Game Progress Topic: Crystals Shed Light Silently! TWEETER911 I learned from both Jushin Lyger AND Mr. Pogo, you insolent fool! (7/9/06 9:31 pm) Reply | Edit | Del All Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87....? I started a new file of Metroid Prime and I got 100% scans in Metroid Prime after all these years. All I was misisng was a freaking Chozo Lore each time, that was behind a wall hidden next to a Power Bomb in the Temple Ruins Magma Pond, or whatever its called. My TV that I play Nintendo systems on is also messed up. Everything's brighter than it should be, but Metroid Prime (and the sequal) are still playable. I'm too cheap to buy a new TV though. I also started a file of Metroid Prime 2, and I've in Torvus Bog trying to find the keys. The last thing I did was kill the asshole Boost Guardian. This fight wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't invincble most of time, as a freaking puddle/boost ball. I hate it when he turns into a puddle and traps me against the wall by bumping into me. O_o TaroSH I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost (7/9/06 11:08 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I beat that two-on-two boss fight in the forest against that person and an armor he summoned, and Sydney is on your side except he just stands around and occasionally casts a spell that temporarly boosts some stat (I'm amazed I've forgotten the name of it). All of my attacks were basically missing both of them, and when they did connect they only did about 5 HP damage (it helped some if I switched body parts for each hit, but not much). I beat them by staying mostly out of Battle Mode so my Risk would reduce faster, using a Gain Magic combo to get some MP back to recover, then reflecting the human's Lightning attack (and occasional smack with his sword) at him until he died, then went after the armor, used a Magic damaging combo to keep his MP below using that health draining spell, whacked him a little bit, but I still got most of the damage by reflecting his hits. I'm proud I figured out how to deal with them (and that my timing was good enough to actually do this), but I didn't appreciate spending about an hour fighting them. I beat the Fire Elemental and the Earth Dragon pretty much the same way, because my hits were also doing jack. Am I missing something here? I feel like I'm back in Threads of Fate where I got to that crypt and was doing about 1 HP damage per hit on those three headed zombies, which probably had something like 100 HP, took forever to beat all three of them, finally got to that thief and got whooped, then went back to town and found out there was a shop that sold bracelets that increase your attack power. Except here there's no such thing. A guy at GameFAQs said to just combo them to death, but WTF, even at Zero Risk I was still barely getting anything in. And when I tried that, my Risk got so high (I once hit 100) that I was just got toasted by the Lightning spell. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/9/06 11:31 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. As I mentioned in the other topic, the dance boss battle in Wario Ware Twisted is giving me a lot of trouble. I could work on beating each minigame in the Spindex, but I usually like to finish the main game before doing that stuff. I played some more San Andreas, but not a lot. I'm just really tired, especially with this allergy medicine I'm taking, so getting the motivation to sit down and play something for more than a few minutes is always hard. What I've seen so far manages to be a lot more interesting than GTA3. I dunno, the world just feels a lot more alive in this one. Not perfect, of course. Driving around is enjoyable, but I think reactions of other drivers and pedestrians could be better. For example, if you drive towards some guy walking on the sidewalk, he might dramatically dive away from your vehicle to get to safety, even if you're hardly moving. One time, I stopped at a red light just to be realistic about it, and somebody slammed into my car. One time I drove onto a sidewalk, doing a bunch of damage, and probably hitting some people. Thing is, there was a police car nearby, and there was no reaction. You basically have to kill in order to get them after you, I think. TaroSH I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost (7/9/06 11:53 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: One time I drove onto a sidewalk, doing a bunch of damage, and probably hitting some people. For some reason this was the first thing I read, and thought "WTF? I didn't think he was THAT bad of a driver!" Facilitypro Slow Daddy (7/10/06 1:25 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Codie, -have you been visiting workshops to make more powerful weapons? You can raise affinities by combining weapons. (Like, if you find a staff with an attribue of 20 against undead, combine it with your undead weapon. The form might change, but it will be even stronger against undead. Also, say you find two weapons with 5 against dragons. If you combine them the new weapon should be 8 against dragons. Keep messing with the blades you have but are not using. -Use gems to boost affinities. As the game goes on you'll find weapons with more and more gem slots. -Use the analyze spell to see which body parts are vulnerable to what kinds of weaon types/affinities. KazuoSH The Burninator (7/10/06 11:28 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. - Yes, and I never seem to be able to make much. - I would, except none of my weapons have slots for them. - ...no... except when I learned it, and then it didn't do anything (not even against a goblin), so I kind of forgot about it and figured it was one of those things that's ineffective against bosses where it would actually be most helpful (you know, like Poison and Sleep spells in Final Fantasy?) Facilitypro Slow Daddy (7/10/06 11:51 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. The analyze spell is weird. If it connects, the information will unlock in the status menu. Use the R1/L1 buttons to scroll between Ashley and all the enemies. I think it even shows the boss's affinities and weapon defences, but not the HP/MP. The workshops later in the game allow for a wider range of materials, too. Gengarian Junus Pirate (7/10/06 12:07 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. In my long absense I have polished off numerous games including Tales of Legendia, Metroid Prime 2, Resident Evil 4, both Zelda Oracle games, and I've just begun playing Tales of Phantasia on GBA. I also played some more into the Cave of Trials in Star Ocean 2. TaroSH I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost (7/10/06 8:48 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I beat that other Riskbreaker, and after I saved I backtracked and found a door that led to... a Workshop that dealt with Hegane! Woo! I then toyed around until I got whatever I could made out of Hegane (I didn't get my Phantom Battle Axe upgraded, but I'm wondering if I should just start with a new weapon because it doesn't have that many levels on it anyway) and messed around with Shields until I got a Kite Shield. For some reason I thought it meant the bird, then I realized it meant the wind toy. Oh well. I wonder if one of the reasons I was missing so much was the game decided my Agility stinks. At first I could only get about 10 Risk before I starting mainly missing that Riskbreaker, then I cast Invigorate on myself and was able to get in a lot more hits. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/10/06 10:32 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I did a couple more missions in San Andreas. Just beat up some drug dealers. Sometimes, I just goof around. For example, took a motorcycle and rode it around the city at super high speeds. TWEETER911 I learned from both Jushin Lyger AND Mr. Pogo, you insolent fool! (7/10/06 11:45 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Nearly everyone I talk to says the "goofing around" is the best part in GTA.... >_> Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/11/06 12:06 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. FO and I were talking a little more about SMB3. Somehow (I wish I could remember how) the subject of game secrets came up. Perhaps it was the subject of, how can a game have something like a walk-through-wall, hint at its presence so it's not cheap, yet also not be too obvious? A related issue that occured to me was the hidden hammer bros. in world 2 of SMB3. One hint is that you can hear it walking around even if you can't see it. Similarly, after you beat a stage, there's a pause before you're given control again, as the hammer bros. moves. But what's interesting is, at that point in the game, you might not even notice the pause, or that it's related to the existence of yet another hammer bros. After all, in World 1, the hammer bros. is at the end of the map, and you might not beat it until all the other stages are beaten. Therefore, the pause will always be there. Also, of course, the same will be true in world 2. That game has so many secrets. Now, and maybe even after I got a subscription to Nintendo Power, they might be well known, but I had some conjecturing as to what caused some of them before I really knew. Example, for the white house in world 1. I thought (at least for a time) it was necessary to not only get all the coins, but also get both 1-ups. And the pattern for the white ship was very obscure. Then FO raised the issue of how well the stages are designed. The game has a lot of fodder for discussing that issue, but one example I raised, which might not be mentioned enough, was the world 4 airship. That's the one with all the torches everywhere, and you have to get the pattern right to get through them, and sometimes it seems like the time it takes is such that you finally escape an area by jumping out when it starts to move below the screen. And what about the running jumps over the bolts in the world 7 airship? Another issue FO brought up (maybe as part of another issue) was whether, when and where to use the anchor. I think after awhile, the ship will stop moving on its own. Anyway, I think she said she'd use it in world 5 if she had one. That's the stage where, if it moves, it can move off the map, back down to ground level! So, then you'd have to do the "pipe" stage (though abridged). And if it went back up to the sky, you'd have to completely redo it. Another stage where the moving airship can make you do more stages might be world 3, due to the closing and opening bridges. TaroSH I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost (7/11/06 12:22 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I beat New Super Mario Bros., and have about 130 coins (I've spent some, mostly on alternate routes), Worlds 4 and 7 unlocked, and 4 cleared out except for one coin. Somebody at VGF said "Of course it's easy! They were trying to make it like the classic Super Mario Bros.!" I'll admit something; I've never finished an NES Mario Bros. without emulators, Game Genie, etc. They're not THIS easy. This game's damage also works like Super Mario World; if you're Fire Mario (or in my case, Luigi) and get hit, you turn into Super Mario instead of little Mario. And the classic Super Mario Bros. didn't have the Blue Koopa Shell, Mini Mario, the Ground Pounding, Wall Kicking, and hidden coins. I also don't remember the originals having controls this sloppy. I'm going to have to take a break from Vagrant Story, because all the time I spend sitting in one play time is causing the cyst on my tailbone to act up. ACC KAIN Band on the Run (7/11/06 12:03 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I beat Aero Fighters for SNES with the Ninja guy. If I can remember his name later on, you can add him to the list of characters that are switched at birth with Hattori Hanzo and Hotsuma. TaroSH I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost (7/11/06 2:23 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I beat Sigma Star Saga. I got the worst ending. I can get a slightly better ending easily, but the only way to get the "Best" ending is to do something in a New Game+ (yes, only in a New Game+) and collect all the Gun Datas, which I can't say I can be bothered to do. I could tolerate this game, but I definitely don't think it's very good. And I can easily see a shmup buff like Crawl or Facility hating this game and its button masher random battles. The plot is ridiculous. Did I imagine it, or did Psyme say the Krill get their fleet by breeding ships? And despite the box touting 20,000+ gun combinations, almost all of the gun datas are completely worthless. There's one that fires the gun up and down (so you have to move over or under whatever you want to kill), one that slowly drops land mines behind you, one that throws a ball on the ground, one that throws a bouncing ball on the ground, acidic bubbles that float upwards, and so on. Do any of these sounds helpful? They could potentially be if you could switch datas in battles, but you can't; you're stuck with whatever you had set when you got into the battle. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/11/06 3:12 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: If I can remember his name later on, you can add him to the list of characters that are switched at birth with Hattori Hanzo and Hotsuma. That would be Hien. He's the guy whose plane shoots shuriken instead of lasers or bullets. Isn't the final boss a flying gorilla? Magical Yard Gnome Heavy Metal Chainsaw (7/11/06 4:18 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. What is it with ninjas and names that start with H? MaskedSheik Pirate (7/11/06 5:06 pm) Reply | Edit | Del ... Crawl said this about series of games in another thread: Quote: Not only that, but when a game series is forced to be a 1-a-year fest, then it CANNOT possibly be the best game a game of that type could be. A designer can't put all their relevant ideas into that particular game, because a) They used up some relevant ideas for the previous game and b) because they need to hold onto some ideas for next year's game. Donkey Kong Country 3, oddly enough, doesn't seem to have any problem in coming up with relevant ideas - almost every level has a (new) theme that could lead to some interesting level design. Every level is an idea and almost all of them are fresh (none of them is seen in DKC2; none of them is too gimmicky; none of them is repeated). Where DKC3 falls short of DKC2, however, is that none of these ideas is executed well. None of the levels has any build. They end just as easily as they begin. I've just "beaten" DKC3 (3:26) and am now working on gathering those last few percents. They're really easy to scrounge up; I found the bonus barrels and DK coin within one playthrough of every level but three or four. I'm disappointed at this game's secret design. DKC2's was much smarter. ShadOtterdan Cameo senses tingling! (7/11/06 7:05 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... In Kingdom Hearts:COM I'm up to B2 on Riku's mode, I've only been levelling attack and dark points, however, I found out that my dark points weren't going to max out like my attack and HP would have, so I finally decided to level my HP up a bit before taking on the next boss, who can take out all 80 of my HP in a single hit. Also, in Resident Evil, Racoon City was definetly made for racoons, after all, everything important is very shiny. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/11/06 7:58 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... BTW, the Street Fighter Alpha Anthology DOES have the complete cast list. If you at least make it to the final boss, you'll get the code (which is simply hold select when you choose the game). That unlocks just about every character, including Guile and Evil Ryu. The original arcade version seems to have a shockingly smaller cast list (not only none of the characters from Super Street Fighter 2, but also missing characters like Juli and Juni). CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/11/06 7:59 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: Nearly everyone I talk to says the "goofing around" is the best part in GTA.... I don't know yet. t seems like future missions have the potential to be pretty fun, but it is cool to just explore and see what kind of trouble you can get into (usually resulting in your death). MaskedSheik Pirate (7/11/06 10:57 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. What an anticlimactic ending. After finishing off a few more stages and killing K. Rool again, the game ends with.....(spoilers >_>)......collecting a bunch of banana birds as the final task (and watching a stupid ending where the top of a huge egg falls over K Rool.). DKC3 was otherwise a better game than my previous descriptions of it, and I was hoping it would culminate into.....something. Bomberguy221 Hit and away is my style! (7/12/06 3:49 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Yeah, the DKC3 ending ranks up there with the Couples Mask in Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Some programmers just don't get that "hard work = good payoff" is a very nice rule of thumb. Fire Emblem (GBA) - I joined up with Lyn and the others from her story, but suffered a loss: Florina. Fire Emblem: PoR - I beat "The Atonement" and levelled up Kieran to a paladin. I got Devdan, but after this point, it's no longer necessary to get new units (except Reyson) for me to reach my all-promote goal. Still, I might get Tauroneo for simplicity. Animal Crossing: WW - Caught a bee, saw stag beetle, and a fruit beetle. I also gave some of my neighbors some presents. Most of the people in this town either want white furniture or pink furniture. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I got Marina's picture, which is my second neighbor picture (not counting K.K.). Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/12/06 7:14 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: Some programmers just don't get that "hard work = good payoff" is a very nice rule of thumb. Like the programmers of D, who gave you a whopping blank screen with the sound of a baby crying for several seconds. Facilitypro Slow Daddy (7/12/06 10:28 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I'd hate to see the bad ending. CRAWLand1000 The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/12/06 11:51 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... I didn't really think the reward structure in DKC3 was all that bad. I guess, having said that, it might sound like I'm saying more than I am. I'm not saying that it's great or anything. And I'm definitely not saying the "eggshell dropped on K. Rool" was a good bonus ending. But before that, you get extra stages for finding hidden items, and there's an extra final boss, too. Okay, those are the exact same type of bonuses as in DKC2. And, yes, for the most part it could be said that DKC2 did them better. I do kind of think that DKC3's bonus boss might have been better than DKC2's. We once had a person here who claimed the DKC2's bonus final boss was one of the hardest bosses ever, much harder than the normal final boss. THAT is an opinion I've found inconceivable. The secret boss attacks maybe 5 times, those attacks aren't really that different than what you had to survive to beat the normal boss, and you can safely absorb one hit, and then the boss only takes one hit to kill. As I recall, the bonus boss of DKC3 was harder than its normal boss. However, part of that was due to the slowness of Kiddie's controls; because he had copious animation frames of him putting down a barrel, it took him some time to respond to my commands. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/12/06 12:18 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... In San Andreas, I learned that you can go to the gym to get more muscular and then to learn new moves. There's a limit to how much you can workout for each game day. I also was shown where to buy new clothes. Finally, there was a tutorial on gun targetting and advanced controls. There were a couple new missions. One has you in a car chase, trying to kill some rival gang members. After catching up to them, I ended up kind of blocking their car in and so it wasn't very hard. Next, you have to do the driving for a drive by shooting, but I messed it up and got a game over. MaskedSheik Pirate (7/12/06 1:46 pm) Reply | Edit | Del ... Quote: I do kind of think that DKC3's bonus boss might have been better than DKC2's. We once had a person here who claimed the DKC2's bonus final boss was one of the hardest bosses ever, much harder than the normal final boss. THAT is an opinion I've found inconceivable. The secret boss attacks maybe 5 times, those attacks aren't really that different than what you had to survive to beat the normal boss, and you can safely absorb one hit, and then the boss only takes one hit to kill. As I recall, the bonus boss of DKC3 was harder than its normal boss. However, part of that was due to the slowness of Kiddie's controls; because he had copious animation frames of him putting down a barrel, it took him some time to respond to my commands. I found the secret final boss in DKC3 harder too, but for a different reason - I could never hit K. Rool in the final part (the electricity around the steel barrel) with Dixie's barrel throws (she takes forever to throw and she holds the barrel over her head, so I couldn't position her correctly), so if I lost Kiddy I was helpless. I wound up switching to Dixie every time the electricity appeared, in case I got hit, and then switching back to Kiddy when I got the opportunity to attack. The DKC2 bonus final boss was really easy. I'd say I beat it on my first try, but I wasn't even trying (sorry, I couldn't resist >_>). I do like the DKC3 bonus final boss better, and it would've been nice if it ended the game. TaroSH I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost (7/12/06 1:52 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... There's a weird glitch I found in DKC3's second final boss. There's this time in the fight where a metal barrel appears, K.Rool turns the electricity on, a beam comes out of one of the sides, and you're supposed to run to the opposite side of the metal barrel which absorbs the electricity. If you pause the game, you'll see this faint white beam pass through the metal barrel, and I think if you let it pass through your characters then unpause it they die. I don't remember the details of it. Maybe somebody could fill me in, or give it a shot. TWEETER911 I learned from both Jushin Lyger AND Mr. Pogo, you insolent fool! (7/12/06 5:12 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I got the Echo Visor in Metroid Prime 2. Arrgh, I forgot what I have to do next. : ( Oh, and did I ever mention that the Spider Guardian has to be the stupidest boss ever? CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/12/06 6:56 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Completed that drive by mission in San Andreas. Now I'm a little stuck on rescuing a gang member without getting shot to death. I archived another GPT, though I didn't bother to change the main page to reflect that yet. I also decided to read the progress topics from last July 4th onwards, as I sometimes do. Curiosity about what I was doing last year at this time. Freaks me out sometimes, because it can seem like only yesterday, but in another way, like it's been 10 years. TaroSH I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost (7/12/06 7:41 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I've unlocked and "completed" every stage in New Super Mario Bros. I'm missing maybe 25 coins in the entire game, and anyone who thinks I give a shit is horribly mistaken. Shelving time. ACC KAIN Band on the Run (7/13/06 10:55 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Oh yeah, Hien, that's his name. I beat it again with one of the hidden rabbit characters. Does the Super NES version not have the Dolphin? Bomberguy221 Hit and away is my style! (7/14/06 4:28 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Fire Emblem: PoR - Beat Ch. 17, causing Ike to promote. Gave him Aether. Pumped bonus exp. around the board, causing Jill to promote. Gave her Guard. Oh, and I got Boyd, Oscar, and Kieran all to promote. All three can now use bows. Animal Crossing: WW - Caught a lantern fly and grasshopper for donation. Unfortunately, this was also the day I managed to catch Blathers in a bad mood. So, he'd tell his sob story every time I needed to talk to him (which happened to be quite a bit). Dr. Shrunk was also in town, and I got the "scheming" emotion. Paid 10,000 to my debt. Grew a hybrid flower. Gave some furniture away. Attempted to keep Olivia in my town until I get her picture. Long day. Nixxy Blayde Pirate (7/14/06 12:23 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I beat Master of Darkness (a huge Castlevania rip-off) on a Sega Master System emulator. I also beat Viewtiful Joe finally after owning it for about 3 years. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/14/06 5:00 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I've done several more missions in San Andreas, and now I have some choice as to what to do next. There's a racing mission, one where you have to steal weapons from a warehouse, and one that involves chasing someone down on a motorcycle. I tried and failed all of them, but none seemed impossibly difficult. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/14/06 11:42 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I just reread Animal Farm. "Just" being literal; I easily read it in a sitting. Anyway, while much of the symbolism for this book (as has been repeated ad nauseum) may be taken from the history of Russia, I do think it's a mistake to read the book too narrowly. After all, Benjamin, who I can't help but think is speaking Orwell's mind, or at the very least has the most perspective on the situation, always says that things are just about the same no matter what -- meaning, even if the particulars are related to Russia (or the USSR), there's something universal there. Consider this quote: Quote: We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! An argument justifying an exorbitant salary of a CEO could take a similar tack. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/15/06 10:07 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... FO's been working on a shrine for Magic of Scheherazade shrine, so I decided to join in the fun and start the game myself. I started it on the computer, but then took a password, and took it over to my NES. I still haven't fully set up my systems -- in fact, even now I only have my Playstation and NES connected to my TV. I have half a mind to get a new TV, but ... anyway, I'm digressing. FO has a neat trick for writing down passwords. If a character is a number, she'll put the # symbol above it, so 1's can't be confused with I's, or 5's with S's, etc. I think I'll adapt that habit. Anyway, when I started MoS myself, long long ago (maybe before FO moved here -- actually, FO is telling me that she bought it for me in New Jersey and mailed it to me, which sounds right, so I probably played it then), I didn't do much in it. The menu battles sort of annoyed me because I couldn't select what enemy to attack. Well, now I've finally made some progress. I just beat the first world. The random battles get better after you make some progress. By the end of the first world, aside from yourself, you'll have 3 main characters in your party, and you can also have 3 characters (including yourself) in a battle. Not only that, but you can also hire moblin-style soldiers for menu battles -- maybe up to 99, but 4 can fight in a battle at once. So, all that extra offensive makes battles go faster, and extra characters and such might give a little more depth of strategy. Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/15/06 10:28 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I remember starting MoS a long time ago, then giving up after I got a password I wrote down wrong or something. It was after the Luigi-Face-With-Wings joined. I've been getting in Vagrant Story when my cyst will let me, and I beat the Sky Dragon. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/15/06 10:57 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I had to make an adjustment to the MOS Shrine because of something I discovered about the game through Crawl's playing it: I usually play as the Magician Class and only change when the game absolutely forces you to. Because of that, I've always fought Gilga as the Magician. But Crawl is using the Fighter class and when he fought Gilga, he had to shoot each eyeball twice to kill them. This, apparently, allowed Gilga enough time to cast a Thunder spell. I never knew he had any attacks in his first form. If you're the Magician Class, you can easily kill his eyeballs before they have a chance to cast the Thunder spell, and therefore, I'd never seen it. I guess I always did think it was strange that his first form appeared to have no attacks, but that game isn't known for being conventional. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/16/06 1:02 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Geez, I went a little overboard with gaming tonight. (Well, for the weekend, I guess 1 am isn't that late). Anyway, I made it to the first password in chapter 3. In chapter 2, I had to go back in time to look for a monkey to help me through a maze, then I had to go back to the present to get a robot to translate the ancient language, then I could rescue the monkey, then I had to go back to the present again, and then finished up the chapter. It took a bit longer than it might have sounded like. For one thing, I tried rescuing the monkey before I had the translator, and he wouldn't join me because we couldn't even communicate. The dungeon with the monkey had some invisible pits in it. The boss of chapter 2 was Curly (probably supposed to be Kali). It was a bit of a pain. He / she has 6 limbs, three on either side, which are the creature's only weak points. It moves back and forth, potentially faster than you can, and you (most likely) need to hit it with your magic rod. Your magic rod can only have one attack on the screen at once, so if you have a shot lined up and it moves out of your way, you have to wait a while before you can attack again. And Curly can regenerate, so while you're missing with your attacks, he's undoing what damage you already did. Oh, and before fighting that boss, I got in a menu battle of note. I was near full health, but, before I could do anything, the enemy party did a combo attack that killed my main character instantly. One piece of humor in the game: Some people tell you to cast the spell Oprin, which reveals hidden passages. One particular town has such hidden passages in almost every screen. After you've gone through several screens, you meet a guy who says, "Yes. You know what I'll say. Cast Oprin here!" Bomberguy221 Hit and away is my style! (7/16/06 6:43 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Animal Crossing: WW - Caught several beetles, including a few large ones. This is good, since the ones I don't sell will likely end up being entries in the Bug Off Competition later today. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/16/06 4:29 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Quote: I've been getting in Vagrant Story when my cyst will let me, and I beat the Sky Dragon. By the way, I don't know if it seems like I should be adding more to the conversion for games I'd recommend (CB007 attempting Symphony of the Night might be another example), but I guess I'm just trying to let people develop their own opinions on those things. For Vagrant Story in particular, I think part of the pleasure is figuring out the game's "system", so I really don't want to spoil that. Jifu Pirate (7/16/06 4:41 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I just arrived at the Imperial City in Jade Empire. My character is now purely learned in the Way of the Closed Fist. I think I'm at level 12 right now, and intimidation seems to be my best conversation skill. She uses the sword Fortune's Favorite, but I also like the Tempest and Spirit Strike styles. Don't use a lot of Transformation styles (yet). Now I just need to talk to a lot of the people in the city and gather more subquests, so I can further my knowledge of the Way of the Closed Fist before talking to Princess Lian to futher the main plot thread. Bomberguy221 Hit and away is my style! (7/17/06 6:34 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Animal Crossing: WW - Submitted my 80 mm insect. Yeah, he's pretty big. Or she. Anyway, did a few odds and ends, but most of the animals were interested in the Bug Off and thus were not interested in me. Did make a good chunk of change after last night's hunt-a-thon. Fire Emblem: PoR - Beat the chapters with Naesala and Jill's father. I'm still all-living. I attacked the wyvern riders with Jill in Defending Talrega, and some started to insult her. In fact, I defeated her father with a few rounds of her attacking. He didn't say anything remarkable other than the phrase he says when she first attacks. CataTonic9 Retro-Rocket Phantasm (7/17/06 11:20 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Been away for awhile. Haven't been playing much. I finished Halo 2 and tried out some NES games on emulators. Just can't seem to stay too focused on games these days. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/17/06 8:23 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I beat Chapter 3 of Magic of Scheherazade! There were a few interesting things about this chapter. For one, for some misdirection, it's possible to enter the final palace in the wrong time period. I dont' think it's possible to really do anything there then, though. For another, there's a cave that's blacked out. If you get an item (the Cimaron staff and Pukin'), then it's like a Dragon Warrior maze, where you can only see a few squares around yourself. FO told me that she was never able to find an optional sword in that maze, but predicted that I would be able to. It turns out that, yes, I did find it. And the final palace (in both time periods) has "wizard battles". The magic field (where you plant a seed) was inconvenient to get to in this chapter (it's AFTER the maze, where the only thing left is if the final palace), so I skipped it. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/17/06 11:38 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... I might be wrong, but I believe I've explored all of the present of Chapter 4. I found 3 towns, got a new party member (who gave me a holy robe), and got the crystal (which I guess is the next wand in sequence, though I almost never use them). I'm leaving off for the night. Oh, yeah, and for the last chapter, there was a part where you need to be the Saint class (to get the cimaron). That seems to be a worthless class. Its advantage (besides what's needed for the quest) is the ability to stand on spikes without taking damage. However, its sword is a Lagoon-style nub of a dagger. So, you're stuck with the wand, which can only fire 1 attack at a time. Time for some subjective comments, I s'pose. Is this game a CLASSIC? Well, I've found it entertaining enough. I mentioned before that the first time I played the game, I was annoyed by the random battles, but, again, any annoyance at that becomes a nonissue once you get into the game. (On the other hand, some of the deaths I've gotten were due to instant kills in RPG battles. While there are instant kills in Final Fantasy 1, you couldn't lose your whole party to one. In MoS, if your main character dies, it's a full loss. Nevertheless, this isn't too big a deal; I'd rather have something in a game that could be arguably cheap than have designers afraid of having anything that could present a difficulty). The game has a decent pace, insofar as I'm constantly making progress and never have nothing to do. The RPG elements do NOT slow the game down. In particular, yes, there are experience levels to gain, but I never felt a need to stand around and fight the same enemies over and over to level. On the flip side, since there's a level cap of 5 per chapter, you can't OVERlevel, either. BUT.... yeah, I guess the other shoe has to drop ... I don't have any specific complaints about the game, but I don't know if, particularly so far, the game has risen above the level of being basically entertaining. The combination of RPG and adventure gameplay? There are two simple ways of looking at it: a) RPG and adventure gameplay already existed; it doesn't take THAT much creativity to combine them. b) ...but on the other hand, maybe it does, since no one else had done it. I guess my answer on the issue is that the creativity does count in the game's favor somewhat, but even with a creative setup, execution is still needed to push a game over the edge. What about the adventuring? It kind of reminds me of The Guardian Legend (another hybrid, though of different types). The overworld(s) is(are) rather straight forward. The Legend of Zelda's overworld was more complex (however, MoS's maps have been becoming more complex as the chapters go on). Basically, there is, for the most part, just one path from one point of interest (town, maze, palace, whatever) to the next. To make things a little more maze-like, sometimes the paths are two screens wide (so you could take two similar paths, rather than one, to the next goal) but it's really not a big deal. As for the music, some of it is good (I especially like Overworld 2 / 2000 years ago), but I wouldn't consider it to be a consistently fantastic soundtrack. I'm not that wild about the RPG battle music (or Salamander's Overworld), for instance. I like the music that's between chapters (when the party is flying around on the carpet), and the ditty for when a new member joins, though happy songs like that aren't usually my thing. I guess the Spring music is some more happy music that stands out. And the title music is good. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/18/06 12:15 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Maybe another thing I could mention is the game's password system. It's gotten a few complaints. I still think it's a nice idea. It's only about 50 percent longer than Castlevania 2's password, but stores more information (CV2 only stores the items you have, your time, and your experience level. MoS stores your items (and partners, and weapons, and...), your experience -- not just the level, but the experience points -- your cash, your name, etc.) I've played partway through chapter 4, and I've only entered passwords TWICE: Once, to transfer my game from the computer, where I started, to my real NES. And another time after a Game Over (which was unnecessary, since I could have continued). Yes, this means I'm keeping my NES turned on. So what? It's connect to my own TV, which is more or less dedicated to playing videogames, and the only person who would want to watch TV on it is me, so it can't be tied up. The NES is on a surge protector. And how much power does an NES draw? 10 Watts, maybe? (I seem to recall that figure for the Super NES) It's like having a nightlight on or something. A system with a motor would be a different story, of course. On the other hand, I've TAKEN a dozen or so passwords. I guess if I ever need to enter a password for some reason (power-outage, a simple decision to turn off the system after all) I wouldn't get set back far even if I miswrote one. Taking passwords doesn't seem unnecessarily time consuming. So, I certainly don't think there's anything to complain about regarding having a password system for a game like this, and, in fact, I personally wish MORE adventure games did things that way. Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/18/06 12:31 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... As anyone who's been keeping up on that SAB topic in the Kitchen Sink forum might guess, I'm having somewhat of a bug for Blaster Master lately. It's because my brother recently had me eBay the PSX one for him, and he was playing it (although I've been too shy to discuss the game with him and just pretend I don't remember anything about it, when in fact I remember every cutscene/FMV down to that one that had the original Sophia model with its wheels incorrectly portrayed, every boss, and several gameplay segments... although I don't remember as much about it as I'd like to. And in my shyness my memory completely failed me when he actually did try to discuss it, and in the times I've wanted to say something I've never been able to force any conversation of my own out; I always freeze when I try to bring anything up). Something I need to do in the near future is play my cartridge of Blaster Master 2. It's the only one I've never beaten a hard copy of (heck, I've never even played my hard copy since I got it off eBay some years ago), and I've only finished it on an emulator by spamming savestates. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/18/06 7:20 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: ... Quote: By the way, I don't know if it seems like I should be adding more to the conversion for games I'd recommend (CB007 attempting Symphony of the Night might be another example), but I guess I'm just trying to let people develop their own opinions on those things. That's sort of how I feel about things. There's a lot more I could say about MOS, but I'd feel I was just arguing and it'd be pointless. Besides, I'll soon have an entire site that should answer any questions anyone would have about what I think of the game. CRAWLand1000 The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/18/06 3:51 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... Eh, well, naturally my opinion on MoS is still developing, since I haven't even played the whole game. But it would be perfectly appropriate to reply to any of my posts on the subject after I've beaten the game. pOrn Sigma Sexy Thang (7/18/06 3:54 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... Another reason I didn't want to talk about Blasting Again with my brother is when I get in a conversation about a game I've played I always blab too much. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/18/06 4:33 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... There's not really much to say. And even if my mind hasn't changed much or at all at the end, I still always feel like kicking myself for saying anything (case in point: the discussion of Ys 3's music from awhile ago.) And I don't want to get burned out on talking about the game when I've only got 1/5 of a shrine completed. I originally intended to add more to that Arc the Lad 4 section on my site (a page for every playable character), but I got so sick of talking about the game I couldn't do it anymore. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/18/06 5:26 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... I don't feel particularly burnt out for talking about any of my favorite games. I just hope for the opportunity to say more about them than "I hope you enjoy it" or "Good to see someone else playing it." Example, I was even able to say some things (earlier in this very topic) about Super Mario Bros. 3. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/19/06 10:12 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... Maybe there'll be some things I can bring up about SotN, I just haven't been able to get around to playing it yet, pOrn Sigma Sexy Thang (7/19/06 10:52 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... I gave Shantae a shot last night. Holy crap, this game was developed by the same people who did Sigma Star. I thought Capcom made it. Er, hitting stuff in this game is awkward. I didn't play it for very long, though. In Vagrant Story I made one last run through that area with all the orcs, that long path you're given three minutes to get through, and you originally fought the Earth Elemental and the Sky Dragon at the end. There were three Treasure Chests, except one was locked with a key. Got some levels on my equipment (my Hand Axe has a 95 human level including a gem that boosts the Human level by 15, but I wish I could turn it into something with more attack power), and I guess I should be ready to go into the Iron Maiden now. James FP Schmendrick's Nose Moderator (7/19/06 12:12 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... I beat Gun-Nac on the hardest difficulty with ROB mode on. It was pretty tough, but Zanac was harder overall. Magical Yard Gnome Heavy Metal Chainsaw (7/19/06 3:29 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... Quote: I beat Gun-Nac on the hardest difficulty with ROB mode on. It was pretty tough, but Zanac was harder overall. Congratulations! I haven't beaten it on the hardest setting yet. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/19/06 8:31 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... I'm going to want to kick myself later, but fine, I'll say it: I actually think that MOS has one of the most consistently good soundtracks amongst games on the NES. However, there are a few songs that don't really work as well when listened to outside of the game. The underwater music, for example, is just a short series of notes meant to sound like "bubbling". And while the Lava World theme is not my favorite in the game either, I do think it has a creepy overtone that works particularly well for that part of the game, especially when you're 3000 years in the past. I like the battle music, but that's about all I can really say about it. I do think it's more consistently good than even Crystalis's soundtrack, which does have some great songs, but I can agree it's not one great one after another. One thing that impresses me about the soundtrack is that it has a lot of really short songs that are really good. Like the Password/Time Door theme and the Winter song. While it's true that it's harder to make a long song than a short song, it might be just as difficult to write a short song that can be just as captivating and listenable as a long song, because it's really rare that they are. Other examples I can think of off the top of my head are the Song of Storms and the Zanac ending theme. Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/19/06 8:40 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... Earlier I played Chip and Dale, and beat it in about half an hour. I continued once, because I lost a lot of lives at that section at the end of Fat Cat's Factory where you're on the conveyor belt with the low ceiling and a lizard and weasel come after you, and I couldn't figure out what the hell I was supposed to do about them. Yes, I'm ashamed. Although I probably wouldn't have had to if I realized earlier that in those bonus stages the top-middle box always contains a one-up earlier. I also watched the bonus shorts on MST3K volume 7. The Venezuela one was pretty bad. The telephone one was weak, but still bearable. The Spring Fever one was awesome. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/20/06 1:41 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I actually like Feeding Frenzy. Attractive, colorful graphics, simple and very responsive controls, and easy to learn gameplay with a gradual increase in complexity. Definitely made with the casual gamer in mind, but with less and less time for videogames, I can certainly appreciate it. You basically control a fish in a fairly limited playing area just larger than one screen. You have to eat smaller fish in order to grow bigger while avoiding bigger fish that will eat you, poisionous fish that reverse your controls, mines that blow you up, and other things. Various powerups and bonus stages add to the variety. After clearing a series of levels, you take control of a larger type of fish, and do the same sort of thing, with a little added difficulty. I'm thinking of trying the sequel for PC, actually. sethrashnoo I Look Like an Egg Moderator (7/20/06 3:51 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I got to that long underground hallway in Kingsley's Adventure where you have to jump across those columns with the slippery grass on top and they are only just wide enough for you to land on. I kept falling to the floor and after about 50 or so attempts at this, I gave up for now. pOrn Sigma Sexy Thang (7/20/06 4:41 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. In Vagrant Story I did as much as I could in the Iron Maiden as I could, then ran into a door locked with a key I didn't have. When I fought the Iron Golem, that was the first time I encountered a boss I could barely do anything to, but also couldn't do much to me. A 6 was a Critical Hit for both of us. I decided to disarm myself so he could get about 30 on me and I could reflect it, and in the end I got about ten levels on my Evil weapon. I also toyed around in Keane's workshop until I got all of my weapons above 20 attack. Strangely my Dragon weapon only said it was 16, but I guess the Hilt affected it. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/21/06 12:01 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I beat Magic of Scheherazade. I died several times against the final boss: He has an instant kill move, and it's possible (and likely, the first time you fight it) to be hit with it within seconds of starting the fight. In fact, considering how much healing potential you have (plenty of hit points, plenty of magic points, spells that refill your hit points, items that instantly refill your HP when they run out), chances are, instant deaths are the ONLY way you'll die in this game. Having said that, I'm pretty sure it's true for me. Anyway, one reason I died so many times was that I missed a clue for beating the boss. After dying against it several times, I hit reset and entered my previous password. I thought I might need to be a different class to win. Actually, as a different class, you can't even gain entrance to the fight. And so then I had to restart with that password again. I thought I had everything with my final password, but I didn't. I was only at level 24 (of 25), and still had Coronya, and thus didn't have the Isufa wand. When I regot the Isufa wand, I finally noticed the clue. I died one more time against the final boss, but beat it on the next try. The funny thing about the last chapter is that it doesn't necessarily seem more complex than previous chapters. There's really no significant time travel (there's one dungeon in the past, I guess, but no overworld), only one more party member to recruit, no quest to get that guy recruited, no quest AFTER he's recruited, etc. There are a couple of puzzles near the end of the game. And I ended up mapping one of the mazes. For Salamander, I had to hit reset after I realized I couldn't beat it as a fighter. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/21/06 7:00 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Magic of Scheherazade might be one of the first RPGs that had characters that were both named and had unique personalities (even if there's not much depth to them.) I can only think of two other NES RPGs that would even qualify, and those would be Destiny of an Emperor and Dragon Warrior 4. Might & Magic had default characters with names, but they didn't have personalities and they were completely customizable, so I wouldn't count that. Quote: The funny thing about the last chapter is that it doesn't necessarily seem more complex than previous chapters. There's really no significant time travel (there's one dungeon in the past, I guess, but no overworld), only one more party member to recruit, no quest to get that guy recruited, no quest AFTER he's recruited, etc. I've always felt that the entire point of the last chapter was "now to kick Sabaron's ass because he deserves it", although I might be slightly suspicious more may have been planned for that chapter but was cut for time/budget reasons. The main reason I'd be willing to believe that is because Hassan just joins your party out of the blue, there's no real explanation for him, and he is the only other character besides Mustafa who does not have some other kind of role or purpose in the plot. But Mustafa at least has a personality. Hassan really doesn't, he's basically just another Faruk. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/21/06 7:19 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Did I ever mention how messed-up the original artwork for this game is? http://www.flyingomelette.com/mos/art/scheherazade1.jpg Kebabu here is portrayed as being a Valkyrie, although in the game, she's a bird with a woman's head, which is MUCH more apparent when you use the Ring as opposed to her normal (Luigi-head) sprite: http://www.flyingomelette.com/mos/chapter2/kebabu.gif I have no idea who that guy in the silver armor right next to Kebabu is supposed to be. That little monkey with the cape must be Supica, although he doesn't look like that in the game. Those two giant heads in the background must be Hassan and Faruk, although aside from having pointy ears, neither of them look anything like their game sprites. Gubibi is literally a baby bottle (!!!!) and Rainy (right next to him) looks fairly close to his game sprite, except he looks weird without his antennae. This artwork is what also finally confirmed that the Troopers ARE bulldogs for me. I never really knew for sure from the sprites in the game itself. Pukin looks pretty much identical to his game sprite (which is still rather scary-looking). The Hero is portrayed in all three forms (Fighter, Magician, Saint), although in the game, he does not change his clothes for each form (I wonder if it was originally planned for that to happen, though...) Epin and Coronya pretty much look identical to the game versions. Gun Meca...WTF??? And I'm guessing that old man reading his book is Mustafa because his hat is covering his eyes, although in that artwork, it looks more like he simply doesn't have eyes. sethrashnoo I Look Like an Egg Moderator (7/21/06 12:42 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: Those two giant heads in the background must be Hassan and Faruk, although aside from having pointy ears, neither of them look anything like their game sprites. Which one is Faruk and which one is Hassan and why is one of them a Viking?? O_o I got past that part of Kingsley last night and I beat the dragon boss at the end, but my god that part with the conveyor belts and switches that comes right after him is murder! And there's no save spots! sethrashnoo I Look Like an Egg Moderator (7/21/06 4:15 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. On the subject of MOS, quoted from FO's Shrine: Quote: Although I feel disappointed that this game never got a sequel, there might be some consolation in knowing that Culture Brain's Ninja Boy series actually declined in quality after Little Ninja Brothers (NES) and Ninja Boy (GB). I sort of agree with that, but I think part of the reason the Ninja Boy games declined in quality is because they pretty much kept making the same game over and over again. If they had made a sequel to MOS instead, then there's so much more they could've done with the concept. I can imagine really tough Alundra-style boss fights. And I would have liked to have seen a final boss fight that included more involvement from your party members (although by that I don't mean another one of those finales like Final Fantasy 4 and Earthbound where everyone you met suddenly shows up to give you power, or something like that.) I always thought that MOS felt like just the beginning of a story. It explains how everyone gets together, and after a few things happen, they leave for an adventure at the end. I guess either MOS didn't sell well enough to make a sequel or the Ninja Boy and Hiryu No Ken games were just easier and/or cheaper to make. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/21/06 4:39 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I don't know if I necessarily agree. The ending to MOS certainly seems to be setting up a sequel, but sometimes I like endings that imply that the story goes on just as a complete ending on its own. It's not always necessary to find out what happens next. And since sequels more often than not don't carry the story on the way we might imagine it would or should (see Arc the Lad: End of Darkness and Alien3), it's sometimes better to leave that up to your imagination. The message is that life doesn't end with accomplishments or failures. It continues on its path without us ever really knowing where it will go. "If our lives could lie before us Like a straight and narrow highway So that we could see forever Long before we took the ride We would never look to heaven, Make a wish, or climb a mountain Because we'd always know the answer To what's on the other side" On a side note, I've seen a lot of places say that Super Ninja Boy is the sequel to Little Ninja Brothers. Technically, it's the sequel to Ninja Boy 2. The timeline of those games goes like this: Little Ninja Brothers - Ninja Boy 2 - Super Ninja Boy I'm not sure where (if anywhere) Ninja Boy 1 fits in. It's a self-contained game, so it could go anywhere. But NB2 is definitely the sequel to LNB because you meet Blu Boltar at one point and he recounts your previous meeting. SNB is definitely the sequel to NB2 because the character that reveals himself as the final boss is one of the villains from NB2 and Jack and Ryu recognize him. That's one thing that irks me about SNB's story is that if you didn't play NB2, you'd have no idea what that was all about. Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/21/06 9:41 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. In Vagrant Story, I went through the Iron Maiden and got the Chest Key. The game makes a special documentation of this like it's optional. Is it? I also went into this area locked by the Bronze Key, found the Iron Key, Teleportation spell, and a bunch of Sigils including one that unlocks a door in the Wine Cellar (?!?!?!). If I didn't know better I would've thought you had to go into this area earlier because the bosses I encountered were way too easy. When I tried out the Teleportation spell, I didn't know what the yellow one meant, and thinking it meant "Here's where you need to be" selected it. Turns out it means the one you're standing on. That's so nice of you, Vagrant Story, to take my MP and not teleport me anywhere! Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/21/06 10:04 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Well, the MP cost is proportional to the distance between the locations, so even if it took some MP, how much would it have been, 3? Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/21/06 10:10 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. 15. Wasn't bad, but was kind of annoying. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/22/06 12:11 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Scratch what I said about Mustafa earlier. He does have another role - only he can reveal Troll's true form. Pukin reveals the first form, but Mustafa unveils the second. So that leaves only Hassan with having no other role besides "final party member". I guess what must have happened is that Hassan's lamp was destroyed by the Salamander, but since you change the past, that changes Hassan's fate. Maybe he somehow knows this and that's why he joins. I mapped all of Chapter 3 and I'm up to Chapter 4. I still haven't scanned my Chapter 2 maps yet. BTW, if you write down an MOS password wrong, just keep trying to enter it anyway. As long as you have the first two digits correct, you'll still start in that chapter. The only problem is that your acquired items, spells, and party members may not be the same. This means you might have to redo some things (but still better than redoing the whole game) or you might end up a little farther ahead than you should be. For example, if you enter a bad password in Chapter 3, you might find Pukin in your party, even if you didn't bring him to life yet, or Mustafa, even if you didn't pay him to join. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/22/06 8:29 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: So that leaves only Hassan with having no other role besides "final party member". Hassan can also say, "Hassan ... CHOP!" pOrn Sigma Sexy Thang (7/22/06 2:37 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I'm still trying to figure out where I'm supposed to be next in Vagrant Story. I have 60% of the map and 25 hours. I have several Sigils, two of which I know I can't use right now (they're for the Limestone Quarry, but the door after the Water Elemental is locked with a Sigil I don't have) and the rest I'm not sure I've even found the places yet (I don't have any warps for them, but possibly there's just no save points in those areas). Quote: Kebabu here is portrayed as being a Valkyrie, although in the game, she's a bird with a woman's head, I just now figured out the word I was looking for, and I think it's "Siren". Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/22/06 3:45 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Yeah, I think she's either a Siren or a Harpy. Crawl said that Kebabu in the "ring" cinema looks like Kid Icarus, but I actually think she much more closely resembles the Syrens from the final level: Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/22/06 5:05 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I don't know what I'll play next. I'm not even sure what, if anything, I'm in the mood for. Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/22/06 5:17 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Okay, I think I figured out where I need to be in Vagrant Story, but a Harpy killed me. I went back to Keane's and toyed around with my Human and Beast weapons, because I turned them into Blunt instead of Edged. I soon found them to be of little good against most Humans and Beasts. They're not quite as powerful, but considering there's a type of soldier who takes about 10 HP damage from a blunt Lv.103 Human weapon with over 30 Attack no matter which body part I hit, I think it's worth it. Those Harpies were also a pain in the ass with a blunt instead of edged weapon. I also named my weapons after what enemy type they're for, because I kept confusing myself with two weapons called "Angel Wing", one for Evil and one for Undead, then two "War Hammer"s for Human and Beast (not that this one applies anymore, because now my Human weapon is a Falchion and my Beast is some kind of Axe). Like, my Dragon weapon is "Dragon Slayer", my Evil one is "Light Bringer", and my Phantom one is "Ghost Buster". By the way, I think I did get ahead of myself somehow. In the City Walls North there's a Dark Elemental you need to beat in thirty seconds or else the locked door won't unlock when you do beat him, and I already fought it several times (because I kept getting pseudo-lost and thought I was in the City Walls with the Iron Maiden). Then I wandered into the Undercity and found it as a boss, which was kind of a WTF. Fire Elementals can be found as common enemies in the Snowfly forest, but that was after you fought it as a boss. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/22/06 5:27 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. As I recall, I tried not to get too creative with my weapon naming in Vagrant Story, but always tried to have the name indicate what sort of enemy it was strong against. "Soul Stealer" might be strong against ghosts, "Dragon's Bane" against dragons, etc. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/22/06 6:27 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I wonder what the deal with the Ramipas spell in Magic of Scheherazade is? At least three different townspeople tell you that you won't see any enemies if you use it, but it doesn't prevent enemies from showing up on the overworld, it doesn't prevent random battles, and it doesn't prevent wizard battles, either. And it's not mentioned in the manual. I wonder if it's something that was "dummied" for the American version of the game? In other words, something that they couldn't take out altogether, but they just fixed it so it wouldn't work. If it really could stop you from encountering enemies, I'd think it would make the game way too easy. I also realized something about this game that I never caught before - No wonder Nintendo Power got so confused about that Fire Palace issue. There are actually two completely different palaces involved here. The Fire Palace is in the present world of Chapter 4 (and 5) and that is where Salamander lives in the present (although he won't show up even if you reach his room - you'll just get trapped in his fire field.) However, when you travel 3000 years to the past to beat Salamander when he was first born, the Fire Palace does not yet exist. Instead, you go to the Yufla Palace, which is where he was actually created. Yufla Palace is in the northern part of Celestern, the Fire Palace is in the south, so they have to be two completely different places. And the Yufla Palace most likely was turned into the Yufla Town that exists in the present because they're in approximately the same place. I'm still more correct than NP was. They said to jump off the cape to get to the Fire Palace, but that leads to the Lava Town where you get Rainy - and getting Rainy is a necessary step they omitted altogether. But until now, I never realized that the Yufla Palace and the Fire Palace were not the same building. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/22/06 6:52 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I've finished Feeding Frenzy's main game. It was pretty short, no timer, but maybe two hours. The last boss is a giant shark that too me a while to beat. The hard part is that there's almost no smaller fish around, so getting big enough to handle the larger ones is really time consuming and dangerous. Once you can handle the medium sized fish, it rapidly gets easy. There's a time trial mode that looks like it could be more challenging, and it's worth some more achievement points, so I may attempt it. I downloaded the free trial version of Feeding Frenzy 2 for PC, but I don't think I'm going to buy it. It's twice as much as the original was on Xbox Live, and the mouse control doesn't work as well for me. It's also too similar to the first one. In Mutant Storm Reloaded, I unlocked the yellow and orange belt difficulties. Interesting game, but the loads between levels make it drag sometimes. I currently have about 6 or 7 movies that I rented from a Movielink sale that I have to watch within the next week, before they expire. I've just been too tired, but I'll have to look at one of them tonight. Maybe Capote. I wish I knew why I had so little energy all the time. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/22/06 7:17 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I started Poe's Thousand and Second tale of Scheherazade, partly in honor of finishing Magic of Scheherazade. It's not a long story (well, I don't know if any of Poe's stories could be called "long"), but I'm stopping in the middle of reading it to make this post because I had to stop reading anyway, as we're about to eat dinner. One game that occured to me to try next could be God of War. I haven't played an action game in a while (I just beat Magic Of Scheherazade, an adventure, and before that, Abe's Oddysee, mostly a puzzle game, and before that, Aria of Sorrow, another adventure, and replayed Symphony of the Night, another adventure...). And, as I said before, I like the idea of a setting based on greek mythology. The only problem is that FO has currently our only Playstation 2 hooked up to her television. So, I'll have to decide if I want to go through the bother of moving it or not. It would also make it harder for us to watch movies. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/22/06 8:28 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I was just thinking that I should probably try replaying Chrono Trigger again. Going through the early parts bores me, but I don't think I've ever seen most of the endings, and I'd like to me a little more knowledgeable about the game. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/22/06 9:30 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Huh. I don't really think I'm bored by going through the early parts of that game. If any way of playing that game would bore me, it'd be playing New Game +, since you're so over powered compared to anything else. Anyway, I finished the 1002 tale of Scheherazade. It turns out that the king thought her last story was so ridiculous that he changed his mind and decided to kill her after all. Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/22/06 11:20 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I'm up to the temple in Vagrant Story, and found the Silver Key. Part of me thinks I cheated in getting to the front door, another part of me doesn't think there was any other way. The fight with the brother and sister of that guy who fought you with the armor was insane. Since what was so insane about it is a kind of spoiler about the fight I won't mention it, but Facility and Crawl might know what I'm talking about. But the thing about it made me go "Holy shit!" My Evil weapon is Lv.107, but I do have three Demonias on it. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/23/06 12:17 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I think it's just that I've started and quit CT so many times that the first couple hours are insanely familiar to me by now. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/23/06 1:33 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Hmmm... I'm actually not quite sure what Codie is refering to. The story scene after the fight was kind of a "holy shit" moment for me, though... Anyway, I did decide to start God of War. According to the game's clock, I've played it for an hour (I would have guessed an hour and a half), and I made it to the save point after the medusa fight. As FacilityPro suggested, I did start on Spartan difficulty. The game seems to assume players would want to wuss out, though: If you die a few times against a boss, it'll ask if you want to switch to Easy mode. Fortunately, the default choice is "No", because the first time that came up, I just hit the confirm button right away (because I had just tried confirming to continue), before I was even able to read what the message was. The game seems okay so far. Honestly, fighting minor enemies (like the skeletons or zombies on the boat) does seem to be just a lot of button mashing. But that's not all there is to it. I tried just button mashing the medusa for a while, but didn't have any success with it. So, I figured I must have needed to use some modicum of strategy. Well, there wasn't TOO much strategizing to be done, because there are only so many things you can really do in a game like this. Since button mashing didn't work, I figured I must have needed to use the block ability. So, I'd stand around blocking, wait for her to attack, and then do a 1-2 counter attack. After the fight went on for a while, and I figured I was getting the hang of things, I would sometimes make a first attack, if she had just been hanging around for a while. I also learned what patterns of hers had two attacks I had to block, and which had just one. Before that, I also had to use a bit of strategy against the cyclops. For them, I could button mash them until they pulled back, then I would dodge at the last instant, then continue the combo. Dodging them was similar to dodging Glass Joe after fighting Mr. Dream, insofar as it seemed easy to dodge way too soon. And the hydra boss wasn't too bad, either. When I briefly played a demo of this game in a store, I thought I fought the hydra boss, but it was really just a miniboss of one of its heads. The real boss had a bit of a puzzle for it. A character in a cinema (incidentally, all the NPC's in this game's cinemas seem to die in them, except for women Kratos had sex with) gives a clue (which turns out to be sort of misleading) "You have to kill the big one first! It heals the others!" So, I was able to "kill" the two little heads several times before I figured out what to do. Then there's also a puzzle aspect to the real boss fight. I thought I just had to tap the buttons that appeared on screen, so it took me awhile to figure out I had to mash it. Compounding my confusion was the fact that it seemed like even doing that combination correctly didn't do anything (I didn't realize it was until I was close to beating the boss). Kratos does seem to look Greek in his face, particularly his nose. I guess for a videogame, you don't have to worry about questionable casting of actors in ethnic roles. I did sort of like the atmosphere of the first stage, of the feeling of being amongst the wreckage of ships attacked by an enormous sea monster. But, man oh man, what the fuck was up with those balance beam segments? It's like the designers were purposefully trying to come up with the least appealing game mechanic they could. Facilitypro Slow Daddy (7/23/06 2:38 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. After I read your earlier post I decided to play through GoW again (On Very Hard), since I got bored trying to get 100% again in Maximo. Yeah, the balance beams are really annoying. And they do appear several times in the game. I played up to a part just a bit beyone where Crawl left off. I really like the block mechanic in that game. The action slows for a second when you block a blow just before it lands. This becomes especially useful when you get your blades to level 3. You get a move called "hades revenge" or something like that that allows you to counter attacks when you parry a blow just right. There are good parts and slow parts in that game; thankfully the good ones far outnumber the slow ones. I'll have to think about what my favorite part of the game was. pOrn Sigma Sexy Thang (7/23/06 12:20 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: Hmmm... I'm actually not quite sure what Codie is refering to. The story scene after the fight was kind of a "holy shit" moment for me, though... Well, that too, but... (highlight) In the actual fight I was smacking the dude around for 5 HP a hit, he was immune to combos, and Analyze wasn't working on him. Then I decided to Silence the two of them, and when I went to Silence the woman I hit for a 150 HP. The fight lasted about two more seconds. Anyways, I beat Ashura (I didn't look up her name, but since she had three faces, four arms, and would levitate-sit when she cast a spell that's probably who that was supposed to be), and the super Water Elemental (don't remember the exact name) in the castle. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/23/06 12:49 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Well, the thing about Vagrant Story is that one person's boss experiences could be almost radically different than another's based on equipment, combos, strategies, etc. I don't think I ever had that particular thing happen to me. Anyway, I played just a few minutes of God of War a few minutes ago, before we'll go out and do our Sunday chores. I only advanced one checkpoint. You have to run around that temple a lot, opening different passages which don't seem to do much, but eventually you're able to scale a wall, knock a statue over, jump on its remains to another building, fight some enemies (more medusas - which are MUCH easier now than when it was a boss - and even Minotaurs), shoot a rope with a giant bow across the way, and climb hand over hand across it. Anyway, I just reached the bridge past that area. I was thinking to myself, "You know, this stage doesn't REALLY capture the feel of a city at war. It feels more like a city that WAS at war, was conquered, and most of the conquerors have left, and now I just have to pick off the stragglers." But I also felt that it might have been hard for a videogame to capture the feel of a city at war. After all, how can one person reasonably fight thousands? Well, after reaching the bridge, you catch glimpse of a battlefield below. There are hundreds or thousands of soldiers down there, firing arrows at an enormous giant. That was sort of a cool moment. I guess that guy has to be the next boss. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/23/06 6:19 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Okay, that doesn't seem to be the next boss. The next cinema explains that that IS Aries, the god of war. Gee, if he'd just hustle a little more and move a bit faster, he himself could have destroyed Athens by now. Anyway, this seems to be a pretty long stage, quite a bit longer than the first one. From where I left off, first you have to run down a sloping walkway, where you're fired on by demon archers, and have to fight a few more medusa. Then you make it to the city square, where you have to fight one cyclops, then two at once. There are a bunch of citizens running around here, who can restore your life if you kill them. They make doing "finishing" moves on the cyclopses difficult, though, because you might inadvertantly grab a wrong target. In fact, I thought the hit detection on the big attack for a cyclops was bad anyway, because they never seemed to kill them. However, after observing it a few times, I don't think they're really instant kills. You just hook their heads, slam the heads into the pavement, and that releases some money. After that, you run around some more, and have to fight some demons with magical shields. I'm leaving off now, but my save is just before a part where I have to fight some weird shadow/skeleton demons that can slither around under/just above the ground, and they swarm, and are fast. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/23/06 6:21 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: I'm leaving off now, but my save is just before a part where I have to fight some weird shadow/skeleton demons that can slither around under/just above the ground, and they swarm, and are fast. Those things annoyed me, IIRC. I think you're almost up to where I stopped playing. pOrn Sigma Sexy Thang (7/23/06 7:51 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I want to know what crazy ass version of the game these guys are playing. I'm just over 350, and my MP is only about 76. And I can barely do 4 HP damage. I was fighting this fucker for about an hour before I finally called it quits. You can't approach him, he only approaches you when he wants to attack, he only attacks with magic, and it takes him about five minutes to drain his MP, leaving the two of you playing the Mexican Standoff. And I love his Blood Sin attack. For all that show, every time it left me going "WTF? Was that supposed to hurt?" Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/23/06 9:31 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I revised my strategy, and wasted him in less than 10 minutes. I still can't believe I didn't think of that sooner, considering I did it somewhere else. Another thing that peeves me is I spent two hours leveling up a bow and a spear on a gremlin doll because I thought long-range piercing weapons might have been better, only to waste that time. Bleh. I still want to know what's up with the numbers on that picture. New Game+? Facilitypro Slow Daddy (7/23/06 10:09 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Yes, new game +. You can keep your stats and items that were in storage, I believe. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/24/06 12:28 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Hmm... Usually, when I fight the final boss of Vagrant Story, his Blood Sin attack can kill me instantly if I don't use a combo to absorb back some of the damage. Anyway... Quote: I think you're almost up to where I stopped playing. No way? I recently reread your progress posts on this game, and I had gotten the idea you were close to the end. Well, I had figured out how to take care of them. It seems it's important to know how to block effectively for this game. (And there's even a parry move, but I'm not bothering with that for now). Those enemies I had described will jump into the ground, slither towards you, then pounce while spinning around. THEN, they do a leaping attack. So, it's important to keep blocking until the whole group is done with all of their attacks. As for a counter against them, it's really easy to grab them. So, you can instantly kill them rather easily. I had worried about using those "fatalities" against an enemy when he was surrounded by his buddies, but, funnily enough, all the other enemies will leave you alone while you're performing the fatality on the weak enemy! The only problem with the group is that you might target the wrong enemy before the fatality animation takes effect. I got past those slithery enemies, and all of Athens, in fact. Holy fucking shit... What were they thinking with the Oracle? And people thought the crying baby in Yoshi Island was annoying? This lady is hanging from a rope, all the while yelling "Kratos! Get me down!" "Kratos, what are you dooooingggg?!" "Athens crumbles while you waste time!" "Kratos! Get me down!!" Over and over. While she's yelling all that, you have to figure out and solve a several step puzzle involving pulling some statues around and stacking them on top of each other. So, you'll have to listen to her bitching for several minutes at least. Then you get to continue to listen to her bitch as you have to perform a timed platforming section. I won't act like this is some huge game-ruining issue, but, geez... (and to reiterate) What were they thinking??? And even if it's not a game-ruiner, it does make the game seem unpolished. I watched the "making of" video, and they talked about how the game was extensively play-tested. None of the play testers were annoyed by that woman? As for general comments about the game... This will probably sound contrary to popular wisdom. I think it's very difficult for a game like this to look visually impressive. For what it is, it looks okay. I'd probably say it's better visually than Ninja Gaiden X (and might be looking to be a better game, too). But for games like this, in 3D, to work much at all, the view has to be zoomed out far enough that, when you're actually in a fight, you can't see any detail on Kratos or any of the enemies. There are a lot of times when I'm almost sure that the characters look smaller than small sprites in some NES games. And NES (or 16 bit) games had characters that were superdeformed, or at least stylized, so the most important details were easy to see. Look at this screenshot of MoS: http://www.flyingomelette.com/mos/chapter1/horen.gif Now, the main character of that game, aside from merely not being drawn realistically, isn't even drawn with human proportions. He's three heads tall! Yet because his head is so big compared to the rest of his body, you can see a lot of detail in it. You can see the turban, and how the turban is made of more than one piece, and how it has a jewel in it, and a feather above the jewel. And for the mermaids, you can clearly make out their mermaid figure, as well as their head dress, and the cloth around the head dress. But for modern games, because characters are drawn realistically, their heads are so small relative to their body that (except in cinema scenes) you can't make out any facial features at all. Basically, all I see is a human shape. (Maybe that's why Hotsuma had the flowing red scarf -- you can't make out any details of his body, but at least there's something there to emphasize his movement and sort of catch the eye). For another example, for the most common enemies in the game, I can't even tell if they're really skeletons, or dissicated zombies, or what. It's just not possible to see that much detail on them. The game's music isn't very melodic. It's just "Bum bum bum! (bum bum bum!)" bombast. Gee, what would modern action game designers do if there had been no Devil May Cry? This game follows the style of that one VERY closely. (The camera system might be a bit better.) -The fights are very much beat'em'up style (every enemy takes multiple hits, stage/arena layouts aren't that important compared to the types of enemies you're fighting), though faster paced. -There's a bit of adventuring intersperse amongst the action. -"Bad ass" hero (the "bad ass factor" being stronger in this game, while Dante was a bit more comic) -Weapons that have new abilities to be purchased, life bar and magic bar (devil meter in DMC) extentions. And so on. I don't really think the designers of this game were trying to buck any DMC conventions, or re-evaluate the entire style of game, thinking about what works, and what doesn't. Instead, it's more about ... I don't know. I guess they tried to put a person spin on it with the setting. And maybe they tried to make this game more "extreme", with the violence, the hero's personality, etc. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/24/06 12:31 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Oh, I forgot to mention that I sort of screwed up after the Oracle. I went straight into the sewers and didn't explore the "Suicide Bluffs" area first. And now I can't go back (I'm right before the desert now). But I reloaded my previous save, and found that I missed a phoenix feather (a piece of a magic bar extention). I'm not sure if I'll just keep playing with my further save, or go back and do that whole area over again. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/24/06 12:37 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I don't remember playing for more than 2 or 3 hours. This is the last progress post I can find that I made for God of War. Quote: I just got the power of Zeus in God of War and got enough Gorgon Eyes to increase my health bar. Not long after, this post: Quote: Continuing to play God of War is becoming a little questionable. I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I won't have time to finish it before it's due back at Blockbuster. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/24/06 12:49 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Okay. I am a bit past getting the power of Zeus and the first gorgon eye powerup. I don't remember for a fact, but I'm about 2 and a half hours into it myself. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/24/06 12:54 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I really should consider playing it again someday, there's just never enough time. I haven't played much of anything aside from those Xbox Live games in over a week, I think. I was having fun with San Andreas, but I'm not sure if I should keep working on it for dozens of hours more or try to find another game that I could complete in a reasonable amount of time. Chrono Trigger is still a possibility... was going to start it tonight, but of course, I fell asleep at 7PM and didn't wake up again until after 10. Now I have to try to get back to sleep. Maybe I need more vitamins. Bomberguy221 Hit and away is my style! (7/24/06 2:16 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Fire Emblem: Beat the castle in Lycia. However, I think I missed out on getting two people to join my party. Animal Crossing: I got both Olivia's and Cesar's pictures. DEATHAMSTER O Solo Mio (7/24/06 9:13 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I made it to a boss in Crystalis that wouldn't die even though I was fighting it for at least a half an hour. James eventually told me there's something else I have to do first. (Yup. This is the first time I've actually put a lot of effort into beating this game.) pOrn Sigma Sexy Thang (7/24/06 9:26 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: Hmm... Usually, when I fight the final boss of Vagrant Story, his Blood Sin attack can kill me instantly if I don't use a combo to absorb back some of the damage. I got pegged with it at least six times in all the time I was fighting him, and each time it did maybe 40 HP damage. Apocalypse and Judgement were way more damaging, and it felt like Zeromus going from the nearly-kill-my-entire-full-HP-party Big Bang to 50-damage-to-one-person Meteo. DEATHAMSTER O Solo Mio (7/24/06 9:39 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Also, on Crystalis, I have a feeling I know where I have to go - probably to that cave in the desert, but there's a huge maze in there and I was wandering lost for what seemed like an hour before I gave up and decided to try searching elsewhere. The game is really good and it looks nice. Has some good music, too. The story is a little more sparse and typical than I might have been expecting but I'm mostly holding out for the revelations that occur at the end. Lord Vyce Lord of Women's Lingerie (7/24/06 12:19 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I finished New Super Mario Bros. and got all the coins. I've started a new game of the fan-translated Treasure Hunter G. CRAWLand1000 The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/24/06 12:23 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: it felt like Zeromus going from the nearly-kill-my-entire-full-HP-party Big Bang to 50-damage-to-one-person Meteo. Well, THAT is something that does happen to every Final Fantasy 4 player (unless maybe it's possible to kill Zeromus before he goes into his Meteo attacks). ShadOtterdan Cameo senses tingling! (7/24/06 2:10 pm) Reply | Edit | Del . I bought a new tv for my games, my old tv would keep screwing up and getting all staticy when I was playing my games. I decided to splurge and buy a small hdtv, found one at costco for $360. The graphics look really neat, although I find myself thinking that it's not worth the price. I played Full Metal Alchemist:The Broken Angel, I would really only recommend this game to diehard fans of the show, the fighting is pretty bad, and the storytelling kinda sucks. The game can get challenging at times though, like in the third fight against Genz, as far as I know there is no way to deal more than 1 point of damage to him, and elemental weapons deal no damage (which sucks because the wind element helps you deal a lot of hits), also the fight against Armstrong and Mustang is hard even when you have max stats, Armstrong is a pushover, but Mustang will dodge almost every one of your hits, and his attacks can easily knock you around and take out half your health. I didn't find out until much later through the fight that the one attack he can't dodge is the cannonballs from a transmuted tank, although you can only make two, and if it gets hit with a chain attack there is no way it's not going to get destroyed. I also got the rest of the Megaman Zero games, I really like this series a lot better than the other megaman games, haven't really thought about why I do though, so I'm not sure if I should recommend them. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/24/06 5:32 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: While she's yelling all that, you have to figure out and solve a several step puzzle involving pulling some statues around and stacking them on top of each other. So, you'll have to listen to her bitching for several minutes at least. Then you get to continue to listen to her bitch as you have to perform a timed platforming section Crawl mentioned earlier about how gamers weren't outraged about the Katamari Damacy creator's comments that he doesn't like games. I mentioned in a conversation that I found it disturbing how there wasn't outrage amongst Crystalis and NES fans in general to the desecration of the GBC version. Look at any review of that game. They try to be as gentle as possible, or they blame any problems on the original version, or they buy lock, stock, and barrel into Nintendo's bullshit that "We HAD to change it because this is what SNK REALLY wanted it to be like!" Now I'm beginning to wonder just how much gamer outrage would really affect most developers anyway. Everybody bitched about Secret of Evermore using ambience instead of music for a lot of its areas. Yet many modern games (even the most popular ones) have hardly any music. Everybody bitched about how annoying the constant voiceovers were in Star Fox 64, and yet somehow we still get things like the screaming woman in God of War or that TMNT game where the characters wouldn't fucking shut up ("TALK TO THE FEET! TALK TO THE FEET!") Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/24/06 6:21 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Here's another way of thinking about those God of War issues (the screaming woman; and also the balance beams). Normally, I don't mind minor flaws (if they actually are minor, isolated, and offset but a bunch of good stuff) in games too much. As an example, MDK2 had a few parts I'm not overly fond of (the bomb sequences in ... stage 6, I believe; and the bouncing targets in stage 7). But that's in the context of MDK2 being an incredibly ambitious game, with dozens of different styles of challenges and puzzles and stages. With so many different styles, some are bound to be better than others, or at least be liked by certain individuals more than others. Peter Travers has put this issue as, He'd rather see a movie take a bold swing and miss than not to swing at all. But the excusing factor there -- ambition and creativity (and throughout it all, challenge) -- is a higher standard. To me, "fun" is a lower standard. But I've been thinking lately that maybe one sign of intelligence in humans is the ability to see things from others' perspectives. So, while my natural inclination might be to judge a game by challenge, I can imagine judging a game by how fun it is. But if I would do that, I still would have to hold the "fun" to a higher standard. Anyway, I guess what's bringing these thoughts to my mind was Game Informer's review of God of War, which concluded with a line like, "This is the most fun I've had with a game." (He didn't mention what his number two choice would be) Aside from seeming like a rather lame way to end a review that's supposed to overblown with praise, it also raises the question of just how to judge what would be the most fun I've had. I said that striving for higher aims can excuse a few pitfalls on the way. But if fun is the standard, then there are no higher aims. Anything that detracts from fun is just a flaw, plain and simple. The most fun game should at least be entertaining from beginning to end. Honestly, even THAT isn't all that high of a standard, I'd say. However good God of War may be in other respects, I can say with almost no doubt in my mind it won't be the most fun I've ever played, nor do I expect it to be all that close. And continuing with the NES proportion thing, I don't want to suggest that it's just Magic of Scheherazade. That game might be seen as having a somewhat cartoonish style anyway. Here are some more "realistic" games: http://www.flyingomelette.com/ezboard/pap2/nespropo.gif Trevor is about 4 heads tall. The guys from Sword Master and Contra are perhaps 5 heads tall. None are particularly close to being 7 and a half heads tall. Yet, I never thought any of those characters looked disproportionate. If any of those characters were to be made 7.5 heads tall, either a) They'd have to be a huge target (FO suggested Astayanax, but even he isn't 7.5 heads tall!) b) Their heads would have to be miniscule (and Contra guy already doesn't have too much detail in his face). Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/24/06 8:49 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I made it to the Temple of Pandora and am part ways through it. Okay, for this post I'll say nothing but positive things about God of War. I said that for its kind, this game's graphics are okay. So, what are some of the good parts? I liked the scene from Athens overlooking the battlefield, where you see all the arrows firing at Aries. I might have thought it looked a little cooler at night, when Aries is right in the middle of everything, but it looks cool before you go into the desert, too. I'm a sucker for clouds and sunrises. I also liked scene of Kronos carrying the temple of Pandora. This game plays rather fast and loose with Greek mythology, which is common practice (eg., Homer not even being blind in the Ducktales episode! And why was Homer even the one on those adventures, anyway, when it should have been Odysseus?) Anyway, the game is at times challenging*. Unfortunately, there's no way of getting rid of that asterix there. It can be challenging on the hardest of the 3 available-by-default difficulty levels, but who knows about the other two? I'll bet that at least on the easiest, most of the game is just button mashing, which is probably what some reviewers found to be "fun". Anyway, the game seems generally okay, but I'm having trouble coming up with more specific positives. Okay, I'll indulge myself a couple of quick complaints: Running around the desert hardly qualifies as "fun", either, in my book. And sometimes this beat'em'up, pound every enemy a million times gameplay (especially for the enemies outside of the temple) gets old (even with these games being ten times faster than, say, Final Fight). I'm still thinking that for a 3D melee combat game to be great, it would have to take some cues from NES platformers: Have level design be important, and have you fight lots of weak enemies (whose position and such is important) rather than a few strong enemies (or enemies that continually "gate" in) in an arena. I'd still say by far the best 3D melee combat game is Shinobi, and it sort of does both of those things. Its fighting system has some DMC / brawler influence, I guess, but thanks to the Tate system, just about any enemy can be killed in one or two hits, getting rid of tedious button mashing; and there's more platforming and level design, and enemy placement / level design interplay (though not as much as in a 2D game) than in other similar games. Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/24/06 11:31 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I just discovered something else about Magic of Scheherazade that I never knew before!! Let one of those palace wizards transform you and then before his helpers have a chance to insta-kill you, use the Ring. http://www.flyingomelette.com/mos/chapter4/kebabu.gif Kebabu will pull you out of the battle, but you'll still be in the transformed state. Now you can see her entire body! Apparently, she really is a bird with a woman's head, and it's much easier to see that here than in her normal sprite. I guess I'm not the only person who sometimes has difficulty getting characters to look right from a head-on front view. (http://p197.ezboard.com/fflyingomelettespalacefrm23.showMessage?topicID=436.topic) Captain Ladd Spencer Behold the many uses of my amazing BIONIC ARM! (7/24/06 11:42 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. We were having a thunderstorm so I didn't want to play a console, so I spent a little time with Mario Kart DS. I made a phoenix for my emblem. I got gold in three of the cups and cleared all the Level 1 missions. So far this game is looking a little meh, but I'm only on 50 CC. And it controls better than Double Dash. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/24/06 11:46 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I thought the SMB3 airship track was pretty cool, but otherwise, I didn't think Mario Kart DS was that great. It also hurt my hands to play it. But none of the other entries in the series really drew me in, either. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/25/06 12:04 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I'm about 5.5 hours into God of War. I just beat Atlas's challenge. Oddly, the hardest room for me in that challenge for me was the first one (where you have to kill the zombie centurions, then the gorgons). I got through it by first running to the second room and killing the gorgons there (don't ask me why that would be easier), which earned me enough orbs to power of Poseidon's Wrath to level 2 (the only other weapon I've powered up are the chaos blades, now at level 4), which I used against the gorgons. I imagine that the part FacilityPro was refering to regarding getting grabbed while climbing was the hand-over-hand rope segment in the bowels of the challenge. I was grabbed many times there, but managed to avoid getting shaken off. (WHen I was grabbed, I'd quickly grab the analogue stick with my whole hand and shake it) The backstory (of which I suppose there is more to be revealed) of Kratos and Aries wasn't what I was expecting. I thought that Kratos would have been a blood thristy, ambitious officer who wanted to have more power in battle, and sold his soul to Aries for it. Instead, it seems when he was about to be killed, and his forces routed, he promises his life to Aries if the god will save them. I was talking above about how distinctive a character might be in a 3D game like this when the camera is pulled back. I suppose that might be the main reason Kratos has that red lightning bolt tatoo across his body, though even that isn't terribly distinctive from a distance. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/25/06 12:35 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. There was one other thing I wanted to mention about Magic of Scheherazade that had slipped my mind until now. It has some impressive sound effects. In fact, they might be the most impressive I've heard since Secret of Evermore, or PunchOut ("since" meaning, "since I personally played those games", not "since they were released"). It's just too easy to take sound effects for granted in a modern game. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty of making good soundeffects, but, oh, well. On the NES, though, we KNOW that realistic sound effects must be difficult to pull off, because they're sort of rare. I don't remember all the effects, but some areas near water have the roar of the current. CRAWLand1000 The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/25/06 12:31 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. I've been thinking about bit about my God of War opinion, and how it's been developing. Last night, I struggled to fill an entire post with positive thoughts on the game. Yet on Sunday, I was thinking the game was pretty good, and was looking forward to playing more. Now, I'm starting to think it's nothing but a mediocre Devil May Cry knockoff. I'm not even sure if I like it more than Ninja Gaiden X any more. What has changed? Well, there's one big thing. I'd say the best part of the game so far was at the very beginning: The hydra boss. There hasn't been anything like that since. FacilityPro said it was too early in the game to be a challenging boss. :shrug : I've already said that at that point in a game, I'm more interested in having the game hook me, and suggest what could come next. But even so, I didn't think it was all that much easier than anything that came later. It's even part puzzle. And it's probably the coolest moment of atmosphere in the game. Jaffe said they couldn't have put more bosses in the game because they didn't have time. Hey, I understand not having time. But couldn't they have made some time back by cutting out some of the crap? I'd happily lose all the rope climbing segments, the tight rope walking, the desert run around, and some of the more redundant fights could have been gotten rid of, too. Not only that, but the game is serving up more irritating, unentertaining things, so much so that it's starting to become systemic, rather than a couple of isolated annoyances. Another one was in Pandora's Rings, where you're privileged to pull a handle and slowly rotate the room around to reach the next passage. Since the Hydra boss, what I have learned about the game? I learned a little bit of the importance of blocking against the medusa, and a little more from those wraiths. That's about it. At some point, it becomes easy to survive for arbitrary amounts of time by blocking (blocking seems to block EVERY attack, with the exception of enemies grappling with you -- and that's rare), so then the next trick is to learn how to be a bit more aggressive to kill enemies faster, so fights don't have to be so drawn out and tedious. Anyway, I've seen another scene that was kind of cool: When you're scaling the temple near the chains whose links are as big as you are, and the view is from above, and you see Kronos below you pulling the temple. On the other hand, please don't tell me the scene where you sacrifice the soldier was supposed to be emotional; or brutal; or emblematic of Kratos's personality, or hard to pull off because you don't want to hurt a fellow human being, even virtually; or, on the other hand, cool. It's just ridiculous in its attempted manipulation, and since the guy just keeps saying over and over "Gods on high! Save me from this barbarian!", so he never comes across as a human being rather than as an element in a videogame (not to mention that you just meet him before you kill him). Facilitypro Slow Daddy (7/25/06 5:20 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. As far as my own God of War progress, I just got the two shields and opened the door into the sawblade room. I have level 3 (max) Posiedon's Rage, Blades of Chaos at level 4, and Medusa's gaze at level 2. As far as upgrading goes, this might be the most upgrades I've gotten up to that point. I've been trying to get more orbs by doing finishing moved when I have more than 10 hits. One big move is using Medusa's gaze against harpies. If you stone an enemy and crush it, you get 15 bonus orbs. If you stone an airborne enemy and it falls to its death, you get 30 bonus orbs. The harpies are weak and always airborne, so they are easily frozen. Using the gaze against them got me huge amounts of orbs. I agree there are lots of slow parts in the game; I've never understood why there are mechanics such as sidling against walls, yet it's featured prominently in even blockbuster titles (Wind Waker, Prince of Persia, God of War--I guess Ninja Gaiden X had it's version of that, too.). Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/25/06 7:18 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. The first Cerberus on Spartan was giving me some trouble. I eventually figured I'd have to try something totally different than what I had been. "What I had been" included -Just my normal style of fighting. -Focusing on the cubs, to prevent them from becoming big. -Play defensively, not worry if the cubs became big, try to wear the challenge down (this plan was kind of idiotic). What I eventually ended up doing was using the Medusa head to freeze the first big Cerberus, then smashed it to bits with the Artemis. After that, I went back to the blades of chaos; fighting the cubs by themselves with those is easy. The whole thing was easy that way, really. But that's not a complaint. I sort of like figuring out little tricks like that. So, that's one point to God of War. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/25/06 11:01 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Before I beat the Cerberus on Spartan, I tried it briefly on Easy with the cop-out (but of course reset later without saving to restore my original game). On Easy, you can beat that challenge by button mashing. I don't know how much different the game is as a whole, though. I played up to the gears and spikes under water that way. I actually had an easier time on Spartan for the part before where you sacrifice that guy. It seems like the enemies there are infinite. On Easy, I fought them over and over and over, and finally made a break for it. On Spartan... crap, I don't remember all the details. I think what I did was (after positioning the cage as close as possible), run up to the hallway where the sacrificial chamber was. The enemies won't pursue. From there, I turned them to stone and smashed them to bits. Then I ran back and got the guy. For some reason, they didn't reappear in front of me (though by the time I got the cage to the hall, I could hear their gibbering behind me). The sacrificed guy's voice sounded familiar to me. I looked it up in the manual, and it turns out to be Rob Paulson, previously known as the voice of Raphael from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I just ran away from those scythe-weilding knights in the area where you can see Krono's back. Too many kept reappearing, so I just said fuck 'em. The only trick for the spikes that close in under water is moving straight while dashing. I lined it up as well as possible before entering, then made no corrections at all while dashing (that will only screw you up). If you can dash with hardly any corrections until the end, you can simply normally swim out the last stretch, which is easier to control. The last challenge for the night was a room with Harpies (who are pretty easy, though you have to watch out for their dive bombs) and more armored skeletal soldiers -- who are also mostly easy, but they kept gating in for a long time. I guess there could be two ways of looking at: 1) When you're in a fight and you have no idea how long it will last, it becomes more exciting. 2) Having to fight endless waves of the same enemies in the same room is boring. I tend towards position 2. Even though I can conceive of that opinion (on my own; I haven't heard it argued by any one else), I still think it seems flawed. Facilitypro Slow Daddy (7/25/06 11:32 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: 1) When you're in a fight and you have no idea how long it will last, it becomes more exciting. I think that's the case with many shooter bosses. Like in R-Type, when you're fighting Bydo, and you keep thinking each win (spiral ball thing) will be his last. But then there's ANOTHER one! But I agree it's no fun when it's just wave after wave of enemy. Challenge 8 of Challenge of the Gods was one of the hardest yet the worst. Just wave after wave of 4 gorgons and about 10 knights. I'd spend 5 or 6 minutes here and then die. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/26/06 7:53 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Yeah, I'm specifically talking about challenges where you don't know how long they'll last because they could just have another wave of enemies. In a sense, you get that unpredictability naturally with any game, because you don't know how long a stage will last. So, the only advantage the "waves of enemies" approach has (in this context; that is, aside from being easy for the designer to make) is that it's harder to keep track of how far along you are, whereas in a game with level design, after you've been through the stage once, you know how long it is for subsequent attempts. Also, some "level design" games have clues that their stages are wrapping up. Shinobi, for example, always has a part at the end that raises the stakes over what came before. But that's cool, too. It indicates that there's structure not only throughout the whole game, but within a stage. And even in Shinobi, there are still some moments of wondering how long something will last. An example might be in the very last stage, near the end, when you're running up those black platforms in that sparse area. True to the rest of the game, the very final bit has an extra challenge (that giant ogre creature), but before that, the nature of that area is that you don't know if you're one-third, one-half, two-thirds, or what, through it. CRAWLand1000 The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/26/06 9:33 am) Reply | Edit | Del Re: .... Of course, another example of a game generating tension by not knowing how much further you have to go, in a game with level design, could be another thing in R-Type: The first time you play a stage, you don't know where the check point is. So, when you die, your first thought is, "Did I make it? Did I make it to the checkpoint?" Followed shortly thereafter by "Yes! Yes!!" or "Nooo!!" Back to God of War, one thing that's weird about it is that the difficulty curve isn't always constant. Example, I've fought Cerberuses 4 or 5 times so far (the first battle; then some cubs after some giants and in front of some archers; then some more cubs after the first time you go swimming; then one or two [it seemed like one on Easy, two on Spartan] after returning to where you got the Poseidon. And by far, the hardest one was the first. The cubs are easy to deal with, and for the last one with big dogs, no little ones appeared (the big ones weren't even vomiting out little ones, though perhaps they in principle could). But for the first battle, it's just wave after wave of cubs, and the big one definitely can spit out more cubs, so it's possible (if you don't use my strategy mentioned above) to be eventually overwhelmed with the behemoths. I guess one way (off the top of my head) of justifying a reverse difficulty curve like that could be, If the hardest one comes first, it makes the enemys' first appearance a memorable "moment" rather than just another part of a stage, and might make subsequent enemy appearances have a bit of (if specious) tension, because you don't know if that fight will develop to be like the previous, harder one. It still seems like a bad idea to me. More in a bit. TWEETER911 I learned from both Jushin Lyger AND Mr. Pogo, you insolent fool! (7/26/06 5:27 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. FINAL GARD HAET CURI! Finaly got a Final Guard Soul in AoS2/DoS. Now I have a Final Guard AND Iron Golem. The only pain in ass souls I need are Stolas, Peeping Homosexual Eye, and Arc Demon. And maybe a few more minor souls for 100%..uh..soulage rate. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/26/06 5:57 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. CHRONO TRIGGER IMAGE CAPTION ADVENTURE http://home.comcast.net/~cb007r/chrono/chrono.html This is just something I threw together as a test to see how it might work. Kind of inspired by FO's shrine work, and bored with having no original content on my site anymore, I thought about going through a playthrough of Chrono Trigger, taking screenshots and posting comments. Sort of like what I did with Donkey Kong Country last year, but more lengthy (sadly, I lost those images) There's no point in making a Chrono Trigger shrine, as it's probably been done better than I could do it a million times before. Still,a a final version would probably be a little more in-depth, maybe not all nonsense, rather than just an easy joke for each screenshot. Would anyone like to see more of that? I'll probably proceed regardless... Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/26/06 7:14 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. That is too great for words. CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/26/06 7:49 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Thanks, fun as hell, too. I'll try to go much longer between additions, but here's a few more because I'm bored. http://home.comcast.net/~cb007r/chrono/chrono2.html Flying Omelette No One Shall Deny The Greatness of... PUTTYCAT!!! (7/26/06 8:39 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. The "Back" link doesn't work. Might want to fix that. Great one with the PowerGlove there. I probably never will because it's too long and complicated of a game, but if I ever did make a Shrine for CT, I'd have the description of the PowerGlove be, "Crono loves it. It's soooo bad." CLOUDBOND007 Lunitari Mage Moderator (7/26/06 8:43 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Yeah, I've got to make a main index page for the Chrono stuff, and link everything there together, and to the main site. It's all kind of a mess right now in terms of file names and such. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/26/06 9:03 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: And maybe a few more minor souls for 100%..uh..soulage rate. After talking about Aria of Sorrow with my brother (he has a different opinion on it; he thinks it's the best GBA game he's played) and listening to his various strategies (mostly for boss rush), I think I've decided I'm not 100% qualified to finish my review on that game until I get 100% of the souls. Crawl and 1OOO The Fuzzy Physicist Administrator (7/26/06 9:18 pm) Reply | Edit | Del Re: Kids are always after me Lucky Game Progress Topic #87.. Quote: What a totally random thing to say. I'll just forget all about that, seeing as how that bit of information will never be of use to me. Wouldn't it be great if peop