Editing STanGameNotes
This page contains SeleneTan's notes on games, which ones are good or which ones she liked, which ones made her nauseous... Games (with plots) that she has actually finished: (closely related to games that she really likes) *ChronoTrigger (yay Magus!) (I have the piano sheet music book for this.) *ChronoCross (Guile should totally have been more prominent... Especially since in RadicalDreamers he was Magus!) (I have both the soundtrack and piano sheet music book for this.) *RadicalDreamers (which was sooo trippy, but now I've finished all the Chrono games! Yay!) *FinalFantasySeven (yay Vincent!) *FinalFantasyNine *WildArms *IllusionOfGaia *ActraiserII *EVOSearchForEden (not EscapeVelocityOverride) (Finished with help from AlexUtter, who is much better at sidescrollers/platformers than I am.) *WarcraftIII (single player, albeit cheating in the last 5 minutes of the last mission when they creamed my defenses since I didn't want to go through the previous 40 again... I should try to do that again sometime. But then again, I could be all stereotypically girly and just play the thing for the story. :P) *GabrielKnight: Sins of the Fathers *GabrielKnight 2: The Beast Within *SecretOfMonkeyIsland (or whatever the first one's called. I think that's what it's called.) *CurseOfMonkeyIsland *DiscworldII *DiscworldNoir *ParasiteEve *CelticTales *Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (with some help starting out from a friend so that Alucard had decent starting stats) (Note on something I found in my replay attempt... I'm not very good at spells. However, if given the chance, I can pull off Summon Spirit regularly enough that 1) 4 of them are in the air at the same time and 2) each casting is timed to take place during the short period of invulnerability after the last casting. Note that I can only very rarely pull off Tetra Spirit, and only slightly more frequently, Soul Steal.) *Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (this one I beat on my own, though with a bit of help from an online full castle map when I got stuck/lost, and from a FAQ to get the GOOD ending. this probably means that it's an incredibly easy game, and I'd probably actually recommend it for people kinda new to platformers and new to the Castlevania series.) *Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (This was pretty good; more of a challenge and more story than Harmony of Dissonance. I'm glad I played HoD first though; I'm not sure I'd have been able to do this one without the skills I picked up there. ) *Terranigma (Finally! I liked how you could help cities develop; there should have been more of that. Used a cheat code for the last form of the last boss when it became clear that I had neither the reflexes to beat him nor the patience to go out and level until I could.) *GrandiaIi (Dissatisfying. Not sure why I finished.) *MadMaestro (Cute and harder than it might look at first. But fun.) Wow, this list is larger than I thought I would be... Games in-progress, with intent to finish (related to games she really likes): *ValkyrieProfile (only couple of chapters from the end, but the game got tiring... playing it for 3 days straight with breaks for eating and sleeping probably got me burned out, although it was fun not having parents around...) *FinalFantasySix (the game is cursed, I tell you! Twice I started it on emulator, and got to the WorldOfRuin and was taking out dragons in preparation for the final boss and the first time, my hard disk crashed and needed a reformat. The second time we needed a new hard drive. And the PSX version has such icky load times...) *FinalFantasyFour (I left it for another game and came back to find myself in an airship with no clue where I was supposed to go) *GrandiaIi (In progress with about 26 hours clocked. I'm getting less and less sure that I want to finish this game... I started letting the combats go on full AI mode because they were too much of a bother (and I don't have the reflexes to successfully bypass them ). And some of the characters are just growing and growing in annoyance factor...) *FinalFantasyFive (left, came back, was lost) *Lufia (left, came back, was lost) *LufiaII (left, came back, was lost; also came back to it while at Mudd, which severely cuts down playing time...) ::''LufiaII is a neat game. A little on the easy side, but solid gameplay and a cute story, as well as one of the best bonus dungeons ever. It's a shame you have to play through it twice to get to "gift" mode....'' *Saiyuki (Full title is "Saiyuki: Journey to the West") I just started it last week, but I'm on chapter 3 out of 5. I like it sooo much better than FinalFantasyTactics! (Fuller writeup under SaiyukiGame.) *WarcraftIIIExpansion (I intend to finish it... I cheated through about half of the Night Elf campaign because I got sick and tired of dealing with Maiev and also because I kept getting whupped.) *Persona2EternalPunishment A rather different ConsoleRPG where you can talk to monsters to get special items, or fight them to get experience. (And you need those items to be effective in battle.) It's a bit slow going because I just found out that I'm about 5 levels too low for the next game boss... *DarkCloud2 I got this because I wanted a game with lots of crafting. It has a lot of crafting, which is nice, although the system isn't particularly complex. It does have a fun city-building-ish thing, where you build stuff in the present to make stuff happen in the future so you can progress in the present. Yay causality :P. It's also very cute, with pseudo-cel-shaded 3D graphics. (Random note: AlexUtter has been complaining that I spent 1000 Ridepod (it's a mech-ish thing made from barrels and whatnot) XP buying it a voicebox when I could have bought two Ridepod guns for the same amount of XP.) *WildArms3 *ICO *PrinceOfPersia SandsOfTime *ShiningSoulII ''You're certainly not the only person with the "started, took a break, can't remember where to go" problem :-) If you can find a walkthrough for the game in question, it's often easy to look through and figure out where you are (and hence where you're supposed to be going). There's a risk of spoilage, most particularly of the "oh no I missed <cool item X>" variety, but that may be preferable to replaying the first 10 hours of the game.'' Games she's started and gotten a "significant" way through (note that "significant" may be redefined for each game), with no intent to finish *FinalFantasyEight (I'll finish it only if someone shows me there's a way to kill off Rinoa so I don't have to rescue her anymore. Also a way to make Squall not an idiot anymore.) ** There's technically a way to kill Rinoa permanently, but it ends the game in a "you lose" fashion, so I don't think it'd help. And there's no way to make Squall not an idiot. *LegacyOfKainSoulreaver (thing started making me nauseous, blast it... I wish I didn't get motion sick from games. :( ) *SeikenDensetsuThree (I'm kind of lost and also getting slaughtered by the enemies. agh!) *TalesOfPhantasia (dunno, just lost interest) *Wolfenstein3D (I stopped when I started seeing the corridors in my dreams. Whee, an FPS I can actually play!) *LegendOfDragoon (the characters are idiots, the dialogue is annoying, and the battles take forever. On the other hand, I was really bored that summer vacation and my brother kept hogging the computer, which is why I actually got anywhere in the game.) *MagicKnightsRayearth (the pastel colours are starting to annoy me and so is the battle frequency... Can't vouch for the manga or anime, but I don't like the game all that much - might be the fan-translation) *BahamutLagoon (I lost a lot of incentive to finish this after being shown the ending, which is extremely dissatisfying) *HarvestMoon (got too repetitive/boring) *NewHorizons (got too repetitive/boring) *FrontMissionOne (too many confirmation dialogs!) *PlanescapeTorment (it was fun at the start, but my first try I managed to anger the LadyOfPain and got stuck in a dungeon/maze where I kept getting killed, and in my second try I'm stuck under Sigil and need to get stuff from some crypts and keep getting slaughtered by the random monsters in the area, and keep getting killed on my way back to Sigil) *StarCraft (I'm not that good a player, and the commando-style missions are not happy for me...) *FinalFantasyTactics (the ultra-long battles got boring, as did my frequent deaths... Also my (burned) CD stopped working and I didn't bother getting a new one) *Ancient Domains of Mystery (I keep getting killed!) *Grandia (the changing camera angles were making me nauseous, and I was getting really annoyed with the childishness of the characters. Mostly since it seemed like unnaturaly, badly scripted and translated childishness, even though the characters really are kids.) side note: SeleneTan gets very easily disoriented in games. Very. There are several games (especially FinalFantasySeven) where she had difficulty moving in a straight line. Also, she never managed to get through the first town in Xenogears because she couldn't find the exit and the spinning was starting to make her nauseous. She greatly dislikes getting nauseous from video games, since so many of them are ones she'd like to play (e.g. Deus Ex, where she was done in by the fourth training room or so) ---- notes about Minesweeper (I'm annoyed with it) A lot of people seem to like Minesweeper, but as a game, I really can't see why. It's a decent finger-twitch absorber, but that's about it for me. Basically... Its learning curve is waaaaay too steep, and luck remains a significant factor even when you're very good. Luck? Well, if you're not lucky, your first click gets you a square that tells little or nothing - certainly not enough to get anywhere. Hmm. I think I'll get the furthest if I compare this game to FlashNet. Basically, in both, you deduce information about tiles from the information you have about adjacent tiles. The thing is, in Minesweeper you can make mistakes that end the game. And when you're first starting out, most of your moves are going to be mistakes. In FlashNet, there's at least no such thing as a fatal move. You'll probably end up with a low score if you're new to the game, or be forced to brute-force a solution, but you ''will'' win/complete it. And to me at least, that makes FlashNet infinitely more enjoyable than Minesweeper. ''The thing with Minesweeper is that it takes a few random shots in the dark before you can start really solving the minefield. I usually start off by pecking away until I hit an open area, which usually takes about 3-6 clicks in a large minefield (you really want to be playing with the medium or large fields, the small one on Windows Minesweeper is dumb and involves more luck). Yeah, you do hit mines a fair portion of the time while doing that, but given that you will have been playing the game for about 3 seconds, who cares? Just start over. I find that once you get a starting patch cleared out, large portions of the field become solveable and those that can't be solved can be left for the end of the game when you start counting off how many mines are left. True, there is still a leap of faith or two that you have to take, but that's what makes it so intense, eh?''-AlexBobbs (Ex-Minesweeper Addict) ---- === GameBoyAdvance Experiences=== When I was in Hong Kong, I got a shiny new GBA SP (only metaphorically shiny, I opted for a regular US-version black instead of Japanese silver so as not to have to fiddle with converters for the chargers), along with a discounted FinalFantasyTacticsAdvance ("If I buy this with the game do I get a discount"? "Okay, only [~US$13] but without the box or manual.") and a flash memory card with reader. The flash card reader hooks up to a normal USB port and lets you copy ROMs and save files onto the card, so I've tried out MetroidFusion and the three GBA Castlevanias. (As well as Fire Emblem, Golden Sun, and some other things I can't remember.) In any case, I think MetroidFusion starts easier than SuperMetroid but gets hard quickly. I like that it has a stronger story, and I like having a sense of direction. In SuperMetroid I felt like the goal was "wander around aimlessly for no apparent reason until you die. Painfully." However, I've been playing Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance a lot more. It's easier than Circle of the Moon and Symphony of the Night. I wish for more plot, but monsters I can actually kill make for a big bonus in HoD's favor. So... the reason for this rambling is because I think I know why I've liked the two Castlevania games I've played a lot better than the two Metroid games I've played a fair amount - levels, stats, and equipment. These are a GODSEND to mediocre players! Just because Samus gets more missiles doesn't mean I know or am capable of using them any better, but when Alucard or Juste gains a level or some new armor, he takes less damage and dishes out more, without me having to magically be able to press a gazillion buttons in exactly the right combinations to do a triple spin wall bomb jump charge shoot super missile power bomb doohickey. (Okay, so I don't ''think'' either of the Metroids I've played involves those, but as far as I'm concerned, that's the amount of coordination they require.) (Actually, I'm purportedly semi-decent at bomb jumping, but that's only because it involves timing on one button, instead of a gazillion. The art of wall jumping continues to elude me.) Other than that, FFTA was going along peachy-keen until I realized that I was 2-4 levels behind the NPC allies in a plot battle. Then I realized that you have to cheese to get anywhere in the game. I went through maybe 2 or 3 battles of cheesing (3 Black Mages with Blizzard + party member wearing Ice Shield + Law banning Fire and recommending Ice = cheeeeese!) and decided it was getting waaay too boring. I keep running into problems with being under-leveled in RPGs because leveling up is so boring. Then I get creamed by the bosses. (Although in FFTA's favor, they did away with the whole spirit-turns-to-crystal thing, which makes it feasible to marginally win some battles.) So, um, I tried playing Fire Emblem instead, which is another tactical game, but with a very different feel. There's less cheesing here, or at least it's not as abuseable. Or something. Units with attacks get experience for attacking; it seems to be related to the amount of damage dealt and current level and stuff like that. Clerics get experience for healing, but can't heal units that have full HP. Bards get experience for playing, which refreshes one ally unit so that it can take another turn. I don't have two bards yet, (I'm still in the tutorial missions) so I don't know if you can have two of them keep refreshing each other. But... yeah, there aren't as obviously exploitable XP generators like there are in FFTA, especially since weapons have durability ratings that decrase with usage. Characters who attack more often (and especially those who manage to strike the killing blow often) will still tend to end up higher level, but there's not the stupidity of "Boost/First Aid/Blizzard the guy with the ice-nullifying shield/Cure the people who don't need it/Blizzard/Blizzard" in order to ''match'' the game. Granted, I may feel differently once I've gotten farther in Fire Emblem. Oh, and backlighting is the best ever. :P
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Editing STanGameNotes