A friend of mine recently forced me to sit down and watch a little dealio called Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog - an online musical dealing with a super villain wanna-be, his fairly bone-headed superhero nemesis, and the love of his life that he sees at his local laundromat every so often when doing his laundry... I'm typically not a huge fan of musicals, but I bloody loved it beyond words.

It's probably worth mentioning that I've listened to the sound track several times through today alone.

I was also fairly happy to see that the Chaos;Head visual novel translation project reached 98.01% - I've heard fairly positive things about the anime, and if Fate/Tsukihime/Utawarerumono/Clannad/etc/etc/etc/etc/etc are anything to go by, the original VN version of Chaos;Head should be somewhere around the order of eleventy billion times better than the anime adaptation.

Katawa Shoujo is apparently also making great progress (though it's an original English VN, not a translation), and should have a demo release sometime early-ish this year. I'm looking forward very much to it - the fact that it has the single most utterly absurd premise that I've ever heard of for a game and/or VN may be a factor.

On an unrelated note, a friend of mine discovered the sv_cheats variable in Left 4 Dead. What resulted was about two hours of zomgwtf. Also good times, but not quite so much... and, while I'm talking about L4D, there's a fan-made Resident Evil 2 themed campaign in the works - it's been a very long time since I last played RE2, but from what I can recall, the environments they've shown thus far look spot on.

So, I hate RPGs.

There are a few exceptions to this rule - I adore Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar: Eternal Blue... I enjoy a good romp around Neverwinter Nights 2 and Xenogears now and then, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 are decent as well.

On the other hand, I think that Final Fantasy 7 should be burned from existence, and removed from the collective memory of mankind before it is able to further taint the universe. My opinions regarding most other RPGs aren't quite so pointed, but still tend to be quite negative. I'd like to blame Squaresoft for turning me sour toward the genre, but that probably wouldn't be fair.

Anyway, a while back a Japanese PC game called Utawarerumono (of which I've spoken in the past about) received the honor of being translated by a group of fans, who described it as being a visual novel with SRPG elements.

Visual novel? Color me interested. SRPG? Not so much (at that point my only exposure to the genre had been through Super Robot Wars, which I hate almost as much as Final Fantasy 7 - which is saying a lot), but still - I figured it'd probably be worth it for the VN element, and plunked down some money to have the game imported. Good decision.

The game's visual novel elements are good. Absurdly so. My only complaint would be that the... 'romance' scenes seemed completely forced, unnecessary, pointless, and in more than one case completely out of character - but considering that such scenes played a thankfully minor role (and could be skipped by way of the control key), I was able to ignore them for the most part, as I enjoyed the story and cast quite a lot.

What really surprised me however, was the fact that I rather enjoyed the story driven SRPGish battles. The combat system was amazingly basic to be sure, but was still a lot of fun, and didn't make me want to castrate myself in the same way that Super Robot Wars had. So, when I finally completed the game, I wanted more, but didn't know where to look. Eventually I forgot about the whole deal until I was online looking for games to buy for my then-newly purchased PSP and stumbled upon Disgaea.

Being the cynical sort, I had a lot of misgivings, but decided in the end to throw out my relatively hard earned cash on the game. And let me say,

****ing hell.

I threw myself into the game without really reading any of the instructions or such (as any real man should do, I might add) but was still able to go through and wreck **** up, while having a jolly good time at it. Fast forward sixty-some gameplay hours (according to my save file), and I'm still coming across things that I hadn't known before...

If you pick an enemy up and throw it into another they merge into one higher level enemy? Brilliant!

If you pick an enemy up and throw it into your base panel you can attempt to capture and enslave it (or have it ruin your base and kill all of your undeployed units, if that fails)? Excellent!

I've completed one run through the story, got the fairly bad end that I'm certain most people get the first time around, and have begun my second cycle through with a focus on leveling my already absurdly (by the main story's standards) powerful characters up until I'm ready to take on all of the extra missions, after which I plan to go through and grab up the story's several remaining endings, in a plan that will most certainly require an absurd amount of time to see through to the end.

If I'm not sick of the entire genre by the time I'm done, and if Disgaea 2 is able to hold my interest as forcefully, Disgaea 3 may eventually force me into buying a Playstation 3.

The X button on my Hori EX2 arcade stick is apparently dying... I use it quite extensively as my kick button in SC4, so this makes me amazingly sad.

Seriously, I've had that pile of garbage for less than six months.

Thankfully, I'm already queue'd up for a custom 360 stick using parts that are lightyears ahead of Hori's garbage.

So those Chun-Li figures that I won through some odd twist of fate from the initial auction here arrived today. The proportions on them are appropriately strange loooking.  Two figures in total were sent - one meshed up in blue clothing (marked as being number one of three thousand, no less), the other in pink.

I gots me sum Chun Li. Props out to the mighty mights at Capcom for the raffle business - I was expecting that our moderately hard-earned points would be used to purchase things like avatars and wallpapers, not legit merch. HATS OFF TO YOU, GOOD SIRS.

I make the following assumptions:

• Capcom USA's shipping department likes to, for some unfathomable reason, attach perfectly good UPS label stickers to cardboard, and then tape said sticker/cardboard combo to a box slated for being shipped out. What?

• Capcom's shipping department is good at keeping their copy of WorldShip up to date. Some poor saps are still using 9.x, which lacks a number of things found in 10.0 and up.

• Snow Infernus was involved in this somehow.

• If the person or persons that got Capcom's UPS account setup are as lazy as some of the people I know, I could probably spy on all of their incoming and outgoing UPS shipments.

With that said... Jesus Christ, I'm a dork.

(and yes, I've dealt entirely too much with UPS)

Noteworthy because I said so: Thief 2 Multiplayer

A friend of mine recently released a multiplayer hack for Thief 2, the current beta version of which is the result of a year's worth of on-and-off development and nonstop mad hax0ring.

In less noteworthy news, I'm currently in the midst of a second playthrough of Utawarerumono, and it is goddamn awesome (the anime was complete and utter trash by comparison, as is typically the case in such situations). Highly recommended for anyone that knows how (and likes) to read... and/or anyone that isn't afraid of playing a game that is probably 90% text/story and 10% strategy RPG.

MirrorMoon released their translation of the third and final scenario in Fate/Stay Night, which I went through obsessively until completion. For a game that has zero actual gameplay, it somehow manages to trump roughly everything else in the universe. I'm going to have to go back and play through the Fate and Unlimited Blade Works scenarios again, now.