Found a used copy of Harvest Moon A Wonderful Life on GC for $4. I had it once sold it for $30 many many many years ago had the itch to play. SO here I go again. Plant water harvest

When I've had spare time I've been tackling a handful more PS3 games now that I can catch up! MGS4 was as epic as I'd hoped although the sneaking element seem a bit shadowed by boss fights to me this time. GTAIV is shaping up pretty well, driving is giving me grief though!

Got a demo for a quirky little puzzler called Stacking which was very entertaining. A cool gameplay mechanic, nice sound a visuals and multiple solutions to objectives are making me think that I'll fork out for the full version.

I've been cracking out a few Gameboy games on my recently jailbroken iTouch just for a few laughs, also my girlfriend's developing an old school text adventure for iOS as part of her dissertation dicussing retro games on iPhone/iPad, it's pretty cool and coming along pretty quickly. Having this jailbroken pod means we can test it out for real without having to pay Apple's dev costs. If it does work out well, I'll see if she'll consider getting it on the App Store (or at least Cydia.)

I'm way late to the Burnout Paradise party, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm not much of a driving or racing game fan but I love the Burnout games. The open world setup is interesting; I think it works from an atmospheric perspective, providing a really cohesive environment that's great to just cruise around creating havoc, but sometimes the inability to warp is frustrating.

I'm also playing The Next Big Thing, an upcoming adventure game from Pendulo Studios (they made the Runaway games). They sent me a pre-release copy - apparently I'm some kind of adventure game expert.

The production values -- visuals especially -- are fantastic. It has an unusual narrative structure whereby the game is broken into pseudo chapters and checkpoints, with progress from each one accompanied by a brief voice-over from a TV-style narrator. The hint system is one of the best I've seen, although seasoned adventure fans probably wouldn't need it, and interaction is pretty standard adventuring fare. I'm enjoying the dialogue, too. There was this one ridiculous discussion I had with a fly-man hybrid about the term peculiar and the way in which it applies as a descriptor of another character -- a huge alien stunt actor and poet with a high tolerance for pain.

back to Xenosaga Ep. I - Der Wille zur Macht. Beat Ep III and needed to get the early plot straight since it had been a few years. Definitely amazed with how much in the first game knows and refers to content only revealed in the second/third, but yeah, the battles and puzzles are a little more forced. Also, I'm recording the cutscenes... I can conclusively now say this game is roughly 25% cutscene. Crazy.

Meanwhile, I've also modded my NES2 with A/V-out and am periodically taking stabs at Blaster Master. Still not sure whether I approve of the US plot vs the Japanese, but the mechanic/gameplay concept is awesome. After seeing the Sofia the 3rd perler at Awesome Games Done Quick, I'm also working up a fully-articulated Lego model that I may donate to the next SDA charity marathon...

And this is why I have the game installed onto my internal HD via HD Advance. The load times were becoming atrocious and with battles being slow enough as it is (front/back end loading) I just had to run off the HD. Thankfully I have one of the rarer DVD5 format discs that didn't need a DVD9 rip/concat.

Sean I'm a huge fan of BM USA. I also love Below on the GB and believe it or not the WiiWare BM is outstanding. Give it a shot if you have the "means".

Squishy Tia wrote:


Odd... I'm finding the playable areas load slower than the movies. I can usually guess when a cutscene is over because the transition is twice as long. Also, hey, when the cutscene is 15 minutes, I'm not going to complain too loudly about cumulative 30 seconds of load spliced in between shots.

seanstar wrote:


The biggest part of loading is the battles. While relatively fast for its time, it's painfully slow when you're used to playing games off a HD on a computer where load times are usually minimal. The transitions between playable areas on my machine is no more than about 2-3 seconds tops, even coming from cutscene to field area, obviously because I installed it onto my internal HD. It also is the only reason I found Wild Arms 5 even remotely playable. There were areas that took upwards of 20 seconds to load even off the HD with battles taking 5 seconds sometimes to start, which would be magnified by a disc playthrough.

Mana Khemia ~ Alchemists of Al-Revis (Playstation 2)- This game is... something like Ar Tonelico's kid brother, and pretty much undemographable in western culture. It's a NIS America RPG built on the same overall engine as Atelier Iris and Ar Tonelico, including vibrant 2D-in-3D graphics, thick audio scoring, character-relation side-quests, unique takes on JRPG party-battle mechanics, and a pathologically deep alchemic item creation system. However, in spite of a later release date, MK is not AT in soundtrack, perhaps visuals, and definitely for reasons which get back to the undemographability. The whole scope of the game is 4 years at a European-styled live-away high-school-level magic academy. The amount of game they fit in such a narrow context is impressive, but it feels a little constrained nonetheless in that pretty much all plot elements are inherently school-y no matter how much raw content they push. The game was probably targeted at young-high-school-age Japanese, but with so many fewer live-away private academies in the US, the nearest ready metaphor is college while the game itself is rated and translated at the E10+ middle-school level. While still throwing swear words. And cracking sexy-exploitative-nurse, polyandry, geriatric homo-pedophile, and other decidedly mature situational humor. And at least strolling past some fairly heady exposition on the nature of life, living, death, dying, relationships, trust, and how experience shapes differing points of view. Which no E10+ middle-schooler would recognize and no college/postgrad/professional would ever go far enough past the bright exterior and shallow surface-context to find if they weren't a crazy NIS/game-design enthusiast. So yeah... it's a mixed bag, but if you've never played a NIS America title, it will be like nothing you've ever played (in a generally positive way), and if you're into those crazy Japanese, I think you'd enjoy it enough to recommend buying it if you see it, unless the store also has Ar Tonelico and you can only afford one.

Final Fantasy VIII (Playstation)- The Distant Worlds concert (if it's in your area, GET TICKETS) gave me a craving to finally buy and play this one, if only for completion (now played at least a chunk of every FF 1-12). It has been... worth the $9.95, but... yeah. Worth the $9.95. Props on the improvements in 3D-over-FMV gameplay, but between the designed-for-frustration area layouts, zero-instruction minigames, "leveling" system, and plot that cannot seem to make any significant advancement without the aid of pathological irrationality, will-siphoning cliche, or gratuitous eschewing of the laws of reality... this one is likely going on the "energy isn't worth the entertainment reward" pile.
Lunar: Eternal Blue (Sega CD): Why did you have to go under, Working Designs, WHYYYY?!?! *sob* Cosmetically simple, but solid RPG with good pacing and strong audience engagement. The classic Working Designs humor is a little dated, but since the game doesn't rely on it, that doesn't really matter. I had some reservations about the pay-to-save system, but it seems to work without being too obtrusive. Cutscenes and VO are impressive for the era, and quite sufficient to get the story across without being overbearing. The fact that I'm enjoying this one more than a game from a bigger studio released 5 years and 1 hardware generation later speaks volumes.

It's been a while since I played Lunar: SSS for PSX - what is the pay to save system you're referring to?

Thanks to the recent article, I've finally gotten around to playing Link's Awakening. I'm up to the 7th dungeon after 3 days of playing. Probably would've made it there much quicker if I had a real Gameboy I could carry around, but I've been playing it on my girlfriends MacBook. (For those interested, I'm using BGB through Crossover.) So far this is some of the most fun I've had playing a Zelda game in a very long time. I'm a long time Zelda fan and have beaten every console game, but haven't played any of the handheld games. Link's Awakening always seemed kiddy to me, but that's not the case at all. In fact, the sense of humor is my favorite part of the game. I'm very much looking forward to finishing this game.

Tia- yeh, from what I recall, SSS didn't have pay-to-save, at least not n the PSX release (haven't grabbed the SCD original yet). Eternal Blue (the sequel) lets you save anywhere, BUT each save costs an amount of party magic-experience which increases the further you get in the game. It's not actually as intrusive as it sounds, but it does prevent gaming the system.

Ha! That reminds of the damn ink ribbons in Resident Evil.

Right now I'm playing a bunch of different games:

I recently finished Puzzle Agent 2 which I found just as entertaining as the first game. The expressions Graham Annable gives to his characters are hilarious. See this for an example.

I finished playing Portal 2 a while ago and have finally gotten around to playing the co-op multiplayer this week. It's a challenge at first but once you both get in gear things feel a little more comfortable. Still mind-boggling though, in a good way.

I've put the most amount of my gaming time into Far Cry 2 recently. It's been around for a little while so I thought I'd get it on the cheap. There are plenty of flaws but it's still a pretty engrossing game. It plays a little like an FPS RPG as your situation changes and you gather upgrades for your various skills and weapons, meet new buddies and fight against malaria (yes, your character has malaria from the get-go). The best thing is the amount of freedom, the worst thing is that the world is massive, and it takes forever to get everywhere. Additionally, it's buggy and there are other irritating problems. I've had to reload my game a couple of times after characters and other items have trapped me so that I literally can't continue and I'm stuck between a door a guy doing situps. THAT is really annoying.

I messed around a bit with Far Cry 2 a few months ago. I'm hoping to get back to it later this year.

I've been playing Picross 3D on and off for over a year now. I love it. The puzzles are always engaging and seldom frustrating, plus I find I can do a puzzle while waiting for something -- such as an important file download, my iMac throwing me a spinning beach ball, or a lengthy reboot into Windows.

I'm working my way through Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which is reminding me how much I love that kind of action-adventure-exploration hybrid. It feels like a great update to a classic, with more modern platforming mechanics and less, uh, blocky level design. Speaking of level design, I always thought the early Tomb Raider games had brilliant level design. This remake has (thus far) reinforced that sentiment. I haven't played Tomb Raider Legend yet (that'll likely be next), but I'm beginning to think Anniversary might be the best Tomb Raider -- it's definitely better than the uneven Tomb Raider Underworld, and Tomb Raider 2, which would probably be the other contender, hasn't quite aged well enough to beat it out when you ignore the time context.

I've also been playing I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. I always wanted to play this game, but I never got around to it. Seems pretty true to the style of the original story, but not *quite* as horrific. It plays just like every other point-and-click adventure game from the 90s, but the puzzles are generally logical (in a twisted, evil sentient AI with a grudge against the playable characters kind of way). The dialogue is well written and competently acted, which is a relief given the literary source material.

Definitely give FC2 a bit of time, I wasn't sure at first.

I've always had a difficult time with Tomb Raider games. I love the level design but for I-III (the games I played most) I never really liked the controls, no matter how much I played. I'm interested in the reboot they're working on at the moment, it looks pretty dark and intense.

I should add that I got Portal 2 for PS3 which includes an activation code for Steam, meaning I can sync my saves and it play it on the console and my Mac. The Steam overlay on the PS3 is pretty seamless and I'm hoping Valve continue to branch out with that. Cross-platform co-op really is an excellent feature, if anyone gets the game and fancies playing the co-op I'm always up for a game!

Prince of Persia Trilogy upscaled rerelease for PS3. Never got around to playing them on PS2. Fun games. Gonna get ICO and Shadow of Colossus Collection upscaled for PS3 next.

Emulator front:
FF3 (US) on my iPhone when I have long breaks.
Just beat ActRaiser again on my Mac
Gonna play Borderlands for my Mac soon. I have it for Xbox 360 and beat it already, but someone is borrowing my Xbox. My PS3 had definitely become my system of choice, so I lent it out when my buddy's red ringed. Haven't missed it except for games I wanted to replay.

menace690 wrote:


I can't wait for the Ico collection, they're definitely some of my favourite games, especially SOTC. I'm also really looking forward the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection although I'm irritated about the lack of the original MGS. I know it's available on PSN already but an upscale of the Twin Snakes remake that appeared on GC would have been great. Apparently that was halted by some sort of legal issue with Nintendo. Bummer.

I might consider Prince of Persia now that you've mentioned it, if the price is right.

I AM ZOPHAR! MASTER OF SH***********t....
So yeh. Lunar 2. Total awesome. And FFVIII is pretty much abandoned.
Now my queue is, courtesy in part to a crazy-lucky haul at the local vintage store Friday, Vay (SCD), Lunar (SCD), Vagrant Story (PS1), SaGa Frontier (PS1), Ogre Battle (PS1), Valkyrie Profile (PS1), Valkyrie Profile 2 (PS2), Atelier Iris (PS2), Dark CLoud (PS2) and Rogue Galaxy (PS2). Anyone want to help inform which I start next? I suppose getting a PS3 and starting Hyperdimension Neptunia is also an option, but I just put down for a new quad-3.4 27" iMac, so I'd rather go at least one more game before buying more new hardware...

My friend bought me an iPad 2 so I've been playing one of my all time favorites that is actually good on the pad. Pirates! So far it's the best looking version of the game I've seen. I thought that title went to the PSP or the Wii but no the Pad wins in my book. Dancing is hard as all get out though tapping all over the screen. I would've liked to see more customization of the ships like in the Wii version but hey I'll take and give on this platform.