Topic: What Games Are We Playing

[DarkWolf]

I was playing Retro Game Challenge, but got kind of bored with grinding in Guadia Quest (on the last challenge).  I recently picked up My Japanese Coach and have gotten through a few lessons on that.  Kind of wanted to do French (no new writing system to learn) but they didn't have it at the store and Japanese was my next choice.  I seem to be doing better at the Kana than I did the last time I attempted to learn them.  Maybe I just needed structure perhaps?  Oh that's right, I also have recently gotten SimCity Creator for DS since it was fairly cheep, but I got a bit bored with it and put it back on the shelf.  Why can't they do a decent SimCity anymore?

In the non-console world there's going to be a LAN Party after work tomorrow and we're going to be playing Unreal Tournament ('99).  Ahh, the classics...

[JonLeung]

Still working through Final Fantasy X...

On the DS side, I just finished Professor Layton And The Diabolical Box.  Even the extra stuff that comes with swapping passwords with the first game, but of course not the third.  Didn't try any downloadable puzzles yet though.  The game was epic, and the ending was more spectacular than in the first game, though maybe a bit rushed.  Still, a good 10 and a half hours of fun.  What should I play next on the DS...Scribblenauts, or Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story?

[snesmaster]

Final Fantasy X is definitely one of my favorite Final Fantasy Games.  Are you the type of person that will beat the game and stop playing it, or do you try to find everything and do all the side quests and max out your characters?

[TerraEsperZ]

Man, I've got a ton of games I need to play. I recently bought the Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Wii, Bit Trip Beat, Bit Trip Core and World of Goo for Wii Ware, and I still need to finish Portal which I only started playing yesterday. Unfortunately, my on-board graphic card sucks and the game is nearly unplayable since it's so slow, so I need to buy both a 3D accelerator card and a new power supply since the one my computer came with sure won't be able to handle it (it's 200 watts short).

[JonLeung]

Final Fantasy X is definitely one of my favorite Final Fantasy Games.  Are you the type of person that will beat the game and stop playing it, or do you try to find everything and do all the side quests and max out your characters?

I'm typically very thorough, though in recent years there seem to be too many games I want to play, so I'm now increasingly likely to be okay with not having 100%.  With the main-series Final Fantasy games I still try to be very thorough, so as you saw earlier in this topic I semi-recently got through Final Fantasy XII with just about everything, and I even returned to Final Fantasy VI Advance even after a two-year hiatus to finally finish it off, when I probably wouldn't have returned to a game untouched for so long.

In Final Fantasy X, though, I lost in the mandatory Blitzball game, and even if that one was supposed to be pretty hard, I don't know if I have enough interest to get through many Blitzball games.  It just seems to move too slowly for my tastes, and I don't like many sports to begin with.  Apparently I have to play tons of Blitzball for Wakka's ultimate weapon or something, which sounds like it could be frustrating.

I could take my time since I own the game since it was part of that stack of PS2 games I got for cheap, but it's quite possible that I might just pass up on FFX's Blitzball stuff and just move on to the next game, which if on the PS2 will either be Resident Evil: Code Veronica X or Final Fantasy X-2.  I don't like being behind, even though I couldn't bring myself to buy a PS2 (since like I mentioned, I got this one for free when a friend upgraded to a backwards-compatible PS3, even though he doesn't use the backwards compatibility much if at all), and those two, especially Code Veronica, are pretty old, and not in some kind of "retro" revisitation sense, but in a to-play-but-never-got-around-to-it sense.

I also have a bunch of Wii games I started, which I hope to get back to, like No More Heroes and Help Wanted, and I kind of started some Muramasa: The Demon Blade, plus at some point I want to play Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (though I'll likely just download a save since I finished it on the GameCube, I mostly just want to play with Ada).  And then of course with new games on the way like TMNT: Smash-Up (if it's any good), A Boy And His Blob, Spyborgs, and a few others I can't recall, I'm sure I have no shortage of games I'd like to play for the rest of the year.  I save my DS playing as a pre-sleep thing, which is why I have time for those games, and so I did get into Scribblenauts yesterday and finished most of the first world's puzzle-challenge stages (I haven't started the action ones).

But do you know what's been wasting my time the most during the day?  Trying to catch a $@#%!ing giant petaltail (dragonfly) in Animal Crossing: City Folk.  It only appears from 4 PM to 7 PM, (and I get home from work before 4 PM, if you're wondering) and is incredibly rare, and won't appear after Hallowe'en, so I have to spend up to three hours each day* just walking around, bored out of my mind.  I'm incredibly lucky to even see it at all, so I know many days it's a complete waste of time, but at the same time I'll never catch it if I don't at least try.  It is the final bug for me to catch, after all.  But is it worth all this trouble just to complete my bug catalogue?  Nintendo can be pretty cruel sometimes.  This is worse than the stupid "2% rare" PokéRadar Pokémon in Pokémon: Diamond Version - which sure didn't feel like 1 in 50 since I never ever freaking saw one - because at least in that I could transfer them from my FireRed Version when I eventually gave up.  It may be a good thing that if I don't catch the giant petaltail by Hallowe'en I'd have to give up by default before I go crazy, but then until next August I'll be wrestling with whether or not I would want to hunt them again since both hunting them and NOT hunting them are both so very unappealing.  Don't you hate those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations?  I just want to catch one so luckily and easily like my brother did (who just saw one sitting on a sign so he didn't even have to give chase), and I hope I do it soon.  (See, at least if I was spending a lot of time on something like an RPG, I'd at least feel like I have the "productivity" of gaining more gold and experience, rather than just walking around with nothing to show for it by the end of each play session...)

*I'm sure any non-gamer and casual gamer would wonder why I should care at this point.  At least I'm not missing out on life, which actually cuts into that three-hour time window by quite a bit, so maybe I'm not even spending an hour on it, if I get a chance to spend time on it at all, but that drags it on and reduces my chances of seeing these stupid giant petaltails, which makes me wonder if I shouldn't maybe spend MORE time on it...graaagh!

[snesmaster]

Yea, I know how you feel.  I used to do that with games as well, I must find every item and max out all character stats.  Of course that made the game last much longer and when you don't have a lot of games or the next great RPG is not due out for a while it works great.  But like you I have ended up with a stack of games to play.  So now I just go through and beat the game and move on to the next so I can experience the variety of more games.  Don't feel bad I also decided to skip the Blitzball part of FFX except for the few mandatory games to get through the story line.  I did however max out the characters and do all the side quests that weren't blitzball related.

You speaking of trying to find that rare petaltail reminded me of trying to find the Pink Puff from Final Fantasy II (IV).  You had a 1 in 256 chance of getting them to appear and a 1 in 256 chance once it appeared to get the pink tail from it.  Fortunately I soon learned about the trick of setting up both controllers with one holding down "left" and the other holding down "right" to make you walk back and forth to trigger random battles and the turbo attack button held down to kill off all the enemies.  Then just left it on overnight a few nights to finally get it.  Then I just needed to do that 4 more times so I could get one for each person in my party.

[DarkWolf]

I checked two stores for Scribblenauts yesterday and couldn't find a copy.  I'll have to hunt one down this weekend.

[JonLeung]

I finally finished Final Fantasy X.  With other stuff going on in, you know, real life, it's the first time a FF game has taken me months instead of mere days.    Stupid side-quests.  I managed to complete everyone's Sphere Grids, but I skipped all the stupid Blitzball.  Now until XIII comes out, I'm caught up on all the main-series FFs (excluding XI but that's online which is kind of an excuse).  I believe the order I finished them is: IV, (I), VI, VII, VIII, II, III, V, IX, XII, and X.  The summer a few years back when I did II, III, V and IX was kind of a blur though.

I'll play X-2 at some point, but I think I'll put aside the PS2 catch-up for now and catch up on some Wii games instead.  I did play some New Super Mario Bros. Wii with my brother last week and made it up to World 7, but one of these days I'll probably play it single-player as well.  Then the next plan of attack will probably to tackle the unfinished Wii games like Help Wanted and No More Heroes and Muramasa: The Demon Blade.

Oh yeah, I finished every stage of Scribblenauts a little while ago...is it worth it to go back and do them three more times with different words?

[Maxim]

I finally finished Super Paper Mario. I have to say, it was kind of disappointing, and I really can't be bothered to collect all the cards and hidden chests and the #@!% Pit of 100 Trials. Whereas Galaxy gives you innovations and new ideas right up to the end, SPM really just has one real trick (the 3D flip) and then gets progressively more frustrating.

[Revned]

I feel the same way. I never even finished it, actually. It started feeling quite tedious after awhile.

[JonLeung]

Really?  I managed to get everything in Super Paper Mario in a single rental, which is not what I could say about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on the GameCube.  In that one, I missed two Star Pieces and couldn't tackle the Pit Of 100 Trials (or whatever it's called) due to time restrictions, I think Blockbuster hadn't yet implemented the no-late-fees thing yet.

In Super Paper Mario, there was time enough for both me and my brother to play it on separate files.  He didn't bother to go for 100%, though.  While the Pit Of 100 Trials was fun, I would agree that it is clearly an attempt to extend the length of the game.  I think there was two (correct me if I'm wrong), and when you get to the bottom of the second one, you get nothing and are sent back to the top and have to go through it yet again to get whatever it is.  In that sense, they could've at least tried to be a little less blatant about it by just calling it the Pit Of 200 Trials and having a save/teleport point on the 100th or 101st floor, sheesh.

I miss the days when I could drop everything to finish games within a timeframe of mere days...and now with so many games I could be playing, I have to learn to prioritize.

[TerraEsperZ]

Sorry to revive this thread, but I just had to mention a Wii game that I managed to find after hearing about it on another forum, called Muramasa: The Demon Blade. The game itself is a sort of a 2-D RPG lite taking place in ancient Japan in which you get to acquire and forge over a hundred different swords each with different powers. In itself that's pretty neat but God is that game gorgeous to look at and listen to! Everything looks like traditional Japanese paintings, only animated! Seriously, I've never fallen in love with a game's style so much as with this one. There are tons and tons of parallax layers and everything as a painted feel to it, with added lighting and fog effects on top; forests, bamboo forests, rice fields, Japanese towns and castles, frozen forests, hell, heaven, you'll visit a ton of enchanting places.

As for the sprites, they are all animated superbly with tiny movements and deformations; it looks a bit like some flash movies but the quality is light years ahead. The soundtrack is also amazing with a ton of traditional instruments and some modern ones but always mixed well, and they also kept the Japanese voices to retain the 'feel' of the period.

Sorry if I sound like I'm promoting the game, but it's so rare that games with hand-drawn graphics that lok this good come out nowadays that I just had to share it with you guys . Here's the best trailer for it in my opinion.

[JonLeung]

I've been playing that too!  o_0

I just got Momohime to Level 99 yesterday, survived the "Total Pandemonium" enemy lair, and got the bracelet that lets me do infinite special attacks without using any Soul Power.    Now to do the same for Kisuke and get the remaining few brown swords.

I also finished Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story two nights ago, but apparently I have to do it again with all three characters at over Level 40 for something, I dunno.  I found all the hidden underground beans, at least.

[Revned]

Assassin's Creed II, Age of Mythology with friends, and I'll be starting on Uncharted 2 soon.

[FlyingArmor]

I finally finished Mother 3, after a year of not playing it, haha. Very satisfying I must say! Now I just gotta wait for my Mother 3 Handbook to arrive. About the only other game I've been playing lately has been Lennus II. Slowly still making my way through that.