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niku

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About niku

  • Birthday 05/28/1991

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    Male
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    Sweden

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    gomgam

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  1. I had a huge package with Famicom RPGs (+DQVI for SFC). All the boxes next to each other made me very happy indeed :3
  2. Cool, I did. I accidentally added some random girl first, she didn't know what fuwanovel was
  3. My discord lost all its servers, would it be possible with a new invite :)?
  4. I keep juggling Starcraft 2, Street Fighter 5 & Overwatch on PC with Puyopuyo Tetris on PS4. Too many games, it confuses me big time but I can't decide on one to kick from my line-up.
  5. Well there are several large cities I would want to visit; Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, Brussels and Seattle. I wouldn't say I hate travelling, its more of a fear of being around people I don't know. Earlier in life I enjoyed travelling but currently in my hiki lifestyle I get anxious thinking about going to the supermarket so there's no way I'd get on a plane and go to another part of the world.
  6. Game Information Title: SC2VN Genre: Visual Novel (ADV) Platform: Windows PC Year of release: 2015 Developer: TEAM.ELEVEN:ELEVEN Review If you ask me to think of an impressive feat performed by a human, it would most likely be related to gaming. I'm not huge on traditional sports. Growing up I was always the nerdy kid who was picked last for the football (soccer) and floorball teams every break during elementary school. It also happens that the game that made the 5 year old me a gamer in 1996 was Warcraft II, a real-time strategy game. For many years growing up, I almost exclusively played different RTS games, one of them being Starcraft. I was never any good back then and I'm probably even worse nowadays, relatively speaking. I found it beyond cool to learn that someone made a visual novel with Starcraft as its focal point. I read that it was a short one so I decided to jump in without reading any reviews or trying to learn whether or not I would enjoy it. SC2VN, of course, is a very peculiar visual novel in terms of theme. It is set against the Korean pro-gaming scene, professional Starcraft II specifically. Somehow I find it very exciting with meta-geekery like this. A video game about gaming, that's right up my alley. Just like Genshiken, a manga about otaku culture, or GameCenterCX for Nintendo DS, SC2VN offers a glimpse into nerdhood in the by now mythical Eden of pop culture that is East Asia. I'm aware a lot of people consider Akiba a sort of Mecca for geek stuff but surely the place to be when it comes to competitive gaming culture is Seoul with its eSports bars, PC bangs and never ending tournaments. Admittedly I have often caught myself fantasizing about living in the east, be it hanging out with my imaginary friends at PC cafes in China and Korea or arcades in Japan. The game starts with you, a male or female (whichever one you pick) Starcraft II player aspiring to go pro, leaving your home country for South Korea. I found the premise and sometimes also the presentation of it reminiscent of shounen anime such as Hikaru no Go or Bakuman. Certain segments in particular seem to imply that you will become the best (like no one ever was) through the power of friendship and never giving up. There's also some very standard manga character archetypes, especially the former Starcraft champion tsundere girl. That said, there is no romance in this VN and I'd say that's a fortunate omission as it would've severely crippled the realism that, despite shounen tendencies, is always present. SC2VN at times paints a very bleak picture of a hopeless, uphill climb to the top in an industry that doesn't pay as well or has the opportunity for career that other walks of life have. The writing is concise and kept me interested at all times, there isn't much in terms of bloat conversations but the writer(s) still manage to flesh out the characters surprisingly well. I had judged, if you will, most characters in more ways than just “I like” or “gtfo” by the mid point of the VN. It took me a little over 4 hours to get to the true end but I imagine it would be quicker for most people as I'm a fairly slow reader. I do personally watch Starcraft e-sport and play the occasional game myself but I don't think that's a prerequisite for enjoying this game. It looks far more at the players and their lives as eSports athletes than the game itself and its mechanics. There's also a glossary included in the game for Korean and Starcraft-specific terms used throughout the story. Perhaps the decisions you need to make could be a bit tricky as they're all gameplay decisions but every bad end in the game happens just a few pages after you made the wrong pick so going by trial and error wouldn't be very cumbersome. All in all I recommend this game, in particular to people who are curious about the Korean gaming scene. Honestly I feel this game has the potential to bring two subsets of gamers closer. Its a perfect entry point for an RTS player to get into visual novels or vice versa, a VN fan looking to get into RTS games. Over and out.
  7. I loved these 4. Non Non Biyori is pretty much the best things that happened in my life in the past 5 years. Non Non Biyori No Game No Life Barakamon One Punch Man
  8. While I don't buy into most of the core concepts that this article relies upon (and seems to assume are true without providing support), I can certainly relate to this feeling it describes as 'elevation'. Any anime with parents who trust or treat their children gently tends to make my heart metaphorically smile, be the reason Freudian or not. Sawako's parents in Kimi ni Todoke and Nagisa's parents in Clannad had that effect on me. A bit more than a year ago my sister had a child and had I not been inspired by characters like the ones I mentioned, I don't think I would've been able to build the resolve to be the uncle I want to be. Hopefully I can be an emotional support when things are dark and cheer on when everything is well.
  9. From a geek/weeb/gamer perspective, this thing with Gawker is certainly a big topic. Personally I don't really care if Hulk Hogan is offended or if Gawker goes bankrupt but these things have become symbols for some kind of war. Actually I find it astonishing, when I was a teenager I thought that people around me were too tame, I wanted to have extreme opinions and provoke some kind of reaction. Now that I'm a mid-20s geezer I kind of have an opposite desire: I'd rather just get along with people and go about my business. I'm not sure if the world suddenly got super extreme or if I became the most boring person ever. Either way, it seems to me that everyone I talk to nowadays have picked a side in an ideological showdown. One side believes that there's a Jewish conspiracy to exterminate white men and establish some kind of Matrix-like society. The other one thinks that the slightest expression of opinion or even the private habits of other people is extremely offensive, an affront to democracy and that it's somehow controlled by a male conspiracy, a patriarchy, instead of a Jewish one. Am I misunderstanding something or is this really how things are nowadays? I don't actually meet people offline, mind you, so my experience is purely based on what I see online.
  10. I play sometimes but I'm a bronze league noob.
  11. Might as well join, sounds like fun. In other words I "clearly state" that I "wish to participate" in the current cycle. I suggest MonMusu as it is clearly the high brow gentleman choice.
  12. I remember the not-insane guy from the documentary about The Pirate Bay talking about why he rather used AFK in place of IRL when denoting anything he did which was not in front of his computer. Recalling the exact quote proves difficult but it doesn't matter as my point isn't necessarily what he meant but how I perceived it. I seem to recall his reasoning being something along the lines of online and digital presence also, technically, being part of real life. It makes sense to me that reality is not exclusive but in fact the opposite; inclusive. Anything that can be at all I would consider part of reality and thus also, if I am involved in it, a part of my own real life. Which leads me to virtual reality. Not VR but the idea of virtuality. As far as I know, European philosophers back in the day (and maybe even now?) sometimes divided reality into the material reality (is actual, has form) and virtuality. Keep in mind that I'm using the term very liberally. Something virtual can be a thing, such as a character in a visual novel, which is not material but according to some people very much real since it obviously exists. If the character did not exist, there would be no way to see or interact with it, even through the UI of the game. There may be moral values connected to the importance of something virtual vs. something material but that is another discussion. However, I don't really buy the fact that distinctions between forms of realities are necessary nor representative of the way it works. This is why I'm just going to say that everything is real, real to the extent that we don't even need the word real as nothing can not be real. Truth be told, I am making a conscious effort not to get trapped in a spiral of semantics, arguing the duality of language, thoughts and symbols such as the word 'reality'. So, in conclusion to this paragraph, let me say that since I consider reality inclusive and non-specific, I also consider reality all-encompassing and so it includes anything that follows henceforth. Since smooth segue is smooth and If I haven't already lost everyone at this point, what I wanted to get to was this: animu and vidya are for realz! In fact, it makes me very satisfied that I can fool myself into believing the equal reality of MMORPG worlds enjoy compared to the one my shrink wants me to be functional in. Ever since I was a wee lad I have enjoyed escapism a lot. Like many of my generation I was at a point completely absorbed in the World of Warcraft, Azeroth. Because, while I love the worlds of my favourite movies, anime, fighting games, visual novels and so on, they are a bit lacking in the world department. With world I mean a traversable landscape which preferably differs enough from Earth to make it interesting. So, for me, what an MMORPG needs to be is a system which makes an as large of a virtual landscape as interesting and exciting as possible, ideally to the point that you start to forget that it is not indeed virtual. My interest in these kinds of games has dwindled significantly for the past several years. I feel they have become more about being virtual landscapes supporting a gameplay system than the other way around. Specifically I'm talking about convenience features which make the gameplay systems quicker and easier to understand. I didn't get into them for that, though. There are plenty of games I enjoy primarily for their gameplay features, such as Street Fighter and Starcraft, but none of them are MMORPGs. Recently I have regained hope, though. On March 11th this year, Visionary Realms streamed over an hour of gameplay from the pre-alpha version of their game Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. I've been skeptical, thinking the game was most likely vapourware until I saw the stream but now, seeing how far along they've gotten, I think it will most likely see the light of day after all. Basically, the game is like any other game in the genre only stripped of what I consider bloat features. It will also be significantly slower paced and focus more on group efforts as opposed to solo play. There will be limited fast-travel, instancing and enemies which can be killed by a lone player. They are promising that there won't be exclamation marks over the heads of NPCs giving quests and combat as well as regeneration of health will take longer than in modern MMORPGs. The graphics aren't exactly state of the art but to me they look serviceable, although I'm fine with playing Dragon Quest (1986) on my Famicom so my standards aren't exactly sky high. Maybe this pitch sounds like a snorefest to you and I completely understand why someone might think so but I do hope that there are enough people interested in this kind of niche to let the game stay afloat. Perhaps you are like me and love to escape to a world of fantasy, be it in a visual novel or otherwise. Perhaps you are like me and happen to have 12-20 hours to kill in front of your computer before you sleep again. Just thought I'd put the word out there in my own construed and needy way. That's all, thanks.
  13. Thank you very much Yes, niku is for meat. I don't really remember my reasoning on that name but now I find it amusing
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