A Gaming Diary
Archive for February, 2006
King Of Fighters M2
Feb 7th
Yes, it’s King of Fighters… on a mobile phone! Well, sort of. The ant-sized sprites do a good job of looking like the fighters they’re meant to be. All four of them. And I don’t think there’s room for any trademark Mai breast-wobble. Or maybe I just need new glasses.
Anyway, it’s a game best explained by it’s control scheme.
1 – Jump Left
2 – Jump Right
3 – Taunt
4 – Move Left/Guard
5 – Move Right
6 – Attack
Though it’s slightly more complicated than that. Successfully blocking knocks a point of your guard guage, which can be recovered by taunting. Once you’ve attacked enough to do a special move you can activate it by pressing and holding the 6 button. You then have to hammer it to fill a gauge within a time limit. If you succeed then you do a super strong attack. There are also other special attacks you can do if you guard against a super or hit five times in a row without taking damage. These require different inputs. Terry, for example, may have to play a quick rhythm action mini game, where the 6 button has to be pressed at the correct time. Mai gets a very annoying game where a nine-digit number has to be typed in within an extraordainarily tight time limit. That sort of thing.
Is it any good?
On the one hand… no, of course not. It’s a fighting game that uses a mobile phone keypad. And you thought the Xbox’s d-pad was bad? And it’s only got one attack button, as noted.
On the other hand… it’s admirable. The developers have actually realised that they’re working on a mobile phone and have tailored the control scheme to it, it’s responsive, fast (on my K750i) and it does actually look quite nice, even if the fighters are about a centimetre high. And it seems fun in a “sneaky couple of rounds at the desk after lunch” type way.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 6th
So I made my way back to the boss. Luckily, the dungeon before him hadn’t reset, so it was pretty easy to get back to him. A tough fight, but I defeated him. And then, as is the way of these things, he transformed into a different form and splatted back to church. So I decided to try one more time to kill him. As luck would have it, he doesn’t reset back to his earlier form so I only had the second form to deal with.
I checked the boss tips on GameFAQs, which scared me. I hadn’t set myself up properly, didn’t have any of the recommended attacks or weapons and thought I was going to die. I nearly did, too.
We were twenty or thirty turns in. My main healer was on the floor dead and my secondary healer was near death and running out of magic, fast. He could have died that turn but the boss chose another target. And after the boss’s turn it was my turn. A fireball in his face and then a huge scythe chop and… down he went! I couldn’t believe it.
Far easier than GameFAQs had led me to believe… though I could have died had things been slightly different. I guess I was a bit lucky.
Anyway, after he was defeated the game got back to normal… more or less. Harder now, for reasons I won’t go into, and darker than it’s been previously. Things are getting serious.
Thirty-seven hours in and still a lot to do.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 5th
Not played it again but I did go to GameFAQs to see if it was possible for me to do this fight.
Apparently, I’m at the exact recommended level to do it. Hmm. One problem seems to be that my main character is a boomerang user, which means damage is spread across multiple enemies. Great out in the field. But not so good against a boss.
Anyway, I’ll try again. If I was way too low level I’d probably have binned Dragon Quest VIII now. I’ve still got loads to do, too. I didn’t check to see what it was, but this boss fight is part 41 of the FAQ and there are 67 parts in total. So I’ve probably still got fifteen hours or more after this boss.
Maybe I should just give up and accept the fact that lengthy RPGs aren’t for me any more. I’m too much of a magpie gamer.
Xbox 360
Feb 5th
I uninstalled Final Fantasy XI. I was never going to play it again.
Watched Aeon Flux and Mission Impossible 3 trailers, just because they were in hi-def. D’oh.
Played the Full Auto and FIFA demos again. I’d be really tempted to take a look at the full version of Full Auto if I could be sure they’d sorted out the slow down issues.
Geometry Wars 2
Feb 5th
Hooray!
I was aiming to finally get over 250,000 and I did – three times. Best score was 293,655. Good.
Two things are taking the edge off my happiness, though. Firstly, I managed to get 231,000 in one life during a game and if I’d just held on a little longer I’d have got the “survived 250,000″ achievement as well as the “score 250,000″ one. The another annoying thing is that my arch rival Zomoniac has a score of 356,000, still well above anything I’ve got. Ah well.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 5th
Oh hooray.
A lengthy dungeon followed by a boss battle far harder than anything else ever seen. And when you die you start off from a church in the nearest town, so I’m going to have go through the dungeon every time I want to try to kill the boss again.
I have no idea if I’ll even be able to at this level, or whether my tactics are at fault or whether I just need better equipment.
Suffice to say, I did hundreds of hit points in damage to the boss without it blinking while it used its three goes per turn to stamp me into the ground.
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Feb 5th
That’s 200,000 bells for fruit collected during the Eastenders Omnibus. Should have my 800K mortgage paid off this time next week if I keep this up.
Wasn’t up early enough the buy turnips today, anyway.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 5th
I’ve just met the most intentionally annoying character in RPG history.
No, make that gaming history.
No, make that plain, simple history.
Luckily, I doubt I’ve got to put up with him for too long.
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Feb 4th
No fruit picking today. I’ve left it. I can do it tomorrow during the Eastenders omnibus.
Today was Flea Market day. Which meant that, theoretically, I could buy stuff from inside my neighbours’ houses. Except most of them weren’t home and the only thing I did want to buy – a stereo – wasn’t for sale. Oh well. Frobert and Anchovy bought some of my stuff. I didn’t really want to sell anything, but they seemed to want my shit so very much. Though why Anchovy bought a billiard table I don’t know, given that he’s gone and put it against a wall. D’oh.
Anyway, after that p’anther, Earl and Dekay came round to play and then I went to Teacozy to visit p’anther. A lovely time was had by all.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 4th
Thirty hours in now without any sign of the game coming to an end. It’s just huge. Good thing it’s such great fun.
There’s nothing I can really say about it that’s not full of spoilers, though. Even if I said I’d just got access to a… no, better not. Or that there’s a… yeah, better keep quiet about that.
