In this brand spanking new episode we play one of the games made by Square before Final Fantasy came along.
出っ尻 [でっちり] (detchiri) protruding buttocks, big butt
I have never heard this term used but I have to wonder if it is because it is because it is not a commonly used term or Japan’s lack of big booty babes.
Finished two games this past week.
Finishing my Final Fantasy V challenge was exhilarating. Playing the game with such a crazy restriction caused good amounts of frustration but having to come up with different strategies to win was great fun. The final battle can be found here. I think I’m going to try to do a new challenge every month. Tomorrow I think I’ll start Final Fantasy Tactics and hopefully beat the damn thing. Been working on Final Fantasy 4 Easy Type and I don’t think I’m going to rush through that, but an hour or two every now and then really makes progress in this game. It is so short and after finishing the DS version of FF4 almost two years ago I really don’t find this game to be all that challenging. It is still fun, though.
I’ve come to determine that my lifestyle cannot simply hold an MMORPG amongst its endeavors. I just can’t do it. I have logged into FF11 once since installing it almost 3 weeks ago. It’s not even that I don’t have the time to sit down and play a game. Even though I do spend a significant amount of time playing games on the go, I manage to find time to play games on consoles. I just can’t dedicate it all to one game, especially a type of game that requires so much investment to actually do something of progress in one sit down. Hopefully this will finally be the time I give up MMORPGs for good, although I highly doubt it.
The other game I finished was Duels of the Planeswalkers on the 360. While genuinely fun, it reminded me of two hard cold facts:
- I have shit luck.
- People suck.
The first was confirmed with the number of times I got mana screwed/flooded. It is borderline stupid. But that’s random numbers for you. Why it seems they hate me on such a regular basis, I don’t know. But I can’t damn it too much. It is what it is.
People, on the other hand, really need to stop dropping out at the first sight of their loss. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but this is just ridiculous. The worst was when I was playing a four player game and the “Host dropped connection” after I had taken down the other two players. This wouldn’t be a big problem if the single player was great, but it isn’t. The AI is dumb. I have seen plays that don’t even begin to make sense. Why, when I am all tapped out, would you spend all your remaining mana on regenerating a creature that you’re not even attacking with? The AI just completely dumped their remaining mana on their turn into a Drudge Skeleton, which I was able to kill off the next turn. I know that it won’t make the best plays but where in the game of Magic would this even make sense? How would they have programmed it to think this way? It’s just silly.
I also started Gyakuten Saiban which is better known among English speakers as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. There are a good chunk of words that I don’t know, but I am surprised that I am actually understanding a large chunk of the story. Enough to actually solve the first case without a hitch. I know it’s supposed to be easy, but I figured the language barrier would be too much. Glad to see that this isn’t the case.
So this week should be that, Final Fantasy 4 Easy Type, some FF Tactics and maybe some Donkey Kong Country if I can convince Eriko to throw down a little.
DOOT DOOT DOOT DOO! DOOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOO!
So Square Enix is dangling their moist berries in front of us proclaiming NEW GAME at this site. If you turn your volume up really high and wait a bit you can almost hear some sort of music. It’s sort of old schooly and gives me proverbial popped boners.
I bet it’s a remake.
A lot of buzz is flying around as to what it is, mostly due to that 4 in the corner. Now it does say new game and in rather capital letters to boot. A lot of people are thinking SaGa 4 or Romancing SaGa 4 but as we’ve had two new SaGa “series” since Romancing SaGa this kind messes that idea up.1 I’m personally hedging on some sort of new IP. At worst I think we’ll get a side game to a series. There has recently been a trademark for 光の４戦士 (Hikari no 4 Senshi) Four Warriors of Light. If you’re thinking something related to the original Final Fantasy you’re thinking like me.2
We’re under just about 10 days remaining at the time of my writing. I’m not going to be foolish enough to say “THIS IS GOING TO BE THE SQUARE ENIX GAME THAT BRINGS ALL THE HATERS BACK!” but I will admit that I am excited and my calendar is marked to check this site agin when the timer is about to run out.
To say I have a bit of a gaming backlog is an understatement. To say I have a huge one is barely scratching the surface. I know gaming is just a hobby but I still felt like I needed some little push to get me in order in the games I play. What with today’s social networking and letting everyone know every little thing you are doing, a site has popped up in the past whenever that lets you get a bit of a handle on your massive unplayed gaming collection.
The spirit of The Backloggery is summarized in their tag line “You have the games. Play them.” Since a few of my friends had been using it they had been bugging me to join as they knew my unplayed game situation was much more dire. I dreaded entering all my game data into yet another place after having recently switched to Gamepedia, which I still happily use. But after a friend offered to input them for me, I had no excuse. Now I use both Gamepedia and Backloggery as I definitely prefer having something stored on my computer1 but Backloggery gives me a bit of connection to the outerworld and motivation from other gamers. It is definitely the little things that help.
That’s not to say Backloggery is not without its faults. It has a beautiful skeleton with a lumpy, unpleasant body surrounding it. Getting your games in may be a quick and pleasant breeze. Changing the information of your currently playing could be a little smoother. The site’s design feels like something out of the late 90s. This isn’t bad as it does exactly what it sets out to do. I just expect a little more out of sites today. I hate to say it but it feels like they could take a page or two from how Facebook runs things. After that I think a real community could build and the motivation would really flow.
That said, there is nothing wrong with using the site now as it is. That little bit of extra organization and motivation has helped me so far in the past few weeks and I plan on using it for the foreseeable future.
- And the iPhone syncing is also excellent with Gamepedia. [↩]
ダッチワイフ [datchiwaifu] (1) life-sized doll used for masturbation (trans: Dutch wife), (2) cage (rattan or cane) used in bed in the tropics, (3) bolster used for warmth when sleeping
I think I can get enough for this weekly segment just by searching for in the dictionary for the word “use”.
Japan is infamously known for a few things, one that may have slipped past your radar is the love pillow. Whether or not this lady of the Netherlands falls into the pillow category or not I cannot quite say. What I can say, though, is that one walk through a sex shop in Japan should really open one’s eyes into what sexuality really can be.
A little old, a … Hmm, nothing new. As of late I’ve been picking up random cheap games I’ve wanted to finish but no new releases have even really interested me. My gameplay has been at a bit of a standstill in a few points.
In the Final Fantasy corner of my life we’ve got FF11, FF5 and FF2 going on right now. I’m not really progressing in FF11. Whenever I log in I don’t have much time to accomplish much and I’ve forgotten too much of the game to move at a speedy pace. FF2 has just been slight progression here and there when I poke the PSP on for a bit. FF5 has been the biggest standstill of them all as I can’t really figure out how to take my rag tag team of shitty classes and get them to do enough damage to finish regular battles. Good god, the thought of the latter bosses is giving me anal convulsions.
I picked up Duels of the Mages on XBLA last week. I’m a sucker for Magic: The Gathering to this day and for $10 maybe this will help quell the beast that rises inside of me from time to time. The puzzle mode was nice but I cleared it quickly. The last few required a bit of thought but the fact that there were only eight was quite disappointing. It reminded me of the puzzles found in inQuest years ago but in goal only. You have to finish the game in the turn you’re on1 but the situations don’t tend to be that dire. The campaign is pretty fun but I either get my celestial ass handed to me or the AI makes completely ridiculous choices and I smash face heartily. That all said, it is strangely satisfying if not limited. You can’t really customize decks, which is a shame.
Spent some time playing Donkey Kong Country with Eriko. I suck at this game and often she is asking me to get past difficult parts. Whoops. I don’t have two controllers so we can’t do cooperative play, but passing the controller back and forth is still good fun. For the hype this game got back when it was released I don’t think I ever really played it. I mean, I had played it, I think Paul had a copy of it? Someone did but it wasn’t me. Anyway, a few of the stages have been really fun, particularly the mine cart one, but for the most part they have been of the formula “Introduce mechanic, make it progressively more difficult, end level.” which is okay but it feels a bit too mechanical.
This week’s goals involve getting some serious progress towards finishing FF5 and plucking away some hours at FF2. Come the start of July I’d like to pick up Final Fantasy Tactics again and finally finish that game.
- Although I do believe some of the inQuest goals got rather strange from time to time instead of just always going for victory. [↩]
Sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench waiting for other people to finish eating before I could order my own food I pulled out my DS. Eriko gave me a look as if to say “Really? Now?” and I responded with an odd contortion of my face in an attempt to be cute. Mission failed. She sighed and received a peck on the cheek before my attention went back to the electronic device in my hand. I had progress to make in a game, dammit! If I felt this site was important enough, I could try to pass it off as work.
As someone who bemusedly refers to himself as a gamer I tend to look for any opportunity to play. It is not that I need to but rather that I want to. I realize life is short enough as is to not spend all my time at home gaming. On that same token I also have to realize that if I want to actually play all the games I intend to, I will have to spend a few minutes playing a game instead of sitting in silence. And hey, she wasn’t saying anything either.
As a moderately satisfied but ultimately annoyed owner of the iPhone, I have been trying to get a grasp on the gaming scene of the device.
Many of the games that I have played feel like flash games gone awry. A large bulk are of the traditional puzzle solving types or score attack based time wasters. I feel bad attributing the term waster to the games, but a lot of the games do have weird skill curves and seem, at least to me, designed to be played in bursts until the player doesn’t feel like ever touching the game again. Some may become addicted longer that others but none really have given me the “sink my teeth into” feeling that I tend to want out of my games. These are meant to be hit and then subsequently quit upon. Like most Flash games.
Now, the beauty of a Flash game is that I’m usually not expecting it. Someone sends me a link or I stumble upon it myself. The experience tends to be short. I play it until it finishes or I am satisfied and with Flash games it tends to be the former. As the kind of gamer I am, I don’t tend to return to these one-shot games unless I run into a link again a few months later. The best games I do find myself replaying, perhaps, but I never quite get the experience that I did the first time. As someone who replays a lot of games, I really see a lot of these games as ones to be experienced but not necessarily loved. Whacking that penguin with a club toting polar bear was hilarious the first time, but there was nothing to make me go back to it again. That’s not to say it was a bad experience. Just not one that can sustain itself longer. That is something I personally tend to look for in all of my games.
I don’t believe this experience can be replicated elsewhere at this time. I’ve tried some more “fleshed out”, if you will, games on the iPhone and still haven’t found myself entirely satisfied.
While I have played a number of games, the two I have spent the most time with are Crystal Defenders and Zenonia. The first is a “Tower Defense” game from Square Enix featuring classes seen in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. The latter is an action RPG from a South Korean company named Gamevil.
Crystal Defenders has a bit of an interesting hook to it, as I assume all games of the Tower Defense genre have. When I first expressed some complaints with the game, although, many were quick to blame it on the game being a port from the original iPod. That may cause some issues as the sprites being too small for accurate touching at times, but the majority of my issues are with the game’s intricate design. It could use a few user interface tweaks, to be sure. But it could just give me more information. How did I do compared to what would be considered a “good play”? I have my high score but am I even close to cracking the top score? How much better could I be doing? Cliched as it is a Failed/Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum marking would really help me keep motivated in playing this game.
Zenonia is mildly amusing but mostly frustrating. The way the directional movement handles would have to be my biggest complaint. A directional “pad” is on the screen and pressing the “buttons” allows for movement. Alas it turns into having to pick up my thumb after every movement to not go up or down when I want to go right or so on. Some have told me they have found it to “suffice given what it is” but I don’t know if I can be so lax just because the iPhone is what it is. If it wants to play with the big boys it has to satisfy like they do.
That’s some potentially awkward innuendo.
Looking up Zenonia on Wikipedia I am surprised to see that it is only available on the iPhone. I really had a feeling it would also be found on one of the whatever variations of the GamePark console that is released in Korea. I thought this would explain some of the weird UI quirks the game has along with oddities such as being able to move your character beneath your onscreen controls. Now I’m not sure what the excuse is. Don’t get me wrong, the game is enjoyable. I just wouldn’t consider placing it among the ranks of other games I have enjoyed.
Perhaps the game will come that convinces my otherwise but as of now gaming on the iPhone is a fun enough novelty that only adds a bit to my gaming experience and won’t soon be replacing any of the handhelds I carry with me.
I am, although, open to any suggestions of games to try on the iPhone to convince me otherwise.
