http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:Zanris&section=today deviantART RSS for by:Zanris en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:14:04 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/24649087/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/24649087/ Fri, 08 May 2009 09:54:57 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/23323911/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/23323911/ Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:19:40 PST *
*
*
*
*
SPOILERS
*
*
*
*
*
Everywhere I look I see reviews for how great Tomb Raider: Underworld is. I have played this game, I was so excited to get it, and yet I felt so disappointed that I'm considering selling it. My absolute favorite x-box game was the prior installment in the Tomb Raider saga - Tomb Raider: Legend. This game had pacing, character, very cool environments, fun moves, awesome level design, engaging music that I WISH I could get on itunes, just enough hostiles to make the game feel like it wasn't holding out on the main draw of the action/adventure genre - ACTION! Underworld, on the other hand, relies almost completely on its new and admittedly cool environment generation that it pretty much sacrifices everything else. The two redeeming factors of this game are that the puzzles are harder and allow the player to go about solving them via a various number of routes. Unfortunately this is most visible only in the first level of the game in which the platforming options allow you to take one of several routes to reach your goal. After that it's pretty much copy and paste for the rest of the game - do you jump around to pull first the left lever all the way up on that remote ledge and then the right, or do vice-versa?

In terms of the fighting the enemies are so spread out that the encounters feel forced and contrived. "Laura's been jumping around for a while so.... lets throw in some random mercenaries!" or "They have spiders in Thailand right? Well, whose going to notice if those same exact spiders show up in snow covered mountains or in Laura's basement ?" I kid you not, you fight a total of about 8 different AI as follows: big "yeti", little "yeti", enormous tiger, enormous tiger painted black to be a panther, mercenaries, green giant iguana/"naga", red giant iguana/"naga", and sharks.
While in Legend the dialogue flows smoothly through a barrage of bullets, acrobatics and creative takes on old action/adventure environment classics (i.e. swinging and jumping through the heights of a sprawling city (usually in Japan or China), and the old, abandoned Buddhist/ martial arts monastery high in the snow covered mountains), in Underworld Laura's dialogue in presented as her "documenting" her findings while she uses a video camera to record her surroundings. Throughout all levels there is little to no in-game communication between Laura and her posse. This is odd since in Legend we are entertained and sometimes helped in all levels by Zip and Alister who communicate via Laura's headset. Having this back and forth helped provide dialogue, move the story along and strengthen inter-character relationships, not to mention the secondary characters' personalities which, without this dialogue, appear as ancillary and largely uninvolved. In Underworld we have to take Laura’s word that Zip and Alister are helping her and are worried about her obsession. It would be like having Batman present Lucius Fox with the machine that uses all cell phones in Gotham to project a sonar grid, telling Lucius that he can communicate to him out in the field and help him find the Joker, and then never hearing or seeing Lucius again until the scene in which he self-destructs the display. SERIOUS INCONSISTENCY HERE!

Speaking of inconsistencies, at the end of Legend Laura is in possession of Excalibur, in all it's kick-ass glory, which she has just used to defeat Amanda. The game ends showing her telling Skip and Alister that it's not over. She and Amanda are officially enemies since her ex-colleague was the cause for the disappearance of Laura's mother (which is shown in the intro). Laura is now determined to find Avalon and prove to herself that her father was right about her mother not being dead. Then Underworld picks up. The first warning light is that there is no mention of Excalibur at all. Who has a weapon like that and trades it in for a pistol that needs a million shots to take down a mercenary? "Okay", I tell myself, "maybe they are going to do some gameplay taking place in the past like in Legend and explain what happened to it." Nope. There is never any explanation. It’s just dropped. The second warning light is that Laura is, within the first level, introduced as being on a completely different mission of discovery involving Thor's hammer this time. The leap of logic here is really hard to grasp. If there are many portals to Avalon all over the world, each of them using the same type of sword (as explained in Legend), why is Laura all hopped up on jumping through hoops to find and assemble the pieces to a new super weapon which requires a completely different kind of gate in order to get to Avalon? Again, I tell myself that it's only the first level, and there is sure to me some explanation right? Again, nothing of the sort is offered save for the fact that her father though Valhalla and Avalo... ]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/22474452/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/22474452/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:03:12 PST On the upside it's a new year and the way I see it, like with my laptop when the hard drives died, I can rewrite my notes and make them even better the second time around. It still sucks that I lost my notes in the first place, but I am somewhat comforted by the fact that I transcribed a few of my notes on my desktop. My goals for the new year are several fold. Most of them involve projects due at the end of January, but still.
1) This J-term I'm taking a non-credit course for those who want to participate in the National Novel Writing Month, which basically means that it's a group where we peer review each other's work and are taught techniques for becoming more dynamic writers. Besides brainstorming in general, I'm going to make my main project "Terminate the IdiotBoys". So, by the end of January (baring unforeseen disasters) I hope to have 50,000 words of Terminate the IdiotBoys on my computer, external hard drive, and flash drive (just to be safe). ^-^
2) I want to rewrite my Psychonauts fanfic. notes and possibly start rough drafts for the first chapter.
3) I want to add fancy templates to my Journal and Gallery pages on deviantart. I'm currently taking a J-term crash course in XHTML, HTML and CSS here at school and my teacher has been really helpful in my endeavor. He's totally awesome, and if he sees this I just want to give him a thumbs up and a sincere, "THANK YOU!" For anyone else who has a subscription and wants to pimp out their pages go here --> [link]

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/21343214/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/21343214/ Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:38:50 PST Mass Effect
***I was so excited to get this game, yet at the end I can't help but feel disappointed. There was a true glimmer of genius here that could have been easily brought out with more work. However, as it now stands on the market the jerky pacing of the game combined with a lack of immersion makes the whole experience feel uncomfortably constrained and rushed. First of all we're told a lot of things about the various alien cultures and traditions, but we don't get to see or experience any of it. Where are these migrant fleets of the Quarians? If the Krogans are so scattered and desperate for work how come the only ones we see are Wrex and the lab grown ones working for Saren? I was also discouraged to find out that the game didn't allow you to visit any of the species home-worlds within Council space. In fact there are only a handful of developed places that you can explore (the Citadel,Therum, Feros, Ilos, the interior of the Normandy, Eden Prime, and Noveria) but even these have constricted areas due to the linear way in which you must complete your main objectives. All other worlds consist of a drive in the Mako with occasional stops to survey some minerals, excavate a downed probe or ship (which you can't explore), look down a mine shaft and investigate one of two kinds of bases. There is supposed to be this great feeling of being involved in an expansive and dangerous galaxy, and while the dialogue tries to convey this your character's movement and interactions through said galaxy are so narrow and essentially isolated from any NPCs not on your crew that it's impossible to feel like a part of it all.
***Which brings me to another point. I found the crew, including Tali, Garrus, Ashley, Kaiden, Wrex and Liara, to be very difficult to connect to. It not that I didn't try, I even envisioned my custom female character to be bisexual so I would have more reason to hang out with Tali and listen to her talk while all the time I was staring at her boobs. It didn't work. It's like the characters just drop out of nowhere and suddenly you're working with them. They all have background, which they will tell you if you ask, but other then Wrex, Ashley, Joker, and Captain Anderson the other crew mates feel like they just filed onto your ship with flimsy reasons why they should even be there and why you should care about them at all. None but the characters I mentioned above are essential to the story, which leaves me thinking that they were just placed there to give the player more lessons on the alien civilizations and politics. If that was their objective however, I would have to advise that the editors either cut them out or somehow revamp them into main characters. Otherwise they're not necessary to any of the dialogue, they don't add to the story (unless you play as a female character and want to sleep with Garrus or Kaiden), their presence is not necessary since their skills are available through yourself, Ashley and Wrex (the useful characters), and they just take up space and gun modifications.
***Dialogue is another thing which I felt needed improvement. If you want to tell us a ton of information to flesh out the various species that's okay, but for God's sake break it up. Trying to cram that much knowledge into your head the minute that you are given control of your character breaks the flow of the game and feel more like the game is trying to cite something that the player should already know but is too thick to remember. Maybe an even better metaphor would be to compare the relationship between the dialogue and the player with a student trying to cram an entire history course the night before the final exam. One idea would be to parse out all of the background through the side missions so a) the side missions don't feel like annoying distractions from the main quest (which the plot would have you believe you must urgently finish, thus making side quests a form of procrastination from your responsibilities as a specter) and b) the player feels like they are being rewarded for learning the environment of the game rather than being forced to quickly absorb reams of dialogue in order to earn some measly XP and feel like they can actually be a part of the plot. Another idea would be to pimp out the citadel to make it feel more multicultural and thus visually give the player a hint that there are various tastes and styles out in space. Another thing that tripped me up as I was starting to get into it was when I noticed that there were no variations in gender among the species (except possibly for the Elcor and Hanar whose gender is unkownable). There's no explanation given for this either! All Batarians, Volus and Turians are male and all Asari are female. Either they all reproduce by budding or change gender when it's time to increase the population again.
***Overall I'm giving it a 6.5 out of 10. Some of the side missions are a lot of fun, the main quest (while feeling w... ]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/21061056/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/21061056/ Sun, 19 Oct 2008 10:22:10 PDT Mass Effect has reawakened my love of intricate Sci-fi universes with expansive depth and character. All in all I'm pretty pumped, and ready to write!

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/19543531/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/19543531/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:31:41 PDT started this fic on fanfiction.net but for various reasons was not able to continue it. With her permission I have adopted it, tweaked it, and made it my own. I'm really excited about where it will go, and already have a time line of all the major events planned out. In fact, I'm going to go work on it now. Bye!

Much love to and

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/18619881/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/18619881/ Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:55:42 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/17682518/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/17682518/ Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:18:43 PDT

Brought to you by...
& The leading providers of parent hysterics, younger brother tears and creative fandom inspiration LOL.

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/17118338/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/17118338/ Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:09:49 PST
Point Two: I have been introduced to Firefly and it has rocked my world!

Point Three: tonight is red curry shrimp! Yum XD

Point Four: I have to beta chapter three of AF, I have some dialogue of chapter four and an outline for it, same for ch. five, all of ch. seven, and a little of ch. eight.


&

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/15612283/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/15612283/ Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:33:23 PST
As always, lots of love to and

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/15255146/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/15255146/ Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:21:48 PDT God I sounds so emo. MUST.. RESIST.. WHINING!! However, on a good note I joined the deviantart club for alternative IZ pairings X) I figure since there's so little Gaz/Skoodge out there that I might meet some peeps in the club who like it too ^-^

and

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/15085337/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/15085337/ Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:55:13 PDT [link] XD
I'm currently working on some remodels of Zim, Dib and Skoodge with spiffy new uniforms. Just line art at this stage but I'll color them once my midterms are out of the way.
As for an update on my fic, well, my computer's hard drives somehow became defective so I've had to replace them. Which means that all fanfic work I haven't posted on the internet was LOST! WAAAHH! It's a bad thing and a good thing on some levels. I was kinda stuck with this scene for the next chapter, and now I can reformulate how they will approach it. ....yay?

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/14749404/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/14749404/ Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:53:33 PDT


]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/14742113/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/14742113/ Sat, 22 Sep 2007 10:54:53 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/14532242/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/14532242/ Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:05:18 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13940316/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13940316/ Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:18:40 PDT
I have writers block.
Three stories was a bad plan
To write all at once.

Yup, like it says I was like, "Yeah, I can write my two Rurouni Kenshin fics as well as "Alien Fugitives" at the same time. No problem. I can do it! I can do it! I can, oh crap I really can't. T-T" To get things back on track I'm putting my Rurouni Kenshin fics (Hiko/Saito and Chou/Sano) on standby so I can focus on "Alien Fugitives". I also have four days before my next work day so it should work out. Thanks for sticking with me ^-^

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13648043/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13648043/ Sat, 07 Jul 2007 15:07:27 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13560686/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13560686/ Sun, 01 Jul 2007 07:06:34 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13476500/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13476500/ Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:40:38 PDT Good news about "Alien Fugitive"! The creator of the fic. that mine branches off of has given "Alien Fugitives" her blessing, and that means that the project is back on track. I had stopped writing for a while because it had seemed like I might not get the go-ahead, but my fear was unfounded! Hurray! Chapter one will be ready within the next few days, so hang tight peeps!

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13341254/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13341254/ Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:32:36 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13102010/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/13102010/ Sat, 26 May 2007 14:24:14 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/12831722/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/12831722/ Thu, 03 May 2007 18:28:16 PDT I'm a z-a-d-r member!!! awwww yeah!! I can't wait to upload some stuff!!

]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/12804564/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/12804564/ Tue, 01 May 2007 14:50:52 PDT
]]> ~Zanris http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/12764353/ http://Zanris.deviantart.com/journal/12764353/ Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:47:38 PDT
]]> ~Zanris