Tag: video games

Leaving NaNoWriMo Behind

Laura Highcove

I ended up with none of my round 2 beta reads back at the beginning of Dec, which turned out okay since I also finally got Final Fantasy 15, which I spent this entire past weekend playing. (I’ll probably put out a post with my response to that later, after I’ve finished.)

Not wanting to put my entire writing everything on hold for this video game I decided to take a lesson learned from NaNo, and give myself a goal of 2k words a day (except for Fridays). That’s about two hours at my current word production rate. This still gives me time to mess with podcasts and other ‘writing improvement’ stuffs, as well as work on some revision as I go. Then once my work day is over, I still have time to play some ffXV.

I’m still not positive where I’m going in the Huntsman, but it’s been fun playing with these characters in a new story. Even though this book is really just a series of disjointed scenes that I’ve written completely out of order, the shape of it is starting to fill in, in my head, allowing me to move forward. It’s rather a weird experience, but whatever gets the job done. I need to focus on cleaning up how and when my two pov characters get to Copperwinds, the kingdom where the main tale for this book is going to happen. Once that’s done I can write more scenes where they interact in said kingdom, which is what is lacking right now.

Analyzing The Prince of Persia

Laura Highcove


I love a movie with a good title screen.

The Prince of Persia movie is one of the few video game movies that is considered good. It is in my own list of favorite movies, though not because it is a video game movie. This movie does a lot of things well and is overall an enjoyable experience, even if you’ve never played the game.

Here are a few of the things I think this movie does very well from a storytelling perspective:

Characterizing the three brothers


Dustan: “Garsiv, your hand is on your sword again.”
Garsiv: “Where it should be!”
Tus: “Oh, my brothers!”

From this first scene where the three of them interact while talking about whether to attack Alamut, they perfectly portray their personalities as well as their opinions of each other.

When Dustan is later framed for killing his father, the brothers act to type in that Tus is conflicted about what to do and Garsiv just wants to cut Dustan open.

It makes it all the sweeter when Dastan is able to convince both of them that he is telling the truth which leads to the feel-good moment when they come together at the end. I love that the trust between the three brothers is such an important part of the story.

Dustan and Tamina

The relationship between Dustan and Tamina is basically a perfect example of the kind of relationship development I love, down to them calling each other ‘prince’ and ‘princess’ sarcastically at first, which later turn into terms of endearment.

They have no reason to trust each other, each using the other to get what they want, but over time they begin to trust each other, and that leads to respect, and then love. It’s such a natural progression that you have no doubt that they will come to love each other again even after time is rewound.


Tamina: “Please don’t mock me, Prince.”
Dustan: “Oh, I hardly think we know each other well enough for that, Princess.
But I look forward to the day that we do.”

Parkour

The choreography for this movie is top notch and that includes all the parkour elements. Since it’s one of the selling points of the game, of course it’s important in the movie too. Unfortunately it is not easily displayed by screenshots.


I’ll just leave this here.

What I Didn’t Like

This movie is not perfect, and it has a few things in it that I don’t like, and it took a while before I stopped and looked at those pieces closely enough to determine why I don’t like them.

This scene always bothered me, because basically, the Sheikh and all his guys followed our heroes from the desert into the mountains before asking what the heck happened with the snakes the night before, and are about to leave before Tamina bribes them with gold. It’s a rather obvious example of leaving a discussion until a later scene in order to improve pacing, and it’s always bothered me since I’m not sure it would’ve been any worse for them to have that discussion when they were still in the desert.

Dustan makes a lot of leaps of logic. While this basically keeps the plot from being too slow, the boy really does piece together plot elements very accurately from very little information. He is characterized as thinking well on his feet, so maybe that’s where you’re supposed to get it from. Luckily he does draw a few of the wrong hasty conclusions as well.

The Sands of Time just …go away when Dustan and Nazam go back in time. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to assume that Tamina was just wrong about the Sands of Time wiping out the earth, or what, but it’s played up as a huge problem, and then it isn’t one.

Despite the flaws, I have watched this movie over and over again. Generally the only scene I skip is the race to the sandglass, which is pretty good for a movie I’ve seen so many times.

Warcraft Movie

Laura Highcove

So a few weeks ago I went to see the Warcraft movie. I knew it wasn’t going to be good and I knew it wasn’t going to have a happy ending (cause the whole Alliance vs Horde thing), but I was hoping that I could get some entertainment value out of it.

Now at one point I was a pretty big Warcraft lore buff, but it’s been three or four years since I played World of Warcraft, and so most of it has faded. The only name I remembered was Medivh, and that he wasn’t a good guy.

As for the movie itself. The script was pretty terrible, however the characters did a good job of showing what good friends they were with each other. I don’t know if that was the script, or just good acting, but it made the movie bearable.

The graphics were, of course, amazing. Especially the orcs and how they moved and looked. I was also pretty impressed with the magic effects. I could see people saying that the magic was a bit overblown, but after playing World of Warcraft, it’s exactly what you see swirling around a mage or a warlock when they cast.

Seeing the cities of Ironforge and especially Stormwind was just amazing. I enjoyed seeing Karazhan and Dalaran as well, though they looked a little less like their in-game counterparts. Also, kudoes to the Alliance’s armor, showing off the shiny and the bling. Not realistic in the least, but who the heck cares?

And the movie did bring up nostalgic feelings of playing World of Warcraft, which I did from 2006 through 2012 in a hardcore raiding guild. I admit, I got goosebumps at the end when the crowd was chanting “For Azeroth!” and then shifted to the one “For the Alliance.”

Overall, movie was not great. I’d probably watch it again, but I have a feeling this is one of those movies where I’ll skip a lot of it. If you loved World of Warcraft, go check it out for old times sake. If not, you won’t miss a thing.

A Lesson on Backups

Laura Highcove

So when I was in middle school, I first heard of the pokémon craze. Kids were playing it, talking about it, and I wanted in on that. I got a game boy for Christmas, along with the blue version of the game. I played the heck out of that game, catching all the pokémon I could, leveling them up, reading strategies. When the next games came out I got those as well.

As I grew older, the pokémon franchise did as well. They made a new generation of pokémon where the stats were fundamentally different, as such the older pokémon could not be transferred to the new games. Everything after that cutoff however could be moved forward each time there was a new game. I collected pokémon for years. I saved all the rare or once a game pokémon. I saved pokémon that had a special place in my heart, like my team (generally the only pokémon I named) that I played through each game with. I even got legal copies of the pokémon you couldn’t get from the game at all, mew, jirachi, and celibi. Along with a mewtwo named Jessica that I specifically made sure had the proper personality, that I got only speed and special attack EVs. All those special pokémon got moved from old game to new game up until pokémon SoulSilver came out.

In my opinion HeartGold and SoulSilver was the pinnacle of pokémon. The game was everything I had ever wanted, it had the pokéwalker which was a huge hit, and I spent tons of time getting all the pokémon that I had collected over the past decade onto my SoulSilver game.

I never actually found out what happened, but my theory is that one day I had gotten a new video card for my computer, and all the packaging was on my desk. When I threw away that packaging, my SoulSilver cartridge was on my desk and somehow got collected up and thrown out.

It was a few weeks (I wasn’t actively playing the game at the time, hence why it was out of the game boy) before I went looking for it and couldn’t find it. It took another few months of desperate searching before I had to finally admit that the game cartridge was gone, and with it was every pokémon I had ever collected.

My husband tells me that I was actually in mourning. For several weeks I would just stop in the middle of what I was doing and lament that my pokémon were gone. Even now, years later I still wish I had them. Just because they represented so much of my childhood and the memories there.

Unless you played pokémon like I did, it’s unlikely that you really understand the loss involved. I mean it was just a video game, after all. However, this event in my life has made it super clear to me that some things are irreplaceable. Even if I played all the games again (and I did try this briefly) the collection would never be the same as it was.

As such, I do not even take a chance that one day I might wake up having lost all of the stories that I have written over much the same period of time. I daily back up the stories from my laptop to my desktop, which in turn backs them up to an external drive overnight. Once a week I zip the files up and upload them to both Google Drive and my own website, as a college professor once warned us, a backup in the same physical location as the original is not a backup.

I still mourn my lost pokémon but I choose to look at it as a price I was willing to pay in order to never have to suffer through losing all the work I’ve done on my stories. And perhaps this little nudge from me will convince someone else to back up important files so they never find themselves without a backup.

Bowser

Laura Highcove

A few months ago, the other game store in town went out of business and had a sale. That was when I saw this monster turtle mini from a set called Warmachine. I snatched it up with the idea of painting it as Bowser. Despite my enthusiasm, however, it took me until now to actually paint it. I painted the whole thing in one afternoon. Took me around four or five hours all told (sans the spray paint base which I did a while ago) and it turned out rather well. I know I could have done some modding to add hair and horns, but I decided against that. I don’t really like modeling stuff yet, probably cause I’m kinda bad at it. Anyway, results:

Harvest Moon: A Tale of Two Towns

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)

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.

Final Fantasy XIII

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

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.