I just got my first guard ring in Final Fantasy V which means I now have 5 excellent defensive accessory slot items. I only have 4 characters which means one of the items has to hit the bench. The question I have is which one? I have 3 different choices: gengi glove, guard ring, or elf cloak. (I have 3 copies of elf cloak to bring the total up to 5.)
Elf cloak gives 1 agility, 1 magic power, 3 magic defense, 5% magic evade, 1 weight, and causes the wearer to dodge 33% of all physical attacks.
Genji glove gives 12 defense, 1 magic defense, 6 weight, and provides immunity to toad and paralyze
Guard ring gives 10 defense, 10 magic defense, 10% magic evade, 1 weight, 5 vitality, and automatically casts regen on the wearer.
Weight is used in determining how often you get to act. Every 8 weight on your gear costs you 1 tick each time you take an action. Essentially 8 weight is offset by 1 agility. The faster you are the more actions you get to take... Must go faster!
Vitality+5 sounds good, but it turns out it's actually mostly useless. Vitality does two things in the game: determine your maximum health and determine the amount of healing done by regen. Bonus vitality from gera is not taken into account when determining your maximum health so all Vit+5 accomplishes is making your regen ticks marginally bigger. Fortunately this is the item that grants regen otherwise it would be totally worthless. (Regen is not a spell I consider casting normally.)
Agility is pretty much only good for going faster. It should make some weapons do more damage but it's bugged.
Magic power impacts your maximum mana but like with vitality doesn't apply from gear. It also impacts how many times your attack spells hit which at high levels seems like it could be really powerful.
What do the defense stats do? They're flat out subtracted from the damage done from an attack for each hit. It looks like a typical mob (looked up gargoyle stats) attacks 9 times for 62 damage per swing. My samurai has 39 defense, so he'll actually take 23 damage from 9 swings or 207 total. (Ignoring misses for now.) With the genji glove on he'll take 11 damage from 9 swings or 99 total. That's a pretty substantial reduction. The 33% evade from elf cloak would only knock that 207 down to 138.
On the other hand my ninja only has 22 defense. She'd be taking 40 damage from 9 swings for 360 total. Genji glove knocks that down to 252 while elf cloak knocks it down to 240.
So it would seem a heavily armored dude might want to stack on even more armor but any squishies would rather have the dodge from the elf cloak. Elf cloak also has better other stats (go faster, cast better, have magic defense) so I like sticking with it. Guard ring is a little worse than genji glove when it comes to physical attacks but it's substantially better when it comes to magic attacks. It also weighs less and the free regen, while not great, is still something.
Gargoyles are reasonably tough enemies (they guard the entrance to the lithograph dungeons) but bosses and the like are going to hit even harder. As the damage number gets bigger the extra evade will get better and better. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with 3 elf capes and the guard ring. Makes me sad that I went to all the effort to steal the genji glove only to leave it in my bag, but thems the breaks I guess.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
League of Legends: Draven
The newest champion in League of Legends hit the free rotation this week and I've given him a couple plays against bots to get a feel for what he does. I like to do this before reading about a champion to build my own theories about how he works before I get spoon-fed opinions from random idiots on the internet. My feeling going into these games, from having played against him, was that he did a crazy amount of damage. Now, I never laned against him, so maybe he was just getting fed. And my sample size was pretty low. Heck, after the first game against him I thought he was melee! (He's a ranged attack damage carry.)
After playing him a couple times against bots I'm eager to give him a shot against people. I have a feeling he's actually a critically important champion to learn how to play. Not because he's overpowered or anything like that but because he has a unique mechanic that uses a really critical micro skill. It's a skill that's made MarineKingPrime an awful lot of money in StarCraft II. I'm talking about stutter-step micro.
The way I see most people play (and the way I play myself if I'm being honest) is they get into a fight with someone and they stand still and auto-attack them. If the enemy runs away they stand still until the enemy runs out of range and then they start following them. Assuming equal movement speeds that means you'll only have done damage in the time it took them to run out of your attack range and that's it. Optimally what you should do is fire one attack off at them, walk slightly towards them, and then fire off another attack. Because your attack animation is shorter than your attack cooldown there's a brief period of time where you aren't locked in an attack animation and could actually be walking forward with no loss of damage. The trick is to start attacking again the instant your attack cooldown has worn off. Walk too much and you lose damage. (Well, if you have identical movement speeds and an infinite plane you won't lose any damage but eventually they'll hit their base or their teammates.) For optimal damage you need to be scooting and shooting the whole way.
This is true of all champions, really. Even some of the melee champions (Singed especially) actually want to avoid attacking at all some of the time. They want to just keep running beside the enemy and wait for their good ability to cooldown in order to let their teammates kill the person running away. If Singed autoattacks he stops for the duration of the animation which can let the enemy get out of his poison which is bad.
So why does Draven make people better at this? Well, he seems to be built entirely around one ability. This ability causes his next autoattack to do significantly more damage (+85%, +a dot) and makes an axe fly through the air. There's a little target on the ground indicating where it's going to land. If Draven is on the target when the axe lands he gets to do the +85% damage again on his next attack. Catching an axe also refreshes his attack/movement speed buff. So it seems like to get the most out of Draven you need to be good at attacking once and then sliding to a nearby location. Attack again. Slide again. And so on. I think getting good at catching these axes will make someone better at attacking, then moving, then attacking again. You won't get the timing perfect right away, but you'll at least get started with moving between attacks which has to be useful!
After playing him a couple times against bots I'm eager to give him a shot against people. I have a feeling he's actually a critically important champion to learn how to play. Not because he's overpowered or anything like that but because he has a unique mechanic that uses a really critical micro skill. It's a skill that's made MarineKingPrime an awful lot of money in StarCraft II. I'm talking about stutter-step micro.
The way I see most people play (and the way I play myself if I'm being honest) is they get into a fight with someone and they stand still and auto-attack them. If the enemy runs away they stand still until the enemy runs out of range and then they start following them. Assuming equal movement speeds that means you'll only have done damage in the time it took them to run out of your attack range and that's it. Optimally what you should do is fire one attack off at them, walk slightly towards them, and then fire off another attack. Because your attack animation is shorter than your attack cooldown there's a brief period of time where you aren't locked in an attack animation and could actually be walking forward with no loss of damage. The trick is to start attacking again the instant your attack cooldown has worn off. Walk too much and you lose damage. (Well, if you have identical movement speeds and an infinite plane you won't lose any damage but eventually they'll hit their base or their teammates.) For optimal damage you need to be scooting and shooting the whole way.
This is true of all champions, really. Even some of the melee champions (Singed especially) actually want to avoid attacking at all some of the time. They want to just keep running beside the enemy and wait for their good ability to cooldown in order to let their teammates kill the person running away. If Singed autoattacks he stops for the duration of the animation which can let the enemy get out of his poison which is bad.
So why does Draven make people better at this? Well, he seems to be built entirely around one ability. This ability causes his next autoattack to do significantly more damage (+85%, +a dot) and makes an axe fly through the air. There's a little target on the ground indicating where it's going to land. If Draven is on the target when the axe lands he gets to do the +85% damage again on his next attack. Catching an axe also refreshes his attack/movement speed buff. So it seems like to get the most out of Draven you need to be good at attacking once and then sliding to a nearby location. Attack again. Slide again. And so on. I think getting good at catching these axes will make someone better at attacking, then moving, then attacking again. You won't get the timing perfect right away, but you'll at least get started with moving between attacks which has to be useful!
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Final Fantasy: Gender Mixes
Playing Final Fantasy V today got me thinking... My party now, and for the rest of the game, is Nick, Lena, Krile, Faris. One male, three females. I think this is the first time in this entire marathon where my party has been predominantly female. This is certainly the first game where the playable cast is mostly female. Thinking about it more, I think there are only 2 games in the entire series where that's true: FFV and the generally maligned FFX-2. I thought I'd go through and see if that's actually the case, at least of the games I've played entirely (so skipping XII, XIII, and XIII-2 for now because I don't want to look up spoilers)...
FFI - 6/0 - no real characters, but all 6 jobs are male
FFII - 3/1 or 8/2 - depends if you count the 4th slot subs or not
FFIII - 4/0 - the DS remake brought it to 3/1
FFIV - 9/3
FFV - 2/3
FFVI - 10/3/1 - Gogo's gender is unclear
FFVII - 6/3
FFVIII - 3/3 or 7/4
FFIX - 4/3/1 or 7/4/1 - Quina's gender is unclear
FFX - 4/3
FFX-2 - 0/3
FFL - your choice
FFLII - your choice
FFLIII - 2/2 or 5/4
FFA - 1/0 or 5/3
FFMQ - 1/0 or 3/2
It actually looks like 3 female characters becomes par for the course. Main character's love interest, little girl, and uncharacteristically tough woman. I guess even FFV could fit that description. Krile is certainly young (Galuf is her grandfather and he's not made out to be too old. In fact, Galuf was friends with Nick's father, so one would think Nick is a generation older than Krile. And he's likely in his 20s himself...) Faris grew up pretending to be male and became captain of the pirates which would make her uncharacteristically tough. I don't think Lena is the main character's love interest but I've only played it through in Japanese so I would have missed that sort of detail the first time. I could see it happening. So maybe FFV isn't different because it has more female characters than male characters... Maybe it's different because it only has 2 male characters while keeping the standard complement of female characters.
I decided to look it up, and according to wikia Nick is 20, Lena is 19, Faris is 20, Galuf is 60, and Krile is 14. So Krile can definitely be the little girl in the party.
I don't have any real conclusions to draw here. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that 90's Japanese video game culture was geared more towards males and they included way more male characters in their games than they did female characters. I guess it's just a sad observation. Particularly so now that I see there were always 3 female characters in every game from FFIV through FFX-2!
FFI - 6/0 - no real characters, but all 6 jobs are male
FFII - 3/1 or 8/2 - depends if you count the 4th slot subs or not
FFIII - 4/0 - the DS remake brought it to 3/1
FFIV - 9/3
FFV - 2/3
FFVI - 10/3/1 - Gogo's gender is unclear
FFVII - 6/3
FFVIII - 3/3 or 7/4
FFIX - 4/3/1 or 7/4/1 - Quina's gender is unclear
FFX - 4/3
FFX-2 - 0/3
FFL - your choice
FFLII - your choice
FFLIII - 2/2 or 5/4
FFA - 1/0 or 5/3
FFMQ - 1/0 or 3/2
It actually looks like 3 female characters becomes par for the course. Main character's love interest, little girl, and uncharacteristically tough woman. I guess even FFV could fit that description. Krile is certainly young (Galuf is her grandfather and he's not made out to be too old. In fact, Galuf was friends with Nick's father, so one would think Nick is a generation older than Krile. And he's likely in his 20s himself...) Faris grew up pretending to be male and became captain of the pirates which would make her uncharacteristically tough. I don't think Lena is the main character's love interest but I've only played it through in Japanese so I would have missed that sort of detail the first time. I could see it happening. So maybe FFV isn't different because it has more female characters than male characters... Maybe it's different because it only has 2 male characters while keeping the standard complement of female characters.
I decided to look it up, and according to wikia Nick is 20, Lena is 19, Faris is 20, Galuf is 60, and Krile is 14. So Krile can definitely be the little girl in the party.
I don't have any real conclusions to draw here. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that 90's Japanese video game culture was geared more towards males and they included way more male characters in their games than they did female characters. I guess it's just a sad observation. Particularly so now that I see there were always 3 female characters in every game from FFIV through FFX-2!
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Move Over, Galuf
I'm most of the way through the second world in Final Fantasy V and hit a major plot point. X-Death somehow tricked us into unsealing 4 more crystals that were holding him back. Essentially we had to do a tough boss fight (turns out when you're fighting 4 monsters with brutal low health attacks you shouldn't cast berserk on your best guy... He ends up spreading out the damage!) and then hand them over to him. X-Death is about to use the crystals to kill off the party when Krile (Galuf's granddaughter) comes to the rescue! She manages to knock X-Death out with a single spell. Then she does what all stupid good-guys do... She didn't hit him with a coup-de-grace. Instead she turned her back on him and came to help out the party. Obviously he then stood up and destroyed her. Galuf got bitter and went all Tellah on X-Death. He got dazed enough to run off with the crystals and left us alone, but Galuf died.
This seems odd. If I hadn't played the game before I'd be concerned. I've spent hours farming AP for Galuf and he's almost mastered both white mage and time mage. I don't want to start over! It turns out Krile joins your party in his place and absorbs all his accumulated xp and AP. Woo! She is slightly different in that she has different base stats. She seems to have about 8% less maximum health than Galuf did but she gets her turn a little faster. Which was a little annoying in that it changed up the turn order (from Faris, Nick, Lena, Galuf to Faris, Nick, Krile, Lena) and Galuf/Krile have the healing staff so I want to be attacking my own team with them. I once made Lena attack someone who was low by force of habit and she sure killed them. Oops!
I've also mastered my first two jobs. Lena mastered monk and Faris mastered thief. I'm not sure what to do with them now! I switched Lena to a ninja with the counter sub ability thinking that could do a lot of damage. I switched Faris to a knight with the mug ability so I can keep stealing things while being tanky. Nick remains a sorcerer and Krile is going to keep leveling white/time mages.
This seems odd. If I hadn't played the game before I'd be concerned. I've spent hours farming AP for Galuf and he's almost mastered both white mage and time mage. I don't want to start over! It turns out Krile joins your party in his place and absorbs all his accumulated xp and AP. Woo! She is slightly different in that she has different base stats. She seems to have about 8% less maximum health than Galuf did but she gets her turn a little faster. Which was a little annoying in that it changed up the turn order (from Faris, Nick, Lena, Galuf to Faris, Nick, Krile, Lena) and Galuf/Krile have the healing staff so I want to be attacking my own team with them. I once made Lena attack someone who was low by force of habit and she sure killed them. Oops!
I've also mastered my first two jobs. Lena mastered monk and Faris mastered thief. I'm not sure what to do with them now! I switched Lena to a ninja with the counter sub ability thinking that could do a lot of damage. I switched Faris to a knight with the mug ability so I can keep stealing things while being tanky. Nick remains a sorcerer and Krile is going to keep leveling white/time mages.
Monday, June 25, 2012
League of Legends Issues
A couple weeks ago League of Legends tried to update their North American servers with a new patch. It failed spectacularly and they ended up having to roll back the patch after a day of widespread connection issues. They tried again last week and it again failed spectacularly. I guess they decided another rollback wasn't going to be a good idea so they charged forward at full speed...
It turns out they'd made some sort of change to the way they were accessing their database and they did a very bad job of it. It couldn't operate properly under load so when 'millions' of people started playing at the same time disaster struck. Massive lag and disconnect issues forced them to put a cap on the number of concurrent users. This resulted in 3+ hour queues to get into the game at all.
But that's not the worst part... It seems whatever they did to the database also caused them to lose some of it from the production servers. Some people lost all their purchased runes. Some lost all their champions. Some lost all their built mastery trees. Which used to be saved locally but were recently changed to be stored online... Personally I lost all my champions and my mastery trees but kept my runes. Because I didn't have any champions I could no longer really play the game. I could use the 10 free champions but I wasn't allowed to do any drafts (6 champions get banned and 9 other people pick champions so you need to have access to at least 16 champions in order to guarantee an option if you're an unlucky last pick).
Over the weekend I was going through LoL withdrawl so Robb and I started new accounts in Europe. I was thinking my ping would be terrible but it turns out I have 90ms ping in NA and 120 in EUW so it wasn't that bad. I didn't own any champions there, either, but at least there wasn't a 3 hour queue. Also Robb couldn't even log onto NA even if we wanted to wait 3 hours. It was interesting playing again with no runes, masteries, ignite, or flash. At level 3 Riot gave me 400 RP which let me buy a champion so I got to play with Poppy instead of the free ones. POPPY!
At any rate, my account finally got restored late last night and I'm able to play again. They also gave everyone who lost stuff 1000 free RP. That's about $7 worth, so that's not nothing. I'm not sure it provides enough happiness to make up for not being able to play for a week, but it's not nothing.
It turns out they'd made some sort of change to the way they were accessing their database and they did a very bad job of it. It couldn't operate properly under load so when 'millions' of people started playing at the same time disaster struck. Massive lag and disconnect issues forced them to put a cap on the number of concurrent users. This resulted in 3+ hour queues to get into the game at all.
But that's not the worst part... It seems whatever they did to the database also caused them to lose some of it from the production servers. Some people lost all their purchased runes. Some lost all their champions. Some lost all their built mastery trees. Which used to be saved locally but were recently changed to be stored online... Personally I lost all my champions and my mastery trees but kept my runes. Because I didn't have any champions I could no longer really play the game. I could use the 10 free champions but I wasn't allowed to do any drafts (6 champions get banned and 9 other people pick champions so you need to have access to at least 16 champions in order to guarantee an option if you're an unlucky last pick).
Over the weekend I was going through LoL withdrawl so Robb and I started new accounts in Europe. I was thinking my ping would be terrible but it turns out I have 90ms ping in NA and 120 in EUW so it wasn't that bad. I didn't own any champions there, either, but at least there wasn't a 3 hour queue. Also Robb couldn't even log onto NA even if we wanted to wait 3 hours. It was interesting playing again with no runes, masteries, ignite, or flash. At level 3 Riot gave me 400 RP which let me buy a champion so I got to play with Poppy instead of the free ones. POPPY!
At any rate, my account finally got restored late last night and I'm able to play again. They also gave everyone who lost stuff 1000 free RP. That's about $7 worth, so that's not nothing. I'm not sure it provides enough happiness to make up for not being able to play for a week, but it's not nothing.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Ziggyny's SNES Adventure
While recently playing Final Fantasy Mystic Quest I found myself thinking that perhaps it wasn't as bad, relatively speaking, as everyone makes it out to be. It certainly pales in comparison to the other Final Fantasy games on the SNES but how would it fare compared to other RPGs on the SNES. I thought the same thing about the soundtrack which I didn't think was all that great but people seem to love. Maybe my problem was that I spend my time listening to Final Fantasy music on YouTube and forget the general sound quality for your average SNES game.
I've always been oddly drawn to reading about people playing old games. In particular I've 'followed' two different blogs purporting to play through every NES game. Some of them die out after a couple of posts. One of the NES ones is already into the Ks (he's going alphabetically) which is more than 300 posts! That's a lot of terrible NES games to have played!
Personally today marks the 466th consecutive day with a blog post. Some days have come easier than others, and some posts have certainly been worse than others, but I've managed to stick to having a post up every day. A couple years ago I built up a stash of posts in advance (the bridge hand series) but since that experiment ended it's been basically day to day. Oddly enough I actually find it more difficult to get posts done on the weekend than I do during the week. Part of this is because I sleep 12 hours vs 6 hours so there's less time in the day. Part of this is I spend the ~2 hours of transit time either playing games, reading, or mentally writing blog posts. Part of this is a weekday has easy breakpoints where I can fit in writing a post (right after work, say, or right after eating). Part of this is my 'awake day' and the 'real day' sync up better during the day than they do on the weekend. Always writing things day-of also makes things tricky when it comes to going out or having people over. I need to budget in extra time in the morning or make sure I get home before midnight which is a little annoying.
I've decided to put those three things together in the form of a new blog series... I'm going to play all the SNES games and make a little post about them! Initially my thinking was to put one post up per week on Saturdays and to revive the Star Trek blog and post it on Sundays. Then I found out there were 715 games on the SNES list and realized that at one post per week it would be 14 years before I got through them all! And then I looked at how many Star Trek episodes there are and there are 726! Hmm...
At any rate, I've got a couple posts written up for this weekend and we'll see where things go from here. I'm sequestering the new posts in a new blog. I believe I've got my Facebook integration thing set up so they should appear there like a normal post. Here's hoping!
I've always been oddly drawn to reading about people playing old games. In particular I've 'followed' two different blogs purporting to play through every NES game. Some of them die out after a couple of posts. One of the NES ones is already into the Ks (he's going alphabetically) which is more than 300 posts! That's a lot of terrible NES games to have played!
Personally today marks the 466th consecutive day with a blog post. Some days have come easier than others, and some posts have certainly been worse than others, but I've managed to stick to having a post up every day. A couple years ago I built up a stash of posts in advance (the bridge hand series) but since that experiment ended it's been basically day to day. Oddly enough I actually find it more difficult to get posts done on the weekend than I do during the week. Part of this is because I sleep 12 hours vs 6 hours so there's less time in the day. Part of this is I spend the ~2 hours of transit time either playing games, reading, or mentally writing blog posts. Part of this is a weekday has easy breakpoints where I can fit in writing a post (right after work, say, or right after eating). Part of this is my 'awake day' and the 'real day' sync up better during the day than they do on the weekend. Always writing things day-of also makes things tricky when it comes to going out or having people over. I need to budget in extra time in the morning or make sure I get home before midnight which is a little annoying.
I've decided to put those three things together in the form of a new blog series... I'm going to play all the SNES games and make a little post about them! Initially my thinking was to put one post up per week on Saturdays and to revive the Star Trek blog and post it on Sundays. Then I found out there were 715 games on the SNES list and realized that at one post per week it would be 14 years before I got through them all! And then I looked at how many Star Trek episodes there are and there are 726! Hmm...
At any rate, I've got a couple posts written up for this weekend and we'll see where things go from here. I'm sequestering the new posts in a new blog. I believe I've got my Facebook integration thing set up so they should appear there like a normal post. Here's hoping!
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Diablo III: Hardcore Day 2
When last we left our hero BuffyIV was level 11 and needed to get up to level 20 by the next Wednesday. She had a wide selection of banked gear from following people around in Act II and was seemingly positioned well to make it to 20. BuffyIV even started off light by taking on the Skeleton King quest at level 11 and easily smashed all the way through Butcher and into Act II.
Once in Act II BuffyIV decided to get revenge on the achievement which killed off the original Buffy. Not by charging ahead blindly but by quickly and efficiently mowing everything down between the two cultist lairs. No problem! Achievement earned! BuffyIV was up to level 18 and sailing smoothly when disaster struck!
Wandering into an open area a large number of monsters crested the horizon. BuffyIV knew the situation was going to be dicey so she implemented the brave plan 'run away and shoot backwards'. Or at least, she tried to. Hit tumble, no movement. Shoot forward, no arrows. Hit invisible, stay visible. The monsters had stopped moving at this point and it was clear that some sort of time warp was going on. BuffyIV quickly tried to take the blue pill and leave the world behind but it takes 10 seconds to digest and alas it was too late. The monsters suddenly came to life, teleported beside BuffyIV, and obliterated her in an instant. *sad trombone*
Ok, whatever. That sucked, but it's only a minor setback. I still had three days to go. So BuffyV started off with no gear set aside and no initial free levels. I did have a stockpile of crafting materials and made liberal use of my blacksmith training to stay reasonably geared. I ended up getting to level 17 by yesterday which is within 5 levels of the rest of the team so I was fine as far as staying away from the xp penalty. I also found a good weapon so I was able to contribute positively to the fighting. Hurray!
We got to Belial and I screwed up yet again. I decided the right way to try to live through his meteors was to use tumble to dodge around them instead of trying to time my invisible ability to ignore the damage. I ended up tumbling through multiple meteors that were landing at once. (I just missed diving from the one landing on me and ended up just rolling into another one as it was landing. And maybe eating a third in the process.) Kaboom! BuffyV was dead. Everyone else survived and killed Belial. Rejoining now seemed like a waste of time, so I headed out with the plan of tagging back in once they got closer to level 40. Monks are tougher than demon hunters anyway, right?
I was annoyed with D3, so I decided to go play some League of Legends instead. I waited in a log-in queue for about 45 minutes (playing some Pilotwings while I waited) and when I finally got in decided to check if the Megaman Ezreal skin was live yet. Turns out no. And oddly enough it wouldn't let me buy the existing skins either as it had them labeled with a 'need to own champion' icon, which is weird because I've owned Ezreal for months now.
Ok, whatever. Time to play a solo queue ranked game. Nope, can't sign up. I don't own 16 champions so I can't participate in the draft. Juh? Check out my profile. All my champions are gone. All my masteries are gone. Grrr!
I played a quick normal Dominion game with one of the free champions (Fiora) and then Brent suggested logging out to see if that would make my champions appear. Instead it made the server disappear as I wasn't able to reconnect. Grr!
Ok, no LoL. Back to D3 I guess? It turned out Ike and Snuggles had just started hardcore characters so BuffyVI came to life to join them. I think I got up around level 8 before we broke for the night. I believe Tom, Robb, and Adam are around level 30... Can I catch back up I wonder...
Once in Act II BuffyIV decided to get revenge on the achievement which killed off the original Buffy. Not by charging ahead blindly but by quickly and efficiently mowing everything down between the two cultist lairs. No problem! Achievement earned! BuffyIV was up to level 18 and sailing smoothly when disaster struck!
Wandering into an open area a large number of monsters crested the horizon. BuffyIV knew the situation was going to be dicey so she implemented the brave plan 'run away and shoot backwards'. Or at least, she tried to. Hit tumble, no movement. Shoot forward, no arrows. Hit invisible, stay visible. The monsters had stopped moving at this point and it was clear that some sort of time warp was going on. BuffyIV quickly tried to take the blue pill and leave the world behind but it takes 10 seconds to digest and alas it was too late. The monsters suddenly came to life, teleported beside BuffyIV, and obliterated her in an instant. *sad trombone*
Ok, whatever. That sucked, but it's only a minor setback. I still had three days to go. So BuffyV started off with no gear set aside and no initial free levels. I did have a stockpile of crafting materials and made liberal use of my blacksmith training to stay reasonably geared. I ended up getting to level 17 by yesterday which is within 5 levels of the rest of the team so I was fine as far as staying away from the xp penalty. I also found a good weapon so I was able to contribute positively to the fighting. Hurray!
We got to Belial and I screwed up yet again. I decided the right way to try to live through his meteors was to use tumble to dodge around them instead of trying to time my invisible ability to ignore the damage. I ended up tumbling through multiple meteors that were landing at once. (I just missed diving from the one landing on me and ended up just rolling into another one as it was landing. And maybe eating a third in the process.) Kaboom! BuffyV was dead. Everyone else survived and killed Belial. Rejoining now seemed like a waste of time, so I headed out with the plan of tagging back in once they got closer to level 40. Monks are tougher than demon hunters anyway, right?
I was annoyed with D3, so I decided to go play some League of Legends instead. I waited in a log-in queue for about 45 minutes (playing some Pilotwings while I waited) and when I finally got in decided to check if the Megaman Ezreal skin was live yet. Turns out no. And oddly enough it wouldn't let me buy the existing skins either as it had them labeled with a 'need to own champion' icon, which is weird because I've owned Ezreal for months now.
Ok, whatever. Time to play a solo queue ranked game. Nope, can't sign up. I don't own 16 champions so I can't participate in the draft. Juh? Check out my profile. All my champions are gone. All my masteries are gone. Grrr!
I played a quick normal Dominion game with one of the free champions (Fiora) and then Brent suggested logging out to see if that would make my champions appear. Instead it made the server disappear as I wasn't able to reconnect. Grr!
Ok, no LoL. Back to D3 I guess? It turned out Ike and Snuggles had just started hardcore characters so BuffyVI came to life to join them. I think I got up around level 8 before we broke for the night. I believe Tom, Robb, and Adam are around level 30... Can I catch back up I wonder...
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Favourite Game Candidates: NES Games 2
In the second NES installment I'll go over games I mostly discovered during the time I owned an NES, which was in University and was 14 years after the NES launched. I missed some of the 'classic' games that I'm sure other people really love (I'm looking at you, Zelda) but I didn't play them so they don't have a place on this list. I bought the NES after a scunt (my house was scunt headquarters and I think the guy who lugged it over didn't really want to take it back) mostly because it had a Final Fantasy cartridge in it. Best $10 I ever spent!
Final Fantasy - I played a lot of games at Comfy Prime. I watched a lot of people play games at Comfy Prime. The common area in the basement had three tvs with an NES, a SNES, and a Playstation. Josh left his computer in the room. And with all those games going on the one game that has the most memories for me is the original Final Fantasy. It spawned the nickname Bung. I remember one term Manders was working 20 hours a day and then would come home and play Final Fantasy instead of sleeping. Well, while sleeping. The game waits patiently for input so falling asleep wouldn't kill you. Buying potions one at a time with your foot so a party of four white mages could slowly beat the game? Sweet! The cartridge only had one save slot and I can remember people waiting to get their turn with the save.
Ice Hockey - I used to play this game a lot with Andrew. When my NES eventually got stolen out of the MathSoc exec office this was the game inside. *frowns* You had the option of choosing between three different types of skaters on your team. Skinny, medium, and fatty. You had 15 different possible team configurations but I'm pretty sure I only ever used two of them. Fatty, fatty, fatty, fatty or fatty, fatty, fatty, skinny. Fat guys were the best at checking and scoring. Skinny guy was there as the token fast skater to try to advance into the enemy zone. Penalties in the game only came about after a fight... Loser of the brawl gets a penalty!
River City Ransom - Truth be told I didn't really play this game. Josh bought it from a used game store for the house and I mostly just watched people play it. It was a pretty decent side-scrolling brawler game. I remember it had a cash system for upgrading things? It was sort of a sandbox/RPG/Double Dragon style game.
Gauntlet II - This sequel to Gauntlet featured 100 levels and a bunch of different power-ups that made you really powerful. I remember spending a day pounding away at the game to beat the 100 levels. Only to discover, sadly, that there was no end to the game. It merely scrambled the order of the 100 levels and made you start again. But you kept all the power-ups so there really wasn't much point in playing. You couldn't possibly die or get better. I guess you could keep making your score bigger by collecting tons of treasure but after playing through a little over 100 levels of Gauntlet I gave up.
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| Solo ninja ho! |
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| Green?!? |
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| 2x4s and High Schools, together at last |
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| Blue wizard needs food BADLY! |
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