12.04.08
Posted in Gaming, Movies, Shameless Self-Promotion, Site News, Television
at 7:10 pm
In case anyone’s planning to rob my house really interested, I went ahead and updated the Collection page, over to your right. I’ve been on the verge of wanting a second ‘big’ shelf to put the cabinet stuff in for quite some time now, and while I still have plenty of room, the primary purpose of the big shelf is to give me an at-a-glance look at the backlog. Despite my best efforts, this is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish.
Anyway. Enough bragging, I go now to eat and relax for a little while.
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12.01.08
Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming
at 8:31 pm
At 8:22p, I completed Stage 3 of Space Invaders Get Even on WiiWare. This is the thirty-third game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP), followed by Chrono Trigger (DS) and Castle Crashers (XBLA). The main game (no DLC) was completed in twenty minutes.
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11.22.08
Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming
at 8:42 am
At 8:30a, I defeated The Collector, final boss of LittleBigPlanet on the Playstation 3. This is the thirty-second game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP), followed by Psychonauts (XB) and Penny Arcade Ep. 2 (360). Game was cleared over 24 days.
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11.17.08
Posted in Demolitionist, Gaming, Rants
at 9:47 pm
(Doing something new, folks: any time a demo strikes my fancy, I’ll write up impressions here. I’ve done it enough for other demos, might as well give it a formal name. Anyway, enjoy.)
RPGamer broke the news about the Neverland Card Battles demo today, and it was almost as an afterthought that I gave it a spin. I kinda wish I hadn’t, though; while the game’s mechanics are sound, and a bit more intuitive than Culdcept’s, the execution is quite a bit lacking– due mostly to the utter uselessness of the online help and the excruciating sound effects. I skipped over the story under the impression that I wouldn’t want it spoiled for me; and I’m not about to go back to find out what I missed.
The game’s mechanism for obtaining mana is based on the number of squares on the playfield colored in with your color; you color squares by walking over them with your units. This brings a strategic element to the combat– or at least that’s the intent. Instead it makes the game entirely a turn-based strategy game hamstrung by a patently ridiculous and severely broken card deployment mechanism. Whereas Culdcept had you winning based on an accumulation of points, NCB requires you to annihilate your opponent’s Dominator unit to win. It’s broken because the enemy can just sit back and flood the field with cheap monsters which you have to hack through agonizing square by square. The only thing stopping you from doing the same is that you will always get crappy cards.
Ordinarily I would give the game the benefit of the doubt given that a demo, without the ability to customize the deck, isn’t a fair assessment of a game like this; but the problem is that I see just so much wrong with this game that I am grateful I had the chance to try it before wasting money or more time on it. The only thing this has produced, really, has been the name for a new feature on the site, and a desire to fire up Culdcept once the writing is done.
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11.13.08
Posted in Gaming, Shameless Self-Promotion
at 8:31 pm
This evening, my Xbox Live Gamerscore reached a grand total of 5125 points over 278 Achievements. The achievement which brought me to the 5000-point mark was “Return”, worth 50 points, for completing the ninth mission in Halo 3. It has been 112 days since the last thousand-point milestone. My achievement value average is 18.44 points. It is interesting to note that I have only acquired one non-mission related Achievement for Halo 3 to this point. As with the 4000-point level, this personal milestone offers absolutely no significance whatsoever save a small amount of pride.
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Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming
at 8:23 pm
At 8:02p, I completed the ninth and final mission in Halo 3 on the Xbox 360. This is the thirty-first game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP), followed by Mega Man 9 (Wii) and Psychonauts (Xbox). Game cleared over (mostly) five days.
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11.09.08
Posted in Gaming, NaNoWriMo, Rants, Writing
at 7:43 pm
I don’t want to obsess over this too much since there’s nothing more that I can do, so I promise you that this is the last you’ll hear about the mouse. Until the situation changes. Or the little bastard shows his face again. Yeah.
Beyond that, the novel writing continued fairly well– I’m only half a chapter behind where I wanted to be (after schedule slip), and I’m sure I can pick up the slack over this week. I was worried that I was going to hurt my hands more, but using the wrist brace helped tremendously to a point where I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble tomorrow. So there’s that.
And yeah. I like Burnout Paradise. I was going to write up a lot about it but I figure that it would mostly just be preaching to the choir right now. A choir of screeching tires, shattering glass, and squealing twisted metal. Fun fun crashy.
Catch you folks tomorrow. Maybe. Don’t count on daily updates just yet, but I’m trying to get back into that habit, I really am.
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10.30.08
Posted in Gaming, Rants
at 6:01 pm
OK. Here’s the deal. Go here and fill out the survey. Preferably truthfully, but I would strongly recommend that you give your approval to Klonoa’s “classic” look. For those unfamiliar with the character, Klonoa wears a blue hat with Pac-Man on the side, and has very long floppy ears. I have no idea what the new version of the character (without hat and with sharper, upright, cat-like ears) is supposed to resemble, nor why Namco Bandai decided they needed to redesign him for North America. Klonoa’s identifying characteristic has always been his ears, and there’s tons of people who love the character just as he is. Put another way, when Sega decided to redesign Sonic the Hedgehog back in 1999, for Sonic Adventure, they kept what made him immediately identifiable as Sonic. If this change goes through, NB might as well bury the franchise right then and there because the sales will not meet expectations. Anyway. Please fill out the survey. For me?
But if they do keep the old design– which, in case I haven’t belabored the point enough, I think they should– who would I have to kill to get a Klonoa plushie?
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10.26.08
Posted in Gaming, Rants, Writing
at 8:12 pm
I realize that I’ve been, well, more than a little lax about getting stuff up onto the blog lately. When you look at it, though, October has seen more posts more frequently than this summer had probably led you all to believe, so I think that even given my sporadic update schedule, this is slowly sliding back into daily updates. Which I think we all could get used to once more, hrm?
Anyway, with regards to the titular plan, as most of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month, and I’m heading into it with a full new outline for Harvesting Blueberries (which, incidentally, will probably get a new title). My time for gaming will be dramatically reduced, so I don’t expect to have much of anything in the way of Game Clear notices for the month. As it turns out, it might be that R-Type was the last game to be cleared in 2008 anyway– I don’t know if the writing will run long for “Blueberries 2.0″, and if it does how much of December it will take. Furthermore, even if I get done early, most of what’s left on the Backlog for ‘08 are long-form RPGs, and Mega Man 9 (which I’m increasingly convinced was done a grave disservice by my putting it on hold during October). Still, regardless of what game might get started in December, there’s no guarantee that I’ll be finished with it before New Year’s. So, it’s likely that thirty games will be the 2008 total… not bad, considering, but I do want to try to push that even further if I can.
As for what I am playing now, you might have noticed I made a little progress with Disgaea. I’d been holding off on advancing the plot any further than Chapter 2’s final mission, but gave that a run just to see what would happen and was pleasantly surprised. There were still some hiccups, yes, and Flonne came in just in the nick of time to (however temporarily) become the lowest-level member of the team. More grinding, fun wow. In all honesty, Disgaea is starting to feel like the “new” Super Robot Taisen: a game I like and enjoy, but that punishes me for playing it and therefore makes me turn to it only sporadically. I’m considering keeping it on just the “when I get to it” list and turning my active attention to something more recent and a bit easier… like Star Ocean, or a Tales game.
I’ve done some reflecting on the 2009 List, as well, and have decided to “de-prioritize” games from it so as to make it a bit more manageable. There’s 16 GBA games on the list, all of which I’m moving to the back-burner: most of those were picked up for the Reclamation Project, with only a couple of exceptions. (More to the point, three of them are Pokemon games (Ruby, Emerald, and FireRed), and I’m probably going to try either a speedrun or another Poketoberfest in ‘09.) There’s also a handful of games for other, older systems as well, plus a few Virtual Console titles I’ve picked up and set aside. The thing is, though, those are games I’ll be looking to play later on. Right now, I have a lot of very interesting current games that I want to try to get through. Ultimately, by relegating those older titles to the ‘later’ column, I’ve shifted my 2009 backlog from 71 titles down to 35 (this counts Luminous Arc 2, which isn’t out yet, but not Chrono Trigger DS, which isn’t changed sufficiently for me to count it as a “new” game). The ultimate goal is to have everything cleared out by the end of 2009, but 71 (or more!) games is a bit much. Assuming all goes well in the year ahead, I’ll be lucky to get through even 30.
That’s all mostly irrelevant to many of you. Much like, well, everything else on this blog, but eh.
We’ll see just how this month shapes up. Tomorrow, on the LJ, I’ll have the October gaming report, and Wednesday I’ll have the anime report. If I get anything for this side up, I’ll be surprised, but here’s hoping. Ciao.
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10.24.08
Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming
at 8:04 pm
At 8:34p, I destroyed the Bydo Core, the final boss of R-Type Final on the Playstation 2. This is the thirtieth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Mega Man 9 (Wii), followed by Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP) and Brave Story: New Traveler (PSP). Final clear time unavailable (I forgot to check).
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