I just "finished" playing Terranigma, a really nice SNES action rpg. Although there really isn't anything substantial left to do, I'm max levelling the character just for the thrill of it.
Terranigma is part of a "spiritual trilogy", consisting of Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia/Time and yes, Terranigma.
Soul Blazer and Terranigma are fairly similar in the sense that you don't really *need* to max out the level of your character. There is no über-boss waiting for you and the final boss is very weak, unfortunately. In Soul Blazer, the main adventure takes maybe 7 hours and you'll spend 15-20 hours levelling up if you are going for the max level. Funny thing is that you reach your max stats BEFORE getting to the max level, so getting all the way up to Lv50 is, well, pointless.
Terranigma has a similar problem, but not as bad. The main adventure takes about 15 hours, but I deduce that you won't need more than 10 hours to max level.
Also, still occassionally playing God of War, the HD port for the PS3. Trying to complete God Mode but so far utterly failing in the penultimate battle.
Gained my first Platinum Trophy through this downloadable title though! Awesome!
Hitting Deus Ex and finish some side quests. I'm waiting for a new shipment of games before I touch any others in my collection so for now I'm generally stuck with MvC3.
I am STILL working on my replay of FFIX, but P3P got in the way and this game is soooo long. xD It's not that I want it to end but at the same time I want complete it. asdfsdf.
Dragon Quest IX on the DS. It's different xD But so far it's not too bad. The fairy girl annoys the crap out of me though, she keeps on saying FLAPPIN in every sentence. xD
Replaying FFVII because it's been a few years. Same with FFIX.
Also picked up Dirge of Cerberus again because I never beat it. I'm not used to the controls and it's making me do things I don't mean to do. I make Vincent look extremely incompetent.
Yeah, get used to that esuna. Unless you're some kind of DoC goddess, Vincent will spend a goodly portion of that game looking at least mildly incompetent.
DoC goddess I am not. Mashing the melee button in a cramped room full of Deep Ground soldiers because I can't aim the gun worth a damn, only to discover that I'm not hitting anything that way either and Vincent is essentially doing a very jerky dance while getting shot to death is more than a little incompetent.
Satsu, BRIAN BLESSED, MIGHTY AND WISE Junpei Iori: Ace Detective, Maccaffrickstonson von Lichtenstafford Frabenschnaben, Polite Krogan, Robert Baratheon
I have been playing a bunch of Zelda hacks. First I played a LttP hack entitled Goddess of Wisdom, which I had never played before. I liked it enough to play it twice. I'm lifting my review, which was in two parts, wholesale from SO:
I'm playing Zelda: Goddess of Wisdom, a hack of A Link to the Past. For the most part it's a very high-quality hack, but some of the puzzles are far too difficult. Sometimes, for instance, items you need to pick up to advance through the game are disguised as items you can't pick up, and in other cases they're hidden behind lamps or other items that make them invisible. This is a source of fake difficulty and I find it kind of irritating. Also, I'm stuck at a place there's no walkthrough for; the dungeon was heavily revised in the latest revision and no one has done an LP of it yet, which leaves me in a frustrating position. I suppose I could just cheat to get past it, and in fact I already did so in one room where I couldn't figure out what to do, but I don't really feel like doing it again.
Other than the aforementioned issues it has basically everything I could ask for from a Zelda hack. It's a much better hack than Parallel Worlds (even though one of the people who worked on it also worked on Parallel Worlds) and if it weren't for those minor issues I basically wouldn't have anything to complain about. Overall I'd recommend it to fans of LttP.
I'm 99% finished; all I have left to do are get the silver arrows (which I'm not sure I'm going to do since they're not actually required in LttP) and fight Ganon. Apart from two major and three comparatively minor issues, I have no complaints with it.
Major:
The aforementioned hidden items issue. The designers usually hinted that something wasn't as it appeared by inserting a gold star near the disguised item. Unfortunately, this isn't explained anywhere, so until you make the association you'll be left scratching your head if you don't know any better, and it wasn't done 100% consistently. There are a few cases where you can only figure out that something's amiss by trial and error. If they had just included the gold star consistently the major source of this complaint would have been eliminated.
A recurring puzzle was having to move a statue over a long distance to accomplish some task. That itself isn't particularly bad, but in some cases you have to hookshot across a gap about twelve times to make it work. In other cases you have to keep lights lit with the fire rod in order to see where you need to push the statue, or you have to cross a couple of rooms to keep hitting an orange/blue switch repeatedly. It culminates in the dungeon where you get the silver arrows, which I'm completely fucked if I can figure out how to transport this statue. I don't think I'm going to bother getting them; they're not necessary to defeat Ganon.
Comparatively minor:
It's a bit short. Only two swords, no mirror shield, no blue or red mail, no "half" magic, no titan's mitt, and the dark world isn't very developed. The latter two problems are linked - if the mitt had been included, you'd have been able to get to glitchy areas of the dark world because nothing is specified in the ROM data.
Some of the enemies take too many hits to kill. There are a lot of enemies you have to hit four times or more at the start of the game. While I can see how this increases difficulty, it also gets annoying when these kinds of enemies are all over the place on the overworld. The original game had them in only a few places on the map and for good reason. It's overkill.
The lack of dungeon maps is kind of annoying. Goddess of Wisdom isn't alone here; Parallel Worlds has the same problem.
That said, I'd rather have a short hack than a repetitive one (I'm looking at you, Parallel Worlds - there was no reason to make people climb the whole frakking Parallel Tower three times), and the enemy hits thing is pretty freaking minor.
I was able to figure out what I was missing in dungeon 2 pretty goddamn easily (I didn't think to use arrows in a critical space) and blame sleep deprivation for not figuring it out the first time around, but there was one room I still would have had to cheat past earlier in the dungeon because I couldn't figure out where the requisite orange/blue switch was (I just gave myself the fire rod for a room). (Edit: I just figured out what I did wrong. It wasn't even anything hidden that tripped me up in this case; I just didn't take a very close look at the actual shape of the room)
Overall I'd recommend it, despite the frustrations I mentioned; the thrill of a largely well-designed new LttP hack outweighs the comparatively minor annoyances associated with it. For the most part the feeling I got from exploring it and solving the puzzles was roughly akin to the feeling I got when I played LttP for the first time, and it kept me up basically all night last night. There's very little higher praise I can think of to give to a game.
To this I would simply add, since it somehow slipped my mind to mention it the first time, that there are some segments that are very difficult. There are two portions where you have to fight bosses from the Dark World before you get the Master Sword. However, LttP does not expect you to fight them before you get the Master Sword, and the only way to deal damage to them with the regular sword is by spin attacking them. Needless to say, this makes the fights substantially more difficult. You also have the option of using arrows in one of the fights. Of course, arrows are limited (you can't have used the Waterfall of Wishing to raise the number of arrows you carry yet because you need the hammer, which you can't have at this point in the game, to access it). The game is nice enough to give you a few extra, which makes the fight easier. However, you'll still need to use some spin attacks.
In the other fight, you need the hookshot to defeat the boss. You could presumably switch between arrows and the hookshot, but it seems like far more trouble than it's worth. The fight is also more difficult than the original because you have limited room for manoeuvring. You're pretty much guaranteed to take a certain amount of damage.
In fact, taking damage is a necessity in some boss fights. There's actually an Armos Knights fight above a spike pit. The entire thing is a spike pit. You basically have to kill the boss as quickly as you can; and if you don't have enough heart containers or didn't bring a refill of health, you're screwed. This principle is reinvoked for the final fight with Ganon; the entire fight isn't spikes, but you have to traverse some to light the torches that enable you to deal damage to Ganon.
Despite what I said, the puzzles mostly aren't all that difficult if you think about them for long enough and check to make sure you're not standing near deceptive items. There are a couple cases where you need to use Ether or Quake to alter an enemy and throw it at a switch. That's pretty much the most difficult thing in the hack.
I then played Parallel Worlds:
I'm playing the second quest of Parallel Worlds. Sort of. They never really finished the game; they were going to release a version 2.0 that fixed many of the most frequently complained about issues with version 1.1, but both hack creators vanished off the face of the internets, and Hyrule Magic won't load the ROM so I can't attempt to make my own version that satisfies most of the complaints. Not that they would have fixed all the flaws even if they had released version 2.0, but judging from their list of planned changes, it would still have been a lot better. So we're stuck with a hack that has several significant flaws.
I'm getting around these flaws (most notably, the fact that you have to climb the Parallel Tower a whopping four times if you want to get all the treasure out of it) by cheating. There is a code that allows you to walk under rooms in dungeons which eliminates the need to climb the Parallel Tower more than once, although if misused it causes severe glitches (and somehow, despite the fact that I thought I wasn't misusing it, I've wound up with a completely borked overworld map nvm, I somehow turned off HDMA emulation accidentally). There is also a code that allows you to put the Cape on Link permanently, which since reaching the second half of the game I've been using only using sparingly in rooms that have too many Beamos statues or other annoyances (I used it extensively in the beginning of the game, which is way too difficult, as even the hack creators have admitted). I've also used a code that lights up all dungeon rooms, because there are far too many mazes that are almost impossible to navigate with just the light from Link's lantern. Finally, I've given myself the Hookshot, which isn't available in the second quest normally, because the inability to grab everything in the game bothers me. (That said, at least two, possibly three, dungeons can be completed without the Hookshot, although Sheik's Hideout requires some smart thinking and split-second timing using bomb jumps and other bizarre creations of the LttP engine. I am not using the Hookshot in those dungeons. I will probably also replay the Second Quest at some point without the Hookshot).
Overall this is nowhere near as strong a hack as Goddess of Wisdom. The received wisdom about this hack is that the overworlds are up to the standard of the original game while the dungeons are crap. This isn't 100% accurate, but the dungeons are definitely significantly weaker than the rest of the game; many of the dungeons require far too much backtracking and present annoyances like an overabundance of Beamos statues and flying tiles. Two of them, Nabooru's Hole and Impa's Ways, are simply too gigantic to be comprehensible, for differing reasons; Nabooru's Hole is an eight-floor dungeon where you navigate by dropping down a series of holes, and your only navigation is your lantern and it's full of Beamos statues, while Impa's Ways is simply full of identical rooms and teleporation tiles. I do not know what possessed Euclid and Seph to believe either of these was a fun idea for a dungeon, but each time I have to play them I simply use a walkthrough.
There are other stupid things, like the Lost Woods combination (
east, south, north, east, south
) not being anywhere in the game; this is problematic because you basically need the Cane of Byrna to beat the dungeons in the second half of the game, and the Cane of Byrna is found in a region that can only be accessed via the Lost Woods. The way to access the Cane of Byrna is pretty stupid, too; I can understand using bomb jumping once or twice as a puzzle, but the region requires like ten of them. There are also stupid bugs like a door exit from the Blind fight that will cause the game to crash if entered (I am amazed this got out of testing) and ways to deprive yourself of Bombos and the red boomerang permanently.
That said, with sparing use of the cheat codes I've mentioned most of these annoyances don't detract from the game, and the other ones are solvable with just a bit of knowledge. If you can ignore the flaws, there are quite a number of laudable things about this hack. Some of the dungeons, like Darunia's Ruins (a Zelda 1-style dungeon with a good original remix of the Zelda dungeon music) are actually pretty fun to play through, and the world of this game is absolutely massive, and rewards you for exploring. The overworld of this game makes the overworld of the original game look small in comparison. In part this is because there is way more stuff to find; for instance, due to the fact that there are only five heart containers in the entire game, there are way more pieces of heart to find. Naturally this also means that the caves are absolutely massive and extend way beyond the range of the original game's caves. For the most part these are well designed as well.
This is actually my third playthrough of the game, and second this month, albeit my first playthrough of the Second Quest; that said, I only played without cheats the first time (although I still used save states; this hack would be impossible without save states).
You can find the hack here. If you want to play the Second Quest, the name to enter is
TotT (it stands for Tower of the Triforce)
. The codes I mentioned are:
7E045A03 - light up everything
7E00EE01 - walk under rooms
7E005501 - permanent invisibility
7EF34201 - hookshot
I've uploaded a walkthrough here which you will probably want to grab, as Impa's Ways and Nabooru's Hole will likely take you literally hours if you use the trial and error method. Unfortunately it doesn't list how to get the tablet in Nabooru's Hole, but you can find that on YouTube.
Overall I'm glad I replayed it despite my complaints; however, they may be dealbreakers for others.
Most recently, I played Outlands, a hack of the original Zelda. This is pretty much a flawless hack, although if you dislike backtracking, you'll hate this; you have to visit the first few dungeons in each quest several times before you can clear them out, due to the way necessary items are staggered throughout. Once you pass about the fourth dungeon in each quest, the game becomes pretty linear, and the only other real break from the original game is that it's much more difficult. As an example, after defeating the Ganon replacement in the Second Quest you then have to defeat three more Patra replacements. Furthermore, it's only after you defeat the first of these three that you can collect (1) the red mail and (2) the sixteenth heart container. As just one more example, you can't even pick up the sword in the second quest until the third dungeon. (The first quest is much more generous. On the other hand, I have never been able to locate the sixteenth heart container in the first quest; I'm reasonably certain there isn't one nvm, just found it; it's squirreled away in the first dungeon in a room that isn't on the map).
Got my hands on the capcom package offer for cheap, so far I'm giving DMC4 a try (been wanting to play it since 2009 ;.; ). I'm leaving SF4 and Resident Evil 5 on the corner until other players come along.
Uncharted 3 multiplayer. But I just purchased Vagrant Story. Only played about a half hour so far, but I'm looking forward to playing through this game.
(At the same time, my friend bought Parasite Eve, and we're going to download them on one another's systems next time we hang out.)
You can do it ! (: Though he's a little harder in the DS version than the SNES... think that he does Big Bang more often. xD I think there's a patten to him, but can't remember what xD
The first quest of the original Zelda is severely broken. It's possible to have the blue ring, the white sword, and six heart containers before even entering a dungeon, and you only need the bow from the first dungeon to get the magic key in the eighth, which enables you to bypass large parts of dungeons Nintendo presumably never intended you to bypass. Granted, you'll probably need the red medicine, plus the aforementioned blue ring, white sword and six to seven heart containers if you plan to play through that without save states, but taking that route enables you to clear through the first quest in about three to four hours, which is what I'm doing now (playing most of it from memory, I might add). The second quest isn't nearly as badly broken, and of course it's also substantially more difficult.
Anyway I'm playing through Zelda's first quest right now using the aforementioned strategy. After this run-through I think I'm going to try a swordless run.
The year was 1988 and I remember explaining the difference between the second quest of TLoZ and Zelda II to some idiot on the playground. What a flake.
/random flashback
Thanks to more than one thread around here (plus a sig), I started a new game on Chrono Cross. But now I might just sit and watch the intro for a while. Still gives me chills. Ha, it transcends time, how about that.
I wonder if watching the ME2 trailer in 2022 will feel the same.
Satsu, BRIAN BLESSED, MIGHTY AND WISE Junpei Iori: Ace Detective, Maccaffrickstonson von Lichtenstafford Frabenschnaben, Polite Krogan, Robert Baratheon
