Kireatic

Or is it Miku Append. I really hope not.

As anyone who knows me will be aware, I have a certain fondness for Miku Hatsune, the virtual singer. For those that don’t know, Miku is a synthesized singer made using the Vocaloid software. She looks like this:

And she sounds like a person singing through a robotic filter. It’s a very unique voice, and some of the songs (and videos) are lovely. I’ve posted one on here before.

Recently, the company who makes the Vocaloid software updated Miku’s vocal libraries, in a release called Miku Append. Miku now looks like this:And she sounds…well, getting close to human. Not quite, but it’s close.

The problem is, she doesn’t sound like herself any more. I’m yet to listen to the full range of Append songs, as people are still only slowly making new ones (thus why this post is a few months after they updated her libraries, I can’t talk about things I haven’t seen or heard), but what I have heard is…while they are good songs, they aren’t all recognizable as Miku singing anymore. And that’s actually really sad.

I hope people continue to make songs with her original library, or one of the Append libraries can be used to sound closer to her original voice.

That and I pray that’s not actually her new look. Seriously. Let it just be a one off for this expansion. Let the internet and the company forget about it. Miku, you look trashy. Put your skirt back on, and cover up your navel. You are in public.

And please still be Miku Hatsune. Miku Append may as well actually be a different singer entirely.

/end

Recently, Valve killed TF2. They might not have noticed yet, but the most recent update of Team Fortress 2 sealed it’s fate for several communities and clans which I know – including a large portion of the community of which I am a part. They did it quite simply – they took something generally hated, the random drop system, and added some more weapons only obtainable via that system, as well as more completely pointless hats.

For me at least, this was the signal Valve had lost it, and I shut off TF2 until the Engineer update (where I hope for sweet heaven that they fix the drop system). As I do so enjoy my multiplayer games, I instantly latched onto Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

On the whole, BC2 is a solid multiplayer game, provided you have a squad full of team members. It is a good game, of this there is no doubt, barring the few niggling balance issues that DICE have promised to fix (the M60 soon, apparently). However, it has a very high skill ceiling, unlike TF2.

Let me explain. Team Fortress 2 clearly has excellent skill ceilings in the form of airshots, movement prediction, sticky carpets, and so on and so forth. However, most of these skills are tactical and not physical. Once you can aim, you can, in theory, learn the other skills, the most important of which is being able to work in a team. Because these skills are tactical, the physical skill ceilings for TF2 are actually very low. Take the Pyro. It might be my favourite class, but I’ll be the first to admit, it comes down to flaming everything that you can, and shotgunning or flaring the things you can’t flame. The reflects are one of the rare ‘skills’ in TF2, akin to aiming, but the Pyro can be played by anyone, and you’ll eventually kill anyone without too much difficulty. This is the same with all the TF2 classes – they are all very easy to pick up.

Bad Company 2 is different. Because of the lack of hit points, and the high weapon variations and damage outputs, physical skill in the form of aiming, jumping and movement in-game becomes an extreme indicator of how quickly you are going to die. This hasn’t been much of a problem up to now, as the game has been new; so players have been adapting. Now all the weapons are unlocked however, and people are settling into certain roles, players are beginning to pull rapidly away from public server skill levels.

This is great for competitive play. But it will make the game extremely newbie unfriendly. Counterstrike, anyone? And it’s already begun – I personally can’t aim for shit, when compared to the gamers I typically end up playing with. Yes, I’ll outshoot the majority of gamers, but this is just because I’m at the very bottom of the top. I’m good at games in comparison only to those who aren’t good. I’m terrible at games compared to almost anyone on my Steam Friends list.

Because of my personal lack of ability, BC2 is already dying for me – it can’t hold onto me when I die every 30 seconds. And it’ll be interesting to see if it manages to keep drawing new players to it when they join a server full of rank 40 players only to get fragged almost instantly.

In the end, it’s inevitable; TF2 held people by adding new content, and now it’s gone too far for the original playerset. Bad Company 2 will hold the hardcore players with its range of tactics and it’s high skill ceiling, but without fresh blood, all games die. But I can’t predict either of the games lifetimes, I can only say that every game dies for someone eventually. It’s just a matter of holding the majority.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of playing in the Star Trek Online open beta, thanks to a pre-order I’ve got on the game. I wasn’t aware before the pre-order if the game was subscription or not (it is), something most MMO’s are. I however find myself wondering if it has the right to ask for a subscription as the gameplay stands at the moment.

Me in Star Trek Online. Feeling a little lonely in my instanced mission.

My main MMO is is EVE Online, a space sandbox more commonly referred to by its players as ‘Spreadsheets in Space’. EVE is what I imagine in an MMO, a large, persistent universe which is truly massive, with all its players operating in one version of reality, where your actions are permanent, and there is a loss to your actions. In essence, a massively multi-player game in which what you do actually affects the game. This is only possible with persistence.

However, most MMO’s, most notably World of Warcraft, instance most regions of the game. An instance is a sealed bubble of the game which a small number of players go to do a mission or dungeon, and the what you do in the instance is kept inside that little sealed bubble – a new group of players won’t see anything you’ve done, and they’ll have exactly the same experience of the game whether you were there or not. Now, this is understandable for games like WoW, as they wouldn’t function very well without it.

With Star Trek Online, however, I find myself automatically drawing comparisons to EVE, and finding STO failing. STO isn’t an MMO – there’s nothing massive about it. You can only be interacting with around 50 players at once with the current instance system, and that is an upper limit. That’s not massive, I know two or three FPS games that have larger player counts in a round than that. I can understand that there are lag issues, god knows STO is laggy enough at the moment during beta, but EVE proves that this doesn’t need to be an issue, it just needs planning.

I say avoid instances where you can, MMO designers. Otherwise you’ll be less of an MMO and more of a single-player game with optional co-op mode.