Saturday, July 30, 2011

ComiPo! English Tutorial

This is a manga creation software that was shown in one of the earlier OVZ episodes, and apparently it's now being brought over to America! I don't really have any interest in getting this, but Asakawa english narration is always welcome <3

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Summer begins

So summer has started, and so far the most noteworthy thing that's happened is that I've gotten accepted into my Masters program at Cal Poly Pomona.  I'm pretty excited about this as the school is pretty close to home and a lot of my friends go there as well.

However...  dealing with this school has been nothing but a pain so far, as there's been all sorts of complications.  In my acceptance letter I was asked to contact the department advisor so I could get an idea of what classes to take my 1st quarter, and the letter only provided me with his e-mail address.  So I e-mailed him, and didn't get a response.  I looked up his contact info on the department website and got his office # so I would periodically try to call him.  3 weeks later, I finally get ahold of him by phone so I set up the appointment.  It turns out that the reason he didn't respond to my e-mail is because for whatever reason, it got sent to his spam box.  I also found out that I wasn't even allowed to register for classes before meeting with an advisor so this effectively delayed my registration for 3 weeks.  There's also other stuff like not getting a straight answer from anyone about registration fees and their deadlines, and having a time conflict with the classes that the advisor suggested that I take.  So it's been a huge headache.

I've been playing the fan translation of Persona 2 Innocent Sin on PS1 recently and I'm pleasantly surprised with how good the game is.  It also has the most badass main character in an SMT game, helped by Takehito Koyasu providing his voice.  I thought the battle system was really clunky at first, but in retrospect it really fits well with the game because of how big team order and fusion spells are.  I also initially thought that I wouldn't like the game as much as P3/P4 because of the lack of social links, but it turned out to be just as engaging.  In true SMT fashion the game is also quite difficult, and in some ways more of a grind than P3/P4 because of the lack of persona fusion.  In P2 new personas are obtained by collecting tarot cards from demon negotiation, and you have to level them up the traditional way so you can't have your Lvl10 social link do the work for you.  I guess my only complaint with the game would be the lack of a minimap, as some of the dungeons are pretty confusing.  I don't think the hardware at the game was capable of supporting it, though.

I suppose I should talk about a tournament I went to about a month ago called Revelations.  I was only able to go for 1 day because it ended up falling on the weekend right before my finals.  I really wanted to join the AH3 tournament but it was scheduled to be on Friday so I couldn't work that out.  I ended up going on Saturday only with Jeff, Brett, and tenkai.  This was probably one of the best tournaments that I've been to solely because there was so much space for casuals.  The venue, which was actually a restaurant near LAX, was also really big so I didn't feel cramped like I normally do at tournaments. 

Anyway, by Saturday AH3 was already at top8, so the only tournament I could join was the GG side tournament.  I didn't get to play any AH3 casuals because I couldn't find anyone with a spare PS3 pad, so that made me kind of sad.  I got to play a bunch of GG casuals, and I did pretty well in the tournament too: got 3rd, only losing to Latif twice.  I was also surprised that I was able to beat Purrin, since I generally never do well against him.  Latif's Eddie really threw me off, as I'm not used to his style of Eddie play.  I'm generally used to a more conservative and safe style, but he had a balls to the wall approach that I don't see very often.  He would also literally do panic bursts whenever his momentum was thrown off which I wasn't expecting.  Anywho, I had to play Latif twice, as he sent me to losers and also eliminated me in losers finals(3/5), so we played a total of 5 matches.  Each of them basically played out the same, going down to the 3rd round, but I could never clutch it out to win the match.  Japanese player Satoshi, who is known for playing Potemkin in Guilty Gear and Makoto in Blazblue was also in attendance, but sadly I wasn't able to play him in GG.  We were on total opposite sides of the bracket.  He ended up playing a bunch of characters in this tourney: Pot, Faust, Venom and Slayer.  I had heard that his main is actually Faust now, and it seemed like he mainly went with that character unless someone requested he pick Pot.  Anyway, it was a good tournament, and probably the best I've ever placed in my GG career.  Too bad it had to happen after the game's prime!