Oh, hey, I’m back and you can now all cheer

Hi.

::hooray yippee woohoo:::

Okay, settle down. It’s not like I’m–

::wahoooooo::

Aw, so you did miss me, dear readers? That’s swell. I missed–

::so much frakkin’ confetti everywhere::

–you, too. But not too much–I was on my honeymoon in Walt Disney World after all. Hard to miss nearly anything when you’re in the happiest place on Earth.

Now…since this is a videogame blog and not a wedding blog, let’s see what I got to play over the last numerous days: Dragon Quest IX and Picross 3D.

THAT’S IT. I had my entire DS collection with me, and I only ever switched out the cartridges twice. Unless you want to count me not going crazy over missing out on Fallout: New Vegas fun as a game. Cause I played that a lot. A LOT. But I did a good job about not pestering Tara over it. And we’re still married! Hooray!

But yeah…I grinded in DQIX like never before thanks to airplane rides. I was able to raise my party of four by four whole levels from roughly 41 to 45, taking down both nasty forms of  King Godwyn, and have now made my way to the Realm of the Almighty for what I suspect is the final boss battle. I say that like it means something, but with DQIX, it really  doesn’t. Beating the final boss does not mean completing the game, but it will open up a slew of more sidequests, as well as give me more breathing room for grinding new characters and completing all those lists (alchemy, item, clothing, so on). Speaking of sidequests, I finished a couple of ’em, the most frustrating being Prat’s the Way to Do It, wherein I needed to get my Minstrel character to land two critical hits with the Pratfall ability. No easy task. Grinding helped though, and when I nailed the second one I was genuinely surprised and happy; I hate giving up a sidequest to make room for another one that seems impossible to do (uh, like that metal slime one). I also ended up completing two treasure maps, killing some legendary bosses like Shogum and Nemean–I think those are references to previous DQ games, but I don’t recognize ’em.

Oh, and the tally of completed puzzles in Picross 3D is now 279. Impressed? Well…you should be!

So, yeah. Not an amazing amout of gaming got done during the wedding/honeymoon time, as was to be expected. But that’s all about to change. Here I come, Fallout: New Vegas!

Be right back, getting married

Well, I gotta put Grinding Down on hold for a little bit as I’m getting married this Saturday. Random and pointless blathering about videogames will continue once I’m back from the honeymoon, and you’ll know when that is when you see posts here again. Fallout: New Vegas comes out when Tara and I are strolling the streets of the Magic Kingdom and Hogsmeade, and I guess that’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I have two things to say to those getting the game on the day it drops: 1) have fun, you lucky bastard(s) and 2) I hate you.

Be back soon, dear readers!

P.S. Those are the cake toppers Tara and I designed based off of my Supertown comic style. Adorable and faceless is the way to be.

The arduous task of deciding what Nintendo DS games to pack for the honeymoon

Five days to go until the wedding, and I’m still not even packed yet for the honeymoon. Hmm, might want to get going on that. Will have to make a note. Or, um, just look at this blog post again later. And I’m not even talking about packing clothes…just trying to narrow down what Nintendo DS games I can fit–and should fit–in my travel bag.

First, let me stop you and your finger-waggin’ assuming. Yes, this is Tara and I’s honeymoon, and yes, we’ll be doing lots of honeymoon-like things. Wink, wink. As well as going all over the place in Disney World and the Wizardy World of Harry Potter, dining fine and laughing and loving it up. I promise you, we will. But remember, there’s the airport waiting and flight itself to contend with, and if there’s one thing I’m really not a huge fan of…it’s flying. Anxiety and giant hunks of metal and wires magically floating in the air do not mix well. So I will need some distraction like woah, and thus enters my Nintendo DS. My travel bag can hold around 12 game catridges (I’m actually a little fuzzy on that; it might even be more), as well as another cartridge in the DS game slot.

Here’s the ones that fall under must definitely bring:

• Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars
• Chrono Trigger DS
• Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies
• Mario Kart DS
• Picross 3D
• Scribblenauts

DQIX will be perfect for killing time, as there are a bunch of sidequests and grinding to do. I also picked up Chrono Trigger DS last week and am enjoying that a lot too (more on that game later). Scribblenauts, while not perfect, is fun just to fool around with, and I think the others listed are self-explanatory.

And then here’s some filler:

• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
• MySims Agents
• Pokemon HeartGold

 

I think Tara is just bringing one game with her, and that’s Animal Crossing: Wild World. I have good memories of that game helping to soothe my sanity during a much longer flight from New Jersey to Arizona when I went to see my sister, meaning she’ll be just fine.

Either way, still lots to get done this week. Please pray for me.

REVIEW: Samorost 2

Developer/Publisher: Amanita Design
Platform: Mac OS X [reviewed], Windows, Linux
Genre(s): Point-and-click puzzler
Mode(s): Single player
Rating: ESRB: No idea, but it was fairly harmless and I’d guess something like E for Everyone
Time clocked: Around one hour

Sadly, I had to pack up the Xbox 360 and TV yesterday as my father came up to help me move from one apartment to the next. He was, however, running late, and I had about two hours to kill in a room full of boxes and nothing fun to play with (please keep your dirty thoughts to yourself). Sure, sure, I had my Nintendo DS, but that was kind of tucked away in my travel bag, and I just didn’t feel like getting off my Mac at that point. Then, ashamed, I remembered that I got five six games for my laptop back when I purchased the Humble Indie Bundle. Five main ones, and the sixth one, Samorost 2, was a bonus for those that helped contribue to the cause.

And so I scanned the list, trying to decide what to play for a bit. I dismissed World of Goo because I’m stuck on one level and can’t do anything else, as well as Aquaria, which is a game I like, but I really need to be in a mood to play. Finally, I picked Samorost 2, knowing nothing about it, only finding the name intriguing.

Samorost 2 is, obviously, a sequel, a follow-up to a game I’ve never played, but from what I can gather–that’s okay. You can go into Samorost 2 knowing nothing about it and still have a great time. The game opens up with a couple of aliens landing on a small planet, eating some fruit, and then stealing a strange little man’s dog because it was barking a little too much. The little man, referenced on another website as a space gnome, doesn’t change out of his PJs and follows their spaceship in pursuit of his best friend. And that’s the plot: rescue the dog and return home. It’s simple, but it works, and the world and creatures and mechanisms that revolve around the plot help buffer it along.

And man, what a beautiful world it is. The quality of the visuals is striking; the space gnome, his dog, and alien lifeforms are presented in a cartoonish form, but animated very well, giving off a Monty Python’s Flying Circus feel to it. The backgrounds (and foregrounds) on each level are extremely detailed and colorful, with a variety of alien flora and fauna (pun-intended) to enjoy, all done in a collage kind of way.

Gameplay is point-and-click, and the cursor turns into a hand when hovering over an item or part of the level that can be interacted with. Breaking tradition, there’s no inventory system, meaning if the space gnome picks up an item, it can–and must–be used there and then to solve the puzzle and move forward. This is a good thing in my opinion; I’ve been currently carrying around a lot of the same items in Broken Sword: The Shadows of the Templars, and each time I try to use them I fall flat on my face. Stupid elephant carving. Anyways, yeah. You point, you click, something happens. Sometimes you have to point, click, and click again while something is happening, but it’s pretty easy to figure out if you pay attention to the level and what does what. There were only two times where I got stuck. The first was because I just couldn’t find the exact pixel to click on, which was frustrating, and the second time came at Samorost 2‘s end when you have to do a bunch of things in a very specific order or start all over again. I did those final puzzles three times before I got it right.

Samorost 2 features a very odd, atmospheric soundtrack. Some levels have just tiny bits of music to it, some have none at all. It works well, but ultimately it’s forgettable. Also absent…dialogue. Progression and plot is told visually, and again, it boils down to “rescue dog and return home.” Some alien gruntage and a few doggy barks pepper the landscape, but it really doesn’t need a narrator or the space gnome’s opinionated musings. Though I still don’t understand why the alien monster is watching soccer on his TV.

Alas, Samorost 2‘s biggest fault is that it is a very short game. Even shorter than Limbo…dun dun dunnn. Consisting of seven levels, all of which are re-accessable via an age-old password system, the game’s running time is estimated between one and two hours, depending how stuck you get or how slow you pace yourself. I gobbled the game up very fast though. It’s extremely charming, stylish, and deceptively tricky. There’s an invisible rope attached to your heart, tugging you forward, and when you reach the next room, you just can’t help but click around, and before you know it, you’re in the next room. And so on, and so on. If you got some time to kill, I definitely recommend it. You can play a good portion of the game for free over at its website. Hop to it, young space gnome wannabes!

Harvest Moon meets FarmVille meets a mouthful of sleeping pills

I’ve spent the past two weeks so far packing up my little studio apartment and slowly moving everything over to Tara and I’s new place, now officially known as The Leaky Cauldron. Cause, uh, when it rains, the ceiling leaks. How fun! And I’ve discovered a number of videogames that I bought and kind of forgot about as I shove them into boxes and bags. One unmemorable piece of plastic and coding turned out to be Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, which I bought during an extreme spout of depression back in late June. I thought it might help fill the mild void that FarmVille left; side note, I was never addicted to the Facebook farming game, but I did log in every day for a few months to see what was what, but eventually lost interest despite liking the idea of crafting a piece of land into exactly what I wanted.

It’s a farming game with a mix of monster killing/monster raising, but I never got very far with it. It’s also been described as “Harvest Moon where you wield a sword.” The mechanics of it all though were very cold and regimented, leaving me confused and unsure of my farming skills. I basically started the game as Raguna, a fellow suffering from amnesia and wandering into the local town called Kardia. There he meets a girl named Mist who gives him a piece of land to farm and then…well, then you farm it. No tutorial really, no explanation. Exploring the city’s shops and houses allows Raguna to meet a host of characters, eventually finding himself face to face with the mayor who will allow him to enter the first cave and clear it of nasty monsters attacking Kardia. From there, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is open-ended. You can continue farming, trying to earn money by selling logs, woo women from town, or go cave-clearing. Or you can do what I did and try to clear the first monster cave only to get so far and then run out of health, exit out to rest, and go back to find ALL THE MONSTERS I PREVIOUSLY KILLED RESPAWNED. Meaning, I was not moving forward, only wasting my time.

Supposedly the storyline will not continue on unless new caves aren’t opened and cleared by beating the boss at the end. Greaaaaaaat.

Well, let’s try farming. Maybe I will become an expert farmer instead of a supreme warrior. So, in Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, you have two gauges to keep track of: Hit Points and Rune Points. I think we all know how HP functions (if not, maybe Grinding Down isn’t the blog for you), but Rune Points more or less convert to stamina, and just about every single action Raguna takes uses up RP. If you run out of RP, then every subsequent action depletes your HP bar. Let’s take a look at what uses RP: digging, planting, watering, picking crops, swinging weapon, cooking food, and so on. RP is essential to living life, and it’s a shame because after maybe planting 9 seeds and then watering them, you’ll have run out of RP and are then forced to go to bed to restore your bar. And that, to me, seemed to be all I could do, day in, day out. I tried selling some logs and plants to make some money, but had no idea what to buy.

Either I’m missing something or I’m just not good at this game. It might be a mix of the two, but I found myself growing bored very fast as doing the same exact tactics over and over was not very fun. Maybe someone can explain it to me? If anything, Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon is a gorgeous-looking game. So there’s that at least, but it’ll most likely never get played again…

Moving, the game of heavy boxes and staircases

No, this post is not about the PlayStation Move, but it is about moving. Cause that’s the reason I didn’t play any videogames yesterday. That’s right. Not a single one. Didn’t even end up busting out the Nintendo DS before the Sandman came to take me away. Oh wait…I did play the game of not having a heart attack after repeatedly climbing two sets of stairs with heavy boxes as Tara and I moved into our first apartment. I totally beat that game. Cause…I’m typing this post, see?

Anyways, we only brought over miscellaneous stuff at the moment. It’s going to be a piece-by-piece sort of move, as I still have my own studio and she’s still living at home with her folks until we get married. Which, amazingly, is happening one month from today. One…month. ONE MONTH. Trying not to freak out here. Deep breaths.

Want to see some more shots of our new, mostly empty pad? Check out Tara’s Flickr account then.

I’ll get back to videogame-related blathering soon, I promise. Visiting my folks for the weekend, which means packing up the Xbox 360. Tara hasn’t gotten to play Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game yet, and I now need help beating The Clash at Demonhead level. I’m even gonna be nice and let her play as Kim, as Scott’s move list has actually grown on me. I had to grind with him for a bit just to get past Lucas Lee on “Average Joe” difficulty. Tis a hard game. But if I can beat the no heart attack game, I can conquer this one for sure.