reviews Archives - Page 6 of 6

Harvest Moon: A Tale of Two Towns

October 29, 2011October 29, 2011 Laura Highcove

So new Harvest Moon game. After Bazzar, which I put down mid summer and never picked back up again. This one is called Tale of Two Towns, and oddly enough there are two towns. You pick whether you want to live in the farming Japanese style town of Konohana or the animal raising Eurepean style town of Bluebell. I started in Bluebell and moved over to Konohana in the summer. I will be moving back to Bluebell in Spring 2.

Bluebell Pluses:
Townsfolk (I like them better)
Focus on animals (Like animals)
Lots of flowers (So happy I can plant flowers again)
The man I want to marry lives here (Yay Cam)
Beehives (Intrigued by keeping bees)

Bluebell Minuses:
The mayor isn’t as good looking as Konohana’s mayor
Make money slower with animals (Though money still comes really fast in this game.)

Konohana Pluses:
Cute bachelor who likes horses
Make money faster with crops

Konohana Minuses:
Townsfolk (Just don’t like them as much…maybe cause so many are old.)
I’m getting disillusioned by growing crops (More on this below)

So as you can tell I just like Bluebell better in general. And end game I will likely max out my Bluebell farm.

Game Pluses:
The horse and carriage that carries all of your inventory around is just handy and cool.
They kept the dogs and cats that turn your animals in and out, which is really nice once you get them trained up.
There are “request” boards which are like quests for townsfolk. You bring them items and they give you stuff and money, which helps with the general monotony of HM games between festivals.
In addition there is a cooking festival every week which has a rather long cut-scene, but also helps with monotony.
There are “furrows” that allow you to water multiple crops in one shot, even with the lowest level watering can.
You can get an umbrella, which doesn’t do anything, but is totally cool.

Game Minuses:
The furrows are rather hard to pull off. Like really hard. And when you mess up you don’t only have to start over, but first you have to hammer what you already did back down. This has seriously pissed me off on many occasions. (When you upgrade the hoe this problem goes away.)
The higher level requests (everything above the lowest level) ask for items it is impossible for me to get at this part of the game, so it kinda just makes you feel bad.
The shops not only have more than one day a week that they’re closed, but close at 5pm, AND if it rains all day they’re also closed. Not only that, but they have a random assortment of a limited amount of items per day, so it’s possible to not be able to get a something you need for a rather long period of time. I didn’t see tea tree seeds through winter or spring of my first to second year.

Pokemon Black (and white)

March 10, 2011March 10, 2011 Laura Highcove

So being the pokemon fan that I am, along with the convenience of it coming out mere days before my birthday, I picked up Pokemon Black this past weekend. I started playing it. First impressions. Okay cool, we’re back to planning on going on a pokemon journey instead of having to save the professor and just accidentally picking up the starter. Eh, not bad that you have two childhood friends that pick up the pokemon you don’t choose and then show up in many story things as you go. Pretty bad that there are not many decent pokemon in the starting levels unless you want to use those god ugly monkeys. (Munna sucks btw, usually psychic types have some sort of redeeming features, but he’s slow AND has no defense…this’ll be my first game EVER going though without a psychic type.) Horrible that the ‘rival’ role is filled by a neurotic green haired thing who talks too much and ends up having a castle later. (OMG SPOILERS) Beyond horrible that there are different areas in black and white. The Black City as opposed to the White Forest. Sorry guys, it was bad enough you making some pokemon exclusive to a game pack color, but a whole area? BAD. BADBADBAD.

I’m warming up to some of the pokemon though, which I didn’t really think I’d do, but in general I just see every way it’s not as good as HeartGold/SoulSilver and it makes me cry. I haven’t picked it up in two days. I will get through it, but I’m not really sure what I have to look forward to.

OH GOD WHY!?

July 1, 2010July 1, 2010 Laura Highcove

Just got back from ‘The Last Airbender’ movie midnight showing.

Atrocious is not a strong enough word.

Final Fantasy XIII

June 6, 2010June 6, 2010 Laura Highcove

Been putting off this game until I was able to get done with *something* in my backlog of games. It does contain spoilers, which I’m warning you of even though we’re technically past the time limit for such bans.

I actually was really into looking into this game at the very beginning. Then when I only knew of two party members (Lightning and Snow) I kinda let it fall by the wayside so that I only saw the rest of the party members when I got the game. Was basically right about all of the first impressions of seeing those other characters, except for Fang, who I assumed was a caster and turned out to be a dragoon (or as close to it as she can without the class title).

Graphics are gorgeous, but then that’s to be expected. Graphics are always going to be amazing in games that have the budget.

Story so far is very angst ridden. I’m not sure they properly portrayed the fear of l’cie before you find out Serah is one. However, the pace at which you, the player, finds out what the heck fal’cie and l’cie and cei’th are is pretty good.

After picking up the manual, like above I though Fang was a caster and was wrong about that, but I knew Hope would be a little whiny brat, and he was but luckily he got over it and is now turning out to be pretty strong considering he can’t be more than 12 or 13. My first guess was that Cocoon was some sort of prison, but being ‘pets’ does make a lot more sense considering all three cities I’ve been to are a huge mall, a seaside resort, and an amusement park. I am looking forward to more clarification on the ‘factory’ as it were.

I do, however, understand the comments about the ‘tutorial’ of Cocoon which consists of having your party picked for you and almost entirely being limited to two people which is just a real pain. But then don’t most FF games pick your party for you a lot of the time? I think X and XII were more the exception.

My only complaint now is that the game has a lot of fun throwing mobs with ridiculous hit point counts at you. A lot of the fights, it seems, are meant to last 8 minutes. They don’t nearly give enough ‘experience’ for that.

However ‘auto-battle’ is pretty cool. While a lot of people complain that it’s playing the game for you, just think about how much slower the fights would be if you were 1) Controlling all three party members and 2) Inputting every attack all the time. The auto-battle allows the battles to move fast, look visually stunning, and actually allows for the game to be *harder* since the computer picks the correct spells and abilities such that it’s *expected* for you to play at very near optimally. The part you have to play is getting into the right roles at the right time and occasionally tell the game to use more aoe attacks…

Also, whoever said you can only control Lightning must have complained before getting to the point where making your own party is no longer grayed out. Logically, why would they bother to give everyone in the party a summon if you were only going to be playing as Lightning?

It also seems just annoying that Snow is the first sentinel AND gets the first summon and then you don’t get to play him for more than a fifth of the time. However, linked experience is teh bomb.

My party right now is Lightning (COM, RAV), Fang (SEN, SAB), and Hope (RAV, MED). I haven’t gotten into fully buffing my party very often just because it takes so long. Maybe when Hope gets his summon and can buff a little faster.

And for now I’ve hit what I assume to be the ‘final’ boss before heading down to Gran Pulse and he’s really rough so I have to level up a bit on mobs that take way too long to kill. Yay.

Aion Beta II

August 17, 2009August 17, 2009 Laura Highcove

From the future (ie 2018) the image links on this post no longer work. I must have deleted them in a cleaning since it’s an old post and it’s not worth it to me to try and find them again. Sorry.

Okay, so more Aion beta action time. Got some advice from Sil wherein I now know how to auto run. Man that feels better, but I’m not surprised I missed the keybind. It was called like “Automatic Forwarding” or something equally long and ambiguous. I got confused by the keybinding that was called “Run”. Silly me.

Secondly, for mana regen we were told of “resting” wherein you sit and regain health and mana kinda like drinking in WoW only without food and MUCH more slow. Way too much downtime to be worthwhile, since the amount regenned seems to be set instead of a percentage.

Mages ARE given two abilities to get back some mana. One gives like 200 mana on a minute cooldown. The other gives just under 200 mana on a 12 sec cooldown but it takes reagents. Sounds good right? Not when I have 2.5k mana. I’m really hoping we get something better, but looking at Mana Ability II that we get at level 22, it actually gives us LESS mana. I don’t know how that’s possible. I’m hoping it’s a beta mistake.

Sill huge problems with the spirits not being able to fly. Every time I wanted to fly over a few mobs (Not to mention flying up to the actual quest hub.) in the new quest area that allows flying, I had to resummon my spirit. (Don’t get me started on the fact that this new hub has no flight path.)

Also HUGE problem with a campaign quest line that threw me into an area where I got two shot. Only after running back did I find out that one needs a group (quest doesn’t say it) to complete it. I (On my spiritmaster) went in with a cleric and two rangers. We died a half dozen times while kiting each mob for at least a minute to kill it. We got the first campaign quest done; only to find out the second part was killing a named that was wandering around who two shot one of the hunters. We had to give up on it for lack of a tank. (btw, these mobs that were chewing us up and spitting us out were Mau. I repeat my previous comment about them being op.) It rubs me the wrong way that REQUIRED quests REQUIRE a full, balanced, 6-person party to complete.

I also spent much of this beta getting my templar to level 16. I am pretty irate about the fact that there are nowhere near enough quests to level. I actually had to grind three-quarters of level 16 because there just were no more quests. That makes me feel that the zones were just poorly planned. I feel like I saw more gray quest arrows than colored each time I moved to the next quest hub.

Despite that, I loved my templar. It was a little slow killing mobs, but I had absolutely no downtime, and it got even better at level 16 with more damage dealing abilities.

So I wanted to try out the dyes in this beta for fun. So here is the original, a cool looking green outfit on my templar. When I looked at it, I guessed that the part that would be recolored would be the green. Makes sense right? Apparently not. Some idiot decided that the silvered plate should be recolored instead of the actual colored part of the armor. /slaps forehead So I dyed each piece different in protest.

Lastly was my complaint from two weeks ago about the inventory space. So I decided to take screenshots of what my inventory space looks like just to prove a point. Everything you see in the warehouse is a crafting material that you either gather or get as a drop (sans the patterns which, as you can see, I can’t learn yet.)

My inventory space is currently cleared of any gatherables. Right now is just potions, a few pieces of gear and quest items. I started just not picking up manastones I don’t use, but in live, that would be throwing away a lot of money, so it’s not really an option. So add about 8-9 manastones and 7-8 gatherables that will be in my bags while I’m questing and really… just not a lot of space. And looking at the price for upgrade, that’s for the warehouse, upgrading my actual bag is 61k, still a lot.

I’m hoping that when we go to live, I’ll be able to make more money such that I can more quickly update my space, but again it seems like poor planning to rely on a non-set monetary source in order to have enough space to actually play the game.

Also, I got my DP to 4,000 in order to morph some aether powder, and took a picture of the shine around me.

And yet despite all these problems, I still plan on playing it when it comes out, just not dropping WoW for it.

Untitled

April 4, 2008April 4, 2008 Laura Highcove

Anime I’m downloading:

Spice and Wolf
Clannad
Shugo Chara!
Rental Magica
Shion no Ou
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS
Shakugan no Shana II
Gundam 00

Spice and Wolf is the tale of a traveling merchant, Lawrence, who makes a promise with a harvest god, a wolf named Horo (or Holo, those silly Japanese) to take her North, and their resulting journey.

Impression: Actually, this is one of my favorite series to date, and that took me totally by surprise. So much so that I was thinking of putting together a Horo costume for the upcoming con. Horo’s character is just amazingly well done. The chemistry between the two main characters is just perfect. All storylines revolve around being a merchant and buying and selling goods, but it never gets boring. My only regret is that it’s only 13 episodes long.

Clannad is the story of a high school delinquent, Tomoya, who in his free time starts helping out a lost looking girl, Nagisa, who wants to restart the school’s drama club but lacks the confidence to do so.

Impression: After Air, and attempting to watch a few other dating sim games, I was sort of turned off by the general classification. But I saw Dom’s review of Clannad on Megatokyo.com, and I decided to give it a shot. I’m very glad I did. Once again watching the relationship between the two main characters evolve is a joy, and the supporting characters are lively, friendly, and in general everyone just wants to help everyone else. Just stay away from the movie. Usually I like movies like this because they kind of take the plot and condense it, and you get a nice quick trip with the characters from the series, however, this movie sapped the life out of Nagisa. She didn’t feel like Nagisa at all, and I just hated it. Plus it puts the supporting characters into nothing more than brief cameo roles, which isn’t fair to them.

Shugo Chara! follows a girl, Amu, who is seen as ‘cool’ by everyone at her school, but who really just wants to fit in. She then finds a trio of guardian eggs that tell her she can be anything she wants to be.

Impression: Just a fun magical girl show with everything you’d expect from the love interest, the rival, the friends, the enemies who aren’t really so bad, and of course the magic.

Rental Magica is the story of a boy who inherits his father’s mage renting company, even though he knows nothing about being a mage himself. It follows the small company and its employees, as well as the young leader of an impressively powerful mage renting company who befriends them.

Impression: Having a lot of fun watching this series. It’s nothing that I would end up watching more than once, but it’s entertaining the first time through. Hm, I make it sound more underwhelming than it is, but I can’t go into much detail without spoilers.

Shion no Ou is about a young girl, Shion, who is unable to speak since seeing her parents murdered in front of her when she was a child. She grew up raised by her next door neighbors, while learning to play Sougi.

Impression: I figured it would try and be some sort of Hikaru no Go rip off, but the murder is front and center in the plot of the series. It also goes into a lot of detail about the differences between men and woman’s shogi. (I’m almost positive there was no such distinction in Hikaru no Go.) Shion is adorable, and she acts like a perfectly normal girl except for having to write things down to communicate. Plus she’s falling for a bishie, and we all know how much I like those.

Shakugan no Shana II is more of the same as the first season. Still good, but you’ll be lost without the first season. Gundam 00 is extremely underwhelming right now. I think I got through about seven episodes. I’m still downloading it, but saving it for when there’s nothing else to watch.

CLAMP

March 5, 2008March 5, 2008 Laura Highcove

I have been a fan of CLAMP since before I even knew what they were. My first introduction to them was a manga volume my friend Anne brought to school. I read it with no idea what manga was, or anything about the story, and simply marveled over the drawings, and what I could get of the plot. It was not until much much later (ie years) that I now know what I read was the second volume of Magic Knight Rayearth, which incidentally became the first of CLAMPs works that I read in full. Avoiding spoilers, (well immediately) the ending to MKR was one of the most interesting things I had ever come across.

The second of CLAMPs works that I really got into was Cardcaptor Sakura. I watched the anime first, and it wasn’t until later that I was able to read all of the manga, but it became another of my favorite series.

I continued along in my otakudom, reading other CLAMP works Angelic Layer, X, RG Veda, Clover, Chobits, CLAMP Campus Detectives, and I enjoyed all of them (except Chobits). Magic Knight Rayearth, Angelic Layer, and Cardcaptor Sakura were by far my favorites.

So one day I was in the Waldenbooks down in Blacksburg for one of SD and my’s trips to town, and I spotted a manga on a display. It caught my eye because at a glance it looked like Sakura and Syaoran. Well suffice to say I was shocked when I read the back to find out it *was* Sakura and Syaoran. It was a new series Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles. I was thrilled. Two of my favorite characters of all time were back, and whats better, the world they were going to were going to be filled with tons of CLAMP characters.

So I read it, and it was pretty good. I eventually got the XXXholic which is seperate, but runs alongside Tsubasa’s story. Eventually the anime was announced, and I was even more thrilled, but eventually…I dunno it became monotonous? I stopped getting the anime episodes the day they came out, and I actually looked forward to new XXXholic manga and anime releases than Tsubasa, and basically it dropped into the background. I still read it, it was still good, but it wasn’t great, and I wasn’t sure why.

Well I was surfing the Internet, and stumbled across someone’s blog that pretty much summed up the problem I was having with it. Syaoran was a horrible one-dimensional character. At the beginning he was the endearing Syaoran that we all knew and loved from Cardcaptor Sakura. Blushing glances thrown at Sakura, stumbling over words between them and such. When she was in trouble he did not hesitate for a second to help her…but that was just it. He started out on his quest with her, Fai, Kurogane, and Makona and all he cared about was the feathers and we were like ‘Awww, he’s giving up everything for her.’ but he never stumbled, never faltered. His one and only focus was getting her feathers, and while there were the occasional blushing glances, there was nothing else going on. That was why I drifted away. I felt like nothing was happening, and that there was no room for anything to happen.

Below here are spoilers. So don’t click unless you’ve been keeping up with TRC, or don’t particularly care about spoilers.