The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Dracos]

Beat Rygar this weekend.

Started god of war 2.

Oddly, not as bad as god of war 1.  I'd even say good things about it, had not the setup confused me once yesterday and I ended my game on a 'the game has locked up.  And I was just saying nice things about it too!'

[Dexie Oblivion]

Still playing FFT: War of the Lions. Don't know how much more I'm going to play though. The lag and slowdown is EXTREMELY annoying, as in, even the Throw Stone and Choco Beak abilities have slowdown associated with them. I'm tempted to skip the Summoner class completely because of the problem. :/

Oh well. It really sucks, because it's really a fantastic port/remake. The new cutscenes are beautiful, the new translation is mostly awesome, and a lot of the little touches are pretty neat. It's just utterly killed by the freaking slowdown/lag. x.x;;

[Jon]

I've never played FFT before the PSP port, but I'm not noticing any slowdown in battle. Stone seems speedy enough to me.

[Dexie Oblivion]

It's pretty damn noticable if you've played the original, especially with spells and abilities with multple targets.

[Dracos]

Beat God of War 2.  Surprisingly not bad..  Giving it another run on a higher difficulty.  Much better than GoW 1 was.

[Merc]

Finally finished Phantom Hourglass. The game isn't long, mind you, but I spread it into long segments, where I only did one 'mission' at a time, usually. The controls are for the most part, pretty solid for a stylus only game.

I did find that sometimes Link would not slash when I wanted him to, but generally, not a problem. Link's fairly fast on his feet.

Rolling, however, is a chore, as were some spots where you wanted to jot down your notes or needed to draw something, and the system has trouble getting it. For example, when fighting the final boss, there are parts where you're supposed to draw an 'hourglass' shape (a spoiler of a non-spoiler variety in my opinion, since you get told to do this as soon as you get the power, so nyah to those bothered by spoiler).

I could not get the damn thing to work. I actually looked in the internet and my answer was "spam draw figure 8 over and over until it works, and hopes it works at the time you need to draw it". Obviously, this is what I had to do. Died once, though second time fighting Bellum I actually managed to get the spam trick to work at the moments I wanted instead of just a little too late. Still cutting it too close for comfort.

On the other hand? Stylus is wonderful for use of every other tool in your arsenal. I mean it. It really was nice to use the stylus, and in a different manner than using the wii remote. It's pretty cool to actually sketch out the pattern you want your weapons to move.

General movement was also pretty good, though Link isn't good at figuring out "Hey, he wants me to go to that ledge! I shall go straight there despite the huge gap between that ledge and where I'm aaaaaaaat *falls*" as opposed to "Hey, he wants to go to that ledge. I shall run a little more carefully and get to that walk spot and then the ledge."

You just have to be really careful with those thin pathways, but otherwise, pretty good movement control.

The game is pretty simplistic generally, and its ditched a lot of Zelda game-norms, such as collecting heart pieces. You do collect stuff, but rather it's power ups for your fairies. In general, when you get a heart, you just get a full heart for killing a boss, with a few rare full heart containers here and there. The only collecting you do is power pieces for the fairies (10 pieces for 1st level up, then 20 more pieces for 2nd level up), some random salvage from the ocean floor (usually ship pieces, coins, or on rare occassion, some sand of time, which is rather useful in one temple that you'll be visiting a -lot- during the game).

Some piece of advice on one of the rare heart containers: The guy with the sales ship, forget his name, but sometimes he wears a helmet. It's pretty obvious when he's doing that. This only happens rarely, but he'll have a heart container for sale for you when he's wearing it. Hopefully you have the money for it, but if not, be aware that the helmet version makes pretty rare appearances.

It's nice that travel between islands has been shortened, and though enemies pop up to bug you along the way, generally they're not much to worry about unless they're a mini-boss of some sort, or they're in the fog area (which is the most horrible place in the goddamn game).

In general, your time will be spent as such: 40% in the Temple of the Ocean King, 20% ocean travel, 40% all other temples. If you find the frog king (which you can do as soon as you first get past the fog area for the first time, which is -really- early in the game), you can start finding the teleport spots, and travel time is more split as 45% TOK, 10% ocean, 45% all other temples.

I highly recommend exploring a lot in the TOK area, especially on each visit where you get a new weapon. Finding those shortcuts can be invaluable since you're going to be doing a lot of stages over and over and over again. Remember to jot down where the gold pots are, even if you can't get to them early on. And how you got through a room. You'll want to search for those shortcuts, but sometimes they take too much time to find and you just have to move on.

Anyhow, worth buying? Well, it's a short game, and the only replay is trying to find all the ship parts, fairy boosts, and trying to shorten your time run through the temple of the ocean king. And that's not gonna last long. That said, unless you're certain you're gonna finish it in the rental time, might as well buy it. It's an easy enough game to take breaks on and get right back in whenever you want, since you can jot down notes about what you were doing, and the controls are so easy to get right back into.

[Dexie Oblivion]

Interesting note, I thought: The first Zelda game didn't have heart pieces either, it just had full hearts.

There's a lot of stuff from the original game in PH, I've noticed. The Pols Voice, for one. It's the rabbit enemy you stun by yelling into the microphone. The Japanese Famicon had a mic on it's controller, and you beat it by yelling, but since the US NES didn't, they just let you stun it with the boomerang.

There's a lot of other little things, too, but those two really jumped out at me.

[Merc]

Heh, is that where the cute bunny thing is from? Never actually played the first Zelda more than a few minutes.

I kinda wish they had more mic stuff in this game though. They used it early on in various of the puzzles, but forgot about it as you started to get more and more items, in PH.

[Dexie Oblivion]

First Zelda reeeally sucks by today's standards. Full of showstoppers and just bad designs.

I'm glad they didn't overdo the mic stuff, personally. Took me forever to get the salvage arm down to a reasonable price. X_X;

[Merc]

...

I make a screaming face at you for your comment on the salvage arm. :-O

[Dexie Oblivion]

*stuffs a sock in your mouth :D*

[Jason_Miao]

Another promising Angband character is dead.  Some problem with my auto-aim magic missile macro makes it occasionally cause my character to take a step instead of shooting.  Which means I walked right into a death mold.


Crunching through the adv portal maps whenever I get a half hour free (And I got a slice of cake to go with dinner tonight.  Just because).

[Dracos]

Ar Tonelico is continuing to overall impress.  I am having a very good time with it.

That it turned into a porn shooting last session has nothing to do with this (e.g. what the heck?)

[Taishyr]

Replaying Arcana (...why.) and Legend of Mana (trying out a custom-setup map, which seems to have some really cool added effects, if the hype is to be believed). Polter Box pet, Flail user. Yes, I'm insane. Probably going to re-run Persona 2 as well soon, before playing through Red and Riki in SaGa Frontier.

[Dexie Oblivion]

Digimon World: Dusk on DS.

Oddly, not as terrible as I thought it'd be.