D.C.S.S. Episode 21

Posted on November 20, 2005 by DarkMirage

Summary: Sakura almost manages to convince Aisia to stay away from the path to Kotori’s doom (as predicted by me), but Aisia grows too smart for her own good and runs away (presumably to the magic sakura tree again).

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World Cyber Games 2005 Finals

Posted on November 20, 2005 by DarkMirage

Just reached home from the WCG Finals. Quite wasted. Anyway:

  • USA won CS: Source and Halo 2
  • China won WC3
  • Korea won Starcraft: BW (surprise!)
  • Japan won DOA: Ultimate (does that guy even own an Xbox!?)
  • Some other countries I don’t care about won some other games I don’t care about

USA also won the overall championship for having the most wins.

Singapore managed to get second for DOA: Ultimate… Wilson Chia received louder applauses from the audience than the champion.

China also came close to third placing for Starcraft. It was quite an intense three-round match that was too close to call right till the last map. The Australian player using Protoss got pushed back to his main base by an early game Zerg rush and survived on a single Photon Cannon that finished building just in time. Then he slowly regained the upperhand and eventually won.

The CS:Source Finals between USA and Kazakhstan was also quite close. USA needed 2 rounds to win the game while Kazakhstan needed 8 to force the game into overtime. Then Kazakhstan managed to win 5 rounds during which USA won only one. But alas, USA proved to be the better team.

Overall, WCG 2005 was quite an enjoyable event. Although there is still much more room for expansion in terms of scale, but that’s up to Italy, the next WCG host.

I will post today’s pictures later.

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Comptiq – Da Capo Girls Ranking

Posted on November 19, 2005 by DarkMirage

I finally got my hands on the latest issue of Comptiq! The store owner recognized me and realized that I have yet to collect a previous issue because I borrowed a friend’s copy to read. しまった！ Oh well, I’ll have to pay for it the next time I go there… x_X

Comptiq December 2005

This issue has information on To Heart 2 for PC, Bokutachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai (new game from Navel, creators of Shuffle!), Tomoyo After (new *gasp* 18+ game by Key, the creators of Air and Kanon) and others like the new Pia Carrot game (that makes…five?), Tales of Eternia Online MMORPG and Fate/stay night anime. Joukyou Kaishi! (状況開始っ！) also looks sort of interesting.

Anyway, here are the popularity rankings of the Da Capo girls and their vote counts.

  1. Kotori Shirakawa – 1451
  2. Nemu Asakura – 965
  3. Aisia – 781
  4. Mako Mizukoshi – 474
  5. Miharu Amakase – 459
  6. Sakura Yoshino – 310
  7. Yoriko Sagisawa – 200
  8. Moe Mizukoshi – 131

Kotori forever! Aisia is almost catching up to Nemu… Kind of sad that Tamaki didn’t make the list. D:

Surprisingly, this issue has two pages dedicated to the Xbox 360. Not surprisingly, the only game it bothers to mention is eNCHANT arM, a Japanese RPG. It’s kind of sad for Microsoft that eM’s release date has been delayed and it won’t make it in time for the Japanese 360 launch, which means that the only game that the Japanese are even remotely interested in is going to be left out of the launch list. Will Xbox 360 ever manage to outsell Playstation 2 in Japan? I doubt it.

Posted in Anime, Games | Tagged , | 4 Comments

JLPT 2005

Posted on November 19, 2005 by DarkMirage

I received my JLPT notification in the mai!

JLPT letter

I got assigned to the text centre at Changi again. That’s on the other side of Singapore mainland from where I live. Goddamnit, the other two test locations would have been so much more convenient. the Japanese School at Changi also has very tiny desks and chairs designed for primary school kids. Plus it’s located in front of a relatively narrow road that always gets so jammed that you can walk faster than the cars move. Oh, cruel fate!

On another note, I noticed that the mobile phone store at Burlington Square has the new Sony Ericsson W550 Walkman Phone on sale. Man, it’s much smaller than I had thought, about 1/5 to 1/4 smaller than the W800.

W550

But knowing the prices that this store sells import phones at, I didn’t even bother asking.

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Gunparade Orchestra Episode 01

Posted on November 18, 2005 by DarkMirage

I just finished translating episode two for Conclave and episode one is rumoured to be being encoded right now. Sorry for taking forever… Since it’s going to be released soon (really), I’ve decided to blog about the first episode (a few weeks late).

Title screen

But anyway, Gunparade Orchestra is based on the PS2 game by the same title and is a sequel of Gunparade March. It’s a sequel in the sense that they are (supposedly) set in the same universe, but there is no real continuity from the first series. In fact, the GPO has quite a different feel in terms of character and mecha designs that give it a lighter atmosphere, but judging by the first two episodes it could very well get more serious later on.

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World Cyber Games 2005

Posted on November 17, 2005 by DarkMirage

WCG 2005

I took a break from translating Gunparade Orchestra to check out the fifth World Cyber Games currently being held at Suntec City level 6 in Singapore. I was there from around 4pm till 7pm and caught two highlight CS:Source games.

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Recommendations

Posted on November 16, 2005 by DarkMirage

I have created a recommedations section at the right. It displays selected CDs and books I like using the Amazon.co.jp database. (They do ship overseas for most printed materials and music CDs, so it’s a pretty good site to get stuff from) It took me damn long to get the script working right.

Stop reading here if you are not interested in technical fluff.

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Singaporean Netflix

Posted on November 16, 2005 by DarkMirage

Oh man, I got very little sleep last night at a class gathering. We rented a chalet at Aloha and a few of us played Mahjong from before dinnertime to 3am. Feeling quite dead now.

Anyway, Video Ezy has set up an online DVD retail service in Singapore. (About time…) Basically, just like Netflix, you sign up for an account with a flat monthly fee. Then you get to have any DVD in their catalogue mailed to you in a return-paid envelope. You can only have a certain number of DVDs on-hand at any time and each time you mail back one DVD, the next DVD on your list is delivered to your mailbox.

I signed up for one month to test the service. The movie library seems quite acceptable, although it lacks a lot of Japanese movie. The anime stuff also seems quite haphazardly chosen, but all the big-title movies are there (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed and a lot of Ghibli stuff). However, it does have all but one of the twenty or so IMDb Top 250 titles I tried searching for. The one that it didn’t have was Pulp Fiction.

Since I watch most DVDs only once anyway, this could save me a lot of money and keep me occupied during the school holidays. The downside is that I don’t end up with a nice row of DVD casings to display on my bookshelf at the end of the day… XD

The website is somewhat buggy though, especially on Firefox but also on IE for certain things. Hopefully they do something about those bugs after receiving my complaint suggestion e-mail.

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Fansubbing Slave

Posted on November 15, 2005 by DarkMirage

This guy is in charge of pestering people for the Gunparade Orchestra project over at Conclave. I am (supposedly) the main translator. Apparently episode one will be released soon (finally), so they are bugging me for more translation now…

[00:25] <gara> this is level1 stalking. just idletime-monitoring.
[00:25] <gara> level2 would be connecting to random other networks to see where you are hiding.
[00:25] <gara> level3 involves figuring out people you know in real life and have them bug you. ;)
[00:26] <gara> aeh. did i say stalking? typo. was supposed to be “proactive project status update distribution”.
[00:34] <ThePaper> ok… im going to blog what you just said now D:
[00:35] <gara> there has been only one case of level3 stalking in my personal history of fansubbing, and while interactii wasnt exactly happy about it, he DID time the damn eppisode very quickly after that. ;)
[00:35] <ThePaper> T_T

Alright. That’s it. No more blogging. Time to sleep…

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A Guide to Learning Japanese

Posted on November 14, 2005 by DarkMirage

So, I finally got my lazy ass down to the post office and mailed that letter to IDS! that had been lying around my room collecting dust for months. It is my first letter written completely in Japanese (excluding e-mails). On the way home, I started thinking about when I first learnt to write “あいうえお” nearly three years ago. I thought that it would make an interesting blog entry if I do a recap of my still on-going effort to learn Japanese and make it into a pseudo-guide for those of you who are thinking of taking up Japanese as a foreign language.

And no, this is not an attempt to copy a certain popular guide to the Japanese language. ;)

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Posted in Japanese | Tagged | 29 Comments