Rolling

Haven't been playing a single game heavily recently; I tried to continue my playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII for Emily but my PS2 refused to play it last time I asked, but I also have active games on Assassin's Creed and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. I want to finish the first AC again mostly to get everything fresh again for when I start Brotherhood, and FFCC is just because I like it and I want to show Emily how pro I am when the second GBA arrives so we can play together.

Nothing else interesting to say, really. Did some more Quake speedrun practice, got a 30-minute realtime run, which is not exactly impressive to a seasoned runner but it fits into my time slot. In fact, it leaves me 5 minutes to finish the secret levels in case whatever extra donation total we decide on is met, which is probably enough. It's just so annoying to keep on running and running and come up very short on the great Connor Fitzgerald's record run. Also I spent 4 minutes trying to get the jump on e3m1 this time, haha.

Oh, also Bruce has been really talkative today, lots of nice chirps and cheeps and burbles.

NINTENDO!!!

Nintendo seem very set on preventing Emily and I from playing games together. First we tried playing the free Four Swords Anniversary Edition together from DSiWare, but apparently our DSs don't want to talk to each other because they're speaking different kinds of English or something I guess?

Then we had the bright idea of getting an extra Gamecube->GBA Link cable so that we could play Four Swords Adventures together! And guess what, her US copy of the game refuses to talk to my EU Gameboy Advance.

I love interoperability.

Anonymous Notes Chapter 1 (DSiWare)

So I played a little more of this dungeon crawler. The exit from Abyss 3 led to a boss chamber. The boss himself was pretty trivial (I got some Minotaur dude that walked around really slowly getting peppered by my arrows) and afterwards he dropped some B-rank axe and let me exit. This reset the entire dungeon and regenerated it, so the areas are different (and longer) and the monsters are tougher (well, more HP/damage). Drops also seem to have been similarly scaled. My save file now says 'Clear: 1', but there's also these 4 star slots which aren't filled in. Kinda sad that I'll be listening to this one piece of music for all the dungeon floors in the game... I hope it changes at some point; the dungeon tiles are the same but slightly recoloured, too.

So now I've played a little more, I can give some kind of judgement on it. It's fun, not particularly profound, would be much better multiplayer. I wonder if Chapter 2 is more of the same or an improvement on the formula. I'll try a little more Chapter 1 before grabbing it.

Edit: Ok, got 2 clears. Now the tileset is white and I forgot to check if the music changed. The game is just throwing good items at me now, and I just got my first S rank item - a ring which prevents all status effects. Damn useful, and it makes using Soul Siphon a LOT less randomly painful.

The Epic of Bruce

It's weird to legally own a living thing. Now in proud (joint) possession of a yellow budgerigar, who was almost immediately named Bruce. He's kinda crazy right now, but given a while hopefully he'll settle down and start squawking pieces of eight or something, that's what birds do right?

DSiWare Acquisitions + Anonymous Notes Chapter 1 (DSiWare)

Emily randomly made me buy some stuff from DSiWare, so my results of this are Anonymous Notes Chapter 1 - From The Abyss (200pts) and Castle Conqueror (500pts). Haven't played the latter yet, but here's some reports about the former.

It's fun! You run around and hit stuff, it's fairly easy at first and gets harder. The stealing-skills-off-enemies thing is a cool idea, though considering how often you get bad results by using the siphon spell it's rather annoying. I'm unsure whether it's a good idea to just kill things or siphon them if you're low on health... siphon can get you HP back (a somewhat random amount? is it based on enemy hp when you siphon?) but it can also poison you, which is death unless you have an All Green. Killing stuff often makes them drop nothing or an irrelevant item, but sometimes a health potion which restores quite a lot. Ho hum.

Also weapon types seem horribly balanced so far. Sword is fast and therefore beats a lot of enemy attacks, axe is slow and only has a 2-long combo, but hits for more. Spears have a 3-combo but they only attack straight forward, which is incredibly annoying. Haven't seen a bow yet. Rods only attack once but they give a magic bonus or whatever, which seems hard to use currently because my spells do very little and take forever to actually cast.

There's already a 'Chapter 2' of this game released, which I'll grab if I have fun with this one. Emily has some more films to review if she'll finally get round to it. :)

Stuff

Not much vidya game playing has been going on lately; been doing boring domestic stuff and buying new things to take up space in my place. Once we have more floorspace and a little extra order has been imposed on say, the contents of certain rooms, it'll be back to throwing controllers through screens again.

Final Fantasy and Willow

I still don't hate Zell.

In other news, we watched one of our "must watch" films this week--Willow, starring Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer. I had been interested in the movie for a long time, thanks to a poster my dad got for free and hung up inside my sister's room. My sister and I always wondered about it, but we never rented it for some reason. When HMV had Willow on sale, I had no choice but to pick it up.

I really enjoyed it! Paul had seen it before, when he was a little kid, but didn't remember much of it. I'm so glad we decided to buy it; I'm sure I will want to watch it again.