Thursday 25 June 2009

RosenKreuzStilette and the One Night Before The Exam

I was reading this blog of this dude called Kev-chan's, and I happened to come across an interesting post. "
RosenKreuzStilette... roughly translates to Rose Cross Stiletto in English. Pretty nice name." I thought to myself. I continued reading, and I found that it was none other than a loli version of MegaMan.

LOLWUT I was in #D-A asking for side-scrolling shooter games like MegaMan five minutes ago, and suddenly I find this? What am I waiting for? Google up the torrent! LIKE RIGHT NOW! As I waited pretty impatiently for the torrent to load, I had a look at the description of the game.

The
"RosenKreuzStilette is the first, and currently only, game created by up-and-coming doujin developer, [erka:es]. Like MegaMari, this game is played exactly like the Mega Man games, however, its setting and cast is completely original."

Hey, that isn't too bad, you know! It's original, yet it has such awesome art. Right, I'm looking forward more to it!

The story as I read: "Thousands of years ago, humans possessed the ability to wield the power of magic, know as "Magi." Since then, however, they had mostly lost that power and only a few were born with such a gift. Those with the power to use Magi, however, were doomed to a life of being feared, hated, and persecuted by the Holy Empire and Orthodox Church. Finally, the Magi users decided to stand up against their opposes and fought a great battle, which ultimately resulted with the Magi users being accepted as part of the Holy Empire's fighting force, known as erka:es (yes, the same name as the doujin group). The persecution of Magi users seemed like a thing of the past, but, to erka:es, it was not forgotten. A few decades later, the game's heroine, a Magi user named Spiritia Rosenberg, returns home to find that all of her friends are waging a "holy war" of sorts, believing that it is their right to use their power to claim dominance and end their persecution once and for all. Spiritia doesn't agree with their way of doing things, and decides to get to the bottom of their sudden madness.
Hmm.. apparently this might differ a bit from MegaMan, or at least I think. Well at least I don't recall the player being able to swap weapons in game, lest say switch color themes for every different weapons.









Depending on which weapon you're wielding you get a different sprite.
Random fact here : If my friends know I'm actually downloading another
bishoujo game like this again, I know for a fact that my best friend will be like, "eii, don't play games like this la...." like what happened when he caught me playing Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. But seriously, I can't help it. DATTE, KAWAII DESHO?! Checking out a few of the screen shots, I guess I did feel a chill up my spine. This definitely wasn't your average MegaMan game. It was a total monster. A monster, rivalable only by Touhou on Lunatic Mode. It was bullet hell at time, and when it wasn't bullet hell, it was intellect hell. Let me show you a sample of bullet hell moments.











You gotta be fast!

And this is when it's not bullet hell.














Guess wut, those platforms Spiritia is jumping on are placed by the player, and they won't stop rising. You have to be fast, and place the platforms at the right timing, for your weapon enrgy (yes, those platforms count as weapons too) is very limited, and is symbolized by the red bar next to the yellow bar.

Like MegaMan, this game comes with its share of awesome bosses.










Freudia Neuwahl










Zorne Sepperin









Trauare Wrede










Luste Teuber











Grolla Seyfarth










Sichte Meister










Liebea Palesch










Schwer-Muta Casasola Merkle











Graf Michael Sepperin





It all ends with a male boss. Quite a perfect way to end it, huh?
Within 2 hours, the torrent is complete, due to bad seeds and various reasons. Right... extract, patch... DONE. Run!

All right. Within 2 minutes into game, I lost all three lives. Bullet hell wasn't terrible, the fact that bullets actually knocked you back a short distance was. Numerous times I found myself shot down in the air, right into an endless fall, losing a life in the process.

The boss fights are just as bad. At least in Touhou you get a hitbox, which means your sprite can be grazed for points, just as long as you don't let any bullet connect with the ominous red dot in the middle of the sprite. In RosenKreuzStilette, you don't. Your whole character sprite is your hitbox, a graze knocks you back a small distance, and takes a healthy chunk off your already short health. It's worse if you're using Grolly instead of Spiritia, I don't know what the game makers were thinking when they made melee characters take more damage than ranged characters. I mean, in any game, the melee heroes will almost be beefier and can tank much more damage than the ranged ones, isn't it?








You know... I really don't remember going through such projectiles in MegaMan.






Writing on crazy stuff, listening to crazy music (Tomatsu Haruka - motto ni hade ne!). Wow, way to kill a night before an exam. If anything, I blame Kev-chan!

Tuesday 23 June 2009

Cosplay



I'm sure everyone would know what's cosplay. Ok, perhaps not everyone (if you don't, go HEREand come back once you've read the first sentence, and seen the first picture, you do not need further knowledge on the topic anymore). OR, if you're just too lazy, I have prepared a motivator for you RIGHT here, which I shall present RIGHT NOW:
So, that was a photo of people cosplaying as dolls from Rozen Maiden. I have to admit, I do not have an original picture of the dolls at the moment though.

Either way, another motivator:


Right, you get the point.
So anyways, I recently came across this cosplay of one of my favourite characters from K-ON! (yes I'm one of them KyoAni fa[s]g[/s]ns) Azusa Nakano, and I was like WHAT? COSPLAY? OF MY AZUSA?

Well, of course I clicked on the pictures, and I literally screamed, "MINDFUCK!"
Here's a comparison


Azusa in nekomimi was supposedly one of the selling points of the show. BUT this girl who DARED to defile Azusa's honor, put on nekomimi too, and I could only watch as the next-generation-anime-faggots all swoon and say KAWAII DESU~.

Random relevant fact here : Japanese government banned nekomimi and pregnancy in eroge games. Well what I personally think they should do, if they want to ban nekomimi, is ban the usage of nekomimi in this defiling of their culture called COSPLAY.

C'mon, folks, does this girl seriously think she can match Azusa in terms of moe?



If anything, cosplay like this should be erased from this world. The 2D world, in my humble opinion, isn't a place for the 3D world to interfere.
A fine example of what I'm saying would be:


Learn your lesson, folks.


Too bad you don't.


Tuesday 16 June 2009

Exams

Exams. Coming soon. Next Friday.

Wow, Next Friday. 26th of June. K that's really fast. I'm pretty much running out of time here. Let's see... we start with Parasitology a.k.a. Biology. Coming next is Chemistry, tailed by Physics, and finally to round it off, Latin.

4 papers. Sounds easy, isn't it? Okay, well, let's see... the Biology department, well it's stuffed with teachers who don't really speak English, there's also this fella who gives you a good mark in the following scenario : You get the topic "Fish", AND you teach him how to make fish curry. Yes I kid you not. So there really isn't much to worry about. Make sure you hit the keywords right, and you're out with an awesome grade. I might start studying for it 4 days before the actual paper.

Chemistry. Wow. Now that's one tough nut. All right, we do get the actual questions to prepare before the exam. 50+ questions, in fact. All written. Length is random, spanning from at least 2 pages to 4-5 pages. K it wouldn't be this hard, but the fact that my chemistry teacher loves me so much is making it really really hard. I've heard from seniors that for 95% of them, their marks in the 2nd semester exam are exactly the same as their marks in the 1st semseter. Which means I'll get a borderline mark. Gee, I hate chemistry.

Physics. Well, managable I guess. Not exactly a subject I'd be confident in, but if I answer directly to my teacher, I'm pretty sure he'll do his best to help me. Or so I hope.

Latin. Probably the only subject I'm 100% confident in. I've been practicing this subject all year, no thanks to Mrs. Martinson who never fails to give us tests every week.

I sit here even now, typing out my thoughts for this upcoming exam, and I remember : I have 30+ questions left for chemistry.

Thursday 4 June 2009

Help

Help, what is it? According to the concise Oxford Dictionary, help would be defined as" make it easier for (someone) to do something. O improve (a situation or problem); be of benefit to. O assist (someone) to move in a specified direction."

See the astonishing amount of definitions of it. I daresay myself, that I'm a pretty helpful person. My definition of help would be the first one, for sure : to make it easier to do something. I do not know why, but I really do enjoy helping people. I can't put into words how much it pleasures me when I see their smiles when they can accomplish something because I helped them out.

Yet, as one of the definitions puts it, "to be of benefit to." It's little wonder that people acknowledge my existence only when they need help. When they need the benefits. Without benefits, I can easily be said as nothing to them. Yes, I know that this world may be harsh, people like this DO exist. However, this doesn't mean people can use me till I dry up and throw me away like a ragged cloth. What I implore of them is but the simple act of acknowledging my presence, be it as a friend, or as a regular acquantaince, it matters not.

Why is it so? I find myself waking up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep, thinking of what I mean to myself, and to the others around me. You might say I choose those around me. Yet it's not how it appears. I'm pretty much a loner at times. There are quite a number of people (though I shall be courteous enough to not mention specifically) who only come to me if they have any problems, that they think I can solve. Be it coincidence or my impeccable versatility, I somehow end up having the abilities to put an end to their troubles. And what happens? They come to me only if they need help, or so-called "benefits". My usual existence is lower than that of a flea's, but when trouble, I skyrocket into an MVP in the blink of an eye.

If I may pose just one question : How exactly would you feel if people you considered to be your friends actually treated you like a packet of condoms?

As the Chinese proverb speaks, "助人?快?之本" or "helping people is the base of happiness", I find myself already doubting it. Of course, there're times when I'm happy when helping certain people, yet there are also times when thoughts like "people like this, why am I even striving to help them out?" cross my mind. Yet, I'm too much of a kind person to turn down every request coming my way. Why did I choose to walk the path of studying medicine in the first place? Because I wanted to help people. Growing up in a family of doctors, I can comfortably say I've seen much suffering. All through the eyes of a child, and moving on.

When I first started medicine, I wanted to be a cardiologist, or perhaps a paediatrician. Yet disturbing thoughts I've mentioned above constantly trouble me. Childish as I may be, I now think that I should just specialize in forensic sciences next time. Why? Well, of course the dead do not know you, yet if you help them speak, it would be an utterly different matter. Perhaps this may be a childish thought sparked by HK dramas (no thanks to a certain Madam Loh), but I just have this feeling that, just as the dead tell no tales, neither would they treat you like a box of condoms.

Either way, I stand at crossroads. No, I have been standing at crossroads, from four to five weeks ago. Left says to maintain this way of life, accept everything that comes my way, help everyone regardless of whether they appreciate it or not. Right says to put everything to a stop.

Perhaps this shall be a problem that haunts me for the rest of my days, I know not. For now, I stand up again, ready for a batter tomorrow. ('sif that day would ever come, eh?)

Now to you, the reader of this blog : 私の存在は何の物?