PSP

I’ve got all the torn letters now. Hooray! I guess I’ll have to go and fight the final boss now, though I’m not sure I have enough lives left after losing a huge amount on a difficult section in one of the levels. Also, I’ve got to Morgan in the boss rush and I haven’t worked out how to deal with him. His normal form took me a while – twenty lives or so – but the upgraded form doesn’t appear to be leaving me any openings. It is, of course, I’ve just not been able to spot them yet.

Fighting the upgraded versions of the annoying twins Kim and Chi over the last few days, I found myself experiencing the gaming equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a rock hard fight, I was dying dozens of times, over and over again… and yet I started to feel like the game was doing everything it could to help me out, as if it was my ally in the fight against the twins. The twins’ recovery times after attacks started to seem absurdly long, the warm up times equally so. The collision detection seemed to be skewed heavily in my favour. Every failure felt like my fault – and there were far more failures based on bad split-second decision making than based on mucking up the controls. Sometimes I didn’t press the buttons correctly, but mostly I was dying because I was just deciding to do to the wrong thing. It felt like the game was giving me all this help, yet I was letting the side down. Maybe we should call it Prinny Syndrome, when a game seems to be trying to help you out even though it’s killing you over and over again.

Anyway, I killed Kim and Chi this lunch time, finally, and then went through the rest of the bosses in the boss rush without any real problems. Basil and Chervil are another two-character boss, but much, much easier than Kim and Chi. Slower, easier to predict, no real trouble. Next was Cyberclops 2.0, who was as insanely easy as the first version. Get in the right spot and you can kill him without being in any danger of being hit. Then on to a fight with Hoshikage, who took ages to work out when I first faced her, but who I only lost one life to today. And, finally, Moab, who should have been the easiest of the lot, but who somehow held me up for quite a while, taking about ten or fifteen lives off me before I got him. (That mainly was down to impatience to finish the rush, I think. Once I forced myself to calm down and take it slow I beat him easily.)

So now it’s on to the final boss again. I’ve got 677 lives in stock. Will it be enough?

Just spent 45 minutes of lunch break getting the ninth torn letter.

Why, I don’t know, as I’m never going to be able to get the tenth one.

And I seem to have missed the second and eighth ones along the way, somehow.

Not quite. I got to the final boss, but then in a fit of self-sabotage I used my Prinny bomb attack with wild abandon. Now, the Prinny bomb attack uses your lives to send Prinnies hurtling from the sky. I spent so much time watching the boss’s health bar that I forgot to watch my stock of lives and was quite surprised when the attack stopped due to me having no lives left. Oops. I didn’t even get the boss off his first form. (I’m assuming he has several, being a final boss and all.) So it’s back to the beginning of the game again. Fine by me.

At least now I have unlocked all the villagers. Also I unlocked a few awards. They’re pretty special – the first game about thirty hours into the game and was the award for unlocking all the villagers. Shortly afterwards I got an award for doing three levels in gold time and one for killing ten thousand enemies.

Just shy of seventeen hours, all lives lost. But now I’ve restarted with my collection of items intact, all practice stages unlocked and a new move. Hooray!