Sick liaisons raised this monumental mark

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:41:03 GMT

I have a hypothetical for everyone here; I got to thinking after seeing http://www.metacoding.net/ and their pretty disgusting terms of use policy:

Let's just say I had an idea; an idea that was so awesome it could possibly make the internet itself explode. What would I need to do to protect my interests and intellectual property, and what should I avoid?

As far as things I can do to protect IP and the like, are there specific things I'd need to file with organisations? Should I avoid mentioning the idea and all development of said idea to other people? Should I avoid using online things like Google documents for brainstorming?

I'm just interested in figuring out the process that people who come up with the new myspace or facebook or shacknews would need to undergo to ensure they maintain proper ownership of everything throughout the development and release process.

The Second Coming of Matsuno

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:49:52 GMT

Matsuno lives! And he is working with none-other than Hitoshi Sakimoto on "some stuff":

1UP: Over the years, you and Matsuno have collaborated on a lot of projects and seem pretty close. Do you still talk with him a lot, and do you think you might collaborate on something again in the future?
HS: Yeah, we're still friends, and I'm currently working on some stuff with him.

1UP: We're looking forward to it, since you guys are a good match.

HS: Personally, I've always wanted to work on games, and Matsuno is one of those guys who just loves creating games. I feel like we're a great team and great pals.

The return of Zombie-Matsuno is nigh! Repent!

This is you!

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 05:08:52 GMT

Well, it's me; not you. But that doesn't really matter at the moment. All that matters is that I still, in all that time I had between my last post and now, haven't been able to find another sideboob picture that rivals the last one I posted. Well, plenty with boobboob, but no actual sideboob niceness. It kind of reminds me of that episode of Family Guy:

Like that sideboob? Well you shouldn't, because that's MY SIDEBOOB. Goodnight everyone!

Lack of sideboob aside, I've been making some steady progress on bejar, trying my utmost to figure out what stories I can remember and more importantly, what stories I can remember and would actually be interesting. Sure, it may be supremely interesting to me to recount a wonderful day of cricket or some part of a level I got up to in whatever game, but those sorts of stories probably will never go down in literary circles as being "meaningful" or even "good". Then again, the point is just to tell entertaining stories, the content doesn't exactly have to be the most interesting, just as long as the journey (or narrative, if you will) is memorable, witty and/or creative. It's not quite the same as the classic Chopper quote "Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story", but I like to think that he was thinking about my memories when he said it.

I've managed to get the list up to about 35 stories, with about 30 being truly worthy of recounting. I'm sure over the coming weeks and months, I'll start to remember more and more about my childhood and adolescence, but this seems to be a fairly sizeable list. And there's some great stuff in there too, but these are stories that I've told so many times, they're almost automatic. The point is to get to those very obscure memories that I've kept locked away for ages and then get them down as best as possible, so there's something there for prosperity; my legacy, if you will.

Simon, Novak, if you read this and can think of stories that involved me that might be worthy, let me know; it might jog my memory a bit.

I was meaning to mention this earlier, but I got rear-ended the other day; it marks my official "first ever accident" while driving a car. I was driving along, minding my own business, probably rocking out to some sort of angry metal music when all of a sudden, I felt a very abrupt *nudge* from behind. It felt a little stronger than simply me hitting a curb or something (which is likely to happen when I'm headbanging), so I rounded the corner on St Georges Terrace and flicked my warning lights on. I jumped out of the car in peak-hour traffic to be confronted by a young lady (I forget her first name) who wasn't even sure if she'd hit me or not. I surveyed the damage and it all looked fairly innocent (even now, I can't even see any problems), so she gave me her name and number and said if I needed to do any repairs or anything, let her know.

I get home, check out what damage there is (not that there was any), and I decide to give her a call to let her know she's in the clear (I'm good like that!). It turns out that she was one of my good mates at high school's cousin. I guess with a name like LeSouef, and a city the size of Perth, these sorts of things aren't all that rare; but I thought it was pretty freaky indeed!

Almost as freaky as this guy.

I hate to leave an entry like that, but I guess it's just bad luck :)

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:58:52 GMT

Welcome to another (mis)adventure in the life of me. The only blog (that I know of) that can very easily turn from savoury to saucy in seconds. This entry probably won't divulge that far, but there is some interesting stuff that I want to cover today.

Since my last entry, things as far as my abhorrent health is concerned have started to settle down quite a bit. After having blood tests that returned "boringly normal" and a reduction in my actual symptoms (although they've flared up somewhat today, in typically timely fashion) has brought a fairly nice calm to my life. I've stopped worrying about my health so much and that seems to have sorted a few things out. I often wondered if I was just beating it up to more than what it should be over the past few months and wondered whether it was all just "in my head", a wonder that has since solidified, given my current state of being.

Getting back into the swing of things with cricket just about to start up again. I'm even getting into doing some pilates for my back (another possible reason for my illness(es)) and sorting out my posture, which (and perhaps not even strangely) seems to have coincided with a reversal in my health "issues". Cricket of course, is still mental, but the fitness stuff that we do now is manageable, as opposed to the pre-season where it was simply "sickening". All-in-all, I feel like I'm slowly getting back on my feet. Anyways!

It turns out that something I'd taken for granted for just about my entire life is actually true! Yes, parallel universes exist! I've always been fascinated with that stuff. Like, in a parallel universe, instead of being extremely tall and blonde, I could be bald! The possibilities are absolutely astounding when it comes to something like this. Somewhere, in the massive reaches of time and space, my wildest fantasies could be living themselves out. As heartening as this may be though, my worst fears could (and would if everything was equal) also be performed over, and over, and over again.

I'd often thought about writing stories about different things; parallel universes (although done to death) might be interesting. Some ideas that I've been slowly piecing together have been highly politically motivated, some resorting to horrific situations such as loss of memory, loss of recognition. I was watching the news last night and they were talking about things involving deaf-blind people. Can that not be the most horrific thing that anyone would ever have to go through? Being so hypersensitive to things like touch and temperature but not actually being able to communicate to an even moderate level? I'd want to be put out of my misery, I don't think anything could be anywhere near as horrific.

After chatting with a mate of mine who lives on the other coast of Australia this morning and finding out that she was extremely interested in authoring herself, I'm starting to get a taste for it. Of course my skeleton-outlines are not exactly what I'd call "compelling" just yet, I think they're kind of shaping up to be something that I'd like people to read. Perhaps someday, I'll actually get around to it!

Speaking of being distracted, I stumbled across this little gem today at work (although not quite safe for work):

Awesome side-boob *bow*

That's another thing I was going to start actually, I've got another journal set up bejar that I've created with the sole purpose of chronicling my myriad stories of my childhood and life so far. There are just so many things floating around in my head that I really want to get down somewhere and maintain for prosperity that I couldn't not do something like this. Of course, maybe it'll happen when I get around to it.

Matsuno, where are you?!

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:45:40 GMT

I just read through this forum topic on neogaf that contained an interesting (albeit badly written) article about Yasumi Matsuno (Vagrant Story, FFTactics and FFXII) working on an as-yet-unknown Wii title for MonolithSoft (1st party Nintendo developer) and it got me thinking about the whole situation and how plausible it all is. I'll repost the article here:

"Yasumi Matsuno is a legendary developer in Japan. His games Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII have both got 40/40 scores from Famitsu. He has left Square Enix but after leaving nobody knew where he was.

He was later seen on a Wii promotion video at a Pre-Release Press event in Japan.

Well we have just heard from a trusted source where he is right now and what he's been up to since leaving Square Enix. First of all know that he is DEFINITELY working on Wii but he is much closer to Nintendo then you think.

You see since Satoru Iwata became President he has wanted Nintendo to excel more in the RPG field. He has pushed a lot of money into Fire Emblem since becoming President but he also always wanted to create a new First Party RPG owned by Nintendo that is as popular as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are in Japan.

Both Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto know Matsuno is the Director of two 40/40 scoring RPGs. Once word he left Square Enix reached Nintendo, Satoru Iwata contacted him and asked him to join Nintendo. He accepted and was allocated to Nintendo EAD Tokyo as it was closest to his current location.

At EAD Tokyo Matsuno got to play Super Mario Galaxy a lot and also got in-depth knowledge of the Wii hardware and controls from the developers there. Iwata wanted him to start planning on a new First Party RPG for Wii and allocated him a group of 4 developers to work with and get his vision presentable in some form. This process took around 8 months.

So Matsuno was at EAD Tokyo for 8 months. He joined around April 2006 and it was near the end of his stay there that his face was shown on the Wii promotion video at a Pre-Release Press event in Japan.

Here is what he said on the video:

"The Wii controller makes total sense when you think about FPS-like games, but my question was, will the controls fit other existing games? However, when I first tried Mario Galaxy, I realized that the controller fit the game almost scarily well. It allows you to intuitively feel the game and its atmosphere."
'Graphics (these days) have evolved, and there are many games claiming that this generates a more realistic atmosphere. However, there are very few games that have a control interface that lives up to this atmosphere. With the Wii controller you can actually feel like you're touching or living in this atmosphere."

Notice how he has played Super Mario Galaxy and has magically got the Nintendo mentality of Gameplay over Graphics even though Vagrant Story and FFXII pushed their respective consoles to the limits? Someone has been employed.

Matsuno showed his RPG for Wii and naturally it was impressive. Iwata wanted it to be fully realised in a game but they had no team to make it. Therefore Iwata started to look outside Nintendo for help.

They needed a development team that had experience with RPGs, and could produce graphics on par with the best in the genre such as Square Enix. Iwata then recalled Monolith working on Wii and that most of the Xenogears and Chrono Cross team were at that studio.

This is where Matsuno would make their First Party RPG. Matsuno returned to EAD Tokyo continuing the planning of the RPG while preparing for a development team to come available.

Iwata then eventually bought Monolith from Namco Bandai and Matsuno has already settled in the studio and has his own development team currently in the early stages of making our First Party Final Fantasy killer.

He has united with people that have made classics like Chrono Cross and Xenogears. Monolith is focusing on Disaster: Day of Crisis, a Survival game on Wii, but once complete Matsuno's RPG will take over completely and hopefully become a big RPG series in Japan.

Monolith to Nintendo now are what Square were to Nintendo back in the SNES era.

Now, apart from sounding like total Nintendo fanservice (fiction), it's actually an extremely interesting theory. It was a very sad day when we learned that Matsuno had to resign from his position as FFXII director, but when you look at it seriously, it makes sense. Going from Final Fantasy Tactics, which was basically an evolution of games he'd worked on for years previously; to Vagrant Story, which is admittedly an extremely introverted and incredibly tight gameplay experience with a much lesser scope; to Final Fantasy XII which was almost a redefining of the entire offline RPG genre with a ridiculously large scope; it's going to be too much for most people to bear the responsibility for.

But, onto the story itself, it almost makes an eery sort of sense:

1. Nintendo buying MonolithSoft was fairly out of the blue; Pairing them up with someone who can actually coherently put a game together makes sense. Although some might argue that dev team 4 (ie: the Ogre Battle team, Sakimoto and Yoshida) is as important to Matsuno as he is to them.

2. Word on the street is that Matsuno and Sakaguchi haven't really talked to each other for a while, so the chances of him working with Mistwalker are fairly slim; the information on ASH is extremely sketchy though, and hearing that lovely Sakimoto soundtrack was getting my hopes up about an SRPG return for Matsuno under Sakaguchi's wing.

3. Nintendo have started to put a bit of weight behind their RPG series'. In particular things like Fire Emblem and the Crystal Chronicle series, it makes a bit of sense that Iwata would want to start pumping out some "quality" role playing games. Quality is of course a subjective notion.

Whatever the result, as long as Matsuno and his team are still involved in making games, I think it's win-win; no matter what console they develop for. The world needs more games from these guys, I need more games from these guys :)

Speaking of which, I may spend my day off from work playing FFXII :)

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:06:03 GMT

The Rules:

* Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog

1. I used to weigh like 130kg when I was between 16-18; it didn't help that I worked at a pizza place. We used to have our tuesday night tradition of the "orgasm" pizza, that was like a double-cheese stuffed crust, layer of sauce, then bacon, cheese and garlic, more sauce then cheese and garlic on top. Seriously, I felt my arteries harden from that bombardment. After I quit that job, I decided to get serious(tm) about my weight and dropped down to 78kg. Of course, some may call this an "eating disorder" and my mum used to say I was a "walking skull". Being 6'5" and 78kg was really not doing wonders for me. I'm now 90.5kg and I'm still pretty skinny, took me a long time to get to even that weight.

2. Some friends and I used to be really into comics, and we'd often go out to a little remote spot just over the railway line near my childhood home (I lived in a mining town) and we'd "make a base" out of a big hollowed out tree and go on "missions". We all got to choose our mutant talents, which was really cool. We were all wolverine though. That all stopped when a guy we went to school with found out about our bases and got his dad to come and cut them down with a chainsaw. What a fuckhead :(

3. I keep meaning to start up a new livejournal so I can recount all of my hilarious and/or poignant stories, but I'm too reluctant to leave this old journal behind, even if it is emo ramblings about ffxi and gaming in general. That's me though, I find it very tough to let things go.

4. I used to collect video game magazines religiously. I think when I moved out of home (all of 5 months ago lol), I had something like 4 boxes of magazines all dating back to the time of things like James Pond and battletoads. I remember the most interesting and memorable things about those magazines were the massive, sprawling RPG walkthroughs they used to post, my favourite ones were of FF1 and FF2 on the NES and another one that I seriously hope comes to the Wii Virtual Console: Neutopia (TG-16), it was probably a weak zelda clone, but it really was enjoyable, and the nostalgia was just awesome.

5. I really don't mind doing journal/internet meme's. In fact I probably go out of my way to do them.

6. I've never had any close female friends apart from my one (and only) girlfriend. Seriously, and this goes more to the types of people I try to befriend rather than any sort of special thing about me, all the girls I've attempted to become friends with have all fallen in love with me. Once again, I say that with the utmost humility, this has nothing to do with "girls thinking I'm hoooooottttttt!", it's more I somehow tend to befriend neurotic messes of girls that need constant reassurance and think my "being nice" equals "he must like LIKE me". It's pretty fucked actually.

7. For some reason I feel it would be awesome to have close female friends. I dunno why that is, but I feel like I've missed out on something. Maybe I'm secretly gay or something*. Most of the girls I attempt to become friends with are (and probably rightly so), excessively shallow, but that's just because they're hot, and I'm stupid :)

8. I like The Bill, a UK cop drama. There, I said it!

* Note: Not secretly gay at all, totally into girls

The 8 people I tag:

8 people is a bit much... so, maybe ajax_ionic, keisos, akiito, gracile, aethyas, makenshi if he still reads this crap.. umm, whoever else, go for your life :)

The "Real Gamer"...

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 09:03:53 GMT

I was just trawling away through LJ posts and comments and I came across a post that I just absolutely disagreed with. I couldn't quite figure out why I disagreed with it until I read one of the comments that pretty much sums up one of the most pretentiously ludicrous and vile philosophies that invades the gaming community. The idea of the "hardcore" gamer.

This was the statement that I disagreed with (and I apologise to the author if he/she reads this, it's not directed at you per se, it's more at the philosophy):

"Nintendo just left the real gamer market"

Nintendo just left the real gamer market? What, the 0.1% sub-subset of a diminished and diluted "hardcore" market isn't happy that games aren't being specifically tailored to their attention deficit-charged methods of gameplay?

If you look back at those game series you mentioned, I don't think there was a single instance in any of them that was built specifically for a "hardcore" or "real gamer" (or the pretense-ridden, bullshit "core gamer" tag that Vanguard developers use as mantra), they were all built with accessable elements and people made them hardcore. Speed runs, shortcuts, mechanic-bending, all those elements were discovered, developed and nurtured by this "hardcore" market and I would be unbelievably surprised if any of these were intended as a key component of any of these games. Sure there are elements that are specifically placed in games to make sure that people who want extra challenge can have them, but they're not necessarily how a developer has envisioned a gameplay experience.

Take a couple of examples; firstly look at Vanguard. For years this game was supposedly developed with their "core gamer" archetype in mind and anyone who didn't enjoy an almost masochistic gameplay experience were universally berated and panned by the community because they couldn't understand how in a game "like this", you needed to suffer to have any real achievement and enjoyment. I think the current subscription numbers, problems from release and whatever behind-the-scenes crap that happens is evidence enough to the point that these guys pretty much missed the mark, no matter what their original vision was.

Another game that comes to mind is Hoshigami (the original on the PS); now I was a MASSIVE fan of FFTactics, it's still one of my favourite games of all time, so I thought Hoshigami would be right down my alley. I was wrong. I'm not a "weak gamer" by any stretch of the imagination, but this game was hard to the point that it just wasn't enjoyable, more a ridiculously frustrating mess of mechanics and completely unforgiving gameplay. Now this game has its own "hardcore" community, but even they're separated into the the "softcore" and "hardcore" divisions; but in a game that is almost universally disliked because it's so difficult, is there any real point of challenge just for the sake of it?

Maybe I'm missing the mark here, but I'm of the frame of mind that games should be developed the way that Blizzard absolutely loves them to be. Simple to learn, difficult to master. This sort of formula has the accessable hooks that get people into the game and get them enjoying the experience, but it also has the underlying systems that enable those that really want to get into it, to learn the systems, to learn the mechanics and make that "hardcore" element rise to the surface. This is what separates alot of games from being flash-in-the-pan short-term experiences that are forgotten as quickly as they're started to being massive life-sucking, life-changing experiences that make you realise why you enjoy playing games.

Games should not be developed to fit a subset market, not from a business-sense, not from a game experience sense, not from any sense because if they are, they miss the mark and are forgotten so quickly that there's no real point in the amount of time that was put into them.

So, back to the original statement: "Nintendo just left the real gamer market", I'd argue that they're one of the only companies in the world that actually understand what being a real gamer is.

FF3 Postmortem

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 07:52:47 GMT

3 posts in 3 days? I know, it's like some sort of miracle (or disaster, whichever floats your boat)! I thought that seeing as though I'd bitched and bitched about the game a while ago (read: 2 days ago), that I'd write a little postmortem of the game to say what I think it did right, what it did wrong and hopefully not go too far into the realms of bashing an obviously classic game for dated mechanics (although I can't really guarantee it).

What it did right

- Difficulty
Now, I complained about tuning or the lack thereof in a previous post of this game, in that you can entirely steamroll 90% of the end-game content only to get your ass kicked by the final boss, and while I freely admit that I said that, the overall difficulty and pacing of the game as a whole has been pretty excellent. There's always a bit of grinding to do before you hit each dungeon and the ability to change jobs on the fly (albeit crippled for a set amount of battles) gives a nice layer of strategy to the game; I often found myself theorising how well a certain job roster would work in a given situation, and that's something I really enjoy, being able to sit down, outside the game and actually figure out on paper what could possibly be a good combination to beat a given encounter.

- Battle Presentation
Battles looked absolutely stunning; and I'm a massive fan of the older sprite-based battles, so that's saying alot. The migration from 2d to 3d was absolutely excellent.

- Addictiveness
I'm not sure if this is quantifiable, honestly. Certain games (and I imagine it's got something to do with being able to grind both experience levels and job levels and then go again, almost like an MMO) just have the ability to be compelling in a certain way. I found myself wanting to level my jobs to 99 so I could finish them off, get the reward at the end and then try something new, and even then, I never managed to try out a few of the jobs (mostly the magic-based ones, I'm not the biggest magic-fan in RPGs for some reason). Maybe that's the reason so many games come with ranking systems or collection systems, because people find that sort of thing completely addictive and are willing to put in ridiculous amounts of time to finish things off.

What it didn't do right

- Difficulty
I know I just said the difficulty was a good point of the game, but it really was its downfall towards the end. Once you'd hit level 45+, you could absolutely trivialise the final dungeons with the right set of jobs and equipment only to get completely destroyed by the cloud of darkness. This then forced you into a completely unnecessary extended level grind (I think I completed the game at lvl 56 on all my characters) to beat the final boss and receive your kudos, which were fairly stock-standard in an RPG sense; these weren't the days of the lead protagonist being killed, or going missing or the planet being destroyed/saved. These were the days of "Yay you killed the monster and saved us! Have some pie! Don't forget to take out the garbage!". Not that I'm complaining, it is pretty charming to have that sort of closure in a game these days rather than something completely shocking.

- Interface
Another "I know I said x was a good point" situation, but one thing I just didn't really get into was the game's overall interface and the fact that everything is completely hidden from the player apart from very rudimentary base stats on weapons and armor. Now I'm a fan of hiding complexity from players because the last thing you need is to be bogged down in statistics and abilities and other things like that. It's always a good idea to make things deep mechanically but make them seem simple to someone looking from the outside, but this is dumbing things down to a massive point, I literally had to look up a FAQ to find out what weapons gave which stats and what armour protected you from which status effects. I really don't think that's intuitive.

Also the interface in battle; and I'm not sure anyone has managed to get this 100% right (Although FFXII and FFT were done very elegantly, not so much Vagrant Story), but I think maybe due to hardware limitations, they had to go with the classic "white-text-overlay" interface for the battles. Surely, surely there's a way to make this stuff look nicer. I wish I knew what this hardware was capable of.

- Other bits
There are other bits I didn't like, the story was pretty bland/cliche/any other superlative one could think of, the music was average, although I did really like the boss battle music and some of the dungeon stuff and I didn't think each of the jobs really made themselves distinct enough. I mean, I had a Knight that I just guarded with, a devout (although I think the devout was definitely a good class), a ninja that was a throw-bot for the final boss (at about 65000 gil a pop mind you) and a generic melee for the rest and a Dark Knight who had a really cool AE sword skill that, even at lvl 99 didn't do nearly enough damage and did way too much reflected damage. I'm not entirely sure about the rest of the jobs because I didn't get too far into it.

Another thing leading on from the jobs was the fact that some jobs became redundant. Fair enough you want people to progress and use different jobs/more powerful jobs towards the end, but if that's the case, why make the early jobs absolutely crippled and practically force people to go onto a new or "upgraded" version of the class if you can level them to 99? Surely there should've been a thought that each class should be distinct and viable to level til the end game? Maybe I'm just stuck in MMO balance mode or something, but I don't think it's entirely fair to see my lvl99 ranger do 1/4 of the damage my lvl1 black belt does for a massive cost.

Alot of these complaints are remnants of an old game with tired mechanics, so while I do feel they're relevant enough to put into a post-mortem, I don't think they're relevant enough to give their own subjects because they all fall under the "this game is xx years old" category.

Overall

As much bitching as I've done about this game, I really have to say that I loved playing it, for all the balance issues and job problems and bland story, the game really was worth the time and effort and although I can't see myself picking it up ever again (I'm not really a completist), I do think the 20 or so hours I put into the game was time well spent.

Now what to play next... :)

A False Memory

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 01:37:48 GMT

I've been in one of those moods lately; it's hard to say what it is but I've been going through my back-catalogue game music and the memories have just flooded back like I just can't get over. So much so that I've really had an absolute compulsion (is that a word?) to get back into some of these classic games and re-experience them first hand for the nth time.

Soundtracks

In particular, ever since I smashed through Final Fantasy Tactics (the original on PS1), I've fallen in love with Hitoshi Sakimoto's particular brand of bombastic and overtly pompous overtures (which I'm definitely attributing partially to Iwata, but I'm not entirely sure he's followed up with anything quite as memorable), rich with orchestral flurry and memorable hooks.

This is a love that I haven't managed to get over either with his follow-up work on FFT:A, which admittedly didn't have the same effect on me that the FFT soundtrack had (the entire game wasn't nearly as moving an experience as I'd hoped, although I played the absolute snot out of it) as well as the absolutely brilliant FFXII soundtrack; filled with some of the most beautifully melancholy pieces as well as some of the most brilliant battle overtures ("Battle with the Esper" and "Esper", itself). And recently, I've been listening through the soundtrack to one of the most unbelievable games I've ever played that seems to get a bit of a rough trot with people: Vagrant Story.

Just like the game, the soundtrack is a gritty, claustrophobic masterpiece that showcases some of Sakimoto's percussive strengths. The absolutely epic battle themes such as "Minotaur", "Wyvern" and "Ifrit" fit in perfectly in what is quite likely the most wonderful game ever created (That's my opinion of course :). It's funny really, because when I heard team Matsuno was working on a game that could be completed in "6-7 hours", my heart sank because I was absolutely sure that they couldn't follow up the brilliant FFT with any sort of relevance. Funny how almost a dozen playthroughs, constant spins of the soundtrack and rose-tinted memory works on you.

Future Gaming Plans

So, after I've managed to finish FF3 (that's a definite work in progress, although I did just get the Ultima weapon and changed my viking and black belt to knight and ninja respectively and am working on grinding out some levels), I'll be going back and playing through both FF6 (the SNES one, I couldn't get my GBA emulator to work too well on the PSP) and VS, all in preparation for the re-release of FFT (although I do hear that it's plagued with some pretty bad slow-down at times) and the re-experience of some of the timeless classics of the last (and before last) generation of gaming. I hate the way Square have become, if only they would get back into the business of making good games instead of continuing to ride the coat-tails of past succes.

And what the hell is Matsuno doing with himself now? I need to know he still does games :(

Alteration of Scope

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 02:34:03 GMT

I seem to start every post I make to this thing with "wow, it's been a long time since my last post" or something to that effect. This is just one of those cyclical things in my life that I get really interested in for periods, then it lies dormant for far, far too long. With that said however, onto the "guts" of the post itself (and how I wish "guts" was a reference to Final Fantasy Tactics.

Pacing of Content (or lack thereof)

I've been playing my way through Final Fantasy III for the DS over the past say 3 weeks or so, and find myself right at the end and constantly, infuriatingly smashing my head against the final brick wall, aka Dark Clouds (If I remember correctly). I'm not sure who was in charge of pacing or balancing towards the end of the game but the general ebb-and-flow of difficulty versus level versus time just totally went out the window. I'm not sure I've ever played a game before where you can simply steamroll the entire last dungeon, using your Devout to "attack" for the majority of it (read: not heal at all) and then get your ass handed to you by the final boss; and by all accounts, this final boss has been tuned down from the original FF3.

I'll give some background, and I will freely admit that the reason I'm having such an easy time of it in the final dungeon is because I have some pretty power-packed melee and a very tough tank:

Exp : Hovering around 54, each character has about 3000 hp
Jobs : 92 Viking (tank), 32 Devout, 20 Black Belt, 93 Dark Knight

It's a bit of a funny lineup I have to admit, but what I've been doing (probably to my absolute detriment) is having my Viking sitting in the back row with crystal armour and 2 shields (1 crystal, 1 aegis) and provoking every turn, this in turn gives my devout absolutely nothing to heal (Vikings with a full defensive loadout are harder to kill than anything) and my melee dps the chance to basically go all out. This of course comes unstuck in the battle against Dark Clouds when there are 3 targets (not sure which attack, I think they just do support magic and cast lightning) and DC gets 3 attacks a turn which may or may not include the most stupid attack known to mankind: Photon Beam.

I just can't soak the damage from it, my 2 damage dealers (even with one in full crystal armor; or as much crystal as they can) get insta-gibbed by this attack, and even if they didn't, lightning pretty much finishes them off; it's a source of massive frustration because when I'm left with my Devout (who basically spams Curaja) and my Viking, I have absolutely no damage coming out to supplement the damage coming in. This of course leads me to believe that I am _totally_ fucking up this battle with the lineup I have and I need to switch my tactics (and spend about 10 hours in Eureka leveling them up of course).

My proposed party consists of the following:

Jobs: Knight (in place of my Viking), not sure what weapon, but I'll probably go 2 weapons before DC, Devout (hopefully a much higher level), Ninja (back row shuriken spamming seems like the way to go) and Dark Knight (I have to admit I'm at a bit of a loss with this one; my DK is almost lvl 99, so I'd want to swap it out for something else for a while; but I'm not entirely sure what, I'd possibly go a summoner just because I have all of the extra summons).

If it gets down to it, at least this loadout will give me some added attack and some much needed support. If it gets down to it, it's possible I may even swap the Viking for a Bard just for the pure support and healing. I'll see how it goes.

Sick of MMOs (maybe)

This is another cyclical thing that happens to me, after going total gangbusters for the last 9 months or so in WoW, I've decided to hang up my boots again. At the release of TBC, I decided to abandom my warrior and pick up a blood elf paladin just so I could give my guild a leg-up in the healer stakes and hopefully guarantee myself a spot in the raiding hierarchy, and while I must admit, I'm hardly ever left out of a raid, I do have a very large feeling of underappreciation for the massive amount of hard work I had to go through on my road to lvl 70, when my intentions were purely to help my friends out (as it turns out, I'm a little more selfish than that). I'm just purely lacking motivation to try to log in when I can (which is increasingly difficult these days with work and girlfriend) and just help other people out with no apparent personal gain. I'll say again, it is a selfish outlook, but I feel like being selfish at the moment, and so I cancelled my subscription.

I know I'll be back for the next expansion or when the bug bites me again, but right now, I just need an extended break.

I'm going to continue to post on here; I wanted to make it a software/graphic/game design/implementation-centric blog but I'm in the middle of setting up a new web-based project, so that may have to wait for another time, so for the time being, it's probably just going to be game-related (and RL if I feel saucy).

Year Zero

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 07:23:54 GMT

Awesome. That is all.

Got to be kidding...

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 01:49:53 GMT

I just finished watching the KH2:Final Mix+ ending and I have no idea what to think now. Apparently the original secret trailer was added to the original KH2 just like the deep dive clip was added to the original KH as "something cool that would get people talking". Well, now that this one has appeared out of absolutely nowhere (pls to be releasing KH2:FM+ in english!), I have to say, I'm pretty inclined to believe that the KH universe is going to keep living; I have to call shenanagins on Mickey being in it though, I really do. That's just mean :(

Please squareenix, keep my favourite series going :(

Edit: Ok, just read an interview with Nomura, who reckons that "part" of the KH2:FM+ secret trailer pertains to the "new series" and that this series will definitely not be Kingdom Hearts 3. Bit of a shame I have to say, but as long as the universe remains intact, I can probably handle it ;)

So...

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:12:00 GMT

Anyone got a spare tbc beta invite they want to throw my way? :)

I build castles out of honesty...

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:53:53 GMT

Changes

Well, look at what we have here, a journal update - who'da'thunk? I spent quite a while thinking about what I wanted to put in this update and believe-you-me, it was going to be something absolutely stupendous and awesome and another random superlative, but then I got bored and decided I was just going to update my gaming progress amongst other things. You know, just for shits 'n giggles.

World of Raidcraft

So, my guild on Frostmourne's been doing reasonably well over the last little while, we began our raiding careers with a full clear of MC up to Rag who we wiped on for about 3 days or so (the best effort we had at the start was a 1% wipe with 35 people). In this first clear, we managed to get ourselves a left binding and a whole bunch of druid shi.. erm.. loot, so it was a good start we found. Since then, we've managed to one-shot MC consistently and even manage to get Rag down to about 24-ish% before sons, so we're doing fairly well.

One thing we're not doing so well on is BWL and Razorgore. We've been banging our heads up against this encounter for the best part of a month now and, with average attendance as well as constantly changing strats, we're just not making any headway into the encounter. Recently though, we've managed to decide upon a strat (kite dragons, dps down humanoids) and that's been working pretty nicely so far with our best attempt (literally our 2nd attempt at the strat) managing to get to 9 eggs before our tanks get wtfpwnedbbqetc by too many dragons and not enough healing. We have found that the humanoids aren't the problem here, it's our shortage of healers; unfortunately this number is dwindling even further now as the healers bitch about "itemisation" and how if a priest wanted to get a +damage set instead of a +healing set then they'd have to wait for all mages and all warlocks to get the gear before they could. I like to say "cry me a river" and note that if you wanted to do loldps in raids, they should've rolled another character, like a warrior. Speaking of which...

I'm currently the guild's #1 dps warrior (and #1 dps'er in general) after I managed to spend many, many weeks gearing myself up to be DW fury and then getting thrown a curveball and being the only eligible warrior in an MC raid to pick up a Bonereaver's Edge (our guild prioritises armor and items based on class and role, so tanks will get tank gear over dps warriors). And herein lies a bit of a problem; This guild has just not had any sort of luck getting high-end weapons for dps characters that are dedicated to playing alot. Sure we've been getting our share of CHT's and OEB's (so much so that all of our warriors now currently have an OEB, regardless of role, and we've de'd 3 aswell) but we've only had one BRE, one perdition's blade (which unfortunately went to a rogue who hardly ever turns up, and when he does he leaves early and then is surprised how high he is on the damage meters when he's only been in the raid for half the run (he must be afk for half the run if that's the case, because he sure as shit is sitting in the instance with us)) and no other weapons of note. Where we've excelled is in our caster weapon and caster armor drops; we've been absolutely swimming in this shit and we're getting to the point where almost every one of our 10 mages has an azuresong mageblade and/or a toep. This is absolutely ridiculous and much to the disgust of the guild and the other top DPS warrior (somehow, the two of us are consistently 100k damage over everyone else in the raid), a big 2h simple just will not drop for him (he's still using a TUF after like 3 months in MC). We keep saying one will drop for him but knowing this guild, the chances of getting a spinal reaper, zin'rokh or bre are exceedingly small. In other related news, we haven't had a single brutality blade drop either, which has caused one of our top rogues no end of emotional pain.

Of course, while we've been unlucky in certain areas, we've been amazingly lucky in another with the guild managing to get 3 bindings (2 left and last night, our first right) and get our inaugural thunderfury. Knowing that some guilds manage to play the game for 1.5 years straight in MC on a single binding and we've managed to get ours after 3 months of MC. I would say that was fairly lucky and after alot of asking around the big guilds on the server, we managed to get the 50 arcanite bars we needed and then hammersmashed thunderran in the face. So tonight, we get to have our first thunderfury raid and I for one am really looking forward to it (especially considering it's so hard to open up on even trash mobs because of threat issues).

Hopefully we can get a fair chunk of BWL progression in the bag before the expansion, although I've heard a rumour that we're going to be attempting the big dungeons like AQ40 and BWL and Naxx post expansion anyways, just for the experience.

Final Fantasy XII

Can't say too much about this game without absolutely swooning. This game is awesome and absolutely reeks of Matsuno and co's brilliance and I can't wait to get further into the game. If you haven't managed to get the game, grab it because it rocks your face :)

I think that's all for now, I've spent way too long typing when I should be working :) So Adios Amigos!

Eye needz halp!

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 01:26:34 GMT

Hey all, I realise that I haven't updated this for, well weeks/months/whatever and eventually I will, but for the time being, I am looking for some help. Specifically, WoW help, specifically Fury Warrior help.

I'm looking for a decent dw fury warrior build and equipment set for someone in a guild that is up to (and likely to down) Ragnaros in the next week. I realise I may be barking up the wrong tree on this sort of matter, but, thought I'd give it a go. Here's my current setup on ctprofiles: http://ctprofiles.net/1285329

A bit of background, I'm currently the 2nd ranked dkp warrior in the guild, complete zg, aq20, most of mc and ony and I'm just pretty sick of the cookie cutter ms build. I got myself a frostbite and lobotomizer from AV on the PTR and gave that a go and was very pleasantly surprised at how much of a change it was from simply MSing and WWing forever (well with a slam or two chucked in there). I realise my gear is subpar for BT, but HS was critting for almost 1K against mobs in AV (I realise that's not the best test around, I'll need to test some more), and well, no other warrior has picked up the fury warrior baton in our guild, so I thought I'd be the one to give it a crack :) Thanks in advance if you can help out :)

I'm a consumer whore! (and how!)

Tue, 30 May 2006 01:35:48 GMT

DS MENS
So, like, I have one of those super cool (not that I've actually even ever used a DS before) DS Lite things coming my way on Thursday night hopefully, and I'm still a bit vexed over which games to pick up straight away. I don't know anyone else that has a DS, so I'm not sure that picking up a game like metriod hunters is the best thing to do until I can find people to play against locally. I've sort of narrowed it down to between new super mario bros, that brain age thing and something like metroid hunters or nintendogs or something equally as fruity. I really want to get into the multiplayer thing, so games like mario kart and tetris aren't out of the question at all. Any advice? I'd appreciate it! :)

I'm back baby
I caved, reactivated WoW and am doing that whole thing once again (for the 3rd time). This time, rolling an orc warrior on the Frostmourne server and overall it seems fairly good. Joined an up and coming guild with a whole bunch of real life mates so that's great. They're still working on ZG until they get their numbers up (getting towards 40ish members, about half of which are 60) and get keyed up for different things, but it's exciting to be part of a guild that seem to want to progress through the game at their own pace and learn everything on their own rather than zerg the shit out of the content. They have good guild policies set up, a bank system, merit points and dkp and all that fun stuff, so no arguments over gear and shit, everything's perfectly transparent and the guild leader - who is the guild main tank, is that a prerequisite or something? - seems like a decent sort of person unlike the last decently sized guild I was in, so I'm enjoying myself. Also, I have to say that it's fucking awesome to be back on the horde side, I always felt like I was betraying myself rolling alliance on proudmoore all those months ago, but I guess it's something I had to try out for a while; but now, I'm back with the group that actually have a bit of character and attitude, no more mangina fun :)

This brings me to my next question/advice request - and this is placed squarely at keisos, so hopefully he reads this. After watching hulksmash and sonic and your (spritzer) fury warrior videos, I'm freaking amped to try it out (the first time I played warrior on BR, I was 31/20 (ms/enrage) all the way), so i was wondering what a decent levelling up fury build would be. I'm pretty sure I know what to do and I'm looking at 20/31/0 to get bloodthirst and other fun stuff in arms (impale/tm etc) but I was wondering if it was worth investing more into fury, like having a 17/34 build just to get impale on arms side and have a bit more flexibility on the fury side. Also in a 20/31 build, i'm putting 4/5 into quite a few talents which I'm not too fond of.. Any advice? Talent build links I can check out?

That's all for now :)

whoahsurveys :P

Fri, 26 May 2006 01:20:05 GMT

1. WOULD YOU GET BACK WITH YOUR EX IF YOU COULD?
Don't have an ex, so I couldn't really say anything about that...

2. WHAT KIND OF SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING?
Apple green Van Heusen business shirt.

3. HAVE YOU KISSED ANYONE ON YOUR FRIENDS LIST?
Nope.

4. DO YOU HAVE "A THING" FOR ANYONE ON YOUR FRIENDS LIST?
Maybe a couple ;)

5. HOW MANY PEOPLE ON YOUR LIST DO YOU KNOW IN REAL LIFE?
One I think, depends if he actually still uses his LJ though.

6. HOW MANY KIDS DO YOU WANT TO HAVE?
2, but that's not a bridge I want to cross for a long time.

7. DO YOU HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP WITH BOTH YOUR PARENTS?
I do now that they've split up heh.

8. DO YOU MAKE OVER 40K A YEAR
After benefits, yes!

9. WHAT NAME WOULD YOU WANT TO HAVE BESIDES THE ONE YOU HAVE?
Michael I think, don't know why though.

10. WOULD YOU EVER MAKE OUT WITH SOMEONE OF THE SAME SEX?
Nah, girls do it for me.

12. WHAT DID YOU DO FOR YOUR LAST BDAY?
Last bday.. Good question, I think I went out to dinner with my family, 24 isn't exactly the most monumental birthday.

13. WHAT'S YOUR MAIN RINGTONE ON YOUR PHONE?
J-E-N-O-V-A, OST version. Love it :)

14. WHAT TIME DID YOU WAKE UP?
7:00am, to be at work by 8:30am.

15.WHAT WERE YOU DOING AT MIDNIGHT TWO NIGHTS AGO?
Midnite, was watching Big Brother Up Late and flossing before going to sleep.

16. HOW MANY OF YOUR EX'S ARE ON YOUR FRIENDS LIST?
No exes.

17. DO YOU LIKE HAVING YOUR HAIR PULLED?
Stupid question :P

18. NAME SOMETHING YOU CAN'T WAIT TO DO?
Spend the weekend with my girlfriend down in Margaret River in 2 weeks, can't wait at all!

19. LAST TIME YOU SAW YOUR MOM?
This morning

20. DO YOU GET ALONG WITH YOUR SIBLING(S)?
Yeah, I only have a brother and we get along really well.

21. WHAT IS ONE THING YOU WISH YOU COULD CHANGE ABOUT YOURSELF?
My teeth actually, I'm pretty happy with everything else.

22. IF YOU HAD $250,000...HOW WOULD YOU SPEND IT?
Probably look into property.. Geeze that makes me sound old :(

23. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN AT YOUR CURRENT JOB?
7 weeks (+6 weeks contract)

24. HAVE YOU EVER TALKED TO TOM
WTF.

25. WHAT COLOR UNDERWEAR ARE YOU WEARING?
White bonds briefs, very comfortable

26. LAST THING YOU ATE?
Toast with vegemite mate

27. WHATS YOUR FAVORITE MONTH?
December, easily.

28. YOUR LEAST FAVORITE Month:::
June :(

29. WHAT'S THE LAST PIECE OF CLOTHING YOU BORROWED FROM ANYONE?
Can't remember at all :P

30. WHO IS GETTING ON YOUR NERVES RIGHT NOW?
Noone, I'm doing ok :)

31. MOST VISITED WEBPAGE
shacknews.com

32. LAST PERSON YOU TEXT MESSAGED?
Sarah :)

33. LAST PERSON TO MAKE YOU SAD?
My brother I think.. He can be a real jerk sometimes

34. WOULD YOU TAKE A BULLET FOR YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Yeah, I would, although I'd want to take it somewhere non life-threatening.

35. FAVORITE KIND OF DRINK?
Coke Zero?

36. FAVORITE FOOD?
Chicken hehe, I dunno :P

37. FAVORITE DESSERT?
Chocolate bar or something

38. HAVE YOU BEEN TO EUROPE?
Nope

39. IF SOMEONE YOU HATED DIED, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
That's happened before, I hated him for fairly decent reasons though. I still felt bad about it and that's probably the difference between the two of us, if it were the other way around, he wouldn't have felt bad about me dying.

40. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED?
Date Movie I think.. Can't really remember...

Consternation

Sun, 21 May 2006 10:32:48 GMT

So, I'm thinking of reactivating again on WoW, probably on one of the new Oceanic PvP servers when they become available. I don't know why I'm starting over again for a 3rd (4th?) time, but all this reading up on new stuff that's being implemented into the game is just making it too tough for me to resist! :(

Axe just wanted to do a solo!

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 17:17:08 GMT

Just got back from the Perth Opeth concert, interesting setlist:

Ghost of Perdition
White Cluster (holy shit)
Amen Corner (holy shit x2)
Baying of the Hounds
Under the Weeping Moon (power went out halfway through, crushed the mood a bit)
The Grand Conjuration (worst Opeth song ever)
The Leper Affinity

Encore - Deliverance

Great set, had a couple of big big surprises which were the absolute highlight, and after the power went out in UtWM the mood didn't really return until about halfway through Leper Affinity for me, I really have to say taht TGC is the worst Opeth song ever, why did they ever even bother writing that pile of shit, it's just so un-Opeth it's not funny :( It had to come though considering it's their one and only single, so, it was probably best that it came after the mood was completely shattered because honestly, nothing can save that song :(

Really enjoyed it, my new earplugs were absolutely great too ;)

Darkness of the Unknown

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:27:44 GMT

So, I finished KH2 - Big spoilers and battle report under cut (for those that are interested)

Well, it's all over, all 45ish hours of it and I'm just blown away, I have to say that I didn't think that a battle could get any better until the final 3-phase Xemnas battle. Cutting through buildings, Dragonball Z'ing everywhere and the final battle with Riku and Sora against Xemnas in human form. That was just absolutely astoundingly memorable. Shimomura's "A Fight to the Death" is one of the more brilliant ending battle music pieces I've heard for a long time, rivalling "Disappeared" in just how cool it is; the huge, epic flowing piano melodies just send shivers down my spine, absolutely hauntingly beautiful and I don't think anyone does it like her (Yoko that is). Darkness of the Unknown, the tune playing during the last two battle scenes (I think) is decent as well, although I'm not the biggest fan of some of the synth sound; I'm trying to decide on whether I like Forza Del Mal and End of the World or the ending music from KH2 more. Might grow on me a bit more, I'm not too sure.

After it was all over and the final scene in the World of Darkness from the beginning of the game appeared with Sora and Riku accepting their fate of never being able to see their friends again I have to say that I almost shed a tear when they finally returned to Destiny Islands and reunited with everyone. It was one of the more moving and satisfying endings (even though it was all warm and fuzzy, which some people get a little uptight about) I've seen for a very long time because honestly, I've absolutely been in love with Sora's story; the characters and settings have been just so charming and so sinister and so overwhelming that it was just as overwhelming for me to finally see moments of happiness for everyone.

That aside though, the fabled "secret ending" appeared that I've heard so much about but managed to avoid seeing anything until I'd finished the game. As most people have probably heard, Nomura has been heard to say that KH2 is the end of Sora's story and before the "secret ending" and the appearance of a letter in a bottle from the King (letter in the bottle appearing on Destiny Islands, the same as the bottle that Kairi floated off early in the game that was found by Sora and Riku at the end in the World of Darkness, perhaps a hint?). This then fades out and then Nomura king hits us with a big pile of random bullshit that is just way too cool to ignore.

Chasers, Keyblade War, Memory of Xehanort, The Last Two? Not to mention the fact that the 3 keyblades that the armored warriors are all extremely similar (Nomura has already said that this scene is possibly from the past?!) to the keyblades wielded by Sora, the King and Riku (Way to the Dawn, not Riku's Soul Eater; you can tell by the cloud shaped key teeth at the top and the heartless keychain). It all adds up to a really confusing, tantalising and completely jerkish thing for Nomura to give to the "fans". I've read the interview in Ultimania and he mentioned that while "Another Side" was merely something to let fans know that there was a real setting and half a storyline for KH2 developed, "Sunset Horizons" was something that apparrently Nomura has so heavily realised and concepted that he's certain of what the setting and storyline of this ending will be. Whether it's actually going to be branded Kingdom Hearts (Seeing as it's not Sora's story anymore and it's about the Keyblade War as opposed to the creation/unleashing of Kingdom Hearts, the absolute darkness), and whether it's actually going to be developed is another question all together. Nomura has mentioned that he would be happy leaving it as something for the fans of Kingdom Hearts to debate about for basically the rest of time; I don't know whether that's supposed to be a positive thing to do or not. I was always brought up to never leave things unfinished, and if he leaves it at a "secret ending" that is just so sinister and continues the Kingdom Hearts line, then I think he's doing everyone a disservice; surely KH2 sold enough to warrant another sequel hehe ;)

Anyways, to the battle report:

Jiminy's Journal complete: 92%
Gummi Ship routes cleared: 42% (yikes)
Times saved by Mickey: 3 (twice in one fight, fuck that Xaldin fight was tough!)
Most used form: Valor (61 times)
Most summoned: Genie (14 times)

I obtained Ultima Weapon, Save the King+ and Save the Queen+. I had 3 Ribbons on Sora too lol :)

That's all I can really remember. I was utterly depressed to finish this game by the way :) Not nearly as much as I was when KH1 was finished, that game had such an effect on me when I played through it, I remember it with such fond memories. Sigh. Now time to wait months for the next game (FFXII) to get here :(

The 13th Dilemma

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 06:14:40 GMT

13 Orichalcum+? You've got to be shitting me! Now that I think about it, I can get that down to 7 using an energy gem or something like that. Fuck I've beaten KH2 hardcore over the last few days; up to Castle Oblivion - lvl50 proud mode so far. I've still got a whole bunch of synthesizing stuff to do, complete the remaining gummi ship levels, investigate the coleseum a bit more and try to max sora up a bit for the Sephiroth fight. Still got plenty to do thank goodness, I don't want this game to end :(

The Encounter

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 23:16:01 GMT

So I was playing through the Hades Cup in KH2 and when I changed form, I turned into a crazy black sora that beat the living shit out of everything.. I guess this is that anti-form I hear so much about, talk about overkill :P

He's a Pirate!

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 02:34:25 GMT

In yet another KH2 related post, I just wanted to do a quick progress update:

After reading noda's journal regarding the gummi ship stages, I thought I'd have a shot at clearing the levels and upgrading my ships some. This was a good plan in theory, however, I ended up spending the next 5-6 hours trying to get S-rank on all of the missions that I have the skills to actually complete (I'm no good at the free-camera levels to be perfectly honest). This is one of the more astounding things about this game, that absolutely everything is almost perfectly realised within the context of the game. The mini-games are well thought out, the gummi ship could very well be a standalone game for how deep and how rewarding it feels to complete stages in it and the core gameplay is absolutely excellent.

I did all of the above after completing the Timeless River level (Steamboat Willey) which just about has to be the most beautifully realised and executed piece of gaming nostalgia I've ever had the opportunity of playing. Every part of this level was an absolute delight to the eyes and a pleasure to play, and the boss at the end (Pete vs. Pete of all things) was probably the first boss battle in the game that I actually thought was half-challenging. All-in-all, brilliant stuff.

I also completed the first underworld tournament in the Coleseum world and let me tell you, what a tough nut that was to crack! It had tournament level 20 and I was consistently getting my ass handed to me by the cartoon car heartless battle (part 4 I think), I was just getting hit too hard. So, after realising I had one piece of armour for Sora and co (that being the Champion Belt from winning the struggle tournament at the beginning of the game with Roxas haha), I went back to Hollow Bastion and bought myself a couple of Dark Anklets; not for the resists necessarily but for the extra defence, and swapped in my Kingdom Key instead of the Champion's Mark (whatever the keyblade you get from completing the first episode of the Coleseum is) for that extra defense and then breezed through it.

One thing I'm noticing is there's not exactly a huge progression in keyblade power so far; they all have relatively equal stats, but each has a somewhat desirable ability associated with it, meaning that there's no real clear-cut choices as far as weapons go, you generally use what's consistent with your playing style. If for some reason you use magic at all (I am finding there's a huge de-emphasis on any magic except cure; well even cure is hard to use, given it's single-use policy), you can use keyblades to supplement magic and magic regen, if you're interested in big-flashy combos, you can equip the coleseum keyblade along with the first extra keyblade you have in your sub-weapon slot and be able to pull out like 12 hit air combos in valor form. It's pretty interesting, the way they've gone this time.

There's just so much to do in the game, it's just crazy and EVERYTHING can be leveled up individually, it's pretty intimidating how deep they've attempted to make the game. For instance, you can level up your synthesis moogle to get better recipes etc, you can level up your characters individually, you can level up each of your extra forms to get growth abilities and power them up more significantly (wisdom form doesn't seem all that useful at the moment though) and even the gummi ship gives you different levels of blueprint to use and you can customise these to whatever you like (I've basically been using custom forms of the existing sample blueprints, such as putting a meteor g laser on a falcon gummi ship - talk about imba). It's going to take a long time to 100% this game I can feel it in my bones :)

Speaking of bones (how's that for segue!), I had a bit of a play around in atlantica with the absolutely garish sung tunes (the performances were good, the tunes themselves are like nails scraping a blackboard to my ear though) and that's definitely a nice change in the core gameplay, not content just to bash heartless/nobodies for a while, now we have to participate in a musical ;P Interesting stuff to say the least, I just wish the songs weren't so awful :P Now I'm up to Port Royal and I'm really disappointed in the VA for Jack Sparrow and Will Turner (Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom in the movie). There are parts where this game is expertly realised and very true to the original game (Organisation XIII's voice acting comes to mind, just the standard of voices they used), and there are parts where the game feels like a SERIOUS straight-to-dvd-disney-sequel, such as the Port Royal section. The replacement VA is acceptable but where a character is so memorable isn't just in their mannerisms and visual acting, it's in the voice; and getting people to do an imitation of an excellent performance in a sequel is just an exercise in mediocrity imo. I know that's harsh, but I put alot of stock in production values, and this is one part that just grates on me.

As far as the soundtrack has gone so far, I've been a little unimpressed to be perfectly honest. The reproductions of disney soundtracks have generally been spot-on in whatever realisations Shimomura has decided upon, as well as the re-visits to original KH tunes, the battle tunes for the most part have really lacked that decidedly epic feel from the original. I could listen to the battle themes from just about every KH world and even be able to hum them if prompted, they're just that memorable. The only battle tunes I've found memorable in KH2 so far are Tension Rising, The 13th Struggle (but even that's from CoM), Desire for all that is Lost (probably my favourite of the game so far), Dance of the Darling (Beasts world) and Vim and Vigor (first hear that fighting Shan Yu in Mulan's world). There are some good tries around there, like Dance to the Death (hear that fighting the giant heartless ghost in Beast's castle and when you first set foot in Mickey's Castle) and Scherzo Di Notte (which is a revisit of the original, which was brilliant, probably one of my favourite battle musics from KH). Alot of the others sort of fade into the background quite significantly. Oh, I absolutely loved the gummi ship tune Floating in Bliss, the stages this tune is from are absolutely fantastic too! Maybe the original KH soundtrack was a fluke amongst OSTs, there were just so many gems on that album that it was probably impossible to reproduce that form. I'm pretty harsh in my judgements :(

There you have it, I'll probably play for another 6 hours again today, another binge when I honestly should be preparing for my upcoming job. It's systems analysis, which is totally boring but not the hardest thing around, it's for 6 weeks so it should keep me out of trouble for a while.

Passion

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 03:08:19 GMT

I managed to get my copy of KH2 opened and going (albeit at 11:00pm last night after my brother decided he wanted to marathon Season 6 and Season 3 of Buffy) and while I'm completely and utterly impressed with how much I'm enjoying it (as much as I thought that it might even be a letdown after all the ExpoHype (tm) I launched at it), there are a couple of things that I did find a little disappointing:

- English Sanctuary :( Really unimpressive after hearing the original (now that I'm listening to it for reference)
- No Billy Zane doing Ansem's VA. I have to admit that's probably the most disappointing thing I've found in the game so far hehe, I absolutely LOVED his performance in the original, and while the guy who's doing it now has been doing a great job so far, it's hard to forget Billy Zane - He's a cool guy!
- The menu/camera control. One of the things I really enjoyed about the original was being able to traverse the menu using the right analogue stick. Obviously now it controls the camera rather than the shoulder buttons but now it's virtually impossible to control/dodge with Sora while traversing the menu. I guess the extra shortcut slot was meant to be a compensation for this, but it's just hard to work through unless you have disjointed thumbs or something.

So, there's only a couple of things that I was disappointed with. I have to say that I do like some of the changes to the battle system; The reaction controls are pretty fun and I like the idea of being able to do things like open chests using the triangle button instead of traversing the menu, and being able to have your stock items replaced with the same items is undeniably useful. I notice there's now a slot for accessories (as well as a whole wealth of new status-specific attributes such as elemental resists, which were implied in the original but was hard to tell how they worked as far as their mechanics) as well as equipment; I'm not sure if I remember correctly but there weren't equipment/armour slots in the original, so this is a nice RPG-ish change which I'm looking forward to working with.

As far as the soundtrack goes, I'm absolutely loving the re-visited/re-worked/re-imagined versions of original KH tracks. I've read complaints that alot of the soundtrack basically ports original KH tracks rather than create more original material, and while I see the point, in my opinion the re-visited tracks all have a much different feel to them, while the changes are subtle, I do think that they fit very well in the context of the game. The battle music so far is an absolute highlight, although I think that Tension Rising pales in comparison to Night of Fate from the original (the track played when Sora goes back to the island to look for the boat they created only to find the place overrun by Heartless and Darkside), it's still completely memorable, and the 13th Struggle (taken from CoM) is an absolutely brilliant track ;)

Production values are like everyone said - freaking fantastic. The animation/effects/level of detail on everything is utterly astounding and the number of absolutely memorable moments I've had (and I've only just completed Roxas' opening story) makes me wonder how the game could get any better (the battle with the first tutorial boss - holy shit - even though you don't control too much of it, how awesome is it?!#%). We'll just have to wait and see though.

Story-wise, very interesting, I'm going to read through that long KH2 theory post I made earlier to see how accurate my thoughts were; now that I think about it, I almost hit the nail on the head as far as Namine and Kairi go (it was probably pretty obvious) but Roxas being a member of the XIII Organisation? Didn't see that one coming, nor the battle with Riku from Deep Dive. Very, very interesting stuff so far and I have to say, if I'd never played the original or CoM; I'd be completely lost :) Can't wait to see what the game brings ;)

Hangman

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 21:57:22 GMT

It's kind of a surreal feeling having waited for a game for such a long time, only to have your pre-order sit days past the "item will ship out when stock arrives (28th March)" message it so vehemently claims. Spending a whole wad of cash on only something more than a promise of something probably isn't something I'm going to do too much more in the future. It's just getting annoying now to be honest :( Of course I'm talking about KH2 which has been getting semi-mixed reviews from various english gaming publications; these of course completely go against the grain of the various japanese publications that gave the game absolutely rave reviews. IGN/Gamespot are both saying that the game is simply far too easy and the gameplay itself is ridiculously repetitive. I wonder if they REALLY played the original because that was sort of half the fun, grinding away with exceedingly fun mechanics with smatterings of magic and other stuff thrown in; surely more of that with a vastly refined and improved battle system can't be bad? I dunno, I'm still firmly in the "fanboy" area of gaming and maybe my completely biased view of Square and their beloved series is making me see shit through rose coloured glasses but seriously, I really want to play now!

Even bittorrent is failing me, I've had a torrent going for almost 2 days and while the upload is firmly stuck at around maximum, my download is firmly stuck at around 2k/s. So, my ratio is like 20 and I've only downloaded a smattering since it started. I don't understand how this works; probably public trackers? I really don't know..

Finally, I just wanted to say a big goodbye to one of my long-time internet LJ friends whom I've known for the best part of a year and a half I guess. We started chatting out of the blue with not alot in common and I thought we really hit it off for a while there, I really enjoyed back at the start of our relationship when we talked crap for hours. Gave me something to look forward to on some nights when I really had nothing going for me. However, more recently I have to say that I'd become increasingly frustrated by the amount of times I'd get drunken abuse flung at me over IM, it was happening often enough for it to be more than just "a bit of fun"; couple that with increasingly cryptic, jaded, pretentious (I'm very guilty of that) and oftentimes sarcastic and hurtful liaisons between us and I've really just had enough. The last "link" I guess we had left was our LJs, and now that I've removed that and you've done the same, I can assume you understand where we're at. I feel bad in the fact that what was once someone that I absolutely loved talking to won't be around anymore, but now that I think about it; it was just an internet relationship with someone I really didn't know much about, as much as I'd like to think I did, and these things happen. Chances are this person will never read this and realise how I felt about the whole situation, but, it's the way of the world, really and I have to say that if this is the only thing I've got to be emo about, I'm really doing OK ;)

Was nice knowing you!

Anyways, time for work!