All Achievements Achieved – Dead Rising 2: Case Zero

For some reason, I expected the Achievements to be much harder for Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. Especially the one for killing 1,000 zombies, but I quickly realized that it only sounded more difficult than it truly was. I just spent a good 15 minutes running them over and over and over again with the pushcart thingy when I had to carry back the first bike part. Yup, even a zombie game has its percent of grinding to do…

The toughest of the bunch focused on fetch quests:

Still Creek Survivor (20G): Saved all the survivors in Still Creek. So much work in such a short stay!

This one required dedication and attention. Given the strict time limit in Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, you basically have to forgo finding all the bike parts in favor of saving everyone else stranded in Still Creek. That’s fine. I never really liked Chuck’s daughter, and seeing her taken away by the military for a second time bothered me not a bit. Now, actually saving the survivors is not a walk in the park. In fact, it’s more like a walk in a zombie-infested park. And they’re all drunk off moonshine. Okay, okay–maybe only one is actually drunk, but the rest sure do act like a bunch of inebriated clowns. Basically, you go find where these survivors are and then get them to follow you back. Sounds simple. It’s not. They like to run directly into groups of zombies instead of following the path you’ve cleared for them with your spiked bat and electric rake. The worst survivor is a sick woman you have to carry all the way back to your hideout; I flashbacked hard to Musashi: Samurai Legend and felt everything inside of me twist upside-down from repressed torture and anguish.

Seven Achievements are guaranteed to unlock during your first playthrough. The rest require another playthrough or two, but don’t take long at all to get. Small Town, Deep Pockets was the last to unlock for me after buying way too many stuffed moose heads from Dick’s pawnshop. A surprisingly easy 200 Gamerscore overall.

It’s a good week to love slime in DQIX

Still haven’t beaten the second form of Corvus yet…

Trust me, I’ve tried. Twice actually since the last update on Dragon Quest IX. He’s supremely frustrating in that he seems to understand too well how badly I need Kingsley, our group’s priest, to stay alive in order to buff and heal and set up magic barriers for the party. Corvus kills him as fast as possible. Two or three hits, down he goes. Then the others fall quickly. I think everyone needs better armor and weapons, and the good news is that this week on the DQVC is loaded with awesome gear. Why? Well, it’s Metal Slime Week, of course!

According to the Internetz, metal slime items can only be obtained through treasure chests in high level grotto maps. So…there, and DQVC. Meaning, if one really wanted these items sooner than later, now is the time to jump on them.

The downside to all of this is that metal slime items are extremely expensive.

So far, here’s what I’ve been able to buy after many thoughtless hours of grinding during movies like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Elf:

• Metal Slime Armour (bought for 38,000 gold)
• Metal Slime Sollerets (bought for 11,000 gold)
• Metal Slime Gauntlets (bought for 12,500 gold)
• Metal Slime Shield (bought for 30,000 gold)

And here’s what I still really want to get, but lack the funds currently:

• Metal Slime Spear (costs 49,000 gold)
• Metal Slime Helm (costs 25,000 gold)
• Metal Slime Sword (costs 45,000 gold…but I don’t know if I actually want or need it currently because Hadwynnn, my minstrel, rocks a whip)

I was also able to snag one oricalchum, a reset stone, some lava lumps, and a couple Hephestus’ flames. Either way, it’s a good week to be hopping online and doing some shopping. Just hope y’all have the gold to blow! I suggest trying to farm the Gold Golems near Gleeba because each one drops around 500 gold upon death. Other than that, just keep at it…the mindless button-mashing is worth it.

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!

The time to time-travel in Chrono Trigger is now

I’ve played the first hour or so of Chrono Trigger at least five times total over these many years of mine. But that’s all I ever played. The first hour–waking up in bed, going to the festival, losing Marle to some time vortex, following after her, the trial, eventually ending up in the future, which is all about being post-apocalyptic and  tragic–is pretty dang near tattooed in my brain, and I have shoddy ROMs to blame. Yup, I used an SNES emulator way back when to catch up on some games I missed, and it seemed like every time I got to Arris Dome (or one of those domes) the ROM would crash. And so, I never got back from the future, and I’m guessing my in-game friends of Crono, Lucca, and Marle all died terribly of massive hunger and depression. Robo’s probably still there unless his robotic comrades turned him into scrap metal.

Hmm…no good way to transition from that.

Well, last week, during a heightened stage of insanity from wedding stress and worries about [detail redacted], I picked up Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS. It’s a cartridge I’ve been wanting to add to my collection for some time now, and I found it reasonably priced at $20.00. Even though it was a used copy, it still came with the poster that new copies were shipped with…so that’s nice. Granted, I won’t really be hanging it up, but bonus stuff is bonus stuff.

And the even better news is I’ve broken out of my Chrono Trigger slump. I’ve played about three hours worth of the game now and even made it to the end of time. Dun, dun, dunnn. From there, I time-traveled to the land of dinosaurs, which, if I may make the joke, is more accurately known as the land before time. I really do hope I can throw a Lightning Slash against Ducky “Bigmouth” Saurolophus because, as it turns out, one can only listen to her “Yep! Yep! Yep!” so many times. Lots of places to visit there, but no clear quest direction, and I’m not sure how to get back yet.

So I got some grinding to do though as these dinos are actually really tough against my LV 13/14s, and I have to wonder if I wasn’t supposed to go here first; I did head back to the original timeline beforehand only to discover the town and such overrun by goblins and beasts. Not sure what to do about that yet, but regardless, I’m just glad to be experiencing more Chrono Trigger than I ever did before.

Also, the normal day-to-day enemy battles are really tense, much more than any of the boss fights so far. I really like that and miss that feeling of uncertainty and timing and importancy on paying attention to health points and where the enemies are on the playing field. No offense, Dragon Quest IX, because I do love you, but I can just button mash my way to safety each and every time. Chrono Trigger is certainly a refreshing RPG experience, which is funny considering it’s 15 years old.

Autosave feature, you do not complete me

I beat The Saboteur some weeks back, but it’s a game I keep on playing. There’s a lot of post-ending grinding to do (mostly for Achievements), and I know it’s not something one completes over the course of a single night. For example, one Achievement asks that Sean spend 75,000 contraband. That’s A LOT. By the game’s end, I had only spent around 45,000, and this Achievement now involves a lot of weapon/ammo buying, and dying to head back to the shop to rinse and repeat. So…slow is the name of the game, but that’s okay with me. I enjoy playing this game in short spurts, killing a couple of Nazi dots and continuing to explore this wonderfully open Paris.

However, I loaded up the game last night to discover that my last save was from early July 2010. Um, no. I had just played the game a few days before…which means all that hard work of blowing up Nazi towers and collecting postcards was all for naught. This also includes the roughly 5,000 contraband I worked on spending to get me closer to the 75,000 mark. And here’s why this happened: I relied on autosave, a function that worked well throughout the main story missions as it saved often and strongly, most often at different mission checkpoints. However, in the post-game world, where there’s no missions left to do, the autosave function does not compute as often as I’d like. I have to wonder if it even does anymore at all. Now there’s only manual saving, something I forgot to do last time. And after seeing all those white dots back on the world map, I will never forget again.

So yeah, I’m a little grumpy over this, and will now most likely take a break from The Saboteur. Just a few days, that’s all. It’s not been my proudest moment. And now I’m reminded of a beautiful little quote from our leading lad Sean Devlin, “Let’s see how proud you are with my f*cking boot up your arse!”

The Elite Four wall

Well, I gotta come clean. The Elite Four, more specifically the first member of the league with his/her psychic-themed Pokemon, completely pwned me. Of my six Pokemon I’m currently using, only three are over LV. 40, which seems to be where the Elite Four’s Pokemon start out at. Plus, psychic attacks had my Ho-Oh eating dirt fast, and it’s my strongest fighter at this point.

So you know what that means, right?

Time to grind.

I don’t have a huge problem with this because grinding in Pokemon HeartGold is relatively simple and easy not to pay attention to. What do I mean? Well, you basically find the cave or spot of grass with decent leveled Pokemon, equip the Pokemon you’re not using as your lead-in with the EXP share item, walk around until you get into a fight, spam your hardest attack, repeat until you run low on health or PP, heal up at the closest free healthcare center, and then do it all again. You can also watch TV during all of this.

No, what bothers me more is this severe spike in difficulty. Because if the first member of the Elite Four is trouble enough, you then have to take on three more without a chance for free healing and such. That means…I need all six of my ‘mon in great shape, most likely around LV. 50 to LV. 60. Oh boy. That’s a lot of experience to go around. Or maybe I can get by earlier than that. I will most certainly try, as I really just want to “beat” the game and open up more paths on my Pokewalker (wow, that’s kind of a sad goal).

And I dunno…given the length of the plot and major storyline events, I don’t expect many players to reach the league battle with extremely high level pocket monsters. Maybe one or two, but not a full team. Unless they played previous games before and just loaded in their super powerful team and whooped some major butt. But then phooey on them. It’s us newcomers meant to suffer.

So we’ll see. I’m definitely at a standstill currently. Maybe I can get through them with just four strong ‘mon or maybe I can see if anyone is willing to trade something good my way. The problem, naturally, is I have nothing great to give back, unless HeartGold exclusives count.

Happy anniversary for Grinding Down!

That’s right, my silent and stalky readers. Grinding Down is now celebrating its one-year anniversary. Woo-hoo!

::confetti and Daft Punk tunes::

Back in March 2009, I decided I wanted to take another stab at videogame journalism, but at a much more relaxed pace. Well, maybe too relaxed in the beginning. See, I posted a few times in March 2009 and then quickly forgot about the blog until the summer hit, wherein I found myself with a lot of topics to muse about online. And since then, I’ve been pretty good at keeping this thing lively (just not on the weekends, which is fine by me). There’s some reviews here and there, but it’s more of a home for randomness, reflecting on older games, and having a bit of fun with pictures and words. That really doesn’t plan to change much.

But yeah, a whole year of grinding. Bow-chicka bow-wow! Er, forget I just wrote that. There’s cake and punch in the back.

Making it last with Pokémon

According to my save data for Pokémon HeartGold, I’ve now invested over 15 hours into the game. The amazing part? I’ve only made a really small dent. My Pokédex says I’ve seen about 75 Pokémon, of which I’ve caught around 30 or so. I just earned my third gym badge, now finally moving past Goldenrod City to the National Park and the Pokéthlon for some Pokélympic games (side-note: that was way too many pokés for one sentence). A good portion of this time has been spent on grinding my team towards a better balance, as well as just meandering about the world.

But still. Fifteen hours and only a little bit through. For some games, that’s their entire length…or not even. I’m looking directly at you, MySims Agents.

It’s just nice to know that HeartGold is in it for the long haul. And so am I. And so is Abigail:

Grinding is Good and Bad and All We Really Ever Had

There’s been a lot of talk lately about grinding, some for it, some against it, and some just not sure how to define where it shows up. Here’s some links, all of which are worth a read and/or listen:

• Adam Sessler’s Soapbox says that grinding is good
• An interest article by Daniel Feit follows up on this
• And then there’s this direct response to Feit’s article by Gerren Fisher, which argues that if someone enjoys the gameplay mechanic attached to grinding then it isn’t a grind at all

Having named my blog Grinding Down for a reason, I feel equally mixed about this subject.

It’s a staple of RPGs, sometimes more prevalent than not, and I much prefer it to be an optional sort of thing. Cases where it has not been optional are Eternal Sonata and Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King. In both these games, I found myself stuck at a boss fight that I was clearly not ready for…which meant wasting an hour or two grinding, fighting the same monsters over and over, sleeping at the same inn to heal for cheap over and over, and so on. This is depressing. There might as well have been a scratch on the game’s disc because this kind of grinding is basically stating, “You can not play this game any more. Not until you kill X more slimes/whatever. Ha ha, fooled you.”

I’m surprised I haven’t had to grind yet in Fallout 3. Or maybe I have and I just haven’t noticed. Playing as a sneaky thief, I don’t necessary have to be super strong to kill a room of ghouls. I can instead just sneak past them. All experience that I’ve gained along the way (now a Level 21) has felt natural and just enough to get me through the next section. Whereas in Oblivion, a game that levels you up so long as you constantly use the same skills over and over, grinding there is visibly obvious. Want to excel in blunt weapons? Better start smacking some mudcrabs around.

Truthfully, I’m fine with grinding so long as I don’t know it is happening, so long as it is an enjoyable aspect of the game and not jarring, so long as the reward is worth the work. I have fought and defeated Emerald Weapon in Final Fantasy VII, and this was during the days of “no Internet guides”; all I had was my thumbs and the knowledge that I needed to have Cloud and the gang at incredibly high levels. So I spent a weekend grinding. This involved fighting, fighting, fighting, take a potty break, fighting, lunch, fighting, fighting, fighting, dinner, fighting, fighting, potty break, possibly a shower (I can’t remember anymore), fighting, fighting, and then bed. Once I felt battle-ready, I saved and then took Emerald Weapon down after much stress and sweating. The question remains…was grinding to gain XP to be strong enough to beat a boss to gain even more XP worth it? Not really. In addition to experience, you get the Earth Harp item, which is tradable for the remaining master materias. Meh. I could’ve been outside reading or something. That part of my youth is gone, and I have nothing to show for it.

Oh well.

Videogames can be fun and frustrating, you know

Two videogames have been driving me absolutely bonkers lately. One won’t just let me complete it (three achievements to go!); the other won’t even let me move forward.

LEGO Batman. Sure, I “beat” it months ago, but every now and then I pop back into it to grab some missed items and trying and unlock everything. And I’ve gotten just about everything…that is, but three collectibles. Now, one of them is painstakingly annoying to obtain. Trust me, I tried three times in a row last night. In one of the Penguin’s villain levels, you have to guide your characters down an icy slope, going through five specific flags to unlock the hidden canister. Sounds simple enough, yes? The problem is that if you miss even one flag you are then dropped into the level’s final boss battle room and cannot return to try again. Meaning you must replay the level again and again and…again. I’ve had zero luck so far. Insert heavy sigh.

And then we come to Eternal Sonata, a bizarre RPG that isn’t really my favorite thing in the world, but I liked it enough to get to the middle of Chapter Three. It has my gang running around a pirate ship of…evil pirates. I don’t know. The storyline is a bit murky to my memory at the moment. Anyways, my dudes are about all LV 19s, and we hit the ship’s main boss: Captain Dolce. To put it simply: she slaughtered us. An online walkthrough suggested that our party be all LV 22s at least before tackling Dolce. That means, if I want to move forward, I have to now waste a good couple of hours just wandering the ship’s floors, fighting generic minion after minion after minion.

I know this blog is called Grinding Down, but grinding is not something I yearn to do. Time is precious, and this sort of roadblock only wants me to put the game back on the shelf and move on to something a little more forgiving.