It seems like I am forever playing catchup with my sources of entertainment. Half a decade after The West Wing finished airing, I finally took the time to finish all 156 episodes. Seeing as each episode is 42 minutes long, this is on hindsight an incredible waste of my short mortal life, but goddammit it is the best waste of life ever produced for American TV.

Politics for most people is a battle of words and ideas. Political discourse for the average person is conducted in pretty much the same way most hypothetical physics questions are answered: in a vacuum frictionless room containing a perfect sphere. While convincing arguments can be made on paper and discussion boards, the real problem with politics is that it involves humans who are irrational, illogical and whose shit is generally all retarded.

Politics, as it applies to real-world governing, must therefore necessarily go beyond merely finding out and trying to convince people of the best solutions to society’s problems, but also compromising and making the most of any situation in a debate populated by people who will never see eye-to-eye with you, perhaps even rightfully so.

The West Wing, a serial drama depicting the fictional presidency of bleeding-heart liberal Josiah Bartlet (portrayed by Martin Sheen, who is also the voice of the Illusive Man in Mass Effect), highlights the human side of politics and in doing so paints a picture of democracy that feels closer to the truth than the caricatures spewing talking points on cable news.

Whether you find The West Wing to be an uplifting feel-good story of people trying to do good in an imperfect world or a depressing look into the way backroom political deals that affect the lives of billions are made for the most trivial of reasons depends on how much (or little) you already know about American politics. If you went in like wide-eyed Bambi, happily oblivious to the money politics and unscrupulous maneuvering taking place behind the scenes, you might enjoy the show’s implications less than a more seasoned cynic who got to see the softer side of the story.

My recently rekindled Magic addiction has left me thinking about the idea of the “metagame”, which I think is an appropriate description for the kind of politics portrayed in The West Wing. At the basic level, the game is a debate of ideas: does single-payer work better than private health insurance companies? But the metagame is the larger picture: knowing the opinions of all the other players in the playing field and the facts of the situation, how do you then go about winning each particular game? That’s a level of strategy that most online political debate will never consider.

While ultimately not all rainbows and sunshine, The West Wing presents a compelling case for the audience to be conservatively optimistic in the democratic process. Of course, the real hardened cynic would note that this is exactly what the media would have you believe with its thinly-veiled propaganda film.

Although the series has a clear liberal leaning in that it depicts a Democratic White House and most of the main characters generally fall on the left side of spectrum when it comes to hot-button issues such as the separation of church and state, education reform and gun control, the series does not serve as an advocate for any particular issue. It generally tries to humanize both sides of the debate while highlighting failures and imperfections in the system wherever they crop up, such as how the corn industry in the US wields disproportional influence on the formulation of public policy (such as corn-derived ethanol being pushed as “clean” energy) due to the importance of the Iowa caucuses in determining presidential nominees.

In fact, the show can sometimes be too mind-bogglingly apolitical for a story that is supposed to be set in the White House. For example, throughout the series, President Bartlet does not make a single policy speech on-screen. Major speeches, such as the State of the Union, are always cut off right after he steps up to the podium. The sole exception to this is a presidential debate that takes place in the last season where the two candidates actually speak substantially on real political issues such as education and healthcare reforms. I suppose this is because backlash was no longer a concern for the producers in the show’s final season and they felt it was a good opportunity to help raise the level of political awareness.

The West Wing has a knack of surprising you with fresh insights by attaching abstract ideas — often ones you disagree with — to the passionate voices of flawed but lovable characters as they go about trying to run a country. It will occasionally challenge your preconceived notions by lending voice to other ideas.

One particularly memorable example of this is when the black Democratic mayor of Washington D.C. met with President Bartlet to discuss a rider passed by the Republican Congress to create an experimental program allowing some parents in D.C. to have the option to receive school vouchers to pay for private schools. The rider was attached to the spending bill for D.C.’s budget and President Bartlet reassured the mayor that he was going to veto the bill because school vouchers take funding away from public schools. But the mayor surprised the president by requesting that he signed the bill because public schools in D.C. were not improving and the mayor felt that he owed it to the children of his district to at least try out the Republicans’ idea.

You will grow fond of these characters and feel like you are watching them every step of the way as they develop as individuals over the course of an eight-year presidency and do their best to make the country better, or at least not collapse under its own weight.

The West Wing is an highly intelligent show and I highly recommend it to everyone with an interest in politics. Of course, given that I am five years late to the game, this is probably a meaningless recommendation.

This is somewhat of a spoiler, but I find it interesting how closely the fictional election depicted in the series’ final season parallels the 2008 elections: The young minority Democrat beaming with naive enthusiasm and the old moderate Republican with a reputation for being a maverick in his own party. The writers must be amazed by their own prescience.

Also, the eighth episode of season five titled “Shutdown” depicts a federal government shutdown after the Republican Congress fails to agree with the President on the budget bill. This is obviously intended to echo the shutdown that happened during the Clinton administration, but it is also very relevant to the on-going stand-off between the Obama administration and the Republican House of Representatives over the national debt ceiling and the possibility of an impending government shutdown. The players may be different, but the name of the game is still “more tax cuts”.

“They want more tax cuts? Screw it.“

Games of Thrones, a new HBO medieval fantasy drama series, scratches an itch of mine that had not been properly addressed since Twelve Kingdoms. It is probably the most amazing thing on BitTorrent television right now, edging out Community which lost points in the second season for recycling its best episode from the first season.

I am not a huge fan of the fantasy genre, partly because it is dominated by the same old epic quest recycled five million times from Tolkien to Dungeons and Dragons, but mostly because many fantasy writers wilfully abuse the “a wizard did it” excuse as carte blanche to violently eject all semblance of plot logic from the decomposing corpse of whatever hideous monstrosity they try to pass off as storytelling. I don’t care if you have teleporting mages or flying monkeys, but for the love of Cthulhu and all that is evil, just make sure they don’t magically stop being able to teleport or fly the second they stumble across a tower that they need to ascend in an excruciatingly inefficient manner.

In this respect, sci-fi fantasy and science fiction writers have always been superior in covering their tracks, leaving behind a believable story universe that doesn’t constantly force characters to perform illogical deeds that contradict their personalities. Good fantasy stories like Twelve Kingdoms also employ an almost scientific approach in designing self-consistent rules governing their worlds.

Game of Thrones is a good fantasy story where the fantasy setting neither defines nor interferes with the storytelling, but silently lends aid to it in the background by stoking the fire of the audience’s imagination. The focus of the story lies in the complex web of political intrigue and rivalries being spun by a diverse cast, each with his or her own private motives that fall somewhere between the spectrum of good and evil. Indeed, the high fantasy aspect is mere dressing to a story that is already fascinating by itself.

The general gist of the story (or at least the first season) is a family feud between two great noble houses, the Starks and the Lannisters. Lord Eddard Stark is the king’s best friend and fought with him to gain the crown from the previous king, but Queen Cersei Lannister sees him as a competition for power as she seeks to groom her son to be the next king. What starts off as benign rivalry played through harmless sarcastic exchanges of words quickly turns ugly due to a series of unfortunate events and a few misunderstandings. At the same time, there are two parallel stories taking place at the northern borders and a foreign land that hint at far greater troubles ahead for the kingdoms.

The Stark House. Tony is somewhere behind

Presumably the Starks eventually reign victorious because one of their own invents a mechanical suit capable of flying and remotely smiting its wearer’s foes by firing repulsor rays from its palms. Also, the Queen’s eldest son, Joffrey, is the splitting image of my personal impression of what Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy should look like…

Stark’s eldest daugher, the weak and naive girl forced by circumstances to face reality

I am not a well-read person when it comes to classical literature, so I can’t say exactly whence A Song of Ice and Fire, the source material for Game of Thrones, draws its inspiration. But I do know that it shares many similar tropes with the original Dune novel which, when you really think about it, is really a classic medieval story of betrayal and revenge but set in an alien desert with sandworms. Eddard Stark, the righteous nobleman who tries to do right for his family and people in a cut-throat political environment that leaves no good deed unpunished, just reminds me too much of Leto Atreides. Speaking of which, I think the time is right for someone else to take another shot at bringing Dune to live, this time with a proper budget and script.

The absolute best part about Game of Thrones is, in my opinion, the acting. With a few exceptions, the acting is simply amazing and completely immersive. Scenes in the show tend to be more drawn out and conversations are littered with meaningful glances and double entrendes masterfully delivered and faithfully reproduced in glorious high definition. Particularly noteworthy is Peter Dinklage, who plays the midget Tyrion Lannister. He is definitely going to win an Emmy for it.

Lord of the Rings just puts me to sleep whenever it’s not showing me something exciting and shiny because the actors and lines are terrible and Frodo is nothing more than Harry Potter with fairy feet, but Game of Thrones manages to stimulate and engage the audience’s mind to make even a moment of silence between two characters feel so meaningful and intriguing. There is so much depth to all the characters, even many of the minor ones, that sometimes you just can’t predict what is going to happen next. It is nourishment not just for the heart but for the brain.

You get to see her boobs. Alot

One important thing of note: the show features many boobies. As anyone who has seen Sasha Grey‘s guest starring in Entourage can attest, HBO is not shy of letting its actresses show off their frontal nudes and Game of Thrones is no exception. There is plenty of almost-explicit fornication to be had by all, along with the short flashes of boobage where contextually appropriate. In my opinion, this is actually a rather sensible way to produce television/movies because it doesn’t break immersion by constantly making me marvel at how the leaves/flowers in the foreground always manage to position themselves at such opportune angles that obscure the actress’ nice lady parts. Of course, it may have the opposite effect with certain people. Your mileage may vary.

Yes, there are girl-on-girl scenes

And in the same vein, gore and violence in the show are depicted where they are required and appropriate, instead of the usual Hollywood-style diametric extremes of either ridiculous censorship (i.e. magical sword fights featuring no blood or cut limbs) or gratuitous violence (i.e. gore porn). So there is no excessive gore for the sake of it, but you get to see the entire swing when Lord Stark beheads an oathbreaker and there is even a scene where one of the characters skins a moose (or was it a deer?) as he speaks. It’s pure class.

Unfortunately, the first season of Game of Thrones is merely ten 1-hour episodes long. The good news is that the show is so well-received that a second season was approved almost immediately after the first episode aired, but the bad news is that it is at least one year away. Well at least it didn’t turn out to be this decade’s Firefly.

You can see the longing in his eyes

So absolutely check out Game of Thrones if you are into good storytelling, awesome writing and brilliant acting. The fantasy aspect is really incidental if that is what you are weary about.

I would read the novels, but I have quite a bit of required reading to do before college starts and all the time I am not making any headway into it. Though, I do have the nagging feeling that I wouldn’t enjoy the novels as much and reading the story ahead would end up spoiling the show instead.

I’ve been spending the past two weeks burning my way through a long list of backlogged games I want to clear before school starts and I lose my NEET badge, including Shadow of the Colossus, Red Dead Redemption, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 2 and L.A. Noire.

Valkyria Chronicles 3 is one of them. And this time I am actually reviewing it in an almost timely fashion and nowhere close to the release date of the next game. Go me.

Story

VC3 takes place at the same time as the original VC, during the war between Gallia and the Empire. It’s a side story about a black ops Gallian military unit that was secretly responsible for many of the greatest blows dealt against the Empire that were never made known; this kind of makes you wonder just how much good Welkin and friends really did if so much important shit went on behind the scenes without them knowing. This is the problem with side stories.

Conscripts and cadets, I could understand. But war criminals? Really?

The unit, known as Nameless, is basically a place where the army sends misbehaving soldiers to die in futile suicide missions. But many (i.e. all) of these criminals were actually misunderstood victims of military politics or corruption and all they really needed was the competent leadership of Kurt Irving, the main character, to lead to them to great untold glory. What a heart-warming story.

Silver hair and red eyes…

The squad members consist of the usual assortment of anime stereotypes who definitely do not look like they belong to such a sinister secret military unit of ill repute. Breaking with the franchise’s tradition, there are two heroines this time: Imca, an unfriendly emo Darcsen girl who ends all her sentences in negatives, and Riela, a long-haired red-eyed girl who somehow survived the total annihilation of all the units she had ever been assigned. (Can you guess who is the Valkyria in this game?)

Imca is an adorable tsundere with a giant ahoge

The writing is okay. It’s definitely a huge improvement from VC2, but that’s not saying much. The missions are much more story-driven this time, but overall the epic feeling of the original VC is just not quite there.

Interestingly, the Calamity Ravens, the main antagonists in the game, are a secret Imperial military unit consisting entirely of Darscen soldiers who are fighting for an independent Darscen state. This sounds insane when you consider that the Darscens are supposed to be the Jewish people and the Empire they are working for is based on Nazi Germany.

Calamity Ravens

That is until you realize that this was exactly what the Zionist militant group Lehi tried to do during WW2 when they asked to be included in the Axis team in return for Nazi assistance in expelling Britain from the Palestine Mandate. And of course the real hilarious part is where former Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir later became the Prime Minister of Israel. Oh nationalists, you so silly. But I digress.

Gameplay

Valkyria Chronicles 2 was quite a huge departure from the original VC; pretty much the entire battle system was revamped in order to accommodate PSP’s technical limitations.

The changes from VC2 to VC3 are however more evolutionary than revolutionary, which is unfortunate in my opinion as I had expected a bigger shift back towards the feel of the original. I suppose it can’t really be helped.

Strategic map showing cutscenes and missions along the way

There is a long list of small changes, but they don’t really add up to much. For example, you can now have 9 units on the map compared to 6 in VC2, but you still can only have a maximum of 5 per area so the tactical considerations aren’t that different. In fact, many of the area designs are copied wholesale from VC2 with some cosmetic changes added to make things look darker and grittier. There are some new area designs that look bigger at first, but are really the same size stretched thinner; imagine if the original areas in VC2 were 4×4 units big and in VC3, you get some that are 2×8 and 1×16. Big whoop.

One of the reused mission areas from VC2

One of the new longer areas

There are some new types of mission objectives but they aren’t that different. Also, all vehicle chassis only consume 1 CP now, so the trade-off between heavy and light tank is now limited to speed. This makes the heavier chassis viable options for those tough missions with tight S-Rank requirements.

Revamped Classes

VC2’s horrible, horrible branching class system that forces you to train four of every class in order to get all the elite class types has been completely abolished and replaced with something that more closely resembles the original VC.

The list of classes in VC3 is: Scout, Shocktrooper, Sniper, Support, Lancer, Machine Gunner, Armour Tech, Fencer.

Imca doesn’t give a shit about using class-appropriate weapon

The veteran and elite statuses unlock access to new equipment like in VC; variants such as grenade-launcher scouts, anti-tank snipers and anti-infantry mortarers are back to being weapon options instead of class options.

There are some minor adjustments done to the retained classes, some good and some horrible.

There are many, many cameos in VC3

Scouts have been nerfed and die a lot faster now so they can’t do point rushes like they used to, at least not until you train them to elites and upgrade their HP enough. This actually makes some of the earlier missions quite difficult if you are used to the weak damage enemies dished out in VC2.

Armour Tech deploying shield

Armour Techs now deploy their shields in front of them at the end of their turn, forming a barrier that other characters can hide behind. This makes them a heck lot more useful than in VC2. Also, their hammer attack is needed to deal insane damages to a new type of mission objective that you have to destroy.

Armour Tech shield protecting my sniper from boss rape

Fencers are no longer bulletproof like they used to be when they were an upgrade from Armour Tech. They basically take damage from bullets like Shocktroopers now. They still move as slowly. I have no idea why they were nerfed so horribly in this way as they were already highly situational in VC2. Now they are utterly useless and you are almost always better off with a Shocktrooper instead.

Battle Potentials

For the perfectionist gamer out there hell-bent on maximizing his characters’ Potentials, VC3 introduces a new system that allows every character to become any class in the game. A new class-specific Potential is unlocked with each level of class progression.

Many cameos…

For example, you can turn your elite Scout into a newbie Lancer and retain the Scout-specific Potentials that it has earned, such as “Power Scout”. This creates many cross-training combos where certain Potentials work best with a class they do not belong to.

The game keeps track of the level attained by every character in each class and it is possible to train a single character to be an elite in every class and gain all the Battle Potentials in the game. (But you can only have four active at a time so that would be a really dumb idea.)

Special Attacks

The three main characters, Kurt, Imca and Riela, also have access to personalized special attacks after certain points in the story are reached. Using special attacks consumes 1 CP and 1 SP (Special Point). Unlike CP, the number of SP is restricted per battle and does not regenerate between turns. You usually get anywhere from 1 to 3 SP per battle.

Direct Command

Kurt’s special attack, called “Direct Command”, allows him to have any two squad members to “group up” with him and assume direct command of them. They will move together with him for that turn and shoot at whatever he shoots at, excluding classes that do not normally perform suppressing fire, such as Lancer and Fencer.

Assuming direct control. o_o

This is a possible way to kill some enemy named elites or to have slow-moving units like Fencers move forward quickly. However, once you unlock Imca’s special attack, Kurt’s becomes just a complete waste of SP.

Also known as the Pew Pew mode

Imca’s special attack is called “Open Fire” and it’s basically like one of those multi-target-missile-lock-on thing that mechas in sci-fi do. You have to get all her targets into one single screen, so the angle and position matters, but if you do it right you can wipe out the whole area in one cluster shot. Tanks hit by her Open Fire attack take damage as if they were attacked from the back.

Everyone of them is dead

I’ll leave it to your imagination what Riela’s special attack entails…

Consuming an SP also causes the character to ignore the diminishing returns of AP and he/she can move for a full AP bar for that turn. This can be used tactically to great effect, especially if the character is a Scout.

Thoughts

The problem with me and Valkyria Chronicles 3 is that I played the first game. On its own, VC3 is an amazing PSP game and a fine improvement over VC2. The in-game art and atmosphere are so much more stylized and detailed compared to VC2. Unfortunately, it does not ever quite manage to recreate the same feeling of epic-ness of the original PS3 classic. It’s just too immersion-breaking when battles are confined to tiny claustrophobic rooms masquerading as villages or valleys.

The difficulty curve and balance in VC3 are also much, much better than facerolling VC2 and many of the fights pose a genuine challenge.

At the end of the day, VC3 is really not that different from VC2. The improvements are mostly cosmetic and the combat and class changes do not alter the basic feel of the gameplay.

I could not remember if this was a VC2 or VC3 screenshot…

So yeah, definitely pick up VC3 if you loved VC2 or if you are just a Valkyria fan boy like me. But if you hated VC2 and hoped for a shift back to the original, you will be sorely disappointed. Even with the tweaks to the class system and a better story, VC3 is ultimately just VC2 in a fresh coat of paint.

More Screencaps

A crap load of extra screencaps because I overdid it as usual.

Character portrait placements during dialogues are more interesting and varied than in VC2

Look away and say no. Classic tsundere

Oh hey another cameo

Of course

Eddy is here too

Wait a minute…

…

Apparently the whole damn cast of VC and VC2 has met Kurt but no one mentioned a thing in the past two games

There are two different romantic endings for VC3

One of the Calamity Raven commanders

Not quite the giant boss fights from VC

All Nameless “uniforms” are customized by one of the girls

On second thought, maybe this whole game was just an excuse to give Selvaria another chance to shine :D

I am really itching for Mass Effect 3 after finishing the second game. Damn it. I just want to see Tali’s face…

Hollywood has its flaws. Cookie-cutter scripts and commodification of art can often ruin beautiful things. But at least Hollywood gets the cinematography right and doesn’t usually suffer from the pandemic of awkward overacting rampant in Japanese mainstream cinema. 2011’s Space Battleship Yamato live action movie is anime-comes-alive, but in a bad way that constantly reminds you how stupid the world would be if everyone behaved like manga characters.

Still, it’s not a total disaster.

Space Battleship Yamato will be out in Singapore cinemas on 24 March, but I caught a preview screening of it a few days ago.

Although I do enjoy the classics of anime from time to time, Yamato has never been one of them. I also don’t care a single bit about soap actor and SMAP member Takuya Kimura. If you are a fan of either, I suspect that what I write in this review will not matter and you will watch the movie anyway.

But for the rest of us, there are a few things I want to talk about.

This picture cracks me up for some reason

Story

The general gist of the story is that some unknown alien race has turned Earth into a radioactive wasteland for unknown reasons and mankind has been driven into underground bunkers much like in Fallout 3.

Thoroughly beaten in space, the United Nations for Space Exploration (which apparently consists solely of Japan) pools all its remaining resources to construct the Space Battleship Yamato using warp technology provided by another unknown alien race. The ship sets off on a last-ditch voyage to retrieve radiation-scrubbing technology from the unknown alien benefactors in order to make Earth habitable again, but nobody mentions how anyone plans to deal with the hostile invaders who created the mess in the first place and who are still right there in the solar system ready to do it again if necessary. As a wise man once said, “Fuck it, we’ll do it live!”

And for unknown reasons, the design of the ship that is to be humanity’s last hope is based on a Japanese WW2 battleship that was overwhelmingly out-teched and sunk by US carrier-based torpedo bombers. Though, interestingly, there is a hole in the bow where the Japanese imperial seal would’ve been.

I am pretty sure those facial hairs are against military regulation

Okay, so the story has more holes than the moon, but I suppose that is not just expected but required of such a production.

Visual Effects

Digital special effects in the movie are actually better than I had expected given the track record of the Japanese film industry, but the rest of it still bears an unfortunate sentai vibe. The bridge in particular, where it feels like most of the movie takes place in, wouldn’t look out of place in an Ultraman movie. This problem is further exuberated by Japanese cinema’s habit of filming entire movies from one single camera angle.

It feels like the producers blew the effects budget on a few scenes that account for maybe 1/100 of the movie because some of the special effects going on in the second half of the movie look downright comical.

I think it’s really weird how Japan, a country known for its anime and video game industries, still has difficulties producing industrial-grade special effects for its movies when New Zealand has Weta and ILM’s Singapore subsidiary worked on Ironman 2.

If those shades were really needed, they would’ve added shutters to the bridge’s windows

Execution

Yamato does take a page or two from Tinseltown’s playbook with some degree of success. There are few shots in the movie (the aforementioned budget busters) that evoke the kind of grandiose and awe big-budget US titles are very good at creating. You can actually see most of them in the trailer if you want to save some money.

The first quarter of the movie is easily the best part of the movie. This is where we are introduced to the post-apocalyptic Earth and a human race on the verge of extinction hiding beneath its surface. Children grow up in bunkers devoid of proper sanitation and hope. The hero of the story, played by Kimutaku, goes up to the surface in a ghetto hazmat suit to collect scraps for a living. The Yamato, humanity’s last hope, is unveiled.

All great moments in the movie, some of them are unintentionally poignant in light of recent events in Japan. The movie was right on the cusp of greatness and my cold cynical heart was ready to be moved.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the story that follows this fast-paced Hollywood-style introduction quickly degenerates into an endless series of mind-numbingly bland conversations between boring characters taking place in generic enclosed cabins. The existential threat facing humanity becomes tangential to the predictable interpersonal drama taking place between uninspired character stereotypes drifting around the bridge in various stages of comatose. It comes as a huge relief when many of these unbearable automatons are gradually killed off over the course of the movie.

My friend was sniggering at the corny dialogues throughout the movie, but the cheese gets so bad towards the end that even the more-reserved individuals in the theatre laughed aloud.

The male and female uniform designs have Freudian implications if we consider grey to be negative space

Overall

It’s a run-of-the-mill product of Japanese mainstream cinema with relatively better special effects and decent entertainment value. Imagine a Japanese take on Armageddon but replace every Hollywood trope with its equivalent Japanese idiosyncrasy. It even comes with its own Steven Tyler love ballad.

In my completely professional opinion as a person on the Internet, the best part of the movie is Meisa Kuroki in the role of Yuki Mori, the heroine. She brings the fictional concept of tsundere to life in all its meme-licious glory.

“It’s not like I needed you to save me or anything.”

She has Brazilian blood in her

So I have been clocking a few hours into Atlus’ horror puzzler Catherine on my PS3 because Rie Tanaka was tweeting about it and I am easily influenced by Twitter. Surprisingly, it is actually not a bad game, but it takes a lot of patience to overcome the rage-inducing learning curve, and ultimately at the end of the day the puzzle stages are not what people play the game for, or maybe that is just me.

The story is about Vincent, an average shmok, “accidentally” cheating on his girlfriend Katherine with a mysterious hot blonde girl named Catherine.

He starts having nightmares of himself “falling” which are depicted through a series of puzzles in which he has to climb to the top of a tower of stone blocks by moving blocks around in a certain way and escape death before the entire wall falls layer by layer into oblivion. This video should explain everything:

Due to the nature of the puzzle mechanics, a wrong move can totally block your progress and force you to restart the whole stage, ala Sokoban. This can be frustrating when it happens a few times right at the end of a super difficult boss fight. Also it’s rather hard to concentrate on the puzzle when some grotesque monstrosity from hell constantly distracts you with its inhuman howls of rage and infinite despair. D:

Sweet dreams are made of these

When Vincent is not busy having nightmares, he spends his time in a bar called the “Stray Sheep” where he talks to friends and strangers about his love troubles and where most story events take place. This is actually my favourite part of the game because it kind of reminds me of Shenmue (in a very distant and vague way). Vincent’s conversation with strangers he meet in the bar are often linked to the events from his nightmares which he has no recollection of while he is awake. The dialogues have a kind of Kafkaesque quality to their writing.

Some of the story is told through anime

But most of it is rendered in cel-shaded 3D

The title girl Catherine has a very sexy character design and is basically in charge of fan service in the game. She is playful, flirtatious and light on commitments while Vincent’s girlfriend Katherine is kind of a drag and constantly goes passive-aggressive on him over his inability to commit.

Y U NO MARRY ME?

Both of them send emails to Vincent’s mobile phone and the player can customize the replies from a few options. Dialogue choices throughout the game affect an unexplained good-evil meter which presumably has some kind of an effect on the final ending. I always pick the cheating-bastard option because I want to see more Catherine fan service. I’m sure this sentence will come back to haunt me someday.

The real 3D version

The attention to details in the story mode is quite cool. The email gimmick and the illusion of freedom in the way you choose to spend your time in the bar make you feel like you are actually living out Vincent’s life and to some extent make you feel like you deserve to be sent to hell in the nightmares for being such a lying cheating bastard (or not). The game in general also has plenty of style and atmosphere.

You can actually tilt the cutscene camera using the right analog stick ala MGS4… It doesn’t help <_<

I especially like that part in-between stages where Vincent is asked by an disembodied voice questions such as, “Do you think that marriage is the beginning or the end of your life?” After you give your answer, the game uploads it to a central server and shows you a pie chart of actual collated responses from other players sorted by gender. It’s an interesting idea that serves no gameplay purpose but seems oddly appropriate for the material.

The what-the-fuck-omg-shit in-game moment

So yeah, it’s a weird game. The puzzles are so hard even on easy mode that the creators rushed out a 1.01 patch that adds a super easy mode and unlimited retries. But it’s pretty fun overall and I can’t really explain why.

Catherine will be released stateside this summer. English trailer is up on YouTube.

So, I got rid of my 20-dollar Logitech keyboard and bought my self a DK9008 mechanical keyboard from Taiwanese manufacturer Ducky Keyboard. Lame brand name aside, this is probably the best hardware investment I’ve ever made.

If it were possible to marry a keyboard, I…wouldn’t but the DK9008 is still a pretty darn good keyboard.

The world of mechanical keyboards is a secret subcultural gathering of people who are way too obsessed with the amount of pressure they need to depress plastic buttons so that they can discuss on online forums, while throwing around jargons like “Tenkeyless” and “NKRO”, in great details how awesome it is to type out what they are discussing while discussing it. It’s kind of meta.

I thought those people were crazy but mechanical keyboards are actually pretty cool if you swoon over them in moderation.

White balance is a bit off; the LEDs are actually blue

The basic idea is this: Most keyboards were once mechanical back in the lost era known as the 80s. By “mechanical”, it means that each key has its own physical “switch” that is triggered when you press the key. Sometime in between the 80s and modern times, rubber dome-switch keyboards (with rubber membranes instead of mechanical switches under the keys) were commercialized. Cheaper and easier to produce, they soon dominate the market and almost all keyboards today are dome-switch keyboards.

Mechanical switches come in many form, the most common of which are manufactured by a German company called Cherry, who specializes in making business-grade keyboards for POS (point-of-sale; not piece of shit) devices and server racks. The types of switches and technical bits are too much to cover, so check out this FAQ if you want. For those who care, my DK9008 uses Cherry MX Blue switches.

For a while, people who wanted mechanical keyboards had to rummage through eBay for condemned POS keyboards or ancient IBM Model M, but eventually many niche providers started providing higher-end customized coding/gaming keyboards, most of them using Cherry MX Blue, Brown or Black switches. Ducky is one of them; Filco, a Japanese brand, is another.

And more recently, mainstream brands such as Razer and SteelSeries also entered the market with their eyes on hardcore gamers (the logic being that mechanical keyboards are more resistant to wear-and-tear). The Cherry Corporation must be doing quite well selling all those switches to everyone.

So how exactly does a mechanical keyboard improve your typing skill, speed, intelligence and sexual stamina? Well, the specific details differ from individual to individual, but there are some general benefits.

Being marketed at enthusiasts, mechanical keyboards generally have better build quality. Many of them incorporate functionalities and manufacturing processes that are considered not cost-effective in regular keyboard production.

Numlock with LED

For example, my DK9008 has a removable USB cable; built-in options to disable the Windows key, to swap the Ctrl and Capslock keys (for programmers) and to swap the Windows and Alt keys (for Mac users); cool LED lights that are embedded into the -lock keys themselves; and full n-key rollover.

Mini USB slot behind the keyboard with cable guides

The main benefit of a mechanical keyboard, in my opinion, is faster typing because the switches produce a tactile feedback that allows your fingers to sense a keypress without full depression. But this is somewhat subjective because it involves personal preference, which is why Cherry manufactures different types of switches to carter to different tastes.

Cherry MX Blue switches are blue

The main drawback is that, depending on the switch mechanism used, the keyboard may sound significantly louder to type on. Again, some people actually prefer the louder sound as feedback mechanism. Personally, I don’t care about this either way. Cherry MX Blue is notorious for being the most “clicky” switch (you can listen to it here), but I chose it for the typing sensation. On the other hand, Cherry MX Brown and Black are basically the same as a regular rubber dome-switch keyboard in terms of noise.

I am really content with my DK9008. It’s much more pleasant to type on, especially if you learn that you don’t have to fully depress keys anymore. The sensation and tactile feedback take some getting used to but I can already feel myself typing faster.

In addition to the type of switch, Ducky also offers options for the key caps. I chose black-on-black (black text on black keys) key caps because I am too chicken to choose the completely blank key caps but want to look like I can type without having my keys labelled…which I can. Most of the time.

Special key caps and cap remover

The keyboard also came with a more wear-resistant set of WASD replacement key caps for gamers, but I prefer to keep my keys consistent.

That said, at the end of the day, it’s ultimately just a keyboard. I am content with the DK9008 because it fulfils my typing needs and I probably won’t need another one for 20 years or so, assuming that claims of mechanical keyboards’ longevity are true. I won’t be starting a mechanical keyboard collection any time soon, unlike the more hardcore enthusiasts.

Still, it’s pretty interesting how online communities can form around pretty much anything. Thanks to them, I now have a pretty sweet keyboard that makes me feel like I’m co-starring with Angelina Jolie in Hackers every time I type a blog post. Woot.

Mess with the best, die like the rest

P.S. Singaporeans can get Ducky keyboards from SmallWalrus on VR-Zone forums for around S$150 depending on options.

With the release date of Valkyria Chronicles 3 for PSP less than two weeks away, I figure this is the perfect time (by my usual standard of procrastination) for me to write up my thoughts on VC2, a game which I had only recently completed.

In my defence, I only got to play the original VC three months ago after finally caving and buying a secondhand PS3. Also, Valkyria Chronicles 2 is the most amazing game ever created for the PSP and everyone with two opposable thumbs should play it.

Gallia’s Lanceal Military Academy

The original Valkyria Chronicles is in my opinion the game that made good my PS3 purchase. This was completely unexpected because I bought the console primarily for FFXIII, which I threw into the rubbish chute after 10 hours, and VC is pretty much obscure and under the radar for most people.

I found the art style absolutely amazing and the combat system pure genius. This makes sense because the game was developed by the part of Sega WOW formerly known as Overworks who were responsible for fan-favourite Sakura Taisen series, so they really know what they are doing. (Incidentally, I learnt how to play Koi Koi not because of Summer Wars but because of the mini-game in Sakura Taisen…)

The first VC stood out in two aspects. The first is a cel-shaded 3D graphics engine that I think outclassed all previous attempts to simulate manga-style art with 3D models. The second is the hybrid combat system evolved from a combination of third-person shooters and classic turn-based tactical RPGs like Front Mission and Sakura Taisen.

Not that the drawn CGs are bad

Unfortunately, only the latter survived the sequel’s transition to the PSP, obviously due to technical limitations. In VC2, character portraits and cut scenes are sadly all standard drawn CGs. The battle system is also tweaked to accommodate smaller and close-quarter level designs involving fewer soldiers, but I won’t say that the game has become worse than the original — merely different.

Gameplay

Pre-mission briefing

The VC series employs a pretty unique combat system. Basically instead of moving units in a grid like in traditional tactical RPGs, you have a limited number of moves every turn with which you can take direct control of individual soldiers in a third-person view. The enemies will lay suppressing fire on your units but are otherwise immobile during your turn. Moving your troops across the battlefield while dodging enemy fire is hence a far more active and engaging process than in traditional turn-based strategy. This works out incredibly well and the gameplay is very addictive.

Battle map

Controlling a scout

Your units can only move a set distance and carry out one action (e.g. attack) each time you select them, so you have to think of how to maximize your limited actions per turn while killing enemies and achieving objectives such as capturing points.

Performing an attack

So for example, you can start your turn with a Scout rush by using its high movement range to storm the enemy’s command point and capture it. Then you spend your next move calling in a Gunner using the captured point to obliterate multiple enemies surrounding you. This is a more efficient use of moves than trying to use the Scout’s feeble peashooter to kill the enemies one by one or taking multiple moves to bring the slow-moving Gunner over to the enemy base.

Crouching behind a sandbag to take cover

Similarly, if there’s a tank in front of a command point, it is usually more efficient to capture the point by running pass the tank with a Scout or Shocktrooper and then calling in a Lancer (anti-tank infantry) to attack the tank’s weak spot from behind, than to slowly chip away its armour from the well-protected front.

Sneaking behind the enemy tank with my Heavy Lancer…

The indicator tells me it takes 2 hits to the weak spot to kill this heavy tank. Would probably take 6-7 hits from the front

There are many ways to reduce the number of moves you need to achieve the same result and pulling off a perfect combo gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. That sense of satisfaction is the essence of this game. The battle system creates natural synergies you can exploit simply by thinking tactically and does not rely on hard combos that have to be memorized. It’s like poetry. You can watch it in action in this VC3 promo video.

Victory

With enough min-maxing, it is sometimes possible to win a mission by capturing all the command points within one turn even though the mission’s limit for S Rank is five turns.

Classes

One huge mechanics change in the shift from VC to VC2 is the class system. VC employs a very bare-bone system with 5 basic classes (Scout, Sniper, Engineer, Shocktrooper, Lancer) and an elite version of each class that slightly modifies the gameplay (e.g. Shocktroopers get flamethrowers).

Class upgrade tree for Engineer/Medic

In VC2, the 5 classes basic classes (Scout, Shocktrooper, Lancer, Engineer, Armour Technician) can each be further upgraded into 2 veteren classes (veteran versions of every class, plus Sniper, Gunner, Mortarer, Musician, Swordsman) which in turn can each be upgraded into 2 elite classes (e.g. Anti-Tank Sniper, Heavy Gunner, Medic, Explosive Swordsman) making a grand total of 20 elite classes to play with.

Of course upgrading involves a hell lot of grinding for a variety of random drops (or “credits” since the game setting is a school) that differ for each class… But it’s actually not that hard to get everyone to elite by the end of the game if you diligently play though every mission. You don’t really have to grind (i.e. replay missions).

Armour Tech, a new class in VC2, is a melee unit with a bulletproof shield that can disarm/plant land mines

According to the saved file, I logged 64 hours into VC2, excluding the few dozen reloads it took to perfect some non-repeatable story missions. In 64 hours, I managed to complete all the missions at S Rank (mostly in one playthrough), excluding character-specific missions belonging to characters I don’t use in my main squad, and upgraded all my squad members to elites (with at least one unit of every elite class).

My squad setup

There is a lot more replayability in VC2 compared to the first game. Some of it is grindy, but generally it is thoroughly enjoyable.

Annoyances

If you play through VC, there’s a part during the tutorial where the game proudly informs you that there is no need to grind levels with individual units because all units of the same class share the same class level. You merely have to collect generic EXP to upgrade entire classes. What a thoughtful system, you think to yourself…

Class levels

In VC2, generic EXP and class levels still exist, but elite status is no longer linked to levels. Instead you have to fulfil specific credit requirements for individual units and manually upgrade them one-by-one to elites. This renders the class-level system completely redundant as anything but a linear stat boost. Sigh…

Credits are granted only to units that perform well in missions and each mission grants a specific category of credits (out of four; e.g. Attack credits, Support credits) and each category contains four different grades (e.g. Attack, Attack II, Attack X, Attack II X).

Credits issued after a mission

These credits are granted somewhat randomly, so you can imagine the frustration when you only need one single Attack II to upgrade your Veteran Scout but the mission keeps giving him Attack II X and wasting Attack II on a Shocktrooper that doesn’t need it.

Objection!

Also, the original VC was fully voiced throughout but VC2 has voice-overs only for select scenes. This is a rather huge annoyance in my opinion because partial voice-over is lame and reminiscence of the Nintendo DS.

And I can’t help but feel sad that the awesome cel-shaded engine Sega made for VC is going to waste now that VC has permanently abandoned the PS3 for the PSP…

Capturing a point with my scout. Her character-specific ability also happens to activate, healing her to full

Gameplay balance is also not that great. It’s not so bad if you play against another human player, but certain strategies such as Scout rush are powerful to the point of being broken against the retarded computer AI.

The mission-ranking system determines rank by the number of turns taken. This mandates an offensive play-style going for fast efficient wins, which is further disincentive against using support classes such as Engineer/Musician and slow-moving classes such as Armour Tech in most situations, making the Scout even more overpowered.

S is Japanese for A

Of course, getting S Rank using other classes is perfectly doable and there are very few cases where a Scout rush is absolutely essential. But it often makes things too easy.

Improvements

The weapon/tank upgrade and research options are a huge step up from the original.

In the original game, the upgrades are largely linear stat boosts that, while helpful for progression, do not alter the style of gameplay with few exceptions. The “elite” gimmicky weapons that named NPCs drop are largely useless compared to your default stat boosters. Your tank stays in the base for most fights because it is costly to move and there are very few cases where it is necessary, or even more convenient, to use it.

Submachinegun upgrade tree

In VC2, your tank can be customized for a large variety of purposes, from heavy-armour tank that costs multiple movement points to use and can deal massive damage to enemy bosses to low-cast light-armour personnel carriers that can rapidly transport your troops right to the enemy command point while building bridges and clearing obstacles. This makes the tank useful in nearly every mission.

Similarly, there are numerous weapon sidegrades and special enemy drops that are actually vastly superior to your default upgrades and it actually makes sense to keep an eye out for them.

Heavy tank with heavy armour-piercing rounds, rear armour and enemy camouflage

Light tank with desert camo and water sprinkler (removes heat ray debuff on desert maps)

VC2 also does a much better job of developing side characters. In the original game, each of your squad members supposedly has a unique personality and back story, but none of it is covered in the game itself. You only get to infer them from the one-line voice-overs and the in-game encyclopaedia.

Story scene for one of the Lancer side characters

Lycoris/Anisette, the younger sister of Edy from the original game

In VC2, there is a series of cut scenes and a character-specific mission for every squad member. Sure, the back stories are all cliché-fests, but it’s still nice to have them at all. That said, some of the original VC supporting characters such as Edy are strangely popular with the fans despite having zero presence in the game’s story…

Guess the cliché

Another side character’s story mission

There’s also a decent multiplayer option now that lets you play ad-hoc wireless co-op and versus games with your friends. It’s hard to describe how co-op works, but it is quite fun. Versus mode can be slightly broken if the two players are at very different tech levels in their respective games, but it’s still possible for the disadvantaged player to win if he plays his classes right.

Overall

I think Sega has found itself an incredible game franchise in Valkyria Chronicles and there’s a lot of innovation going on in the two games published so far. Unfortunately, the games do not seem to be doing very well commercially and the move to the PSP, a dead platform in North America, certainly does not help.

Welkin and Alicia from the original game

VC2 is a very fun game, but it is also flawed. Most of its flaws can be attributed to either the technical limitations of the PSP or the strange Japanese notion that all games made for the PSP must be incredibly “replayable”…or grindy (see: Dissidia, Crisis Core, Monster Hunter). The former is made glaringly obvious by the glorious masterpiece that is the original VC on PS3.

The beautiful enemy commander, voiced by Ayako Kawasumi, issues an order

VC of course has its own share of flaws. The story is much grander and more immersive, but the gameplay is slightly too simplistic. On the other hand, VC2 has a much lighter cookie-cutter story but improves the gameplay mechanics in some aspects. It’s a two-step-forward-one-step-back deal.

Becoming the bad guy alters your sense of fashion

Still, in spite of its flaws and limitations, VC2 is by far the most enjoyable PSP experience I have had. It really is disheartening to see that such a brilliant game is apparently not popular enough to warrant even one proper walkthrough on GameFAQs…

More screenshots because I took too many.

Mission shop

There is always a hard-ass drill sergeant

There is always a mascot animal of unknown species

Mission selection screen

You can tell they are bad by the colours

The tank driver/technician is a hawt oneesan who says, “Don’t break it next time, kay?” everytime you bring your tank in for repairs

Arranging your characters before a battle

Blowing up an enemy supply vehicle

Enemy moving in to capture my point during the opponent’s turn

The academy’s scenery changes with the seasons

A total tsundere in a bromance with the main character

It’s like Pikachu with wings

For Queen and country; That is your Queen (voiced by Mamiko Noto)

I eagerly await the release of Valkyria Chronicles 3 on 27th Jan. ^^

Valkyria Chronicles inspired me to attempt to play through all five Sakura Taisen in order.

How the mighty has fallen. Once upon a time, Microsoft could sell garbage and people would still buy them because it was the only garbage in town. Now it’s desperately playing catch-up to iOS and Android with its late-to-the-game abysmally-named Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Naysayers are already predicting a Kin-like premature demise for WP7 and that may very well turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But for this ethereal moment, I am happy with my LG Optimus 7.

The lock screen with MIKU-02

I’ve been using the Optimus 7 for a few days now. It is a decent phone with powerful hardware and some flaws, which puts it on par with most higher end Android phones. In fact, given that all WP7 phone OEMs are also hedging their bets and making Android phones, the hardware difference between the two platform is more or less purely cosmetic, so the real competition lies in the software.

The WP7 OS is basically Microsoft’s attempt at out-Appling Apple. For every difference in philosophy between the iOS and Android, Microsoft went with iOS. This makes the end product anathema to my usual preference for customizability, but I can see its merits.

Interface

Microsoft chose to adopt Zune’s UI directions when designing WP7, completely abandoning its Windows roots. This is a good thing because Windows Mobile is and will always be the ugliest smartphone OS ever created.

The home screen with Live Tiles

The unified UI design (Microsoft calls it Metro as it resembles subway signs) is very much in line with my personal sense of aesthetics — san serif, flat and minimalist. I never liked the 3D chrome and shininess that both Android and iOS employ in their icons and UI. Some people would see it as lazy design (*cough* like this blog *cough*), but I just find the flat display visually appealing.

The UI elements are all very smooth and responsive and in terms of human interface there is nothing that really differentiates the WP7, for better or worse, from the iPhone. You have all your standard swipes and pinches.

The OS interface taken from Zune media players is fantastic. Combining real-time information and application icons into so-called Live Tiles offers no real practical advantage but does stylize the home screen a great deal. The flip side of this is that for all purpose and intent the home screen is not customizable beyond rearrangement of the Live Tiles.

The Pictures hub

Microsoft calls its app-design concept Hubs, but that moniker makes zero sense to me. What they mean is that what would normally be different screens within an app on Android or iOS are combined into one giant side-scrolling screen. You swipe horizontally to see different aspects of the application. For example, in the Music and Videos app, you swipe rightwards to see play history, recent additions, etc. This implementation reduces the number of on-screen UI elements needed to navigate the applications, which is great, but some people may be annoyed by the way the screen crops.

Album art, navigation buttons and white san-serif text on black background are all I need

Oh and I really love the media player interface. It’s an exact representation of my ideal interface. Indeed, I would be all over the desktop Zune player, which uses the same design motif, if it wasn’t missing so many features like global hotkeys or minimizing to tray.

Hardware

Taking a page out of Apple’s world domination guide, Microsoft has set very specific guidelines for WP7 hardware. The end result is that all the launch phones look like clones of one another. They are all extremely boring in their perfection.

Some app tiles; also media control at the top

For example, all WP7 phones (Windows Phone 7 phones? Please shoot the marketer who came up with the name) come with three physical buttons below the screen: Back, Home and Search.

By default Search launches a hidden Bing app but this behaviour can be overridden by the active application with an app-specific search. For every new app you use, there is no way to know what the Search button will do when you press it until you give it a try. It’s like Heisenberg’s cat except that instead of death you are forced to use Bing half the time. There is no way to change the Search to launch Google instead, making this particular compulsory hardware button completely dead to me.

The Home button works like it should. You can hold it down to activate voice commands. The only thing I don’t like about it is that, unlike the iPhone, you cannot use it to wake up the phone. You have to press the Power button to unlock your screen. Again, there is zero options to modify this default behaviour.

The Back button not only goes “out” of a screen/app like in Symbian phones, it literally goes back like in a browser. For example, you can press it in the Home screen and end up at the previous app screen that you just closed. This can be useful or annoying depending on who you are, but I think it’s useful.

The 480 x 800 capacitive touchscreen is really nice, but then it’s standard by now. The Optimus 7 has a TFT screen but some of the other launch phones have AMOLED. There are some slightly dark spots at the bottom of the LCD similar to the PSP screens, but they are not noticeable in normal use. Personally, I think it’s good enough.

The battery life is like 5 minutes or something. But apparently it’s still rated as one of the longer ones in today’s smartphone world. Certainly, I don’t think it is shorter than most Android phones, so it’s more of a limitation of physics than anything.

Some hardware gripes specific to the Optimus 7: the power button is awfully small for a button you have to press all the time to unlock your phone, the volume rockers feel terrible to press on because they are small and hard and the USB cover feels flimsy as they all do.

I’ve also had problems with applications opening up in landscape mode (the main UI has no landscape mode) even when I hold the phone upright. I am not sure if this is specific to the Optimus 7’s accelerometer implementation, or if there is something wrong with WP7’s software algorithms. It’s a minor problem that can be easily solved with an orientation lock. Hilariously, Apple unsolved this problem for the iPad in the latest update.

Software

This is where you can tell that Microsoft really rushed this puppy out of the door.

Most default applications come with close to no customization. For example, Internet Explorer has a total of three options plus delete history and there is no way to change the home page. (Arguably you don’t have to since you can just create a shortcut for it but that’s a dumb argument.) Now it works fine, scrolls well and is generally bug-free, but it’s no Opera Mobile.

Internet Explorer

Functionalities like YouTube and World Clock were added in through official Microsoft apps in the Marketplace probably because they failed to meet the deadline for the production ROM.

The official YouTube app is just a browser window with YouTube’s mobile version, but you must install it to play YouTube videos because it comes with some critical backend that should’ve been native to the phone, given that the vanilla OS already plays H264 videos out of the box.

Official Twitter app

There are supposedly thousands of applications on the Marketplace, but most of them cost money so I am too cheap to try them. The free Facebook and Twitter apps are decent if slightly lacking.

On another note, Bing Maps sucks monkey balls especially when it comes to location search. The WP7 app doesn’t even have turn-by-turn directions. I often find myself using the horrible web-based Google Maps (or gothere.sg which uses Google API). I can only hope that Google finds the time and incentive to make a WP7 Google Maps app.

My favourite part of the WP7 software is the People app/hub (i.e. the contact list). The phone can synchronize all your Windows Live, Google and Facebook contacts and create consolidated information of every person. It does so by matching email address across accounts, but you can also manually tell it to link contacts that it cannot automatically match. The end result is that I can easily see the Messenger accounts, Facebook statuses, email addresses and phone numbers of people in one single interface and use their Facebook display pictures for Caller ID.

Facebook status updates in the People hub

The drawback to this implementation is that the master list defaults to your Windows Live contact list. There is a setting to hide Facebook contacts who are not linked to anyone in your master list, but you can’t do the same for Live because it is the master list. And of course there is no way to change the default option.

So if you have a habit of adding random strangers on your Messenger account, you will have a lot of unrecognizable email addresses in your contact list. Fortunately, this is more of a matter of aesthetics than usability since there is instant search. Bizarrely, there is a software button for instant search in the People Hub, rendering the dedicated hardware button moot in this case.

Zune

What is even more bizarre is that Microsoft decided not to implement Outlook contact sync. In the past, this was done with ActiveSync (brings back memories of my old HP iPAQ), but that ancient relic has now been replaced by the Zune software suite, which, being a media-centric software, provides zero contact management functionality. Ironically, this makes iTunes superior because it does sync local Outlook contacts.

Of course, this problem is specific to contacts stored locally. There is no issue when syncing with contacts stored on Outlook Exchange servers because you can simply add the Exchange account like any Gmail or Live accounts.

Amusingly, the easiest solution to this problem is probably to export all your local Outlook contacts into Gmail using a CSV file and then syncing with your Gmail contacts.

Managing photos on the phone in Zune

But in general the Zune desktop software is pretty sweet. It feels more lightweight than iTunes on Windows, no doubt because it uses native Windows APIs and does not need redundant memory hogs like Bonjour or Apple Software Updater. It even plays Xvid AVI files, auto-converting them to H264 when syncing with WP7, but unfortunately it does not recognize MKV containers.

Zune sync

Zune also does all the iTunes stuff like Marketplace, photo album management, song ripping and transcoding and region-locking you out of Marketplace if you live in the wrong country… God bless Microsoft.

Zune album management

Of course Zune comes nowhere close to replacing what I use Winamp for, but I actually find it orders of magnitudes more usable than the horrible spawn of Satan that is iTunes for Windows.

Facebook v. Google

The level of Facebook integration in WP7 is actually quite amazing. For Microsoft, this may be a strength worthy of further leveraging.

You can find both the individual Facebook status updates of your contacts and a general feed in the People hub. There is even a built-in interface to read and write comments.

Facebook is also the only other built-in upload option for photos taken with a WP7 phone, with SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud offering for photo sharing, being the other option. Picasa Web Albums is nowhere in sight.

In the Pictures hub, both your Facebook and SkyDrive albums are listed alongside your local albums/folders. You can also find a feed of Facebook albums uploaded by all your friends and comment on them from within the native UI.

Gmail: the only Google product that WP7 grudgingly mentions

Plus the fact that the stupid hardware search button is hard-coded to Bing, it appears that Microsoft and Facebook are really getting in bed together to form a united front against Google. I can see WW4 in the making (after we emerge from our nuclear bunkers in the aftermath of a second Korean War).

Overall

It looks like I have more complaints than praises because finding faults is what I am good at. The truth is that for all its lack of multi-tasking and copy-pasting, WP7 is not any worse an OS than iPhone’s first iteration. In fact, I much appreciate the general design and UI innovation that WP7 brings to the table. I find the minimalist navigation more to my liking than iOS or Android and that is the main reason why I have a generally positive final impression of the WP7 OS.

That said, the road ahead for Microsoft is long and treacherous and it faces a Sisyphean task ahead. There is much taint associated with the Microsoft and Windows Mobile brand names, and being as good as the competition is not good enough to overcome that. Given that it is already late to the game, it may never get the momentum it needs to redeem itself.

Adjustable thumbnail size would be nice given the tiny default

The Metro UI design is highly subjective in its merits and works for me, but in terms of pure technical advantage the WP7 has nothing. In fact, it is functionally inferior to the iOS at this stage even if you do not take jailbreaking into account, much less the open Android platform.

Microsoft needs to first fix all the things that are wrong with the OS (crappy calendar, copy and paste, lack of settings, locked to Bing for most dedicated functions), which it may or may not manage to do with the rumoured massive patch that is coming.

Then, even more importantly, it needs to bring something new beyond aesthetics. Perhaps something to do with the existing Xbox Live integration. After all, the 360 seems to be the only bright spot on Microsoft’s resume these days.

I’m selling away my Optimus 7 when I leave Singapore next year so I’m only intending to experiment with WP7 for a short while. Despite how much I adore its UI, my conclusion for now is that Android will probably be more suitable for me in the long term because I need things like tethering and USB mass storage support (which even a jailbroken iPhone can do)…

But perhaps Microsoft will make me change my mind with updates in the next few months. Do you believe in miracles?

If only there were some way to get the best of both worlds.

P.S. I would totally love a Windows desktop OS that uses the Metro design.

A long time ago, I stumbled upon the Golden Boy OVA series on Nico Nico Douga and thought it was an odd and unique piece of work. It left a bit of an impression but I didn’t think much more of it. Recently, I had the chance to read the 10-volume manga series that it is based on. It blew my mind in a way that words alone fail to describe.

Golden Boy starts off as a sexually-charged gag manga full of raunchy toilet humour much like the OVA, which was made based on six of the chapters contained in the first book. The interesting thing is that, up to the third volume, the degree of sexuality portrayed is actually much more explicit in the OVA than in the manga (at least until the third volume, after which the manga overtakes it by leaps and bounds).

The basic storytelling template is as follows: Kintarou Oe, a boy genius who dropped out of Toudai after obtaining full credits in order to go on a journey of self discovery, arrives at a new town and takes up a new part-time job in order to learn a new skill. There, he meets a hot girl who is usually instantly turned off by his unrestrained perverted nature and thinks that he is just a good-for-nothing freeter. In the end, he surprises everyone by not only picking up the skill in record time, but doing it better than anyone else. He also usually ends up changing the girl’s life positively. But by the time anyone realizes what he has done, he leaves town on his bicycle and heads for his next lesson in life.

This story structure is repeated many times in the first two volumes and appears to be the original concept before the manga. However, by the third volume, things start to change. The episodic storytelling format is eventually replaced by a long continuous story as we learn more about Kintarou.

The most obvious shift happens when he encounters a cult bent on world domination who uses S&M sexual techniques to brainwash and mind control people. This quickly grows into long discussions about the state of modern society and its use of violence as a tool of conflict resolution, the role of the education system in producing unthinking slaves for the system and the role of sex in achieving inner and outer peace.

At this point, I suppose you just went “WTF?”

Consider where I cut off the image. Hint: nopan

Yes, the real meat, at least from the author’s perspective, behind Golden Boy is not its expert depiction of the female anatomy or its thorough examination of the different genres of sexual fantasies. It is instead a soapbox for the author to voice his anti-establishment and leftist ideologies in manga form. As a result, Golden Boy’s dialogues can get somewhat wordier than in most other manga, and disagreements between characters frequently descend into discourses on history, politics and society.

The main messages constantly repeated in Golden Boy are:

• The Japanese education system destroys a person’s inert ability to learn and brainwashes him into a conforming slave
• Sex is both a tool of political control and social liberation
• Modern society is built on egoistic violence against other people, against the natural environment, against tradition and culture, against human nature. Examples used include:
  • Destroying the environment to build golf courses and a fictional Japan-hosted Olympics (waste of tax money collected forcefully by the government)
  • World War II (he brings up Rape of Nanjing and Unit 731), Vietnam War, Russo-Japanese War
  • Indoctrination of the people to accept rule by elites through a hierarchical education and corporate system
• The Japanese political system is a continuation of the pre-war status quo and the same old flaws are concealed by material wealth
• Material possession and social status are hollow and meaningless
• Avocation of free love — that true love is not possessive and love does not tie you to your partner
• Avocation of life-long self-motivated learning over systematically-imposed rote learning (i.e. street smart over book smart)

The meaning of life in manga form

It is interesting because a lot of these messages coincide with the leftist and anarchist student movements in post-war Japan. The author, Tatsuya Egawa, was born in 1961 and taught college mathematics for a few months before switching to drawing manga, so it’s easy to see where the political outlook expressed in Golden Boy comes from. He was probably disillusioned by own education experience and subsequently influenced by the leftist anti-government anti-consumerism sentiments that were prevalent in Japanese universities during the height of the Cold War.

In sooth, Tatsuya Egawa is not at all a good story-teller. He frequently dedicates so much time in writing his tirades against modern society that the story becomes incoherent or neglected. His matter-of-fact rants are also rife with factual errors, probably copied and pasted directly from Communist propaganda pamphlets, so they should be taken with a grain of salt — they are interesting to read but far from gospel. Still, it is very eye-opening to see how Egawa, a Baby Boomer, perceives Japanese society at the end of its roaring bubble economy.

Beyond the political and social messages, Golden Boy also goes into great lengthy discussions about the human psyche — how we derive our own self worth, how we distinguish ourselves from others as individuals, how we seek to dominate or be dominated, etc. The author’s arguments in this areas make for some interesting food for thought, but are probably standard fare for college-level psychology.

It’s okay because they are (still) wearing clothes

For those who dare to venture into the unknown, be warned. While Golden Boy is not actually considered M-18, this must be placed in context of Japan’s traditionally liberal view regarding sexuality. Let’s just say that it has everything up to the extreme threshold acceptable for a manga that is not explicitly smut, including fetishes, S&M and almost an entire volume dedicated to a single sex scene — the characters literally discuss the socio-political significance and symbolism of sex while doing it.

Golden Boy is really one of those only-in-Japan phenomenons that can never find a profitable niche outside of Japan, except perhaps in prose form. Beyond the first two volume and the OVA series, the series’ message is so foreign, explicit and politically-charged that it’s impossible to appreciate it outside of its intended context.

With the right mindset and conditions, one can find some meaningful ideas in the way Golden Boy pushes the envelopes of political correctness and sexuality. But that perfect cosmic alignment of the universe happens rarely, so it’s not something I can recommend to anyone even though I found it curiously enjoyable. It’s an odd piece of work that is difficult to appreciate, as evidenced by the slew of hate-filled negative reviews it receives online. Really a hit-or-miss thing.

If you are still interested, you can find scanslations (no idea how good they are since I read the raws) up to the start of Volume 8 on AnimeA and raws of all ten volumes on Crazy’s Manga.

It’s also quite amazing to hear that Tatsuya Egawa has apparently just recently started to serialize Golden Boy II in Business Jump, after ending the original run abruptly thirteen years ago. (Sadly, the ANN comment thread on this announcement is quite superficially negative because English speakers’ exposure to the series is limited to the OVA series.)

I haven’t had a chance to read the first chapter of Golden Boy II yet, which I believe has already been published, but the promotion art looks quite evolved from his earlier works. I just wonder if the passage of time has served to temper Egawa’s fiery brand of political expression and if Golden Boy 2 will turn out to be a more mainstream ecchi gag comedy. Looking forward to finding out.

P.S. Having recently discovered the joy of RawScans, I have been downloading and consuming manga raws ravenously. I just finished reading Tokyo University Story, a 34-volume series by Tatsuya Egawa that was serialized the same time as Golden Boy. It contains the same general themes, but with a lot more focus on education and human relationship. It also has the most WTF ending ever in the history of human creativity.

Like any modern metropolis, Tokyo’s glittering skylines carefully conceal a more sinister side from the casual observations of an outsider. And like most other things Japan, organized crime in the form of yakuza carries with it cultural quirks that are at times indecipherable for those of us who live outside the Galápagos. Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein is a book that sets out to document and interpret a small slice of this enigma, written from a Jewish-American journalist covering crime stories for the Yomiuri Shinbun. The end result is a thought-provoking page-turner.

I first heard about the book and its author from an episode of The Daily Show last November. Looking at Jake Adelstein’s relaxed demeanour and boyish looks, one would never guess him to be a grizzled veteran reporter well-versed in the workings of the Japanese underworld, but the interview did leave a strong enough impression that I eventually bought a copy of his book. Being the cheap bastard that I am, I of course waited for the paperback release, which is why I am only now writing this review nine months after his Daily Show plug.

I picked up Tokyo Vice without any high expectations. After all, what could a Jewish-American guy possibly manage to uncover about Japan’s crime syndicates, even if he is the first foreign journalist to ever be admitted to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club (which is only opened to the Japanese press)? Japan society at large is well-known for its insular nature, much less the secretive yakuza groups with their mystical rituals and honour codes.

As a result, I had expected Tokyo Vice to be a compilation of humorous quirky anecdotes from Adelstein’s time as a reporter there, perhaps only slightly more in-depth and insightful than the typical Japan-is-so-weird drivels that are a dim a dozen at Kinokuniya. There is certainly some fluff of that nature present in Tokyo Vice, but the book is much more personal and serious than that.

The central point behind the book is a record of Adelstein’s journey from an aspiring reporter to a veteran journalist who managed to uncover a huge scoop about how Tadamasa Goto, a then-powerful crime lord in Tokyo, managed to obtain a US visa to receive a liver transplant at UCLA, despite being on ICE‘s blacklist for trafficking and money laundering. The result of his investigation was shunned by the Japanese media, including his own employer the Yomiuri Shinbun, but eventually caught the public’s attention when Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post agreed to publish the story after verifying it with the FBI. He and his family were then put under police protection, while Goto was eventually forced out of his organization (and conveniently became a Buddhist monk while under criminal investigation) as a result of the ensuing scandal. It’s the stuff of TV and movies.

With the popularity of Japanese pop culture, there are many people who dream of studying or working in Japan. But it is actually extremely difficult for a foreigner to enter the Japanese education and corporate systems (which are really one and the same). Most foreigners who do manage to find a living in Japan do so more or less detached from its integrated corporate employment machine (e.g. running a restaurant, working for a foreign MNC, teaching English).

The fact that Adelstein, who is neither Korean nor Chinese (the two foreign groups with the best chance at integration), managed to graduate from Sophia University (one of the top private universities in Japan) and find employment as a full-time Yomiuri Shinbun reporter (a complex process of interviews and standardized testing that only a native can navigate) is a pretty amazing feat by itself. The fact that he managed to not only find a way in but to get to places as an American that even Japanese journalists find difficult accessing is simply unimaginable. The perspective of Japan he offers is nuanced and eye-opening. This is not your typical American travelogue of Japan.

The story that has everything you want from a crime thriller: the murders, the sex, the threats, the corruptions, the battles lost and won. It’s all there, only much more real. Adelstein’s vivd recollection of the many encounters he had has a reporter — with police officers, yakuza bosses, fellow journalists, sex workers — brings his story to life and gives reader a rare matter-of-fact glimpse into a world that, shrouded in the mysticism accorded to it by popular fiction, often seems surreal to those of us living more mundane lives.

Toyko Vice is a hard look at a seldom-seen reality with its share of bitterness and humanity, with the occasional life lesson and a dash of seasoned sentimentality. In a way, it is even inspirational. It is the kind of book that makes me feel that the world out there is a lot bigger than me (and also makes me kind of want to become a journalist.)

Get the book off Amazon or go to Adelstein’s blog Japan Subculture Research Centre for more information.