Based on a friend's recommendation. Saw the Ghost Club in VRChat in a headset recently. It was extremely good. A lot better than I could have imagined. Was lucky enough to see a VJ in action in the 2nd set too, which was really nice.

Seeing what is basically a rave in VR was an interesting experience, especially since I've never been to a rave or something close to it IRL. Making the leap to see it directly in VR was a pretty far-out experience.

One of the things that the experience made me acutely aware of was that the distinction between a “gaming experience” and an “enjoyable experience” is actually quite blurry – drawing a line between them can feel somewhat artificial, in a way. In general, people play games for enjoyable experiences, and if something that's not technically a game can satisfy it, then it is just as good.

From the perspective of game design, I think this kind of non-game, unusual, and enjoyable experience can really take an aspiring designer out of the frame of “designing a game” to “designing an experience”, which opens up space for a lot more design possibilities. Journey and Flower are good examples of this type of design.

Even for it's own sake, Ghost Club was well worth waking up early in the morning for (the Club operates on Japanese time). It's a unique experience that can't really be replicated via a stream or a recording. I highly recommend everyone who has a headset and have an appetite for new experiences to try it out.

— Categorized under: #gaming, #gamedesign, #vr

Earlier today I found myself reminiscing about the Nintendo DS RPG series Etrian Odyssey.

I have fond memories of that series, especially the ability to draw your own maps in it. Having played quite a lot of games on the DS/3DS, Etrian Odyssey's map-drawing mechanic stands out as the most thought-out and polished dual-screen experience on those consoles. It really drives home the excitement of exploring an uncharted territory. The designers put a lot of care into making drawing maps intrinsically rewarding – there are few gaming experiences as unique and as satisfying as using your own map to navigate a terrifying dungeon.
Ironically, due to the game's strong integration with DS hardware, the series have trouble finding home in the Switch generation. There just doesn't seem to be a good way to draw maps on a Switch, and the franchise will likely fall by the wayside until the next hardware evolution, if there will be one.

Even emulators and tablet remasters, which have usually been the saving grace of older games, will have trouble replicating the dual-screen experience.

Seeing the publisher release what was essentially the swan song entry of the series two years ago was quite bittersweet. The DS and the 3DS are now considered outdated consoles, and given the uncertain future of the series, very few people will get a chance to experience it going forward. I do hope the series does find its way a sort of revival at some point, but even if not, it was at least nice to be along for the ride during its heydays.

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Categorized under: #gaming

Had an unusual experience today where working on art recharged me more than playing games.

Specifically, I started playing a game to recharge before starting art, but had some frustrations that left me more drained.

Afterwards, I thought “what if I started drawing now, while I was drained?” and ended up having so much fun with it that I don't feel drained at all now.

It's a reversal of the usual trend, and something I quite like. It's a good reminder to not come to early conclusions about what you might not like.

— Categorized under: #irl, #art, #gaming

“Stars Falling on Tenma's Mountain”, theme from the 5th boss of Touhou 18 – Unconnected Marketeers.

Just cleared Touhou 18, and read up on the majority of the plot.

I had a blast with the game – that was probably the most fun I've had out of any Touhou game, the plot and the music are slightly less strong compared to 15-17, but strangely I'm finding myself caring less and less about these comparisons as new games come out.

I remember excited waiting for Touhou 10 to come out back in 2007, and over time I've become more and more amazed by ZUN (the creator)'s persistence in creating one game after another. It doesn't really matter much that one game had better music while another one had better story and gameplay – the very fact that a solo developer can continue a single series for so long is amazing to witness. I can't think of anything quite like it, not even an analogy. It just feels like watching some sort of miracle unfold in real time. This is something that I especially treasure since I don't expect ZUN's new Touhou games to be around in 20 years, at least not with the current frequency.

As a creator, it's really easy to get hung up on creating perfect things and make nothing for years. There's something really convincing about Touhou that says very convincingly, over 26 years, 18 games, and hundreds of characters and tracks, that the act of putting things out there is beautiful in its own right.

As someone who creates things, there's nothing quite as inspiring as that.

(Edit: just saw the following on Touhou Wiki, which made the character design quite neat)

Chimata seems to be based on Ichigami (市神), a god of marketplaces in japanese folklore. Ichigami was worshipped as the god who protect the commercial activities and security of marketplaces. when the old school traditional marketplaces go into a decline in Modern Japan, folk religion of Ichigami also declined.

Chimata is a god of marketplaces, defined here as physical marketplaces (such as a town square). Rather than a god of capitalism or something like the stock market, she is more akin to a god of barter and trade, or marketplaces as they were before the invention and proliferation of capitalism.

Specifically, she is the god of “special event” marketplaces (as opposed to something like a regular farmer's market), which in Unconnected Marketeers is signified by the lunar rainbow. Her powers and goals are aligned towards trade occurring in those marketplaces, and when ownership of an item is transferred from one person to another in a regulated way.

She may be based on a long-forgotten medieval Japanese custom of holding markets when there's a rainbow. It was believed, that the boundary between the human world and the world of Gods is beneath rainbows, so holding a market during a rainbow would please the Gods, because they temporarily receive everything that is being sold there.

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Categorized under: #gaming, #touhou, #art

Despite being an anime fan, I have a really strong aversion to harem type animes selling cutesy appeal. Because of this, I sometimes get questions on why I like the Touhou game series. After all, if you only look at the characters, it looks just like all of those franchises trying to sell as many cute female characters as possible.

I've always struggled to give a good answer when I hear that question. Touhou has a very specific appeal to my that's very difficult to articulate on the spot. For my sanity though, I'll attempt to answer it here.

To start out with some background, it's important to know that Touhou is a video game series. The game series started in 1997 and has a total of 24 official game entries that builds on the same world. As the series grew popular, Touhou branched into official light novels, comics, and CDs. However, the amount of official work pales in comparison to fan works (5,000+ CDs and 30,000+ comics). Most people hear about Touhou through fanworks, which can make things confusing. The original game looks something like this:

The games take place is a fictional village named Gensokyo. The world “Touhou” literally translates to “Eastern”, and true to its name populated by characters inspired by Japanese religion, culture, and folklore.

“Touhou” is really an apt name for the series, as I blieve the primary strength of the franchise is that it recreates the appeal of traditional Japanese culture much more successfully than any other media franchise.

Creating new works from historical source material is the modus operanti of creators worldwide. Take the magician:

The magician architype has been successfully utilized in some of the biggest media franchises today. But the magicians in pop media today look nothing like the tartot card depictions from the 15th centry. The card's art held some appeal for the people 600 years ago, but needs to be reinvented to have the same level of appeal to the audience today:

In the very same way, Touhou digs into historical Japan to find source material to inspire its games. Unlike the wizard architype that has always enjoyed some level of popularity, Touhou looks at source material that have lost the majority of their relevance to people today, finds their unique appeal, and reinvent them in a way that preserves their innate appeal.

In such a way, Touhou 7 rediscovered the appeal of the Saigyō Hōshi, Records of the Ancient Matters, Records of the Great Peace, Motojirō Kajii, and Tales of Tono. Touhou 14 rediscovered the appeal of Rokurokubi, Tsukumogami, Amanojaku, Inchlings, the concept of peasant rebellions. The list continues on.

Japan has no shortage of shows that reinvigorates its ancient culture. The Twelve Kingdoms, Natsume's Book of Friends, Mushishi, and The Eccentric Family are all great examples. But to my knowledge, few works have as much willingness to find beauty in old and dusty history as Touhou does, and no work compares with Touhou in its scale and accessibility of discovery.

That means that every time I visit a new Touhou game, I can expect to find something beautiful about a fascinating culture that most likely no other media has shown me before. That's among the best thing you can ask for from any piece of media.

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Categorized under: #gaming, #touhou, #art

The 18 Touhou game was announced! Link.

Even though I don't finish the new Touhou games at highest difficulties nowadays, it still makes me incredibly happy that Touhou is coming out with new games even after all these years. I think the first Touhou game announcement that I was happily spreading the word about was about 8 games ago. That was back in 2007!

Anyways, it looks like this game has a purchasing system in play? Pretty unusual for a top-down shooter game, so I look forward to seeing how it will work out.

Most importantly, Touhou games have been improving even after all these years, I'm super hyped for the new soundtrack!

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Categorized under: #gaming

Recently did a clear of an arcade game called Ketsui that I'm pretty happy about!

Ketsui is a top-down scrolling shooter where you play as a pair of pilots in an undercover U.N. mission to stop a global arms dealer called EVAC[1] Industries. The covert nature of the mission meant that, regardless of success or failure, the pilots must not return alive; so the premise is a bit tragic from the start.

Since it's release back in 2003, Ketsui has always had a niche following among bullet-hell gamers on account of its old-school roots combined with great pacing. It also has a notorious hidden boss that took arcade-goers years of practice to clear.

A few years ago, before emulations were a thing, I actually visited on a few remaining arcade venues that still has this game just to try it in person 😊

Structurally, the game is divided into 5 levels. The difficulty curve is quite interesting – stage 5 is extremely long and is harder than all the other levels combined. The music is peaceful here, which is striking compared against the chaos on the screen.

For the run itself, I messed up badly in stage 3 (died somewhere easy and missed a 1-up), but did really well from stage 4 onwards, and managed to beat it with one last ship in stock.

After beating stage 5, I got into the second loop, at the end of which you face the hidden boss. I don't have plans to clear this loop yet, so I ended up doing some commemorative save-states and accidentally scored a pretty humorous death.

I edited out two pauses to answer some IMs during the session, was planning to edit out the wallpaper too, but I ended up liking it as framing and kept it in.

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[1]: a tongue-in-cheek reference to the game's developer, CAVE.

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Categorized under: #gaming

(Editor's note: this is a migration of a post from late March of this year.)

Did a no death clear of Samidare's Extra Stage!

Samidare (Lit. Early Sumer Rain) is an indie top-down shooter game released in 2002 for Windows.

Around 2002, a student club in Tokyo created a variety of top-down shooter series. One was the Touhou (“Oriental”) Project, one was the Seihou (“Occidental”) Project, and the last one was Project Blank. Each project had multiple sequels, with Seihou taking inspiration from Touhou, and Project Blank taking inspiration from both.

Samidare is the first Project Blank game. It has a shield system that allows the player to absorb projectiles to boost firepower. The shield meter regenerates slowly, and most of the gameplay is centered around managing limited shield uses.

I like Samidare a lot – you can tell it's a labor of love. The gameplay and the soundtrack are both excellent, the crossovers with Touhou and Seihou are really well done, and the unlockable Extra stage showed the kind of attacks possible only with the shield system.

Most importantly, the game made me feel like that the student club really had a good time back then.

Anyways, I dug up this old game recently, and thought that I should give it a proper sendoff. The last time I played it was 13(!) years ago, and amazingly I still remembered the extra stage pretty well. Back then I was pretty happy just to be able to beat it, but the no-death challenge felt manageable this time around.

Note: as with most modern shooters, the player's hitbox is really small. In Samidare it's the red square on the player ship, and the shield meter is on the bottom left corner.

Enjoy!

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Categorized under: #gaming

Recently I have been feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for things that I have made in the past. Yesterday I went though my old hard drives and dug out some compositions I made with a complementary copy of Sonar LE ~10 years ago. As expected, they were not great. However, I found myself pleasantly surprised by some of the ideas I had back then. I had thought that I remembered all my old compositions well and could recreate them from memory, but that turned out to not be true, and I was glad that I preserved the files for these songs.

Then today I suddenly remembered a game that I had made during high school. It was called “Tower of Heaven” (not to be confused with the released game Tower of Heaven). It was a slower-paced platformer in the vein of old Castlevania games, and the maps were strictly linear. The premise was that every child, as a rite of passage, needs to ascend the Tower of Heaven alone and discover what lies at the top. It took a month to make and had something like 12 levels, several bosses, an intro montage, and a proper ending. It was quite self-contained.

All in all, it was a game I was proud of. However, I never did show the game to acquaintances. The reason was simple and interesting in retrospect: I took materials from other games. I took characters from Luna: The Last Hope, enemies from Mother 3 and Zelda Minish Cap, and music from Etrian Odyssey 2. Despite the genre differences for these games, the end result felt cohesive. However, in the Western tradition that's not something one would properly release even on their own sites. So besides maybe the 4 or 5 people who played it back then, the game sat in my harddrive and was gradually forgotten.

Remembering that game this morning, I came to realize a lot of things.

First, I think that mainstream creators' perception (note: not law) of copyright are probably unnecessarily restrictive in terms of material reuse. I think that using existing art assets from other copyrighted works to create new works is in itself undervalued as an artistic challenge. I think that Jazz, Zines, and Doujin Games follow a tradition of material reuse that is much more fluid and as a result generate many more stellar works. Furthermore, I think the strict perception of copyright reduces educational opportunities for up-and-coming creators by creating a higher barrier to entry.

Secondly, I found myself surprised by the satisfaction that came from making something under the mindset “let me do the best thing I can from what I have” rather than “let me improve so that I can make the things I imagined.” There is a lack of anxiety in the former mindset that encourages play and exploration, and while the latter mindset is important for making quick improvements, I think now I wouldn't mind letting go of that thought every now and then.

Finally, thinking about the game, I understand better now the Japanese Doujin mindset of “making something just for fun”. I remember debating with a friend about whether art has value if it was never seen by others, and now that I thought about Tower of Heaven, my response shall be “100%, no doubt”. Even though I barely showed the game to anyone, it was something that I had fun designing and executing on, and captured my perceptions at a certain stage in life. For some reason, just that was enough to make me happy whenever I think about it.

I think that at some point in the near future, I will be making my way to the top of Tower of Heaven again.

— Categorized under: #gaming, #at