Ashs Adventures – Page 9

On Bug Repellant

August 30, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #28

I didn’t think this was going to happen at the start of this year, but this weekend I find myself in Seattle, attending PAX Prime with Tamrielo and Kodra. I’ve previously been to East (twice) and South, but this is my first time coming to the original venue. It’s also my first time attending any event where there’s been a Final Fantasy 14 Battle Challenge. The enemy for this event is Ravana, normally encountered as part of the Heavensward storyline at level 53. This one’s been scaled up a bit to be an appropriate challenge for level 60 characters.

We met up with another member of our free company, which meant we had 4 people familiar with the fight. Joining us were 3 people who had never played Final Fantasy 14 before, and one who did play, but was not high enough level to have seen the fight. We got through the slaughter phases pretty well, but we had some issues with the defensive phases.

In the end though, we emerged victorious. It was actually kind of satisfying helping people who hadn’t seen it before get through, and we got nice new shirts out of the deal.

On Rocking Out For Real

August 29, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #27

The resurrection of Guitar Hero and Rock Band brings to mind the guitar game that came around as they were fading. Rocksmith (also on Steam) requires an actual stringed instrument and a special USB cable. The latest release is almost two years old now, but they just put it on the new consoles, so I suppose it counts as current. Unlike the others, this one is attempting to teach how to actually play guitar in the form of a game. It has an arcadey score attack mode if you miss the Guitar Hero aesthetic. It also now has several years worth of DLC.

Needing an actual guitar or bass makes the buy-in here rather high, but for people like myself who already own one, it’s an interesting experience. It has some major flaws in teaching how to actually play an instrument, but it is pretty good for learning how to play specific songs. It (on the default settings) dynamically adds more notes in as you get more familiar with a given song. Songs you’ve never played before are adjusted for what the game thinks your skill level is.

If you’ve ever thought about learning guitar, this might be a good first step. It makes “practice” entertaining, which helps a lot. You should seek out another resource if you’re serious about it, however.

On Rocking Out

August 29, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #26

I’m quite likely to pick up Rock Band 4 whenever that comes out, the announcement that my instruments and previously purchased tracks will continue to work was somewhat influential here. Even with varying skill levels, it makes for a very fun party game. The expansion of the single player mode helps too. They’re dropping pro guitar mode, but I never used that in RB3. (According to metrics they released, I’m far from alone.)

At the same time, Guitar Hero Live is coming out this year, and I’m not sure who the target audience is. It’s guitar-only, uses a different controller than all previous games, and abandons the colorful atmosphere of previous Guitar Hero and Rock Band games in favor of showing a live audience. When you add the tracklist included with the announcement to this, I can only conclude that it’s for someone who isn’t me. (They’ve since added tracks that I’d be more interested in playing, as well as vocals. There may be hope for this one yet.)

It’s 2008 all over again, but I’m OK with this. I suspect we won’t end up with mountains of unsold guitars in stores this time.

On 仮名

August 29, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #25

At this point Tam probably knows more Japanese than I do, and I took a quarter of it in college to fulfill a communication requirement. (The options were sign language, a foreign language, or a selection of classes that would make me re-live high school English. It wasn’t a difficult choice.) One of the things that brings back memories is learning to read Hiragana/Katakana, and more importantly, how to write using them.

This was actually the part of learning a language that I was pretty good at. I came up with somewhat odd ways of remembering what meant what. It actually helped me that several of them have extremely similar shapes, because then I could easily pick out the differences and remember them that way. わ, ね, and れ are a good example of this. Over time, I got faster, and through repetition I learned to write them too.

I had the same textbook Tam is using, but also a workbook for practice. I also had classmates for practice speaking and understanding, and I begin to realize the importance of that too. Maybe I’ll start falling back down this rabbit hole, if only so I understand when people near me say and write otherwise incomprehensible things.