The iPhone

I finally picked up an iPhone 5s this week along with a new phone provider. It's amazing how simple to use this device is, heck even my mom is having fun learning the ins and outs of it, which shows something about the Android. The biggest differences I can tell is that the Android, while having extremely good flexibility and power for a low cost, can be a little overwhelming to people who want simple first-party integration and functionality, and quite often 3rd party software developers, the cell phone providers, the operating system developers, and the hardware manufacturers butt heads (similar to a PC) creating so much unnecessary bloatware that it's mind-boggling for a new user to understand the basics of the device.

A good example is the Samsung Galaxy S-series of phones. Let's say you want to check your text-messages. You can use the default Samsung app, Google Voice, Google Hangouts, or Chat-On. If you want to purchase software, you can use the Amazon App-Store, the Samsung Marketplace, or Google Play. Internet browsing you have the option of the default Samsung browser, Chrome, or Firefox. If you want to check your e-mail you have Samsung's application or Google's alternative. Even looking at images there's at least 4 different gallery apps, and taking photos is a pain on it's own when you have Dropbox, Google +, Facebook, and Google Drive all asking to upload your images.

To make matters worse, Samsung and Sprint not only wants to bundle their own software, but they make it unremovable unless you decide to root your phone. Why do I need a Sprint Zone app if I never use it? Why do I need two e-mail apps, two different browsers, three text messaging apps, etc? On top of that, OS upgrades are decided by both Samsung and Sprint. You'll have a piece of hardware that's capable of running the latest platform, but you're waiting for Samsung to give the go-ahead 4-5 months down the line so you don't have the scenarios such as the S3 competing against the S4 with the same up-to-date operating system...and then when they finally give the go-ahead you wait another month for Sprint to roll out their updates (unless you reset your phone profile to make it look like a "Brand new phone").

So when I am trying to teach my mom how to use her Android device and she asks me questions like "How do I send pictures to my computer?" And I have to show her how to install Samsung Kies, plug the phone in directly and browse the File Directory to the images folder on her External SD Card, or how to transfer images via Blutooth or WiFi Direct, then you've failed at making a device understandable and accessable.

I believe Google's line of Nexus products are a huge step in the right direction. Having the OS designers work with a well-known hardware developer (Asus), and giving you the option of ordering directly from them to avoid the bundled proprietary software from cell-phone providers is huge...but brand recognition is still a ways to go. People know what Android is, people know what Samsung Galaxy S is, people know what the Nexus 7 is...but what about the Nexus 5? I think Google should really try to improve it's marketing and advertising campaigns, but it's hard when you have so many devices already running on your own platform, then you have people asking "Why do I want to spend $300 on a new phone with KitKat 4.4 when I already have a Galaxy S3 with KitKat 4.4 installed in it? Just to run Angry Birds faster? So I can get rid of some of these excess Samsung apps?"

Then there is the iPhone. I've had previous experience with Apple products, most notably the iPod Touch line of products a few years ago. Eventually my 2nd gen device fell into the "No Longer Supported" graveyard and I just stopped using it completely in favor of Android products. Going back to the iPhone is like a breath of fresh air. As a gamer going to the App store and finding all these iOS gems I've been waiting to be ported for Android for months/years is reason enough to justify the switch. But the fact that Apple's proprietary software is good on its own without the unnecessary bloatware (or almost-mandatory installs of better software to replace the Samsung junk) of an Android device creates a great easy-to-use device.

Already I've noticed my battery life is almost triple what I had on my Android, my mother was actually able to figure out most of the features of her phone without constantly asking me for help, and my sister is sitting back playing LEGO Harry Potter for hours on end. The call quality is extremely superior as well, and I can't tell whether it's the 4G LTE (Which T-Mobile now provides, that Sprint spent years making excuses on) or the hardware itself, but the first time I picked up the phone and heard what sounded like my sister being right next to me was extremely surprising and unexpected.

Heck, even my car sees the iPhone and displays the information as such instead of me fiddling around with my Android file-folder structure whenever I start my car...that alone is good enough for me :).

Changing Tastes

It's strange to see how tastes in gaming and entertainment can change over a while. As a kid, I used to be hugely into JRPGs, Anime, Manga, J-Pop, etc. This was back around 99-2000 when Anime was just starting to kick off from being child-like cartoons (with Pokemon/Digimon primarily) to a respectable art form through avenues such as Toonami, Fox, etc. I grew up falling in love with Gundam Wing, Big O, Cowboy Bebop...heck I even caught the occasional episode of Sailor Moon.

Going into a Barnes and Noble in the 90's, you would find maybe one copy of Volume 2 on a Manga that was released 10 years prior...now the shelves have more Manga than Domestic Graphic Novels. Also video stores have changed, if you wanted to watch Evangelion Episodes 1-3, you had to pocket out $59.99 for the DVD...now that's the price for an entire series on Blu-Ray (Episodes 1-26). Also, back then if you wanted to watch anime on the computer, you had to go through various backdoors (this is the pre-torrent era) just to watch it. Now you have various legitimate online websites such as Hulu or Crunchroll that simulcast the same day the show airs.

Even gaming has changed, with Sony making their devices region-free, I'm able to play games months...even years before they come out to the States (if they even come out at all). This has definitely upped the pressure for me to learn a new language, much more so than it had back when I was in High School as a weird Otaku/Nerd dude.

So things have changed very fast, which probably explains why I lost interest for a while. There was admittedly some outside influence and negative comments regarding Japanese entertainment, so I stopped caring for a while, binned my figures, DVDs, etc. The anime genre at the same time started taking a weird change and I just couldn't care that much about Naruto or Bleach; mangas were too many to keep up with; I started cringing at the JRPGs, with weird non-sensical stories and horrible dubbing. I ended up going along in favor of the mass favor of the XBox 360 with its US-based games, and didn't even bother picking up a PS3 until only a couple of years ago just to have a separate console for my place in Everett while I was away from home. Little did I know back then that it would remain my console of choice...

Gamer's reaction to the consoles throughout the years:2006: Sony don't "get" gamers. XBox 360 FTW!
2013: Sony really understands gamers! BOO Microsoft!!!

Much has been written about the difference between Eastern and Western games. I think the PS3/360 split of last generation was a direct result of that (in fact, I would argue there's a third split with console and PC gamers, with the latter focused more on strategy and indie games...but that's a separate topic). You had one group of gamers who preferred more action-packed, pick-up and play multiplayer games (Madden, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Gears of War, etc...) and a set of gamers who preferred more cartoony elements, story-building, and simplified gameplay (Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Phoenix Wright, 999, etc...). Coincidentally, with drastically different sales figures between both East and West and growing differences between Japanese Developers and Western Developers brought about the split between the PS3 vs XBox 360. Where the Sony represented the older generation quirky Japanese titles that Western gamers were getting sick of, and Microsoft represented the next gen, graphics-focused action-packed and Indie games that Western developers were already extremely good at on the previous XBox and PC (which also started a new recent trend of focusing less on PC development and more on console development). Ironically this is exactly why Microsoft received so much initial backlash with the XBox One as they began to cater more towards the big Western publishers (EA, Ubisoft, etc...), implementing restrictive DRM schemes similar to the headaches PC gamers already endure, and Sony chose to stay with the less restrictive path of the previous generation.

Oh and Nintendo...well they did their own thing, ignored gamers altogether, sold an underwhelming console, still enact region-locking, poorly implemented multiplayer functionality and failed to grasp the attention of 3rd party developers for the Wii and now the WiiU, which is now biting them in the ass. But at least the 3DS is still getting great localized games, wish I could say the same for the Vita (at least Toukiden is coming out next month!)

Bravely Default comes out on the 3DS in a few weeks! Thank you Square Enix!

As for God Eater 2 for the VITA...still nothing from Namco-Bandai.

 As a gamer, I've played games from practically every genre. Despite the poor reviews from respectable Western outlets, I took Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk.2 for a try last year as the first JRPG that I've played in over four years. My first impressions were "Wow...this is bad!" I cringed at the English dub, couldn't quite understand the story, the references, or the humor. My first thought was "With games like the Last of Us or the Walking Dead collecting dust, why on earth was I playing something like this?" I would have shelved the game if I had not turned on the original Japanese dubbing, looked up some of the references, and continued on with the game.

Hyperdimension Neptunia

I had a similar story with Dynasty Warriors, an import gamer friend of mine highly recommended the series, but my first impression was the poor dubbing and not understanding what the motivations behind these weird Chinese soldiers. I would ask: "Why is Cao Cao so focused on ambition...", "Why is Liu Bei such a pansy...", but the gameplay was interesting enough, and when the Japanese audio DLC came out my impressions changed drastically. I could finally feel the emotion at some of the character's deaths, instead of listening to someone read a poorly translated script. I also really enjoyed the character design of most of the characters...instead of having over 60 identical Chinese warriors, I have a selection of male and female warriors with different manners of dress, expressions, etc. And reading the original story and seeing a face to these real-life warriors makes the game much more personal, and even more impressed knowing how accurate the game is to the real story (minus a few details added for effect).

Cai Wenji, historically kidnapped by a group of Nomads and rescued by Cao Cao. Proceeds to kill a bunch of generic warriors with her harp. That's historical accuracy right there!

This, coinciding with my Japanese studies, has overwhelmingly put the preference on leaving it on the original Japanese dubbing. Some things simply do not cross well, especially with bad dubbing. Now that I'm importing more games and learning more vocab, I'm opting to skip waiting for Western localization altogether. I just imported Sengoku Basara 4, for example since Capcom has no intentions of releasing another Sengoku Basara title here in the States due to poor sales of the last game.

Western Gamers simply don't like Samurai Games

My interest in anime is also starting to blossom again. I just recently finished the entire series of Steins;Gate and finished first season of Oreimo. I have Kill la Kill, Attack on Titan, amongst many other series on my queue. I also picked up a few Mangas on my tablet to read and enjoying them a lot, almost as much as I enjoy Western comics (because unlike most Western comics, there's a beginning, and an end to each series, and no need to jump into a specific story arc).

Check out Kill la Kill!

What I find most impressive of all, is that for the first time in years, I'm not bored. I used to spend a majority of my time on my laptop looking for Steam sales and trying to get into stuff like League of Legends, DotA, Team Fortress 2, and a bunch of indie games that earned much acclaim from reviewers. Yet after spending a few hours downloading, I'd sit there, play the game for an hour or so, get bored...and then the game would start collecting "virtual" dust. I was always baffled "This was rated Game of the Year by "Random" Gaming Magazine..., so I should enjoy this...but I'm not?"

I would enjoy this a lot more if it wasn't so depressing.

Perhaps the easiest explanation for this is that my tastes are changing, or rather they are returning back to my original tastes...what got me into Eastern gaming in the first place back when it was big in the PS1/PS2 era. That's not to say I dislike Western games though, I really enjoy GTA V, Bioshock Infinite, Assassin's Creed, and Saints Row IV for instance. I also still use my laptop to play FFXIV, World of Tanks/Warplanes, Farming/Rail Simulator, and Paradox's grand strategy games. But my tastes are much more different than what most other people enjoy...so perhaps that's why it's hard to explain sometimes that while I am a gamer, I am not...well...typical from most gamers?

Observations and tips for learning Japanese.

Weekend is coming up soon...after a long week of work I gotta say I'm looking forward to it.

Hopefully I can put some hours into my gaming backlog this weekend. I'm considering skipping FFXIII and XIII-2 and just going straight to XIII-3 when that comes out, since the fan-service and gameplay intrigues me much more than the prior games. Not to say the last two games are bad...it's just they aren't that good...(which more or less equates to the same thing)

I'll be playing FFXIII-3 Lightning Returns for different reasons...

I also want to start playing some Atelier Totori Plus for the Vita and dabble a bit with Ar Tonelico on the PS2

Not sure why I stopped playing this game! :P

I think my last post showed some of the difficulties it is in learning a new language. In a nutshell, the traditional route I'm taking in learning a new language is much too slow.

That's not to say that I shouldn't read from Genki I or stop practicing from my Learning Kanji book. Those are essential in writing and speaking properly grammatically as well as learning the correct conjugations. But the vocab isn't enough. Two-three weeks to learn 50 words is way too slow, especially when I know my memory retention is much higher based off previous studies of other learned languages. So I'm now using a combination of two apps.

The first app, Obenkyo taught me Kana when I first started learning a few months ago and gives vocab based off the JLPT; it has Kanji testing too, which is useful should not be used in place of vocab...because you'll either forget it shortly after, or remember the English meaning but have no idea how to say it in combination with other Kanji. "Oneself(自) + Revolve(転) + Car(車) = Bicycle(自転車)?" I just started it up again a few days ago, added about 20-30 new words a day (not including those I already know, but added just for retention purposes), and I now memorized the entirety of the JLPT 5 Vocab (484 words) and JLPT 5 and 4 Kanji (about 250 characters)

That seems impressive, but it's not really. Basically I can understand a word by sounding it out with its kana pronounciation and from the overall "look" of the Kanji. For the basics it's passable, but if your looking at a Kanji reading that looks like an 話 (talk) or an 語 (language), it gets quite difficult...and this happens a lot in Kanji, where the shape looks nearly identical but with the replacement of one or two small radicals. In this sort of example, memorization of the word shape does not work that well to your favor and that's where writing out and memorizing the Kanji in context with sentences (which is why I go over Genki I Workbook exercises) over repetition comes in extremely handy.

I use another program called Anki in conjunction with AnkiDroid Flashcards, which I can sync from my laptop to all my other devices. The problem is that it's only as useful as you make it. I'm using it to enter in some Vocab from my Learning Kanji book, which is really time consuming. I'm also using shared libraries for my Genki I and Genki II books. The biggest problem I have is that it's just not fun...and just as your starting to get into it "You have completed your 20 words for today". Then next thing you know, the next day you have 20 new words plus 10-15 words to review, then more the following day, 20 new words plus 20 words to review, and so forth...It starts becoming a chore to keep up with the program. Add to the fact there's no multiple choice options (which Obenkyo has), and your basically guessing with three options: "Bad, Good, Easy", in where I can "cheat" and just put "Easy" for every card, which eliminates the purpose of the program.

The plus-side is I found a decent Anki Deck that incorporates the Core 2000/6000 most frequent Japanese words, including example sentances and audio...which breaks the monotony of looking at a white card with a word. I'm going to play around with this a bit this weekend to see how well it works.

The Legend of Heroes

End of a busy gaming week, start of a new week.

I ran into some frustration yesterday while trying to play The Legend of the Heroes: Trails in the Skies in Japanese. It's really text-heavy and just shows how little I know when it comes to translating games, especially without pointers or directions for the quest objectives, the closest I can figure out is "Ok I need to go 西口 to マクドナルド病院 and look for a モンスター?" If you don't understand what I just wrote, then you can get the idea how I feel when I encounter 95% of everything in this game.

It's not to say it's a bad game, in fact it's one of the best JRPGs to come out in the past decade. I'm more frustrated in the fact that this is a game that came out in 2006, was just translated to English a little over a year ago, and there has been 5 sequels for the game already. So when you're playing something that looks like this:

Fast forward 5 games later, we have something that looks like this:

And the only announcement from the publisher, Xseed is that they will release the second game in the series sometime in Mid-2014 and there's no guarantee that they will even localize the third game. With the time it will take to play the latter game in English, it'll be already 2024 (which by then they will already be on the 10th sequel...get where I am going?). It really makes you wish there was some sort of magical ability to learn Japanese faster. In the meantime I'll stick with the English translation for now while I continue to build up my Japanese skills...since that's pretty much the only thing I can do until I'm confident enough to be able to read a bit more than "Go North and Kill Monster".

But what can I say, I'm spoiled. Even so I still have a bunch of quality translated JRPGs in my backlog, such as Tales of Graces f and Xillia (and Xillia 2 coming soon), Neptunia, Final Fantasy XIII, Persona 4, and now Bravely Default which is coming very soon. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I suppose what I am trying to say is I need to stick with the basics with language learning before tackling a sprawling, epic JRPG this early on. It's like trying to tackle Tolstoy's War and Peace after you have just learned to read Curious George.

Can...ok there's a paint can...I think this means "George is HOLDING a CAN of Paint!" Yes I am a genius! Where's my copy of War and Peace?

Back to work...

Finished up my Christmas vacation and back to work this week. I can't really say I miss it, but who can honestly say "Wow, I love my job!" unless you work for Mythbusters or for the Porn industry.

Most of us only watch Mythbusters for Kari Byron anyway...

I recently (re)discovered Backloggery and sorted most of my library into their database. It's basically a gaming tracker similar to Goodreads, where you add games to your library and track how far your into each game. With such a large collection to keep track of, I sometimes find myself more demotivated to play games. It's like going from 3 channels on the TV to over 500. From "This is the only thing on...looks like I have no choice to enjoy it!" to "Ughh 500 channels and there's nothing on...". I guess there's some sort of science/psychology behind this phenomena, something to look up later.

Of course, when you have so much quality educational programming choices to chose from on, especially on The Learning Channel...why would you need any more channels?

What I especially enjoy is finding people with similar game interests on that site. I'm into some weird games, so when I encounter someone talking about Call of Duty or Madden, it's hard to relate "Oh yeah, I can't wait to play some Persona 4 Golden and 英雄伝説 閃の軌跡 later...you didn't catch that? It's the new Legend of Heroes title...you never heard of Legend of Heroes either? Yeah...well so far only one game of the 7 game series has been published in the US...but you should definitely import it anyway!" Yeah...essentially my gaming conversations come out pretty dry...

Yeah...shoot that badguy with that gun!

So yeah, slow week so far. I got a few new figures from December that I'll need to post online sometime later. Other than that...just gotta keep gaming :).