for future reference (tales of the abyss)

I'm just typing this into my computer so I'll remember it.  Why I'm posting it on the internet, I don't know.

My current arte setup with Natalia:

• Neutral: Piercing Line
• Up: Gallant Barrage
• Down: Heal
• Left/Right: Star Embrace
• Right stick up: Scare Shot
• Right stick down: Barrier
• Right stick left: Recover
• Right stick right: Sharpness

The arte setup I'm going to change to next Friday:

• Neutral: Heal
• Up: Star Stroke
• Down: Storm Edge
• Left/Right: Gallant Barrage
• Right stick up: Sharpness
• Right stick down: Barrier
• Right stick left: Recover
• Right stick right: Scare Shot

FOF change reference: (artes I'm currently using)

• Heal: Wind (becomes area of effect)
• Star Embrace: Water
• Piercing Line: Wind
• Gallant Barrage: none (but it pwns enough anyway especially if I can sneak up behind an enemy and fire it at point blank)
• Sharpness: Fire (longer effect)
• Barrier: Water (longer effect)
• Recover: Wind (becomes area of effect)
• Scare Shot: Water (becomes area of effect)

FOF change reference: (artes I'm not currently using or don't have yet)

• Storm Edge: Fire
• Aerial Laser: Wind
• Cavalry: Fire (3x duration) (don't have)
• Star Stroke: Earth
• Resist: Earth (longer duration)
• Cure: Earth (new lease on life) (no srsly) (full heal + status removal) (expensive as shit though)
• Revive: Earth (becomes area of effect) (don't have) (expensive as shit, but auto-res is worth that)
• Healing Force: none (don't have)

Other mildly useful info:

• Natalia turns into Tear on surprise encounters.  So keep track of Tear's setup so you can actually use her, which I've neglected to do thus far other than knowing where Pow Hammer is.
• The AD skill that increases her physical attack can be activated while free running
• The Combo Plus AD skill line is immensely useful for her, more arrowspam = more TP for heals, buffs, and Scare Shot

Things I need to figure out:

• How exactly a single target spell works when FOF changed into an AOE spell.  Do you get to target the AOE as normal or...  what?

Something I just realized:

• This is a role-playing game where you have eight skill slots and you choose your eight active skills from a larger pool of available skills.  lololololol guild wars

trackball woes fixed?

I may have found the answer to my XP->Win7 upgrade "lack of trackball configuration software" issue.

I'm headed out right now but I'll post more after I experimentally ditch Kensington's shit so I can try it out.

Relevant link: http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm

UT2k4 Invasion

I had forgotten how much fun the Invasion gametype is in UT2k4.  Relics really add a lot to it.  The odds are stacked tremendously against you, and the relics act as powerups to give you that fighting chance.  Relics don't completely remove the difficulty, you still have to be intelligent to stay alive.

The three relics that I've found to be the most useful are Health, Ammo, and Defense.  The three relics I've mentioned prolong the inevitable in different ways.

But wait, what exactly is Invasion?  You and the other players (or bots) are all on the same team.  When a wave begins (there's a countdown, it's hard to miss) random monster-type enemies with different attacks start spawning.  Your team's job is to kill them.  To aid you in your quest, you have a radar on your HUD that shows blue dots for the other players and yellow dots for enemies.  While trying to kill them, you need to watch your health very carefully because if you die you're out until the end of the wave.  While dead you can view from your teammates' points of view and help them with voice chat.  If everyone dies the round is over and it progresses to the next map.  I don't know if there's an end, with a team consisting of me and two bots that never seem to watch their health I never made it much past the third wave.

Some weapons are much better for Invasion than others.  The Flak cannon is particularly effective, only requiring two or three shots for most of the enemies I've encountered thus far.  Also useful are the Minigun and the Rocket Launcher.  If they're on the map, the Ion Painter and/or Redeemer can turn the tides of the fight when used at the right time.  Invasion uses the Deathmatch maps, and the more confined the map is, the harder it is.  It really helps to have space to move around.  Also, maps with instant kill hazards can be particularly annoying, though helpful if you can lure the monsters into the hazards.

Also useful for Invasion: The UT2004 RPG mutator.  Perhaps I'll post something about that in the future.

bored as shit

It's cold, my sweatshirt and sweatpants are in the laundry that I've been putting off doing, it's 2:30 AM, and I can't decide what to do.

Choices:

• Watch Chu-Bra episode 8 - 20 minutes of entertainment, then boredom
• Play UT2k4 - pick up relics, order bots around with my voice
• Play Guild Wars - I can...  uh...  try to do more hard mode missions?  Technically I was going for that title.  I don't really have a lot left to do in this game that isn't boring repetition or otherwise grinding for titles.
• Play PS2 games that aren't Guitar Hero - because lol my parents sleep right above me and me soloing on the fret buttons wakes them up.  I was surprised it wasn't the loud strumming personally.  Sub-choices:
• Rumble Racing - an old favorite, but lack motivation because I've regressed in skill and can't beat any of my fast times anymore, that and the AI even on the hardest level doesn't really present much of a challenge (so I guess I haven't regressed too much)
• Dark Cloud - technically I never did beat this game, I just got tired of having to maintain about five million stats.  Seriously, thirst level?  what the fuck.  I always get thirsty at the farthest point in the level from a water source.  Stupid mechanic was stupid.
• Chrono Trigger (PSX) - oh yeah I could actually start playing this again instead of just saying I'm going to and then not
• Read the pile of manga I have sitting here - 5 volumes of Negima that I've already read scanlated, and Yotsubato! volume 6
• Finish The Salmon of Doubt - I've had a bookmark in it for ages, and I'm fairly close to the end.  Actual book lol wut
• Eat - Go into the kitchen and make something that will make me fatter but keep me warm because fuck it's cold
• DVDs - I have a bunch of stuff on DVD that I could watch, but I tend to randomly fall asleep while watching even if I was perfectly awake when I started
• Go wrap myself up in a blanket - because holy fuck it's cold.  Also this combos well with, well, really anything else on this list other than eating or computer games because my hands are freezing and I'd have to have them not be inside the blanket to play them

now archiving weekly instead of monthly

I had neglected to notice that I've already posted more in two weeks on this blog than I usually post on Seven Random Characters in two months.  The Archive box would have grown to truly epic proportions just for the month of February alone.  So now I'm archiving by week, which should keep things fairly reasonable.

I also just noticed that I didn't post at all yesterday.  I guess nothing really happened.

voice recognition is kind of neat

I know I'm late to the party, but I noticed a couple nights ago that UT2k4 has voice recognition for ordering the bots around.  I became further intrigued when I discovered that one of the commands would make a bot get out of a vehicle, which I desperately wanted since bots love to jump in a vehicle just as I'm getting near it.

Setting it up was slightly complex.  In Microsoft's infinite wisdom, the speech recognition engine for WinXP is only usually distributed through Office XP/whatnot.  There is, however, a free and legal way to get it.  Simply download their speech recognition SDK, and install it.  You'll then be able to train it up (it provides several things you can read to it when you have spare time, they only take about ten minutes) so it recognizes your voice, which is necessary for accuracy.

One issue I have is that it seems very adamant on turning off Mic Boost, which my mic needs so I'm audible.  I just have a fairly cheap Altec Lansing stereo headphone+microphone headset that I got at Best Buy several years ago so I could talk on TeamSpeak while playing Guild Wars.  I guess if I get a better headset I'll have to retrain.

It works fairly well in UT2k4 though.  I can now push to talk and order bots around.  Sometimes it takes a couple tries because the mic volume meter occasionally won't go above two or three blocks, and it won't recognize a damn thing I'm saying unless it goes all the way up to the red.  But in CTF I can tell the bots to cover me while I'm running a flag back and then tell them to go back to attacking when I get the capture, without having to navigate the speech menu and divide my attention.

Sadly this doesn't make the bots not suck at Onslaught.  If I try to run any sort of advanced strategy involving me going and tying up the enemy so that our team can get a few nodes uncontested, they'll still take forever to take power nodes on their own, even if I order them to attack.  It would be nice if I could say "Everyone take node 1" and have the bots all converge on node 1.

"Everyone suicide" at the beginning of a match is usually funny.

yay more kana

Solaris-H released the rest of My Lovely Ghost Kana all at once a few days ago.  I didn't notice until now.

Fortunately it's all on MediaFire so it was painless to download.  I also kind of uselessly subscribed to the folder, seeing as how I believe volume 3 is the end of the story.

More adventures of Daikichi and his ghost girlfriend Kana to read...  It's more of a romantic comedy than a hentai manga.  There is sex, but the focus is everyday life with a ghost.

I even painlessly extracted all the .zip files at once using a batch script and 7-Zip.  Doing it through a GUI would have taken forever, but I spent about 5 seconds writing a batch script, double click it, tell it not to overwrite the credits page for each archive (they're the same in all of them), and wham, it's done.

This reminds me I still need to catch up in Yuria 100 Shiki.  I've been putting it off because I'm several volumes behind, but I'm not getting any less behind by not reading it...  I also have a pile of print manga sitting here that I got for Christmas that I haven't touched yet.  Five volumes of Negima (that I've already read on OneManga, lol) and Yotsubato! volume 6.

stuff

So the dilemma now is between episodes 4 and 5 of L/R: Licensed by Royalty.  I broke out the DVDs last night and checked.  I'm leaning towards episode 5.

I had another reason to get out the DVDs though.  I decided to start working on my Anime Family Project, and I needed pictures of some people that I absolutely couldn't find on a *booru because a) they weren't female, and b) were in fairly overlooked and underrated shows.

Then I discovered that regardless of the actual aspect ratio of the video on the DVD, Media Player Classic saves DVD screenshots in 720x480.  So I had to resample to correct the aspect ratio in Photoshop (shrink the width to 640 for the 4:3 shows, and shrink the height to 405 for the 16:9 shows, make sure to uncheck "Constrain Proportions" when you do this).

It's actually going fairly well.  I sat there with writer's block with just Yomi in the list trying to write something (anything) about her and then I finally found some words.  Then I had writer's block again until imagination hit and I had most of a family before long.  I still need a character for my mom, but other than that it's complete.

Also I started writing it here and then realized it really should go on Seven Random Characters, so I copypasta'd it over and moved the pictures to the other hidden album on Picasa.  Unless there's something I'm missing, you have to move pictures from one album to another one by one, which is kind of annoying.

theme night coming up

As soon as I heard we were having an "underappreciated/underrated anime theme night" for one of our showings this semester, I knew exactly what I was going to bring.

L/R: Licensed By Royalty.

A lot of the series is similar to James Bond-type things.  The main characters are agents of an undercover government agency and have all sorts of spy devices and disguises.  There's the doctor who's continually inventing new things, some of which are actually useful, and others of which look neat but fail hilariously.  Then there's Mr. Pennylane, who always says "That's right." in English during mission briefings to confirm the agents' suspicions.  The whole thing is set in a country that's supposed to be a takeoff of Britain, so the random English kind of makes sense, but it's still funny.

As for which episode I want to show, that's where the dilemma is.  My immediate thought was to go with episode 4, which shows how awesome the main characters are at what they do while still maintaining their everyday personalities.  It's also a very entertaining episode overall, with plenty of laughs.

However, that episode doesn't contain my favorite character in the series.  I actually forget which episode he first shows up in, but it shows how epically awesome he is.  Yeah, you read that right, I have a male favorite character from a series.  I need to figure out which episode this is (I think it might be 5 or 6).

Dilemma, thy name is anime.

I'm an idiot

I found my watch.  It had fallen onto the floor between my computer and my desk.

The entire rest of this post is unrelated.

So I was actually testing Tales of the Abyss off of the hard drive with Mode 1 and MDMA0 set, but I've now found a battle that freezes the game on encounter and another right next to it that freezes after the fight is over.  It's such a shame because the world map load times are still reduced even with the HDD speed slowed down.

The battle in question is on the Tartarus, when it's being attacked by Griffons and Ligers, and you see the cutscene with Largo.  It's right next to the ladder that leads way up that Jade tells you to use to get to the bridge.  I could easily run past the enemies, but a) I liek experience, and b) I don't know when it would be safe to start fighting again, and testing each encounter one by one would be tedious.

I can try the other compatibility modes, but I don't really have high expectations.

So fuck it.  We'll just have to cope with the load times.

easy mission is easy

I just did the first mission of Guild Wars: Nightfall 10 times on Hard Mode, once with each of my characters.  I have one of each profession, so this demonstrates total ownage of what's basically the second easiest Hard Mode mission in the entire game.

This is because of their daily rotating quest system.  Today's Zaishen Mission happens to be the first mission of Nightfall, Chahbek Village.  Completing this mission on Hard Mode with the Master level bonus nets you 1000 experience, 250 gold, 100 Sunspear points, and 74 Copper Zaishen Coins.  I'm saving up for the heavy equipment pack, which costs the outrageous price of 15 Gold Zaishen Coins.

They have an exchange rate for working your way up to the more valuable Zaishen Coins.  50 Copper = 1 Silver, and 10 Silver = 1 Gold.  One Gold coin basically costs 500 Copper coins.  There's also, for inexplicable reasons, a small gold cost for going up each level.   So from the 740 Copper coins I got, I cashed in 700 of them and got a measly 14 Silver coins.  Of those 14 Silver coins I cashed in 10 and got my third ever Gold coin.  This is going to take forever.

Hard Mode makes enemies higher level (which grants them more health and affects the damage equation in their favor), and gives them faster movement and skill activation.  The reason the mission is balls easy on HM is because it's a tutorial mission.  Thus the groups are designed to not be very challenging on NM, which translates to a not very challenging HM mission.  All throughout the mission various NPCs are talking about various aspects of the game and when you're doing it on HM you already know everything they're saying and you just wish they'd shut the fuck up.

Anyway, yeah, Chahbek Village is a really easy HM mission in Nightfall, and as previously mentioned I consider it to be the second easiest HM mission in all of Guild Wars, period.  The easiest HM mission is Tihark Orchard, which is also in Nightfall, because it's a solo mission with no real fighting until the very end when you're aided by over 9000 NPCs that can usually kill the enemies on their own.

where the fuck is my watch

Here's the story.  I got home last night from Tales of Fridays.  I made myself some T.G.I. Friday's Honey BBQ wings.  When it came time to eat, I removed my watch and wrist brace, so I wouldn't get honey bbq sauce all over them.

After finishing the wings, disposing of the bones, and soaking the plates in hot water to loosen the remaining sauce, I went back to my computer for a while, then went to sleep.

When I woke up to go to CAINE's showing, I could not find my watch.  Anywhere.  It's not in its usual spot on my bedside table, it's not in my bathroom, it's not on my desk, and I've looked all around the kitchen including in both the freezer and the refrigerator, just for good measure.  No watch.

I had to be a noob and check the time on my cell phone all night.

Dammit, I liked that watch too.  I know it was just a cheap digital watch, but it was awesome.  The LCD had enough extra display elements that it could display text.  When you held the set button in it would say "Hold to set" on the screen.  When setting things it had labels for all of the buttons that explained what they did, like "Done", "Next", "+", and "-".  Also it could adjust any field in either direction, so if I went one minute past where I wanted to set my alarm to I could just go back as opposed to having to go around again.  The numbers were huge as well, meaning I didn't need to shove my wrist in my face to see what time it was.

It was awesome and I want to find it.