Author: loserx

Skyrim: Dawnguard Trailer

The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim: Dawnguard - Official Trailer

Well, the official trailer is here and from what we can tell: expanded vampire gameplay, crossbows (first time in an Elder Scrolls game officially since Morrowind!) and DAT SKELETAL HORSE. There’s a whole bunch of stuff from the Skyrim Game Jam that is getting included in this DLC and TAKE MY DAMN MONEY ALREADY BETHESDA SOFTWORKS.

I’m such a sucker.

Oh, and for the Xbox fanbois, you can take your 30 days exclusivity. I’ll take the moddability and superior graphics on my PC any day.

State of the MAME

mame logo

MAME, for the uninitiated, is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, a project to preserve the inner workings of arcade machines of the past. A curious side-effect is that the games are (mostly) playable.

I’ve been a fan since the late 90s and have almost continuously kept my ROM collection up to date, recently with the help of Pleasuredome, but I’ve not actually been playing any games in a long while, neither have I been keeping up with new developments.

Recently though, I find myself tired of HD gaming (I’ll get back to you Skyrim, when the DLC is here) and found myself wanting to get some MAMEing done, so I went to grab my old go-to MAME variant MAME32 (been using the official builds in conjunction with clrmamepro) and… turns out it has been renamed MAMEUI, and that it has been EOLed.

It still works, but with the explosion of the number of games by MAME supported the ancient controls it uses just cannot cut it anymore. UI refresh is annoyingly slow.

Despite working with and liking the command line for most other things, I just don’t like using MAME from the command line. So, the search for a front end goes on.

IV/Play is a minimalist front end commissioned by John Hardy IV (long associated with MAME32/MAMEUI) and it is not quite what I’m looking for. A tad too minimalist, maybe.

Next I found QMC2, successor to the venerable QMamecat. QT4, so it’s cross-platform. It also supports MAME, MESS and UME*. Plus, it looks like the old MAME32 which I’m immediately comfortable with. Great.

I also found Emu Loader which looks fantastic, plus it supports multiple emulators (Demul, Daphne, ZiNc etc, apart from MAME). Together with its sister app EmuCon which handles console emulators, you’ll just need two front ends to rule them all.

I’m leaning a little towards QMC2 at the moment, since I really only dabble with other emulators, but both should be great choices.

* UME is an effort by David Haywood (maintainer of MAME from 2003 to 2005) to combine the code bases of MAME and MESS, without stripping any functionality out.

Rurouni Kenshin – Cinema-ban: Quick Impressions

Well, the first chapter of the “reboot” of Kenshin to coincide with the live action movie has been scanlated.

I have only one thing to say after reading it: what a clusterfuck.

In just 40 odd pages, characters introduced: Kenshin, Kaoru, Yahiko, Saito, Jin-e, Sanosuke, Kanryuu Takeda (Megumi’s drug boss) and some other miscellaneous guys I don’t remember the names of. What the hell? Never mind Kaoru’s predicament is now pretty damn retarded.

It could possibly be that Watsuki only gets a limited number of chapters to tell his tale, but in that case the series should have just focused on the parts that are relevant to the live action movie (i.e. the fights), rather than rebooting the story in such a sloppy fashion.

On the plus side, the art is more polished. Won’t be enough reason to stick around if the story does not improve rapidly though.

From ANN:

The May issue of Shueisha’s Jump Square magazine revealed on Wednesday that Nobuhiro Watsuki’s new Kenshin manga series, Rurouni Kenshin -Cinema-ban- (Rurouni Kenshin: Cinema Version), will focus on battles fought with characters from the upcoming live-action film. The issue has a feature promoting the “reboot” of the Rurouni Kenshin series, although the magazine is not necessarily using the term “reboot” with the English denotation in mind. The new manga series will begin in the next issue of Jump Square on May 2.

Read it on Batoto

Trailer of the live action movie for anybody who’s not seen it:

『RUROUNI KENSHIN』 Trailer1 （English）

Must say, it looks bad. This is a pretty damn good argument for the existence of anime and animation in general. The Tsuiokuhen (追憶編, Trust and Betrayal) with its serious moods, somewhat realistic fights and not to mention that outstanding story will make for an awesome live action adaptation done properly, but there is just no way the “ORO?”s and ridiculous techniques (what the fuck was that running with the body at an acute angle to the ground?) will translate well.