So you may have noticed that the site has been pretty unreliable lately, which is pretty frustrating given that I’m using Dreamhost and they offer about 4TB a month for data transfer. I am using roughly 0.5% of that in a given month, so their server should be able to keep up. But yesterday was sort of the last straw….
The 9 a.m. jump there is where the Joystiq link happened. The dramatic spikes downward are where the server vomited all over itself. That’s, what, five outages? Hoorah for losing half a day’s traffic at the worst possible time! Anyway, I griped a bit and they were nice enough to put me on a new server, which seems all robust and solid and stuff. So that’s good. Please let me know if you see more of those dreaded 500 errors. I want to believe… that they are gone.
Meanwhile, the box art for Dragon Quest Swords has been released into the wild, and at least I understand what the game is about. Clearly, it is about Akira Toriyama diversifying his art style by drawing characters who appear to have escaped from other games:
I don’t think it’s really necessary to call Paine a skank, Parish >:|
Huh, so it really is Toriyama doing the artwork, I had just assumed they hired a poor look-alike for the project.
According to the internet, Dreamhost is the Walmart of web hosting.
Seriously, Toriyama keeps doing the work himself? I believe he has an army of ninja monkeys with pencils.
Said that, I must confess I find attractive the design of the girl… I must be a terrible person.
Toriyama worked very hard to be able to make a tremendous amount of money by only doing video game artwork. I think he only has one assistant; Tori lives outside of Tokyo where assistants are difficult to come by. (See also: Shirow Masamune)
I’m going to create a Spore creature in the shape of your traffic chart, complete with tail and spikey legs.
Hey I use dreamhost too and was having the same issues. I realized there are two issues here. First, their servers run an insanely high load. If you know a bit about unix, go into the shell and check the uptime. The numbers are crazy. Second, I went into the mysql page, created a new database on a different dreamhost server through their interface, and then migrated all our sql over to there. The stability issues went away for the most part.
It may just be that the sql server you are on is overloaded. Try moving yourself to a different server and you should have better luck.
That can’t be Toriyama. It’s missing spikiness.
No, no. Look at the character in the center. There are spikes there, they’ve just been… sat on. Or left out in the sun for too long.
you broke the internets!
that cover art needs more lents flare
I’m surprised the ‘swords’ in the DW logo isn’t saying “I am a recycled joke from an SNL skit making fun of Jeopardy”. That should have been a gimmie. I am so depressingly disappointed that this wasn’t taken advantage of.
And speaking of S-words that one character design is a dead ringer for Shining Force III’s Synbios. Best voice acting ever.
When I saw the Dragon Quest Swords boxart the other day the artwork DID strike me as somehow different from Toriyama’s usual style. Thank you for pointing out to me the reason why.
So what do you guys want then? If he does it his normal way, everyone screams DBZ. If he changes it up, then they’re refugees from other games. Yes, he’s very prolific, but that doesn’t mean he’s bad. There’s a reason his work has been consistently popular for 20 years. I don’t like DBZ that much either, but he’s done others stuff that you can admit to liking without appearing too plebeian to your internet peers. Dr. Slump, for example. You even get extra leetness points because Alexander O. Smith did the translation.
I agree with the earlier poster, though. There are an amusing number of lens flares on the box art.
You had me until “leetness”, but yeah, the first Dragon Ball series was pretty good. The Dragon Warrior cartoon was a massive success in my country. Also: Chrono Trigger. That’s everything I know he’s done besides DBZ and Dr. Slump, which I never got around to watch. But this is an old entry, so I better shut up now.
Worry not. The leetness thing was sarcastic. And yeah, this is an ancient entry.