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Dead Space Weapon Choices

Dead Space: Downfall

Dead Space: Downfall is the direct-to-DVD animated movie that tells the story of what happened aboard the USG Ishimura prior to the player’s arrival in the Dead Space video game.

The story revolves primarily around Alissa Vincent, security chief of the interplanetary mining vessel USG Ishimura, her team of security officers and their struggle to not only survive, but to save as many of the crew as they can can after terrifying alien creatures are released aboard the Ishimura shortly after a myserious alien artifact is excavated from the planet’s surface and brought aboard.

Despite Film Roman being the lead animation producer, any animation fan will instantly recognize the character design and animation style as being from a Korean animation studio, and indeed,  it is: JM Animation.  If you’re familiar with productions like “The Batman” TV series, the animated Hellboy movies, “Men in Black”, “Jackie Chan Adventures” and so on, you’ll be familiar with JM’s work.

There’s a mix of CG and traditional animation, with CG animation used primarily for vehicular animation and some set piece rendering.  While the CG animation wasn’t anything spectacular, it did the job and didn’t look or feel particularly out of place as it can sometimes when combining traditional and CG animation.

The character animation, however, was noticeably uneven, ranging from fair to good from scene to scene.  To be honest, I’ve seen better, consistent animation on “The Batman” animated series on TV— incidentally also Korean-animated.

They took a “no holds barred” approach with the violence and Downfall is very graphic, with plenty of dismemberment, disembowling and blood spilling to be had.

Story

This is where Downfall comes up a little short, but the film’s makers can’t really be faulted for that because of Downfall’s role as a prelude story.

It does the job of illustrating (and quite graphically too) what happened to the crew of the Ishimura and the colonists of Aegis 7 prior to the player’s arrival in the game.  But ultimately, its hands tied when it comes to revealing more interesting details and story elements since ideally, those are elements that you want revealed to the player during gameplay, not spoiled ahead of time by the movie.

As a result, Downfall doesn’t have a whole lot of depth when it comes to the story, or emotional depth when it comes to its characters and tends to come off as more of a gore-and-carnage showcase really.

Conclusion

Dead Space: Downfall Random Screen Shots

Dead Space game fans are going to get a lot more out of this movie than your regular movie watcher or even animation fans as the gamers will get the backstory which fleshes out the situation they’re facing onboard the Ishimura as they play the game.

As a movie,  Downfall is only fair at best.  It concentrates more on serving up lots of gore and carnage rather than suspenseful horror and compelling characters.

• 2 out of 5

Rent it if you can, but not worth library space unless you’re a completionist Dead Space fan that has some room next to the Collector’s Edition of the game.

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Dead Space: Downfall Movie