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< Piro >

"Interventions"

Tuesday - August 24, 2010

[Piro] - 10:22:27 - [link here]

Breaking Intervention news! There is a schedule and a table assignment!

Fred is at table 15 in the Vendor/Guest room. More importantly his "10 Years of Megatokyo" panel is at 1 PM on Saturday in the Large Panels Room and he's on the "Back in My Day" panel at 2 PM. Also, someone ask him about the Characters page. There wasn't enough laughter over that at Anime Central...

--Kalium

** read down for info on Intervention, the convention i'll be attending in a few weeks**

It took a while, but most of the pre-orders are out the door, but just about all of them are out the door and should be in your hands. For those of you who pre-ordered Megatokyo volume 6 through the MegaGear store, thank you very much for your patience with the time it took for me to sign everything (not to mention things like making shirts and whatnot). Thank you.

That said, you have no idea how relieved it feels to have Megatokyo Volume six done and out the door, both the production of the book and filling all the pre-orders. It’s been a rough year and not everything has gone smoothly, but it’s nice to finally feel like that particular gorilla is done stomping on me.

Speaking of the book, it’s always kind of interesting to look at your new book for the first time. I’m really happy with how the book came out, it looks even better than I thought it would (it seems that drawing digitally transfers very nicely to print). It’s a pretty dense book, and even for me it’s nice to be able to sit down with a print volume to read and review rather than the tattered binders that I usually work with.

As you know, I haven’t really attended too many conventions since Jack joined us almost three years ago, the first in a long time being Anime Central a few months ago. Now that the book is out and jack is big enough to wield a bakahammer to keep the girls away we're been looking ahead and planning more shows. In fact, we'll be attending a new show in just a couple of weeks in the Washington DC area.

On September 10-12 we will be attending Intervention at the Hilton Washington DC/Rockville. Run by the fine folks at Onezumi, it looks like it’s shaping up to be a good show with a fine cast of crim- er, guests including Hawk (who I will show no mercy!) and Pete Abrams from Sluggy Freelance. Sluggy Freelance is one of the comics that somehow got me going into making webcomics, so i'll have to be sure to give Pete my sincere *appreciation* for getting me into this. If you live in the area, be sure to come by the show and say hi. We’ll have a nice selection of fine art prints, a few shirts and copies of volume 6 for purchase and i'll be doing my usual sketching and signing for folks. More details as we get closer to the show. Be sure to pre-reg if you are going to attend!

I've been working on coloring a drawing i did recently of Kimiko in a kind of multi-layered homage to a certain Vocaloid image, and it's not turning out too badly in color. I need to re-work the background a little (make the hex map a little better defined) but all in all this might make a decent poster (as well as a t-shirt, which was my original idea here). Ah, fun.

< Kalium >

Seize the Lightning!

"Capitalism, Ho!"

Sunday - September 26, 2010

[Kalium] - 18:46:11 - [link here]

Before anyone asks, this isn't a political rant. Fred would tear my head off for that -- or worse, send Dom to do it. No, this is about a recent game release. This game plays heavily on themes of commerce and war and advancement over time.

No, I'm not talking about Civilization V. I'm talking about Recettear.

Recettear is a JRPG. Well, sort of. You're a character in a JRPG, at any rate. You're not exactly the sword-swinging monster-killing world-saving hero, though. Instead, you're the NPC item shop owner. You're also a thirteen year old girl, complete with staggering amounts of cuteness and an insane level of enthusiasm. You also inherited a sizable debt from your deadbeat father and have a month to pay off the loan shark. You are Recette. The loan shark is a snarky fairy named Tear. You have to make regular payments of rapidly increasing amounts in order to have her not repossess your house.

As an aside, don't worry about running out of money. You're expected to fail on your first round or two. If you can't make a payment, you're sent back to day two with your inventory, shop, and merchant level intact.

It's not just the standard buy low and sell high, though. As you sell things, you gain experience and your merchant level goes up. You acquire new abilities, like the ability to buy things from customers. Every few levels you gain access to a new tier of items from the shops in town. The best items aren't ones you can buy, though. There's a whole other half to the game.

See, there are adventurers running around town. They're everywhere because the town is surrounded by dungeons. You hire an adventurer and off you go to kill monsters and take their stuff. There's no party system, but it's otherwise not much different from your basic dungeon crawler. You swing a weapon, you cast a spell, you open a treasure chest, you beat a boss, we all know how that goes.

There's a good reason for the dungeon-delving. All the best items are found in dungeons. Moreover, you don't have to pay out for the stuff you find. Your profit margins are much higher. It's about the only way to make enough to keep that loan shark fairy off your back.

Then there's the writing. This game has an awesome sense of humor. One adventurer is thoroughly idiotic. A second repeatedly and drunkenly hits on Recette. A third firmly refuses to believe Recette is the owner of the shop. There's jokes and cultural references (Tear at one point states that she refuses to put a horse head in anyone's bed) and all-around good writing. Somehow, the snippets of Japanese voiceover just add to the charm.

This game is... improbably addicting. Being the NPC shopkeeper should not be this fun. Not even remotely. And yet, it's impossible for me to play only a few minutes. In fact, I'm writing this rant from a machine that doesn't run Recettear so I can avoid launching it to check something and playing for six hours instead. At $20, this game is a steal. Highly recommended.

Now then. I have monsters to kill and items to sell at 130% of base price. So until next time...

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