One more reason suits running (ruining) gaming divisions should be drawn and quartered:
http://www.lik-sang.com/news.php?artc=3901
I feel bad for Sony engineers. They're smart people. They make great stuff. It's just every other bigwig at Sony who needs to go. It's like they're trying to compete with Electronic Arts over who can screw their customers the most.
Who cares what a rootkit is?
Feh.
"What up, people?". Yeah, right. Spent the early part of the day getting a 3-keyboard setup set up properly, and judging by the number of bouncers who had to intervene before we left it was a good evening.
I just got a chance to watch Izumi play FF12 earlier this week. Just about what I expected. I don't exactly dislike the series, but frankly the various Final Fantasies don't really do it for me. Most other RPGs have lots of other things to do in them; cooking, fishing, stealing, item creation, etc. Final Fantasies on the other hand have continuity (read: recycled stuff like Chocobos, Cid, and Phoenix Downs), good-better-best linear item / equipment progression, and pretty FMVs.
No, seriously - what does FF7 do that, say, Star Ocean 2 doesn't? The battle system, where you spend a lot of time grinding in RPGs, is for the most part the same in almost all FFs.Say what you want, most other classic series like Grandia, Legaia, the "Tales of" games, and Star Ocean have different combat and item systems. FF for the most part is the same ol' traditional party-vs-party "fastest guy moves" traditional combat. And I place heavy emphasis on this since you spend more than 75% of your time in RPGs in combat. It is a major component of the genre. In short, RPG = grinding. If you don't like fighting you want adventures, or entirely different genres altogether.
Having said that... I don't dislike the series either. They look nice, for one, and although I'm the last person to judge anything based on mere looks (e.g. I hate FPSes no matter how pretty), at the very least this has forced other publishers to polish up their own offerings; failing that, to develop in other directions. Polished-up 16-bit lookalikes won't survive in today's climate.
So what brings me to today's rant? Why, a 3/10 review on GameFAQs over Final Fantasy 12, of course. I understand going against mainstream opinion (hell, my own inclination IRL), but his complaints are ridiculous.
To wit: camera and unmarked map. An annoyance, to be sure, but "one of the worst systems"? Is this guy smoking goat dung? It's no bad than the mapping in quite a few RPGs, and in fact in FF12 destinations are pointed out to you - people find it entirely too easy. Read the featured reviews (2 of 'em). The camera doesn't swing around like in other crap games like in Conan or Mage Knight Apocalypse, in fact it's a pretty docile camera. This guy is clearly looking to use all the nasty adjectives available. "Inefficient", or "mildly annoying" perhaps, but not "worst". Meh. When reviews indulge in hyperbole it's normally a sure sign the "reviewer" is shooting blanks or indulging in spin.
Next: the battle system. "Unintuitive targeting and movement". Hello? Try comparing this to the traditional combat system. The few paces a character takes in FF12 has no bearing, and substitutes exactly for the standing in place of the latter. In battle means in range. If you force your lead character to move away and into range of another hostile, of course you're going to pick it up... duh? I wouldn't call the system innovative either (I can see, and agree, that it's just a clever working around of existing systems - I read up on FSMs as well), but it's hardly "artificial realism". A different approach was required - no combat zooming in, loading times - and FF12 IMO delivers. Wtf is up this guy's ass? I wouldn't want the same rehashed crap traditional combat system delivered via conveyor belt yet again. And he wants more of that overused bunk? Gawd.
The nitpicky comment on 'k's isn't even worthy of a snort of derision. What, other games don't do this? Puh-lease. I can see the point with voice-acting (a pet peeve of mine too), but the complaint about the story has no merit either. If you skip all the cutscenes of course you're not going to understand the story. This comment of his deserves a huge 12' wtf banner painted in red. It's like someone watching a movie in fast forward and then grouch about not getting it. This is so stupid I'm not even going to comment on it. Oh wait, I already did.
Finally he reveals his true colours, in the paragraph stating "would much rather see a return to the Final Fantasy games like the first in the series, with characters defined chiefly by your imagination, named by you, professions chosen by you, thrust into an adventure that occurs around you." News flash: this is an RPG, you play a role in the story. It can be centered around you, but it doesn't necessarily have to. Wow, so you can't go around doing your own thang? Boo-de-frickin-woo. This is Final Fantasy, not a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Name me any "classic" RPG series where the hero is "named by you, job chosen by you, adventure around you". And no, the option to rename the hero at the start doesn't count (that's missing the point, like this diptard did).
In all honesty I wouldn't review the game yet since I only saw a couple hours of it (although I know a lot of lamers who "review" based on as little as 10 minutes of play, check any of the GameSpot reviews (they're not filtered, that's why)). Yet, even with my own biases, my tiredness of the recycled cliches and non-improvements in most everything (compared to other RPGs) I wouldn't stoop to giving a Final Fantasy game a score of 3 - I think my score would be close to "nice-facelift-but-done-to-death", like say 6+ (or more likely 7).
Right.
The Megami All Stars are joining us tomorrow, so I expect the crowd will be larger and more uncontrollable than today's. Ugh. Remind me again why I do this - oh yes, to stoke my bottomless ego. HEE HEE.
Seriously, always moving as a kid meant I was always fresh meat in each new school / college / neighborhood. I'm tired of always not fitting in, and the endless fruitless attempts trying to. Now I don't try anymore. I have it, I flaunt it, and if people still don't like it they can choke on a choice of any one of the 17 instruments of which I can play.
Shinju showed me how good a fretless 6-string Goddess can sound in the hands of a maestro. I got owned -_-" Need more time on the bass I suppose, I'm just a regular good guitar player.
My copies of Tales of Destiny as well as Tales of Destiny II (Tales of Eternia, renamed) just arrived (thanks, Suman!), can't wait to try them out. I remember getting a glimpse of Tales of Phantasia a while back, and the side-scrolling battle system looked intriguing. I'm looking for all the classics / different style RPGs I missed. Different, as opposed to the traditional party-vs-party battle system you see everywhere. Wonder what else I missed. Oh yeah, still have to play the later Breath of Fire games.
Think my FFT playthrough is stalled for good - no surprise there, calc frog really kills any challenge the CPU puts up, not that there was much playing with an emulator in the first place. Been mostly grinding my Demise party, reaching floor 9 for the first time was really exciting. Also gotta finish leveling my alternate Titans of Steel squad, I need them to finish the final campaign.
Really hot weather, it's gonna be one hell of an Aidilfitri holiday this year. Seasons greetings to all muslims.
Right, back to work.
- Ce.
Picked up a bunch more books at Payless. Still can't find the first and third book of the Adventures of Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh by Brian Daley. I have the second book (Jinx On A Terran Inheritance) and it's extremely amusing. I love reading more than I love gaming and that's saying something. Little wonder however, considering that I've moved around a lot since I was a kid; books are easily portable, require no power source, and you don't say goodbye to them when you leave.
On that note, I'm still looking around for a good space trading sim, a la Freelancer @ Privateer. I don't know how well Freelancer did - by all accounts, reviews both professional and otherwise were largely positive - and it's a mystery why year in and year out companies keep churning out crap shooters and sports games. I mean... just try this: name a well-known platformer with a Dracula motif: "the Castlevania series". Okay, now name a well-known shooter inspired by a war: "...which one"? See? There are so many of them that you cease caring after a while.
I'd also love to see more tactical Mech games, a la Battletech, the Front Mission series, or even my personal favourite, Titans of Steel: Warring Suns. Not everybody wants to play online and shoot at a bunch of random strangers, all the while yelling profanity or typing horribly mangled insults interjected with the likes of "pwn!" or "u sux0rz!" or "omg hax!". I passed puberty a long time ago, thank you.
Not to say shooters are all bad, but the chances of you walking into a LAN game where everyone follows the leaders' commands, congratulates someone for a good play even if it was against them, and talk to each other without needing to resort to using swear words even once, is about as rare as finding a bot-free Ragnarok Online public server. I quit after Doom 2 got stale, missing the Quake and Half-Life bandwagons, and I'm extremely thankful for that. I've watched people play; hour after hour, respawning on the same map, with the same weapons, same people, same everything... wow, and they say RPGs are boring exp treadmills? Pfft.
Itami better return my Star Ocean 2 cds, I need to check out a save I promised someone on generalemu.net. Which reminds me, we're going to play at an after-dinner function tonight. You know, Happy Deepavali and all that. Yeah, uh, and a belated greetings to any Indians out there reading this.
Better start practising in case someone in the audience asks for "another me" -_-" god I hate that song. And Shinju called to confirm our ensemble just now. Argh. Lace and gold trim. Going for the whole doll thing apparently. We're going to have words once the show is over tonight -_-"
What is it with rushed releases? Watching new games constantly needing patches, you'd think it'd be more beneficial to wait and get it done properly before releasing.
People might grumble over a delay, but burning people with a $50 coaster is no longer acceptable. There are lots of games which eventually became playable after patching, but guess how many people bother to wait after getting shafted the first time... first impressions count for a lot. If something is crap from the start, it is no longer reasonable to expect people to hang around for patches (not that it was ever reasonable in the first place)... there are tons of other games waiting to be played.
I've had it with betas shoved out the door disguised as games. Some of the flaws are so visible you seriously wonder whether they actually beta tested the thing. Devs should speak out instead of letting the suits pressure them into early releases.
Nobody cares if your early release is going to beat some other game XYZ, if it's full of bugs you'll get torn apart in reviews and forums and people will move on to the other game anyway. This happens time and again, and yet stupid business people don't understand. Rushing a game out is only throwing money out the window. If your schedule is already f**ed up there's nothing to do but suck it up, unless you're willing to ditch the project altogether. There's nothing lamer than a new game that needs patching right out of the box. This is dedicated to the morons over at the Mage Knight Apocalypse board.
Interesting concept, and based on a board game franchise. Where could they go wrong? Everywhere, apparently. This is also another phenomena, screwing up movie / board game licenses. If you want "your own artistic vision of a project" then don't freakin' "base it off the original". This usually applies to movies by the way - I don't get why all those stupid directors (here's looking at you, Uwe Boll) insist on their own "vision" of the idea. If you're making a movie based on the game, then follow the game's conventions. If it's set in the middle ages and mixed with fantasy, don't set it in present day New York, for f**'s sake. If you do, then don't call it "based on game XYZ", because it is NO LONGER like game XYZ.
People like him are only alive because it's illegal to kill them.
Woop, lv12 :p
Just a quick note, gotta run. Picked up where I left my Demise game. Making good progress, and finally organised my FAQ for it so that it actually resembles one instead of just a pile of notes, heh.
Related to that, I got another mail from Super Cheats. I don't know what the hell's wrong with those people, they ignored my 4 previous messages regarding my other FAQs. Suffice to say instead of don't caring about them they're now on my crap list. I already made it quite plain I don't want my stuff on any weird ol' site. GameFAQs has been around for much longer and is actually focused on the gamer - not the advertiser.
I absolutely loathe wading through tons of ads and crap strewn all over the page, it makes them look like all those terrible personal webpage / blogs that go on and on about their dog and their latest camping trip. Even GameSpot took some time for me to get used to. When it comes to web pages I prefer a clean, minimalist approach - if you really have a lot of info, organise them into other pages and provide links. Don't cram everything on the front page. And scrolling ticker-tape style text, god that's just fugly.
- Ce.
Been a bit busy lately, no time to update my illustrated Final Fantasy Tactics walkthrough (sorry folks). It's already done up to Ninja Gafgarion though, so you don't really need to know anything else - the rest of the walkthrough is mostly just gravy. Also been distracted by VKME's D2LoD mod, I stopped playing my Amazon ("Rohirrim") temporarily to play an Assassin ("Dark Elf") since I found her some nice equipment. And, ouch, someone mentioned Rage of Mages 2 to me, and I got to dig that one out - I don't believe I actually got around to playing it since the prequel jammed on the final battle. Afaik they're not related though.
Got a gig down south this weekend, some musicians invited us over to check out their new studio - and break some equipment in :P Think I'll use this afternoon to practise a bit on the dual Yamahas.
Good evening folks. Today's whipping boy will be DRM (Digital Rights Management). I've spoken enough on the subject, so here I'll just add the more recent stories.
Quote:
"... new terminology, old idea, you are a wallet with legs waiting to be raped. "The store might limit the number of times that you can restore your rights or limit the number of computers on which can use the songs or videos that you obtain from them. Some stores do not permit you to restore media usage rights at all." Translation: not our problem, and get bent, we got your cash. "
Quote:
Copyright was like a tank-mine, designed only to go off when a publisher or record company or radio station rolled over it. We civilians couldn't infringe copyright.
Quote:
I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that's wrong).
How stupid can these greedy bastards be?
Quote:
When it comes to retail customers for information goods — readers, listeners, watchers — this whole license abstraction falls flat. No one wants to believe that the book he's brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You'd be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction.
Quote:
Have a look at the next click-through "agreement" you're provided with on purchasing a piece of software or an electronic book or song. The terms set out in those agreements are positively Dickensian in their marvelous idiocy. Sony BMG recently shipped over eight million music CDs with an "agreement" that bound its purchasers to destroy their music if they left the country or had a house-fire, and to promise not to listen to their tunes while at work.
Well, just read the links. They aren't long articles, but enough to give you food for thought.
By the way, on the infinitesemal chance that someone on the other side of the fence, so to speak, is reading this, consider the following:
Due to the nature of my jobs (plus my band), I reach more young, inquiring minds for free, that you need to spend millions of advertising dollars to target and hold their attention long enough for your hype to register. I have successfully made hundreds, if not thousands, aware of the issues surrounding DRM and the effect on our private liberties. I've steered the few willing to actually shell out money to buy your imported Content Cartel crap at obscene inflated prices away to alternative sources.
Boycotts work. You don't have far to look (the Sony rootkit "who cares?" fiasco, the starforce disaster, etc) to see that we will be heard. Creative media doesn't need you; your function as the middleman is no longer mandatory, nor desireable. Continue to engage in restrictive DRM practises at your own peril.
Ouch, my aching back. It felt like the weekend just didn't arrive - one moment it's Friday evening and we're getting ready for a bash, then it's all just a blur of lights, people, bathroom breaks, and music rubber-hosing the air. Put the guitar down, bam! It's Sunday night. What the hell.
I'm getting too old for this kind of thing :p
What a bunch of whiners on the Titan Quest board. "Waah, they nerfed Ternion, the game is worthless!" I really really loathe that kind of "player". You know the type, cookie-cutter everything, impressed by his own "skill" - they're nothing but one-trick ponies. Take away the crutch and watch them fall apart - exactly what happened here.
This reminds me of those stupid Frozen Orb Sorcs in D2LoD. There was this ice-immune boss and I was just dicking around with Blaze - sometimes it's fun to just mess around, you know? :p So then these morons show up and tell me, "wtf use FO". I tell them, "uh, ice doesn't work", and they're all like "stfu noob, FO is teh pow".
It dawns on me that ownage is in the offing, so I step aside to watch these geniuses try kill it. They proceed spamming FO at it, but naturally nothing happens, except the monster hits back and pretty soon there are a bunch of corpses there. And all the while they're yelling "noob" and "wtf" at each other. I blaze it to death, and they're all yelling crap like "u cheater" "hacker" "lame!!!"
The only reason people that stupid are alive is that it's illegal to shoot them.
Another leisurely step up the ladder. Yeah, no big, it's just level 11. But... "Atomic Punk"? I don't get that reference.
Finally got a Mindflare. Man, breeding monsters in FFT is sooo tedious. Those lousy Pisco Demons, I had like 6 of the class 2's (Squidlarkin), and 1 Red Dragon (class 3 dragon). The dragon alone bred more than the 6 Squidlarkin combined. Sheesh. It took about 2 and a half game years - spent moving back and forth one day at a time between 2 points, so it didn't really take that much real time, about 2 hours or so, but I took breaks. Now I've got to level it to 99 and prepare for the Chapter 2 fights.
Oh, got Yakuza :p Just played a bit though, kinda busy. It looks really interesting, reminds me of those horrible FMV games I disliked back in the '90s but done better. It's like what The Bouncer should've been, although the story parts do take up quite a bit of time. The Bouncer was pretty much all-action, while Yakuza seems paced slower. After reading some player reviews it seems the story picks up soon; I've gone through about 1.5 hours.
Finally ditched Titan Quest and got the latest iteration of V&K's Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction Middle Earth mod, which runs on D2LoD v1.10. I don't care about the v1.11 official patch, because I don't play the vanilla game and they probably only updated a bunch of runewords and stuff (something about Tristram and Chaos Diablo, whatever). What a noticeable difference in gameplay!
Titan Quest is easy, period. Even in Legendary difficulty you can cruise around, click-dead-click-dead (yes, I've run melee chars, not just casters, up to legendary Typhon as well, I think I'm entitled to say the game is easy). That plus sparse mobs means most of the time you're just running around looking at the same ol' scenery, getting angry and bored wondering why the next quest area is so far away. Back to D2LoD, looks like V&K really beefed up the cannon fodder, there's so many of 'em. Can't wait to tear through the multitarget skills again once I level enough. Yep, started a bow Amazon-type ("Rohirrim Shieldmaiden") as my first character.
Was torn between her or an Assassin ("Dark Elf"), but I really miss the strafe action :p Titan Quest's bow skills suck in comparison. I was reminded of how great V&K are at skill rebalancing: got a point in Exploding Arrow (fire AoE) and it's quite useful for clearing crowds. See, no skills are useless in the mod - anything can be useful, given some preparation (if you're thinking of just spamming spells like TQ's broken Ternion attack, you're looking at the wrong game).
It's all about challenge. Titan Quest was a good try, but ultimately appeals to the casual gamer. I don't like the way loot rains at you like nobody's business, nor the way everything dies in one click. Hit bosses with an Ensnare, throw Study Prey on them, then jab them with a Lethal Strike, and you'll likely have taken off 80% of their life. And I'm talking about boss-Bosses, not random mob bosses! Hell, I killed Typhon like that, it was a single critical hit. I was like, WTF.
It felt great to be back in a VKME mod again. Can't wait to fight those Act 5 monsters, or the insane mobs in Act 4. Even Act 2 was supremely boosted, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself fighting for my life. Duriel ("The Watcher") is still as cheap as ever though, but when I next meet him I'll have better skills and equipment so he better savour those deaths since they'll be the only ones he'll get to inflict :p
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