Miscellaneous

Final Fantasy XII Demo

I just played the FFXII demo, and wow, it was pretty good. I hesitate to say really good because I’m still not a huge fan of the FFXI style of play on which this battle system is based. You get to run around in a free environment, no random encounters where all the enemies are on the map. Engaging them is actively done, there’s no separate combat screen to go to. The controls are intuitive, the camera is adjustable however you like, and gameplay is fairly fast paced and lots of fun. The demo is separated into two missions, both where you had to kill a certain/number of monsters and then a boss monster. Vaan/Penelo/Basch weren’t too impressive, but their surroundings, a tropical beach, were pretty. Conversely, the Ashe/Balthier/Fran team kicked several levels of ass, but ran through a standard dungeon setting. I was quite happy with Ashe being a melee character (she carries a large two handed sword!), but I guess that stems from the fact that I thought Ashe was going to be another white mage type caster. The demo didn’t take too long to beat (less than an hour), but it left a very positive lasting impression. It also carries with it the full trailer, and an additional trailer (that I haven’t seen before) after you’ve beaten both missions. Honestly, I hadn’t been looking forward to this game (just because I hadn’t been hyping myself), but this demo has made its case for me to go buy the game when it comes out next year. I don’t have any screenshots to provide you guys, so you’ll have to check out GameSpot’s screen archive.

Miscellaneous

RSS Feed Change

Kaspar pointed out to me that the RSS feed was loading way too slow for certain clients/browsers because they needed to get all of the images. I’ve changed the settings so that the feed now shows only the excerpt (basically the same mini-entry you see on the front page). There should still be a “Read On” and “Comments” link for you to click and see the full entry on the page itself. Leave a comment if you have any complaints/suggestions/whatever. 🙂

Miscellaneous

Minor Site Update

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, this site has been getting more and more popular over the past few months. The downside of that is high bandwidth consumption. I realized earlier that a lot of people were directly linking images, and so to halt that, I’ve disabled hotlinking. The basic policy for using images from this site is to ask first, and my reply will usually be something along the lines of “It’s fine for you to use the images if you save them on your own webspace and leave a link back here.” There’s really no reason for me to say no, so as long as you ask and use your own hosting, there shouldn’t be a problem. 🙂

Miscellaneous

One Million Milestone!

StatCounter informs me that Random Curiosity has crossed over the one million page loads mark! This comes on the heels of two other major milestones: 350,000 unique visitors and 2000 comments. All three are since this site moved onto AnimeBlogger in July. I’d like to once again thank Maestro, Matthew, moyism, Mentar, Ren, everyone who has supported the site, and especially you, the reader. Special thanks also goes out to the anonymous AnimeBlogger hosting bill donor who left a Kawaii Radio email address. Here’s to another million hits – Cheers!

Miscellaneous

Random Curiosity v3.0!!

Welcome to Random Curiosity v3.0!!
I got tired of looking at the Almost Spring theme (which is quite popular these days), so earlier this week I decided to change the theme. What you currently see is a modified version of the “Bored!” theme by gnu-. The image on top is of Yotsuba-chan of Kiyohiko Azuma’s work Yotsubato!
If you see any problems, leave a comment here with your browser and resolution and I’ll see if I can’t fix it.

Thanks go out to moyism for providing me with tons of images to work with, Ren for giving me banner suggestions, Maestro for the gracious hosting, Matthew for being the inspiration for me to get started blogging, and everyone in the community for supporting and visiting this site! Thank you!!

Miscellaneous / Random Musings / Zettai Shounen

Random Musings: Site and Series Updates

  • moyism informed me of WordPress plugin that allows you to have paged comments. I installed it and fiddled around with it until it looked similar to the old style. So comments are now shown 20 to a page. I actually wouldn’t have considered using this plugin if last week’s GSD final episode post hadn’t gone over 100 comments. Anyway, if you experience any types of problems, leave a comment or send me an email.
  • Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t blog Zettai Shounen this week. I more or less have lost interest in this series, so I’m putting blogging of it on hold until either the story really picks up or the series ends, whichever comes first. I will still be watching this series, just not writing about it. Matthew does a thorough job on his posts, so refer there if you want to stay updated. For now, I’m biding my time on Fridays until the Hana Yori Dango drama starts in two weeks.
  • I have also axed Ginban Kaleidoscope as a potential series. I found nothing particularly wrong with the first episode, but it just felt really average all around. I was expecting something like Hikaru no Go, however the series comes off feeling more like Suzuka to me (don’t ask why, it just does). The only thing really amusing was the “Kiss my ass” bit, but the rest of the english just got on my nerves. moyism had similar feelings about it.
  • A bit of personal news: I was involved in a car accident yesterday, and my car is now more or less totaled. Fortunately, no one was hurt. But for the time being, I’m having to rely on my friends and others for transportation. This means that I have a lot less control over my schedule, meaning that certain posts over the next month or so may be written later than normal.