Monday, March 29, 2010
Summer School
SHOULD I DO IT?!?!?!?!? Chinese intensive, courses 1 2 3 in six weeks. Sounds like hell. If I want to graduate on time, I really really should do this. May even be able to do some upper div Japanese if I do this. Gwuh. I really might do this, I'm going to hate myself for this though.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Still not convinced but...
HO! Touche FFXIII, touche, that is what you call an unexpected twist. I don't believe it actually happened, given that...well... alrite this is impossible, SPOILERS IN FOLLOWING:
I dont think Sazh is dead. Yea, he shot himself, yea, hes in a coffin all dead looking, but lets make somethin clear: I just acquired his eidolon, but havent used it. Would they really bother to create an eidolon for Sazh without showing it off first? No. Square never misses a chance to show off, this game makes that readily apparent. The whole kill off a character has already been done, doing it again would be gimicky, square has been pretty fuckin lame recently, but I dont believe tehy are that lame yet. the story still sucks, the game still kind of sucks, but this is a step in the right direction, shit is happening now, not just pointless melodrama. well theres still that too, but at least actual evetnts are happening too.
I dont think Sazh is dead. Yea, he shot himself, yea, hes in a coffin all dead looking, but lets make somethin clear: I just acquired his eidolon, but havent used it. Would they really bother to create an eidolon for Sazh without showing it off first? No. Square never misses a chance to show off, this game makes that readily apparent. The whole kill off a character has already been done, doing it again would be gimicky, square has been pretty fuckin lame recently, but I dont believe tehy are that lame yet. the story still sucks, the game still kind of sucks, but this is a step in the right direction, shit is happening now, not just pointless melodrama. well theres still that too, but at least actual evetnts are happening too.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Some Initial Thoughts
...on FFXIII. I've played ~15 hours, so I'm guessing I'm about a third/halfway through.
Holy crap is it beautiful. Graphically it really has no peer, at least not that I am aware of. The cinematics, of course, are stunning, but the insane amount of detail but into the characters and environments with the in-game engine is just mind blowing. So visuals are a big plus.
Unfortunately, that's kind of where the pluses end. Square kind of took a big step away from their MMO experiments, and, never thought I'd say this but, it's kind of too bad. It's as if they said, "hey, the last game that was loved unconditionally by everyone was FFX, lets do that again, just focus all our effort onto graphics and nothing else."
That's probably a little unfair, but the way they made this game, comparisons to FFX are inevitable. I had read prior to playing that FFXIII was super linear, which I wasnt too worried about since, well, FFX wasn't exactly an open world game, but holy crap by linear people mean literally the world is linear, you walk down straight corridors for hours. Beautiful corridors, but corridors nonetheless, and it does get tiresome. FFX was pretty forward moving, herding you from place to place in a predestined order, but it didnt really bother me since the story was awfully captivating and the characters were all either interesting or at least not painfully annoying. And on top of this the gameplay was first class, the sphere grid, while simple and straight forward at first, allowed for endless amounts of time to be wasted planning different paths for you party. Even if it didn't really matter in the end, targeting certain spells and stat boosts you wanted in the future was tons of fun. FFXIII fails in all these aspects. The story, while being a pretty interesting concept, is fairly boring. This may simply be because the characters are super flat, only character I'm fond of at all is Lightening, and I have to admit her whole emo-soldier bit is gettin tiresome. And then there is Vanille, holy shit why is there Vanille. I suspect in any other game I would despise Hope, but because Vanille is in this game I'm just so dumbfounded as to why such a worthless character is in the game to care. O and the level up system just plain sucks. Totally mindless, and it caps you periodically so you dont breeze through the game too easily! Which is ridiculous since the game is pretty fuckin easy to begin with.
The combat, I will say, is awesome fun to execute, but if you don't really care you can easily get by by mindlessly setting up a healer and combatants and jamming X to victory. I mean, theres a fucking AUTO-attack/heal/whatever command, its as if they are saying that battle is just an obligatory filler from point A to B of the story, fucking retarded, makes me care still less.
So lemme just set straight since this post is comming off really negative, I am enjoying my time with the game so far, but it has been a pretty disappointing experience. It just feels like it could have been better. It's shiny, but from where I'm at, it lacks depth. I'm hopeful things pick up, like the story gets a little more interesting. The overall framework of the game kind of sucks, so that really is the only thing that can improve, hopefully something else besides, "we're enemies of everyone now! Im angry! Im sad!" happens. Hopefully endgame is good too, since the whole level up system is micromanaged by the game so tightly, endgame should be really really well balanced right? Normally endgame of RPGs are really easy since you over level on sidequests, so im hopeful in that regard too.
Holy crap is it beautiful. Graphically it really has no peer, at least not that I am aware of. The cinematics, of course, are stunning, but the insane amount of detail but into the characters and environments with the in-game engine is just mind blowing. So visuals are a big plus.
Unfortunately, that's kind of where the pluses end. Square kind of took a big step away from their MMO experiments, and, never thought I'd say this but, it's kind of too bad. It's as if they said, "hey, the last game that was loved unconditionally by everyone was FFX, lets do that again, just focus all our effort onto graphics and nothing else."
That's probably a little unfair, but the way they made this game, comparisons to FFX are inevitable. I had read prior to playing that FFXIII was super linear, which I wasnt too worried about since, well, FFX wasn't exactly an open world game, but holy crap by linear people mean literally the world is linear, you walk down straight corridors for hours. Beautiful corridors, but corridors nonetheless, and it does get tiresome. FFX was pretty forward moving, herding you from place to place in a predestined order, but it didnt really bother me since the story was awfully captivating and the characters were all either interesting or at least not painfully annoying. And on top of this the gameplay was first class, the sphere grid, while simple and straight forward at first, allowed for endless amounts of time to be wasted planning different paths for you party. Even if it didn't really matter in the end, targeting certain spells and stat boosts you wanted in the future was tons of fun. FFXIII fails in all these aspects. The story, while being a pretty interesting concept, is fairly boring. This may simply be because the characters are super flat, only character I'm fond of at all is Lightening, and I have to admit her whole emo-soldier bit is gettin tiresome. And then there is Vanille, holy shit why is there Vanille. I suspect in any other game I would despise Hope, but because Vanille is in this game I'm just so dumbfounded as to why such a worthless character is in the game to care. O and the level up system just plain sucks. Totally mindless, and it caps you periodically so you dont breeze through the game too easily! Which is ridiculous since the game is pretty fuckin easy to begin with.
The combat, I will say, is awesome fun to execute, but if you don't really care you can easily get by by mindlessly setting up a healer and combatants and jamming X to victory. I mean, theres a fucking AUTO-attack/heal/whatever command, its as if they are saying that battle is just an obligatory filler from point A to B of the story, fucking retarded, makes me care still less.
So lemme just set straight since this post is comming off really negative, I am enjoying my time with the game so far, but it has been a pretty disappointing experience. It just feels like it could have been better. It's shiny, but from where I'm at, it lacks depth. I'm hopeful things pick up, like the story gets a little more interesting. The overall framework of the game kind of sucks, so that really is the only thing that can improve, hopefully something else besides, "we're enemies of everyone now! Im angry! Im sad!" happens. Hopefully endgame is good too, since the whole level up system is micromanaged by the game so tightly, endgame should be really really well balanced right? Normally endgame of RPGs are really easy since you over level on sidequests, so im hopeful in that regard too.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Well at least it's behind me
Finished my take-home final, so when I hand it over tomorrow my quarter will be done. What a fucking disaster of a quarter. One dropped class, one class I really really hope I don't fail but am not confident about at all, and one class where I should have done much better had I actually applied myself. But it is done, nothing can be changed now. Next quarter! Next quarter promises to be my best ever. No evidence, just a gut feeling. Hopefully motivation will return, hopefully a lot of smiles and hopefully not so many sad faces.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
O God...
I dont put much stock into spring training results. By much I mean none really, its fun to look at but I realize by now that they mean pretty much nothing. But holy shit, that just does not happen if you are a big leaguer of Ben Sheet's caliber. Well, it doesn't usually happen to any big leaguer. Am I worried? A bit, perhaps he is hurt, but hopefully its just a bit of an outlier performance, maybe everyone in the field was hungover or something.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Faillllll
Bombed my oral test in Japanese today. Feeling sorry for myself at the moment. I really have to change things next quarter. There really is nothing more dangerous than success, just allows laziness and complacency to seep in. Though on the flip side, there's no better motivator than failure. I really really really hate myself sometimes. And by sometimes I mean right now, how fucking stupid can I get.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Mixed Bag
Saw the first blossoms of the season on some trees today. Was really pretty/uplifting. I also had my first allergy attack of the season. ah life...
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