Life of Knowledge

Clock shows it is now 01:47 in the morning. Now Friday the 21st of November, 2008; here in this tiny place called McDonald’s Ampang Park there sits a young man in his 2 and a half months before his 20th birthday comes about typing this very post.

Finally! An OS Upgrade!

Thanks to this guy who’s my course member (and also a comrade), I decided to make my laptop as a “scapegoat” to testing a Windows XP 64-Bit Edition that he obtained recently.

What’s more, his newly obtained software coincided with my plans to use a 64-bit OS to make use of my 64-bit ready CPU (it’s an AMD Turion 64×2 TL-58 clocking at 1.9GHz base speed) and also my 4 gigs of RAM, so I prepared the necessary stuff yesterday in a whim (backups etc, it’s not that hard – that guy has an array of softwares that can replace my missing ones, and my files were mostly music files and stuff that I obtained via IDM plus… err, some secret stuff not so important that I had to say it out here.

The installation works, however there were quite a bit of issues that bothers me.

First of all is the unavailability of hardware drivers for the MCP (the Motherboard Chipset module) and the VGA (it’s the display, d’oh). Secondly, that Windows XP has an HD Audio hardware conflict which worsened things for me (there’s no sound playing at all from my laptop at that time), and after much struggling I decided to wait for today and in the process, since too many things will limit my capability of basic things… I went straight ahead for another upgrade to Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition, also from him. Things worked out well and I managed to make use of my wireless, and finished what was missing. With the chipset and VGA drivers obtained… everything is considered complete for me, and here I am; typing this very first blog post from this newly-upgraded laptop.

All in all, the day was all about “HAHAHAHA!! FINALLY I CAN FULLY UTILIZE MY 64-BIT CPU AND 4 GIGS WORTH OF RAM!!”

And blogging, as a certain someone once said, while waiting for a download to finish is a really good way to kill time… currently I’m getting my weekly supply of Toradora! and Index. Ami, as how I expected it to be, turned out to be way much better than how we know her at her first anime appearance. I’ll be dying to see RyuujiAmi in action…

All right, Shiro out.

Dengeki Gakuen RPG: Cross of Venus

And so I randomly lurked and posted around the Net and find this neat stuff for a… um, freak like me…

An interesting find.

There you go. Title is: Dengeki Gakuen RPG: Cross of Venus.

So, what is this shit?

Dengeki Gakuen RPG: Cross of Venus is, a game, obviously. And it’s for the Nintendo DS (WHY!!!!?? I WANT IT TO BE IN PSP! But it’s fine by me though). Now what is it all about? It tells of our hero (he’s unnamed, so if you guys get the game, PUT ANY NAME YOU WISH FOR HIM! By the way, he’s designed by Kuroboshi Kouhaku, Kino no Tabi’s illustrator) who, along with his childhood friend Kizuna Kasugai (illustrated by Noizi Itou. This Kizuna girl is a novel freak XD), attends a fictional high school called Dengeki Academy (school name is obviously because of the game title).

From left to right: Our unnamed Hero and Kizuna Kasugai.

One day he accidentally discovers rumors of a ghost which have been appearing late at night in the schools recently. Although he’s actually uninterested in so-called ghost stuff he actually uses the story as an excuse on a night where he attempted sneaking into the school. But somehow Kizuna discovers him (I think that’s what happened, I never had a chance to take a personal insight of how the storyline goes) and when she heard that our Hero here is going to look for the ghost, she with her craze for the supernatural intended to follow along with him. And so they went for a lookout for the said ghost…

They searched until they came to a bench in front of their campus’s store, and from there they got to the door of the store and opened it. In the darkness they saw a silhouette of someone moving inside there. After a hard time trying to pierce the darkness with a normal eyesight our Hero found out that the silhouette is eating something like a Meronpan and deducts that this is the ghost that people that the people have been talking about…

And the ghost is, when we speak of Meronpan it’s of course…

Hero: “ZOMGWTFLOLBBQ!?” Kizuna: “OMG IT’S SHANA~~!!!11one” *fangirl mode ON* Shana: “*munch munch munch* LOLWUT? *realizes who discovered her inside* O HAI.”

YES! IT’S SHANA.

And from Shana they discovered that there has been some shit going on that makes the novel worlds and the real world to become interconnected towards each other enabling people from each realm to cross over to another and so. Apart from that, they discovered that this is the works of an evil organization called Zetsumu whose aim is “to snatch away the smiles from every person”. So along with Shana and several other heroines from the other 7 novels involved (I am not sure but from what I hear it’s not going to be only 8 as how the main site indicated, but somehow dozens of them from the novels), our Hero and Kizuna began assisting them in their quest to combat Zetsumu’s evil aims.

So THIS is what you’ll be fighting for… I mean, not achieving what you see in this pic. THE GAME IS ABOUT PREVENTING THIS! Recognize the silhouettes? If you do then get ready to play Hero-kun.

That’s how the story goes.

Character page from the game’s official website. And who do we see here…? It’s Shana (Shakugan no Shana), Kino (Kino no Tabi), Kana Iriya (Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu), Index (To Aru Majutsu no Index), Dokuro-chan (Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan), Aisaka Taiga (Toradora!), Nogizaka Haruka (Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu), and Minakami Misao (Asura Cryin’).

At first I thought the game will be turn-based, but it’s not. You have some combos to perform with each character you use and every single one of them will have their specific weapons and/or abilities to fight against enemies (So you guys think Haruka can’t fight. Remember ‘o’ remember, that she can, just look at the earlier parts of Nogizaka Haruka series), and from what I see from sample screenshots our Hero can also jump into the fight, although I am not sure what he can do.

Screenshots? Ask and I will give. (Oh snap this is going to take me hell of a time doing this!!!)

I chatted with a particular friend about this and his comments were: “This game… urg. For the promos, looks like as if the original illustrations were copypasta’d into it, doesn’t show any interaction between the characters… and the in-game graphics looks like… I’m having some RPG Maker flashbacks here, no offense. I’m not a graphic whore and knowing the game’s platform is for an NDS I couldn’t expect much, but still… the graphics looks like the old SNES, they could’ve done better. And if only the illustrators for the series go into a collabro doing one single promo poster for the game maybe I’ll have a different impression on the game itself.”

“I actually hate water but I like swimming.”

I don’t have any positive or negative views on the game myself, as I set myself to being neutral until I manage to get my own hands on it and try out the game myself. Seeing that this is the first ever crossover I’ve ever heard – well, not the first time hearing “crossover” in general but if it’s these novels – THEN THAT’S MY FIRST TIME EVER. I wonder how each character will interact with each other and what will the storyline’s outcome be (MOST IMPORTANT!).

I do hope there’ll be a brand new promotional picture showing the characters interacting with each other, though. But, as far as I recall there’s one or two fanarts depicting the game itself…

Okay end of story. It took quite a long time for me to write this one whole article about a simple game…

Sources: Wikipedia, GameWatch Japan, Official Game Site

Links: Wikipedia Entry | GameWatch Japan | Official Game Site |

Trailer (I just got this so yeah sorry):

Every sources I use here is copyrighted to their respective orders. (I’m too tired to cite source names any more!!!)