Deus Ex and much frustration

So I was really looking forward to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I said a while back that I'd preordered the collector's edition, which came with an artbook, a DVD with various extras on it, and a figure of the main character. I'd paid off the preorder in full, and was eagerly awaiting release.

The night before release, though, I was called up by the EB Games store and informed that they wouldn't have a copy for me. There'd been some allocation error or something, I don't know the specifics but it all seemed pretty bullshit to me. I was in the middle of a DotA game at the time so I just told them we could sort it out tomorrow when I went in to pick it up. The next day I went in and the guy told me much the same thing, that for reasons beyond his control his store hadn't received the requested number of copies. Again, it all sounded like a load of shit to me, but I realised it wasn't his fault personally so I didn't give him too hard a time of it. I did tell him I was extremely annoyed, and asked him what the point of preordering was at all, if not to guarantee a copy of the game come release day. He agreed with me, and said it reflected extremely badly on the company and that he was very sorry about it.

In the end I was given a copy of the augmented edition (like the collector's but without the figure) for the price of the normal game. I still wasn't happy since I could've gotten it even cheaper on the internet, but by that stage I just wanted to go home and play it.

I never asked for this

And then it started pouring down on the way home, so I took my glasses off when I got off the bus and put them in my jacket pocket. Of course, when I got home and went to get changed, I forgot all about this and ended up accidentally standing on them, and now they're quite broken. I hope they're not too expensive to fix. At least I'm short sighted so it doesn't impact my ability to see my computer screens clearly.

It was kinda like this, minus all cuteness.

The day looked up after that though. I thoroughly enjoyed Deus Ex, and have just finished my first playthrough today. I liked the endings. A lot of people on /v/ complained that they don't give you a lot of closure, but I think it was a nice way of reflecting on your choices without messing too much with the canon already established by the first game. If there was one thing about the game that annoyed me, it would be the boss fights. The second one had me stumped for so long, as I was mostly a non-lethal stealth character and I just kept getting demolished in the fight. After trying for over half an hour I gave up and went to bed. The next day I woke up and tried it again, and beat that fight on the first try. Feels unexpected man.

I'd recommend it if you're interested in stealth shooter RPGs. It's a fairly long game, and it has a lot of replay potential.

I'm on holidays for a week now, so naturally I'll get nothing useful done all week. I might go play another few games of DotA, even though it's only going to make me annoyed.

Not taking it easy enough

It's been a busy last couple of weeks. I had some assignments to do that I'd completely put off until the last minute, so I had to spend a few long days getting them done. That's not the half of it though, since I've been busy watching the first reveal of DotA 2 in that German tournament with the insane prize pool.

From leeks to hotdogs

It's been a couple of months since I posted anything about Toyota's Miku campaign, so I figured I'd see what's happened since then. I'd hoped that it'd just die down and fade away, but then came the whole bacon-wrapped hotdog fiasco, and a couple more opportunities to make some more terrible terrible ads:

These two are a bit cringe-worthy, but could be worse. I still think it sounds silly to say "Miku-chan" in an English language ad, but that's not such a big deal. The worst is yet to come:

Yeah, I really have no idea what they were going for in these two. The ads aren't about Toyota any more, since the last three haven't had anything to do with cars, and they certainly aren't about Vocaloid as a music synthesizing program, so the only remaining possibility seems to be to piss off fans and shit on any chance of Vocaloid being taken seriously.

If you don't think the videos themselves are bad enough, take a look at the Youtube comments, where the reactions range from the positive ("MUKI IS TAKINGOVERTHE WORLD!!") to the negative ("Dont do it miku!!! dont fall for the people who nuked your home country!!", "*transforms into Black Rock Shooter* i will go and save miku before she is lost forever!").

There's also been a contest to come up with an American Miku design, to be announced at the J-Pop Summit Festival in San Francisco later this month. Given the bacon-wrapped hotdog theme though, it's clear what they're shooting for in the American market.

At this point maybe they'd be better off going the whole way and changing the song they're using from World is Mine to something more appropriate:

今の私よりもっと太く大きくなって見せるよ

On the bright side, there haven't been any new commercials in a while. I can only hope this trend continues.

I recently ordered a stack of Vocaloid CDs myself, after getting my tax return. I have no idea why the government taxes my welfare payments only to give all the tax back to me at the end of the year anyway, but it makes for a nice windfall. I ordered the new Gumi compilation album that's coming out in a month, as well as 8#Prince's newest CD and some older stuff by 40mp, among others. Hopefully they won't take too long to arrive.

And finally, it's only a week and a half until the Dota 2 championships - it'll be the first look at the game as well as (to my knowledge) the biggest prize pool in video gaming's history. I may do a post about this later, as I consider it a pretty big deal.