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Sunday, April 17, 2011

Little King's Story

I've been playing this game a lot lately and I'm really determined to get 100% in it. Have any of you played it before?






It's yet another strange, not well-known Japanese RPG. In a nut shell, you are a polygamist, 8-year-old king who rules over his town with an iron fist by sending its inhabitants to war with rival kingdoms and forest guardians.

Little King's Story has a game play very similar to Pikmin in which your peons follow behind you and you send them out to enemies one-by-one as well as many job choices that come in handy for both fighting and puzzle solving. The best part about it is the huge variety of scenarios you get thrown in to through out the game and the exploration heavy aspects to it. If you love just running around and collecting things, this is a great game to pick up and aim for 100% in.

Another interesting aspect of the game is the wives you pick up from defeated kingdoms. Though there is no real dating simulator component as each princess falls in love with you upon sight once you release her from genie bottle-like prison, the game caters to several fetishes whom you can earn a special cut scene with by completing their gathering quests. You have a fat princess for BBW lovers. A Japanese school girl for business men. A mathematical genius girl with glasses for nerds. You even have a toddler princess who rides around in a car for pedophiles. (Creepy, right?)


Whatever tickles your pickle...
 
So if you can get over all the shota, polygamy, and pedophilia, this game is worth a play through.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Pinyin

Pinyin is the alphabetical basis most important to learning Chinese for any native English speaker. Luckily, most Chinese people also know pinyin and it becomes a useful tool when asking how to pronounce characters or names.







Though there is an official alphabetical way of reading the consonants, it is not necessary when actually using pinyin to pronounce words. When studying Chinese, since you'd read pinyin the way it should be said instead of spelling it out, going over how to say them individually would be as useful as giving my cat my tax forms and throwing pens and Taxes for Dummies books at it every January. So far I haven't received any money back and I keep getting letters and threatening phone calls from someone called the "Federal Government" but this year I think the claw marks really captured the essence of my financial earnings.

Consonants, for the most part, are pronounced the same way as the hard sounds of their English counterparts aside from the following (particularly the ones that scare substitute teachers shitless when they appear on a list of student names):

c (not pronounced like k)
zh
q
x

C has a very odd pronunciation in which it makes a "ts" noise. Start with a normal t sound and follow with a s sound just like the end of "cats". It's a lot easier than it looks.

The Zh sound is like a soft g as in how you would say "George". It's very similar to a j sound.

The Q sound is the same as a "ch" sound like the beginning of "cheese".

 The X sound is the same as a "sh" sound as in "shell".

You might be wondering why a language would have two different "ch" and "sh" noises when they are exactly the same but there is a major difference in pronunciation when adding an i to either ch and q or sh and x but I'll go over that tomorrow when I cover vowel sounds.