Plowing through Front Mission 3 at full speed - imagine, S rank weapons before even leaving Japan! lol. I'm getting hit with the full -15% penalty for weapon skills in each story battle, but as I explained it doesn't matter.

As part of Shinju's dare, I went to work today dressed as FF12's Princess Ashe. Of course, the pink miniskirt wasn't as... flimsy looking... as what Ashe actually wore. You can be sure I picked a really reliable blue belt :P   I also added a large white cloak with the FF12 logo which I wore when outdoors - it's hot here in the tropics.

The students recognised it straight away, of course - I teach a programming class, what do you expect? :roll: Half of them are probably in the middle of the game. The hardest parts were the metal guards, but my tailor's used to doing costumes. It took 6 weeks to get done, but it paid off. I guess the only thing is that Ashe looks distinctly caucasian and has slightly longer hair - mine's still as short as in the banner above.

Edit: meh, can't hotlink. URL fixed.

I was let down after getting a handle on the purpose of the medal ranking system in Front Mission 3 - it's yet another pointless "sidequest" that ends up achieving nothing. Consider: after each story battle, you get a scorecard of sorts, with bonuses and (mostly) penalties. Among them is, you get penalised if your weapon ranks (skills) are too high. Low penalties = good score = platinum medals. Scoring a certain number of platinum medals makes a high-experience-rewarding wanzer appear in a certain simulator map (yep, that's the only reward for getting good scores i.e. platinum medals).

Getting that high-exp wanzer on the map will mean your weapon skills will shoot up = higher penalties on your battle scorecard = no more good i.e. platinum medals. The thing is, you only get enough platinum medals near the endgame to get that reward. Which means, most of the game you'll be struggling with low weapon ranks trying not to get high penalties, and consequently suffering in battle... and the reward allows you to raise your weapon ranks higher (i.e. get lotsa exp) = high penalties.

The whole premise is stupid. You might as well abuse the simulator and get good weapon ranks at the start of the game, so as not to have problems in the story battles. There's no other reward for getting good medals. None. It's a waste of time. Which reminds me of Tales of Destiny 2 which I just completed prior. It's an RPG with a great fun battle system, but the sidequests in the game - ugh. Too many of them are pointless and unrewarding. Example, the arena. Not only is it pretty damn short and you win crap, the one unique fight in it (apparently cameos of characters from one of the prequels) only ever happens once - you beat that fight, that's it - the arena will only ever be the same crap 3-in-a-row fights again.

Then there's stuff like the chamballoon thing (sp?), or the big one, some sort of card game - it's not that great in the first place, and the reward is a piddling amount of the alternative "cash" which is only valid in the game's obligatory funfair / minigame town. Don't get your hopes up here either, you can only play the cardgame there, or the auction - which is really more like a game of "hope the bids on your items double instead of bust", and you don't get cash back, just more of the alternative "cash" thing. The point of getting that basically is just to trade it in for some items hard to obtain elsewhere. The sheer amount of it you need to get even the crap items is the only challenge.

Back to Front Mission 3, I'm going to ignore the medal count just like I did for Emma's story (I'm playing Alisa's story now) and concentrate on the bits which I really enjoyed - the story. Yep. The battles, to be honest, aren't really that fun - there's too much of an element of luck involved (i.e. how to get your battle skills to trigger). No other turn-based mech game beats Titans of Steel, which I'm still playing btw. The inclusion of a random map generator boosts it from awesome to untouchable. And this just makes me more pissed off that well-known large publishers (Square, EA, etc) are content to foist off crap games on us.

Oh sure, their games LOOK great. After all they have to show what the development money got spent on. But gameplay? Fun? Replayability? Most of them get poor to failing grades. There's a reason I've always gone out of the way to look for my own games, rather than sit and read some gaming mag, or wait for updates from some gaming website (I repeat from a previous post, I'm on GameSpot mainly for comparing player reviews - I don't really care for the front page news). My favourite games are still mostly non-mainstream ones. You won't find Empire Deluxe or Demise or Titans of Steel on many other profiles. Yet those three games alone have given me way more gaming hours than any hundred-odd well-known titles that you'd care to name.

Oh well. At least the Front Mission 3 story is pretty enjoyable. Can't say that for too many games, once you get past the shiny surface.

I just completed Emma's story @ Front Mission 3. Without giving any spoilers, let me just tell you that the ending scenes were awesome, there were only a few loose ends not really explained, and that ... somebody died, and it effing sucked.

:cry:

Dammit. My team was ownage-incarnate. I could've Body Smashed (1HKO) any enemy if I cared to (most of the time I prefered to shoot them slowly to bits, to milk the most experience out of the encounter). And despite that... let's just say that it was plot related (grr), that I'm pissed off, and all fired up to finish Alisa's story which I started immediately - and pray that it doesn't end with another sucker punch.

- Ce.

... you're kidding, right? :P Anyway, it's been a while. We're still around, just busy.

Still, we hardly play any of our own compositions at all. Last weekend it was all Yngwie Malmsteen and Eric Johnson, between the random Ueno and K.Sada stuff. Oh, and we played a couple of jdrama themes - Izumi and Shinju are on a pop trip for some reason. I tell you, I don't mind sappy songs when the occasion calls for it, but doing back-to-back Zard numbers really isn't my style :? Even playing Stage 5 didn't make me feel better. I had to pull out the heavier stuff (Crownd, Fukasawa) to feel better.

I'm still playing Front Mission 3. I must say, it's got one of the more interesting presentations I've been through. There was this one lamer who complained about the "full of political crap" plot - wow, so go play another braindead FPS and stop peeing on other games. Morons like that shouldn't post reviews. It's like going into a bookstore and complaining that there aren't enough picture books. Back to FM3, I'm really enjoying the story, not just the game. The battles are alright, but some of the things like arbitrary inventory limits and the spinning network graphics are irritating. I keep needing to refer to my notes for stuff like e.g. LAB/GOV/USN since the graphics aren't stable - you can't memorise "click X here, two lefts, another X, right, X". It looks nice but going through the network is a pain in the ass, especially since it has no "see new changes" option - which would actually be trivial to do.

I mean, it makes sense - as long as you've at least visited the website once, you should be able to tell your computer to flag it for any changes - new bbs entry, news article, download, whatever. Having to wander through the labyrinth of links repeatedly is just tedious. At least email is centralised and has a "you have mail / no new mail" flag message. Now that works.

Still, the story's great. I've taken over 1,400 screenshots, and that's after I slowed down after taking one of each frame of dialogue early in the game. I might post some later, if linking images weren't such a pain to do.

- Ce.

Yet more brain-dead commentary by the clueless asswipes in Big Media:

" Universal Music Group CEO calls iPod users thieves "

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/11610/

Calling your customer base criminals doesn't work in the long run. We all know how successful that was at stopping the spread of file sharing - if you can call 'abysmal failure' a success.

They should know about thieves - Vivendi's ex-CEO Jean-Marie Messier is in trouble for stock fraud, to name one example. You can bet the rest of this inbred gang of corporate criminals are doing the same kind thing. Tell me how a desk paper-pusher deserves multimemberships in golf and yatch clubs, afford luxury palatial mansions with gold plated $5,000 toilet seats, and travel around in private aircraft.

But what can you expect from these cartels who thrive on the suffering of the artistes whom they are supposedly promoting? You think any of the money that got levied (e.g. blank media tax) on to the public got shared out among their artistes? Screw it - the artistes get exactly what's in their extortionate, lopsided contracts. The rest of the money - all of it - goes to feed the neverending gravy train.

Big Media are lying, doublefaced criminal bastages. This latest attempt at justifying double-dipping just goes to show that their greed is out of control. Face it, these desperate money-grabbing attempts tell us that you're finally feeling the pain of your business model spiraling down the toilet. Take it like men, or have you sold your balls as well?

I'm pretty sure it was an obscure miniboss' name in Diablo, but I couldn't find it :P Probably one of the upper floor beasties, maybe a spitter-type? Brrr, hated those doggies. I remember the first time I discovered what "stunlock" meant.

Might have noticed that I recently started playing Front Mission 3. It's awesome! I'm having loads of fun just replaying the simulator to rack up skills. One annoying thing of the system is I haven't figured out how the skill rank thing works - your characters start with As and Bs, but e.g. Kazuki's shotgun skills seem to have been maxed (for now) at C...? And raising your weapon skill level (where?) seems to get you penalised when it comes to medal awards. Bleh.

There's no mention of what the medal awards mean either - from all the FAQs I've scoured only one mentions that after getting a certain number of platinum medals, a certain type of 'wanzer' (mech) becomes available at a certain map - good news for people who like to capture enemy wanzers. This is really annoying since I've scored poorly in the story battles because my characters are... overqualified? Kazuki's skill list is already scrollable, and that's saying something after merely 11 or so story battles - I've been grinding like crazy to get them everything.

Okay, not exactly everyone - it would be pointless to get Emma ROFUPs, for example - but I made certain to force everyone who could benefit from particular skills to learn them, and I used Kazuki to unlock all skills from all wanzer parts I obtained (all captured enemy wanzers I butcher for parts - there's no reason to keep spare wanzer configurations since you can always reconfigure them between battles... unless this option becomes unavailable for some reason).

Thing is, although Front Mission is definitely fun, it's... action-y. Yeah I know it's a turn-based game; what I meant was, it's hardly realistic in that sense. Arbitrary team turns? This is why I play Titans of Steel: Warring Suns. The time system is ultra-realistic without being needlessly complex. All turn-based mech games could benefit from that style. The traditional rpg model of I-go-first-then-you-go-next is showing its age, and frankly, if the games of the new console generation perpetuate the situation, it just goes to show that they aren't really "next gen" at all. Just the same old games, except that they're shinier.

Which is what I've been saying all along. And it's a damn shame, since there's so much potential in this new crop of hardware, compared to previously. Sadly, I forsee business as usual, with the release of the same old cliche sports, shooters, and rpgs. It's a safe bet to predict that many of the new games will be easily comparable to games on previous consoles if you reduced the bling factor.

I'm not saying every new game has to be a Katamari Damacy or Okami, but surely we've learned our lessons with the countless forgettable bargain bin titles. Although many were poor and rightfully belonged in the trash, there were many also that weren't bad per se... but were simply uninspired, recycled rehashes. Same old, same old. And not that there's nothing wrong with sequels (to a certain point...), but gaming companies should really look beyond just churning them out.

It's not that hard. A good first step would be to get a decent beta testing team, to eliminate bug-ridden, awful camera, poor control response issues. I bold these since they are my pet peeves - I'm sick of publishers foisting off unfinished betas disguised as final builds, all just to meet some pencil-pusher's deadline (see rant blog entry below, somewhere). If they just adhered to this, it would cut AT LEAST 50% of the crap out there - not a mean feat considering how much junk gets released.

- Ce.

The little Creative Neeon 512mb decided to pack up today. Ugh. If I knew all the stuff I just read on the Creative forums I'd probably have sprung for a different player.

See, I don't need all that organising junk. I just want something small that plays music, period. No ripping, no fancy recording, no radio. Just something that can recharge via USB, and that I can drag-drop songs from my pc to. The Neeon does that, and I was happy with it, but I'm certainly not happy to read about how crappy they are.

Mine just went south during a recharge session. I periodically press the play/pause button to see if the indicator is still showing the "lightning bolt" recharge icon, or if it's already showing the "connected" icon (which means it's already fully charged), so that I can unplug it - I don't like to leave things to get overcharged. Anyway, I press it and poof! Display stays dark. Disconnect, try to power up, still dark. Reconnect, pc says unrecognised USB device. What the hell. Time to visit teh intarweb. A couple minutes' reading later... ugh.

I can still listen to music from my Dopod, but that's a cellphone not a music player, and I don't want it running out of juice halfway through the day. Now I've got to go RMA that thing, bleh.

Apparently MS has an official device emulator for mobile devices, and since my Dopod 838 Pro runs WM5, I can see how stuff installs on the virtual device before I actually install it on the real thing. Yaay :)

Get the device emulator here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C62D54A5-183A-4A1E-A7E2-CC500ED1F19A&displaylang=en

You'll also need some sort of virtual connection thingy, the link is also on that page. Get that first and install it (you'll need to apply the new protocol that it installs onto your network connection), then download the small zip file and install it, then download the 57 meg file and install that as well.

Then at the newly installed menu item (MS mobile emulator images) select PocketPC Coldboot. Let it boot (takes a while), configure whatever settings you want (owner info, date/time), then save-state-&-exit. Next time just run PocketPC Savestate and go from there. Easy!

I downloaded the freeware Pocket UFO, a remake of the wildly popular XCom game - which to my shame I never really played much beyond a couple of minutes. It's an awesome remake, and even on a handheld it's great. You can get Pocket UFO from the official website here (Russian devs, but don't worry, the game is in English):

http://www.smksoftware.ru/pufo.shtml

Oh yeah, for some reason my ISP is being flaky (again) recently - anytime I connect, some sites won't be reachable. Notably, Google, Wikipedia, some of my favourite forums. It's kinda stupid, all I have to do is reconnect and test the problematic URLs again. What the heck is up, I have no idea, except that being a virtual state monopoly, there's really no other option. Bleh.

It's become a trend lately to outfit your car headlights with halogens, so that instead of a soft yellow light you get a harsh blue-white glare. These inconsiderate bastards don't consider that by doing this they blind oncoming cars, or the ones in front of them when you look in the mirror to find out what the hell that bright light is.

Invariably, these lights seem to be attached to large luxury cars. I've always noticed that, without fail, people who beat traffic rules, park haphazardly, cut queues, and overtake on the wrong side are almost always morons in large cars / SUVs.

It just goes to prove that no matter how much money you give to lower class people they still behave like lower class people. You can't buy breeding or manners. Put these shack people in Buckingham Palace and they'd still behave like shack people.

Anyway, this moron was weaving around, and I let him drift to the fast lane, when I matched speeds with the car beside so he was stuck. The guy behind him raised his high beams, most likely also annoyed at this idiot for using halogen lights. He swerved left to cut from the emergency lane, but the bus in front was stopping, forcing the guy to take the offramp exit because I slowed down to let the bus cross. Obviously he tried to jink back to the middle lane but the irate drivers behind him jammed their horns, and I believe one of those blessed souls lowered his window and gave the guy the finger. Served.

See, fancy cars don't impress me. I've seen the luxury travel channel on satelite tv. Any schmuck can buy a car. If you want to flaunt it, buy a helicopter. At least I'll respect you for having the brains to beat the traffic, even though I'll still despise you for using a mode of transport that's even more wasteful of energy.

Flashing money around doesn't impress people, especially when you behave like a boor; it makes you look like just another noveau riche parvenu, an upstart with delusions of grandeur.

My brother got me a Dopod 838 Pro :oops:

Such a nice toy! It runs on WM5, but the important part is, I can play Pocket UFO on it (an X-Com remake). It can also make calls, but that's secondary - I already got a bunch of other handphones. Can you imagine? X-Com on a mobile? It makes me feel so giddy. Not to mention I can read my favourite ebooks without having to lug a large laptop along :D

I can also go online with it, but it's kinda slow - and unrealistic, because let's face it, mobile computing is best left to laptops, and I've got those. Still, it's so nice to have it.

- Ce.