Last night, I finished Final Fantasy XIII. In this case, by "finished", I do not mean "beat", but instead mean "defeated". I'd been playing the PS3 version, so this means that I got the Platinum Trophy for the game.

From a plot perspective, FFXIII begins in the middle. You're immediately dropped into a large fight and have little idea why you're fighting or what you're trying to acomplish. In fact, the game very slowly doles out backstory through flashbacks over the course of the majority of the game. The game diverges somewhat from the standard Final Fantasy plot in that your character don't really know what they're supposed to do for a good majority of the game. Although you have enemies, you spend most of your time running from them due to their sheer numbers.

Gameplay wise, it offers and "Active Time Battle" system with a few twists. Firstly, unlike older ATB systems, there is no option to put it in a "slow" or "wait" mode--enemies will continue to attack if you are paralyzed with indecision about what to do. At the same time, the game severely limits how much actual consideration the player needs to do. The default action for each "round" is for them to automatically carry out their role. Also, each of your teammates will automatically carry out their role without any input from you. In fact, you can't control your teammates at all aside from setting which role they are currently tasked with. Now, these roles are actually quite important to the game system. The game has six roles: Commando, Ravager, Saboteur, Synergist, Medic, and Sentinel. Commandos are the big damage dealers. Ravagers are elemental damage dealers that build the "stagger gauge", Saboteurs give negative status ailments. Synergists provide positive status effects. Medics heal (who knew?). Sentinels draw enemy attacks and take less damage from attacks. The game lets you select up to 6 "sets" of roles for your party and during combat you can quickly switch between them as the battle progresses. For instance, you might begin a battle with a Commando/Ravager/Ravager configuration to help build up an enemy's stagger gauge, then switch to a Commando/Commando/Commando role to put out maximum damage once its stagger guage is broken. Since there is no way to slow down battles, this leads to rather complex interaction as you attempt to build stagger chains, keep healed, apply buffs and the like.

The game is divided into 13 chapters. For the first 10 or so of these chapters, the game is essentially a straight line with no sidequests and no ability to decide who will be in your party. I consider this to be something of a failing. For the most part, until you reach chapter 11, you're just along for the ride. The game also very slowly gives access to new abilities and roles during this same period. Some people have likened it to a 15-20 hour tutorial and they may have a point. At the same time, the game will periodically inflict fights on you which can only be beaten through good tactics--leveling, button mashing, better equipment--all of these will have little effect.

Overall, I enjoyed the game. If you're a fan of Final Fantasy or the JRPG style of games, there is much to enjoy here. The game is certainly one of the most visually impressive games that I've ever played, but that alone doesn't make a great game.

Sticking to my previous scale, I'd say this game is probably a zero. It certainly has things that give it appeal, but the extreme linearity coupled with long payoff times make it suspect. In many ways, you could say that it is in a Mass Effect 2 sort of situation: the game is technically good in many ways, but has some obvious flaws that make it difficult to give a blanket recommendation. This is made doubly important due to the pedigree of the game.


Final Fantasy XIII: 0



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Several game companies have recently started having loyalty programs. Nintendo offers rewards in the form of "coins" which you get for registering a first party title, providing feedback on it, and certian other things. They also provide a "membership level" which is based on how many coins you've accumulated during their fiscal year. Though I've not yet spent any coins, my initial registration of all of my first party games ended up netting me a plush Mario hat last year due to reaching the "Platinum" level.

SquareEnix seems to have begun to do something similar. They offer rewards in the form of "points" for registering games. I only have three games that they created that I purchased since they instituted this system: Dissidia Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and Final Fantasy XIII. I registered all of these games a while ago and today got my notice that their "year" ended a few days ago and so I could get my rewards. I'm apparently going to get some postcards.

All of this, however, is not the point. What is the point is the new "social networking" site that SquareEnix has bolted onto their otherwise functional website. They allow you do things like posting to a journal, list what games you're currently playing and other such things. Additionally, you can use their Flash-based system to create an avatar. When I first joined up, I decided to fiddle around with it a bit and made a female avatar. Apparently, this has unforseen implications. Once you create an avatar, the only things you can change about it are the clothes and equipment. Eye color, skin tone, hair tone, expression, gender--all of these become fixed. Furthermore, the gender select becomes your gender as listed in your public profile and is unchangable. Therefore, as far as SquareEnix is concerned, I am a female named "GuyBlade". So yeah.

I'm not really sure why every game company feels the need to roll their own social network. Throw Bioware in there and I now have a remarkably large number of "social network" accounts related purely to gaming. Also, I hope they begin to do it better. Unless they offer an API for carrying out tasks like journal posting, it seems highly unlikely that more than a handful of people will ever use them.

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I often write about the video games that I play here. While I admit that the "reviews" that I write are probably best described as "stream of consciousness" or even "disjointed", I do try to provide some sense of whether the game is worth playing. To that end, I've decided to adopt a rating system for games going forward. Unlike other systems that might have a 100 point scale or a ten point scale or even a five point scale, I will have a two point scale. Games that are worth your time get a 1; games that aren't get a 0. I think this sort of "pass-fail" mentality works better with the way that I think about and play games anyway.


Now, for some past reviews on the new scale in approximate reverse chronological order:

Katamari Forever: 0
Bayonetta: 1
Bioshock 2: 1
Mass Effect 2: 0
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings: 0
Dragon Age: Origins: 1
Shadow Complex: 1
Assassin's Creed 2: 1
Batman: Arkham Asylum: 1
Professor Layton and the Curious Village: 1
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days: 0
Borderlands: 0
Red Faction: Guerrilla: 0
Too Human: 0
The Last Remnant: 0
Resident Evil 5: 1
inFAMOUS: 1

That takes me back to last June which I think is far enough. I may end up adding a 1! (should be read "one factorial") for games which I think should be required reading. I'm mulling it over now, but we'll see if there is ever a game which necessitates it.

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About a week ago, I finished my first run through of Katamari Forever. The premise this time around is that the King of All Cosmos is hit in the head by a stray piece of space debris and loses his memory. Without a strong leader to guide them, the Prince and the Cousins build a robot version of the King to fill his roll. The RoboKing, upon activation, goes crazy and destroys all the stars in the sky, so we're back to rolling up stuff again.

Gameplay wise, this is basically identical to Katamari Damacy and We (heart) Katamari. It turns out that only about half of the levels are actually new, though. The game is divided into the "King's Cosmos" and the "RoboKing's Cosmos". The King's Cosmos consists mostly of rehashes of levels from the first two games (including the damn Cow-Bear level) which you play through to help the King "get back his memories". The RoboKing levels are mostly new and have a few new variations--one level has you using the Katamari to apply water to a parched section of Earth.

Of course, since the game has the power of the PS3 behind it, they decided to take a bit of refuge in audacity by having their "world" level be expandable so many times that there is a PS3 trophy for making a Katamari over 2,000,000 km. Yes, a katamari 6.7 light seconds across.

Overall though, the game wasn't that special. I've seen it periodically show up in the $20-$30 range and think that's probably appropriate. I picked it up for $35 and honestly don't think there was enough original content to make it worthwhile at that range.

After KF, I began playing through Final Fantasy XIII. I'm still currently working on it, so we'll see once I've finished.

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I make hot chocolate at work semi-regularly. Today, the place in the coffee area where I usually grab stir sticks was down to two. My reaction to this was to (1) take one of them for use now, and (2) purchase five 6-inch glass stir rods for future use. I can think of no better way to mix my cocoa.

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So, I've been playing a fair bit of the Bioshock 2 multiplayer. I had initially been dubious of it, given the nature of the main game's play. I found that it had a bit of a learning curve, but was actually relatively fun. I ended up playing it for a few hours every night after work, and then recently hit one of the higher ranks. At that point, I just decided to go ahead and shoot for Rank 40 (the highest available without the DLC) and earlier today ended up hitting it which gave me the last of the achievements in the game.

Unfortunately, my last couple of games were some of my least pleasant experiences. There were a handful of players being poorly behaved--racial epithets, accusations of cheating, people blaming "lag" for their issues. One player accused me of being a noob because I was using the "noob toob" more canonically known as the grenade tube. I, of course, enjoyed the fact that I ended that particular match with a higher score than the top two opposing players put together, but it soured the taste for me a bit. Add on the fact that I hit my goal, I doubt I'll be playing again soon.



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I was given some code that is supposed to replace some code that I had written. The purpose of both pieces was to calculate the latitude and longitude of something based on a series of measurements and interpolating it to a given time. My code has been in use for a while, but we're doing comparisons with another implementation and want to use the same (kind of) function to do this calculation so we can try to find the source of differences in high level implementations.

Anyway, the given code uses substantially different data structures and required a fair amount of wrapper code to get working. Now, it seems that I'm feeding appropriate values into it. The function is giving a return result indicating success, but is returning NANs for all of its resultant values. I find this irritating.

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Looking up something tangentially related, I ended up looking at the list of images types for an id3v2 imbedded picture. Most of the types are straightforward 0x03 is a front cover image, 0x13 is a Band Logo, etc. What drew my attention was the fact that 0x11 is defined by the standard as "A bright coloured fish". Somehow, I suspect that particular type is rarely used.

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On Sunday, I finished up my playthrough of Bayonetta. The game initially caught my attention when I found out that it was the most recent game to score prefectly in Famitsu. I picked it up after Christmas, but I had been distracted by Dragon Age, Bioshock 2, and Mass Effect 2 and so hadn't played more than just a bit of it. I finally started playing again in earnest last week.

The game itself plays very much like Devil May Cry which should make sense due to the fact that they share a director. The game is thus made of fast combat, huge combos, and rapid action. I would classify the game as more forgiving the Devil May Cry, however, due to its inclusion of a "dodge" button. Although the DMC games include the ability to dodge, it tends to be more finicky and can fail. In Bayonetta, a successfully engaged dodge always works, and if timed properly, grants a bonus in the form of "witch time"--a sort of bullet time. Regardless, most of the DMC skills will transfer over successfully.

The term "hyper-sexualized" seems to float about when describing this game and perhaps not without warrant. The main character speaks almost always provocatively and almost all of her attacks emphasize her sexuality--at least one even ends with her in a pose and the game performing a "camera shot" by producing a shutter sound and a quick shutter graphical effect. The deapth of it doesn't really sink in until you realize that the character is essentially always naked. It seems to be implied quite heavily that Bayonetta's outfit is just her hair being strategically arranged via magical powers.

Storywise, the game also overlaps with Devil May Cry. There exists two groups--sages and witches--which previously kept some sort of balance and watched over history. Eventually, a witch and a sage had a child against all of the rules of their orders and led to the ultimate near destruction of both sides. Skip ahead a few hundred years and we have Bayonetta waking up from a coffin at the bottom of a lake. She is, of course, the cross-breed, but seems uninterested in dealing with any of the old problems. Instead, she starts taking jobs fighting angels. The exact reasons for this aren't really clear nor important, but the various "holy" types are mostly just jerks who are more than willing to wantonly destroy part of the human world to reach their objectives. Your character eventually gets ambushed by a more concerted pack than usual and decides to figure out what's going on. That's where the plot more or less starts.

I think the game makes a lot of good decisions in design. For instance, at the beginning of the game, there is a long explanatory cutscene where they explain the back story of the witches and sages. Most games would simply subject you to it, but Bayonetta instead has the dialog playing in the background while you take the role of a fully powered character with infinite health fighting enemies in a huge battle. In the closing of the game, after the final boss, they roll credits with various little scenes playing in the background. Two of those scenes zoom in and become player-controlled battles. They didn't even want the credits to be boring. It's that sort of care that sorts the great games and the good games apart.

There is one other thing that is worth noting: the game makes very heavy use of the song "Fly Me to the Moon". In a sense, it is the game's theme song. It shows up several times as battle music complete with lyrics, several of the battle themes are direct remixes, and even the other songs will occasionally throw in just enough notes in a row to evoke some part of the song. The reasons for this are never made terribly clear, but the continual use of the song does provide some level of unity to the entire audio score.

Overall, I'd say the game is quite good. In a sense, it is better at being Devil May Cry than Devil May Cry is. I picked it up at MSRP and don't really consider that to be a bad thing. I should note that I played the XBox 360 version rather than the PS3 version. Supposedly, the PS3 version had framerate issues, but I have no first-hand evidence on that. Either way, where else are you going to find a game that allows you to weild a katana while wearing ice skates or lets you simultaneously use four rocket launchers?

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So, last night one of my fraternity brothers asked me to for a copy of a document that I made in college (for reference, that would be my proposed IFC revisions related to budgeting and dues). Now, I know that I had made those after my last laptop disk failure, but shortly after graduating, I formatted my laptop and installed linux on it. Before doing that, however, I made a disk image and saved it on one of my big storage arrays in case I needed anything on it in the future. Unfortuantely, I made a whole disk image rather than just saving the specific partition that I needed. Turns out that linux doesn't provide an easy way to treat a disk image with a partition table as a virtual disk with appropriate virtual moutable partitions.

I ended up pulling the data out of the image by using parted to find the beginning of the NTFS partition and then using dd to make a file of just the partition. Then, I was able to use mount with the loop option to actually mount the partition.

Now that I've pulled what I need most immediately, I think I'll copy over the "My Documents" folder so that I won't need to do this again, though I do have a perfectly fine partition image that could serve a similar purpose.

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I ordered the album Daft Club after I found out that it was mostly remixes of Discovery songs. Honestly, I can't say it is very good. I paid less than $6 for it after shipping and am not sure that it was worth even that. I suspect that the strength of Discovery itself makes creating similar quality remixes tricky. I'll probably give it another listen just to see if it grows on me--Coldplay's X&Y was like that for me. For now though, I just can't say that I'm impressed in the least.

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The thing that I think I like most about the recent arc of PPG Doujinshi (which updated today by the way) is the writing of Gir. Although the comic as a whole is generally fun and certainly has high production values, it is hard to beat a green dog-robot looking up at another character and yelling "Call me Ishmael!" for no discernable reason (unless he's calling Bell fat...).

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Earlier this week, I finished up Mass Effect 2. As it is a sequel, I should note that I may include spoilers about the previous game as they are necessary to give even a brief outline of the plot of the second game.

Mass Effect 2 picks up two years after the end of the first game. Shepard, soon after the events of the first game, had been sent out on a patrol looking for Geth and had her ship shot down by unknown hostile forces. She was spaced and fell through the atmosphere onto the surface of the planet that she'd been investigating. Needless to say, this killed her. However, being the protagonist has certain advantages, and a fervently pro-human organization that had been mentioned a few times in the first game manages to find your corpse and spend the next two years putting you back together. This is the reason for both your inventory of spilling and your lack of knowledge of what has progressed since the last game.

Shepard quickly discovers that the universe destroying evil from the previous game has been dismissed as an advanced battle machine of a less dangerous race and now is basically alone in her fight against it save the people from the organization that ressurected her. Added on to that, human colonies outside the jurisdiction of the human government have been "disappearing". In every case, the entirety of the population simply vanishes leaving the buildings, factories, and fields undamaged. Your organization finds this problematic.

The game mostly centers around building up your party to face whatever evil is behind the disappearances and to gain more information about the universe destroying evil. In terms of plot centric content, it is probably similar in size to the previous game, but it feels much smaller. I think this is due almost entirely to the removal of the "screw around in the Mako" sections that the first game had. For those unaware, the first game had a mechanic wherein you could wander to various uncharted star systems and scan planets. On a fraction of these worlds, you could land your multi-wheeled all-terrain vehicle and wander the surface looking for various useful things such as equipment, money, or upgrades. The second game replaces this with a "resource gathering" minigame when you scan planets and has short missions on some planets to pursue. What's important to note is that the "some planets" with missions here translates to roughly 0-2 planets per star cluster with a strong trend toward the lower end of the scale.

Gameplay wise, there has been one other large change. In the first game, you could generally always go back to locations that you'd visited previously. In this game, most areas (with a very small number of exceptions) are treated as "missions" which have a mostly one-way progression. Periodically, doors will close behind you preventing backtracking and forcing you to go forward. Once a mission is complete, you generally cannot return to the area in which it took place, so anything missed will be lost forever. This mission-centric vision has another effect: experience is based almost entirely on mission completion. Killing enemies doesn't grant any XP. Instead, fixed rewards are given for completing each mission. Periodically, a sidequest will give a small XP bonus, but those are somewhat rare with the game preferring to give money as its reward.

As long as we are speaking of experience, I should note that the leveling system has been entirely revamped. Rather than having nearly a dozen skills with upwards of 10 possible levels in each skill, the choices have been cut down substantially. Most characters have 4 skill tracks each of which has four levels costing one additional skill point per level (i.e., level one costs 1 point, level two costs 2 points or 3 total, etc). This of course also means a dramatic cut in skill points. My rough estimate is that Shepard could max out four skills while everyone else could max out 3. Of course, maxing out those skills would mean that they reached level 30 which is something that I was unable to do even though I completed everything in my journal, the two DLC missions that came with my version of the game, and visited and scanned every world accessible. I ended up reaching level 28 after beating the final boss.

I found the game to be somewhat conservative in its scope. Most of the ground here has been tread before, but remains solid and at relatively high quality. Perhaps learning from the fiasco surround the "hardcore lesbian sex" allegations in the first game, all of the romantic choices are strictly heterosexual (well, you can romance one Asari, but doing so will kill you regardless of gender and lead to a non-standard game over). It seems a bit strange given the relative diversity of possible romantic entanglements available in Dragon Age, but I can understand their desire to not draw more negative press with one of their more successful series. Since I had imported my character from the first game and all of the possible romantic options for a female in the second game were uninteresting, I suppose I ended up sticking with Liara.

My hope is that they get more ambitious for the third game.

Two other notes before I finish: firstly, if you buy the collector's edition of the game, DO NOT OPEN THE ARTBOOK until you've beaten it. It has artist's sketches of the final boss as well as all of the new PC characters. I luckily didn't look at it until after I'd finished the game, but I can imagine the irritating of having a major revelation spoiled by a CE "bonus". Secondly, despite being released after Dragon Age, the game doesn't seem to be integrated with Bioware's social networking site. This means that although Bioware have their own achievement system and the game has achievements, those aren't recorded anywhere. I'm having increasing difficulty understanding what Bioware is trying to accomplish with their social networking site. If they aren't going to support what is obviously their biggest game of the year, but are still going to have it waste 2-3 minutes connecting to their servers whenever it starts up, what are gamers supposed to think? To me it just looks like another piece of irritating copy-protection without any benefit at all.

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Apparently, Microsoft is selling the Windows version of Batman: Arkham Asylum for $13. I have already purchased it, but if you haven't, I highly recommend it.

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I've listened to Discovery in its entirety at least four times this week. I consider this time well spent.

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