All week I was playing Etrian Odyssey: Millennium Girl: 63 hours now and level 54. It’s interesting to figure out how to get monsters to drop certain items. Some have to be paralyzed first, or frozen, or fought only with smashing weapons. There’s a huge variety of approaches that will elicit certain items. Occasionally, a person in the pub will tell you how to do it, but most of the time you just have to figure it out by trial and error.
My only day this week with a console saw me play some Ni No Kuni on my criminally underused PS3. I finally got sick and tired of the battle system. It attempts to mix the strategy of turn-based gameplay with real-time, but it doesn’t quite work out. At times you want to get quickly to a spell, or throw up a Defense, and you have to click around the bubbles over your character to get to them. Sometimes it takes several clicks and sometimes you just miss it trying to select that option as fast as you can while a giant boss is about to unleash a powerful attack. Your health bar is way over in the upper left hand corner, and I’m always forgetting about it because it’s so far from the action. I have to glance over there while running around and selecting options for attacks as quick as I can. This results in me getting killed if I’m not always looking over there. It’s just a very hectic battle system that makes you panic and move your eyes all over and curse that the Defense option isn’t always one fast click away. I had to give up on a boss that seemed too difficult for me and my familiars, and backtrack to gain experience, and explore, and finish a side quest. Along the way, I got killed after forgetting to watch my health meter on what I thought was an easy encounter, and rage quit. Grrr!
I explored the Playstation store for a while and was amazed at how many games are free to play with my PS Plus membership. I could go a long way just playing free stuff if I wanted to. Then I looked for a Dynamic Theme for Ratchet & Clank and found one after a pretty lengthy search. You would think just typing in “Ratchet” would bring up everything related but it didn’t. It only brought up the games and their DLC but not the themes. I had to go into Extras and search through the entire library of Dynamic Themes. Annoying! Anyway, it’s a cool theme to finally replace my awesome Pixel Junk Monsters Dynamic Theme that I’ve had for years. And I downloaded the Crunchyroll ap just for curiosity sake.
Then I played some Valkyria Chronicles. My last save was from 2009 when the game came out! Boy it’s been a while. I started over from scratch and watched the cinematics and played the first few missions. After that first mission when the titles come up, I started to get goose bumps of excitement; the music and the rousing speech really got to me. The game is still beautiful, but somewhat showing its age. I remember it being a little more vibrant in the colors; however, this is probably my TV at my friend’s place, which is very old now. My TV at home is world’s better. I actually looked up TV’s during a break and found I could get a really good 32 inch TV for under $300. That’s a lot less than I paid four or five years ago for a similar TV.
While I was looking over the shoulder of my friend on Xbox 360, I noticed the sale for this week showing 75% off the Serious Sam games. I have the first one, but last week I almost bought the other 2 as these are must-have games for me. Luckily I waited because they were $2.50 each this week. I had to wait until I got home to fire up my 360 and purchase them before the sale ended.
I’m going to North Carolina to my Mom’s beach house for Thanksgiving this year and I’m thinking about trading my PS3 for the Slim version. The 40 gig PS3 I have is enormous as I found out carrying it to my friends place today. It would be nice to have the smaller machine with a larger hard drive for my trip. When I go to pick up Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus later today, I’m going to get a price on all that.
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