天下制覇

This has sure gone from 0 to apocalypse in no time flat.

Since it's technically the site's birthday, or at the very least, the time of year when I need to pay hosting and refresh all the domain stuff, let's take a moment and 'advantage' of the current global pandemic to cover some random stuff. First, I plan on getting going on the spring season preview this week, a little bit late, I 'm aware. At least two shows have already announced that their production is torched due to corona and are being delayed, and no doubt more will follow. It may be a bit more of a best guess as to what is actually going to show up next season than usual.

Speaking of which, I've officially been kicked out of the office for the forseeable future for work, and considering that my office was in the process of closing come summer and transitioning us all to work-from-home anyway, that is very much looking like my new normal pretty much permanently. What this means for the blog is probably not a whole ton. Posts will probably be a little earlier in the day, but without the punctual reliability one always loves in social media or a bran diet. I doubt it'll be going back to my old habit of watching/posting ASAP since I've both become lazier in my old age, and things pop up much faster than they did years ago, but we'll see how this whole work-home balance functions.

I think that I want to try to post a bit more in the coming season, and I'm warming up to the idea of watching random old shows, with an emphasis on random, because I am still a contrarian at heart, and I think it'd be much more amusing to write 2,000 words on something everybody memory-holed than something everyone knows. Maybe I've just been watching too many educational lectures late at night and need to transition back to something more brainless. We'll see though. Like I said, this is, while technically not new territory since I was doing a bunch of tech gig work that was basically working from home during the genesis of this blog, it was very different from this.

I may be back in the office for a month or two… in a month or two, but this is a dry run at what the second half of the year will be regardless. Still better than the original plan from a bit back, which was to ship my team across the country.

I suppose I could also mention on the game front that Eushully announced their next game too, and it's kind of hilarious. They might as well have titled it Schmunny Schmlack. As much as that Ninetails game was an unabashed ripoff of Kamidori, this is an unabashed ripoff of Bunny Black. It looks pretty barebones and uninspired though, particularly with the graphics which are on par with… well, Bunny Black, a game that's now ten years old. I genuinely wonder why they're so deadset against just making another game with all the configuration, costumes, gathering, feng shui, alchemy, etc that made Kamidori so great, but I think that the answer is "we tried that with Amayui," oblivious to Amayui cutting out so much of that and replacing it with mostly tedium.

I also played the Suzukuri Dragon/Koihime mashup also mentioned above a little bit, but it was pretty disappointing. Rather than being focused on each playthrough being a 5-10 hour affair in almost a roguelike vein, it's built as more of a one-and-done thing, which makes it way more grindy and removes virtually all of the chaos and randomness to prevent you from either game overing or softlocking. That also removes most of the possible configuration and setup you can do with the dungeon, so it's neither challenging nor engaging.

In any case, here's to another year. Maybe this will be the year I finally update the blog's setup. Maybe I'll finally get around to fixing the forum. Maybe I'll just hope to survive the dawning pandemic consuming world economies right as I was looking around for buying a house. Fun times ahead.

Spring preview up probably a week from Sunday. Why witches? Because I originally had a post around October that I decided to can, and they've been sitting in my pocket ever since then.