The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

Ryan and I have moved on to Normal AI in Supreme Commander.  I’ve improved my production to the point where I can keep up with him now, but I still tech up too slowly, and there’s still a bit of stagnation at certain points.  We were still able to win fairly handily, thanks to Ryan’s early and constant harassment of the enemy.  He kept them busy while I teched up and made an engineering-corps assault on the center of the map.  That center island was a good staging ground for tech 2 artillery and Ryan’s fleet of naval gunships, which penned the AI in until my WTF Bomber and Ryan’s attack fleet could get in there to finish the job.

I messed around a bit with Trackmania United… it’s just as fun as the previous games, especially in platform mode, although it’s still frustrating at times.  I’m also not sure I like the new, shiny graphical design… I liked it better when it was a little more cartoony, and when it was a vaguely top-down view, like old arcade racing games.  Ah well… it still feels like it’ll be a nice time-killer.

Ryan and I just finished our first full game of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, and it was pretty epic.  After our ignominious defeat the other night against three AI of varying difficulties on Seton’s Clutch, this time we went up against two Easy AI to give ourselves a chance to re-acclimate to the game.  I played as the Seraphim, and worked primarily on not getting stuck in expansion brainlock… meaning I pushed myself to keep building and expanding at all times, and never sit back and just watch what was going on.  I think I succeeded, for the most part, at least in building sheer numbers of buildings and units, but my teching up was pretty slow, so I can’t really say I was instrumental in our victory.  Ryan did most of the work of keeping the enemy hordes at bay while we built up our production capabilities, though I can say that my T2 fighter-bombers did a fine job of removing enemy ships that were bombarding our firebases from out of range.  My forces also sealed the deal, when I threw 150 or so T2 land units and around 100 fighter-bombers in behind a T4 Experimental Bomber (otherwise known as the WTF Bomber), supported by four battleships for coastal bombardment.  While I followed that with two more Experimental Bombers to clean up, we had time to mess around and build and play with some of the new experimentals in the expansion pack.  The game was finally ended, appropriately, with a shot from the Experimental Strategic Missile Launcher, a super-nuke, right on the bow of a submerged nuclear submarine that had been taking potshots at our shields for the last half of the game.  Woo!

I’m sitting on the couch at Alice’s parents’ house, watching Lucy play Animal Crossing on her new Gamecube.  I have a headache and a phlegm-filled sore throat, and my feet are cold.  I think I’ve decidedly shifted over to being a summer person.  Or maybe just a not-winter person.  It’s too cold for convertible driving or comfortable riding, things and people are closed for the holidays, and everything is just gloomier.  I guess I can’t appreciate that as much anymore now that I personally am not quite so gloomy.

I got a pretty good haul for Christmas, though, so that was nice.  Alice and I splurged on each other, so she ended up getting me Blankets, The Name of the Rose, Casino Royale, and the first season of House.  The rest of her family got me a couple of Bill Bryson books, a radioactive reindeer (don’t ask), a giant stuffed penguin, and a 1:18 Peugeot 307 WRC model.  Woo!

We’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 around here.  Alice and I suddenly have become able to play GH3 on Hard, though we’re currently stuck on the tier of songs containing Queens of the Stone Age’s 3s and 7s and Muse’s Knights of Cydonia.  It’s still a pretty big improvement over the last time we touched the game.  Magical!  Rock Band is even better, though.  Ryan, Sean and I took out a 12-song set the other night, which left us feeling pretty awesome, but left my throat feeling a bit raw.  Then last night, Ryan, Alice and I beat the Hall of Fame set, effectively beating the game… although there is still the 58-song Endless Set to unlock and beat.  Jebus.

This damnable cough is never going to go away.  I’ve had this thing for damn near a month now.  Balls!  (That one was for you, Trish.  :D)

It’s vaguely fun to dig into the data files for Puzzle Quest and make a character that completely and utterly rapes the AI, in order to get revenge for my first time through the game.  It’s great when you come up against a boss that took you about twenty tries to beat legitimately, and then pull out your custom Uber Spell of Doom.  Take that, Dugog!

I feel bad about vehicle neglect.  I haven’t really taken the bikes out at all for weeks, except a very short blast on April to run an errand, and Faye hasn’t been used for anything but commuting for a long time.  I need to wash all three of them, too, except that I don’t really have a good place to do it in the apartment complex.  I think it’s just about time for a shotgun car-washing….

Alice and I had our 16th monthiversary this past week, and it was pretty glorious, though low-key.  I love you, babe!   I’m looking forward to our 600th monthiversary. 

That’s right, we’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band around here lately. Ryan was awesome enough to help us acquire a copy, with quite the substantial discount, and we’ve been rocking out quite heavily. We even had a Rock Band party the other night, where our rock band consisted of–count ‘em–thirteen people.

I still haven’t gotten around to finishing Heavenly Sword, although I’m right on the cusp. I can’t help feeling like maybe I just haven’t spent enough time with the game, and that if I put in more replays of various levels and put more effort into getting better at the combat system before I wrapped it up (I’m currently a Button Masher Supreme), I would come away with a more rewarding experience. I doubt I’ll actually get to doing it, though… too many other things to do. I got a new-to-me hard drive (thanks again to Ryan), so I have disk space again after a very long time. This means that I can get crackin’ on The Witcher, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, and others. This in addition to Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, and more and more. Argle. Give me more hours in a day!

I’m almost over my illness, I think… I’m still coughing fairly often, and I still wake up with a sore throat every day, but it goes away pretty quickly and just subsides into itchiness and the aforementioned coughing. Alice, however, seems to have just begun the cycle, having caught it on the tail end of my contagion. She spent the day with a very bad sore throat, as well as some nausea. Here’s hoping she doesn’t have it as bad as I did!

Heavenly Sword is, for the most part, fairly awesome. It’s really just me that sucks, as I tend to at action games. But sucking is frustrating! And frustration leads me to feel that the game is no fun, and therefore suck. I just spent a couple of hours carving through most of the latter half of the game. The fights against regular grunts are occasionally frustrating, when you’re ganged up on by a bunch of guys and it feels like there’s no chance to attack, but the main frustrations for me came during boss fights. These guys are fast, and it feels like you’re expected to just go through trial and error to figure out their attack patterns and what to do. I don’t like trial and error, especially when there’s a loading delay of a couple of minutes between each instance of trial and error. I’m currently stopped after a session of error against what I think is the last boss… or at least, one form of him. Bohaaaaaaaan!

The first segment of the winter gaming storm is going pretty decently.  I haven’t mustered the desire (or the disk space) to touch any part of Orange Box aside from Portal and Team Fortress 2.  I suppose that at some point I’ll crank up Half Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two, but who knows.  I spent a fair chunk of today grinding away at Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, trying to turn my party into a decent variety of something other than Squires and Chemists.  How did I ever play this game without massive grinding?  I managed somehow, years ago, but damned if I know how.  I’m getting Halo 3 tomorrow, so that Ryan, James and I can play the coop campaign over Live, and soon after that, I’ll be acquiring Guitar Hero 3 and Hellgate London, both of which will probably devastate my free time.  Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness is tempting me strongly, but hey… didn’t I just buy a SRPG for the PSP?  Damn.  I also have urges to pick up some slightly older games, like Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, and Odin Sphere.  And hey, didn’t another Phoenix Wright game just come out?

I went in for my first eye exam in five years or so, and ordered a shiny new pair of glasses.  I haven’t really been happy with the pair I’ve been using ever since I broke my primary pair in a fit of rage two Decembers ago… they’re too small in many ways, and I’ve long since destroyed the magnetic clip-on sunglasses that came with them.  One of the nosepads, which I didn’t even know could come off, vanished a couple of days ago, and though I’ve since discovered that I actually could replace them (I thought the glasses hadn’t been made for too long), I decided it was still high time to get a replacements.

Alice and I failed twice to go to the corn maze this weekend.  Sucktastic!  We’re going to try again on Thursday night, and hope that there are no crowds (and no inclement weather).

Luckily, it was a productive weekend in other aspects.  We got some errands done, I fixed the Camaro’s electrical problem (I think), and I got some paint thinner to try and fix the faucet in our backyard.  The faucet doesn’t seem to want to be fixed, but ah well.  It’s covered in paint from when the apartment complex got painted over with sprayers, so my shiny hose that I bought can’t thread tightly onto the faucet.  Sucktastic again!

It was a good weekend for video games, too.  I got a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics in, carved through Portal (I’m addicted to the ending credit song, by the way), and played some Team Fortress 2 with Ryan.  TF2 is good fun… anybody want to join us in playing online?  James?

We also watched Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, as well as last week’s Heroes episode, which catches us up.  This presents the problem, of course, that now we have to wait for a new episode to air every week  Sucktastic the third!  KHAAAAAAAAN!

I have corn muffins.  That will be all.

I finally got the goddamned PSP to update itself so that it would play Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and sat down on the couch, ready to put in a nice, solid hour of badguy-whackin’ before bed.  Alas, it was not to be…

I got past the introductory battle by dicking around in the back and figuring out how Squeenix renamed all the skills, while Agrias and Gafgarion did all the work on the front line.  Some cutscenes rolled, and I was put down in the second battle of the game, the first real fight.  I dug through my meager troop selection, found out that I had a couple of female badasses (around 75 Brave and Faith each), plunked down a 75ish-Faith chemist and another random male squire, and then the familiar map faded in.  I remembered it giving me problems before in the original Final Fantasy Tactics, because of the enemy chemist who went around tossing potions to all his buddies whenever I damaged them.  So right at the opening of the fight, I sent Ramza and one of the supersoldiers after him, while the rest of the gang hung out with Delita to take out the enemy squires.

Ahh, Delita… you magnificent bastard, foil of my every plan.  The fight started out just fine, with Delita running around recklessly smacking enemies like a headless chicken, and my troops putting down the guys he lost interest in.  It was a slow process, but Ramza and his companion took out the chemist with no real problems.  Along the way, though, my other uber-chick fell in battle.  No biggie, I thought… just mop up the remnants in less than three turns, and she won’t disappear.  So I refocused my efforts on taking out the rest of the enemies as efficiently as I could.  Part of that plan, however, which ended up being the fatal flaw, centered around assuming that Delita would attack the nearest enemy, especially if that enemy was just about dead.

I ended up with two nearly-dead enemies about half the map apart, with two full rounds left on the death timer for my unconscious babe-sassin.  Delita was standing between the two enemies, but closer to the one that was on the edges of the fight.  So I merrily issued orders sending the others away from that guy, assuming Big D would take care of him for me… big mistake.  He jogged on over to the other enemy and hit him with a sword.

What’s wrong with that, you ask?  Delita took care of one of the remaining dudes, it shouldn’t be a big problem to take out the other and end the fight, right?  Wrong.  Near the last man alive was the corpse of one of his friends who had fallen early in the battle.  Right after Delita’s turn ended, said friend turned into a sparkly little rejuvenation crystal.  The Last Man Standing casually strolled on over and took it, regaining all his health.  Two of my troops were able to reach him, but weren’t able to remove his newly-refilled hit points before my precious sleeping femme fatale faded into crystal herself.

Wyotech is pretty fun, I suppose.  We just got into the shop today after a week of boring-as-hell classroom time, in which I have to put up with about 40 trouble-making numbskulls and about 10 decent people… such is the demographic of my classmates.  It’s okay, though… I get to hear fun stories from the instructors about various experiences they’ve had working on cars, and today I got to rip apart and reassemble a 4G64.

Heavenly Sword is fairly fun, and really pretty (even if Alice can’t tell the difference between God of War II on an SDTV and Heavenly Sword in 720p on a 42″ plasma).  It’s frustrating at times, though, but that’s mostly just my general frustration with action games in general.  They aren’t very intuitive to me, and I get frustrated at things that I don’t pick up very easily right away.  The other part of my frustration with it is the shooting segments, where you shoot things from a first-person view, and then “aftertouch” them to their targets.  That frustration went away, though, as soon as I switched off the motion sensor control of aftertouch.  Good job, Sony, your little gimmick is more annoying than it is fun. 

I feel the urge for RPGs of any sort.  I hear Neverwinter Nights 2’s expansion is coming out relatively soon, and fixes a lot of the UI issues that made me stop playing the original game about half an hour in.  I’ll probably give that a shot….  Also, Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP is out.  I loved the original game, and this remake supposedly has lots of added bits that make it even better.  Who doesn’t love SRPGs?  Not me.