音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

Dying over 200 times in PsychoBreak chapter 6 AKUMU, the two-room sequence (and I have fully upgraded flash bolts x 7)...
↑ Who is more miserable than me?
I believe regardless you have a rocket launcher or not, you need some kind of luck and preparation.
Comparing to this, which would take less than 5 minutes in normal condition, none of the so-called "instant death games" are real.

Indeed the longest 5 minutes.

I wished so many times that I'd rather go fighting Laura another 10 times if I don't have to do this.. But God knows whether I'll keep my decision later on! xD;;
Although I died 32 times with chapter 5's Laura.

Well, at least I got it passed.
And perhaps I'll never do it again.

Yet I'm very worrying about the doggy fight which is coming soon. Except the dino-alpha fight, this one was of the top 1 headache for me in past experiences.
Before that, I'm counting on you about the giant twin fight, Joseph!

My copy of "yorlga II" had just arrived yesterday. Eventually I was able to read its booklet.

Black.
Even more black than its sister.
Not surprising though -- I wasn't even expecting too much at all. That we all know Most of her booklets are in a pure black!!

But the happiest thing has to be that there is furigana!
Otherwise I can't even read all the titles without problem. -- They didn't want you to read it at all, perhaps. I'd say "yorlga II" is the "scariest" now; it beats all Shikata Akiko's "dark side" incantations.

More importantly, it's literally grotesque.
The Noriko style: artistically grotesque.

After a not-so- less-impressive introduction, the military song could be the most normal pick from the whole set. Yet it's has been numbered "zero", which means... past? faded out in history? exiled?... The moon-waiting song is equivalent to "tama no fune" in my opinion, sort of; the ambience is great enough to lead my mind thinking in this way. As for some key words, "moon wax and wane; the last moment; slashed heart; pale death white; interval between sky, earth and the other world"... apparently it's a "talking to the death" song! (I can't help but I'm no literal soul to choose those more fitting words across languages. lol) While the next rock song (can't tell if it's real rock), with more power, it shows a brave soul's bold intention of dying for (forbidden?) love.

Hirota's "mikado" is cool, really.

Starting the exorcising song, the "yorlga-touch" is getting a stronger. What I should point out? The title itself is self explaining. With mixed use of katakana, the song indeed turns into a great dark magic charm -- P.S. This one has the most furigana annotation among all songs. The high tension immediately gets repressed by the following alone-in-the-garden song. "even though I'm here watching for everything, but I'm yet not here as no one sees me." << I'm so familiar with this kind of "Noriko motif" (hyper)! >> "I know who I am." (For some reason, this song and the next are swapped in pages in the booklet.) Then here comes my first-time-listening favourite lantern song~ There is a intensive aura of a ghost parade to me before reading the lyrics. However, as usual, my mind illustration was off a bit lot. You can find all kinds of eerie stuff on the weirdest night market, not only a lantern that shows you the invisible, also mermaid's scales, houou's feather, an automaton girl's heart... Whatever, I'm following my initial imagination to get my draft completed.

Next the canary song is the easiest to follow in terms of the lyrics, like a piece of dark fairytale. Somehow it brings me characters in her "yume kai" story from "yorlga". While the syndrome song is an echo of the final piece of the previous release, still of intensive piles of "negative words". But the penultimate piece, it's exactly "Jack the Ripper" (which reminds me the very beginning of Shadow Hearts)! Finally, the last "meta-ish" song goes out of my type again (because that's a boy instead of a girl? ^^;).

Overall, I like biohazard and Silent Hill, so I'm totally fine with this degree of literal grotesque.
Less favourable than the initial "yorlga" though.

And a new now-playing (other than Bach's cantata marathon): NieR: Automata OST.

All that I know about this game was a 10 seconds long video, and these 10 seconds made me remembering it. The scene they showed on the home page looks beautiful though. The music so far is good too, every track, instead of being a 1-2 minute short piece, it's rather like an independent instrumental song that lasts 5-6 minutes. -- All good but except the stupid shop song. I just can't endure and hate people singing off key, especially on purpose (looks at Takayama Minami)...
Good game BGM doesn't mean the game would be good (e.g. Final Fantasy XV and Valkyria: Azure Revolution based on amazon reviews), but for a few times I do play games only for the music. I'll see, after finishing PsychoBreak AKUMU and probably BIOHAZARD 5 Pro and 6 No-Hope.. (which would take ages!)

The first piece in this year: the previously continuously mentioned "Revive" has finally been remade! ・ω・ﾉ

Revive ~remake~
(because it had "re" in both the title and subtitle, it was a little confusing each time when I type it.. xD;;)
↓
vs. the first print I did 7 years ago.. -- more exactly, 3 days to 7 years.

Before the very first remake, I even checked the difference between remake and remaster.

The appearance, hair colour, fringe, etc. for sure changed. Nothing to comment more, I made the decision at the end of 2013. But they're the same girls as 7 years ago!
As for the graphic, it's common to me, that I can't replicate a finished drawing, instead I always tend to add more variations. At beginning I attempted to get the same position arrangement, yet ended up with a somehow different outcome. << this is remake any ways so I didn't care!

Doing the outfit was the most fun part. What I finally filled with colours was actually different from even the remake draft. Most important, I didn't want to use the original as it looked... I forgot what I thought but of course I wanted a change. => I'm sort of having a CLAMP-styled soul <= need not to dig in further!
Since the overall ambience was supposed to keep the same, which with a strong rose scented stage, it was limited to do the colouring. The balance between the base colour red and characters must be well maintained. Expelled all other choices, nothing but red could balance with itself. And once again, it was proven that black is the colour!! It always echoes with all kinds of other colours -- white does the same, but I personally prefer black.
About the hairpin, it certainly got related back to their main "devices". :3

The background was brand new, as before I simply stole one from the internet and transform it into my work. Those days have gone forever! I can't remember what kind of background I used last time as it was blurred. If go checking my zipped raw files I might get a copy of the original. But I didn't want to. -- Time to remake! Therfore, like previously I said, rose must be the thematic object. 4 in centre, 4 (that being the centre replica) in background, and petals all around. Plus, I haven't looked up how to make a swirl in CLIP Studio, so I got some "vortex" curves blended in, combining the stage spotlight-ish upper gradient. I didn't know what I was thing, some random play-arounds led to the final result.
Rose petals (they can be used as sakura petals if painted in pink) gave me another fun experience. Although I do know the blend mode long time ago, I barely really used it. Perhaps because I don't understand the mechanism behind. "Overlay", "Add glow", "Colour burn" and "Multiply" are so far the great ones I've remembered. To hand drawn these effects would be over my ability. So this time could be the beginning of more use of them!

Stopped using Photoshop for 1 year, and I don't miss it at all~

A couple of new music has been released, including binaria's "tsuduri" and Noriko's "yorlga II".
Sadly, "tsuduri" is still in a state of no touch... .__. I indeed looped "yorlga II" though.
But I'd say the first "yorlga" is better, in terms of the overall ambience. -- The introduction of "Tama no Fune" was way too impressive that made the world of "yorlga" perfect.
I'm not intending to make more comparisons here. So I'm trying to make more praises of "II". I do think all the instrumental tracks are better than "I", and many songs are great too. Of the most attention, I like the "lantern song", the introduction sounds so much like "Shadow Hearts"!! <= Definitely my coming next artwork inspiration!

Then, an earlier release.
The Last Door Soundtracks

It's the type that resembles classical music, and thus become my favourite. "Crows over the city" is the one I can't stop looping, and eventually I tried to transcribe it..

I'm so glad, it's in D minor!!
Maybe I should make a D-minor-collection playlist sometime.
A little wish, that someday I can do it. (I should, the notes aren't that hard.)
However, playing the second half tremolos is a pain. I'm not good with either trills or tremolos. I absolutely believe playing such == muscle training.

The last part. I just reincarnated my site into a revised set of cgi scripts.
NOTE: the phrase "revised set of cgi scripts" used to be "a set of php files" at the period of my "Hello PHP".
It can be due to my quick scanning of only 1 php book in a short time (whereas I've gone through 5+ perl books). Nonetheless, I'm not fond of php at all right now. I used to believe using php would be a pleasant experience since I don't have to chmod to be executable and switch shebangs across OS and handles all POST/GET/WHATEVER within a second without calling extra modules. But problems such as variable scope, empty variable, and my stubborn perl habits making things more difficult than expected. I still think it's a stupid idea to mix ARRAY and HASH, and I strongly hate that I have to quote every single key while calling an array value.
Be brief, I gave up on php. It's hard to convert. I'm a happy resident of the Programming Republic of Perl forever~ (￣ー￣)ﾆﾔﾘ

This post should have been written 9 hours ago, but my Surface was charging and I was too tired.
At least now I can go burning Laura! xD

There're no that many times I dream about video games in all kinds of forms and still remember it after I wake up: Silent Hill 3 and 4 for sure, and then PsychoBreak. That I clearly know the latter was so real, as if I were the main character and running away from Laura or Mr. Chainsaw, and praying for a lovely "check point".
In a sense, PsychoBreak thus made itself to be one of my favourites. And recently I finally began my long survival trip in AKUMU mode, aka the instant kill mode. I've got a pretty Death Record chart, and will be looking forward the outcome after I come back from the crazy loop of dying and loading and reanalysing and improving.

Yet I didn't know our Chainsaw man got me exactly 5 times in chapter 1! It should have been a piece of cake after clear the entire game two times. But who knows there's a pile of "stuff" blocking my way toward the exit.. and knitting with chainsaw man wasn't as easy as watching people streaming on YouTube. Without actually dying for a few times, I won't be able to figure out how the situation was in terms of the placement of various objects.
Chapter 1 took me 49 minutes, including all cutscenes (which applies to all following chapters, as what I've decided).

Chapter 2 could be the beginning of the real AKUMU experience. However, before I actually entered the surivial world, I got lost again in the beginning forest... and in my previous game plays, I got lost too. -__-
In AKUMU, I clearly feel the zombies are sharper in sensing me. Seems the view angle of them got wider so I got caught up more easily. And they run faster, making it impossible for me to throw a bottle at their faces.
Another big problem here was, I could barely see them, as if they are perfectly melted in the darkness. Sometimes I heard their voices surrounding me, and I turned around trying to locate them. Sadly, for most of times, they got me before I finding out where exactly they come from. For quite a lot of times, I attempted to run for a better distance in order to pull out the trigger, and out of luck some "objects" blocked me and I got stressed that I missed all my shots (like Leon said, I should really consider using a knife in close up fights but the system doesn't let me doing so). Either drop a match, or use the handgun. With a half second of hesitation, you'll be dead. Continuous dying got me tired on Friday evening, but at the same time, I did get a better memory about the geography of the village map, together with the enemy locations. I'm for sure getting better, which giving me a big feeling of achieving.
3 hours in total at the end of chapter 2. But the actual time I spent would be longer, as each "now loading" screen would take about 35 seconds.

Fortunately, I'm so pathetic that I couldn't do the no key + no upgrade run (yet). So at chapter 3 I felt much, much better. Not saying that I was able to open the lockers and upgrade the charming flash bolt, Tatiana was right beside me! I was happy and was almost on an one save per kill mode. Again, my brain went crazy and I had trouble find the proper way to the attic after turning the crank for the "old-man" doctor.
In AKUMU, I totally forgot they added one fake Ruvik near the gate, which caused quite a lot of trouble. Also thanks for that, I realised I could went across the fence and thus get access into the building where the doctor was in directly, without going from the front door. The building opposite got one sniper which was even a bigger threat than fake Ruvik. This time, I did something different, that I took the sniper down by shooting him from the room where doctor was hiding. That was fun.
Eventually I didn't want to bother killing Ruvik and all the zombies before dealing with the chainsaw -- as I could upgrade! I chose the second floor in the barn -- as once I got off and Ruvik imposter would get mixed in. I stabbed chainsaw man a couple of times, and finished him up with an explosive. Good thing was Ruvik imposter wasn't treated as an additional boss so he disappeared when chainsaw man was downed -- otherwise I'd be downed by Laura's claws..
Even that chapter 3 wasn't really a pain, 5 hours in total when I made it into the next chapter. I had to say I got lost again and went around the little village for long, only for a missed shotgun shell! Nothing is more important than ammo except your life.
Less deaths here though, and I was quite happy with my good luck in taking care of the bombs. Well trained by Shadow Hearts!?

Stay cool, Seb, we'll make it through!

I wish I could play "Clair de Lune". I'm not asking for something flawless, but now the biggest problem wasn't the key, but the high range in some parts. And I don't feel like I want to shift into the 5th position yet.

"Revive -remake-" is getting there! Now I just need to brush out a good environmentronemnt with a stronger taste! Somehow I got numbed by the song due to over-looping it. Need a break => PsychoBreak! xD;