Category: Video Games

Gambling Fantasy XIII-2

If there’s one thing I hate about Final Fantasy XIII-2, it’s the compulsory gambling. Firstly, and easily the worst, is that you have to earn a total of 7,777 casino coins in the slot machines to earn a specific fragment (of which there are 160 in the game). This may not seem like a big deal,  but when your average winnings are generally 5 or 15 coins, it’s a task that’s going to take some time. If you’re really lucky, there are ways that the slots can pay out much larger sums, but it’s all down to stupid luck.

Padding a game with required grinding is one thing, but making you play the slots to earn your %100 is nigh unacceptable (*coughPorygoncough*). Both are tedious, but at least with grinding you can keep your nose down and get it done, and most games provide decent grinding spots for those with the drive to seek them out. With a slot machine, you could be at it for days before you get the stroke of luck you need to win. Of course, you could also hit the jackpot on your first spin, but that’s pretty unlikely. Such a quick lucky break is moot here anyway, because the most coins you can possibly win on your first spin is 500. It’s a nice start down a long road, but likely won’t make the journey that much shorter.

The slots do have a couple features that can tilt the odds in your favour. Most notably, they have “moods” that do quite literally give you better odds at a winning spin. This can be easily manipulated by leaving and entering the casino world until the machines are at their best mood. There are also two bonus modes called “Victory Mode” and “Super Victory Mode” that allow you to bet more coins each spin. You have to hit one of the two jackpot spins (triple 9’s or microchus, respectively) to enter either of these modes, so they’re rare enough to unlock in the first place, and odds are much better that they’ll time out before you can hit another jackpot.

Lastly, there is an auto-play feature that can be accessed by just holding down the left bumper, but using it actually decreases your odds of winning. So I’m kind of torn on whether it would be quicker to just manually play until I hit the 7,777 coin threshold, or to wedge LB against something, go do something else, and hope to earn 7,777 before my capital runs out. Either way, it’s a super annoying “feature” of the game, and one I do not look forward to seeing again on potential future playthroughs.

The second time the game forces you to gamble is a completely self-inflicted scenario. In fact, you have to pay for the luxury. I downloaded the Sazh quest because I thought it would be a fun adventure starring Sazh with an airship-flying minigame perhaps, and the DLC description promised me he’d join my party once I completed it. That last bit was accurate, but Sazh’s “adventure” was… less than fun.

The DLC quest plops you right back into the casino world as Sazh, and tells you in uncertain terms that you have to keep gambling until you earn a certain number of macguffins. It never elaborates on the conditions that will reward you with said macguffins, so you pretty much just have to keep gambling until the casino owner tells you you’re done. On the upside, the game does tell you that the slot machines will not earn you macguffins, so you can safely stay away from them and enjoy the better ways to gamble.

There are two table games that come with the Sazh DLC, and the first is Chronobind. It’s a game for four players, and it’s all about throwing down a card and hoping it’s the highest. It’s not an overly complex game, but the computer players are really awesome at cheating at it, so it’s really no fun at all. I must have played for an hour before I gave up. In that time, I only won two rounds, and left the table with less than half of my buy-in coins.

The other game, much to my chagrin, is poker. I don’t hate poker or anything, but after Dead Rising 2 I was pretty much ready to never play it again. As luck would have it, it’s also played by the same rules as the poker mini-game in DR2 (I have no idea what variation it is in real life), so I knew what I was doing. Another fortuitous twist is that the computer opponents I was playing against were very susceptible to bluffing, so I was able to dominate the table pretty easily. After a game and a half, I had earned enough collectible dealies to complete the quest, but I’ll never see those three hours again.

On the upside, Sazh is now in my party, and it looks like he’s going to be a pretty solid Synergist once I get him levelled up, which is something I was looking for. The real prize though, was that with my winnings from the hours of poker, I had so many casino coins that I was able to buy all the unique items from the casino and still have plenty left over. And even though it took a while to amass that much coin, it was still considerably less time than it would have taken to win it all through chocobo racing, which is the best DLC-less way to earn casino coins.

In the end, it was saving me from days of chocobo racing that made the package worth 400 Micosoft points, because I hate Chronobind and will probably never play the poker game again. I certainly would have preferred Sazh to have been a 150MSP Coliseum battle like Lightning, or better yet, free DLC. But we all know that free DLC is a very rare treat indeed, and Square-Enix is probably the last company who’ll be caught giving anything away.

Now it’s just a matter of finding a way to kick Noel out of the party so I can play the remainder of the game with Serah, Lightning and Sazh…

Pocket homage

Let’s take a break from talking about Final Fantasy and instead talk about a game that is a throwback to Final Fantasy… Sort of.

So Dragon Fantasy, at least at first, is really more a throwback to the original Dragon Warrior on NES. In fact, it’s structured almost exactly like Dragon Warrior, the biggest difference being that you cannot see the enemy’s castle from your starting point. It was kind of a big thing in Dragon Warrior, but video games on the whole generally don’t have those brilliant, subtle touches anymore. But that’s besides the point.

The quest begins with you hunting down a person of interest (DW: Princess Gwaelin, DF: woodsman) and bringing them back to the castle. Then you go on a fetch quest to collect legendary armor so that you will be strong enough to face the final boss. Each one has little differences of course, but the basic story progression is very similar.

The games are mechanically almost identical too. You’re a one-hero party that fights one enemy at a time. You level up and buy new equipment to get stronger, and are granted new spells at set levels. The spells are even all pretty much the same as in DW. The only way to have any idea what to do or where to go next is to grill every person in town and wander the world until you find new areas. The only noticeable difference is that bridges don’t denote where the random encounters get harder in Dragon Fantasy.

What sets Dragon Fantasy apart from its forebears is its sense of humour. While Dragon Warrior played it pretty straight and Final Fantasy was (probably) unintentionally goofy, Dragon Fantasy works every angle, from puns to pop-culture references to parody. A lot of the story dialogue is spent on making fun of the hero, Ogden, for being a washed-up old has-been.

 Of course, a retro-styled RPG with a sense of humour is nothing new. Breath of Death VII immediately springs to mind. Dragon Fantasy, as far as humour goes, is probably the best so far. I enjoyed Breath of Death more for its unique mechanics and genre subversions than its sense of humour.

Being that it hews so close to the Dragon Warrior template, Dragon Fantasy requires quite a bit of grinding. The only time where you probably won’t spend time walking back and forth fighting mooks is right at the end. Mostly because you won’t be able to clear the last castle in one (or even two, probably!) run, but also because the enemies there drop huge gobs of experience. Fortunately, like its major inspiration, Dragon Fantasy is pretty forgiving when it comes to death, and just puts you back at the last church you visited with all your XP and treasure intact, and your gold stash cut in half.

There are multiple quests in Dragon Fantasy, with more being added over time (free, not DLC). I’m not sure if you can choose from any right at the beginning, but once you’ve completed the first quest, you’re free to play the rest in any order you like. I’ve only just completed the initial game myself, and I was going to skip ahead to the Minecraft “homage” quest, but after watching the intro cutscene, it seems that the chapters have separate but interwoven stories that are leading into one big finale, so I decided that I’d play them in order. Then I started having flashbacks of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years.

Despite everything I’ve written here, the only thing that really matters when you consider buying Dragon Fantasy is this: do you like the original Dragon Warrior? If you do, this game will make your day. If not, I’d recommend staying far away from it.

Cheating Fantasy XIII-2

I’ve been rocking Final Fantasy XIII-2 for a while now, and I just bought the gigantic, overpriced, collector’s edition strategy guide. Yes, I’m terrible at both playing games and budgeting.

Before I started playing the game myself, I gave my youngest brother crap for playing it with the strategy guide spread open in front of hm, but now I understand why. There are a handful of new systems in the game that require careful planning to optimize, but the game doesn’t really tell you a lot about them. Chocobo racing, for instance, is better documented in-game than it is in Final Fantasy VII, but the game still leaves out the part about how to raise your chocobos to not suck out loud.

The game also tells you that if you infuse one of your monster buddies with monsters of other roles, that monster can learn special skills. The truth is that a monster must be fed other monsters of a single, specific role to learn one special ability. So here I was, feeding legions of commando monsters (developed monsters at that) to my one sentinel, when he can actually only learn Reprieve by being fed a wealth of medics. So that was a huge waste of monsters and monster growth items.

The most important thing I’ve learned from the guide, however, is that the game is structured in a way that there are no Lost Forevers. There are a handful of hidden monsters that can only be recruited once, but that’s nothing to worry about. It’s not that I feel like I’m going to need to 100% the game or anything, but it’s nice to know that I don’t have to worry about never being able to get something cool. The best part is, that this ties into one of the things I like most about the game!

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is built not on one big world, but handfuls of little worlds. Like Kingdom Hearts. In fact, sometimes while playing FFXIII-2 I feel like I’m playing a Kingdom Hearts spinoff of some sort. I blame Noel. Anyway, each world represents a certain place at a certain time. There are different time periods for each location, and you can travel through them freely once you unlock each. The game even remembers where you were standing when you left a location. If you search hard enough, you can find special items that allow you to re-lock each world, and then you can play them again as if it were the first time you traveled there.

Of course, the game isn’t entirely clear about this function, but it’s not overly useful anyway. I can’t imagine any reason to restart a world other than to seek out alternate endings. But hopping between worlds is pretty cool, especially since each has it’s own B plot, and they’re usually more interesting than the main story.

I’ve kind of lost my train of thought at this point, but I think the point I was going to make when I begun typing this is that I’ve become a pitiable wreck who can’t play without the strategy guide splayed open in front of me, for fear of missing an item, even though I’ve been assured by the game and guide that nothing is permanently missable. I wish I could put the book down, because the game was more fun when I didn’t have all the answers in front of me. The completionist in me just can’t bear to cast it aside though. I would love to shut the guide, finish the game on my own, and then start a new game with the guide showing me the optimal paths and team builds. But alas, a grownup finds it hard to finish a 60+ hour game once, never mind twice.

In any case, I loves me some FFXIII-2. That’s kinda fitting, because only three people in the world like FFXIII and I’m two of them. I really don’t understand why I’m blogging about it when there is a ton of game left for me in there… Know what? I’mma go do that now.

A foreboding sense of impending crappiness

I’ve been out of the blog world for a while because I’ve been spending most of my free time watching all of Brickroad‘s video Let’s Plays. In the last month I have watched, in their entirety, the playlists for Revengers of Vengeance, Shantae, Spelunky, and Crystalis. I am currently about halfway through the Secret of Evermore set.

Needless to say, I felt like it was time to make my own Let’s Play. Hence the Spelunky video in the previous post. I knew it was a bad idea. I’m not the type of person who has charisma to spare, or interesting things to say. That and I really, really hate the sound of my own voice. But alas, I could not rest until the deed was done, and I spent the bulk of yesterday evening recording a video Let’s Play of MegaMan X.

Don’t get all excited by the prospect of watching the set and telling me how bad they are. I know how bad they are. It’s just… I wanted to have something of at least a little relevance on my YouTube channel. But yeah, it’s pretty bad. I had nothing to say most of the time, and every second sound out of my mouth is either an “umm” or an exasperated sigh. It was a neat project, and I had fun doing it, but the quality of the final product is a little disappointing. I don’t know if I want to post one a week to fluff my content level, or just post them all at once to minimize the pain.

On the upside, MegaMan X is one of the few games I know really well, and I was able to wrap it up fairly quickly and efficiently. There are no game overs, few deaths, and a handful of neat little things that I knew to show off. I skipped over a couple neat things (the hadoken, mostly), but covered pretty much all the game has to offer.

Don’t much like it though. We’ll see if anyone else thinks differently.

Rated M for potty mouth

 

I don’t know what I’m doing. I kind of feel like I should hop on the Let’s Play bandwagon, but I’m no good at the talkies. Or Spelunky, apparently. Anyway, this was mostly just to play around with Camtasia for a while before I actually started recording the world’s worst LP. Also, I swear a lot when I play games alone. So yeah, don’t let the little ones be watchin’ this.

I have a terrible voice too. Getting kind of used to it though, after watching this thirty-seven times.

What? I have a blog?

You know what sucks? Finding a house. It’s not really a terrible process but it sucks up so much of your free time… Actually it’s not that bad, but between that and wedding stuff and work it’s very hard to make time for stupid things like maintaining a blog. I don’t even really have that much on my mind lately, so it’s not like I have a need to blog that is going unsatisfied.

Anyway. You ever heard of Lana Del Rey? I hadn’t, but for the duration of January, my Xbox decided that I really needed to know about her and what a great singer she is. Generally I don’t listen to my Xbox’s music recommendations, but worst case scenario, I’d be GISing a pretty girl. It was from that subsequent Google search that I learned she had a song called “Video Games” so okay. This is going well, might as well look into it. Also the word “sexpot” comes up a lot, but that is irrelevant.

I also learned from the Google search that she had recently “bombed” on SNL, and that the internet was making a really big deal of it. So while I’d never heard of her, she was known to people who hate comedy.

I continued to take my curiosity to YouTube, because it seemed like the quickest way to get the deal on this chick. The first song that came up was “Blue Jeans” and I listened about halfway through the song before I clicked back and loaded up the “Video Games” video. That one lasted until about the two-thirds mark before I closed the browser window.

Lana Del Rey’s music strategy is apparently to make it as unbearably boring as she possibly can. Adele, despite all the hype around her, is boring as fuck, but at least she sounds like she’s interested in the songs she’s singing. Lana, on the other hand, seems to be boring herself to death and sounds like she’d rather be stuffing her arm in a meat grinder than recording a song. I don’t know if she’s just purposely trying to act aloof, if that’s going to be her thing, but it certainly doesn’t make me care about her music. I suppose it beats being another Gaga. Don’t misunderstand me here, because I don’t think slower, more somber songs are bad. I like dark, artsy stuff, but it has to be done right. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is one of my favourite Beatles songs. Matthew Good’s Hospital Music is an amazingly deep album. Lana Del Rey just fails to interest me at all.

Normally I would just brush an artist like this aside and completely forget they exist, but the fact that that she called a song “Video Games” makes me semi-involved. Actually, it doesn’t involve me at all, but it’s something I want to ramble on about. So this song is dreary and boring and just not fun at all. Unless this is a song about Tom Clancy video games, that’s really the opposite of how it should be. Actually it’s not really about video games at all, it’s just a word she ends a few verses with. And an easy way to bait nerds like me into paying attention.

Regardless of whether the song is actually about video games though, I feel like a song called “Video Games” should be fun.  You know, like video games. It’s a legitimate reason to use chiptunes. Though it would be unfair to blame the actual music here. It’s not bad, and I probably wouldn’t mind listening to it if it weren’t overshadowed by the insufferable vocal track. Video games are fun, they are there to entertain, to help people forget their woes for a while and have a good time. This song is exactly the opposite of that. Yeah, I guess there are boring and depressing games, but they generally are not good games.

Speaking of YouTube, the video is pretty stupid too. Actually, so is the video for “Blue Jeans.” They’re both dumb viral/hipster mash-ups of other people’s home videos, with little bits of Lana making pouty faces spliced in. I mean, I’m not sure if they’re actually real people’s video bits that have been collaged together. They could absolutely be staged. But the fact of the matter is that the videos are completely unrelated to anything and only serve to bore me even harder.

Her Wikipedia page makes it sound like Del Rey put the videos together on her own. Given the amateurish quality (and blatant egotism), I could believe that. The only times collages aren’t stupid are when children make them (because it’s cute) and when somebody makes one that’s actually meaningful. These videos aren’t meaningful: they’re just random clips hastily slapped together. No relation, no progression, no reasonable deeper meaning. It’s just stupid hipster garbage.

So the music and videos are all absolute hipster fodder (except now that she’s getting popular, the hipsters won’t have anything to do with her), but Lana herself… not at all. She’s still a far cry from trash like Britney, but she’s got a fairly mainstream popstar look to her. And that’s just not acceptable. If you’re going to act like a hipster, look like a hipster. Get you some thick black glasses, a bad haircut, and a goofy hat at least. Probably a year-round scarf would be a good idea too. Or, better yet, just stop making lame-ass hipster songs.

So yeah, if this thing seems detached and poorly written, it’s because I was trying to stretch my thoughts too thin. I really just wanted to complain about a couple boring songs. And hipsters. I’ve been reading too many long, thoughtful blogs, and have forgottent that my sweet spot is more in concise, to-the-point writing. Also I haven’t blogged in like forever. Give me a damn break.