My import of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger arrived in the mail today. Rarely have I anticipated a game as much as this one in recent memory, much less a fighting game, a genre in which I only dabble in casually. Maybe it was the diverse cast, the fast and flashy action or the beautiful anime sprite work, but this game had the certain something to make me spend waaaay too much money on it.
I even got the Limited Edition, which worked out great because the bonus Blu-Ray turned out to be region-free as well. Gotta say though, I feel some weird business ethics conflict with IGN reviewing a product they helped producing / make money off. Either way, it was worth it for (legally owning) the game's kick ass soundtrack.
As the title suggests, I will try to get Rachel down (with Taokaka as a possible sub), which turns out, is quite a challenge as she appears to be a more advanced character and her Silpheed drive is quite unorthodox. I never shied away from a challenge though, no matter how much I'll suck. I simply couldn't resist her loli charms and her complete indifference and cruelty towards her servants is simply dashing.
The biggest problem with the game so far (as I stuck to the training mode for now) is that the game doesn't seem to do a good job of teaching you useful combos, or I haven't found them yet. Street Fighter IV's challenge modes were pretty boring and useless, but I thought the character trials making you perform certain moves in combo chains was a really useful tool for actual competition and so far, I'm missing this in BlazBlue. Of course the bonus BD has a bunch of strategies and combos, but unless I write them down or go on YouTube (which defeats the purpose of the BD), there's no good way to learn them.
Also trying to figure out whether to use the SFIV fightpad or go for the regular controller (it does have that handy right stick option, but I didn't run into too much trouble performing specials yet.) Either way, I'll first try to get up to speed on singleplayer before I throw myself into the online (hoping it works lagfree), but once I feel more confident, I'll take on all comers and probably lose horribly in the process.
That's of course a lot of unexciting words for just one game I barely played so far, but I felt obligated to write a new blog after three months of silence. Sorry, nothing completely crazy in this blog, but no one except hazel is going to read this anyway.
BADEN-BADEN LILY
Song of the Now: Queen of Rose - Daisuke Ishiwatari
Yes, that's right, yours truly is not only back in the blogosphere but also forcibly so, because I got tagged. And I know some might say "Hey, but I tagged that dude a year ago", at least you might be saying that if you're hazelnutman, but thanks to GameSpot's RSS feed only updating my tracked blogs whenever it feels like it, I discovered your blog months after the fact and decided that the ship had sailed.
So, in the spirit of the day (mind the timezone, America), let me tell you 10 (yes, for some reason it's not 5 anymore) amazing, hard-hitting facts not even I knew about myself that will surely make it easy for all the hackers who do it for the lolz to track me down. Nope, sorry, instead I will talk about video games and other dumb stuff that isn't interesting or even better, a complete lie. You brought this upon yourself, fools!
1. I once played through Super Mario Bros. 7 times in a row because some jerk friend told me you get the "real" ending this way. I also read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy three times, albeit not for the same reason.
2. My French was pretty decent at one point but most of that knowledge was lost in time.
3. While I own 52 PS3 retail games, I bought exactly 4 of them: Guitar Hero 3, Burnout Paradise, Uncharted (ebay) and Killzone 2
4. I own a sizable collection of Magic: The Gathering cards. The most expensive single card I own is a Mox Pearl.
5. This one isn't a fact about myself, it's a simple fact: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is the best series ever. Period.
6. At night, I like to dress up in a school girl outfit and rid the streets of its criminal elements.
7. I listened to every episode of GameSpot presents the HotSpot at least once.
8. My favourite video game journalist is Greg Kasavin.
9. I can't dance, I can't talk. Only thing about me is the way I walk. I'm also confident that I'm the only person on the planet who can walk and chew gum at the same time. It's an amazing gift.
10. I can't think of 10 facts about myself.
That's it, I know, you're all in disbelieve about the incredible things you learned, but here's the 5 people I tag:
To not let this perfectly good blog go to waste, here's a few funny quotes from Disgaea 3:
"Always be on time, if not early. But don't you dare run in the hallways"
"Oh no! Breaking our curfew will make our parents very happy!" - "Yes, it's our self-imposed curfew that our parents strongly objected to."
"Fool! I don't even know the meaning of the word "level grinding"!"
"One of my goals is to make hot sauce the official condiment for eggs."
"Without a rival, won't you be disqualified from being the main character!?"
"I shall teach you all something that you'll always find useful! 8 is still 8 when flipped upside down! However, when pushed on its side, it can hide an infinite number of possibilities!"
"A good and evil heart is a complicated yet exquisite meal, much like pasta with rosa sauce! Boom!"
"If you're gonna be the villain, you should at least get better lines. You need to review the basics of evil."
"What did you say!? I can't allow you to leave without health insurance! I don't care whether you have a proper license!"
"Hold up. When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of u and mption, weddo."
"I'm Ms. Scarlet. I've come from a different game beyond time and space."
"You see, we teachers are too tired and lazy to be holding ****s!"
"Main character, fine, but if a no-namer defeats the Overlord, it's just a disgrace!"
"Overlord's son, you will jump 10000 feet into the air, wait a turn, and do a dive attack! I'll take a critical hit!"
"Why are you always cheating? Every game requires a diligent and gradual level up process." - "But they also have cheat codes. Like max out our levels instantly... What was it? Up, up, down, down..."
"Oh? Your subconscious seems to have dropped something."
"...Um, not that I care, but you're a little on fire."
"Damn these people just popping out of nowhere! When will we get to fight?" - "Don't you wanna see the introductions first?" - "Do you want to be fixed up? I'll make you fire missiles from your boobs!"
"You know... even though it's the last episode and all, it's not like you can just come out whenever you feel like it."
"Isn't it standard for the last boss in a game like this to transform into his final form?" - "Tsk! Damn you for using such a convenient game mechanic! Can't you fight fair!?"
"... But before that, I'll let you Save. We will settle this in the next area."
I haven't written a new blog entry in a while now, so I thought in case someone was wondering, I'd give you a quick run-down of why I was so absent lately.
For the past 3 weeks now, I had again been in the army, kickin' it old-school. As always, it was hella boring, so we had to make the best out of it and have a lot of fun (and beer). Now, let me tell you that I normally don't drink at all (as a Haruhiist), but it's pretty hard to resist a little sip or two with your buddies after a long day of doing nothing. I don't really wanna bore you with all of that but I do wanna say we spend 2 days BBQ-ing on a hill and 3 days were spent with the 3 of our group sitting in our car, playing PSP games, all while maintaining our radio network (which comes down to checking every few ours if the switch was still set to 'on'.)
Going in, the best thing about those 3 weeks was knowing that at the end of it, there would be a demo of BioShock waiting for me on the PlayStation Store. Needless to say I already played through it a number of times and I'm still anticipating its release as if it was brand new, as I managed to avoid all crucial spoilers. The game still looks pretty damn great too, which goes to show how timeless great art design can be. Another game profiting from this fact is Eternal Sonata as it's still as charming as ever and the demo was quite a nice surprise. The most unexpected thing though was finding an automated email by the Japanese PlayStation Store in my mail account, with a promotional code attached. Not knowing what it was about (although I could've read the kana, but it didn't occur to me at the time) or why I got it, I typed in the code and sure enough it was a beta key for LittleBigPlanet.
That said, I didn't have too much time to spend on it yet, at least not as much as I'd like, because I've *had* to play Yakuza 2 (which I finished just a couple of hours ago.) Good game, but just like the original, it's at its best when you're not actually playing but watching the story unfold. Also, the final boss fight reminded me of MGS4's, which is funny because Yakuza 2 was released in Japan way before MGS4.
Oh yeah, another thing I forgot to mention was that I downloaded AngelLoveOnline from the Japanese PS Store the other day, a free-to-play MMO on the PS3. It's been fun trying to figure out how to play the game with everything in Japanese, but the lag makes it almost unplayable at times. I might go back to it when I find the time, but I guess I'll have to wait for Free Realms for my proper MMO fix.
Other than that, I've been pretty much out of the loop due to the lack of internet access and am just catching up right now.
