This song makes me feel sad

Katamari Damacy - Lonely Rolling Star

hidamari sansan
kokoro wa haremoyou
futatsu no hitomi wa
himawari no tane no you
-
The sunny spot, brilliant and bright
My heart looks like clear skies
Those two eyes of yours
Look like sunflower seeds

katarai kasanari
katamari karamari
issho ni iru koto
zettai hitsuzen
-
Chatting, piling up,
katamari entangling
Being together
is absolutely necessary

demo anata daiji na yume wo egaku
owaru made wa zutto sou koko de matteiru
-
But you are painting an important dream
Until you're done, I'll be waiting here always

You're lonely rolling star
tachidomaranaide nee
You're lonely rolling star
saa mae wo muite yukou
-
You're lonely rolling star
Don't stand in one place, ok?
You're lonely rolling star
So, face forward and let's go!

hoshi.zorakirakira
konpeitou no you
amakute setsunai
omoi ga tsunoru no
-
The stary sky twinkle twinkle
It's just like confetti
These sweet yet painful
Feelings grow intense

dakishimeta omoi wa yozora wo mai
kyuukoukashi.te anata no moto e todoku kara
-
These warmly embraced feelings dance in the night sky
And rapidly plummet and arrive at your feet, so

You're lonely rolling star
akiramenaide yo nee
You're lonely rolling star
tama ni wa denwa shi.te
You're lonely rolling star
aitai yo ima sugu
You're lonely rolling star
haa tameiki ga hitotsu koboreru
-
You're lonely rolling star
Don't ever give up, ok?
You're lonely rolling star
Give me a call once in a while
You're lonely rolling star
I want to meet you right away
You're lonely rolling star
Haa, a single sigh escapes

raigetsu mata ano basho de machiawase shiyou ka
-
Shall we meet again next month at that place?

You're lonely rolling star
tachidomaranaide nee
You're lonely rolling star
omoidashi.te yo nee
You're lonely rolling star
matterarenai no nee
You're lonely rolling star
saa mae wo muite yukou
-
You're lonely rolling star
Don't stand in one place, ok?
You're lonely rolling star
Remember me, ok?
You're lonely rolling star
I can't wait for you, ok?
You're lonely rolling star
So, face forward and let's go!

* * *

It's pretty simple, I can set it up and play it by myself using 2 keyboards. But why, why a lonely rolling star?

I miss my sister. It's hard to explain if you don't have a twin. We could look into each other's eyes and tell what the other was feeling. She was the light to my shadow. The mirror to my secrets and dreams. The voice in my head I could trust. And now she's dead and I'm alone... a lonely rolling star.

omoidashi.te yo ne?
matterarenai no ne?
aitai yo ima sugu
-
Remember me, ok?
I can't wait for you, ok?
I want to meet you right away

/wrist

Happy Eid to all my muslim friends. We visited several houses in fine Malaysian tradition, and ate and ate and ate I think I gained a kilo -_-"

Been reading a lot recently. Well, technically it would be re-reading, but there isn't really much happening in the places I bookmarked. Generally, when something is done as a hobby and not as a living, updates really take time to appear, heh. Then again, who am I to talk >_>

Came across an old piano tune that I never got around to practising, finally had a go at it in between grinding on 2Moons. I think I'm gonna quit it, it's just another lame grindfest with the additional fatal distinction of not being admined properly - just listen to all the gold farmers advertising their "services" ingame.

I'm not about to waste my time on a pay MMORPG, besides they're not really all that good either, just look at Archlord for example (it was pay2play before Codemasters (the publisher) re-released it as a free2play game with a Cash Shop). Buggy as all get out, and fairly poor latency / movement prediction. I'm in the market for a decent, simple, even browser-based MMO. Oh, I'm still playing DW:SoE, but it's just TOO simple (heh). I never was a great fan of Enix's Dragon Quest franchise anyway (having Toriyama-sensei (of Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball fame) as their art director doesn't help either, I don't like his sty1e).

It's kinda late, but I just read GaaraDesert333's recent blog post about, well, offing himself. Fortunately he didn't. But still. Dude, you're lucky you have so many friends who responded. Treasure them.

For some reason it reminded me of the guy in that Eminem song, Stan. Sure, people like to laugh at how pathetic he sounds, but when that you live through that kind of sh!t, it's not so funny now is it? Being different, being alone, being laughed at. Feeling lost, isolated, shut out. Malice. Misery. Illness. Suffering. Pain. Despair. Death... Think how poor Ryouga felt, shunned as a freak and a dangerous maniac with a loaded chi attack. Small wonder the Perfect form of the Shi-shi Hokodan takes himself out as well. The kind of misery you need to summon to gather enough heavy chi for that effect, you'd want to die too.

Lately I've noticed that it's way more soothing for me to practise my guitar technique rather than the keyboards (I probably don't need any more piano/keyboard practise anyway, yes I know, I'm so modest ). If you're distracted, that kinda rules out the woodwinds, plus it's easier to channel your frustrations through an electric guitar, that's what amps are for... Izumi was kind enough to accompany me on rhythm through Dragonforce's Deathsquad Revolution, and I must say that spiralling through the 5:28 - 6:40 grind is intense enough to take my mind off how badly things have been. How can you not feel anything but exhilarated, running through that at lightspeed, in the middle of a darkened studio with the bay windows closed against the lashing storm outside?

On the flip side, I could be playing Haikei, Akane-san, but like I said, I'm not going down Ryouga's path. Despair is a dangerous itch to keep scratching.

* * *

Another friend recently asked me to check out a couple of other MMORPGs. Archlord was interesting, but suffered from similar control/lag response flaws most 3D MMOs with that aspiring to reality look suffer from. Plus the character stats were auto-allocated. Then I tried out Acclaim's 2Moons... and I have to say, it looks mighty interesting at the moment. Another GameGuard protected game, and from what I read in the forums the mods are pretty active too. Sounds like this one's gonna be a good replacement for FlyFF, for those who can't bear to play older looking games, and still want nice looking MMORPGs.

....and my apologies to those who just dived into the Dragon Warrior Byond game, I'll only be playing it infrequently.

It's over, I'm done with FlyFF.

Heh, not that I was really that much into it anyway, it was just another pretty grindfest. Guess what I ditched it for... a Byond game, Dragon Warrior: Shadows of Erdrick (DW:SoE). Yep, you got it right, a 2D tile-based FAN game. I'll still peek into FlyFF from time to time (one of my friends is a graphics hoe and thusly doesn't "get" DW:SoE), but I won't be playing it much.

See, it's got more content than FlyFF, and a bunch of other Korean hacks I could care to name. I wasn't really a big fan of the Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest franchise, but I did do my time, and I did enjoy them. The thing about DW:SoE though, it's multiplayer What could be better than playing with a bunch of like-minded oldschoolers? Nothing, that's what

You can pick up the latest Byond client here: http://www.byond.com/ -- make sure to get the version 4-something link there, not the public release version 3.5 (it's already outdated). You'll need to create a (free) Byond account too. The Byond client acts as a launcher of sorts -- it remembers the games you've played, the friends you've made. It's sort of like an IM client, but you don't chat with it, you just use it to see who else is online and to connect to the game servers.

Sure, I admit, fan games are mostly crap (take a look at the, ugh, anime section). But DW:SoE has been in development and polishing for 6 years. 6 years! You don't find that kind of dedication easily. Sure enough, soon as I logged in the game I saw for myself how friendly and close-knit the community is. True, it isn't a very large server (normally 15 players online at any one time), and true, most of them are the long-time players, but there's always a bunch of new people coming and going. Going, because of course this kind of thing doesn't appeal to everyone. They won't capture the graphics hoe crowd, for one.

But there are way many things that DW:SoE offers that many pretty grindfest MMORPGs don't: there's no cheating, botting, hacking, or farming for one thing. That by itself guarantees a level and friendly playing field. No high level snobby elites running around in glowing +10 gear that you as an honest player will never be able to afford. No constant spamming of websites selling virtual money.

There's alchemy, imbueing items, capturing monsters to use as pets (!) too. That's been a big draw for me, ever since I tasted the original Dragon Warrior Online Byond game a couple years back -- although back then the games were new, and servers were often coming and going (which is why I didn't play for long at the time). Now, with a stable server, DW:SoE's turning out to be the fun time-wasting MMO I've been looking for. Sure, it isn't terribly complex (it IS based on the Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest franchise, after all), but there's still enough content there to make it worth playing.

Here's the link to the DW:SoE launch page (you'll need to have the Byond client installed, and a Byond ID to join though): http://games.byond.com/hub/SoE_Team/DragonWarriorShadowsOfErdrick

My Byond ID is Senrigan, so feel free to add me to your Byond friends list on the Byond client.

Everything else quiet, mostly. This is the muslim fasting month, and in true Malaysianspirit the locals abstain from drinking and eating, only to gorge themselves at the breaking of fast in the evening, if the quantity and quality of the food on display at the special evening markets are any judge Seriously... if you don't eat all day, then eat the equivalent of 3 meals in one go at the end, I don't think that's good for you. I've sampled most of the local delicacies over the years, they're pretty good, although it can be dangerous to people with a sweet tooth - there's simply too much to choose from!

My brother is the more level headed one, so I leave the buying of goodies to him. If it were up to me I'd be going on mini-splurges just like the natives, heh. Frosted mini doughnuts, trays of pastries of all shapes and sizes, sweet flavoured fruit juice of various fruits (and all colours of the rainbow, hahah that can't be healthy, lol), kebabs, satay, glutinous rice, ayam percik (spicy roasted chicken, a REAL treat), popiah, apam balik, putu piring, and so much more...

This should be named feasting month instead of the fasting month, heh.

Not much on the music front either. Just been practising a lot lately, it's vexing how easily Shinju and Izumi perfect a particular harmony in half an hour where it takes me half the day... Well, the guitar isn't really my forte, and I really need to stop neglecting my woodwinds, I made three mistakes in one flute section alone :/

Here's the original Present Holiday by Tamao Sato. For our cover version I had to dub the vocals separately. No problems with the instruments, it was a fairly easy piece. Izumi had the honours of cosplaying Asamiya Athena during the recording ~ originally we thought of Princess Athena's original Golden Armor but that was, obviously, too bulky to be playing a guitar in. The trademark Athena red bikini was out too, so in the end she went with the generic schoolgirl uniform, albeit with Athena's fingerless gloves and signature starred hairband.

By the way, if you didn't get the reference, that song is by Asamiya Athena of King of Fighters fame (this is the KoF'96 vocal). Come on, you guys know game music rocks :p

It's back to Byond for meantime though

As per today's (Thu 20/09/2007) update, Aeonsoft apparently changed the FlyFF servers to all-PvM, and set aside a new server for PvP (a la version 9). After going through the forums with a finely-toothed comb, I have come to the conclusion that the developers (i.e. Aeonsoft, not Gala-Net) suck.

Apparently they can't mix PvM and PvP like previously (each server had 4 clusters, one of which was PvP). Also, from the clues I put together, the new monster speedup and terrain/obstacle avoidance is the direct reason why they nerfed skills which affected monster speed (sneaker, ice missile, etc). According to the poor GMs who are easy targets for angry players (everyone likes to shoot the messenger) they were told that due to new code they can't mix PvM and PvP anymore (no reason was given for the speed/skill changes but it stands to reason that they were done for the same reason).

Now... programming is hard. Writing a decent game engine is pretty darn complicated. However, FlyFF already had most of the infrastructure in place during v7 though. After the v9 debacle and subsequent fixes, the only changes that stay are mostly bad: pets still suck, speed/skill changes suck, and the dying/exp thing sucked.

Changing the graphics engine would be one of the hardest things to do properly. However, changing how damage is dealt should be pretty damn trivial. See, when you need to draw an object on-screen, there are gazillions of considerations: from the camera angle, is the line of sight obstructed? Partially or wholly? Lighting effects? Frames of animation? Clipping? ... and drawing stuff in 3D uses up loads of power, tons of computations a second. There's a reason your graphic cards are so freaking expensive, require their own actual processor and memory, and get driver updates every other minute (exaggeration). Contrast that with a damage calculation algorithm: base damage * modifiers. Heck, it can even be a single line of code (for simple games).

I'm no hardcore programmer, but even I can see the flaws in Aeonsoft's flimsy excuses. Merely wanting to change, for the sake of change, is not a valid response either. Come to think of it, does anyone else realise there's a spate of grindfest, crap no-story Korean MMOs lately? It's like a whole class of Korean developers recently graduated from MMO school, and now they're all churning cookie-cutter crap grindfests.

I can point to text-based "games" interfaced using TELNET (for God's sake!) that have WAY BETTER content than most of these graphical travesties. For example, Imperian (one of the Iron Realms MUDs), or Materia Magica (use of ANSI colour makes this one look really nice). Player-run factions, player-submitted (and accepted) equipment/skills/events, and THOUSANDS of quests -- don't take my word for it, google up MM's quests, there are several fan pages containing scads of information. And all of this WITHOUT a fancy interface.

These graphical MMORPGs look great, but content-wise they're like stuck in an early-90's 8/16-bit mindset. I feel nothing but derision and contempt for the current crop of Korean grindfests. Why the hell is everybody so freaking preoccupied with "shiny". Hollywood already proved to us time and again, a crap movie with a million-dollar special effects budget is STILL a crap movie. Polish up a turd, and it will still be a turd. Grindfest MMO designers = FAIL.

...on a lighter note, the free-for-all PK'ing has been removed from FlyFF (well, contained to one server only now, i.e. Demian), so it's safe to play again If anyone is still interested in checking FlyFF out, you can find my guild (the Sisters of Shadow) on the server Mushpoie, and we usually log into cluster number 2.

Shinju was down with a cold last weekend, so while I was over at her place making soup I messed around a little with her guitars. Our recent bout with speed metal had left me wanting to polish my technique, and who else better to learn from than a maestro. Right Shuu? She's sooo modest >__>

Never one to take it easy, I figure Yngwie Malmsteen's Flamenco Diablo should provide plenty of amusement. That piece feels pretty calm and soothing to me, I like how it flows. My fretwork is okay but I'm a little sloppy picking; being lefthanded is a little tricky at times when it comes to instruments designed to be held the other way.

On the gaming front... the latest update, version 9 of FlyFF, has turned out to be a total debacle. I would advise people not to play the game for the time being until GalaNet/Aeonsoft get their collective heads out of their collective arses and revoke this mad global-pk thing. What the hell were they thinking? Or were they not thinking at all? Just because some games are successful PvP games, does not mean other games should blindly follow suit. Do you think giving Mario a chaingun will attract the FPS gamer crowd? Hell no. There's a time and place for everything, and people did not play FlyFF for the rampant playerkilling which pervades (and destroyes) so many other MMOs.

Until they fix this, please avoid playing ANY of GalaNet's GPotato games -- despite the outcry and a currently 74-page complaint thread (and growing by the second), they have NOT deigned to respond. Such a lousy attitude for a company that lives and dies by voluntary player contribution (they are using the Free-to-Play (F2P) model which includes a Cash Shop where players may purchase Premium Content).