Games

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In an effort to catch up on some of my reading backlog, I recently found myself revisiting The Fruit of Grisaia, both the visual novel and the anime. Because sometimes time for reading is limited, and the story is pretty damned long.

In doing so, I’m kind of reminded of several things. The anime adaption while extremely well executed is also extremely condensed. Many key scenes are filtered through but as a whole: you only get something on par with 20% of the visual novel’s content. That is to say: the anime is great, but it’s like looking through a pinhole compared to the original media. Episode one’s one line summary of each character’s story is also spot on.

About 90% of the crude humor that makes Yuuji’s school life so enjoyable is cut, and each characters story is condensed heavily for time. For me that’s kind of sad because the joking and clowning around is part of why the novel left me laughing my ass of more often than not.

Considering that each characters story is practically a novel in of itself, the anime fairs pretty well for cutting out so much. You still get key moments like burying his classmate alive, but much of the detail around it is lost, such as the airhead’s true nature. I think Amane’s story is the only one that really escaped massive trim: probably because there’s no way to actually trim her story and keep the jist. By contrast, Sachi’s which is the longest character story in the novel: only got one episode that struggles to tell the jist of her condition. And the series totally misses out on her sadomasochist sense of humor to a fine degree, and Michiru’s constant bombardment of idiocy and subtle kindness. All sorts of things in the name of fitting into a standard season length.

Likewise things are quite twisted to create a point of co-existence out of the novel’s ladder like structure. So we don’t get to see how much Yuuji / Makina truly mirrors his relationship with Asako, as that would be destructive to a shared finish. And a host of other things. I don’t think we even get the hilarious Lamborghini and frozen turkey scene from Yumiko’s route which was just freaking awesome sauce. Instead a new ending is sort of created, and much of the characters’ suffering and healing is drifted off to the cutting room floor. But if you had to cram it down to about a dozen episodes, I’d say the anime is about as good as could be done with the story.

But then I remember what really made me interested in the story wasn’t Gurizaia no Kajitsu itself: but the anime adaptions of the follow on media. Which pretty much starts out by telling Yuuji’s story, and the road from his truly fucked up youth to his master, Asako, saving him for the pits of hell. It wasn’t until after the anime adaptions of the The Labyrinth, and The Eden of Grisaia that the original visual novel really went on my radar.

Which kind of leaves me wondering: and just how heavily condensed was the rest of the trilogy when they adapted them to anime!?

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Somehow in revisiting Resident Evil 2 (2019), I can’t help but think Claire’s route is better. Also that I missed the A-rank score by about 20 minutes.

Of the choice between Leon and Claire: you get largely the same story but many differences. Early portions mirror each other such as the gas station and the fire escape. Some are branching points like penetrating the watch room or the chief’s office. Things also take different paths towards the end with Leon getting embedded in the Umbrella mystery, and Claire in the quest to shave Sherry.

But somehow, I think the scene at the end of the sewer segment captures it best:

Leon’s time is mostly spent being a rookie man of mystery focused on Racoon City. And perhaps nearly getting eaten because he’s more interested in flirting with the pretty girls than fleeing zombies. At best it can lead to Umbrella being exposed but it’s all rather fleeting. But it’s more exploratory than passionate.

Claire’s a mission about Sherry. While there’s much less intrigue without Ada, I feel the focus on the Birkin family makes a far more personal connection. We all know that Racoon City is doomed, ‘cuz that’s just how these things go. Plus let’s be honest: the original game ended with a get to da choppa / nuclear kabluuy kind of end to the Spencer mansion. There’s no way you’re saving Racoon City, and no point in trying. But Sherry—that’s a difference you can make in how the disaster plays out.

There’s also how the two characters are introduced. Leon is driving into the city because things have gone dark, and he’s supposed to be starting work at the police station. Claire shows up headed there in search of her brother, one of the original game’s S.T.A.R.s team protagonists. You could say these kind of metrics largely keep rolling through how their stories diverge.

 So in the end, I reckon the question of which character’s story should you take, is the question: are you curious or do you care? Personally I feel that Claire’s route makes for a better game, and Leon’s for a better novelization.

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Taking a quick stab at the Resident Evil 3 Demo, I’m kind of thrilled to see that it remains the kind of awesome that the remake of Resident Evil 2 was in terms of game play, mechanics, and general design flow.

Combined with the release of Doom Eternal, of course, I am rather tempted. And know the virtues of hiding my wallet….lol

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The Xbox’s plugs and ports, a visual history.

Nice little view, IMHO.

I pretty much ignored the original Xbox. At the time, I had a Play Station 2 and a PC. By the time the Xbox 360 came out: I had already converted to PC games. So the first iteration of Xbox One was the first time that I actually used one.

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Microsoft unveils full Xbox Series X specs with 1TB expansion cards.

So in short they’ve addressed my two real wishes on the hardware front, and jacked up the horse power for tomorrow’s video games.

One of the things I dislike about the original Xbox Ome controller is that it uses MicroUSB, and I’ve largely migrated to USB-C over a slow process of attrition. My controller is one of the few things I still use that calls for a Micro-B connection.

Something I’ve coped with is the storage situation. 500 GB of doesn’t totally suck 2.5” SATA drive is able to deliver load times that aren’t overly comical, but is quite a bit too small when major games are often 30~60 GB each. A decent 1 TB drive on the USB-A ports has made a world of difference.

Beyond that I’ve been pretty happy with how the original hardware platform worked out.

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Exploring around the Xbox (beta) app for a long while, I found it curious how scroll performance eventually tanked. By the time it became barf worthy, I noticed that one of the processes in its group was marked as around 2 GB. It also persists across coding and opening the GUI.

Exiting the system tray reduced it to about 2~3 something MB for the process group in taskmgr. Playing around, it looks like shifting between the list of games in category view and opening them for the detailed store view causes memory to go up, and be largely hung onto after returning to the list.

Ahh, the joys of memory leaks: and the reminder that even Microsoft ships more than a few bugs. For the Xbox used for Game Pass, at least is flagged as beta quality. Even if it looks like a resource sucking monster compared to something like Valve’s Steam client.

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Having finished The Outer Worlds, I’m reminded of the last time I enjoyed an RPG that much. It was probably Dragon Age: Origins. Which are very different genres: Outer Worlds is a science fiction shooter set in a caricature world; Origins was a sword and spell tactical game set in a fantasy world.

There’s two really specific ways the games connect in my mind, aside from the level of fun.

One of the things I rather enjoyed is the open ended way of conversing. In both OW and DA, you can pretty much respond to given situation how you want. Will your interactions be kind hearted, greedy, or antagonistic? It’s up to you. While some games insert hilarious options, The Outer Worlds, like Dragon Age: Origins: is very consistent in this execution of choice. Down to the point that it may as well be a running gag being able to introduce yourself as the former captain of The Unreliable instead of yourself. Plus there’s the case of choices that actually make a difference, and party interaction.

Another is the Not Another Sandbox Thing. I really enjoyed the Elder Scroll games, for an example. But the 2000s will probably be best remembered as the era of sandbox games, and when shooters traded the dozen guns in your back pocket for MMO-like skill attributes. But I don’t really like “Open world” sandboxes as a game design. I find that they often cause a lose of focus, and in many games not made by Really Big Makers Of Games, it often feels more like a copout rather than a benefit. In fact even when it’s made by big fish it still feels that way quite often. By contrast, Outer Worlds and Dragon Age: Origins are more like a series of small contained environments. You get the open-world aspects of being able to choose where you go, and how you go questing. But you’re not dumped in a sandbox and left to wander around. I find this lends a greater focus to problem solving, and questing.

Pretty tersely: The Outer Worlds is probably the best modern RPG game that I’ve played in quite a while.

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Halo’s developers explain what can go wrong with unlocked framerates in old game ports

It’s also worth remembering that these kind of weird ass behaviors and bugs can occur on games  natively developed for PCs. Older games often have to cope with hardware that is faster than anyone imagined, and totally different from what the game was developed on.

A prime problem that comes to mind is the flying APC bug in MW3. On my older Pentium D machine, APCs would often fly up into the air and usually come back down. On my Core i5 machine: they never would come back down, or even be within targeting range most of the time. Which makes it hard to complete some of the early missions, lol. Today you require limiting the CPU speed and emulating a graphics card in software just to render it playable on modern hardware.

In fact, the game was old enough that when my eyes lit up at finding a copy of Mech Warrior 3: the next problem to solve was convincing the clerk to sell it to me because there was no returns welcomed, lol. I seem to recall Pentium 3s and Pentium IIs being high end processors around the time the game was released.