Niahak's Place

• Putting your PS2 console in a checked bag is a bad idea.  Apparently the disc drive for the system is rather fragile.  When I took mine out of the bag, the disc tray was sticking out a centimeter or so, and wouldn’t open.  This happened to my roommate, but I foolishly believed that if it was secure and protected, it would be okay.  I’ve learned my lesson; they apparently use checked baggage as punching bags and shotputs in airports.  The other lesson I learned from this is how to take apart a PS2, fix the drive (minor mechanical issue, a little guess-and-check worked here) and put it back together.  In good news, I inadvertently broke the front panel off my tray, so now I can use a swap disc system more easily!
• The Suikoden series is just as fun the second time around.  I’m planning a better-written wrapup of the series at vl at some point in the next week, and why it is awesome, except 4 and minor annoyances on other games.  Suiko is definitely my favorite series now.  Final Fantasy is nice and all (well… 1, 4, 6, 7, 9 and I’m told 10)  but it just doesn’t mesh.  Very little carries over from game to game, while Suikoden is on the whole a much more deep (and ambitious) series, plot-wise if not engine-wise.  Wild ARMs is somewhere in between, since there’s no explicit relationship between games in the series, but major themes follow through in each entry and there is an implied continuity (thanks to 3, which tried to patch the series together).
• Ogre Battle 64 looks pretty darn fun so far.  I didn’t like the SNES/PSX one (March of the Black Queen) and I never played the PSX tactical game (Let Us Cling Together?), though it looked kind of lackluster.  64 seems to take the problems with SNES/PSX and make them easier for the player to handle, and has a more involved plot.  Unfortunately I’m not getting a whole lot of time to use the TV as one roommate has played Super Paper Mario nearly continuously over the past two days.  SPM has cool dialogue (“True/False: I love going on message boards and complaining about games I’ve never played!”), but I think I’d dislike the fact that it’s “almost” an RPG, but not quite.
• My “a” key on my laptop has lost its springiness.  The nice thing about my keyboard was that all the keys have a sort of pressure feedback to let you know if a key is pressed.  I don’t know how I lost my “a” key of all of them (I use s,d, j, and k for Stepmania, so those’ve probably been pressed twice as often as the rest), but now I have to re-type every fifth a or so, because I can’t tell if I’m pressing the key.  Lame.
• Genso Sangokushi II (mentioned in prev. entry) is quite expensive.  The only shop I could find that’s willing to import the game (since Amazon.co.jp won’t) is asking $72 and $15 shipping.  I’ll definitely have to think twice with a price like that!  But it’s so pretty…  And the second entry looks like it’s the most cohesive, the most involved with Three Kingdoms’ main storyline, and the most stable.

Sorry I haven’t been doing much with the site in a while.  Not a whole lot interesting has been going on, so I haven’t been as tempted to post as usual.

For those of you who haven’t been following the threads at SoSZ: Lady Wu and Starscream have been posting info about UserJoy’s PC RPG series, Huan Xiang San Guo Zhi, in Chinese.  It’s been translated into Japanese as Gensou Sangokushi and probably would have the English title of Fantasia Sango.  Basically, it’s a fantasy game set in a loose mockup of the Three Kingdoms world, with all kinds of magic, humor, deep plot, and other crazy stuff.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time.  I’ve been on break and rather busy, and I haven’t done much interesting to talk about.

However… I do have something to post about today.

I have a vague, mostly-faded memory of watching anime movies around 10 years ago on the Sci-Fi channel.  This was before anime had caught on much of anywhere, and it was just about the only anime I saw until a few years ago.

Anyway, from my vague and wildly inaccurate description of the one movie I really liked, Taishi Ci managed to give me the name of the show it was, so kudos to him.

The show was one of the Urusei Yatsura (Noisy Rascals, or some such) series movies.  I keep meaning to check it out, but as it turns out it was one of the first ones I was exposed to.  It’s the second movie, called “Beautiful Dreamer”.  Basically, a bunch of students (and one teacher) find themselves in a continually-shrinking dream world.  As a part of this dream world, they are provided with their food and electricity needs, and no one else is alive.  This world consists entirely of their neighborhood, riding in space on a giant turtle (yeah, yeah, bit weird).  Eventually they manage to return to their own world through the efforts of a few individuals.

I don’t usually post about this sort of thing, but we were apparently hit with Thor’s hammer Mjollnir pretty hard this week.  The temperature dropped severely since and it is now freezing.  My prediction is that with a few more weeks of this, the only individuals still hanging on to life in this forsaken frozen desert will be the most stubborn of Math professors (and they can be pretty stubborn!).

To explain: Tuesday, it was 70 degrees and raining.  Lovely weather if you like warm rain.  Said rain was preceded by an hour-long violent storm, lots of wind, rain, and thunder.  The kind of thing you just don’t see very often unless you live in Japan (and one reason why their $5 umbrellas are better than $20 ones here).  Wednesday morning it was freezing outside.  Maybe literally, I don’t know – but yesterday it was actually snowing.  Going from 70+, near-summer weather to sub-freezing temperatures is something I could only expect from Indiana.  Why am I staying here after graduation again?

To avoid the weather I’ve been playing too many video games as usual.  I got Puzzle Quest (DS) in the mail on Monday.  It doesn’t surprise me that this was the biggest-selling game at the end of March.  I’m playing it occasionally, trying to make the depth of the game last longer.  My roommates, meanwhile, have been borrowing the game and using the second save file.  I know one person who’s even considering buying a DS just for Puzzle Quest.  You have to give the game a try at least once.

I also am a bit into Suikoden V.  I really should’ve done a new game plus, but no helping it now.  The challenge is nicer without, but if I remember right you can run faster in a new game plus.   I’d forgotten just how slow this game runs.  Both in the early parts of the game, where 6 hours of story interrupt 1 hour of gameplay, and in general, when there’s a loading screen for each new area and battles take 5+ seconds to start.  The graphics aren’t even that impressive, so I’m wondering just how the heck they’re managing to make it load so inefficiently.  It’s still a fun game, but… seriously, I hope Konami makes Suikoden VI load as fast as the early Suikodens.  S3 is much better in terms of load times than V, and it doesn’t look a whole lot worse.

Leaving for Spring Break tomorrow.  Hopefully I’ll have time to do a bit more relaxing before graduating time.

I finished up Suikoden 3 late last night.  I was thinking that this time around it wouldn’t be as good but something about that game always seems to make it come together at the end.  The extra chapters you get for recruiting all 108 stars make the story that much deeper, and I’m planning to play through them all the way (not like it’ll take that long).

Skipping Suikoden 4.  I tried replaying it several months ago and was only disappointed.  I may try Suikoden Tactics eventually, but for now I’m planning on Suikoden V, then… I don’t know.  I had an idea but lost it.  Ah well, I’ll remember eventually.

I also received Puzzle Quest DS in the mail today.  From my playing so far, it’s essentially the PC version, but they cut down on space and animation quality.  It’s not as luxurious as the PC version, and doesn’t sound quite as nice, but it’s the same gameplay.  I’ll probably be addicted to it for a while.  It’ll be nice to have a DS game that I can play for hours on end.  Phoenix Wright is great, but I don’t see much replay value, same with Trauma Center (cripplingly hard).  Mario Kart DS cramps my hands to play for more than an hour, Rocket Slime becomes repetitive, and Brain Training is… well… Brain Training.  Puzzle Quest should give me that long-term enjoyment I usually only get out of a console.

Also, James has been restored at SoSZ.  Apparently the entire thing was unplanned on his part; one of the other admins banned him on the Ides of March as a joke, then they started the Roman Republic parody.  It was quite enjoyable.