It ends now!
I beat Steambot Chronicles yesterday. That game was impressive enough in some ways for me to write a review immediately.
To summarize: Despite being in almost all other ways a mediocre game, the amount of choice present makes it really fun to play up to a certain point. If you like Harvest Moon, you will like Steambot. It’s nearly everything Harvest Moon should have become five years ago. Dozens of ways to make money (though only a few are viable).
I went out and got a new TV yesterday. It’s a 26-inch flatscreen. I’m upgrading from a 19-inch CRT with only the coax input working to a 720px widescreen with composite input. So far I’m much more impressed by Odin Sphere, but I’ve only played that and Steambot on it so far. I’m looking forward to playing something like Wild ARMs on it, weird as it sounds. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that the text is incredibly sharp, and colors are much better defined. Any sprite-based game should look much better. Now I just need a composite input for my SNES…
In terms of other games, I’m still playing Genso Sangokushi 2 (Fantasy Sango 2). Observe.
Yuan Shu: To think you all made it this far! Guards! Deal with these nuisances right away!
If you noticed Lady Wu’s thread, he ends up getting burned for being a bit too close to his advisor. In any case, the game is certainly continuing and I’m still enjoying it. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I didn’t even notice some of the core features of GS2 until a dozen or so hours into the game. I would love to see it translated (I could possibly do it but I don’t have the hacking know-how and I’d need to shore up a LOT on my kanji), because some of the bits are really nice – the item creation in particular is useful and well-done, if not as deliciously random as in Star Ocean: The Second Story. You upgrade skills by allocating points to them (the higher the skill, the more to level up) and the game has great strategic depth as there are 4 paths you can take for each of the 7 (!) sub-characters Miel (as Lady Wu eloquently named her) can become. Not to mention the fact that some skills are really formations that affect your stats… My only complaint is I don’t have a good heal-all ability, just a couple positive status effects (Armor up is really useful) and Miel’s weak heal-one-person skill. I went down the wrong branch for the lettuce kid (whatever you call him), so I just now got the heal-all skill for him and I bet it’s weak.
Since I just recently figured out how to take screenshots easily, I will likely post many more, as GS2 is a beautiful game.
Also, I’m working on a translation of the NES adventure game Akira, based on the anime movie of the same name. In the past week, I had the chance to read the manga and see the movie. The manga is so much better that I can’t imagine anyone liking the movie – the manga just has so much more depth, while in the movie, everything is horribly compressed and much of the original vision is sadly lost. I really hope no one ever tries to condense Three Kingdoms into anything less than 20 hours.
And, sadly, my work-lots time is not what ends now. I will try to keep updating the site once every few days, but no guarantees.