任是无情也动人

My recs page for youtube, bilibili, etc have been bombarded lately with the new 黑神话：悟空 (Black Myth: Wukong) game.

Been watching various videos, and I have been entertained as much by the cool cutscenes/storyline as by the hilarious reactions of various "journalists" about the game and the various gamering influencers responding to those journalists.

Addendum: After reading a lot of comments, speculation, analysis, etc. (on chinese sites that is), I feel like this video is relevant - 22000字解析：不聊黑神话，我想为西游记解读正本清源

It does seem like the narrative of the game is using an edgy 阴谋论 interpretation of JttW. That said, I think it's not really a big deal for the game to do so? Like, JttW itself was an interpretation of existing folklore based on the POV of the scholars of the Ming/Qing era. That Black Myth as a modern interpretation that is leaning into a lot of modern sentiments (like anti-feudalism, anti-divine, anti-authority...) seems par for the course to me.

And for people worried about foreigners being misled by "incorrect" mythology... em. Really, is it going to do worse than DBZ? Honestly, the real step is to get foreigners even interested in listening to infodumps about chinese myth/history. Whether how accurate it is (a nebulous thing given myth and folklore as a genre) is pretty insignificant. If people are really interested, they'll bother to do the research on their own.

Anyway, not planning on playing it or anything. It's waaay too skill-oriented for my taste.

Though while I was browsing through the linked recs on youtube, I also saw ads and trailers come up for the next GW2 expansion (already?). This would be the 2nd expac I've skipped. The previous one was for the wizard's tower. This one is for Janthir Wilds.

Skimmed through the trailer and it looks... meh. Really. Yeah, nothing to attract me back. -_-

Is it just me? Before, I could play one app one Bluestacks, then switch to another game, and repeat with multiple games. Nowadays, it seems like I can play one game, and then as soon as I try to switch to another, the application goes wonky with non-loading black screen and so forth. Have to close out Bluestacks altogether and then reopen it before I can open another app. And then sometimes, even the first time I play something, it will crash the bluestacks app.

Ugh. Is it just a bad emulator now? Or is it an issue of needing to reinstall fresh? Some setting I should change?

Still... not feeling the impetus to go back to GW2. And honestly, the graphics for this game is feeling really dated now. Might just log in with the accounts to unlock the update (assume they're similar to how living story updates work, I dunno)...



In other news, have been having fun with Honkai: Star Rail. I am at the point where I am hitting the grind part. Such that I've decided not to further raise the world difficulty for now, even though I'm still rank short of the max rewards difficulty level. Characters are also maxed at 70 (of the 80 cap) which should be enough for most content if I'm reading the various resources right.

Also, yes, I have sunk money and pulled on the gatcha, though not for all of the banners. Got Luocha during his banner because he is pretty. Turned out to be a good choice cuz he is like the top defensive support/healer right now. XD



Though of course my luck being what it is, the free 5 star the standard banner gave me is Bailu, another healer. -_- Not going to do anything with her. My other healer I built is the free 4 star from the story, since she's much cheaper to build. IMO building 2x 5-star healers at the same time would just require too much farming.

After him, I skipped the Blade and Kafka banners. Blade because not too into edgy masochist dudes. Kafka because not planning to invest into DoT gameplay. Currently looking forward to the next banner for 饮月君 (Imbibitor Lunae, lol translation) that's coming up in less than a week. Counting the days now...



Also, been reading Star Rail slashfic on AO3 lately... XDXDXD

EDIT:

Also considering getting the light cone for this next banner as well as the character. Because...well, rawr. ^_-

So this is sorta a followup to my previous post

It started when Youtube pushed me an hour long concert performance of Skyrim OST. I also did a brief search on youtube and found a few other Game OST related concert performances which are...pretty much similar to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaskxKfeFno

Now, I do like some of the skyrim OSTs, and I have a couple versions of Dragonborn Comes on my playlist somewhere. But, em... well, let's not compare how much it costs to hire an orchestra vs hiring professional singers/idols...mostly because it seems to be a pure cultural thing that Western games prefer pure instrumental OSTs exclusively, while Eastern games will have a mix (instrumental versions of songs in game, and vocal versions for advertising and pure showing off). But still, style of music aside, I still gotta say the venue and post-production of the western performance is simply incomparable to the east.

Shining Nikki, the 3D game of the Nikki series is released in the US. I've been seeing a lot of ads for it lately. However, looking at my spending and time investment on my existing dressup games, I'm gonna pass on it.

I'll stick with Time Princess for my 3D dressup needs. Speaking of which...


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So recently Dress Up Time Princess had an event that asked players to write fanfic. A lot of it is dross, of course, but there were some good ones.

For context: These are all based on the first "book" of the game, where the Player becomes Marie Antoinette at the eve of the French Revolution. In the game, there's one story route that will let you successfully push through reforms to same the monarchy. With the other route, the revolution still happens, and the good ends there generally result in the Player escaping France with the romance target of her choice.

what's going to be left of the world when I'm not in it, by Etsi Keating (meta-story angst)

Untitled and its sequel Untitled 2, by Angela G.A. (MC x Louis XVI)

Persuasion, by TalaMayumi (MC x Louis XVI)

Another Marie, by Fairylace (MC x Marquis de Lafayette)

untitled 2 by oldlizmar (post-story epilogue)

It's funny that most people wrote either MCxLafayette or xLouis XVI or even xGabrielle but almost nobody wrote xFerson (the more historically accurate romantic pairing).

Especially funny that I seem to like the fics featuring Louis XVI the most, despite that of all the NPCs, he had the least...well not screentime, but definitely the least focus for romance in the game storyline. Not sure what that says about things.

Been feeling nostalgic for Gaia Online and its avatar making fun. Of course, Gaia is now... eh... not exactly dead but let's just say it's not as it once was. Also, its avatars are too small for my tastes nowadays.

So I found out about a fashion game that originated in China for anime style fashion dress up. In the US, it's called Love Nikki. I used an alternate facebook account that I had around just for gaming purposes. The linking makes it easy to post image snapshots from the game.



The only flaw I can think of is the lack of sort and search options (for shops especially). As my virtual wardrobe fills up, it takes longer and longer to scroll through my dresses, shoes, etc. And I'm "only" on 665/13939 non-hair items. XD

EDIT: A lot of these tips have been invalidated since entering the... I guess it's the mid-game right now. So I've made a bunch of edits as of 1/31/20

( hug wall-o text )

So I figure I should mention which one I ended up getting. It's this one from Centaurus. Took its sweet time to ship, and I got it installed and everything last week.

While in the process of moving my games over, I actually found out that Perfect World the PC MMO is pretty much dead, and more surprisingly, replaced with a Perfect World Mobile version that seems pretty popular. A lot of the finicky minutiae of MMOs have been dumbed down of course, which makes it easier to get into. My new characters are still pretty low level, so I dunno how much Pay2Win it is at the endgame. But honestly I'm just there for the pretties.

I use bluestacks for emulator. Not sure if there's better out there.

Alas STO and GW2 have been sitting on the backburner lately. For one thing, there's so much shiny on mobile now. For another, I still haven't kicked my cnovel obsession, and tend to lose track of time whenever another CN catches my interest.

So little time in the day... *sigh*

http://kissmanga.com/Manga/Pokemon-Dating-a-Team-Magma-Grunt-Doujinshi

This is kinda adorable. Game continuity based, looks like.