Yup. After hearing about the XCOM-In-Name-Only FPS that 2K Marin was making, the news and the current info about XCOM from Firaxis was one of the best surprises so far this year. Firaxis' reboot is looking a lot better and a lot more promising than the other guys'.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at March 06, 2012 05:01 PM (UF6gA)
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I have been looking forward to this one since it was announced. I am a bit skeptical of some of the changes, particularly removing time units. But it is certainly more promising than the FPS game being made.
There were some good interviews with the dev team at Rock Paper Shotgun a while back, that had a bit more depth on the changes and the thoughts behind them than this short clip could fit in.
Posted by: haphazard1 at March 06, 2012 06:24 PM (9yBYR)
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I... oh my. Firaxis, just take my wallet and give it back when you're done.
Posted by: Wonderduck at March 06, 2012 06:40 PM (O9XO8)
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at March 06, 2012 08:28 PM (pWQz4)
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Woohoo! I somehow missed this news, though I knew about the XINO* shooter.
If we can get a new Wasteland game and a new party-based tactical RPG from Obsidian, I'll be in happy-land for the rest of the year.
* XCOM in name only.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 06, 2012 09:53 PM (PiXy!)
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And from that video, they seem to have got it exactly right. Preserving the turn-based tactical gameplay while refining the mechanics and boosting the graphics into low Earth orbit.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 06, 2012 09:54 PM (PiXy!)
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The Sectoids sure look amazingly good. I wonder what they'll do with the other races?
If only Sid Meyer wasn't writing the plot. It will put a stake through the heart of the franchise if he makes the aliens turn out to be the good guys, kidnapping humans in an attempt to preserve our species on some kind of cosmic ark before we destroy ourselves with global warming, even though we're so violent they have to frequently fight their way back to their ships after rescuing worthy humans.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at March 07, 2012 06:37 AM (4njWT)
Posted by: metaphysician at March 07, 2012 10:19 AM (3GCAl)
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That was the plot of the cancelled Railroads! sequel, I think.
Posted by: Wonderduck at March 07, 2012 04:41 PM (O9XO8)
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I really should not recommend them, but Game Informer (Gamestop's in-house inpromptu toilet - I mean, their in-house magazine.) did a detailed write-up on Firaxis' XCOM in their February issue. They also have it online, if you do not want to read it at the local Gamestop.
Posted by: cxt217 at March 07, 2012 05:12 PM (UF6gA)
I'm referring to all the "executive meddling" that takes place in games that bear the Sid Meier label (though I am exaggerating a bit). I don't see how anyone bought that excuse in the first place, given that Meier WAS the chief executive in all his games as far back as Colonization.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at March 09, 2012 12:05 PM (4njWT)
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I more mean, where would the idea he'd throw something like that in come from? Of the Sid Meier games I've played, the only one even vaguely similar is Alpha Centauri, and reducing the game to a cliche enviro-aesop is really not doing the game justice.
Posted by: metaphysician at March 09, 2012 07:48 PM (3GCAl)
It's not just the environmentalism, but the common theme in all his games is that every side is morally equivalent, no different from any other except in name. Somehow I don't think that bodes well for Sid Meier's X-Com being the sort of "human underdogs vs. overpowered evil alien maurauders" plot that the previous games were.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at March 09, 2012 11:48 PM (4njWT)
My copy of the first BD of Mouretsu Pirates got delivered this morning. The BD contains the first two episodes, of course. They're both together in a single file, which is unusual.
There's also a clean OP and a clean ED. And there's a 36 minute video of what seems to have been a live kickoff show for the series, featuring the director and the primary seiyuu.
This is backstage picture from that video. On the left is Chiaki. In the middle is Marika. On the right is Sato, the series director.
There were five other women on stage.
Presumably one of those is Jenny Dolittle, but I can't tell which. That seiyuu's publicity picture at ANN is dreadful.
I think the reason they're all in red and white is that this was filmed in December, before the series began broadcasting. So it's Christmas themed.
I think this series is going to end up being a big hit. It'll be interesting to see how the first BD sells when the numbers come out next week.
UPDATE: I got the fancy version, which included a CD. The first track on the CD is an audio play which is thirteen and a half minutes long. The second track is a song sung by Marika. At which point I was beginning to worry.
But the third track is the music that plays under the ep teaser before the OP, so it's OK.
I think the background music on this series is particularly good, so I was hoping the CD would contain some of the best of it -- particularly the music under the action scenes.
UPDATE: Lots of good songs on that CD, and I'm going to upload three of them. I have no idea what they think they're named. Here are my names:
So track 12, which I called "Electronic Warfare", they called "Ugokidasu Toki", more or less "Time to get going".
Track 18, which I called "Odette II", they called "Hakuoh Jogakuin" which is the name of the school. I can believe that.
And track 21, which I called "Solar Sails", they called "Captain Marika". And I can buy that, too. It was when Marika first really demonstrated the kind of coolness and resourcefulness under fire that a real captain has to have.
One way I can tell that a series is a good one is that it engages the part of my mind that tries to figure things out. Some thoughts below the fold, spoilerish.
1
An hour for her hair? When I rewatched that episode, I decided it would be a major breach of reality if she ever showed up in it again without at least two assistants and most of a morning to prepare it.
2
She certainly must have had quite a retinue with her on that liner.
Which makes her stowing away all the more amazing. Not only did she have to sneak onto Bentenmaru without getting caught, she had to give the slip to all her maids.
3
I'm thinking robot maids. For Gruelle's wardrobe and hair, I mean, as opposed to my usual thoughts about robot maids...
As for staying at the school,
with Gruelle officially in the yacht club, the Odette II presents interesting possibilities for vacation trips home. We know it's got good armor and an up-to-date electronic-warfare system; perhaps someone "forgot" to remove the weapons as well, and they're just locked down in ways that surely no schoolgirls could ever circumvent.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 06, 2012 06:18 PM (fpXGN)
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J, I can't see it. I do believe that Odette II will figure in the series again, but not that way. (And I don't believe that it is armed.)
The Bentenmaru's crew didn't seem too concerned with
the three ships escorting the Princess' cruiser, even if things got dicey, (some comment was made to the effect that the Bentenmaru was "vastly more powerful"), so they might have even been able to handle four corbacks -- but the larger battleship would likely have been a more formidable danger. And the five ships acting together...that probably would have turned into a bad day. Which makes me wonder if Pirate ships might be exempted from armament limitations generally imposed by the GE.
Posted by: Dave Young at March 06, 2012 06:52 PM (ZAk0Z)
6
Expanding on Dave's comment and pushing into some other things I've thinking about for a while, the entire set up with the letters of marque
seems to me like a bit of a political compromise. The GE doesn't allow piracy, but they do respect local laws and customs, so as part of the annexation a compromise is reached: Privateers are allowed but are essentially only grandfathered in. New letters of marque cannot be issued. Old ones can be renewed, but only in restrictive circumstances (bloodlines, requirement for actual piracy shortly after renewal) so as to make them slowly disappear. The Sea of Morningstar government wants to keep them around for their military utility though, so they do a lot to assist in successful renewals (government escort while Marika is renewing, lax requirement for what is considered "piracy" to include what is essentially a tourist show).
It all seems like a dance where the Sea of Morningstar is trying to keep military forces that it would otherwise be denied and the GE is trying to eliminate them without being too obvious and risking revolt in the rest of the empire (I imagine a great deal of their ability to maintain their empire is due to them treating their subject systems fairly enough).
Posted by: benzeen at March 06, 2012 08:34 PM (R9i5E)
7
benzeen: That sounds like it might be pretty close to the mark.
Posted by: Dave Young at March 06, 2012 08:59 PM (ZAk0Z)
The privateers
are an excess military ability which fell through the cracks. But they're also politically useful because they represent "plausible deniability". For instance, when those Serenity ships were incoming, Sea of the Morningstar sent Bentenmaru instead of the Stellar Military because Bentenmaru isn't quite official. If it had been the Stellar Military which directly observed Serenity ships firing their weapons, they would have had to open fire themselves and it would have gotten ugly. Bentenmaru didn't carry that obligation, and Marika was able to defuse the situation without bloodshed.
Likewise, the operation that Gruier hired Bentenmaru for couldn't really be done by the Serenity military on her behalf, I suspect. But hiring what amount to mercenaries to take care of it is something where everyone can pretend and look the other way.
I wouldn't be surprised if even the Galactic Empire uses privateers that way once in a while. Their status as being legal-but-only-just-barely is handy in situations where a government needs to do something but doesn't want to take official responsibility for it.
While I'm here, thought I'd mention that I'm going back to "Gruier" as spelling of her name. When she's introduced to her class in the middle school, her name was written on the chalk board both in Japanese and in Roman letters, and it was spelled Gruier. It wasn't a subtitle, it's in the actual show graphics. So it's the official spelling, and we're stuck with it.
Just like we're stuck with "Bodacious Space Pirates".
9
By the way, about that "being too obvious" part of it:
I wonder if the assassin in ep 1, and the Lightning 11, are both working for the Galactic Empire?
I can believe that they're trying to eliminate the pirates. And at the time of a generational turnover in pirate captaincy, there's a distinct vulnerability which maybe, maybe, some organization in the GE is trying to use. After all, if they'd managed to kill Marika, then Bentenmaru's letter of marque would have expired and that would be one less privateer to worry about.
Of course if, as I suspect, there's a revolution brewing and the pirates are part of it, and if the GE suspects, then that's even more of a reason to do it.
10
Of course if my theory is correct, I want the show to spend at least a few minutes on the person who negotiated in that part of the agreement--it seems he or she was one heck of a smooth talker...
A couple of ideas on the grander politics:
A direct revolution could be afoot, but since the population doesn't seem terribly oppressed, I'm not so sure. I'm leaning more towards the GE having over-expanded when in capable hands, but after a couple of generations of rot is now having a hard time maintaining its control over all of its territory. In that scenario, the ones responsible for the attempts on Marika would more likely be the old regional rivals jockeying for position for when the GE starts falling apart in that area.
Of course a lot of it is probably just me finding that to be a more interesting scenario than the other, which seems more conventional. As a result, I'm probably wrong...
Posted by: benzeen at March 06, 2012 09:49 PM (R9i5E)
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I just found it odd that the main battery had the CAPABILITY of being interfaced with the Coms.
Posted by: Mauser at March 07, 2012 03:37 AM (cZPoz)
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benzeen: I don't recall the exact wording right off hand, but
the voiceover at the beginning of the last episode strongly gave the impression that at least some elements in Serenity (i.e., the Princess) were seeking more freedom, so I tend to think Steven's cut on this is probably the right one. And things like "freedom" tend to be very subjective. The tax that got the whole Boston Tea Party thing going were minescule compared to what we routinely pay today. Also, there may be oppresive aspects of GE governance that we simply haven't seen yet. But, ya know, whichever way it goes, it looks to be interesting.
Posted by: Dave Young at March 07, 2012 10:28 AM (FKGw9)
I just found it odd that the main battery had the CAPABILITY of being interfaced with the Coms.
Actually that makes sense.
Tight beam, secure communications are vital and the ships battery likely
has the power to punch through any jamming. The guns are obviously
transmitters anyway and could provide redundancy to the regular
communication array in the event of damage, or provide additional narrow
beam transmitters when a 'party line' is needed.
Also, for a really long range transmission the main battery at high
power would be a useful, (albeit STL) backup, perhaps sending an
important message across interplanetary distances at greater range than
it could conceivably damage something.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at March 08, 2012 11:21 PM (EJaOX)
14
Of course, if you mis-calculate the signal strength, you could literally end up talking someone to death.
Posted by: Mauser at March 09, 2012 01:50 AM (cZPoz)
I'm spending money again. My copy of the first BD of Mouretsu Pirates will be delivered tomorrow morning.
And I ordered a statuette from Bob, which is supposed to arrive next Saturday. (Fedex makes Saturday deliveries.) It's yet another figurine of Hakufu, so how could I resist?
Meanwhile, the world has made a delivery to me that I don't want. Starting about a week ago, I've been finding insect bites on my arms every morning. I told the apartment manager about it today, and she's going to have someone come and check it out.
My fear is bed bugs, but she says it's more likely to be fleas. I hope she's right, because fleas are a lot easier to eradicate.
But it means strangers coming into my apartment, to see what a slob I am.
UPDATE: By the way, starting about a montth ago the dollar has been climbing like a rocket relative to the yen. Why? Who in hell knows?
If I had to guess, it's because of the problems in Europe. Capital is fleeing and looking for a safe haven. And bad as our problems are, they're a lot less serious than what's going on in Europe.
1
I heard the Japanese are printing money, but that may not be reliable.
Posted by: tellu541 at March 05, 2012 03:41 PM (pJ1uW)
2
You might be right. The Euro is rising relative to the Yen, tooo. The Japanese central bank has tried a couple of times to inflate the Yen in the last year, so maybe they're making more of an attempt this time.
3
*shudders* Yeah, hope its not bed bugs. Bed bugs are awful. I had a nasty infestation a couple years back, and we were damn lucky it only took one try to clear them out. And by "one try" I mean "seal everything fabric in plastic bags and leave them to cook in a car, heat dry everything possibly in the dryer, and have the exterminators apply dust under the carpet and in the walls several time, over the course of a month."
I find it rather terrifying that there *isn't* an effective poison to use on them. . .
Posted by: metaphysician at March 05, 2012 05:27 PM (3GCAl)
If you only call a random number generator once, then it's little more than a hash of whatever it uses as a seed. And it isn't necessarily a very good hash. So I decided to stop using that completely.
The new approach for picking an image is to use the number of milliseconds since midnight, with a small amount of numerical tweaking. While I was messing around with it, I saw several images I know I hadn't ever seen before. So I think it'll work better, and have a flatter response curve.
As always, you'll need to force a complete reload of the page, or dump your browser cache, if you want the latest version.
A couple of days ago I spotted four really large torrents I wanted to download. They were announced on NyaaTorrents, but it turned out that they used OpenBitTorrent, a tracker I hadn't run into before.
Ever since I started them (cumulatively totalling about 170G) I've had a strange behavior going: every two hours, my uplink drops to nearly zero for between ten and twenty minutes. Usually my downlink drops quite a way, too, but not to zero.
I don't understand it, because my BakaBT torrents are continuing to run, and if OpenBitTorrent didn't want my uplink, you'd think that BakaBT would cheerfully take it. But all the BakaBT torrents seem to shut down during this window.
There are experiments I could do, but I want those torrents to complete before I mess around. At the rate I'm going now, that'll be tomorrow or the next day.
One of the TVTropes entries is called "Hey! It's that voice!" to refer to cases where you recognize a seiyuu.
There needs to be another one something like "Hey! I didn't recognize her!" Lots of those in this series.
Courier, the blonde EW specialist on the Bentenmaru? She has the same voice actress as Princess Millefiore in Dog Days.
Gruelle has the same seiyuu as Manami in AsoIku. And Chiaki has the same voice as Aoi.
Jenny Dolittle used to be the Railgun.
Misa has the same voice as Fujiko in Daimaou. Luca, the strange navigator? Her seiyuu also did Kanna, the werewolf. And Lynn Lambretta, the hacker? Her voice used to belong to Junko, also in Daimaou.
I sure wouldn't have guessed any of those. Very versatile seiyuu, the lot of them.
1
I'm assuming it's because Chiaki's ship wants nothing to do with the job. Blowing up a ship with a princess onboard sounds like a great way to go from "We're happy space pirates!" to "The Stellar Empire put a giant bounty on our heads, and now assassins jump out at us whenever we dock."
Thinking back to that conversation, I don't know if Chiaki ever said they TOOK the job. She said they got a contract, but she never said they signed it.
Posted by: tellu541 at March 03, 2012 02:15 PM (pJ1uW)
3
One thing that I haven't heard anyone on the show ask, is why they are
searching for the Golden Ghost Ship. A group of warships were fighting to prevent data concerning the Ghost Ship from reaching the princess, another pirate ship is offered a contract to eliminate any other searchers, and no one has asked what is so important about it?
Posted by: Siergen at March 03, 2012 03:03 PM (3/gGt)
Strictly speaking, it isn't Bentenmaru's business why Gruelle wants that ship. She's hired them to find it for her, and that's really all they need to know.
Another thing they haven't asked her is just what the heck is going on back in the Serenity system. And likewise, because it isn't really any of their business.
Given that the contract offered to Barbarossa included a "Kill anyone that gets in your way" clause, it's possible they refused the job. It seems as if these pirates are trying to stay clean. (Indeed, it may be required by their Letter of Marque.) They will kill in self defense, but only if necessary. I bet they refuse to kill any other time. They're pirates but they are not assassins.
There may come a time when Marika sits down with Gruelle and says, "Look, we need to understand better what the hell is going on so we can make better plans and cope better with what's facing us," and then we might get a briefing. But until it actually and directly affects the mission, asking those kinds of questions would be out-of-bounds.
Chiaki said that the contract reached them by obscure means, and they didn't know who it was they would have been working for. That stinks to high heaven and may have set off alarm bells.
Tellu541, I think you might be right that they refused it.
11
One of the things that struck me about this episode is that the opening narration seems to have dropped some pretty big hints about the large-scale plot.
Also:
given the course attributed to the golden ghost ship, I have to wonder if it's still manned and under power. The course looked awfully full of zigzags and deliberate attempts to stay in the hardest to find areas possible.
13
In retrospect, one of the interesting things about the reveal is how it more or less comes out of left field and is giving us genuinely new information. You could say that we've had hints that it could be an issue, but they were at best very indirect ones. It also makes me very curious about the government structure of the Galactic Empire.
(My impression is that most of the opening narrations have been about things that we more or less knew already, but that may well be inaccurate; I haven't gone back to audit them.)
