22 posts tagged “otaku”

* Bioshock 2

[Warning: this post is all about nerdy details of PC hardware. If what's in your PC to get you to read Vox doesn't interest you, your online time may better be spent elsewhere.]

You'd probably know Bioware by Star Wars: The Knights Of The Old Republic or D&D-based Buldar's Gate series. The developer has been making very good role-playing games based on the world settings created by somebody else; which is not such a bad thing, as they are very well made (KOTOR is considered very highly by many, and Buldar's Gate II is one of my all-time favorite RPSs).

I was reading this horror story about a guy whose hard drive suddenly broke down, and how hard it was for him to try to get his computing environment back on. He would bitch a lot about not having backed up his emails and stuff.

Then it occured to me; I don't even have a single e-mail on my local hard drive. They are all on my Hotmail/ Yahoo/ Gmail account. Instead of burning my writing files and stuff to a CD-R or copying them to another hard drive, I simply attach stuff I want to back up and send it to my Gmail address. As for as my correspondence is concerned, I won't lose a thing if my hard drive goes FUBAR right this moment. And with service like Flickr and SkyDrive, you have many options to keep your stuff anywhere other than your local hard drive.

So for non-gaming people, I guess the biggest thing to lose in a crisis like that may be their music collection. (though if you use iPod, I think you can transfer the songs from it to a new PC? is there any restriction doing that??) And if Google Office keeps evloving, I may not even need MS Office sitting on my local drive. Real-time spell checking is a must feature for me and Google Office doesn't seem to have it. Once they do, I would probably go that way. And with frightening speed with which hard drives are getting cheaper and its capacitiy getting ever bigger, the day may come when all you music would end up online, from where you could stream your stuff to your PC or transfer to your portable device.

This trend will change a lot of things; first it spells trouble for Microsoft- MS Office and Windows OS will lose its relevance, as you can do more stuff online and all you need is whatever can get you online (yes, I know all about browser difference when reading HTML/CSS code and all, but you get the basic idea). Also, the notion of privacy will change dramatically, as it's already been happening. I don't think the term completely lose its significance like some nerds claim, but people of the future will certainly see what's private and what's public. It may be a great news for criminals as well- you bust a suspected drug dealer or a yakuza hitman and confiscate his computer, but you can't find a single e-mail to back up your case; he may have an online account he only uses from various netcafes, whose existence he conveniently forgets to mention to the cops. And if you do find out where his e-mails are, you're gonna have to spend some time to secure a warrant if the server exists on a different country (which means his pals have time to erase said e-mails don't you think)...

Primary function of my C drive is to keep my music and games, which it will keep doing for any forseeable future, but it's interesting how SaaS explosion will change the way people work, play and save stuff. I wonder what the "average" computing life will be in ten years.

The renewed version of the original Ghost in the Shell movie has hit select theaters in Japan this weekend. I haven't seen it yet (don't even know where the theater in question is, but I'm pretty sure there is at least one in Tokyo) but the trailer has hit YouTube. 

There will be a remake of the original Ghost in the Shell anime movie, to be released in July in select Japanese theaters. This one would be in fully 3D CG, this Japanese article says. 

Dungeons and Dragons, the pen-and-paper fantasy game that pretty much defined the entire fantasy role-playing genre for decades, has been updated to its 4th edition.

I've leafed through the newly released Player's Handbook (which is the basic rulebook), and my first impression is that, well, there are notably less letters in it. Seriously. More blank space. Less letters. Double-spaced. Take out your 3.5 edition PHB and compare them.
I'm not saying it translates to bad. Some parts of 3rd edition and 3.5 edition books were a bit too long, but then again, it helped to be descriptive, in my opinion (after all, it's a game that depends hugely on imagination; more clues and details to expand such imagination is kind of helpful).
I admit I haven't really gone through the details of new rules (oh, byrd are gone, and so are the monks; I had a monk character when I played 3rd edition campaign some years ago. Meh), but how they describe them seem very pragmatic, not descriptive- it almost seems like, you know, just detailed enough for combat using minatures (I think they want to sell more of those). Spells are described only with a few lines of what they do, and the rest is just how much damage they deal or how they affect player characters.

The same goes for Monster Manual. 3rd and 3.5 edition manuals had detailed explanation of each monster, how they live (sometimes even how they go about their daily business) but this time, there are so much less of that. They are just big bad villains to be slain by the player characters, not part of the ecosystem living and breathing in the fantasy world. (The index is so much better, I might add)

All in all, for me this new edition feels like "D&D Lite". I would be reading the rulebooks and my impression might change though. What do you think, D&Ders?

Some dude who calls himself "futurist" (the meaning of this terms seems to be that these people contemplate what the future would be like) says there could be a free fridge in the future. The fridge will be connected to the Internet, its front panel will be one big monitor, on which they will- you guessed it- be feeding ads. I would assume such fridge also has some kind of CPU and OS, and equivalent of a cookie to keep track of what you have in it; you could probably know its content via your mobile phone, and you may even be able to order replacement if something runs out (thereby feeding merchants/ food product makers and whoever's interested with minute record of what you have bought, your food consumption pattern, etc. Which would affect what kind of ads you would see on front, I would imagine).

As some of you know, Sunday in Akihabara has been a lot of fun; streets are car-free on most main streets, and using this space many cosplayers, bands, idoru (real ones and fake ones), and all kinds of weirdos would gather and a whole lot more people would come to take pictures of them.

So, many of you already know that new Silent Hill game (formerly called simply "Silent Hill 5") will be called "Silent Hill: Homecoming". I went through a few sites but the number seems to be deleted from the title, which I think is the first time it happened in the series?