Saturday, June 26, 2004

FAQ You!

	I added another section to the HTML FAQ just now, about making links. Pretty basic stuff, so it didn't take too long to write. I think the post background and border sections are going to take the longest to write. For the other topics, I'm hoping to write one per day (unless something comes up and I don't have time), but we'll see how it goes. I'm quite notorious for getting lazy with stuff like this about half way through, heh. Besides the HTML FAQ, I've been toying around with the idea of writing a fan fiction sort of thing, based on Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. For a while now I've been wanting to do more with the personalities I came up with for the four colored Links, but until now, nothing has seemed like it could work. Following the story of Four Swords Adventures, though, seems like it could provide a good setting and I'd just get to have fun plugging in the Links' personalities and watching them bounce off one another as they progressed through the "game." Also, the way the game is broken up into eight levels, with three stages in each, would make writing it easier. I'd already have defined chapter breaks, as well as breaks within each chapter for each stage, so it would be easy to sit down and write a little at a time. Maybe that way it wouldn't seem so overwhelming, trying to write something so long. My specialty is shorter articles -- I don't do so well with long stories, except for RPG type stuff on OB, since it's a collaborative effort and I'm not the only one doing the writing. So I guess this is another one of those "wait and see" things. (I'm horrible with those, aren't I?) If I do end up writing it, though, I probably wouldn't start on it until the HTML FAQ is done, but I'd post up each chapter on OtakuBoards as I wrote them. And I'd make a post on here about it, of course. So that may be another thing to watch for. I think I'd first need to do a revision of the Links' personalities before actually starting on the story, though, so if you see me post that, you can probably expect the story to be started soon after.

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Friday, June 25, 2004

The Shameless Plugging Continues

	If you hadn't noticed, there's a new button up there next to the ones for people to use to link to my page. Yeah, I know it's pretty plain, but it reflects the nature of the site it links to: plain, simple, and explanatory. That is, a link to the HTML FAQ I'm writing for people that always ask me how to do things with HTML on their myOtaku pages. So far there's only one topic there (about putting images on your page), but there'll be more whenever I get around to writing them. I've got the list of topics I plan on covering already up there, though, so you can see what to expect. Hopefully people will find this helpful. Tell me what you think of it so far. Oh, and I'm also planning on making a new button for myself some time, since I'm going to have an "It's All About the Rupees" one for my new site, whenever I get it uploaded. So watch for that, too. Edit: Whee, I made my new button sooner than I had thought I would. It's up there next to the HTML FAQ one, in the place of my previous three. Only one version of it this time, but those are the colors I use in my layout, so those are the ones I used in the button.

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Thursday, June 24, 2004

Hindered by a Lack of Intelligence

	I think I may have said this before, but it's worth saying again: Final Fantasy X has the stupidest minigames of any game I have ever seen. Ever. Some of them could be kind of fun, if not for the fact that all of them are horribly frustrating because of idiotic design flaws. First off, about the only half way decent minigame in FFX is Blitzball, but even that seems like it was really rushed. There've been times where I didn't have the ball at all for a whole game, except when the other team scored and I got to start with it -- and then they'd immediately steal it again. So I sat there, watching as I lost and not being able to do a thing about it because you can't do anything when you're on defense. The whole thing seems really unbalanced. I've either lost horribly without ever scoring, or totally trounced the other team; only one game has come down to a matter of a single point. Then there's the Chocobo training thing in the Calm Lands, which I did yesterday. Now, this could be fun, if it weren't totally screwed up by two things: One, the control for your Chocobo is absolutely horrible. Worse than for the Chocobo racing in FFVII, and certainly worse than when you're just running around on a Chocobo in FFX. If I had real use of the analog sticks, instead of the crappy eight way directional control of the d-pad, it would've been about twice as easy, but no, that would've been smart. I mean, they let you have full analog control on the Sphere Grid when you use the sticks, but of course they can't let you have that for control of your character. And two, there are invisible walls that like to push you towards the center of the "track," which tends to get you hit by the homing birds. Nevermind that the actual cliff wall is still ten feet away, and it's a straight shot to the finish no matter what, it still doesn't want to let you get over there. Even though the only way to dodge some of the birds is to go over there, and even though there are balloons over there. It still tries to push you back towards the center. Finally, then, there's the butterfly catching game in the Macalania Woods. Again, this had the potential to be fun, except for the fact that you can't actually see where the butterflies are. Giving them shadows on the ground would've been smart, since it would've let you see where you actually have to step to run into them, but no, that would make it too easy. As it is, you basically just have to run through the path over and over again, memorizing the positions of the butterflies through trial and error. And even then, on the first course that I've done, there was a red butterfly that was simply impossible to avoid, so you had to lose some time from that no matter what. Overall, it looks to me like Square was rushing to try and come up with ways to lengthen the game, since the actual story is so short. And so they came up with this whole big "quest" for the Celestial Weapons, which involves not only finding the weapons, but two other things that you need to actually make them any good. And of course, what better way is there to make the things hard to get, besides horribly shoddy minigames that will have people cursing the developers' names as they try to complete them? Certainly, having them really well hidden and providing hints and clues to make you solve a puzzle to find them would be far less effective. I mean, that would require the use of actual thought instead of making you fight with bad controls, go through exercises in trial and error, and hope that the game doesn't just decide to screw you by making something impossible to dodge. Really, there's just no comparison.

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Monday, June 21, 2004

Purple Link > Shadow Link

	I beat Zelda: Four Swords Adventures today, playing in two player mode with my brother. I won't give out any spoilers, but I will say that I was expecting a bigger final battle with Shadow Link. The fight really wasn't hard at all. So I'm a bit disappointed with that, but the end fights were pretty good. I have no idea how you'd beat Vaati in one player mode, though, unless you can hit him in a different way in single player. Some coordinated attacks from both of us at the same time were required for one stage of the fight. I'm far from done with the game, however. I plan on playing through again completely in single player mode so I can get an equal opinion on both the single player and multiplayer modes, and I'm also playing through with one of my friends, so the next time we get together to play FSA we'll be picking up where we left off last time. And then there's Shadow Battle, too; all of the arenas have been unlocked now that I've beaten Hyrulean Adventure, so I'm also looking forward to getting a few friends together to play that. I may have beaten the game, but Four Swords Adventures still has a lot of time in my GameCube ahead of it, heh. I'm also planning on putting some of my play time back into Final Fantasy X, however, so I'll be taking a little longer to go through FSA a second time. I haven't played FFX at all since I got FSA, though I'm starting to want to play it again, so that's good. FSA hasn't driven me to completely abandon FFX, like some other games have done with previous titles in the FF series. I just wish I had some sort of clue, however small, about what to do with the sigils and crests.

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Sunday, June 20, 2004

Now Playing #45

	Game: The Legend of Zelda Track: Title Theme Time: 1:38 Size: 11.6 KB After thinking about it, I actually like this theme more than the overworld theme. The two are similar, but there are differences. The title theme is slower, and I like its rhythm more. The overworld theme is good for the action of fighting and exploring, but for the narrative and story parts, this theme is perfect. As you'll read below, the song is used in the ending of A Link to the Past, which is one of my favorite endings in the game; the music is absolutely perfect for its ending. Besides being the title theme of the original Legend of Zelda, the song is also used as part of the ending theme in A Link to the Past, and also on the "select a game" screen in A Link to the Past/Four Swords. (And I think it's in Four Swords Adventures as well -- I'll have to stop and actually listen to the title theme the next time I play, heh). While I actually like the LTP/FS version the best, I went with the original version because, well, it's the original version of the song. I was really happy to have the song brought back in LTP/FS, though; I was disappointed that they didn't include it in any of the games between LTP and LTP/FS.

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Friday, June 18, 2004

Giant Bombs Are Biatches

	My Zelda: Four Swords Adventures bundle arrived yesterday just before I left for church. It was almost like I was being tested on whether I would still go, or stay home and play FSA instead, heh. (Just for the record, I still went). After I got home, me and my brother stayed up till about 3:00 AM playing it; we got all the way up to the last stage in Level 3: Death Mountain. And now today, we've gotten up to the second stage in Level 5: The Dark World so far. We might play some more later, or I might play by myself if my brother isn't interested -- I may not have gotten the game right when it first came out, but I think I'm making up for the lost time, heh. So far, though, I've only played two levels in single player, and those were the last two stages in Level 3: Death Mountain. Really, playing by myself seemed like a mixed blessing. One on hand, the puzzles seemed easier to do by myself, since I could control all four Links, but on the other hand, combat was harder. Trying to fight in formation can be really hard, since all four Links can take damage, but trying to fight out of formation is also hard because you've only got one Link attacking. Having even one more person -- to take control of two of the Links -- makes combat so much easier, since you've got half as many Links to keep track of. All in all, I'm highly satisfied with Four Swords Adventures; it's delivered on everything it promised, I think. While it still isn't really a "normal" Zelda game, I think it has done a much, much better job than the original Four Swords in retaining that classic Zelda feel. There's certainly a much better balance between puzzles and combat, that's for sure; some of the fights in FSA are absolutely crazy, whereas combat in FS was virtually nonexistent outside of boss battles. That, and the puzzles and enemies themselves aren't blatently focused on the use of multiple Links; very few things are color coded to require a certain color Link doing a certain thing, which I really like. The color coding in the original FS kind of annoyed me. I mean, really, why the heck would there be things that affect one Link but not the others? They're all still Link, they're just wearing different colored tunics. I much prefer the way FSA does it, by simply requiring the use of more than one Link to complete whatever puzzle; doesn't matter who does it, as long as it gets done, and they don't have many areas that practically scream "this area was specifically designed with the use of four people in mind." Overall, FSA feels much more like a real Zelda quest (which it is) instead of a mini-game. In closing, I should mention that FSA is fast becoming my favorite GameCube game, and I've no doubt it will soon surpass The Wind Waker. Four Swords Adventures is the most fun I've had with a Zelda game since getting A Link to the Past on the GBA.

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Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Ultima(te) Weapon(s)

	Approximately 59:00 of play time in Final Fantasy X. I swear, at least a third of my play time will probably have been taken up by sidequest stuff by the time I'm done with the game. I explored more of the Omega Ruins today; the No Encounters auto-ability is great for running through and looting the place. Though of course, it didn't stop me from running into the Ultima Weapon. But then again, I totally kicked its ass, so who cares? Really, I was expecting a harder fight from something that looked that nasty, and with a description of "Give it your all!" And now I'm wondering what I could possibly do with the thirty Door to Tomorrow items I stole from it. Oh, and I got three Lv.3 Key Spheres from killing it, which I'm very happy about. I've been getting more Lv.4 Key Spheres than I have Lv.3's, so Auron and Tidus actually ended up being stuck at the end of their paths on the Sphere Grid for a while, until I managed to get a couple more Lv.3's in the Omega Ruins. It'll be nice to already have some more for when Yuna, Lulu, and Wakka get to the ends of their paths. Besides exploring more of the Omega Ruins, I got three ultimate weapons, or whatever they're supposed to be called in FFX. I got Auron's Masamune, Yuna's Nirvana, and Rikku's Godhand, after finally figuring out what to do with the Clouded Mirror. But now I'm seriously annoyed, because each has nothing but the "No AP" auto-ability (and what an ability it is . . . really), and absolutely no clues whatsoever have been provided about how to power them up. I'm thinking it has to do with the crests and sigils I've been getting, but beyond that, I have absolutely no idea what to do. I've not found anyone or anywhere that seems to have any relation to the crests/sigils, so I'm pretty much just wandering around the world, trying random crap. And I don't know about other people, but that's not exactly my idea of fun. Seriously, Square did some bloody stupid things with FFX. At least in other FF games you got clues about how to get things like this if you talked to the right people. The whole thing with the ultimate weapons in FFX seems almost like it was thrown in just to add more play time to the game by making you wander around for hours and hours trying to find out what to do. In other news, my Zelda: Four Swords Adventures bundle should be arriving tomorrow (June 16). Or at least that's what the UPS tracking page said. I expect a sharp decline in my average "per day" play time of FFX, heh. I just hope my annoyance with the ultimate weapons doesn't get to the point where I completely abandon the game in favor of ZFSA before I beat it. I don't really want to add another Final Fantasy game to the list of ones that I've played almost completely through before stopping at the end. And since no one else seems to have any more guesses on the lyrics in my last post, look here for a file with the answers for each pair of lines.

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Sunday, June 13, 2004

Now Playing #44

	Game: Final Fantasy X Track: Auron's Theme Time: 2:57 Size: 22.0 KB Auron is definitely my favorite character in FFX -- I found his "story" to be the most interesting -- and he's got a pretty good musical theme. So far I've only heard it twice in the game, however, and both times it was playing really faintly in the background. Which is too bad, since it's a cool piece of music that fits Auron well; it would've been nice to hear it a little more in the game. Maybe, though, it'll be played somewhere around in between the end fights. Hopefully. Edit: Eh, why not. I'll pull a Shinmaru and steal this little game too; it'll fit nicely in with the Now Playing post. Here's the deal: find your playlist, set it on random so that twenty songs come up. Out of those twenty, pick your ten favorite. Copy a pair of lines from each of these songs and paste them in your journal. Watch and behold as people try to guess the name of the song and the artist behind it. Look here for the lines.

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Friday, June 11, 2004

Snakey Go Down the Hooole. . . .

	Up to 40:00 of play time on FFX -- that matches my first week's worth of play time for FF Tactics Advance. Scary. Though I guess I can't really keep that up, since I'm nearing the end of the game. But anyway, I finally found a couple bosses in FFX that managed to kill me. It was by damn cheap methods, but they did get me. Three times, no less; twice on the first one, once on the second one. The first was the Spectral Keeper. Now, I have to say, there really was no way for me to avoid dying those two times. And if it had decided to keep being cheap, I would've died still more times. Basically, what would happen, is that I'd be attacking the thing from behind so it wouldn't hit me with the counter-attacks, and it would just decide to turn around and hit Yuna -- who I had Haste cast on so she could move around and still have time to heal -- with Berserk Tail. And of course, each time it did this, Yuna just happened to be the next one to get a turn. No, not just one turn, actually; two turns in a row. And of course, since I was just attacking this thing, all three of the characters are next to each other, so that means all three of them got hit by the two counter-attacks that was the result of Yuna smacking the Spectral Keeper. This, invariably, would kill all three of my characters since the only one of them that can survive two of its counter-attacks is Auron, and only if he has full HP. The first time this happened, I had gotten the Spectral Keeper down to about half of its total HP. Needless to say, I was kind of pissed, since it was basically an instant death that I had no way of avoiding. (What I would've given for armor that nulled berserk. . . .) What pissed me off even more, however, was that on my second time fighting it, it did the exact same thing on its second attack, and I died again. At that point, I was pretty much sitting there going, "Well, what the crap? Are you supposed to just keep dying until you get lucky and it doesn't do that, or what?" I almost got up and turned off the PS2 then and there to go do something else . . . but then I realized I didn't have anything else better to do. So I tried yet again, hoping that the Spectral Keeper wouldn't decide to be a cheap bastard again, and thankfully it didn't. And besides that, the fight wasn't incredibly hard, so I had no problems on my third try. Even overkilled the thing with a Mega Flare from Bahamut. Biatch. The next fight that I died on was the very next boss in the game: Lady Yunalesca. That fight is what I like to call a "know the pattern or die" boss fight. Because really, how are you supposed to know something like Mega Death is coming? There I was, trying my best to keep myself healed using my meager supply of 16 Holy Waters, and then. . . . Mega Death! Two of your three characters are now dead, and guess what? You have all of three Holy Waters left, because you used the rest trying to rid yourself of the zombie status during the second stage of the fight. Oh, and by the way, the third form of Yunalesca has 60,000 HP. Have fun dying. So yeah, that's basically how it went on my first try. On my second attempt, however, I totally and completely trashed Yunalesca, because I knew the pattern and knew what was coming. Suddenly, now that I knew to use the zombie status to my advantage, the difficulty level of the fight dropped from "near impossible" to "plan carefully and you'll have no problem." And actually, it was kind of funny; on my second try, I only ended up using two or three Holy Waters throughout the whole fight. The best strategy for the third stage of the fight, I found, is to try and keep each of your three characters -- I was using Auron, Tidus, and Wakka -- all at different levels of HP. One character should have near full HP, another should have about 1,000 HP less than the person with near full, and the last one should be near death. It sounds really odd, but it worked amazingly well. What I'd do, is just sit there and pummel Yunalesca with attacks from all three characters. And since all of her attacks besides the counter-attacks hit all three characters, their HP levels would drop by about the same amount, maintaining the balance. And when one character would finally die, I'd use a Phoenix Down and an X-Potion on them to bring them back up to full HP, thereby replacing one of the other characters as the "full HP" character. And since the others were taking damage during that time, the one that was previously near full HP would be in the middle, and the one that was in the middle before would then be near death. What makes this strategy work so well, though, is that you'd only ever have, at the most, one person that wouldn't have zombie status. So, then, Mega Death would only take out one character max, in which case you could just use a Phoenix Down on them and then heal them up to fill whatever position in the "HP cascade" was needed, and you'd resume attacking. So basically, your characters would be in a constant cycle of death and healing, but since you'd be keeping them all at different levels of HP, only one would die at a time, and that would lead right into the next step of the cycle when they're healed. Pretty nifty strategy, eh? Sure made the fight easy for me, at any rate.

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Thursday, June 10, 2004

What the Flux?

	I really hope Seymour is going to stay dead this time. He's just getting annoying at this point. I mean, the first fight with him was interesting, and the battle itself was fairly difficult. . . . But then the second time, they made him out to be a lot harder than he was. Really, it was like, "everyone runs away in fear, but then they decide to come back and totally kick his butt instead." Then at the third fight, I'm thinking, "Dude, I've heard all this before. Shut up and die already." And again, I totally kicked his ass. The only thing that was a threat in that fight was his Total Annihilation attack, which killed one character and brought the other two down onder 1,000 HP, but I recovered from that with one life spell and a couple Al Bhed Potions, so it wasn't that big a deal. And I even made him cast Flare on himself by using Dispel to take down his Reflect spell; it was great. For once, I actually agree with Tidus: "And stay up there!"

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