takeshikitano3

Well if none of the video ones will work I'll stop trying haha.

Same problem that I've seen in other posts as well, have watched both Quick Looks all the way through a few times and the quest hasn't registered. Last one I need on the set too...

Howdy, welcome

Oh I loved the movie. I'm a fan of Tarantino, and of westerns, and the two mixed quite well for me. He is horrible as an actor and I'm not a fan of his cameos, but at least his cameo ends rather explosively.

Defnitely getting Persona 4 soon. Not sure about the card game, but I got that patch for Golden Abyss when I started playing that starts adding in upgrades to cards based on every single treasure I found. And there's a lot of them.

I would totally have added a pic or two to break up that post but this site or this computer just would not let that work for me. Super happy that I was pasting this from another blog of mine and not typing it up here first!

I have a thing for portable gaming systems and knew I wanted a Vita. Having Uncharted: Golden Abyss at launch and eventually more Sony-friendly franchises and PS1 downloads was plenty for me, but not at full price. I was going to get that Assassin's Creed bundle on Black Friday at Gamestop but then heard about Amazon's crazy Vita bundle, which I got in on. The price alone at $180 was less than I was planning to pay, but then they threw in Playstation All-Stars for free and 3 months of Playstation Plus, which I used to get a free copy of Uncharted immediately.

The Vita as a system is pretty cool. I don't need the various touch controls, just like I don't need the 3D in the 3DS, but they can be fun to mess around with. Love having 2 analog sticks on a portable system, the screen looks great, and once you turn it on it's all rather friendly, like a Nintendo system. PS3 and PSP had this very simple cross media bar thing going on, but the 3DS and Wii (from what I've seen from friends) just seem more alive and welcoming between the music and what you can actually play around with. You can even earn trophies on the Vita's system tutorial, though I'll never get them all: this includes a few timed slide puzzles, and I've always been horrible at those.

It's possible that Near is the biggest feature of the Vita, but I haven't quite figured the whole thing out. I guess it can show me what games are getting played the most near me based on my wifi connection, and there are game goods to be acquired but I haven't gotten anything of note. Uncharted has this Black Market feature that is supposed to let you trade some of the rare collectibles enemies drop with other players through Near, but I haven't received anything yet, nor do I really know how to offer anything up.

I determined recently that Uncharted is my new favorite game series, with a deciding factor being how soon I play new entries. I have games on my shelves from Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Metal Gear that I really want to play but haven't been driven to yet. But then within days of acquiring a Vita I was playing Golden Abyss, as excitedly as I dug into Uncharted 2 and 3 within days of their release. Not that Golden Abyss is as good. I would rank the games in a rather obvious and typical order, saying 2 is the best, then 3, then the original and then Golden Abyss, but it was still a solid 8.5/10 rating for me.

Clearly at system launch they wanted this to be a game you could interact with in as many ways as the Vita would allow. There is a lot of touching and tilting. Some of it is optional, most of it isn't. Swiping a finger across the screen was easy so I never minded that. Balancing on logs was hard for me. The worst example was a document you had to hold your Vita up to light to read. A status bar slowly fills up to 100% but it took me several minutes. You need a really strong light, and it took me a while to realize the ones above my bathroom mirror would work best. I will never be able to play that game (or at least get through that part) on a train or a plane, which is annoying.

It still has everything I love about these games. Combat is great, with grenade usage being different but cool. There are fewer characters but I liked them. Voicework and motion capture was up to par with the other games. The legend being explored wasn't anything to write home about and was confusing at times, but it worked. There's no online multiplayer but that wasn't a big deal for me. Beautiful environments too. And, if you were really into treasure hunting on the other games, there are as many treasures in Golden Abyss as the first three games combined.

I beat the game for the first time last night, and will start it up again soon. Played on Easy since I was expecting it to be hard, which it was in places. But also because with the additional treasures randomly dropped by enemies, and the weapon trophies, additional playthroughs would be needed. Got every environmental treasure at least, and have a trophy percentage of 51%.

Oh hey, I should mention another game. I'm a huge fan of The Walking Dead on AMC and wasn't dealing well with knowing it wouldn't be on Sunday nights anymore for a couple months. After hearing so many great things about the Telltale game, I went ahead and bought it, thinking I could play an episode each Sunday night to help ease my wait. Solid start with Episode 1, looking forward to playing more this weekend.

Happy gaming, JP

I'm curious too, not a premium subscriber either. Though I'm also just a greedy stat whore.

460 hours and counting, love the game, can't seem to stop. There is a rather involved and deep town-building element. If you customize your town in certain ways you gain the ability to farm the rarest (and of course most useful) of materials. The most popular towns that people quest in online are the ones that have figured out the rare item business. With the amount of gear you can obtain and upgrade in the game, playing online has been fun and rewarding, especially if you get into a fun guild. There's a lot of quest variety and a lot of ways to customize your character, though you'll find plenty of people who tell you there's only a few ways you should be playing. I'm using a rather unorthodox agile spear/divine character.

You do go through a lot of the old areas again in the second game, but enemies are tougher, items are better, and there are a few new areas too that I rather enjoyed. It's highly recommended you complete the entire single player game and do as many bounties and errands as you can before going online, since basically everything's harder online. As far as evaluating the single player mode... the story is pretty basic with just a couple surprises, but I love the design of the world and the combat engine.

I'm having trouble focusing at the office since it's getting rather warm in here, so I thought I'd try typing up some sort of wrap-up blog for White Knight Chronicles II. I might play another hour, or another few, or once a week the rest of the year, or never again. But I've hit that point where I no longer feel the drive to push my character (via dozens of hours) to the elite levels of my most talented guildmates, which would bring me more addicting PSN trophies, yes, but they were always going to be the hardest to obtain that I never thought I'd get. I'm ok with the recent announcement that the U.S. won't be getting any of the dlc Japan did that we've all been waiting on, because there was still plenty for me to do and I was mainly having fun playing with guildmates. But as fun as it would be to still quest with them, I've sort of had my fill, ya know?

I'm just shy of 400 hours, which is by far the most time I've ever put into a game. It was the only game I touched from late December to late April. I suppose the answer many would give as to why this game could garner so much clock time is that it's an MMO-type game. Playing with different combinations of people on different quests can still feel fresh. And there are always hundreds of rare items to track down to help makes the hundreds of weapons and armor bits you could ever want to try out. I tried to combine such specific hunts with quests others needed, or quests I could use guild tokens on. When you use tokens at the start of a quest, you earn prestige points for your guild, which in the case of the Lolliepop Guild I spent all my months in, it helped keep us in the top 10, entitling us to additional items and shop discounts. It would still help the guild out if I popped in every few days and used up tokens, so I might do so for a while.

I was excited about this game for the art style, the music, and the enjoyable combat, which were all as good or improved upon from the first game, so there are no regrets. But I need to move on to some other games y'all!! I took a trip for work a couple weeks ago, and always like having portable games on me in such times, so I got back into (or rather restarted) Suikoden Tierkreis. I enjoyed it when it first came out but didn't finish because I got sidetracked by another game. But now I'm a solid 15-ish hours into another and determined to stick it through. On PS3, it looks like my next game is Game of Thrones. I've spotted some early reviews, and they're rather disappointing, but I preordered this a few months ago and am going to at the very least take pleasure in the artwork, the story, and the ability to run around in Westeros. Too cutscene heavy they say? Well Xenosaga Episode 1 was GREAT.

Happy Gaming, JP