Rendy's Battle Report 04: IT'S A NEW RUMBLE! YES IT IS!

The King of all updates is here!

The first time a Developer's Note about a future collaboration in The King of Fighters ALL STAR surfaced, nobody would guess what the next one will be. People have been pointing on Gintama, an anime series whose collaboration in the game was established in the Japanese version, as the next collaboration. However, this is a "special collaboration that no one would have expected" as the game's Chief Producer said, ruling out what could've been an established collaboration coming to Global. The next couple of days, the collaboration teaser gave hints of wrestling, and eventually the deal was made: it is, without a doubt the one and only, the WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment, bringing six of wrestling's well-known superstars to the game where fighters who "shot fires, lightnings, and all kinds of things" (if you actually paid attention to Kofi Kingston's dialogue) battle.

Along with the three-week collaboration full of moments and challenges comes a new gameplay system as well, with Unified System, New Infinite Repeat Summon, and others, as well as new gameplay mechanics.

Rendy's Battle Report 03: Keeping Up with the Power Creeps

This post contains spoilers for the storyline of The King of Fighters ALL STAR

First of all, Eid Mubarak to all readers of the blog! We went on a different Ramadan in which things worked out differently due to the ongoing Covid-19 lockdown, but after all it's the same 'ol fasting month. Happy Eid Mubarak to everyone except to those people who had the nerve to populate several places despite being advised to stay at home already. I don't care if it's nostalgia or not, you all suck, and you should've deserved some Attitude Adjustment.

In the last post, I purposely skipped one thing that was happening during the False Halloween entirety because this topic needs its own section since the last post was also long, a fruit of my posting absence: The Platinum Battle Card Summon. It is the banner that gave player a chance to obtain any of the six-star Battle Cards at a rate of 2%:, be it a fighter-specific 3PG Special Card, a fighter-specific option card, or even the first six-star set in the Global: Light and Shadow, featuring Noah. However, it's not just the Noah set that's got a spotlight, the False Halloween set is this too; Time for Medical Checkup offers more balanced buffs and damage galore useful for those who have Strike skills, with CP buffs worth more than the existing 5-tier cards, even the Tekken set.

Obviously mobile games are subject to Power Creeps where, every update, there's always either a better unit and/or a better item obtainable in some way, but with the caveat that the player will go extra mile to get any of them, be it in events that would require an amount of upgrades (like in the case of Real Racing 3's events, whether it's Track Day, Special Event, or Limited Time Series) or perhaps a gacha where the drop rate is generally less than one percent, like what we're talking about right now...

Facing the Outbreak

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I start my year posting again in an unfortunate timing, but here goes something... ☕

A post shared by Rendy Andrian Y (@tsukasa_kadoya) on Apr 9, 2020 at 3:55am PDT

As we all know, the Coronavirus (Covid-19) disease kept claiming its victims throughout the world and we still do our best to flatten the progressively-climbing curve. So many things have been postponed or even canceled to an extent, all to avoid potential spreading of the virus. However, not all hope is lost as a slew of new events, mostly e-Sports series. To this day, the pandemic still continues until God knows when, hopefully that this can be over soon although it won't be that soon.

As for myself, well, the past couple of months have been, if I can say so myself, just like last year, only with a couple of differences here and there. Last year, I just completed distributing my Bachelor's thesis and prepared myself for the road towards graduation which was at the end of June and searched for jobs in-between. This year, I stay home with my family still and went to zero destination due to the pandemic (except for buying necessities) and a month ago I am finally employed in a social organization after no luck in numerous interviews. Apart from that, I spent my time more on mobile gaming than doing anything on PC.

Rendy's Battle Report 02: The N Word

Disclaimer: No offensive remarks were made at the making of this post.

While I've been absent on writing for the past couple of weeks due to job search (and eventually landed on one, thankfully), I've been getting a lot of great stuffs in The King of Fighters ALL STAR. Initially, this post would detail the Wonderland and Valentine events plus all the roulette fighters and new summon systems, then proceeded with Samurai Shodown collaboration in the next one, since, at the time of this post, we're in the last stretch of the False Halloween event. However, I feel like given the lack of Wonderland and Valentine fighters I have and having no roulette characters won, plus my absence, things will go a little bit lengthy here.

Basically, the first quarter of 2020, despite the current affairs happening right now, was an eventful one for KOF AS. Athena in Wonderland and Valentine events were ran in the Global server, and the second collaboration with Samurai Shodown went pass by with a great success. Aside from them, lots of fighters were offered in different ways: '99 Krizalid, '03 Terry Bogard, NESTS Style Kyo from XIII, '03 Mukai, XIV Nakoruru, and 2001 Igniz were obtainable via their respective gacha while NESTS fighters make their way to the spotlight in their respective roulette events, with Whip, Kula Diamond, Angel, and Leona make their original series debut after making their debut in ALL STAR costumes, and even '98 Mai and 2001 May Lee joined the roulette fun. Past FES fighters are also offered via the new Summon System which I will detail within the next set of paragraphs...

RnTheAndrian Goes Professional!

After a number of considerations, I have decided that maintaining my Behance profile is the way to go. Despite my lack of luck in job interviews for the past year, I always wanted to have a portfolio page where I can dump some of my works there. Previously, I crammed in a number of works on my CV file within the second page. It did help, but the portfolio within the CV didn't have that much kick.

Before this, I opened a deviantArt account years back, but has since never touched it, ever. Despite intentions of posting my works there, no execution of any kind was done despite even I featured my own dA account on the site at some point. The idea of an online portfolio has never gotten into me until earlier this year in a bid to create a much better portfolio than just a series of personal work dumps within the CV. This is what drove me to eventually create a Behance account and start posting my projects a couple of days later, but obviously I will need more work in presentation remembering that this is my first time I created an online portfolio. Apparently, this website's ability to showcase work portfolio isn't limited to graphic design projects so I can dump a number of web design and motion graphic stuffs as well.

My biggest conflict was my amount of personal projects against the number of projects I actually did for organizations and stuffs, but that stems from my comparing own works with those with years of work experiences. Even before I conceived an online portfolio, I always thought that my works were "just stuffs" and that's it, apart from my organizational works that is. I ended up with inserting a logo for my friend's Instagram-based shop, a number of 3D works (including the low-poly racing scene and the low-poly Earp Homestead), and even cars from Turbo Sliders and MiniRacingOnline. Yes, I actually put game stuffs as graphic assets worthy of being featured in portfolio, because why not? These are scratch-made after all. If Bao T. Nguyen's Auto Modellista-inspired creation thought me something about how great personal projects are done, why not? Those doubts has been vanished, though it kinda needed its own media as time goes. Also, the VS Racing 2 work by Martin Öberg got me thinking about how treating my Turbo Sliders cars as enhanced graphical assets in addition of being an add-on as well. Worth to try!

Please do enjoy my online portfolio! More projects will be added soon as time goes. I hope you readers enjoy my works as much as I do!

~[R]

Let's Make a Fan Fiction, Again!

Towards the end of January, I found myself fleshing out my mega-crossover fan fiction project at a random whim. I don't know why but a thought of making a crossover fan fiction has finally kicked in after a long time. I mean, I've actually wanted to make one but had to put it in a perpetual backburner due to a lot of stuffs for some reason, and now suddenly I got back here again after not doing anything story-related for a couple of years.

Long story short, I've had two three projects when it comes to fan fiction, at least those with released chapters. First one is a street racing fan fiction with an outlandish concept where cars can even drive inside shopping malls (but stopped halfway through), second one is a competition-themed fan fiction between television shows that has seen two seasons with the third being worked on until it wasn't, and the third is a version of that but this time with teams of three being featured and has bigger numbers of competing teams. Three different fan fictions, three different places, but all share the same thing: I hate how I executed them nowadays. So now I ended up conceiving a concept for the new one.

Rendy's Battle Report 01: The Festive Fest Units Festival

Obey the tier list! Obey the tier list! Obey the tier list!

First of all, this post is way belated than planned since I'm still on a job search at the moment, among others. Thankfully, I managed to snag an interview last Thursday. Hopefully I can get employed because that's what all matters for me now.

Realizing that I've been more active than ever in The King of Fighters ALL STAR, I've decided that I'll be making some sort of random recaps of my progress in the same vein as my car skinning progresses. Playing this game for about more than 100 days realized that I'm on my phase where I've become grown with the KOF universe, and ALL STAR has cemented that. The scavenger hunt for KD-0079 origins and getting into the rabbit's hole has really helped, and it seems that my new gaming pattern has been shaped yet again after being broken during my first discovery.

The Decade's End (Entering the new one)

I actually revisited my Bachelor's thesis presentation art and turned it into a New Year's festivity. Helps that it also doubles as a one-year anniversary of my document's completion.

At last, the 2010s has finally ended and we're now into a new decade. If I have to be honest, it's been quite an emotional ride, both personally and on the internet. Coming to the decade with a "brute force" approach and progressively gaining purpose on what I've been doing, and later leaning towards real-life stuffs as the decade's conclusion came closer, it has been ten years full of all ups and downs as I learned and discovered new stuffs.