Enisa 2020

El Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo ya dispone de los fondos para las líneas Enisa. El importe total será de 98,5 millones de euros y se destinará a las 3 líneas Enisa: Enisa jóvenes emprendedores Dirigida a pymes (y startups) de reciente constitución creadas por jóvenes para inversiones que precisa el proyecto en su fase inicial. Entre 25.000 y 75.000 euros con vencimiento a un máximo de 7 años y hasta 5 de carencia. Enisa Emprendedores Dirigida a apoyar las primeras fases de vida de pymes promovidas por emprendedores, sin límite de edad. Entre 25.000 y 300.000 euros a 7 años con hasta 5 de carencia. Enisa Crecimiento Dirigida a apoyar los proyectos empresariales de compañías interesadas en expandir su negocio o lograr una mejora competitiva. Entre 25.000 y 1.500.000 euros a 9 años con hasta 7 de carencia. Si quieres que te ayudemos a conseguir tu Enisa... Haz clic aquí para que te llamemos. Un saludo, Cristina

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Building A Magnetic Model Transport System

Last June I started collecting Convergence of Cyriss.  Since I was getting the faction almost completely by doing model trades, the project turned into a bit more work than I had planned for it as more than half of what I got in trades were in a horrible state.

That said, I did get most of the faction in one swoop and after a bit of hard modeling work, I had everything ready to go.

Except I couldn't really go anywhere with it because as any war gamer knows, you need some kind of transport system for an army.

That's a lot of CoC!

I've typically used Sabol foam trays carried around in a Battle Foam Pack Air case, but huge based models require specialty foam from Battle Foam, and those are pretty pricey - $23 per huge base.  If anyone knows about CoC, they know you will have at least 3 huge bases, and I ended up with 4 after all the trading was done.

I'm looking at almost $100 in foam just for the huge bases, then at roughly $8 per Sabol tray, I'm easily blowing $150 or more getting everything in foam for this faction.  Then I'm lugging the large pack air case plus an old Sabol Army Transport bag to hold my huge bases if I'm using them in my list pair.

There simply had to be a better way. Then the idea hit me...

Magnets!

I went to the local craft store and bought myself some bins that were the same length and width, but had different heights. I did some pre-measuring of each of my huge bases and my "floating" vectors to check heights.

Each bin is 15.5" x 11.5" and I ended up with 5 bins in total: 1x 8.3" tall, 2x 5.6" tall, and 2x 2.9" tall.  The bins were about $12 a piece, but more importantly I wouldn't ever have to buy more in the future. The only recurring cost for this system is going to be purchasing magnets for new models.

Securing the Models

Magnets don't work on plastic, so I needed to line the bottom of my bins with metal. My local big-box hardware store had 1 foot square steel sheet at about $5 per. Not too shabby.  The only problem was that I'd need to shave off some of the sheet to fit into the bottom of my bins. What's more is that while the overall top dimensions of the bins are the same, the bottoms are not.  

There was a bigger problem. I'm not particularly handy, and I don't have a ton of power tools.  What I do have however is my friend Ray.

This is Ray. Ray is handy. Be like Ray.

Ray is one of those guys who makes his own furniture - as a hobby...and the furniture actually looks good when he's done! He's got tools galore and was kind enough to help me out by cutting my metal for me. I had used a pair of metal snips to cut one sheet and it worked, but it didn't look great. Ray sanded that shit down for me and trimmed it up so it looked better. 

So now I had 5 sheets of steel cut to the right size for my bins. 

Mixing Plastic and Steel

Next up I just gotta stick my steel to my bins, should be easy right?

I tried superglue. That failed spectacularly. The steel pulled right off with a tiny bit of tugging. It worked well enough to hold if I didn't rumble it too much, which was good for a short term solution of carrying the CoC to play games locally. 

So next I decided to buy a two part epoxy that said it would work on metal and plastics.  So I put on my gloves, was really careful, sanded down parts of the steel where the super glue didn't take and weighted down my bins:

After 24 hours of curing....the steel peeled right off with just a little bit of force, just like the the superglue. 

At this point I was done trying to find some kind of glue or epoxy based solution. It was time for nuts and bolts. Luckily the bins I bought had the raised section in the middle where I could have the bolt-ends sit while not exceeding the lip of the base of the actual bin (ie. I won't scratch up any tables due to having bolts on the bottom of my bins). 

Construction Tips

One thing I learned: Drilling through steel sheet isn't great if you don't have special drill bits, which not being a handyman, I didn't have.  You can however put a thick nail through the steel pretty easily, which then lets the drill go through easily and drill through the plastic.  I only hammered my thumb once. Ray would be proud. Sorta. 

Because bolts take up model space, and my huge base solution is kind of tight, I elected to only use two bolts per bin rather than 4. I will see how well this holds up, and if I need to secure it more it's easy enough to mark where to put the holes, remove the plates, make the holes, and re-secure it all. 

That said, there's only a tiny bit of wiggle with the two corners secured as it is, so I believe this setup will work.  Here are my results:

Magnet Advice

I recommend buying strong rare earth magnets for this, stronger than what you'd usually buy if you're magnetizing jacks/beasts. Specifically N52 strength is preferred.  I've gotten some magnets off Amazon but the affordable ones there are generally the weaker kind, so I've preferred to get magnets for this from K&J Magnetics. I'm not affiliated with them at all, but I've used them for years and they deliver quality stuff. 

You can get away with cheaper magnets if you use multiple, and cheaper magnets work well for small based plastic models that don't require as much force. Amazon can help out here. 

I actually had quite a few magnets laying around from years gone by which reduced my magnet purchasing requirements a bit.

That said, once you've used the right magnets, everything stays very secure in the bins. I didn't take a picture, but I was able to turn the bin upside down with the models in it and not have any casualties. 

Carrying Solutions

The final bit that isn't finished yet for this is a bag to hold it all. Currently I use a set of straps I had for carrying a PC around to LAN parties to secure the bins and hold my dice bag + widgets.  This works but isn't exactly pretty.

I am lucky in that my wife is a quilter, and she's currently sewing up a bag to hold this in, complete with pockets, straps for easy carrying, and all the rest. I realize not everyone can do this or has the luxury.  The alternative was trying to find a piece of luggage or a transport/case for a sewing machine that would have the internal dimensions to hold my bins. With better planning up front (buy bins that fit in luggage more easily) this is probably more achievable, but again you're still spending a decent amount of money this way. It's still probably less than a equivalent sized Battle Foam bag + rack system, but it's a lot of work to find the right combo of bin + case. 

Costs and Benefits

I started this project thinking it'd be good long term going forward wargaming wise and would save me money. Did it? Yes, but partially because I've cheated.

I am saving a good bit of money and getting a custom case + transport system, but that's really only because my wife isn't charging for her labor to assemble the bag, Ray didn't charge me for cutting the metal to size, and I don' t have to pay myself for all the work I've done getting the bins setup.  I also didn't have to buy lots of my strongest magnets because I already had a bunch from when I played 40k/WHFB. 

I probably could have just spent the extra money up front and bought Battle Foam's Magna-Rack system and one of their cases. They're pretty damn expensive, and you still have to buy the magnets, but it's basically none of the work and it looks great.  My custom case will look as good if not better, but not everyone is married to a quilter with sewing equipment to make a custom bag. 

The real savings are in the fact that going forward for any new armies I ever pick up, I'm using magnets, not foam. 

Magnets can cost up to $0.50 per magnet of the right size/strength, so 100 models is $50 in magnets. Is there really a cost savings here?  I think so, but in hindsight, it's probably not much.

Typically $50 in foam is not going to store 100 models, especially if you're counting lots of bigger models (30mm to 50mm bases) which take up a lot of foam space, but still only require one strong magnet.   Huge bases (120mm) require multiple magnets per, but even then it's only like $2 in magnets as opposed to $22 for a foam tray. 

You can also use weaker magnets for small based plastic models, where the magnet costs are significantly cheaper, especially if you look around on Amazon where you can get 50 to 100 magnets of the right size for something like $15. 

The real savings comes in the fact that once you've bought+built your bins to transport the minis, you can use them with basically any model set you want. Compared to foam where you need to pluck out whatever kind of foam for your specific models. The other benefit is storing models that have long reach weapons or stick out oddly...like Inverters or Reciprocators. 

When it comes to storing models long term (ie. when I'm switched to another army), I can put some metal sheet in larger storage bins and just put my models into one decent sized bin. This is probably more efficient than what I have to do now to store foam trays for models. 

The other benefit is when it comes to going to tournaments. I can fit my two list pair onto a single baking sheet, which makes for a great tournament tray that securely holds everything. I've already attended one event this way and it has worked out great. The baking sheet was something like $5 and slips easily into my bag. 

Overall I'm pretty happy with how the project has come out and I've certainly saved some money going this route, but it's definitely a lot of work to get here.

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Game 380: Mad Paradox (1992)

Spoiler: no explanation is ever given for this title.

       

Mad Paradox

Japan

Queen Soft (developer and Japanese publisher); Samourai (U.S. publisher)

Released 1992 for PC-98; 1994 for FM Towns and DOS

Date Started: 13 September 2020

Date Ended: 14 September 2020

Total Hours: 8

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

      

Nearly 30 years later, I can't even find any evidence that a company called Samourai existed. The title screen of the game itself is the only evidence. I don't know where they were located or who was on the staff. By all appearances, the company seems to have existed solely to bring Mad Paradox to an American market. I desperately want to find the people involved and ask, why Mad Paradox? Why not any of the host of 1980s and early 1990s Japanese PC RPGs that look so much more interesting? There's Fantasian (1985), which coupled first-person dungeon exploration with top-down grid-based tactical combat before Pool of Radiance did it in the U.S. Was SSI influenced by this Japanese game? I'll never know because I can't play it. Paladin (1985) is a fun-looking RPG-platformer hybrid. There's Riglas (1986), an adventure-RPG hybrid with a "studio" perspective that looks like it could have been influenced by Quest for Glory if Riglas hadn't come out first. There's the delightfully weird-looking Panorama Toh (1983). A bunch of other games I know only from intriguing titles: The Magic of Scheherazade (1987), The Return of Ishtar (1987), Zombie Hunter (1987), Bastard (1988), Druid (1988), Slime Master (1989), Another Genesis (1990). There's a Japanese-only fourth entry in the Phantasie series from 1990. The sin of all of these games, I guess, is that they didn't have breasts.

    

Mad Paradox has those, but the game is so inept that it forgets it's an eroge at some point and plays the last third entirely straight. Having played Knights of Xentar (1991) and Cobra Mission (1992) before this one, I had certain expectations, and I was shocked--not disappointed, you understand, just surprised--when the game had no final "reward." 

          

Yes, it's this sort of game. (Censored so my blog doesn't get labeled as "adult" by Google.)

        

That would be fine if there were anything else notable about Mad Paradox, but there isn't. It's a grindy, linear, derivative, ugly game with limited mechanics and a nonsensical story. In basic form and narrative, it's like Knights of Xentar, but with less freedom, more boring combat, and blander characters. It's rare that I say this even about bad games, but there was nothing about the time I spent on it that wasn't a complete waste. I can't tell you much about what's on my "to do" list this week without giving away too much personal information, but suffice to say that there is no stronger justification for my blog's title than the fact that I spent 8 hours of this week of all weeks winning this game.

    

Paradox concerns a character named Mash, who has been raised all his life as an orphan in the city of Dorah. Now, on his 17th birthday, an old and wise friend named Samos tells Mash of his history. Mash's parents had been the rulers of Dorah, but one day an evil warlord named Gorgus showed up and challenged Mash's father to combat. Mash's father was a pacifist and refused, so Gorgus killed both parents and took off. Samos doesn't think Mash's father could have beaten Gorgus anyway because Gorgus had some way of commanding fire. Mash immediately vows revenge.

              

Samos lays out the backstory.

          

The opening dialogue is another prime example of the wordiness accompanies a lot of these JRPGs. It's like hearing two children shout, "Am not!" and "Are too!" at each other. One round of it, fine, but after a few repetitions you start wondering if any jury of "your peers" would really convict you. In this case, I had to read through several screens of Mash trying to convince the reluctant Samos to tell him about Gorgus, with the equivalent of "Please tell me!" and "No, it's too dangerous" repeated so often that I began to understand Gorgus's motivations for just killing everyone in this town.

    

Eventually, Samos relents and sends Mash on a quest that begins with retrieving his father's arms and armor from the old castle. At first, I worried I'd have trouble finding it, but I soon realized that my worries were baseless. The game consists of only about a dozen areas, each taking up only about four screens. Hallways are wide and buildings large, and areas are therefore hard to get lost in. Pathways don't open until you're ready for them and many of them close behind you, so even when it seems like you're stuck, you just have to loop around the NPCs in a small number of screens, and eventually you'll get the next clue.

           

The game has furniture, barrels, doors, and chests, but none of them (except about four chests in dungeons) are really interactive.

          

Other than combat and NPC "dialogue" (all lines are scripted; there are no choices), there isn't much to do in the game. It lacks any kind of "search" feature. Doors open automatically when you walk into them. NPCs are also activated by walking into them. There are no puzzles, no traps, no out-of-combat spellcasting except for healing. This would describe a lot of games in the 1980s, but it feels like we've come further than this since then.

       

There is no character creation process. Mash (and, later, his two companions) come to the game with fixed values in strength, stamina, intelligence, attack, defense, maximum health, and maximum magic power, all of which increase upon leveling up. Attack and defense scores increase as you purchase or find better equipment. Enemies have no magic and no special attacks. You never miss them and they almost never miss you, and the damage that you do to each other is fixed by a formula that considers the attacker's attack score and the defender's defense score. Because combat is so predictable, it's also boring. There are no tactics save the spells, but offensive spells aren't that much better than physical attacks. You're almost always better off saving magic ability for healing.

             

The main character's statistics early in the game.

        

The game is also extremely grindy. There's a maximum of 40 levels, and you have to be close to the top to defeat Gorgus in the end. If you just walked through the areas (and didn't get killed), you'd probably reach the endgame at Level 16. The rest is grinding, which sucks because combat is slow. Every attack, yours or the enemy's, is accompanied by an animation. Thank the gods that someone told me how to use DOSBox's "warp" mode recently or I never would have survived it. Mechanically, combat seems to be derived from Phantasie. Each round, each character attacks, casts a spell, uses an item, or tries to flee, and the action executes immediately with its animation. All characters go before all monsters. 

          

The translators didn't bother to translate the combat options, but I figured them out by context.

    

The predictability of combat means that you almost always know when you've entered an area that's out of your pay grade, so that's when it's time to return to an earlier area and camp for a while. Fortunately, I was able to watch educational videos for a class I'm taking during this process. It is not an exaggeration to say that at least 5 of the game's 8 hours were spent grinding.

      

That leaves the story, which almost doesn't deserve to be related. As Mash leaves Dorah, Samos asks him to keep an eye out for a girl with a fiery brand but otherwise doesn't tell anything about her. Mash first recovers his father's sword (a regular long sword, discarded almost immediately) from the castle, after which Samos opens the way to Death Valley. Before he leaves town, Mash can have his first ribald encounter with a local girl whose name he doesn't even remember.

     

And so it begins.

       

Each one of Mash's erotic encounters shows three or four pictures of the girl in question, censored in the places that Japanese media typically censors images of girls. None of Mash's encounters are non-consensual, though like Xentar, he is sometimes rewarded with sex (or just images of unclothed girls) in situations where the girls in question have just been through traumatic experiences. As usual, many of the girls look underaged to me, but I'll just accept that's a cultural/artistic thing. The other weird thing is that many of the images . . . I don't know how to say this . . . Many of them suggest that Mash is "participating" in the activities depicted, except that he himself never actually appears. It's as if he's gone invisible. Finally, unlike the heroes of other eroges that we've seen, Mash is not depicted as either particularly suave or particularly inept. He doesn't make jokes or cringy statements about his experiences. They mostly happen without comment, or with bland comment.

    

Areas of the game are divided into those with wandering creatures and "safe areas" (usually towns) without them. In areas that have creatures, they're always depicted as formless blobs until you run into them and the encounter begins. You can avoid them a lot of the time by walking in the other direction, but the game requires so much grinding that it's best to fight when the blobs are present. They respawn quickly. Each area typically only has two types of creatures. The Valley of Death had ogres and "mantrap plants."

         

Mash approaches an enemy party "glob" in the valley.

         

On the other side of the Valley is the city of Garah, which is being menaced by a lieutenant of Gorgus named Gidd. The residents are so terrified that they offer young ladies as sacrifices to Gidd. The latest, chained up and waiting for him to come and get her, is a girl named Lizza. (Lizza disrobes for Mash in exchange for a promise to help her.) Mash also hears about a local young swordswoman named Elle. A third entanglement comes when Mash discovers that the local bartender has imprisoned a girl named Mary in his basement.

              

Ah, the joys of roleplaying a character who ogles girls while they're chained up.

         

Mary supplies the key necessary to unlock Lizza's shackles. Mash creepily has a sexual encounter with Mary before she's even freed from the basement. Lizza returns to her grandmother's cave in a forested area west of town. Lizza's grandmother has some intel on the source of Gorgus's power, which has to do with "plaques" (the way this is used, I can't help think the world is translated badly) that had been created by the gods and covey power over fire, water, and other forces.

    

At this point, its not clear what Mash has to do to enter Gidd's fortress (the guards repel him if he nears), so it's one of the moments of the game where he has to run back and forth to various NPCs to figure it out. Mary says that to enter the fortress, Mash will need an emblem and suggests he talk again to Lizza. Running back to Lizza's grandmother's cave (fighting zombies along the way), he learns hat Lizza has the emblem tattooed on her thigh (picture follows). Lizza suggests that the blacksmith can make the emblem but he'll need to see it, and Lizza doesn't want to return to town. Mash has to return to town alone and go to a shop where the shopkeeper has an "eternity mirror" that captures an image of whatever it's pointed at, but he won't sell it except for a "goddess statue." This turns out to be in the possession of Lizza's grandmother, necessitating another trip through the woods, then back to the shop, then back to the cave to capture the image, then back to town to deliver the image to the blacksmith. Such is the game padded.

            

One of many steps in a senseless quest.

         

Meanwhile, Mash finally meets Elle, who agrees to help him in his quest, as her father was also killed by Gorgus. After Mash picks up the emblem at the blacksmith's shop, Elle meets him at the gates to Gidd's fortress, which (after grinding a while), they invade, killing guards and dark fairies and ultimately Gidd himself. Gidd leaves behind a crystal ball in which Mash sees an image of a girl with a fire brand on her forehead, the one that Samos told him about.

      

Elle is one of the few female characters presented respectfully.

Taking on Gidd.

         

After defeating Gidd, Elle and Mash move on to the city of Krapp. Krapp has a few exits, one of which goes to the "twin cities" of Aquapolis and Foulwater, the other of which goes to the cities of Blessfire and Foxfire. You understand when I say "cities," I'm talking about a couple of screens with inns, shops, and a few NPCs. Each city has a weapon/armor/shield shop, and I found that the party basically had just enough gold for the latest upgrades at just about the moment they became available.

          

Items available at one shop.

        

If you check into the inn with Elle in Krapp, there are some scenes that suggest Mash might have tried to have his way with Elle and was duly reprimanded--this is played for humor, of course. Otherwise, if he checks into the Krapp inn without Elle, he finds that it's a brothel in disguise and has the opportunity to sleep with several prostitutes; there's a sequence exactly like it in Xentar. Great: I've become an expert on tropes in Japanese porn games. Irene will be so pleased.

           

Mash apparently went too far.

        

Elle disappears for a while at one point and is found frolicking with fairies in a waterfall in Aquapolis (with images, of course). In Blessfire, the duo becomes a trio as a warrior named Fugg joins the party to rescue his sister, Lora, who has been taken by Gorgus's next lieutenant, Geir. As before, the party has to get strong enough to raid Geir's fortress, which is populated by giants and necromancers, before taking on the minion himself. Along the way, they free three captive girls (with images, etc.) from Foxfire. Fugg leaves the party after Geir's defeat, which was surprising. I thought the game was going for a permanent hero-girl-male friend composition like Xentar.

          

Fugg briefly joins the team.

          

I lost track of a lot of the plot at this point, and I can't even reconstruct it with my screen shots. The party found one "plaque" in Krapp, but it didn't seem to do much of anything. Later, there was discussion that they had to find a "crystal" and then "holy water." Moving forward for the rest of the game generally meant circling around between "The Wise One" in Aquapolis, Lizza's grandmother, and an overtly Christian priest in Krapp until one of them had the answer.

   

Getting the "holy water" meant visiting the city of Heavens, which turned out to be accessible from the waterfall in Aquapolis. The city was under the thumb of Gorgus's final lieutenant, Goses, who as usual had imprisoned a few girls. Freeing them opened the way to his fortress and represented the last eroge content in the game. As Mash freed them, Elle expressed some jealousy, and I set myself up for an ending just like Xentar and Cobra Mission in which the hero swears off his rakish ways and marries his female adventuring companion in a weirdly wholesome epilogue.

            

The tamest of the images from this section.

          

Goses's fotress required a lot more grinding. Enemies were dark knights and women that looked like sorceresses but were for some reason called "rusty nails." The combat with Goses himself went like all boss combats in the game. Since no one has any special attacks and all attacks do predictably the same damage, combat was just a matter of figuring out how often I had to cast healing spells in between physical attacks. As long as the enemy doesn't do more damage than you're able to heal, you can eventually whittle him down.

    

Following Goses's defeat, discussion again turned to things I don't remember discussing previously. Something about having to find a "sanctum" and an "AquaSword." After making the rounds of the usual NPCs, it turned out that the priest knew of a way to open a doorway to some "sanctum" in Aquapolis. We followed his instructions and found ourselves in a long, linear dungeon (a single straight corridor) containing the toughest enemies in the game, lizard warriors called "death tails" and floating balls of light called "ghost balls." They offered so much experience that we finished leveling up just pushing through the corridor.

        

I guess maybe this is the "sanctum."

          

Gorgus was at the end of it, but he taunted us by saying we could never defeat him without the "AquaSword," which for some reason we didn't have and couldn't find, so we had to back off and return to Krapp. There, the bartender's daughter heard of our plight and stole a "plaque" that the bartender had kept secret. She ran away with it to the forest, where it required her to sacrifice her life to turn into the "Holy Sword," which was apparently capable of defeating Gorgus. This was all told very poorly.

         

JRPGs seem to have a lot of blank lines and ellipses in dialogue.

        

We returned to the Sanctum and engaged Gorgus in combat. It was the same thing as his minions: a couple of attacks followed by a couple of healing spells or potions. It took a long time, but he died.

          

Hollywood, get this script in front of a producer!

       

The denouement was stupid. The girl with the firebrand appeared in the wake of Gorgus's defeat. Gorgus has held her prisoner all her life, telling her she was the daughter of Lord Laggs of Dorah, my father (whose actual name is appearing for the first time), which would seem to make her my sister. Surprisingly, Elle took off at this point, claiming she'd had her revenge. For some reason, Mash expressed an intention to still somehow try to make the "AquaSword," but the nameless girl convinced him it wasn't important and persuaded him to use the holy water to wish their way back to Dorah.

         

I didn't follow all of this, but I wanted the game to end, so I was with "Girl."

        

Back in Dorah, Samos filled in the rest of the story, but it still didn't make a lot of sense. It turns out the girl--who is never named--is not the daughter of Lord Laggs but of the ruler of Garah. A soldier carried her out of town when Gorgus destroyed the city; Samos ended up finding her in the woods; and my parents ended up adopting her moments before they themselves were slain by Gorgus. End of story. The girl didn't end up with Mash, either, so I'm not sure why she's even in the game.

            

Samos appears to be hitting on me.

        

The game ends with Samos offering Mash a drink. A black screen says "And . . . time passed by . . . " and then shows an image of someone--Mash, I guess--sitting under a tree at the top of a cliff. And then the credits roll over (non-lewd) images of some of the females in the game. So I have no idea what that end sequence was about, but neither do I really care. The title of the game is never really explained, either, unless that's the paradox.

 

Unlike most games in the eroge genre, the protagonist of this one ends sad and alone.

        

In a GIMLET, the game earns:

    

• 2 points for some attempt at a story.

• 2 points for character creation and development. There's no creation, but leveling feels suitably rewarding.

• 3 points for NPCs. They play a big role in the game, but everything is one-way.

      

Wandering NPCs are sometimes helpful. Sometimes . . .

        

• 1 point for encounters. There are no non-combat encounters, and enemies are only differentiated by how hard they hit.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Combat has no real tactics and there's no point to the variety of spells, which is too bad because some of the visual effects for the spells are fun.

         

Elle's spell options at the highest level.

        

• 3 points for the economy. It remains relevant most of the game and is a secondary reason to grind. When you no longer need weapons and armor, you can stock up on healing potions.

• 2 points for equipment. There are upgrades to weapons, armor, and shields, and it feels rewarding to buy them, but there's no complexity to the items. They just adjust attack/defense scores.

• 2 points for a main quest with no options or side quests.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I found the graphics grainy (why do they look like they have artificial scan lines?) and the icons hard to make out. Some of the cut scene graphics were well-composed, though. I can't tell you about the sound because the music is so relentless, and can't be turned off separately, that I played with the sound off entirely. The controls work fine.

        

The artists clearly had some talent.

         

• 1 point for gameplay. The overall game wasn't too long, but even within the limited time, it wasted a lot of time with grinding and backtracking. The predictability of combat made it too easy; it's very linear; and there's nothing replayable about it.

            

That give us a final score of 21, which is a pretty low score for the era. I'm glad I investigated what Japanese developers were doing on consoles at the same time because otherwise this would be my impression of JRPGs.

    

I typically haven't subtracted any points for bad translation, so I won't do that here, but the text of the game is riddled with spelling and syntax errors and poor word choice. Also, it's sometimes hard to tell who's speaking.

Normally, I'd offer reviews from contemporary sources, but I can't find any evidence that anyone noticed this game when it was released in 1992. I can report that and Honest Gamers reviewer named Woodhouse agreed with me in a 2003 review:

            

To play Mad Paradox is to step into a world of mediocrity. It's an RPG that skimps on all the ingredients that can make an RPG great. The battles are neither unique nor exciting, you're given only an excruciatingly tiny area to explore, and there isn't any engrossing story or character development. The makers of this title decided to forego all those amenities, instead placing an emphasis on pleasing the viewer's visual receptors. To captivate its audience, Mad Paradox relies on its one and only asset, numerous naked women.

                        

I would normally also report on the developers here, but none of them seem to be associated with any other games, including designer and writer Tooru Hamada, senior programmer Kei Ishizuka, senior illustrator Akira Komi, or even music composer Shirahama Nanki. The development company, Queen Soft, did produce at least half a dozen other titles between 1989 and 1996, mostly eroge adventure games and what can only be described as "strip mahjong." Even more of a mystery is the supposed U.S. translator and distributor, Samourai, which is an absolute ghost. I'm not 100% sure that it wasn't just a warez group that created a fan translation. Why any of these obscure individuals thought that this game was worthy of their time will have to remain an enigma. A paradox. A maddening one.

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Financiación no bancaria

Líneas no bancarias para Pymes Préstamos de fondos de inversión Operaciones sin avales ni garantías a partir de 500.000 euros y hasta 15 millones. Periodos de amortización de hasta 7 años con un máximo de 4 de carencia. Crowdlending Préstamo en masa que no lleva asociados otros productos, no computa en Cirbe y no exige que se perpetúe la relación prestamista/prestatario. Pagarés corporativos Para empresas en crecimiento. Producto muy flexible que actúa como reserva de tesorería y permite regular desfases puntuales. Leaseback y Rentback Venta y posterior arrendamiento financiero de inmovilizado material. Condiciones (plazos y costes) muy favorables y ventajas fiscales. Renting y Leasing Líneas óptimas para la inversión en maquinaria. Aunque tanto el Renting como el Leasing se verán reflejados en el pasivo de la empresa, el Renting no computará en Cirbe. Factoring y otras líneas de descuento Adelanto de derechos de cobro (pagarés, facturas, recibos, contratos...) propiedad de la empresa para reducir las diferencias temporarias entre cobros y pagos y disponer de liquidez. Si quieres saber más, analizamos tu caso sin compromiso... Déjanos tus datos y te llamamos Si lo prefieres puedes llamarnos al 981 90 49 49 (de lunes a viernes de 9 a 16 horas)

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ICO Covid Inversión

ICO Covid Inversión Se trata de una línea destinada a financiar proyectos de inversión para empresas que se hayan visto afectadas por el Covid. Tipo de operaciones Préstamos. A diferencia de las anteriores líneas Covid, éstas tienen un plazo de amortización de 8 años. Destino de los fondos Esta nueva línea amplía el destino de los fondos de las anteriores líneas ICO incluyendo también operaciones de inversión. Importe máximo El importe de cada operación dependerá de la inversión a realizar si bien se suponen límites como los de las líneas ICO habituales (hasta 12,5 millones por empresa) y limitaciones como en el resto de líneas Covid. Las estrategias de las entidades bancarias están cambiando, después de meses cerrando operaciones a tipos muy bajos. Estas líneas ICO pueden ser de las últimas opciones para cerrar financiación a tipos de interé bajos y condiciones preferentes. Si necesitas financiar un proyecto de inversión para tu empresa, ponte en contacto Déjanos tus datos y te llamamos Gracias, Tania de Iberfinancia

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