My new PC

It took a few months, but I bought myself a new PC. Here it is:



It's one of these:

3XS H55 Performance GTS - Custom Series

...except that I customised it so it's got a 40GB SSD drive as the main hard drive, there are a 1TB and a 2TB drive as well for storage, there's a card reader in the front which can also hot-plug SSD drives (!!!), there's a Creative soundcard (mainly because I want to rip my vinyl record collection, and Creative cards come with good features and tools), and I went with Windows 7 Pro rather than the default home edition.

This is the first desktop PC I've bought in nearly 10 years, so I went to a shop that would offer a good system at a mid-range price, then let me customise it with fancy stuff.

...and then they took a month to build it, but I don't really mind. They also got my name wrong almost every time, and gave the courier the wrong address. I don't really mind that either. Well, not much. Well.... enough to mention it in public. :P

This is the first time I've had a PC where the graphics card is almost as big as the motherboard! :)

Things to note:

I didn't specifically choose the boy-racer style case with a window and lights inside, but it is a good case and has lots of ventilation.

It's speedy and quiet. :)

Recettear now available for preorder

As I mentioned in my post about companies translating and releasing doujin games in English, Recettear by EGS is coming out soon through a company called Carpe Fulgur.

official English website
EasyGameStation website

I've played the demo, and I really like it.

You play as a little girl who is running an item shop in an RPG world. She can buy and sell things in town and haggle with customers, she can hire people to go into dungeons to get new stuff for her to sell. And I love random dungeoning! :)

I've got it preordered on Steam even though it's the only version with DRM. It's 10% off for the preorder, and Carpe Fulgur made a point of being nice and fair when it comes to international pricing!

Japanese indie (doujin) game English localisation companies

I decided to start a list because I think the little guys need a shout out. ^_^

I have:

http://rockinandroid.com/

* GUNDEMONIUM Collection
* Flying Red Barrel ~ Diary of a Little Aviator ~
* QLIONE (Qualia)
* SUGURI Perfect Edition

http://www.carpefulgur.com/

* Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

(There's only a demo out so far, but I like it. I don't like some of the language they have used in localisation, but the game seems good fun nevertheless. I'll probably buy it when it's out if they do digital download sales)

http://www.dhm-interactive.com/en/home/

* Chantelise
* Gunners Heart

This is a French company, and I haven't bought from them, but they seem to publish in English as well as French.

EDIT: 6th Sept 2010
I placed an order with them via the website. At first, nothing arrived, so I wrote to the company to complain. A few minutes later, the director of the company had sent me an apology by email and put the order in the post the next day. He had received the payment but had not got the order, somehow! So, I guess I have to call that... good customer service but poor website!

http://www.mangagamer.com/allages/

* Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni
* other stuff. ;)

(though, I think they have massively overpriced Higurashi...)

http://www.nicalis.com

* Cave Story
* La Mulana

I'm kind of reluctant to put the last one in because those games used to be freeware with fan-translation patches, and they are just releasing the games on wiiware which I don't trust. But, I thought I might as well include them.

--

Some Japanese game creators like to release their games in English/Japanese on Xbox indie games, too. They are usually pretty cheap and often have pretty interesting game mechanics.

(Note: Recettear, Chantelise and Gunners Heart were originally made by the same group - EasyGameStation. They seem quite varied!)

Arrrrr!

Yesterday was talk like a pirate day, so I decided to play some pirate-centric games. Steam has a special offer this weekend for the remade "Secret Of Monkey Island" special edition point and click adventure for only £3.49, so I bought it, and Telltale Games had a special on their new Monkey Island spin off games, where you could have the first episode of Tales Of Monkey Island for free. So I grabbed that too. I also decided to play some Sid Meier's Pirates! because it's my all time favourite pirate game.

So, here are my thoughts:

* Tales Of Monkey Island pt 1

It runs pretty badly on my computer, I know my PC is a bit old but lowering the graphical quality didn't seem to help that much and is it really necessary for this kind of game? The game is no longer 2D and I don't like the movement /looking round / item using interfaces - I didn't like having to drag the mouse to navigate a 3D plane, and I didn't like the way that objects would move on a boat so that you'd end up clicking on the wrong thing and have to go through a dialogue scene again.

I think, at least from what I've seen at the start of the game, the script could really use some tidying up. i.e. it could do with them removing all the jokes that aren't funny, even if that means cutting the jokes down to one per paragraph. It's no good trying rapid-fire comedy if most of your jokes miss the target.

Also, I could tell that in some places they were just being self-referential in place of there being a joke - so lines are delivered like they're funny but it's really just repetition out of context of something that was amusing elsewhere. It just fell flat, reminding me of the recent Red Dwarf "Back To Earth" special I watched an episode of (and didn't go back for more).

I didn't play very far into the game though. I think I should replay an earlier game and return to this later.

* Sid Meier's Pirates!

Did you know that if you play this game on Talk Like A Pirate day, all the menus and stuff are displayed in pirate speak? :D

I have loved this game since the C64 version; this game and Elite both gave the player a sense of having a huge amount of space to explore, traverse and profit from. I also played the PC version from around 15 years ago. The version I played yesterday was a newer version for PC (it's still a few years old now!), which I bought in a bundle on Steam a few weeks ago. A lot of games really suffer when it comes to remakes or spin-offs; someone who doesn't quite underatand certain aspects of the original game decide to "improve" it by tweaking things... [sighs at the Katamari games, and some game franchises with large numbers at the end of the titles...] This remake is spot on though, and the new features and enhancements do work really well. I really got back into this game!

* Secret Of Monkey Island Special Edition
For some reason, this game is over 1GB to download! (Compared with under 200MB for the episode of the new spinoff game) So, I haven't played this yet. I'm hoping I've forgotten enough of it so that I don't whiz through the game! :D

As an aside:

The game One Piece Unlimited Cruise (PAL version) for Wii is the rarest Wii game I know of. It's a multi-part adventure based on the pirate anime/manga series. As far as I know it's available as subtitled Japanese only (which I see as a good thing!). The first part came out in June and I have not seen a single copy in shops. It is sold out / out of stock everywhere, and copies are selling for very high prices on ebay - roughly twice the original price, sometimes more. The second part is due out now or in the near future, and I placed an order for it at £17.99 on Amazon (I thought I might as well), but they say it's now out of stock and aren't sure if they'll get it - though this was a preorder! Copies of the 2nd part are on ebay for £30 already, which is about £20 less than the 1st part. It's stupid, the fact that they have totally underestimated the demand for these games, and aren't observing the market to see that they need to get more copies made!

Much as I prefer to have a solid copy of the games that I own, I have to admit, at least they can never run out of copies to sell!

So, there you go, my games-about-pirates day is done.

Darwinia (PC game)

I already owned a boxed retail copy of Darwinia (with a little key chain), but I didn't get round to installing it for years, then I ended up buying it again on steam through a special offer bundle on indie games, so I decided now was the right time to get round to playing it!

I will tell you, to me it was by far the best game I bought in that pack of indie games! (though some of the others are great too)

It plays a bit like Cannon Fodder (which I used to like), but your troops are completely disposable and mostly you are doing missions to assist an A.I. race called Darwinians, fighting to survive from a virus which has infected their world.

It may not sound that good, but the execution of this game is really great.

I really do feel like I am accessing a very small world built for the Darwinians, I am under the impression that this is their long-established home land I do feel like they have their little ways and beliefs and in a way I do feel like they are just wanting to live out their lives in peace, devoted to learning and exploring.

And so, I feel a strong form of compassion and desire to protect them.

It's a game that gave me interesting feelings; fixing the structure of their digital world and even more, their digital but tangible religion, is something that was mind blowing when I stopped to think about it.

The graphics are simple but completely effective, digitally generated landscapes populated with menacing viruses. The sound is also very effective. Most of the music is by someone called Trash80 and you can download some tracks used in Darwinia from his website, it's really good electronic music, a little retro chiptune in places.

The various startup screens for the game are fun references to old gamer geekery too, from watching the Darwinians play out life to the old 8-bit demo scene splash screens, I liked that touch to the game.

The game has a small amount of levels but some of them did take a very long time to do, so the whole game took about 7 hours to complete (according to the clock on steam) but that's over a duration of a few weeks.

I really really enjoyed this game, especially as an experience.

Freelancer

I decided to try some PC gaming for a change, since my boyfriend has a new PC and is all into space / strategy simulations. He's so enthusiastic that I thought I would join in the fun! I've had a copy of Freelancer on my shelf for a few years, I bought it in a charity shop and it had some decent reviews, so I thought I would try it.

The title on the box is actually "Freelancer - The Universe Of Possibility", and the back of the box says "Pirate, Hero, Merchant, Smuggler you decide!", so I thought this sounds good. It sounded like it would be a more up-to-date Elite style game - even though Freelancer was released in 2003 it's a good few years newer than the most recent Elite game, and I really like those! Space trading, perhaps signing up for army misions, perhaps engaging in space piracy, perhaps going space mining, or just plain exploring - yeah, I enjoyed the Elite games very much!

So I installed Freelancer on Windows XP (no problem), and gave it a go.

First impressions:

--

I've gone through one and a half missions before failing the 2nd one because someone on my side got killed. AND THANK GOD. This game is making me infuriated and sick. @_@

Whoever thought that using a mouse was a good system for space-flight control was an idiot. Dear god. It's awful. You accelerate with the "W" key, you slow down with the "S" key. That I can cope with. You've got hold-left-button-and-drag to head in different directions, you've got point and right-click to aim and fire guns. Now how are you supposed to effectively steer and shoot at the same time? You can lock onto an enemy but all that seems to do is put a box round them, it doesn't seem to help your piloting or weapon targetting. All I can do is spin around endlessly, shooting lasers while chasing round spacecraft; I've got a small fleet here - where are our tactics? Why are our tactics just "spin around constantly, shooting at everything"?

--

Then I realised that I could go into the options and change it so that I use the keyboard for steering my ship, and the mouse for firing. That made the game bearable. It is a bad default control system.

I carried on with the game for the following days, and got as far as becoming "level 6", but I think I will give up with this game.

I'm really bored by it. It's all dogfights and bus journeys. By which I mean, there's autopilot for everything so you just click some buttons to select the route you want to take, click some more buttons to go, and you wait. It makes me feel like a passenger, it's like being on a bus.

All missions are "go to X and engage in battle". Rather repetitive. If you want to be a trader, sometimes you get attacked, so, -=yawn=- another dogfight. If you decide to do something different, e.g. go mining, you will also get attacked, so, -=yawn=- dogfight. It's as though the game was thinking "hey, you're flying around not being in a fight, that must be boring! Have some attackers!". It just gets tedious. Well, the whole thing is somewhat tedious.

For a game that touts freedom as its main selling point, this game is really very one-track and repetitive. I do not care to play this game any further than I have so far.

Brain Training For Dummies

I saw this piece of software on a shelf in HMV on Saturday, its title made me laugh.

Brain Training For Dummies

It sounds like a book for people who have picked up a brain training game but haven't worked out how to play it. It's actually a piece of software, though.

Saitek Cyborg Rumble Pad for Xbox 360 and PC

I bought myself a new joypad for using on Xbox 360; it's a brand new Saitek Cyborg Rumble Pad.

The official 360 joypad seems to be quite popular with people, but I don't really like it that much. I love the Playstation Dualshock and have considered it my favourite joypad for a long time. My issues with the 360 pad:

* The two analogue sticks are not positioned on the same level; makes some games a bit awkward (Beautiful Katamari, Beat'n Groovy, etc)

* The "B" button tapers off the size of the joypad. It's not flat on the joypad like the other buttons. I don't know why anyone thinks this would be good...

* The d-pad is a bit squishy and inaccurate; I find it poor on diagonals.

So I came across pre-orders on Amazon for this Saitek Cyborg Rumble Pad around November. It seemed to be the perfect solution: it lets you switch round the position of the d-pad and analogue stick so if you want it to be Xbox 360 style or Dualshock style, that's up to you.

There are more details on the official Saitek Site.

So I ordered one. :)

Here are some photos, showing it in its packaging (I think it looks tacky), then what it looks like without the removable module, with it in one position then the other. And finally, the base of the controller - the headset won't plug in.







The controller feels really nice. The material they used feels lovely; I think it's silicon? I don't know. It feels almost like suede or velvet without the fur, if that makes sense. The build feels sturdy and the look is also very professional. The sticks seem good and I've tried the controller on my "problem games" and the frustration is gone and it feels natural. The buttons are all good and responsive.... well, all except the "guide button" which needs a little more effort to press than seems normal, but then, it's set deeper into the pad than in the official pad. I haven't really tried using the d-pad much yet but it didn't seem to do too well when I was testing it in windows - it kept hitting other directions for an instant before settling in diagonals. One other note - it's bigger than the 360 pad. I quite like the little 360 pad (I only have little hands), but this Saitek pad is still comfortable for me. Oh and it's connected by USB, rather than being wireless. I don't mind, since my console is near where I sit to play.

Overall, I like this more than the official pad, right now. :)

Last Scenario - Freeware PC RPG

If I was going to start playing a new PC game, I'd probably go with Last Scenario, which is a freeware PC game that just got "released" about 2 weeks ago. It's been made by one guy over the period of a year, using RPG Maker XP. Apparently he's changed most of the music, graphics, battle mechanics all to his own liking, and added a mini-game (called Hex), and it's professional-looking and although the story starts off standard and clichéd, it soon turns round.

Yes, it seems strange that the maker (one guy!) has announced it via the somethingawful forums.

No, I didn't find it via reading the forums on that site...