Final Fantasy IV: Difficulty

Final Fantasy IV was the first RPG I'd ever played. I can remember renting it from Midnight Video over and over again without completing it. Partly this was because we tended to rent games only on weekends, partly this was because my brother and I had to share the SNES (and refused to play off the same saved game), and partly this was because the game was hard. I can remember dying over and over to most of the boss fights. Mist Dragon. Mombomb. Milon Z. Kainazzo. The Magus Sisters (well, they rarely killed me, but I remember having to fight them for an awfully long time because they kept healing and rezzing). Valvalis. Golbez. Rubicant. The Wall. The Four Fiends. I'd include the AI thing after the four fiends but I practically never managed to beat the Four Fiends. 

This time through I'm marveling at how easy it is. I just plowed through the underground stuff the first time you get there and was astonished at how easy Golbez was. The timing worked out in my favour (Kain was in the air when he paralyzed the party) so I got to have an extra character alive but I very quickly used life potions on the two dead people and healed to full while clocking him with my beaters. It definitely helps that I don't have to think about what actions I should be taking. I know the scripts in the fights (stop attacking Mist Dragon before he turns to mist to avoid his counter-attacks for example) and I know what spells actually do relevant things. But some fights are just dying before I even have to deal with the script. Kainazzo flat out died without withdrawing into his shell or casting his wave spell. The Magus Sisters didn't cast a raise spell. I expect The Four Fiends will be easy when I get to them because I know to level up enough to have the rank 3 damage spells. I know to chug ethers on FuSoYa so he can keep blasting. 

Maybe I was just really bad when I was a kid. I hadn't honed my 'get ALL the treasures and level up like mad' senses enough? Apparently they did raise the difficulty on some of the fights in the DS version so I'm looking forward to that when I get around to playing the game there...

Final Fantasy IV: Active Time Battle

Final Fantasy IV brought with it a brilliant innovation in terms of how and when characters got to take actions. In the previous games every player and every enemy got to take one action per round. Your speed stat, if you had one, determined when in the turn order you'd go but it wouldn't ever grant you extra actions. The fast guy gets to stab first and the slow guy gets to stab last but they each get to stab the same number of times. (Unless all the enemies die in the middle of the round I suppose.) The system used in FFIV - Active Time Battle - sought to change that paradigm. In an ATB system each unit on the map has a bar which counts up as time passes. When your bar fills up you get to take an action. This way if one character is much faster than another they get to take more turns. (Ideally this would be balanced by making their actions less powerful but that was rarely the case.) It's a pretty great idea for a system, and quite an improvement on the old one. Unfortunately I've been getting rather annoyed by it in this playthrough of FFIV. It was amazing at the time, don't get me wrong, but as they iterated on the system in future games it got a lot better.

The big problem that's annoying me is that bars keep filling as I'm entering in commands. So while I'm screwing around in the magic menu trying to find the right spell for Tellah to case everyone else's bar fills up. For the guys on my team this isn't terribly useful as they need to wait for me to find the right spell. For the enemies it's pure gold. Their turn comes up, they clock me, and they get right back into having their bar fill up. There is a setting to turn off time flowing while in a menu but that doesn't fix the whole problem. Even just mashing the button to select attack and then an enemy to hit seems to take too much time! I'll get into a first strike battle where ideally all my guys should get to go first. Instead I've found I can typically take 2 actions before the enemies have caught up completely and are all attacking me. These aren't complicated actions either. It's me telling Cecil to attack the first enemy and then me telling Yang to attack the first enemy. I try to tell Cid to attack the first enemy but by then the enemies have started swinging. It's very frustrating and has me longing for Final Fantasy X.

I decided to try to take advantage of the situation by making use of the berserk spell. I was hoping that my berserked characters would just start swinging as soon as their turns would come up even if I was futzing with someone else at the time. It turned out to work for me. Maybe too well. I tried it out on the Magus Sisters and it was by far the easiest go I've ever had with them. They didn't even get around to resurrecting themselves a single time. Yang and Cid just completely obliterated them!

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Conclusion?

Yesterday I got an email from someone at Ludia which appears to be the Quebec based company that developed the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Facebook game. It was in response to my complaint about feeling like they tricked me into giving them 5 of my Facebook credits with sketchy button changes. In a nutshell the response said that Facebook lets an app take credits for minor purchases without confirmation. Everything in this game is a 'minor purchase' so they don't have any reason to confirm anything. It was made pretty clear that what happened to me wasn't an accident and they intentionally set things up to make it very easy to get your credits.

He then apologized if I was confused but claimed to be unable to refund credits. The claim was Facebook handles everything to do with credits and gave me a link to complain directly to Facebook. He said the only thing he can do is give me a free play, which he did. Huzzah? Having never used the limited number of daily plays as it is this doesn't really help me out at all.

I went to the Facebook link he gave me and it's solely for troubles with _buying_ credits. Once Facebook has your money they don't seem the least bit interested in helping you out. It doesn't even seem like there's a way to contact anyone at all for other reasons. I just ended up in a help file loop which was relatively unhelpful. On the plus side I did find out how to make Facebook stop caching my credit card information!


In conclusion there doesn't actually look to be any way to dispute a Facebook app taking your credits. What's to stop me from writing an app that just steals credits from people without notifying them? (Morality aside that is.) As long as it falls under the 'minor purchase' category it doesn't seem like there's anything at all requiring the app to tell you what it's doing. Even if you noticed it doesn't seem like there's any way to actually complain about it!

Part of the problem is certainly that you're required to buy Facebook credits in large numbers. You can spend $5, $10, $50, $100, or $200 at a time. So if you legitimately wanted to buy something in a game for $2 you're stuck with at least $3 of credits just sitting around. Where my evil app could siphon them off slowly... Of course Facebook wants it set up like this because they get the full $5 up front and if I never want to buy again they just get to keep the extra $3 forever without splitting it with any apps.


Now there's still a part of me that wants to keep making a stink about this. Yell at the guy from Ludia. Go up the chain to their manager. But it's only 50 cents and my outrage levels are rapidly waning. Frankly I'm not even sure the problem really lies with Ludia. They have a sketchy UI but one that seems to be completely kosher as far as Facebook is concerned. I think the real solution is to uninstall this game in particular and scale back what I may play on Facebook in the future. I'm fine with paying for games but I don't think I want to pay Facebook anything anymore which means not playing new games on there enough to like them enough to pay for them. There are certainly plenty of other games to play elsewhere!

League of Legends: Ziggs!

The main menu inside the League of Legends client has a spot for them to link to youtube videos. The video that was displaying there last week was something called 'Ziggs Champion Spotlight' or something like that. I saw the name and thought they'd gotten someone named Zigg to start doing champion spotlights for them. This made me a little bitter since I have a patent on all names starting with the letters 'Zigg'. But then I went to play a game and forgot all about it.

A few days later something clicked and I realized it wasn't a champion spotlight by some guy named Zigg. It was a spotlight of the upcoming new champion named Ziggs. This instantly changed the bitterness around. Now I was very curious since I obviously have to play a champion with such an awesome name. But what was this hero going to be? I went to the preview website and was immediately greeted with the following...

"Sometimes, you want to go a little crazy. Sometimes, you want to throw caution to the wind. And sometimes, you want to blow stuff up just to watch it explode."

I _am_ a little crazy. I frequently throw caution to the wind in the game. And yes, explosions are cool. So this is sounding good so far... What does Ziggs look like?

So he's a Yordle then? (Yordles are essentially Gnomes.) And he has bombs. So essentially he's a gnome engineer named Ziggs? Did they make this champion specifically for me? Thanks Riot! But what does he do...

His passive makes him do more damage on his auto-attacks every 12 seconds. Any damage is good damage but this sort of thing probably doesn't do a whole lot. Shen has a similar ability and it's not terribly exciting.

His Q bounces a bomb along which eventually explodes. Supposedly this is a 'skill shot' and they mention that they were able to ratchet up his damage because it's hard to land this. Intriguing. I'm not terribly good at landing skill shots right now but I would certainly be willing to practice...

His W drops a bomb on the ground that explodes after 4 seconds or on command. When it explodes it does big AE damage to any nearby enemies and knocks them back. It also knocks Ziggs back (but somehow doesn't hurt him). This sounds awesome. Throw the bomb behind people to knock them forward into your team for easy kills. Throw the bomb between someone who's chasing you in order to blow the two of you apart. Disrupt people who are fighting dragon? Can you pull jungle creeps with it? It seems like a really versatile and powerful ability.

His E drops a bunch of land mines on the ground that explode on enemy contact to do damage and slow them down. Slows tend to be pretty good for killing people but how far away you can throw them will determine how good this ability is. Certainly has potential though!

His ultimate claims to be an enormous ranged AE attack that does tons of damage to people near it when it explodes. It sounds like this might be able to finish runners off similar to Graves? It really depends on the definition of enormous! Regardless, huge explosions have to be awesome.


I was trying to get enough IP in game to buy him when he launched but he came out today and I don't have enough. So I think it's time to pony up some bucks and reward Riot for building a champion just for me. This is how a 'free to play' game can get money out of me without scams!

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Short answer: this guy!

Unfortunately I've not stumbled into a large amount of money. I'm instead referring to a Facebook game by the same name as the television quiz show that became popular when I was in University. The Facebook game adds some social steps (the first few questions are answered by a group of players and their values fluctuate based on how many people get it wrong) but at its very core it's a time limited trivia game with 4 multiple choice answers just like the tv show. Instead of actually winning cash (wouldn't that be nice) you accumulate a running total of cash won across all games which is treated as an experience total. Make enough money and you level up!

It's a fun little distraction if you like trivia, which I do. But as with all Facebook games you should ask yourself how they're intending to make money. Well, you're limited to how many times you can play each day. If you want to play more than that you can buy more from the store. On the surface this looks like the only way for them to make money though they do have little rewards for spamming your friends. In short, it's like pretty much all Facebook games. Spam your friends and pay if you want to play a lot...

Of course it turns out there's a second way to spend money on the game and I feel like I got scammed into using it. To explain how we'll need a little background...

The tv show had lifelines where you could get help from outside sources if you weren't confident that you knew the answer. The Facebook game has the same sort of thing. At the start of the game you get to name two of your friends to be your lifelines. Then during the course of playing the game when you need to select an answer you can click on one of those two people. You automatically get credit for the right answer in the game and your friend gets sent the question. If they get it right then both of you get some experience. If they get it wrong then both of you get substantially less experience.

One of my friends, Ike, ran a Millionaire game show for MathSoc when we were in University. I used him as my lifeline the first time I played (I think I only had 2 friends even playing at the time so I had no choice.) and he made a comment on Facebook about how someone was crazy for sending him a 'Real Housewives' question. I sent it off because there's an immediate payoff for sending it off even if the other person won't have a clue! But then I felt bad after he commented so when I played again a couple days later I kept my eye for a question he'd probably know. (By this point I had 4 friends playing which leads to the selection screen above. My other two friends were auto-chosen but I wanted to tag in Ike and send him a good question.) Lo and behold the very first question was about Steve McQueen. (My complete lack of knowledge about movie actors was the stuff of legends amongst my University crowd so I really needed the help.) Turns out Ike knew the answer (hurray!) and commented on Facebook that that was more like it.

Encouraged by the positive reinforcement I went in to play again with Ike as a lifeline to see if I could send him another good one. Here's the screen I saw when I went to change my lifelines...

Notice the difference? I didn't! For those who may not play a lot of Facebook games the little icons on the buttons there say that I can pay Facebook credits (which have to be bought with real money) in order to unlock those guys as lifelines for my second game. The layout is the same. The buttons are in the same spot. The lines start with the same words. I wanted to do the same thing I'd just done so I clicked in the same sequence I'd clicked before. Instead I clicked on a button which wanted money! I guess this is their main way to make sure you spam ALL your friends to sign up... They gave me 6 games to play today but I only have enough friends to lifeline 2 games. But for losers like me I can pay money to pretend I have more friends!

The kicker? It didn't ask for confirmation or anything that I wanted to spend money. It just made a quick cash grab and went on with its life. 5 credits amounts to about 50 cents so it isn't like they walked off with a lot of my money but it really pissed me off when it happened. Nevermind that sending Ike a trivia question isn't worth 50 cents... I feel like they didn't make it clear that's what was going to happen. Worse, I feel like they intentionally designed their UI the way they did in order to trick me. (I have reported them with the 'Dispute an item purchased while playing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Game' link, so we'll see what happens.)

What may be the worst part of this is Facebook has apparently cached my credit card information. I had those credits on hand (left overs from when I bought some stuff in Galaxy Legion) but it bothers me that an app can snag credits without confirmation and that Facebook has stored the information needed to sell me more credits. What if that button had cost 50 credits? Would it have auto-charged my credit card to buy them?

Intel Extreme Masters

There was a pretty big eSports tournament held a couple weeks ago which featured a League of Legends event. I've been slowly making my way through the replays of all the games and there have been some wacky things going on so far. Support Nunu. AP Tristana. AD Kennen. Dogs and cats living together. It's insane! And interesting to watch...

Check it out here...

Campaign Manager 2008: A Breakthrough?

I had a game of Campaign Manager 2008 finish yesterday where I built an infinite deck and lost. I'll need to look into the game more to see what really went wrong but I tried to get aggressive with playing out attack cards once I went infinite and lost control of the game. I scored up several states in a row but ended up behind after that. But what is really interesting about the game is my opponent used a two card combo to pretty good effect against me and I think it might have potential to break open the stalemate...

There's one difference between the two decks that I have yet to cover. Each player has three media support cards in their card pool. Two of these three cards are the standard 'pick what happens when a new event comes up' ilk which seem ok but not overpowering. The third one for Obama makes your opponent roll twice on the 'bad stuff' chart when he goes negative. The McCain card means McCain doesn't roll at all when he goes negative.

This is interesting but I rarely see anyone go negative. The problem is 3 of the 4 'go negative' cards actually require you to discard 2 extra cards to play them. I do this every now and then to win a powerful state but the problem is it sets you back a lot in card quantity. The 4th card doesn't require a discard but doesn't really coordinate well with itself. It gives you 1 defense and 1 economy in a single state.

So what my opponent did was he set up the no roll card and then kept cycling through his very small deck to play that card over and over. The support gains might be unrelated but Obama can't counter both of them. Eventually you'll get into a position to just overwhelm him in one category or the other and he doesn't have a counter. Even if he plays the same card he has to roll for bad stuff and 1 time in 6 McCain will net a support so Obama just loses in this situation...

But is it sustainable? Pretend we hit a 2 card deck with 2 cantrips in the discard. Open with the negative. Then play Oprah into a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. We're back in the same gamestate as at the start except we've gained 5 support over 4 actions. This is certainly sustainable!

Now that I look at it a little more this seems decent even without the right media support card in play. Assuming it's an infinite vs infinite game the extra card draws won't help your opponent and the key demographic swap does nothing so 4 of the 6 outcomes have no game effect. And even when the negative roll hurts you the best it can do is give your opponent back the support you'd gained. Tempo might work out poorly for you but by and large this seems like it should allow you to break out of the stalemate! Time to put a higher focus on drafting that card!

WBC 2012 Trials

Voting recently finished for the trial events at the World Boardgaming Championships this coming year. Personally I didn't get around to voting (I signed up at the event last year and wasn't really sure how to vote without signing up again. I didn't care enough to figure it out so I just let other people decide my destiny.) 22 of the 25 trial events were events at last year's WBC so there isn't really a lot of turnover going on. 2 of the remaining 3 events are returning from minor absences. Goa is back after taking last year off and Diplomacy returns after taking 3 years off.

Diplomacy in particular is an interesting choice since how do you determine the winner? Some games will finish with one clear winner but often a Diplomacy game ends in some sort of stalemate. Apparently the last time it was an event they played 3 rounds and you scored points based on your finish in those rounds based on number of countries alive in the draw and number of supply centers each of those countries owned. I would imagine such a scoring system is rife with people backstabbing each other trying to whittle down the number of survivors in a draw... Then they add up your best 2 scores and advance 7 people to a final? I doubt I'll be willing to set aside time to play in 2 or 3 full Diplomacy games but I think it's a good event to have. Diplomacy is one of the truly iconic board games in my mind and it just feels right to have it at WBC.

Especially since the one truly iconic game they'd been running, Risk, has fallen out this year. I recently read through all of the event reports for last year's WBC and Risk didn't have one. The GM apparently didn't submit a report which killed the event off entirely for next year. If Risk wants back in then it'll have to get voted in as a trial for 2013. I normally read all the event reports each year and I don't really remember ever seeing a non-submitted report. I don't know if they purge them from the system eventually or get write-ups way after the fact or what. But there were FIVE of them this year. Egizia, Macao, Risk, Storm Over Stalingrad, and Stronghold. Egizia would have been a century event so it got bumped to trial status (it did get voted back in) and the other four were just killed off. It's sad. I like reading the event reports even for games I don't play and have no intention of playing so it's unfortunate that there were 5 no-shows this time.

At any rate, this year's trials... 24 have been events before. What's the 25th? Well, it turns out it received the most votes of any game which is pretty amazing. The game? A Few Acres of Snow. This game has quickly become my favourite game on Yucata. My record in the game is pretty good so far as well... 46-2. The two losses were both tied games where I lost the tiebreaker. (Apparently the French win a tie game.) Both times I didn't realize the game was even going to end, sadly, or I probably could have found an extra point somewhere on my last turn. Having it as an event at WBC has made me even more excited for WBC this year  if that's even possible. I have a new goal... Win this event!