Niahak's Place

So I was flipping through my version of Dao De Jing (or Tao Te Ching) last night and I noticed something. Well, something aside from the Wade-Giles romanization, which I still find annoying. The translator put in nifty little explanations of each section, along with notes where a word may have been missing in certain editions, possible alternate meanings, et cetera. What I noticed more, though, was the bias the author had about Laozi and about Taoism in general. Normally, I wouldn’t mind a few references to Christianity, but a particular entry about how in a certain passage Laozi is trying to find God without the teachings of Christ and is therefore failing was a bit much.. I respect those who have dedicated themselves to their religion. Imposing it on others is another idea entirely.

I changed my theme again, mostly because the theme I’d modified before had a bunch of incongruity.  Sadly, I only just now realized this.

This theme’s a bit bright for me, but I think it’ll do for now.

Also, if you ever watch Scryed (S-cry-ed)  stop at episode 24.  Much better ending than the one at 26.  Other than that it was pretty decent.

So I’ve been thinking about releasing a redone Jesus patch.
I wasn’t particularly happy with the old font, hence the new font screenshot in the appropriate section.

Of course, I’m not happy with the fact that I didn’t expand the ROM, but that’s a can of worms I’m not about to open.

Anyway, I was wondering if there might be interest in such a patch.   Not that anybody really reads the site, but I was thinking about tweaking dialogue and such too.  Maybe I’ll take another look at what I’ve got first.

What else?  The DS is great.  Rocket Slime started out being rather boring, but is now pretty fun.  It looks like it may be on the short side, but I can live with that.  My roommate got Trauma Center for the Wii; it’s even better than the DS one.  Naturally, videolamer has a review.  We at vl have lots of things.  Like an article that made it to the front page of Digg, and made it so we didn’t have as many things as we used to, such as a webhost that doesn’t hate us.  Did get more hits, though.

Anyway, I’m grasping at straws here.  I may be starting a new translation project – new to me, anyway – but we’ll see what comes of it.

I picked up a copy of Yggdra Union for the GBA. I played Riviera, Sting’s previous game, and enjoyed it somewhat (though endlessly “practicing” got on my nerves). I’m relieved to find that Yggdra Union is better. In many ways it’s like previous strategy games, but it makes some nifty improvements that make it lots of fun. It’s got a medieval fantasy story with some pretty dark elements so far.
All the characters are pretty well done, and I also like the branching path stuff. It’s probably the last good original GBA game to be released (FF6 GBA will be released in the US sooner or later).

I’m also impressed with how good GBA games look on the DS Lite. I bet they’re the same on an SP, but I always had an original model GBA. I never even really noticed the darkness of games (besides Castlevania: Circle of the Moon), but everything looks so much more vibrant, it’s amazing.

This portable console generation will be the first time I ever play a portable console over one of the “main” ones. I’m not playing PS2, because Xenosaga II failed to motivate me and I’m just not feeling it now. I’m waiting to head back to school so I can play through Super Mario RPG again.

I’m also playing Rome: Total War, which I also purchased. It runs a bit flaky on my laptop, but it’s actually a great improvement over Medieval and Shogun. I’d really like to try Medieval II, except it probably won’t run at all on my machine… Ah, what a sad time when I’d have to get a new computer to play an RTS!

If you’ve never tried a Total War game, they’re sort of a combination of Civilization and RTS. Turn-based city management with RTS-style combat. Think tabletop Warhammer etc. for the battles, where you have units of cavalry, infantry, etc. facing off against each other. Great game style, and it can get quite intense. All they need to do now is make Three Kingdoms: Total War… That could be really good. Surprised they haven’t come up with it yet since they’re obviously big history buffs. Maybe The Creative Assembly is the new Koei.

Oh yeah, and Happy New Year.  May it be less disaster-filled and divisive than the past 6,000+ of known history have been, though I wouldn’t count on it.

So I haven’t posted anything in a while.

My birthday came and went (as has most of Christmas) this past week, and I was lucky enough to receive a DS and a copy of Trauma Center.

Regardless of what other people may tell you, I think this may well be the coolest game on the DS.  It’s just about the perfect style of game.  I’d heard good things, but I didn’t expect it to be nearly this fun.  It’s looking like it may be kind of short-ish, but it’s a very, very intense game at times.

Other than that… Xenosaga 2 is looking kind of meh.  I was optimistic going in, but I really don’t like what they did with most of the character designs, and the completely different voice cast is a turn-off too.  Battle system looks like it’s going to be kind of bland as well.  I may wait until I’m back at school to resume it.