Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Rupees and Gaming

	A rather large update has been put up on It's All About the Rupees. Those Zelda: A Link to the Past articles I'd been working on for about a month are finally complete and up on the site. I may also eventually get around to writing location, character, and enemy references, in addition to the item reference, though who knows when. Those would be more just straight game info and not so much for the purpose of telling you where things are and how to get them, though, so I don't see them as being as important as the item reference. In other news, I have to take a whiz. I think I'll do that now. ... Ah, sweet relief. (Don't you just love random crap like that? Well, okay, so you probably don't. But I do, so ha.) I spent Sunday night over at a friend's house and we stayed up till 4:00 AM playing GameCube games. First on the list was Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, and we finished up the last four areas of the game, so now I've played through the game completely a total of four times. Great fun, but now I need to play through again with a group of three or four people, heh. Next up was Soul Calibur II, which was brought over by a friend of my friend's little sister; we snagged it when they had to go to bed and got to play it. Now, neither of us had really had any decent experience with the game, but I came away from the game after about 40 versus matches with the feeling of, "Why is this game so popular?" Maybe it's just because I'm not much into fighting games, or maybe because we didn't know many special moves, but it just wasn't that fun. On some characters (especially Raphael), it seemed like all you had to do was button mash and you'd win just because your attacks are so much quicker that you can attack, and even if the attack is blocked, you can attack again before your opponent can. I think I only beat my friend once while he was playing on Raphael, and only by playing on Link (who I used a lot right at first to learn his attacks) and getting in a hit early, keeping him in a combo of sword slashes so that he just couldn't attack at all. But that was one win, while he won using Raphael probably about ten times. Another thing I was rather disappointed with was the movement. I mean, sure, moving towards and away from your opponent is fine, but circling around them seemed to be both rather slow (slower than forward/back movement) and pointless, as they just automatically turn to face you and can smack you with an attack before you can get around on their side and attack them. The only things I found it useful for was moving away from walls and edges, and occasionally being able to dodge around a slow attack or Link's projectiles. So overall, I'm not too impressed with the game so far. I'd definitely be willing spend some more time with it, but it hasn't made a good first impression on me. And as I told my brother just now when he said he was surprised that I hadn't bought the game already just because the GCN version has Link in it, I don't think I'd buy it unless I could find it really cheap somewhere for around $10. But like I've said, most fighting games don't really appeal to me, so eh. After getting bored with SCII, we decided to play SSBM for a while. I don't know if it was because another human was playing, or because I was in some sort of funk, or maybe just because I hadn't slept in about 36 hours at that point, but for some reason I wasn't playing that great. I was having a really hard time keeping up with my friend, who doesn't even own the game, even while playing on some of my best characters. It was really strange, though I think it was the sleep deprevation. It was as if nearly all sense of move comboing left me some time while I was sitting there for a few minutes in between playing SCII and SSBM. And finally, we played Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles the next morning. We're on year six now, after playing somewhere in between 16 and 17 hours I think. We seem to be near the end of the game, as we've done all but one of the dungeons that we can get to (the one on the other side of the ? element miasma stream, Vellenge Mountain or something like that). We don't know if that's the end dungeon or if there are more after it somewhere else that we haven't been before, but we do know that it kicked our butts. Some enemies in there were doing two full hearts of damage to us with their attacks and it was taking a dang lot of hits to kill each one. And at the point where we had to turn the game off and leave, something had happened to the chalice which made it so it was no longer protecting us from the miasma. Which meant we were constantly taking damage (meaning me having to constantly cast Cure), and we had no idea how to get it back to normal. And that was basically it. Multiplayer gaming has become a real treat for me, since I barely ever have anyone else around to play together with anymore, so it's always a lot of fun when I can get together with friends for gaming.

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