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EP. REVIEW: 16bit Sensation: Another Layer


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Kiwi93



Joined: 08 Dec 2022
Posts: 379
PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2023 11:39 am Reply with quote
Really loving this show so far! I feel like this will become a hidden gem this season.
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Joe Mello



Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 2302
Location: Online Terminal
PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2023 11:49 am Reply with quote
I do wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes. I mean, the main character's name is Leaf, and two male characters adjacent to the story are named Mamoru and Touya (okay that last bit may be a stretch but anything is possible).

Definitely recommend the '06 Kanon anime just as a watch in general.
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nyaa



Joined: 27 Oct 2022
Posts: 148
PostPosted: Thu Oct 19, 2023 4:34 pm Reply with quote
This my second favorite show so far, I can really relate to it as I was a rabid gamer in the late 80's and 90's.
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Netero



Joined: 10 Jun 2018
Posts: 172
PostPosted: Thu Oct 26, 2023 2:46 pm Reply with quote
> streamlining development and lowering the overall know-how that informs game development

I get the feeling that the people who wrote Mamoru's "concerns" never had to cope themselves with the transition from DOS to Windows!
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JustMonika



Joined: 17 Jan 2022
Posts: 1143
PostPosted: Fri Oct 27, 2023 3:08 am Reply with quote
Netero wrote:
> streamlining development and lowering the overall know-how that informs game development

I get the feeling that the people who wrote Mamoru's "concerns" never had to cope themselves with the transition from DOS to Windows!


When I had my first computer back in the 90's, I would delete Windows alot of times to save on memory and I primarily used DOS as is for gaming and BBS's.
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Vanadise



Joined: 06 Apr 2015
Posts: 529
PostPosted: Thu Nov 02, 2023 11:50 pm Reply with quote
Netero wrote:
I get the feeling that the people who wrote Mamoru's "concerns" never had to cope themselves with the transition from DOS to Windows!

It actually felt to me like they were practically quoting programmers from that era. I knew multiple programmers who hated the transition to Windows because they wanted direct control over the hardware and not to deal with a software abstraction layer.
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Azure Chrysanthemum



Joined: 23 Apr 2023
Posts: 140
PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2023 8:17 pm Reply with quote
The Y2K coverage simultaneously made me laugh with nostalgia and also crumble to dust at the reminder of my age.
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Emerje



Joined: 10 Aug 2002
Posts: 7400
Location: Maine
PostPosted: Thu Nov 09, 2023 8:30 pm Reply with quote
I really enjoyed this episode. The series needed a real moment of despair for the company. Until now their problems have been hurtles, but this one is more like a pole vault. Can't wait to see how they overcome it. And for goodness sake don't give that girl any alcohol, if she passes out it's all over!

Emerje
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FlamingFirewire



Joined: 03 Jun 2013
Posts: 467
PostPosted: Fri Nov 10, 2023 12:25 am Reply with quote
Love how the show keeps being more than I expect from it week-to-week. Aoi Koga continues to put in what I think is a great performance for the MC, with some more intensity than seen in previous episodes by way of the concluding monologue from episode 6.

Not specific to this episode, but of note is the ending song Link~past and future~ - Lyrics by KOTOKO (extremely prolific artist who's been around anything "otaku" adjacent for some time now), Composition by Shinji Orito (famous for compositions across a lot of VisualArts/Key's), and Arrangement by Tomoyuki Nakazawa (I've composer who's worked on many Visual Novels since the 90s & composer of some of the music for Little Busters!).The choice of instrumentation in particular is very reminiscient of some of the greats of the medium.

There was definitely an eye for pulling in creatives within and adjacent to the history it plays off of. Check out any of the names above on Vndb & you'll see what I mean. Smile
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rizuchan



Joined: 11 Mar 2007
Posts: 980
Location: Kansas
PostPosted: Mon Nov 20, 2023 1:21 pm Reply with quote
This is probably just my inner IT person speaking, but honestly the solution Konoha found in this episode disappointed me a bit. For one, because blowing everyone away with technology from the future that unobtainable there feels kind of like an unfair advantage. But more importantly than that... Mamoru making a cluster of PC-98s to simulate multicore processing might not be completely farfetched (although I'm not exactly familiar with the platform) but just because he can come up with a PC to develop this technology doesn't mean consumer PCs and consoles can run it.

I know, I'm not supposed to take it so seriously, but it just seemed kinda jarring how the early episodes put a lot of emphasis on the creative shortcuts old games took precisely because of technological limitations of consumer devices, so it feels like kind of a cop-out to suddenly be using future technology. It's not like these developers didn't have million color illustrations and animations simply because they never thought of it - even if they hand painted CGs and scanned them in, file size on HDDs less than a gig becomes a problem real quick.

But maybe all my complaints will be resolved in the next couple of episodes, I'm certainly curious to see.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber



Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2510
PostPosted: Mon Nov 20, 2023 1:34 pm Reply with quote
rizuchan wrote:
just because he can come up with a PC to develop this technology doesn't mean consumer PCs and consoles can run it


He's not proposing the game itself be calibrated to his multicore machine, though, I don't think? I might be misremembering, but I thought it was specifically the software for generating artistic assets that his amalgam machine was built to support. That seems more plausible to me---generating artistic assets in the first place often requires more resources than displaying those resources once rendered, optimized, and packaged together.
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blahmoomoo



Joined: 27 Jan 2020
Posts: 499
PostPosted: Mon Nov 20, 2023 1:59 pm Reply with quote
rizuchan wrote:
But more importantly than that... Mamoru making a cluster of PC-98s to simulate multicore processing might not be completely farfetched (although I'm not exactly familiar with the platform) but just because he can come up with a PC to develop this technology doesn't mean consumer PCs and consoles can run it.


I think he was trying to demonstrate a far simplified Live2D that would move layers without any of the complex morphing. Something that should be possible on the Dreamcast and soon-to-be-released PS2, and likely possible on medium- to high-tier PCs with Pentium IIs or IIIs in late 1999 (surely with the option to turn that feature off; some VNs of the early 2000s do have options to turn off animations like, say, falling leaf overlays).

The use of the PC-98 stacks makes this more confusing than it should be. I think the main point here is that Mamoru never stopped loving the PC-98 and his wizardry with the bare metal made it easier to make out-of-era software for building games than he could with an IBM-compatible/Windows system. Presumably, he'll also make it easy to export to machines and consoles that are more in use.
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WatcherZer



Joined: 29 Dec 2016
Posts: 302
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2023 5:38 pm Reply with quote
The computer stacks were to power the digital compositing of the ludicrous number of layers during the artworks creation, once the artwork has been created its a simple image, it doesnt need extra grunt to display.

Last Waltz game name is obviously a reference to Square being in a similar financial position when they decided to have one last throw of the dice and produce their 'Final Fantasy'. The Last Waltz even featured some classic 2d RPG action.
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egozi14



Joined: 26 Nov 2009
Posts: 103
PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2023 11:45 pm Reply with quote
I find it really funny (yet ironic) how this episode basically joke on how bad anime will be like if it will be nearly-fully dependable on the west, which is a concern most Japanese (and even some non-Japanese) anime fans have,

The ep felt to me like they basically show them "in your face" kind of attitude xD

Jokes aside though I can see not identical but very similar result if Japanese will keep go in the direction they do rn~
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rizuchan



Joined: 11 Mar 2007
Posts: 980
Location: Kansas
PostPosted: Mon Dec 11, 2023 9:48 am Reply with quote
egozi14 wrote:
I find it really funny (yet ironic) how this episode basically joke on how bad anime will be like if it will be nearly-fully dependable on the west, which is a concern most Japanese (and even some non-Japanese) anime fans have, The ep felt to me like they basically show them "in your face" kind of attitude xD


I might be reading way too much into it, but as a fan of "bishoujo games" (visual novels in general) myself, to me it read a step further into a comentary on the state of the visual novel/adventure game/bishoujo game/whatever-you-want-to-call-it market.

Visual novels are really struggling in Japan to the point where, apart from mobile gacha games, the genre may well completely die out. Meanwhile, we're in (or maybe just moving out of) in a visual novel renaissance in the west. There are more translated games than ever, and western-made visual novels are overtaking game store platforms. At the same time, Steam, and to a lesser extent Sony, are cracking down hard on any perceived underage sexual content, to the point that there are Japanese developers moving away from school settings lest Steam ban them for having characters that wear school uniforms. (I'm not saying this to incite an argument on censorship wars, just pointing out that profits from the west are great enough that these policies are actually affecting decisions at the development level of these games).

Essentially, "The progressively heavier western influence on bishoujo games is killing moe". - I don't think the show really intends to make that heavy of a statement, but... it kinda seemed like that's what they were getting at.
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