melos han-tani

[han-tani]

My new game Angeline Era is now out on steam!! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2393920

Every level is hidden in plain sight in this nonlinear 3D Action-Adventure game! Travel a vast country's unmarked overworld in search of the next challenging fight, humorous encounter, or mysterious landscape. YOU decide what you discover next in this world of Fae, Humans and Angels!

[han-tani]

My next game Angeline Era's coming out on December 8th! Wishlist it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2393920

Every level is hidden in plain sight in this nonlinear Action-Adventure game! Travel a vast country's unmarked overworld in search of the next challenging fight, humorous encounter, or mysterious landscape. YOU decide what you discover next in this world of Fae, Humans and Angels!

The Angel's mothership, Throne, lays dormant behind a fierce storm. To reach it, unlock its secrets, and usher in the future, you must explore the land of Era and survive its trap-filled ruins, primordial forests, treacherous mountains, mines, and more! Overcome intense battles and hilarious hazards in this tale of betrayal, haunting lore, and fruitless yearning.

Streamer/Press interested in a review code? Reach out via e-mail or DM on bsky/X! Press kit: https://impress.games/press-kit/analg...

On launch, will supports English, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Simplified Chinese

Game will launch w/ 20% sale! Base (undiscounted) price:

USD 24.99 / EUR 23.99 / GBP 20.99 / AUD 36.99 / CAD 32.99 /R$74.99 / JPY 3200 / CNY 95.00

[han-tani]

Screenshot from my upcoming game! Learn more here https://han-tani.itch.io/analgesic-game-5-devlog/devlog/459828/001-art-tests-dev-timeline

[han-tani]

I'm happy to announce...

Anodyne 2's coming in MAY!

Explore 3D landscapes, shrink to 2D places, and cleanse the world's Nano Dust!

Wishlist on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/877810/Anodyne_2_Return_to_Dust/

Follow on Twitter for news: https://twitter.com/sean_htch

Kartridge: http://kartridge.com/games/SeanHanTani/anodyne-2-return-to-dust

Join our newsletter: http://analgesic.productions 

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: http://youtube.com/watch?v=lfNOQsoILBY

[han-tani]

drink review:　さらっとしぼったオレンジ

“SWIMMINGLY SQUEEZED ORANGE (JUICE)”

I bought a large can of this for one hundred and ten yen from a vending machine.

It is worth 110 yen

It was hot and we had not found a vending machine for a few minutes, so I panic bought this. Of course there were many more vending machines seconds after I went to this one.

As I expected this ended up having lots of sugar. 50 grams of it. 200 calories per 490 ml can . you know when i buy these i’m like ‘maybe this one won’t have sugar. maybe this time it will be different... oh hm nope..’

The taste is kind of like a mix between actual orange juice and the really fake bad stuff, but watered down and somehow still in posession of lots of sugar. there is pulp inside.

I would never buy this again in the rest of my life.

it kind of seems like the arizona iced tea of japan

0/10

[han-tani]

The meaning of The Witness (Part 1 of 3)

Promoted from our Community Blogs, Promoted Blog. Hi - this is Part 1 of an essay about the game The Witness! This part tries to establish what The Witness is trying to convey, then, I ...

check out my critical essay on the new game The Witness! part 1 of 3

[han-tani]

THE WITNESS THOUGHTS (part 1)

SPOILERS

Here are my thoughts on The Witness after playing it for 6.5 hours. I intend to keep playing.

Lots of spoilers obviously.

I have finished almost four of the main areas, 160 puzzles in total, and 15 or so "Meta-puzzles".

Overall I like the game. Let's talk about things I don't like first.

The audio logs are kind of odd. You are forced to listen through them and they are scattered and not archived in one place, minus the "Hexagon Videos". They quote things from 700 AD chinese people to einstein to some science historian. They range from confusing hard to glean from almost-nonsense like the chinese person, to sometimes encouraging views on relating to humanity, to disturbing things like 'pro-science anti-art' views, or disturbing ideas like 'we should all just hold hands and be friends.' In short it's a really big mixed bag of names and people . If there is any upside to this, maybe people will google peoples' names and then read books. Although if it's certain peoples' books maybe that is not a good thing. to be honest if i want narrative things or good written arguments i will read book or watch film

I get this sense the game might say something like "work hard, observe, and you can do anything", which is kind of this meritocracy ideology which doesn't really woork in real life

i see a lot of statements about the world science and relgion but nothing about class race or gender

my god if this ends up being about 'pro SCIENCE AND MATH... down with emotional art' i will scream. but i get the sense it is not (at leats completely), given the range of quotes, some dealing with "Zen". there was literally some guy who sort of condescendingly said 'viewing art is a 3rd-hand interpretation... science is facts!" this guy was James Burke by the way in the video "Yesterday tomorrow and you"

speaking of zen, there is an obvious uh... 'eastern' influence in the game. honestly i don't mind, the spaces are interesting and the game hasn't explicitly said any goofy ass shit about eastern ideology, though one audio log was kind of weird.

i hope this isn't about 'pure game design' or whatever. i know blow has very strong opinions.

Let's talk about mixed-feel things

the meta-puzzles. they are kind of cool. they basically involve finding circle-shaped things in the environment (can be as big as a pond) - often you have to line up your perspective just right, then drawing a line through some line-shaped thing in the environment. it's kind of hard to explain but if you've seen those photos of stuff that looks like drawings on walls but from another perspective it is very fragmented, it's that kind of thing

i like th emeta-puzzles because they encourage a more detailed act of looking. I dislike them because it's kind of just about looking for circles and lines. but i like htem because perhaps it can encourage a player - maybe subconsciously - to actively look more in real life? maybe this leas to heightened social sconsciousness. but that is all tenous and hard to really judge.

the meta puzzles and some other weird puzzles i ahvent figured out more or less create  'The Classiest Collectathon".

The game is 'open world' but is composed of modular areas, somehow not awkwardly transitioning from one to another despite their visual differences. these modular areas consist of linear sets of puzzles. so in a way your hand is kind of held, but it's fun and interesting. i don't know. because the puzzles exist on panels in a 3d space, the puzzles usually have you or give you a chance to look at the 3d environment or walk around it while you think, which is a nice feeling and emulates working on problems in real life to an extent - like writers block or coding problems or email writing etc

the game is very heavily designed and detailed. idk if i like or dislike this yet. it's cool. but also kind of like, stuff could almost be anywhere. right now, i perceive this as a tasteful and more interesting version of how castlevania hides shit in walls.

and now some positives.

there's some cool environment observation puzzles! boiling down to gimmicks usually - but idk they've been pretty fun and interesting uses of lighting, textures, shadows.

the open world format is neat because you can kind of relax and step away from stuff that is hard. idk i liek this. it grants value to spaces in the game without any 'puzzle elements'

puzzles are fun!!! even if they are linear

pretty art!

good sound effects!

the density of the spaces is very neat in that there is not a lot of repetition in terms of space-feels and stuff. so there's lots of little ideas for designing 3d spaces i think. despite the islands unrealistic flora and color variance, walking about it feels pretty natural to the woods or whatever. they put a lot of work into the architecture history and it shows

[eventheocean]

New website and trailer!

Check it out: www.eventheocean.com

[han-tani]

New essay: “Anxious Mobile Photography and its Alternate Modes of Vision”

Read here: https://medium.com/p/ef7c300945f0

It’s an accessible essay about some ideas around mobile photography I’ve had recently as well as a look at some photos I took exploring those ideas.

Excerpt:

[han-tani]

Today in “Good Call, Google Photos” (where I search through my collection of photos using Google Photos automatic keyword generating system)

[han-tani]

xmas 2015

The breakdown of the marketing illusion of the Christmas season has been funny this year - between dusty marble staircases (decline of modernity?) in Chicago’s downtown Macy’s department store, to the contrast of the nostalgic snow-and-lights ads with the downtown area looking more like the beginning of Spring.

At the same time, I wonder if these traditions will begin to die off. Certainly the past decades, consumers have grown to recognize the illusion-like natures of a lot of what we consume and participate in. The contrast of the Chicago’s warm, snow-less winter and the idealization within marketing is one of the more striking examples of this (a Japanese catalog of ‘seasonal marketing colors’ in a Taipei bookstore comes to mind. When in Japan this summer, the change of the colors in shops’ advertisements was striking during the movement from Summer to Fall - artificial, yet hard to not feel like the seasons had definitely changed.)

These “new”, remixed, slightly different products, in every area of interest - it’s been a trend in nearly everything, the buying into and consumption of repetitive, slightly remixed experiences. Anime, manga, video games - both “Indie” and “AAA”, music, contemporary art, novels, popular movies, photographs, expensive restaurants, TV shows, youtube channels... Everyone is a connoisseur in their own way. The next TV show about the next group of a particular race, representation, but is there meaningful political change outside of that? Steps, at least. More action movies. More video game HD remakes. More indie games inspired by the same game design tropes. Etc.

Because of so many ways for people to build their consumer identity, there are more ways to achieve small levels of fame than ever, more subcommunities to join, more things one can collect and be knowledgable. Social media networks, plus this, perhaps lead us to pursue followings.. at whatever cost.

This way of consuming, the Internet is optimized for it. Yet maybe being caught in knowing the differences between thing X and thing Y, knowing their pros and cons, maybe there is a way to go past those sorts of consumptive patterns, because despite the diversity and ease of producing creative works, it is still easy to be stuck in trends, trends that continue to perpetuate the current society’s condition.

Anyways, it is hard to say what to do, exactly. Some level of this consumption feels healthy - escapism from the world. We should continue to encourage each other to be critical of the world, expand our interests... if we have the time, I guess. Anyways, Merry Christmas.

[han-tani]

otaku: japan’s Database animals

I read this

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6405096-otaku

here’s my short ‘review’, though the other reviews are worth reading bc i skip stuff everyone mentions.

It’s a book from 2001 about the change in consumption patterns among the otaku subculture in Japan during hte 80s and 90s. and then applies this to postmodern theory things like decline of grand narratives, simulacra, and talks about this database model for how otaku consume. these terms are fancy sounding but easy to get a partial grasp of via google. basically the way the pomo theory works is to kind of convey how these ideas generalize into habits that people do  today.

Other reviews get the point across pretty well. Some arguments are overly-represented or fuzzy, but the writing is a deliberate attempt to be clear, which is nice for a change. I think the author is a ‘critic’, not a ‘scholar’, so there’s not tons of citing and stuff and stuff is sort of passed over. but  the argument re: manga is that otaku started to consume in a ‘database’ fashion, where they look for new combinations of existing ‘moe’ elements, and that consumption has turned towards more instant, drug-like emotional gratification rather than any sort of deeper analysis beyond feeling good.  I'd be interested to see more contemporary writings. This is from 2001, and while it has very interesting analyses of visual novel hentai games from that era, since then we've seen a huge boom in public visibility of video games, formation of 'classic gamers' and 'contemporary gamer' subgroups, etc. I was too young in 2001 to really know how those groups compare to now, but the phenomenon he mentions about otaku centering around anime and the 'girl games', certainly exists in a wide variety of media today. Just look at any recent argument over the newest "Smash Bros" character, the fights between groups of game fandoms, the obsession with digging through games' secrets, the way we market games as bullet lists of features. The way fans of games obsess over the next iteration's changes - will shields be better? will this gun have the same recoil? etc. how we stay stuck on nostalgia and desire for modified versions of existing franchises More salient is how we represent ourselves on social media or resumes - bullet point lists, as a set of retweets, liked posts, liked pages, or shares - sets of small sentences, etc. It's a very short read and despite its shortcomings, sheds light on contemporary consumption patterns, so is worth reading.

[seanhtchart]

Two Hundred and Eighty Eight Kilobytes

[han-tani]

I wrote an essay/criticism! It’s about the issues surrounding a French Artist, Alexandre Ouairy, pretended to be a Chinese native, “Tao Hongjing”, for 9 years while practicing art in Shanghai.

Read my essay on medium: https://medium.com/@sean_htch/the-artist-alexandre-ouairy-his-tao-hongjing-project-and-of-course-race-38969abbbc6

reblogs appreciated!

[seanhtchart]

Photo i took on a marunouchi subway train in japan . 

using : phone + instagram filters

[eventheocean]

“You came to play the story called ‘Even the Ocean’, didn’t you?”

Sign up for the exclusive bi-weekly newsletter! http://eventheocean.com/mail.html

[han-tani]

art history according to the history channel