Niahak's Place

I was a bit uncertain going into the game (clearly)… but I’ve figured out that Ogre Battle 64 is actually a good (if not top-notch) game.  It’s just a little too complicated for my tastes.

I just reached the final chapter.  I like the plot, I like the characters, and the system isn’t bad.  Managing all the individual characters is pretty tough, though, particularly with respect to alignment.  The plot is similar at first to Final Fantasy Tactics (which was made later by the same team, if rumors are correct).  It changes from there to something comparable in style, and the different paths through the game presumably would make the game more immersive.  I probably would’ve noticed that more if I weren’t already aiming for a set path.  So far all of the “hidden” characters (the Zenobians specifically) have been easy to recruit – I have them all – I would only have missed Europea (maybe) and Debonair (if FAQs are correct and you can’t visit the town with a non-Magnus unit first) had I not been looking at walkthroughs.  This game makes me want to retry the SNES Ogre Battle sometime…  Some of the plot turns are really nice, and this game has one element that was really neat in Final Fantasy Legend 2 (namely, your character’s father can join your party), though unfortunately it hasn’t yet changed the plot at all.

Also been playing a good deal of Warcraft 3 TFT online, lots of custom maps.  So far my favorite is still “Tides of Blood”, a more balanced and slower-paced DOTA.  Playing that with friends is an unparalleled WC3 experience.  “Maul” games (Wintermaul) are fun but they are generally way too easy (I can’t believe people still need to “hook” [glitch] or use Crystal!), much like other Tower Defense games.

Oh yeah, big news in the past couple days.  Final Fantasy IV is being remade in the style of FF3 DS.  Cecil looks more or less like an emo goth knight from what I’ve seen, but I’m going to hold off on final judgements until I see more of the game.  The more interesting pieces of news from Square Enix were the new original game and the announcement that they’re remaking Star Ocean 1&2 for PSP (SO1 was never brought over).  Star Ocean 1 is evidently getting SO2’s engine.  If that pack gets translated, that’d be cool, but still not a reason to get a PSP.  Other interesting news: a new Rygar (!) is coming out for the Wii.  Rygar NES was an excellent, if confusing, game.  Rygar PS2 was good for an adventure-puzzle, but the voice acting was abominable and the difficulty too varied.  However… using diskarmor on the Wii could be a lot of fun if they allow good variance of movement.

Other than Ogre Battling, I’ve been doing lots of homework and stuff.  I had two presentations and a test today.  One presentation was in Game Development and involved a project which I plan to reveal on this site in due time, with the permission of my group members.  In another week, I think this project could be pretty cool.  As it is, it’s nothing more than a conceptual version of what it could become.

So when I went to classes today (tired despite it being the afternoon) I noticed something. The entire campus appears to be covered with Pi. Not the tasty kind, the numeric kind. This is one of the hazards (if you will) of going to an engineering school. Many students, perhaps lost in a sea of equations, proofs, tests, and documentation, find themselves lost. They slowly creep into insanity, latching onto this number or that.

To wit, today is a special event where the student association gave out free sidewalk chalk. And, like last sidewalk chalk event, somebody wrote Pi all over campus. Last time, it was from an academic building down around the lake (more a pond really) and ended going off the dock. This time, it circles around the Quad and runs down a sidewalk on one side of campus. I haven’t seen where it ends yet. Another indicator that some people are overly obsessed with numbers… About a third of the way through (estimate), someone different circled three numbers and wrote “WRONG” in chalk.

The rest of the chalk stuff is occasionally funny, sometimes not. There seems to be a religious debate on one bit of sidewalk, there’s a “Don’t give up!” in large friendly letters on another. Last time, though, somebody drew an 8-bit Mario on the side of the library, taking advantage of the bricks to make pixel approximations. A week later, after all of the other chalk was gone, a Frog Mario (from Mario 3) appeared on the side of an academic building, again using the bricks. It lasted about a month but I sadly didn’t get a picture. There are no video game characters today… yet.

When I checked the stats on the site today, I noticed I had a (relative) surge of traffic from people I don’t know. Here’s a shiny picture of why:

Thanks, obviously, to my awesome host for letting me look up this stuff. Apparently this site shows up on search engines now.

Apparently they are mostly looking for Der Langrisser stuff, and while I have some, I am not working on the translation (though I look forward to it!). For that, you’ll want to go to the CoES forums and get news there from the individuals currently involved (Moon Knight, Byuu, Talbain, and D). I lurk there myself for info on the translation, as well as other general cool stuff. As far as I know, they are still in the editing process with beta testing starting soon.

Other than that, I was having difficulty managing the alignment of my characters in Ogre Battle 64 and so have resorted to chaotic means to make the game easier on my brain. I am sadly only 15 hours in, though, being distracted by homework, events, and Tides of Blood.

Speaking of which, I have been playing Warcraft 3 online a bit lately. If anyone who’s reading this still plays or wants to play, drop me a line. I’m not great at the regular game, but I can make a mean spiral tower defense and I’m a decent hand at ToB (I’m not even going to touch DoTA, as that community is too competitive for my taste).

• 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.

Sorry I haven’t been doing much with the site in a while.  Not a whole lot interesting has been going on, so I haven’t been as tempted to post as usual.

For those of you who haven’t been following the threads at SoSZ: Lady Wu and Starscream have been posting info about UserJoy’s PC RPG series, Huan Xiang San Guo Zhi, in Chinese.  It’s been translated into Japanese as Gensou Sangokushi and probably would have the English title of Fantasia Sango.  Basically, it’s a fantasy game set in a loose mockup of the Three Kingdoms world, with all kinds of magic, humor, deep plot, and other crazy stuff.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time.  I’ve been on break and rather busy, and I haven’t done much interesting to talk about.

However… I do have something to post about today.

I have a vague, mostly-faded memory of watching anime movies around 10 years ago on the Sci-Fi channel.  This was before anime had caught on much of anywhere, and it was just about the only anime I saw until a few years ago.

Anyway, from my vague and wildly inaccurate description of the one movie I really liked, Taishi Ci managed to give me the name of the show it was, so kudos to him.

The show was one of the Urusei Yatsura (Noisy Rascals, or some such) series movies.  I keep meaning to check it out, but as it turns out it was one of the first ones I was exposed to.  It’s the second movie, called “Beautiful Dreamer”.  Basically, a bunch of students (and one teacher) find themselves in a continually-shrinking dream world.  As a part of this dream world, they are provided with their food and electricity needs, and no one else is alive.  This world consists entirely of their neighborhood, riding in space on a giant turtle (yeah, yeah, bit weird).  Eventually they manage to return to their own world through the efforts of a few individuals.