D3DX9_40.dll is going to be required if you want to run Touhou 12: Undefined Fantastic Object. Never fear, I have a download link for you as always.
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?gytuyhz5n2k
Be sure to place this .dll in your C:\Windows\system folder or it will not work.
I found an interesting post on the GameSpot forums linking to an interesting study done in the realm of Touhou music. The strong influences the game presentation has on personal opinion makes the results very surprising for a hardcore Touhou fan. I sure as hell was shocked by their findings.
The post is copy pasta’d below:
There was a video on niconico showing the the rankings of the top 50 best Touhou songs, decided by people who don’t even know Touhou. A group of Touhou fans gathered 100 people and sent them mp3 files of EVERY song from windows Touhou games (only ones composed by ZUN from the fighting games), and gave them 3 months to listen to them all a few times and decide which ones they like. It makes you realize just how important the characters, the bullet patterns, and the whole presentation is in makin us decide on our favorite songs.
Here’s the video: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm6210076
In case you’re too lazy to watch the video or to make a nicovideo account, here’s the list:
50. Love Colored Master Spark
48. Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke
48. A Flower-Studded Sake Dish on Mt. Ooe
47. Energy Daybreak ~ Future Dream…
46. Wind God Girl
45. A God That Misses People ~ Romantic Fall
43. Phantom Ensemble
43. Heartfelt Fancy
42. Charming Domination
41. Extend Ash ～ Hourai Victim
40. Faith is for the Transient People
39. Catastrophe in Bhava-agra ~ Wonderful Heaven
38. Gensokyo Millennium ～ History of the Moon
36. Solar Sect of Mystic Wisdom ~ Nuclear Fusion
36. Fall of Fall ~ Autumnal Waterfall
35. Crimson Belvedere ~ Eastern Dream…
34. A Maiden’s Illusionary Funeral ~ Necro-Fantasy
33. Voyage 1970
31. The Doll Maker of Bucuresti
31. Oriental Dark Flight
30. Septette for the Dead Queen
29. Flowering Knight
27. Shanghai Teahouse ~ Chinese Tea
27. The Gensokyo The Gods Loved
25. Deaf to all but the Song
25. Maiden’s Capriccio ～ Dream Battle
24. Border of Life
23. Voyage 1969
22. Hiroari Shoots a Strange Bird ~ Till When?
20. Beloved Tomboyish Girl
20. The Venerable Ancient Battlefield ~ Suwa Foughten Field
19. Sleepless Night of the Eastern Country
18. Lunatic Eyes ～ Invisible Full Moon
15. U.N. Owen was her?
15. Doll Judgment ~ The Girl who Played with People’s Shapes
15. Akutagawa Ryuunosuke’s “Kappa” ~ Candid Friend
14. Shanghai Alice of Meiji 17
13. Touhou Judgement in the Sixtieth Year ~ Fate of Sixty Years
11. Flight of the Bamboo Cutter ～ Lunatic Princess
11. Green-Eyed Jealousy
10. Bloom nobly, cherry blossoms of Sumizome ~ Border of Life
8. Locked Girl ~ The Girl’s Secret Room
8. Plain Asia
7. Demistify Feast
6. Cinderella Cage ～ Kagome-Kagome
5. Wind Circulation ~ Wind Tour
4. Satori Maiden ~ 3rd eye
3. Native Faith
2. Dark Side of Fate
1. The Fantastic Legend of TohnoWow. Who would have expected PCB’s second level theme would win Number 1?
By the way, NecroFantasia ranked 55 and Hartmann’s Youkai Girl ranked 62.
Verrry interesting. Considering my favorites included NecroFantasia and Hartmann’s Youkai Girl.
Boy, what an amazing series this was back in the day. I bought the game at an Electronics Boutique along with the old NTSC model Playstation 2 back in the winter of 2002, with the help of my grandma’s funds because I had good grades and I earned it (yeah, right). I didn’t even expect to like it so much when I first slipped it into the disc tray and closed it. Like sealing my fate for another 50+ hours of gameplay consisting of all-nighters and “all-dayers”. I simply loved it. I even challenged the Expert Mode. But that wasn’t until I had beaten the Normal mode about 3 other times. However, my Expert run was never completed, and I got stuck at the final Riku battle at Hollow Bastian, spamming Ars Arcanum and Elixirs for naut, just to have him kill me over and over with some random critical hit that he scored. And then I deleted that save because I hate to pick up old saves. Maybe I’ll find it in me again to beat it on Expert, but that’s besides the matter.
I picked up the sequel as soon as it came out. My little brother was the one to beat me to it though, to my surprise. Since he was young, he had that aspect about him where he would fight about everything being his, so that made Kingdom Hearts II really difficult to play with him lurking over my shoulders, harassing me to get his fix.
At any rate, Kingdom Hearts went portable with Chain of Memories on the Game Boy Advance, which I was unable to play. This angered me. It angered me so much that I couldn’t play any Kingdom Hearts game until after I had played Chain of Memories. And then they released Re: Chain of Memories for the Playstation 2, which was a miracle. However, I have only seen a copy of it on the shelf once in my life, and I was a bit in a financial bind, and I never got to see it again. My next visit to the same shelf turned up nothing. So I may never get to play Re: Chain of Memories. Not in Sweden, no. I now am a proud owner of a black NTSC-U PS2 Slim and I can’t just buy it in Sweden. Even though I have seen the PAL versions on the shelves laughing at me with a 145 SEK (about $20) price tag. Major sigh. I will have to import from Ebay and then pay taxes for it and everything. This country makes it difficult, really. Not to mention that I’m current short on cash and income is also slim as the PS2 Slim itself.
What makes matters worse is that they have come up with three more installations to the series since I last got to beat Kingdom Hearts II. But I haven’t been able to play any of them either. Not because I don’t want to. It’s because they are for three different platforms. Why does every series in the gaming world have to go multi-platform after years of dedication to a single platform? Kingdom Hearts started off as a very successful Playstation 2 series and now they are going mobile, on the DS, and even the PSP. I don’t even own the PSP. And Mobile games? No. I am lucky enough to own two DSs now, but what if I didn’t have them? This isn’t the only series to screw people over by bouncing consoles as if they were lovers getting stale. How promiscuous can they be?
It’s all about the money. It’s sad but it’s true. A top-star series like Kingdom Hearts going on mobile phones? That’s really going to boost mobile phone sales. I don’t know what kind of settlement Square Enix got out of that one but I bet it was a heck of one if they were motivated enough to release an installment to such a great series on such an obscure device. I don’t even like mobile phones.
That’s it for today folks. I’m burned out and it’s almost 2 AM.
Final Edit: Don’t even get me started on the Japan exclusive Final Mixes.
So this will be the first post of a new category I’ll experiment with. I have decent writing skills and it’s time I tried my hand at … *drumroll* reviewing!
—–
Social networking. An aspect that’s been popularized by MySpace ages back. Not something I was always fond of. It was force fed to me by my sister around 2003 while I was in junior high school in Nevada. It was fun for a while. It sure as hell was. I won’t deny that. However, a second look at MySpace in this day and age, nearing the turn of the decade, the place has become nothing but a big nest for stalkers, pedophiles, criminals, spam… you name it. Facebook will probably reach the dark ages if it hasn’t already. With the introduction of user based applications, and the ability to add them at a whim, has also thrown Facebook into nothing but a huge spamfest. Sure, it’s customizable, but there should be a limit to this. It clutters pages, it lags computers, it eats up CPU. Same goes for those terrible Flash ads, but that’s a totally different rant altogether (which I’ve now downloaded FlashBlock for Mozilla Firefox for that reason alone). Let’s face it, social networking is a good idea gone sour. I would rather depend on word of the mouth, cellphones, etc. If I wanted to create a website, I would do it myself. Like this one. I also messed around with a free Webs account. It’s better to get your own domain. More on those in a different post. 
Twitter, yet another free service (I wonder how they get that funding), is, long story short, a website where one can post about anything and everything (lots of other places I can do that) but the catch is, it can only be 140 characters long. This means that you can’t really blog about anything, it limits posts to mere trivia; you simply can’t say enough. Why would we even care if John went to get a sandwich? Or that Wendy went to McDonald’s instead? Why do we even need to expose our private, daily routines to absolute strangers or even our friends? I’ve tried it first hand and the preface was nice and simplistic, but the execution wasn’t too good. I felt the web interface was a little absurd (you can’t post from the Home page, you have to be on your Profile page, for instance).
My verdict would be that the site generally is useful for brief, quick, trivial posts and notices, but unless you convince everybody in the workplace, your friends list, or forum to sign up for Twitter, chances are your only followers will be spam. Or nothing, if you set it to Private.
Edit: Wow. They actually have a blog theme called P2 that is inspired by Twitter. This just allows for a great multitude of trivial blog posts. What’s the point of that? Blogs are meant for insightful, meaningful entries. Not a place to post little bits and pieces. This is all about creative writing. Quality over quantity. 
It’s time to bring this blog back up. I had a huge overhaul in my life as of late, including a huge relocation from the USA to Sweden. I haven’t done an overseas move since I moved from Japan in the year 2000-2001. At any rate, expect more content. I need a blog and starting a new one somewhere else isn’t the answer; not this time. >:) Those who don’t know me enough understand that I constantly find myself obsessed with having to renew things or start over fresh. But that’s not exactly the best way to live, so I’m changing this aspect of myself as well.
I might start blogging about other subjects instead of only Touhou or Gaming. This blog is going to hit V2.0~!
P.S. What’s with the category “1″ that keeps automatically appearing every time I forget to categorize something? Sometimes it still appears even when I’ve properly categorized. Hmm… Someone give me some feedback about this. That means you, current/future readers. 
Here’s a remix from Kota-rocK of The Road of the Apotropaic God ~ Dark Road, Mountain of Faith’s stage 2 theme. It gives off a dark vibe and maybe something gothic, maintaining deeper, bolder style than the original, as expected.
Enjoy the music.
Remix:
鼓太蝋 – Hide and Seek
Kota-rocK – 風の音塊 -道中編-
Original:
Mountain of Faith Stage 2 Theme
The Road of the Apotropaic God ~ Dark Road
The video that started the whole “Get Down” fad. Except this is far funnier than anything else ever posted regarding the spaz dance. Personally, I haven’t laughed this hard in a very long time.
Yeah, the U.N. Owen remixes are everywhere and a tiring meme, but this was worth a post.
Final stage in Mountain of Faith. The climatic battle against a god. Most notable is her 094-097 Spellcards. 「マウンテン・オブ・フェイス」 “Mountain of Faith” (Easy/Normal) and 「風神様の神徳」 “Virtue of Wind God” (Hard/Lundatic) respectively. It’s a total blast to play.
Recent Comments