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A Gaming Diary
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 13th
Fifty-four hours.
Things are coming closer to a close, I believe.
Not there yet, though.
I must say, the story is a lot more compelling and a lot more, well, more like a story than at the beginning of the game.
Only one boss this evening. He didn’t seem to difficult, but with a few more points of damage from him on a couple of occassions it could have been different. And it took a while, because he had a lot of hit points. I really didn’t make my early game choices too well, so things are more difficult for me than they should be, I think, but not enough to really annoy me. I think that generally the balancing in this game is really very, very good. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had some sort of adaptive difficulty built in. It would explain why the boss fight strategies I checked online didn’t work for me and why everything seems to be just hard enough. Either that or my play style – explore everywhere but don’t specifically stay anywhere to level up – is the expected method of going through the game.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 12th
Got past that boss. Took a couple of attempts, but I got there. Totally ignored what the boss tips in the FAQ suggested, as the strategy put forward there just seems impossible. I don’t know how often the boss used the status-cancelling ice attack when they played, but it used it every other turn or so when I played, making psyching up impossible. I got there in the end, mind, though I did have to use some items I’d been hoping to save.
Ah, well, got there. And then it was straight off to a tough dungeon, with another boss at the end. So, yes, the boss I was having trouble with was a sort of start-of-dungeon boss. Insanity! Luckily, the end-of-dungeon was pretty simple, not having any annoying attacks.
After that, I was rather at a loss, so I wandered around the map for a while until going to get a hint from, er, the place you can go to get a hint. (I know I say this diary may contain spoilers, but I’ll avoid them where possible.) That pointed me in the right direction, so I went off where I’d been pointed, found some new, tougher enemies, realised it was ten o’clock and went back to a town to rest up and save.
Fifty-two and a half hours in now. There’s not a lot of the map I’ve not been to, as far as I can tell, so maybe I’m getting close to the end…
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 12th
Fifty hours now.
No, still not done. Not by a long way, I don’t think.
I got to a boss who slaughtered me in about six turns. Ouch. I assumed it was a battle I was meant to lose, you know, they happen in RPGs now and again. But it wasn’t. Somehow I was meant to win it. So I went back. And lasted quite a long time, but half of that was me hanging on hoping for a miracle while half my party lay dead.
So I decided to look on GameFAQs for boss tips. Before I got that far, though, the section headings made it obvious that I’d missed out a huge chunk of the game.
A-ha! That’ll give me an item I need to deal with this uber-boss!
That’s what I thought.
I was wrong. I checked the first sentence or two of the section I missed, which got me started, but I didn’t really get anything for doing it. Just a sub-quest, I suppose. I wonder if I’ve missed many of those?
I’ve gone up a level now, though, so maybe I’ll be able to cope with the boss now. Maybe. I don’t know, though. It had incredibly powerful attacks.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max
Feb 12th
Just to give you an idea of ridiculously packed this is, here’s the list of choices on the main menu -
Arcade Mode
Variable Battle
Training Mode
Free Battle
Option Mode
World Tour
Edit Mode
Entry Mode
Vs 100 Kumite
Network
Survival Mode
Dramatic Battle
R. Dramatic Battle
Final Battle
Score Ranking
Arcade has a million different options you can tweak, Survival Mode has eight different types of Survival on its sub-menu, World Tour is pretty huge on its own, etc. etc. etc. etc.
It’s just huge a Street Fighter sandbox.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max
Feb 12th
Hooray, round four!
I’m getting better.
My dragon punches aren’t coming as easily as there were last night.
Also noticed a Street Fighter Alpha 3 strategy guide on a bookshelf earlier. It won’t cover everything, but it might be worth looking through. I’ve got an odd collection of strategy guides, actually. Starcraft, Xenogears, Suikoden II, even Crazy Taxi of all things. (I seem to remember that last one was being sold off for 1c in Toys ‘R’ Us.)
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Feb 12th
Well, I’ve got my new room. Given it a vague outdoors feel with stuff I had lying around. I’ve decided to set up a complete T-Rex in there, when I get the bits.
Frobert won the Bright Nights contest, even though I voted for Dotty. Bah.
Released my first bottle in ages. I bet it washes up on my own beach.
Anchovy’s moving out. I like him, but not enough to presuade him to stay. Frobert, Big Top, Dotty and Deena are the ones who I’ll try to keep.
Too late for trunips today, but the next mortgage is only 848,000 or so, so I should have that paid off within a couple of weeks if I keep picking my fruit.
Tried to go out, but nobody had their gates open. Ah well.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 12th
I’ve played for forty-seven hours and sixteen minutes.
That’s nearly two complete days of my life.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max
Feb 12th
Ohhhhhhhh, I think I see.
Each character can only appear in the high score table once. I wondered why it seemed to be letting me enter my intials after some games and not others.
I nearly got to the fourth round of Arcade mode just now. Nearly. But not quite. Fucking Cammy.
I’m wondering if I should learn to use a character who’s not Ryu. His basic moves are nice and simple and part of my gaming hardware after all these years.
Manual lists all the specials for all the characters, though, rather than telling you to go buy the strategy guide, which is nice. Good Capcom.
I remember buying UFC for the Dreamcast and the manual for that had biographical detail for all the fighters (height, weight, birthplace, etc.) and told you to buy the strategy guide to find out how to actually control them in game. I was, and remain, disgusted.
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max
Feb 12th
So, I put it on for a quick go and choose random on the Arcade mode select screen.
The game gave me a V-ism Guile.
Gee, thanks.
I started it up and Blanka kicked my face off in the first round.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 11th
Hmm. I didn’t think this worked off the hard drive, but someone on a forum said it did, so I copied it and it does. Hooray for even shorter load times! Putting the disc back in its case I found the FFXII demo, which I’d completely forgotten about. I’ll have to try that sometime.
Anyway, another five hours. Started off with a boss fight that went on ages but which wasn’t too stressful. Lots of wandering around and exploring. I did one dungeon and then got to another one, but it was proving a little tricky and my resources were dwindling, so I used Evac to get out and then used Zoom to get back to Farebury, because I’m a cheapskate and it’s got the cheapest inn. I’ll try the dungeon again tomorrow. I got to a bit where I couldn’t progress and so would have to backtrack to try and find a switch or lever or cutscene or something to let me go on.
I did die once this evening, actually. Just out in the field. Wasn’t my fault. Some enemies have a spell that goes through your entire party and has a small chance of killing anyone it touches. I’m not sure what the odds are of it wiping out your entire party in one sweep, but I bet it’s high. Not high enough to stop it happening to me, though. I lost about 3,000 gold because of that, too. It’s not like I’ve ever got much cash, because I never sell anything. You never know what you might need. And I can never remember which items are greyed out when using the alchemy pot. Anyway, I did buy Yangus his first new weapon in about thirty hours this evening, so that was nice.
