Welcome to Rupee Shards, my own little world for whatever I feel like writing about. (Gosh!) For those who don't know me, I'm an administrator of OtakuBoards and a theOtaku chat moderator, and I've been hanging around here since September 2001. I'm an avid gamer and anime fan so most of what you'll see here will relate to one or the other.
Nintendo WFC Friend Codes
Wii Number: 8387-7566-7057-0450
Super Smash Bros. Brawl: 1504-5385-2566 (Des)
Rock Band 2: 4667-9521-5706
Mario Kart Wii: 4124-7294-7708
Animal Crossing: Wild World: 4553-2727-4864 (Desbreko in Kakariko)
Well, Christmas has come and gone once more. I had a lot of fun yesterday and none of it involved my PC or the internet—OMG, like, I know, right? My two oldest brothers are up from the Bay Area for Christmas so all four of us have been hanging out.
Anyway, I'm guessing people will skim the post looking for the list of loot before reading the rest of it (or is that just me? >_>;) so, without farther ado, here it is:
• Rock Band 2 Special Edition bundle for the Wii
• Component video cable for the Wii (for hooking it up to the huge HDTV out in the living room)
• Digital converter box (for the crappy old analog TV in my room)
• $50
• A bunch of candy
Not a huge list but I'm happy with it. RB2 was my one big present that most of my family went together to buy me since it cost a little over $200 after tax. But, considering how I got Guitar Hero II shortly after Christmas last year and was playing it off and on until a few days ago, I think RB2 will last me a long time to come.
Speaking of RB2, we had to go on a small adventure to find one of the bundles. See, Harmonix put out a press release saying that the bundle would ship out to retailers on Dec. 18 and that it wouldn't arrive for 5-7 days. That is, retailers wouldn't get it until a couple days before Christmas. So, me and my mom happening to be up bright and early on Dec. 23, we decided to go look for one. (Yes, I went with her to buy my own Christmas present. She knows by now to bring someone along who knows what they're talking about so that she doesn't accidentally buy the 360 version or RB1 for the Wii or something by mistake.) It turned out they had actually shipped earlier than announced and retailers had gotten them the previous week, with the result being that everywhere in town was already sold out. ... Thanks, Harmonix, you guys did a great job on not saying anything about that.
When we checked at one of the GameStop stores in town they said there was, however, a bundle available at a GameStop in a city about 40 miles away. After checking one more place in town and coming up empty, I was surprised when my mom said she'd drive all the way out there to get it. I hadn't said anything about it and had just resigned myself to waiting until a bit after Christmas to find a copy, but she said it was fine when I asked if she was sure she wanted to bother. So we had the girl at GameStop call the other store and hold the bundle for us and off we went. A couple hours later we were back home with a shiney new Rock Band 2 bundle in hand—which then promptly disappeared for two days until I unwrapped it yesterday. :p
I seriously was not expecting her to go through that much trouble, though, so it gave me that warm fuzzy feeling inside when she did. My parents can be pretty cool at times. ^_^
So, anyway, I haven't played it much yet but I'm already loving the drums in RB2. I have pretty good rhythm so I jumped in and immediately did excellent on easy. Medium was a bit more tricky 'cause I haven't developed any muscle memory whatsoever for drumming yet, but I can definitely see myself rocking out on expert eventually. Also, having the green notes swapped from the left to the right side of the note chart was screwing me up because I'd be wanting to hit the yellow pad for blue notes since I'm used to blue being farther to the right on the chart; I cannot see any reason for swapping green's position other than to screw people over and it annoys me.
The new guitar is going to take a bit of getting used to as well. I like that the fret buttons don't stick up and that they're a little closer together than on the GHII guitar so that I don't have to move my hand as far when sliding to reach green and orange notes. But I don't like that they feel squishy, without any click to them whatsoever; it's harder to tell when exactly the button gets pressed and it was screwing with my timing for hammer-ons/pull-offs. That will take some adjustment.
The strum bar is also a lot looser and kind of squishy feeling. So far I like it more for double strumming since it takes less strength to move it (and its shape is just easier to grip between the thumb and index finger), which translates to more accurate timing for longer periods of fast double strumming. But it seems a little harder to do fast single strumming with it since it doesn't spring back to center as fast after a strum as the GHII guitar. I think it should still be possible, it will just require some adjustment to the strumming motion to take into account the lack of springiness.
And now I am going to go pwn the game's solo guitar career on hard to unlock more tracks.
I've been working on Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2 lately. Here I thought encoding the raw to use in the subbing would be easier this time, since I actually know what I'm doing now instead of learning on the fly. But, no, there were complications.
Simply getting a decent raw to encode from was a small learning experience. For ep1, Freelance-RAWs put a DVD image up on Tokyo Toshokan so I grabbed that and was able to encode directly from the DVD source. This time, they put up a 1280x720 upscale, leaving me going, "WTF mates? ^^" (For those that don't know, DVD resolution is 720x480 which then gets stretched out to 853x480 for 16:9 widescreen videos.) I messed around with it, downscaled it back to 848x480, and re-encoded. It ended up looking okay but not great.
After a couple days of still no DVD image showing up on Tokyo Toshokan, I decided to go hunting for one myself. Which involved learning how to use a couple Japanese peer-to-peer programs. I tried Perfect Dark first (no, no relation to the N64 game of the same name) and found two upscaled raws, one of which was the one Freelance-RAWs had uploaded. Apparently people upscale the DVDs for playback on the PS3, since it was labeled "PS3 upscale" or something like that, though I have no idea why. Then I tried Share and, lo and behold, I discovered a DVD image! This made the Des happy but I'm still wondering why the heck Freelance-RAWs uploaded the crappy upscale but not the DVD image this time.
So now I've now got my pretty new encode which kicks the crap out of the other one I did from the upscale, with the OP and title screen subs done.
Earlier I also did styling and scene timing for the ED subs, but I still need to do the karaoke timing for them. Which will have to wait until Dagger gives the ED a look (hint hint ^_^) since I just grabbed the romaji and an English translation off the net to have something to work with and am not sure if it's correct.
But enough ranting. I know what you all really want are some juicy screen shots.
Hopefully we'll be able to get it released some time next month.
And, since I probably won't get around to posting again until after Christmas...
I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Ear!
Yeah, it's been forever since I made a Miku post. I started with the intention of doing them fairly regularly, as long as I was finding new and good songs, but you can see how that turned out. Oh well, I guess I can just dump a huge list this time and go from there.
ファインダー (Finder) [Nico Nico / YouTube] Last Night, Good Night [Nico Nico / YouTube]
These two are available on the album Re:package, by livetune feat. Hatsune Miku. The other songs on it are also decent.
Liberate ～赤い海の夜明け～ (Liberate ~Akai Umi no Yoake~) [Nico Nico / YouTube] シンデレラ・ロマンス (Cinderella Romance) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
The full versions of these two are available on the album Tatsh Music Collection -I-.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it to Anime Club tonight. We've got family visiting over the weekend and such and I might be busy this evening. So, if I'm not around at 6:30 PM PST (9:30 PM EST), someone else feel free to start the chat. Gome, Shin, anybody... anybody... Bueller...?
I'm sure most people have already seen this linked in the chat but I have to post it here anyway:
As soon as I saw that scene in Tales of the Abyss ep7, I knew I had to extract it to mercilessly Jaderoll Gome with. It was just too perfect.
In other news, I went through my ImageShack account just now and tagged all my images. So now you can sort them by anime, video game, specific series, etc. Finding stuff I'd previously uploaded was getting to be a pain, what with the ever-increasing number of images in my account, but this should alleviate the problem.
Last night I also got Adam to fix the bug with sorting World posts by tag. Now, when you click one of those shiny links up in the intro to view only posts with that tag, you'll be able to browse through all the pages of posts instead of having the page nav links reset the tag filter. So yay for that.
