001 Ninja dogs have PRIDE! but I'm not one of them.

Hey.
I passed all the exams at the University and am FREE!
Well I’m still wasting time with stuff…

First of I started playing Ninja Gaiden ∑

Oh boy. I read it was hard, but I figured, what the heck, I passed DMC on Dante Must Die, so I’ll manage…
And I fell through the trap door in the first level 9 times…
And the bosses. Hell even simple mounted enemies are H-A-R-D.

The combos can’t be interrupted. The enemies gang up on you. And what the f is up with Ryu’s jump? And I bet you don’t want to hear about the camera either…

On the 2nd level – the airship (how does Ryu stow away when he’s a highly visible shiny black latex ninja?) I found a killzone, with tons of enemies I figured there’s something of value there and tried killing off all of them. And I couldn’t.
After dying a lot I saw the “Do you wish to abandon the way of the ninja?”. I thought it was a different variable continue screen. But it’s not…

Oh so it’s a difficulty-down screen? Like in Onimusha, when ya die 3 times you get the offer to switch to easy. But I just said
“I’m hardcore. That just how I roll…” © SpoonyOne
And ignored it.

But after dying 6 or more times I decided to try it…

I got a “Are you sure?” screen – why not, my ninja ass hit the floor only so many times.

“Are you really sure?” – screen – oh come on I already swallowed my pride…

Then Ayane (or generic Hayabusa-village girl) shows up and taunts you for being “overestimated” and changes the difficulty from NORMAL to NINJA DOG. Ninja dog? That’s kinda offensive, but hey, it’s your fault you suck…

And on the “easy” dog setting – I still get my ass handed to me!

Damnit Ryu…

So I figured, if they kick me around either way – might as well have them kick me around on NORMAL… And just switched back to the “Ninja way”

Surprisingly after 9 more deaths I actually got the hang of it and beat them on NORMAL. Whoo.

It’s true when they say that, Ninja Gaiden is hard, but it feels really, REALLY, rewarding when you get to it…

Hooray for me and those 2 katanas…

I’ll do a ‘Stylistics’ review of Ninja Gaiden ∑, when I beat it.

Oh and I started taking my drawing skills back to work condition. I still suck, but hey “Good artists are crappy artists who never gave up”


Till later...

Sylistics: Titles.

OK. Welcome once again to 3-6-9, and today we’ll dive into Stylistics. 
Today I’ll talk about titles in videogames. And I don’t mean titles as in franchises, but as in their names and their style.

Now I won’t go into this really deep and all this is just an observation and not an serious science study.
But how did titles look in the 80s and 90s? They were big and artsy, always trying to invent some new font and be all individual.

Examples?






And it wasn’t limited only to the western market.
Take a look at this.


What is that, you ask? It’s final fantasy. They’re usual FFy font wasn’t there yet.
And FFII was



It carried on into the 2000s with things many thing, like Halo for example.


But that’s oldschool now. The new trends are attacking. Watch out for the ‘plain fonts’ and ink attacks.

What are those? I’ll illustrate with Metal Gear Solid series. Cause Kojima always knew and followed style.

MGS1.



The first logo was on all the rules of it’s time. Those lines and the “M” and “R” stretching downward to the “solid”.

But as times changed the logo became…


No stylizations. Just Helvetica Ultra Compressed. A ‘plain font’. 
The ultimate principle that’s ‘Less is more’. It became more popular and subsequent MGS games all used it in one way or another.
The cause for this is also probably oversatisfaction and saturation with previous styles.

And this trend touched lots of other franchises.

Of course FF.



DMC3’s oldshool griny text.


To the simpler


And I’m sure many others.

Now let’s get to MGS4.
It had… this.



The old text, but with some added tricks. And it’s also pretty common. Again you can dilute plain fonts with symbols or artwork, like the FF began to…





Also there’s a tendency to make your plain text either beat up and falling apart 

But that’s the artwork of MGS4 cover, in game the title was different, and sadly I don’t have a pic of it. But here are the same pics of the same font.


It’s painted in ink, Japanese style.
That was possibly started or spearheaded by Okami (at least in videogames).


This is a game that was very unique in style and inspired tons of things to the ‘ink’ style, street fighter IV, prince of Persia and others. 

I guess it’s main characteristics would be flowing, blur, gritty and ext. (gone pretty far from Okami). The main idea is, that the title is not that easy to read. It’ a bit obscured by some style decision…

It’s influence in titles right now is minor, but I predict that it’ll go far.
It’s not limited to Japanese brush black ink (example Muramasa)



But also to just sloppy, hard to define or blurred text. I also put fragmented text here.



And there’s also a mix of both. Plain text with some minor obscurity.
As in



And this isn’t only limited to games.
Plain text.





Ink-blood obscurity


Plain text + obscurity (of the symbol being beat up or showed on the building not directly, but through flames.



So I see “Simplicity” and “Obscurity” as the the biggest trend in visual style nowadays. And I think there’ll be more obscurity…

See you later.
Signing off, Sieg.

3-6-9

Couldn't let this day go by without a post for 2 reasons.
1) It’s 03.06.09, which mirrors the name of the blog
2) It just happens to be my birthday. ;)

So maybe you were wondering why the blog is called 3-6-9.
Well it’s cause I like abnormal names for things and cause those 3 numbers are kind of present in many-many things I do. For starters as I mentioned my birthday, which is 03.06.1989.
Many of the registration numbers I receive have them in one way or another.

I don’t believe in numerology, but I do believe that with persistence, you can find it anywhere.
And I just like abnormal names for things.

See you next time, when I rant about something else… 

000 Introductions are unnecessary

Yo.
It’s me, Zeke Axel, Sieg-sama or Shirokurou.
This blog is something I wanted to do for a long time now.
I’m planning to rant about and subsequently review certain manga.

And finally – draw an online manga. Which is still a long ways off, due to my drawing skills…

Congratulations on reading a as-of-yet useless intro.

See you tomorrow.