April 25, 2007 @ 8:30 am
· Filed under Rantings
- 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.
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