I am currently in London, landed at Heathrow yesterday. Haven’t had much time to do stuff yet, I was too tired yesterday. But today we got around to some sightseeing.

Woke up around 8:30 am and went down to breakfast. I love hotel breakfasts, even tho the bacon was kind of crappy here Afterwards we headed towards Waterloo station, to visit the London Aquarium and The London Eye.

Unfortunately The London Eye was closed due to the weather We might be back later but  chances are it will stay closed for a while. We went and visited the nearby London Sea Life Aquarium as planned though. Tried taking pictures but with no flash and a compact camera it’s hard. Got a few decent ones though. Such as these “Up-side down Jellyfish”. I have no idea.

When we left I happened upon Namco Station, and had a quick stroll inside. Nothing out of the ordinary, some rail shooters and whatnot. Except this one.

Why does this even exist :S Really crappy Rail Shooter. The Silent Hill franchise sure as hell isn’t what it used to be.

Afterwards we went looking around in shops on Oxford Street. Nothing particularly interesting. Later in the evening we went back to the hotel and I left alone to visit Trocadero Funland on Picadilly Circus. After a short ride on the tube I arrived, but spent probably 10 minutes trying to find the place Finally found it and checked the whole place out for interesting games. There was a fighting game corner where people played mostly Tekken 6, but there were a few Street Fighter 3 and 4 cabinets. Didn’t stay long though, because I wanted to check out the music games. Lots of DDR/Pump it Up machines. But what I wanted to play was this:

They were out of Platinum Crew cards, so I had to play without one, but Technika was very entertaining. Loved it. A really great feature which isn’t really visible in my blurry picture is the headphone jack and the volume control for that jack under the touchscreen. Lovely to be able to shut out the annoying 14-year olds playing Pump it Up by your sides. Also found this lonely poor old thing in a corner:

Beatmania 3rd Mix

Wasn’t that fun to play though, and kind of hard

Well that concludes my day, I might drop another one or two posts like this if I find the time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I read a quick description about the series and it seemed to be a very Evangelion-esque show, and I like Evangelion. So I decided to download the first episode and watch it, only to find out that the director for the anime apparently disliked the original manga and made some heavy changes. Which lead me to start reading the manga instead.

I started reading Bokurano Wednesday night, expecting a evangelion clone. I finished it about 24 hours later, and what I got was very different from my expectations.

Maybe I should explain what Bokurano is about before I continue. You’ve no doubt noticed the huge robot in the opening video, and might be thinking that it’s probably just another mecha show. Wrong.

Bokurano begins when 15 kids at a summer camp find and explore a cave by the sea. Inside they find computers and other equipment, which make it seem like someone is living here. At this moment a man enters the cave and reveals himself to be the one living there. He introduces himself as Kokopelli, and he has been developing a game. A game where you pilot a large robot against 15 other robots, and he wants the kids to play-test his game. The kids, thinking it sounds like a fun idea, enters a contract with Kokopelli by placing their hand on a weird metal object. Everyone but the youngest girl agree to the contract, and just as the last one agreed everyone wakes up on the shore, with Kokopelli and his contract seemingly being a dream. But that night two 500m tall robots materialize out of thin air, and a levitating creature calling himself Dung Beetle appears to the kids and teleports them inside the cockpit of one of the robots. There they find Kokopelli who shows them how to pilot the robot and defeat the other robots, by destroying a weak point which is a spherical object hidden somewhere on their body. Just as he defeats the enemy robot the kids are teleported away again, and Kokopelli can be heard whispering “I’m sor…”.

It is now up to the kids to pilot the robot, taking turns in doing so. But there are rules. The most devastating one being that the robot, which the kids dub “Zearth”, uses the pilots life force to move. Meaning the pilot will die after he defeats the enemy robot. And they can’t choose not to fight, or earth will be destroyed.

From here on Bokurano follows one pilot at a time, from the end of the last fight where the next pilot is announced, to the current pilot defeating his enemy. During this time the pilot is certain that he/she is going to die, and have to ask themselves, how should I spend the final time of my life? The pilots have no way of knowing when the next enemy will appear, which makes it even harder on them.

Bokurano is probably one if not the most beautiful and intense manga I’ve read, but don’t misunderstand my intentions with this article. I’m not saying that you should read Bokurano, I just want you to know that it exists.

The Pirate Party was originally founded to raise opinion on the questions of intellectual property and copyright laws, but has since expanded its program to contain issues of surveillance and personal integrity. But apart from these select topics, the Pirate Party doesn’t actually have any opinions. When it comes to other issues like the wellfare system, immigration, taxes and so on, the pirate party states that they will give away their votes to whoever supports them in the few issues they care about^[2]. This means other parties can effectively “piggyback” on the Pirate Party for votes in other questions, which could be more important to society than measly copyright laws.

That’s one of the reasons, and probably the main one for me. But there are more reasons why I won’t vote Pirate Party for the EU Parlamentary Elections.

One of them is their view on copyright. The Pirate Party wants commercial copyright laws to only cover five years.^[3] While I can agree that the current model is slightly absurd, 5 years is even more so. Why should someones right to his creation be forcefully taken from him only five years after it was made? The Pirate Party claims most commercial works only generate profit during the first five years. But why should that matter? And by taking away copyright after 5 years you completely nullify the potential of creating any profit later on, even if the original creator would want to. Why should the Pirate Party have the right to decide this instead of the original creator?

The Pirate Party also want’s to ban Digital Rights Management^[4]. This comes from their view that they have a right to any cultural work, and DRM effectively inhibits that right. While most DRM technologies today are inneficient and easily worked around, there is no reason that the Pirate Party should have a right to decide how the creator wants to distribute his work. If he wants to inhibit the possibility of his buyers to copy the work it is within his rights to do so.

I’m going to go and vote now, and I’m going to vote for a proper political party which voted against FRA and IPRED, and are against the current direction of copyright laws aswell. The difference being this is actually a proper political party, with real politics.

1. http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_%C3%B6ver_politiska_partier_i_Sverige_efter_antal_medlemmar (Swedish)
2. http://www.piratpartiet.se/vagmastarstallning (Swedish)
3. http://www.piratpartiet.se/politik/5_ars_kommersiell_ensamratt (Swedish)
4. http://www.piratpartiet.se/politik/forbud_mot_drm (Swedish)

Well, here is the plan so far;

The Aesthetical

At the beginning I was thinking of doing the case using some fancy type of wood (Cherry tree or Mahogny) for my box, but to save money simple wood will be used. Instead we will focus on the paint job.

We did some quick mockups in Google Sketchup to get a feel for what it would look like (So we know what colors buttons/joystick to order).

Mine first:

My Mockup

And Per’s:

Per's Mockup

The artwork we’re using are of characters from SNK’s Samurai Shodown fighting series, Nakoruru and Rimururu. Our respective characters of choice when we battle out our indifferences in said quality beat em’ up. They are also sisters, maybe we should feel bad for constantly having them fight eachother?

We’re planning on some high-gloss laquer for the finish. Will probably be a lot of work but for a mirror finish it’s totally worth it.

The Technical

We will be using Sanwa buttons (For that generic arcade feel), the actual buttons are Sanwa OBSN-30, a screw in variant. This gives us a few more mm to work with when it comes to the mounting.

A red Sanwa OBSN-30

For the joystick we will be using Seimitsus popular LS-32 variant, a cheap but very good and functional high-quality joystick.

Seimitsu LS-32

These will be mounted and quick-connects will be used so we don’t have to solder on the actual parts. Then they’ll be connected to a terminal block, so there will be no actual soldering involved in changing a button or changing the PCB.

From here we’re thinking of connecting both a wired Xbox 360 controller PCB and a PS1 Dual Shock controller PCB to the buttons at the same time, to maximize compatibility. The 360 controllers are already ordered, and PS1 controllers are dirt cheap these days so we’ll most likely be looking at this setup.

What’s left to do now is pretty much order the arcade parts, get some good chunks of wood, grab those power tools and start going crazy. I’ll keep you updated on any lost limbs.

From left to right: Lilly, Hanako, Rin, Shizune, Emi

I don’t think I’ve ever played through a Visual Novel before, I always shunned them away because of their nature, often targeted towards the otaku demographic (This is only my personal opinion though, I’m sure there are lots of great VN’s out there). So VN’s never really appealed to me, but nevertheless I come across them once in a while.

Katawa Shoujo is a Visual Novel where you play as a young boy suffering from Cardiac Arrhytmia. Because of this condition he is transferred to a special school for children with disabilities.

It started out as a omake page (left) in a doujin by an artist known as Raita, with character concepts for a dating sim game. Then somebody got the genius idea of turning it into a real game. A bunch of people got together and now, 2 years after the original doujin was published, a demo has been released.

I wanted to play this game way back when I first saw the omake page, but I didn’t find out about the project of actually turning it into a game until today. I’m playing the demo as I am writing this, and about two hours in I’m completely lost in it.

Not having played any VN’s before I can’t really compare it to something, but considering it being a fanmade project I feel it’s really good. The backgrounds are mostly photographs with some filters to make them look a bit “cartoony”, but they don’t feel out of place. The characters are really well drawn and the dialogue doesn’t feel weird or cheesy.

The characters are pretty much the same as in the omake page, with some slight alterations in design and personality, like giving Rin pants instead of a skirt.

I haven’t gotten that far into the game but It’s still a really fun experience. I might try another VN after this if my opinion of Katawa Shoujo doesn’t change later on

For more information about the game visit the official site at http://katawa-shoujo.com/.