So I figured I'd make another blog entry on the continued quest to beat the living crap out of Disgaea 3. But the good news is that it looks like we'll actually be able to get more than just my wife and I together for UFC 120. I think it's Brock's fault, as people either want to see him get his ass kicked or just bullrush and crush opponents, but there aren't many MMA fans who don't have an opinion of the UFC Heavyweight Champion.. I think that Velasquez is going to cause a lot of problems for Brock, but I still see Lesnar keeping the belt at the end of the night. Speaking of MMA, WEC is just awesome. Seriously, if you have Versus and you like the UFC but don't follow any other organizations, check out Zuffa's other league with their 135 and 145 pound fighters. Jose Aldo is one of the top 3 P4P fighters in the world right now (with Silva and GSP) and his destruction of Gamburyan last night was just mind boggling. I felt bad that Jung got headkicked to hell, but with him and Garcia both losing, maybe it sets up a re-match between the human windmill and the Korean Zombie. I think the Zombie won the last fight against Garcia, and I'd like to see him get another shot with a fighter who knows nothing about defense, which seems to play into Jung's gameplan which is to hit his opponent harder than he gets hit. Although Roop's headkick was going to turn anyone short of Clay Guida's lights out. And Cerrone kicked Varner's ass all over the cage last night. He better though considering his use of a homosexual slur to describe his opponent and then clarifying that he didn't think Varner liked men, it's just that he had a "bitch gene" in his DNA. *sigh* Keep it classy I guess.
Ok, on to games, I wanted to get some serious Disgaea 3 time in but ended up getting caught in the trap of Super Stardust HD again. I had a really good game going too until Malachi came up and hugged me and screamed, "Dad, you're doing great!" right before I died. Oh well, I'll still take the hug.
Last I left in D3, I picked up a legendary Sunrise Sword and started the grind session to bring it's stats up. I hit level 20 (with a +5 from the Augur) and saved the game, then decided to test the sword out before giving the controller back over to Chi. Mao went from doing about 40-50K to 120-140K on a Blade Rush as I poked around in the Land of Carnage again, and then found in a blue treasure chest a Rare Yoshituna! This will more than likely be the third to last weapon Mao will ever have besides a Legendary Yoshituna and the Level 40 sword so it was time to hold the Level 20 Sunrise Sword on Mao and start crashing Item World again. Chi was happy to get some PSP time as I started pushing down into the Yoshituna and got another +5 from the Augur on the Yoshituna bringing it up to level 25 by the end of the night. At this point the Yoshituna would bring Mao's attack into the 55K range which is a 18K increase from what it's at now, but I think I'm going to give one more push into the Item World before trying to grind the Sunrise Sword up more to help with the final push to max levels with the Yoshituna. Besides, I have sword wielders who can take the Sunrise Sword after it's done as well.
I killed the last of the Diez Gentlemen after finding that Mao could drop 100K of damage and a blade rush all but killed her and her stupid cat. (I HATE cats in this game, their Chasing Fishy attacks do severe damage.) I also killed Asagi which added the main character of Makai Wars (what... the game never came out?) into my party and left me with a NASTY battle with Marona from Phantom Brave next. The ghosts are dealing way too much output right now and it's going to take a bit of time to really taken on that level and push through to Alex, Etna, and Laharl. And yes, Mao can go to hell as soon as Laharl is in my party if he's anything like his Disgaea 1 counterpart. Pun not intended. Of course, I just took one last shot and decided to have Mao use his Vasa Aergun and Blade Rushes to killed as many ghosts as possible then have someone throw him back to the base so he could continue to attack. I killed the ghosts on the bottom floor and had Marona and the ghosts on the other side come down and had my Red Mage roast them next, then set off a Level 9 Blast Finger for 180K damage on Marona which killed her. Slowly up the stairs to kill the last phantoms and I have another high level character in my grasp. As a matter of fact, Marona now becomes the highest level character in my party, but she's going to need some new gear and fast.
Oh well, good enother for tonight, maybe tomorrow I'll pass the next Extra Map and take a look at what I'm assuming by the description is either Mid-Boss or Dark Hero Alex. (I'm guessing not Mid-Boss since he's able to be bought but...)
Not that I'm actually THERE yet mind you, but my god, the X Dimension missions are giving me heartburn. I thought I read somewhere that you needed to clear 24 levels in the X Dimension in order to open it, and now I'm reading 25, which makes me pretty damn sad. I have 26 tickets right now and two of them are way over my character's heads, so it's going to be another long Item World Grind up to the 50s to try to hunt down Pirates that I haven't faced off with yet or hopefully hit the ticket store in the 50-99 level area (I've cleared out the tickets in the 1-50 area) to get some more options on unlocking the Land of Carnage and getting past Rank 34 weapons/armor. I'm a bit loathe to really do a lot of Item World Grinding with the Rank 34 stuff but I'll probably have to boost some of those items up a bit in order to power up enough to finish the only level which looks remotely possible. Waking Nightmare looks flat out impossible at this point with the characters I have, and the other one (not sure the name, I keep thinking Freezing Soul but I cleared that) where you deal 120K damage to the Enemy Boost x3 guy has left me about 20K short. Damn that game and my insistance on doing the power leveling thing through it.
Took some time out tonight to head down to Green Street Social Club with my wife to watch UFC 119. It sucked that they "didn't have Spike" and therefore, no prelims which meant no watching some nice submissions which came from the Dalloway fight and two undercard fights that got shown. I figured that there'd be time somewhere where anything outside of the 5 PPV fights would be shown. Damn, was I ever wrong on that one. The Guillard/Stephens fight was kind of a mess. I kept waiting for Melvin to follow in on one of Stephens' looping leg kicks which constantly kept spinning him around, but it never happened. Later in the fight one of those kicks landed finally, unfortunately right between Guillard's legs. This of course means we had to see him get kicked in the junk about 3 times in super slow motion (please... for the love of God... STOP THAT), and the bounce looked like it was out of Guillard's step at that point. He had still done enough to get the win, but man, it looked less like a fight and more like a clinic in evasion.
Someone just randomly came up and talked to me and my wife before the Sherk-Dunham fight and he asked me who I thought would win. I said that I felt about this fight the same way I did about Lytle-Serra and Cro-Cop-Mir. I wanted Dunham, Serra, and Cro Cop to win those fights, but my heart told me that they would all lose. I felt like my first prediction of those three was going to come true when during some ground and pound, Sherk opened up a cut over Dunham's eye with an elbow. It was bleeding pretty badly and the doctors checked it with 10 seconds left in the first round and let it continue. Dunham survived the round and when they went to his corner, the cut's full damage could be seen. The cut was DEEP and WIDE and I figured that this fight was going to be over in the next minute and Sherk would get the win that I didn't want him to have. Dunham looked pretty bad in the opening of the second round, but then he just snapped into focus and started blistering Sherk with some good stand up. The third round saw Dunham just take it straight at him and by the end fo the fight Sherk would barely hold himself up. He was eating combinations, kicks, and some NASTY knees which had him reeling. I figured that Dunham just pulled off one of the best comebacks I've seen in a long time. A judge agreed with me too, but two didn't and Sherk got the split decision. I agree with Dana White, it's complete bullshit, but also another lesson on why you finish fights.
The Serra-Lytle fight was pretty disappointing. By the third round my wife, (who LOVES Serra not only for the coaching job he did during the season of the Ultimate Fighter when he was a FIGHTER, but for knocking GSP silly when he got the title fight with him the first time) was shaking her head at the way the fight was going. "Take him down already!" Lytle had vastly better standup, was fighting in front of his home crowd, and with Serra not testing him on the ground where he beat Lytle the first time, the home crowd went home happy with a clear 30-27 across decision for "Lights Out". If Serra was coaching himself, he would have been screaming until his face turned blue to take that guy to the ground, but unfortunately he's a stubborn SOB and wanted to hang in the pocket and throw hands even though that wasn't the best plan of action for this fight. Rubber match outside of Indy maybe?
Bader and Nogueria was a strange fight to watch. An inadvertant eye poke in the second round seemed to really slow "Darth Bader" down a few steps and I thought that Nogueria came back to at least make the fight very interesting, and possibly take it. I was stunned that it was 30-27 across for Bader. I thought that he won, but 30-27 seemed a bit overboard, as I could swear that judges could have given at least one and possibly two rounds to Little Nog. Good fight for Bader though and showed that he's definately ready to step up in competition. Unfortunately he probably gets my favorite MMA fighter going right now next in Jon "Bones" Jones, and as much as I like Bader and think he's got the potential to be a top 5 Light Heavyweight in a few years, I think that Jones is a potential #1 P4P guy if he keeps developing the way he is. If he keeps his head straight, keeps working, and keeps learning, I think within five years he'll take that baton from Anderson Silva as the best fighter in the world. The guy's just that sick.
The main event was next, and Cro Cop and Mir put on an awful display of circling and clinching against the cage. Mir could put him against the cage, but couldn't get Cro Cop to the ground to finish him, and Cro Cop after another low blow on this night seemed tenative to do anything during the fight. I don't know how much the eye injury hurt his training, but he just didn't look like he was willing to engage with Mir and Mir wasn't able to do much except lean on him against the cage until the last minute of the third round where he hit a wicked knee on the button and followed it up with two strikes on a KTFO'd Cro Cop before Herb Dean could jump between them and stop the damage from becoming permanent. I don't blame Dean for being a bit late in the stoppage, he was probably put to sleep like everyone else was during the first 14 minutes of the fight.
Of course with the four fights going to time and the fifth one going 14m, that meant no recap of the prelims. Sad stuff since I wanted to see what the heck Mittrione did to earn a Fight of the Night bonus and if that fight really stood up to the Dunham/Sherk fight which also received that honor and deservedly so. I'll definately have to head back there again, hopefully with a bit more planning and get some friends together to go out, drinks some beers, be social, and watch some fights next month.
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I can sum up my thoughts with a few days away from the deluge of news from TGS in one word. Wonder. But I guess the explanation could take a few more so here they are:
1) I still wonder what the hell Catherine is really all about. Two trailers, lots of lurid imagery, but no real details on what the hell is going on with this one. I'm still completely intrigued and I now know against my better judgment, I'll digest every piece of news about this game until something solid shows up. Damn my own curiousity.
2) I wonder if the DM... sorry, DmC 5 character model change is a tempest in a teapot, or something that's going to have REAL backlash. I'm sure the people at Platinum Games are the most confused right now, they should be bouncing off the walls to know that they now hold the definition of the crazy action shooter in Bayonetta, but having created Devil May Cry, it has to be bittersweet to hear the word "Twilight" being assigned to the new makeover.
3) I wonder if all of this Final Fantasy stuff was piling up while the team behind XIII finally got off their asses and put the game out. Between information on XIV, 012, Agito, and Versus, it seems like there was a lot of constipation in the franchise, and I wonder if it might be too late to reclaim what once was SquareEnix' throne as the premier RPG makers with the premier RPG franchise. Everyone from Projekt CD, Bioware, Atlus, and every other maker of RPGs thanks them for their incompetance the last five years.
4) I wonder if Nippon Ichi can hang on long enough to release Disgaea 4 in the United States. Those guys had a HORRID 2009 and seemed to expand far faster than they could handle. There's a problem with making games that take nearly 200 hours to really dig into, and it's that I don't have 200 hours EVERY MONTH to dig into one of those games.
5) I wonder how having people with pedigrees from Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and No More Heroes working on a game CAN'T be full of greatness. I fear that I might find out, and I hope desperately that I'm wrong. I hope that Shadows of the Damned is awesome.
6) I wonder how XBox 360 owners are going to react to Project Dark (Dark Souls?) if it does get the rumored US release on that platform. I'd love for From Software's Demon's Souls "successor" to get some love from everyone, but I just don't know if expanding it's platforms will expand it's audience.
7) Speaking of From Software, I wonder how they go about making a third game in a series which is infamous for having one of the most complicated controllers ever devised and having it work on Kinect. But a new Steel Batallion game is coming that way and it looks like a crazy trainwreck waiting to happen. Godspeed to the programmers of that monstrosity, they need all the help and luck they can get.
8) I wonder how much money it cost Microsoft to have Japanese devs go as crazy as they have with Kinect. From the Steel Batallion sequel, to Rise of Nightmares, to Project Draco, it looks like the Japanese are making the "core" games for that system.
9) I wonder if anyone else will look as cool playing Child of Eden as Mizuguchi does. I mean, I am in disbelief every time I watch video of that game being played that it would play out that way in anyone's home.
10) And last, I wonder if Ni No Kuni is about five or six years too late. I'd be curious to think of what would happen if it was in people's minds closer to the time that Spiried Away won an Academy Award, but we're nearly a decade away from the films initial release and over seven years from it winning an Academy Award. Does anyone really care about Ghibli anymore?
Bonus Thought: I wonder if The Last Guardian joins Ico and Shadow of the Colossus in the short list of games brought up when the "Games as Art" debate flares. Either way, cat-bird-dog-dragon thing and my PS3 need to get acquainted when it comes out.
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So I figured tonight I'd get back to some Disgaea grinding and went on a trophy hunt in Item World. I wasn't going after levels (although Mao did jump from 316 to 332 in the grind) but instead was hunting pirates and illegal tickets to try and open up the Land of Carnage. The end result, +8 tickets thanks to finding a ticket vendor in the 51-100 level range and five more trophies so it looks like I've actually played the game. (32% trophies isn't great, but it's a sight better than being in the low 20s after putting as much time in as I have already) Grabbed an easy one to start by capturing an enemy, then had enough items to jump 2 blocks which let me get the "Treasure Raider" trophy for clearing all treasure boxes out of a treasure room. I found two new pirates, the Cowboy Pirates and the Kit Cat pirates (who I should have checked their levels before they started fusing and getting nearly out of hand) and finally, an Item Warrior trophy for going from 1 to 100 without exiting the item world. I'm feeling a tad burnt out on Disgaea right now, but I'm hoping a few days off to create a new strategy as to how to proceed will recharge the batteries. I'm running low on Hell again after dropping nearly a billion in tickets so it'll probably be time to restart grinding out the rank 34 items to power my guys up for a possible run at the Milliondamagaire tropies.
It's late, have work tomorrow, and need sleep badly. More Beck (volume 4 arrives tomorrow) is probably in the cards for tomorrow night and maybe another run at the 10X multiplier in Super Stardust HD since I keep hitting 9x and doing something stupid to break the chain.
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So the Disgaea leveling train got derailed thanks to Super Stardust HD. I've had the demo now for like 6 months and Malachi still plays it on at least a weekly basis, so I decided to buy the unlock code and just get the game. I've cleared the game twice on easy mode now, but I'm still stuck trying to get the 10x multiplier. I've hit 9x twice, and then I mistake a purple bullet for a shield and BOOM, start over. I've still picked up a nice amount of trophies, and I'm still getting accustomed to the patterns of the enemies that weren't in the demo, most of them I guess, but it does look like one of those games you still replay to see if you can do it better. I've popped 87M as a high score, good enough for the top 1000 monthly and near the top 10000 all time, just need to figure the last parts of it off to see how far it goes if you don't die and eliminate your multiplier.
Still ended up having Mao at level 313 at the end of the weekend though. I'm going to need to figure out when it's best to stop leveling and start trying to power through lesser items to get some pirates coming out so I can build up some Illegal Tickets and unlock the Land of Carnage so I can continue progressing my gear. But I'm not trying to be a perfectionist with the game yet. I just want some gold R34 items and start maxing them out.
Time for sleep, probably some P3P after work tomorrow and then probably watch Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad vol 3 which should arrive via Netflix tomorrow.
So right now I've taken my gaming in two different directions. After trying and failing to get into Fallout 3, I ended up going to something that has an even more ridiculous time commitment necessary. Disgaea 3. I'm offseting the complete insanity of this game with some downloadable bite size games, Hitogata Happa, Gundemonium Recollection, GundeadliGne, and Super Stardust HD are giving me the 15m twitchy gameplay sessions, while Disgaea is for when I have the time to settle in for the long haul.
I'm figuring today is a good day to make demons die, and here's where I'm at right now: Item World Max: Level 73 items. (Madame Butterfly, and Accelerators seem to be the items I'm going for right now) X Dimension levels cleared: 1 (definately underleveled for this stuff right now) Main Story complete Main Character: Level 192
I'm hoping to push forward up to the 250-300 level by the end of the day, but we'll see if I get distracted with something else or if another character (like my Mages have been) pulls forward a ton.
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So I get paid tomorrow and now have to try to figure out if I'm going to take $50 and pick up a yearly membership. I get it, monatizing a podcast is nearly impossible and there haven't been many ads supporting the site (and those which have for the most part have looked the part), and it's a large operation. I've had the same issue of figuring out if I want to drop $50 on Playstation Plus, and haven't done so yet, and wonder which if any I would spend the $50 on first. But thinking about it, Playstation Plus hasn't been so impressive since they offered Wipeout HD and they haven't provided anything that would make me drop the money on that since the first month. Which means that if I have an expendable $50 to throw around, it might go Whiskey's way.
I'm leaning yes for two reasons:
1) The Bombcast has been in my rotation at the top ever since it was called "Arrow Pointing Down". It has never failed to produce the goods, and has been the most consistantly entertaining and humorous podcast since I started listening to it. (And I listen to about 25-30hrs of podcasts a week while I'm at work, and the Bombcast provides two hours I absolutely look forward to.) 2) If during the Persona 4 Endurance Run I had the ability to download those episodes in .mp4 H.264 format and drop it directly on my PSP, I would have jumped at that in a heartbeat. No question, they'd have my money and would have had it instantly for the pure convienence of the whole thing. Snide talked about how it was being converted retroactively and that means since I still haven't watched the Deadly Premonition Endurance Runs, revisiting them might be in the future.
Money's VERY tight, but I want to support hte people who have provided that kind of entertainment through good and bad times. I'll still have to sleep on it, but I won't be surprised if eventually a little bomb logo shows up under my username shortly.
After beaitng Demon's Souls (and by beating I mean getting a Platinum trophy in the game), I decided to pull Fallout 3 off the wall of shame and start trying to go through it. And I'll be damned if I can't get into it. It's not like I haven't given the game a fair shake, I've put in over five hours at this point and it's just not grabbing me. This weekend I spent some time doing other things and trying to figure out why that is, and finally I've come to the conclusion.
1) Too much game after completing something like Demon's Souls: God, the last thing I think I want right now after spending 190 hours playing Demon's Souls is another 100+ hour game. It's just too damn much right now for me to jump into. 2) The environment isn't as spectacular as Rapture: One of the last games I played before starting back in on Demon's Souls was Bioshock (another wall of shame game that I completed). I loved the environment of Rapture and I was looking forward to continuing to explore that place. The Wasteland is great, but it's not Rapture, and it's not compelling me to explore it like I did Rapture. If I played Fallout 3 before Bioshock, the Wasteland would probably fascinate me, but right now not so much. 3) The Wasteland DOES NOT scare or intimidate me: I could see the Wasteland being a pretty tense place, except I'm coming straight from Boletaria in Demon's Souls, so it does nothing to me. Raider coming in on me? I'll drop into VATS, put a few bullets in it's head, and then pick off the rest. If I played Fallout 3 before Demon's Souls, this wouldn't be a problem, but it's doing something at a lesser level. 4) My 4 year old knows what's best apparently: So I went to the arcade with my son last weekend and the first thing he wanted to play was Raiden followed by Dimahoo. Chi wanted some shooty bangs at the arcade and even though he's not good at it (I don't expect any 4 year old to be a master of Japanese bullet hell shooters to be fair) even when he's dead he's intrigued by the patterns of death spreading across the screen in only a way that an observer can be since the player's a bit too busy trying to avoid all that crap.
So I listened to the 4 year old and downloaded Gundemonium Collection on the PS3. And THAT is what I was looking for. Short burst gameplay flexing a different set of skills than what I had been playing before was flexing and with Fallout 3 was continuing to try to flex. I think I'll spend some more time with GundeadliGne, Gundemonium Recollection, and Hitogata Happa and blow stuff up. Hitogata Happa already has given me my favorite trophy outside of Demon's Souls on my PS3 trophies list ("No, YOUR time is up!" for killing a boss when time had expired) and was the first time the name of a trophy made me laugh out loud. If you're looking for some doujin bullet hell fun, and don't want to get the whole collection, I recommend Hitogata Happa over the other two since it has a little Every Extend Extra thing going for it too which is an interesting risk-reward mechanism that makes the game stand out from the other more standard shooters. Maybe I'll update the wiki here or write a review of the games when I spent a bit more time with them, and maybe then my palette will be cleansed enough to go back to the Wasteland and hopefully enjoy it as much as every one else has seemed to.
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Too much time playing games, not enough time writing about it. But Malachi's playing some LBP on the PS3 so a truncated Days 2 and 3 of the Playcation.
Playcation Day 2: This was ALL about Disgaea 3. I started playing it shortly after waking up, and eight hours later I was still grinding levels, playing around with Reverse Pirating, and trying to relearn how it was that I got my Disgaea 1 characters into the 5000-6000 level range. Then I remembered on accident as I jumped into an Item World of a piece of equipment I just bought and didn't equip. A Geo Panel Termination later, and my characters were getting tens of thousands of XP instead of hundreds, and hundreds of thousands of Hell was dropping into the coffers. I spent most of the time powering up lesser items to play with the reverse pirating but in general I had the same reaction to Disgaea that I had with P3P. There wasn't the tension and stress that Demon's Souls brings, and playing DS actually made the future of playing P3P and Disgaea better in comparison. I did play around with my thief in Demon's Souls again at the end of the night, killed another boss, made another Magic Spell and finally got some sleep.
Playcation Day 3: It was off to an errand and my PSP with P3P was handy and I needed it. I had to wait in a lobby for two hours waiting for something, and didn't notice it much at all. After finishing it up, it was nap time as Malachi was getting in some LBP and with three other people running around the screen with him, I was loathe to boot him from the game. I always worry when people play LBP "with me" since I'm never the one playing, and people must wonder how the hell I have Demon's Souls trophies but have such a difficult time with LBP without realizing it's actually a 4 year old at the helm. After nap time, I woke to find my daughter was out with Grandma, my wife was finishing packing up for this weekend's trip, and I took Malachi to the Nicklecade. I love watching Malachi's reaction to the place, since his eyes light up with wonder much like I suppose mine did when I was in the 8-12 year old range and going to the Playoff Arcade back in Worcester, MA. Best moment of the whole time spent there was watching Malachi, after much begging, get on the Dance Dance Revolution machine and flail around like a madman before realizing that the game was over. It only took about 30 seconds but I swear it knocked an hour off of his awake time. I went on the machine with him, and bad foot and all slogged my way through three songs so he could continue flailing about when I realized something important between the second and third song. He was actually catching that he was getting an E rank while I was getting As and Bs. He seemed a bit dejected about the whole thing but when the music started up again, it was lost on him as he went back to happily stomping and dancing away as the lights washed over him. But I need to keep in mind, that even at four years old, he's starting to keep score.
Probably the best thing about the way this broke down was I had to work on Monday and Friday, which meant that I'm not walking into a hornets nest on Monday. I found out that one of the largest clients I have let people in the office know that they were going to be coming in for a visit on Tuesday, or Playcation Day 1. When were they going to be there? The next two days which means I didn't have to deal with them at all. I found this out when I listened to my voice mail on Friday morning on the way to work that I missed them, and I couldn't have been happier. If they called me in, especially on Disgaea Day, I probably would have been in worse shape than I was going into the Playcation, so no sweat off my brow.
And one of my friends had a BBQ today to celebrate buying a new house. I'm proud as HELL of my man Tadao and how he's pulled himself together so damn tight. I met his SO for the first time which means that we absolutely need to spend more time together, and I got to meet his mom who now could put a face to the person who was her son's slave driver when he was one of my Magic the Gathering judges. To be fair, I never gave him more than he could handle, it's just that he could handle A LOT. And when Tadao was on, he was out of this world, when he was off... he made me white-knuckle it. Fortunately, he was rarely off without a reason, it's just being observant enough to figure out what that reason was. It was odd since the people I saw there from my MTG days were the people that I honestly missed when I walked away from it. But I'm glad I'm gone from it, running a game store nearly killed my love for gaming, and it's good to get back in touch with that and see that it's still there, I just need to work a bit harder at making time for it.
But the thing that made me laugh the most was when we were walking through his front room and I saw the Rock Band drum set in the corner and asked what he was playing. "Ohhhh... wait a minute, you've GOT to play this, it's insane!" Tadao walked over and pulled out a copy of Demon's Souls which made me laugh.
"You blocking the Playstation Network notifications that was showing me racking up trophies in that game over the last few months?" We'll have to figure out how to get into each other's game and create some havoc one of these days. If I can figure that out and we can arrange time, it'll be fun running through the Shrine of Storms with someone I know.
So it's nearly the middle of July and I'd been noticing two things. First, I'd been becoming completely irritable at work, and just reaching rapid burnout. Second, I had only taken a little over three days off this year, and none of those were for my own reasons. (Installation of cable at the new house, daughter's graduation, and a nasty illness which I couldn't quite fight all the way through.) I figured with the obscene heat in Utah, it was time to take a playcation and just get out of work and relax for a bit. So here's Day 1.
Demon's Souls: So I beat Demon's Souls, but I'm looking at trying to get the rest of the trophies on the game. I'd really like to figure out the whole world tendency thing, but I focused on the weapons first. The New Game+ is much harder than the first playthrough, and that was brutal enough. I finally killed Flamelurker, getting the Red Hot Demon's Soul to Ed, so now I can start forging forward more advanced weapons. I pulled my White Bow up to +3, forged the Regalia, and pushed my Scimitar up to +4. The problem is finding some Pure Moonstones to finish the upgrade path, pull the trophy, and take my weapon of choice up another level. I keep trying out other weapons, but keep falling back to the scimitar, as I like it's attack speed. The biggest problem has been figuring out how to kill the Crystal Lizards, which a change out of Gloom Armor and into Black Assassin's gear has helped out with a lot. The problem came in Shrine of Storms 2 (Adjudicator's Archstone) where I killed the duel wielding katana knight (after dancing around a pillar and playing peek-a-boo with him for a bit) and snuck up on one of the Crystal Lizards that drops the Pure Moonstone. I nailed it with a bow, missed the follow up shot, and gave chase, only to hit it OFF THE LEDGE and watch the potential for the item I needed going off into the sky. Blargh. Still leveled my thief to Soul Level 106, and I'm preparing to take on the Old Hero in order to open up more opportunities to pick up some Pure Moonstones.
Persona 3 Portable: So, about five hours into the game, it's the best version of P3 yet. As much as I miss the gorgeous cutscenes in the PS2 version, I love the point and click gameplay during the social times more than I miss the animation. The voice acting is still great, as is the combat since having Persona 4's combat system is making this a pretty awesome journey. Playing through as a female also gives some really odd interactions, as it's interesting to see your confidants turn into your suitors, and vice versa. I'm going to be interested in seeing how they do the Iori/Chidori storyline if my character is romantically linked to him, or if it's a possibility. (Junpei is my FAVORITE character in Persona 3 and 4, and dude needs some love.) Seriously, if you have a PSP and you watched the Endurance Run for Persona 4 but haven't played one of those games, this is a must get. It's super fast as well, as it took me about 12 hours to make the progress that I have in 5 as the streamlined social settings make for a great time saver.
Time to rest, and prepare for Day 2. Still not sure what I'm pulling off the shelf, but I think that either Bayonetta or Disgaea is calling to me.
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