Played a bit more Conan this weekend, I was actually motivated enough to continue with the story despite the flawed controls and camera. I bumped my GameSpot review from 5.1 to 5.5 I think.

Seriously, I didn't really have too many issues with the "dated" and bland graphics; the environments in the game DID convey the sense of being in the mountains, running along a river, wandering around a port town, etc. The sound and music were okay. Oh, I forgot to mention my biggest complaint: the screen was rendered like 30 pixels downwards, so you got this black unused area on top, and the last few lines of text at the bottom got chopped off. That was just plain fricking stupid and is another hammer blow against a mediocre but interesting action RPG. Why the hell was the vertical coordinate borked? I mean, the intro vids looked okay. I don't get it. I haven't seen any other PS2 mess up like that either.

If they were doing some weird graphic manipulation they should've added a manual adjust option too, in case things didn't work out. As it is, I can't see the descriptions on some things, and to me that is extremely annoying since I, unlike many casual gamers, actually read in-game story text and descriptions. I'm a speed reader btw so it's not like reading is a problem. I just can't see the freakin' text.

Oh, and on easy mode I can get by with just the XO (leg slashing) combo. Cheap as hell and with a low reach will hit pretty much anything. Tack on the chop overhead finisher (XOO) and you've got a decent combo that will nail pretty much everything. Occasionally I use the XXR2 smash as well but I only really got it because when I first played I didn't know the timing and ended up mashing XX a lot, so I thought what the hell might as well capitalise on that and got the R2 finsher.

My brother thought Zairin (obligatory Conan story chick) was kinda funny looking, but she was blonde, lightly freckled, and had large breasts, so it was ok. Me? I was like, whatever. Zairin doesn't follow Conan around (there was that short area but it was only like for 5 minutes if you don't count that messed up fight near the end which I complained in my GameSpot review about) so I don't really notice her. If this stays true to the Conan storybooks I guess he nails her somewhere, but since this is a regular rated game I don't think we actually see anything (ha!).

Finished polishing one of our songs, but where can I upload it? I mangled it to low quality so the size shouldn't be too large - 4:30, 128kbit 44kHz mono. No vocals, it's a somewhat slow (no percussion except for a programmed tambourine on a slow beat) and melancholy instrumental number with me, Shinju, and Izumi on guitars. We had to rerecord it twice since it wasn't easy to resist the temptation to break out into a faster riff.

Nothing else much this weekend, we were all kinda tired with work and stuff, so it was just a short session.

Edit: wtf, GameSpot mangled the text alignment. Stupid browser/ISP lag.