Killer

It was my turn to play again this morning. I could play extra long though because my girlfriend had to go to the doctor to get some medicine for something that now appears to be more then just a cold.
This did allow me to go through Johnny's memory though and after that to his old burnt down house (easy puzzle this time dude) and found out about him and his sister. And got Roger to take us up to the gate.

When we blasted off though I was shocked to find that my screen went blank and never returned to normal...
This is apparently a problem HDLoader has with this game, luckily though I searched the internet a little andn found that I had to press up on the D-pad during the HDL splash screen to enable MDMA0, which luckily did work.

So now I was at the gate. I walked up to Lady and Killer and killer showed that deep down, even though he was a serial killer named Killer, he was a good person who just wanted to be loved and to have his friend Lady's wish granted, whether it be to regain her humanity or to destroy the world...

First time I faced him I was (as always) grossly unprepared. And most of my characters were quicly disposed of by his instant death attack.
Afterwards though I took some more time to prepare and of course equipped Leonardo's Bear on everyone and something on Frank to stop him from being Sealed so he could Arc Heal everyone. Crazy thing about sealing that I learned is that you can Fuse whilst sealed, just not into any creature, just back to normal I guess.

After a long time and quite a few deaths and ultimate attacks (his attacks, not mine), we finally won. His Malice for really reminded me of Yuri's 2nd and 3rd fire fusion. But aside from my great wish of seeing one of the old characters back (I know roger is still here, but even in Shadow Hearts some characters crossed over from Koudelka) he was a real bad egg.
After he was beaten he kinda does look dead, but you never know with Lady around.

I have now entered the gate and I don't think I'll have much longer to go...

The Real World!

I wen to Gysahl and talked to some people without much interesting happening or finding, then went to Cid to get my Airship fixed.
Then I was told to go to The Real World, so I did that.

Once in the real world I was confronted by pretty much nothing... So I looked around, found a temple and thought it best not to enter, then found a shipwreck that I somehow felt a need to enter... Apparently that was a good idea as I found Aria, some kind of priestess that wanted to save the world and was now sick in bed. Gave her an elixir to fix her up and then she asked us to take her to the temple I'd found earlier.
We went there and to my surprise there were no random encounters. We took a shard of the water crystal and then she asked us to take her to some cave to the north.
Inside this cave was the Water Crystal, but damn there are some tough creatures in there. Not that they do a lot of damage, but Paralysis and Petrification are not your friends!

Got through it though, and also through a whole lot of Gold Needles. But then I met Kraken and found myself unprepared. I died in 2 turns so I thought to call it quits for the day.

Argus

I was roaring to go as I turned on my girlfriend's DS and started Final Fantasy III! I had just beaten both Salamander and Hein and I felt invincible!
There wasn't so much fighting to do yet though. I walked around a little going to some towns to see if there was anything I missed or people that still needed to thank me.
I went to see King Argus about the airship that I wanted Cid to build and used the thief's skills to open some locked doors I'd left behind. And I was about to go on my way to gysahl to see if there was anything of interest there, but alas, by now my girlfriend's DS's light had turned red and I needed to charge it, so no more Final Fantasy for the next few hours...

Gives my time to try other things though.

LF

After having been through hell to get that Model H Biometal and then taking some time to explore and gather some stuff (I likes them energy tanks) I had to go to field F. I'd looked around a little for it yesterday and found it, but of course I died...
This time though I was determined to get through it! So I was a little more careful then I usually am and I took a little more time to see what's going on and stuff and eventually I got to the room with the data disc. And after seeing what the data disc had I was told that they would unlock the locked door... locked door? I hadn't seen a locked door in ages...
Luckily I remembered the door that I'd seen at the beginning of that field and went there which was of course the right place to be (I hadn't thought before on how to get there).

I went into some kind of waterish level and got through it with only minor trouble to eventually be met by the L boss... Some giant fish with the light/bait cord thingy on it's head. To my surprise this boss was farely easy to dispose of. Now I had the model L biometal and I could swim for real! :)
I then went on some more exploration and after having failed my mission by dying too much I decided 'screw exploration and items' and went on with the next mission.

This mission wanted me to go to area G, wth??? I had even less of an idea where G would be because I thought I'd gone almost everywhere I could in order to get to F.
After some searching I finally found it though and ran into a whole lot of fire! Had to go into a burning building and save everyone.
I climbed to the top of the building and then jumped over to the next and eventually found my way to another boss, which I was kindof expecting seeing as I didn't stop right after having fought the first boss.
since I was very surprised I'd beaten the first boss with the help of my energy tanks, imagine my surprise when I fought agains model F and won after only dying once! The world of Megaman is going crazy! Me being able to defeat 2 bosses in one try??

Anyway, after having beaten F and seeing my new bull-like outfit, I decided that I'd pushed my luck with megaman far enough for now and decided to give it some rest. I can always play more later today or tomorrow...

Graveyard scene anyone?

I was happy to find that the puzzle I completed yesterday was one of the last. I went up to the next floor and found no puzzle, which was a nice relief. Then up one more floor and here was a puzzle, but I didn't need to walk around a lot for it, just light up a star. I opened both doors (first the dark one on the left, 80% of the time left is lucky, but right is right) and went up to the last floor, where they tried to place the rings, but were interrupted by Killer.
To my great surprise this was the first boss-fight in a long time that didn't actually kill me and needed me to try a 2nd time.

After he was beaten he tried to kill Johnny, who then magically transformed. Being the evil bugger that his transormation is, he starts knocking everyone on their asses and even hits Shania with the back of his hand (abusive right after the wedding?).
Shania then activates the shrine and Johnny is turned back to normal, except he's KO.

He then suddenly wakes up in his old room in his old house. This reminds me a bit of how Yuri always gets to his Graveyard the first time. I'm still rooting for atleast a guest appearance of one of the cooler characters (Yuri, his cousin, alice, the girl from SH2).

But then I found my save point and of course my girlfriend wanted to play her game so I had to stop playing again (dammit).

Salamander Hein

I had finally convinced myself to play some more Final Fantasy III after having heard from a friend that job requirements are so bad in this game that he bought the official guide just to see which jobs he needed to have where. And since I'm not into buying or even very much reading guides (though I do from time to time) this was kinda unnerving as I could already see myself failing at every turn of the game.
The I read up a little more on how serious it was and was calmed down by the knowledge that 3 melee characters and a Devout are really all you need. So I was good to go again untill I came to a passage about the boss I was about to face, saying that it was the most hateful boss in the game... Salamander. So I got scared thinking I'd never beat him of course, but after having beaten him I can very hardly imagine that being the most annoying boss. He went down kinda quickly.

Then I could change my job to Knight, which I wanted to do for a good while now and was walking around going my merry way when I stumbled upon a stumbling and mumbling person who said that some town I'd visited once needed my help. So I went there only to be incapacitated by the friendly king's soldiers. I was taken to the walking tree that I had tried entering earlier without succes (no clipping?).
So I knew that I was semi-screwed because I did some stuff (nothing big) and didn't save because I didn't think I'd be captured upon entering the village. And anyone who's played FFIII knows that there are no save points in the game.
On top of that, 25% through my girlfriend notified me of her plans to go to bed (she's a bit under the weather at the moment) and I couldn't save! And I didn't want to give up my progress either. So I pushed on, trying my best to get through it as quickly as possible.
Luckily the dungeons aren't all that big (yet) in this game, so it didn't take long, but damn Hein was a tough cookie to bite through. 2x attack seems to be becoming somewhat of a trend amongst (boss) enemies. Multiple hits I can understand, but more then one action per turn is bordering on unfair.
I KO'd him in 3 turns, but I did lose my 2 strongest characters (kinda strange), using the Antarctic Wind I'd found.

Now it's late and I think my girlfriend is starting to feel the urge to give me the evil eye, so off I go again, into bed to waste another 8 or so hours on sleep that I could spend gaming or entertaining her... Oh well, life is sleep...

Half a Model H

I guess 20x went by faster then I expected because I've beaten that weird flying Reptoloid kind of thing.

Afterwards I accepted a job which would lead me to Area F, no idea where that was though, so I started looking around a little. Fought some enemies, ran into this really wierd enemy theme park and went on some rides, fought a few enemies, found 2 sub-tanks (not there, but whilst exploring) and found out that these aren't used automatically when energy depletes which I'm very used to so I keep forgetting to refill my health.

I don't understand though that once you're frozen by those Totem-like things how you can get out of it, because whenever I freeze, I can't get out before I'm frozen again. So those things seem like a pretty good deathtrap to me...
I accidentally did a soft-reset, so I guess I'm going to do something else again...

Just a puzzle...

Had very little time this time, so only could complete the puzzle for a single room. I could've played longer, but I knew my girlfriend wanted to play Suikoden III real bad, so when I finished the puzzle and saw that I could still easily reach my save point, I decided to let her play. So I'm still stuck on the 4th floor.

My First Serialization...

When my study of Visual C# just started I set out to create an application that my girlfriend's mother could use to organize her game shortcuts and stuff.
Today, maybe 6 months later, I finally figure out a way to save the shortcuts into a file and get them out (I learned this a while ago already), but today I figured out how to each give them their own eventhandler.

I created a class that contains the information that I need to get the program to work and also 1 function with the Button.Click event handler signature. I made another class that contains a generic list of the first class.
I save this list through a serializer and call it when the application loads.
I run through every instance of the first class and create a button using the information from my first class and call the event handler from it. This evenhandler uses the info from this class to start the application.

This is probably no great feat, since I'm only beginning and still need to adjust to the idea of the written program and the compiled program. When I'm talking to someone about 5 apples I can't easily talk about each apple individually, but a well-written compiled program can because he doesn't just see 5 apples, but 5 instances of an apple each with unique names that it gave to them (right?).

4th Floor

My girlfriend went off to watch some TV and actually had the option to save right before she had to go (she's playing Suikoden III). So I saw my opportunity to play some more Shadow Hearts, since I couldn't do all that much this morning except go to where I had to and buy some new equipment.

This time it was a little more productive, though it was very uncertain whether or not it would be during the first half hour since I couldn't find my way out!
In the puzzle with all the pillars and stuff in the first room it's never actually explained that you need to touch the white crystal to open the door, and as observant as I am (not), I overlooked it. So I was running around testing various combinations of raised and lowered platforms only to find that none worked... frustrations started building up just a teensy bit, and then I noticed it! All this might not seem like it is a lot (since there are only 3 types of pillars), but with the enemies going around there this can take quite a while.

In the end though I did make it, but only to stumble upon a room with seemingly no white switch. Thoughts were processed along with images and enemies so that I may find out that there was a white switch down on the 'floor'. So I rode one of the pillars and back up again to find that the switches also show what they do to which pillars. So the switch I thought was the end in sight (yellow) actually only sent the yellow ones down...
Looking around I found no 'up' switch, so I went down again, luckily finding the right switch.

So now I'm on the 4th floor and I don't know how many I have left to get to, but I'm sure it's no more then half to be tried again tomorrow...
These games seem to progress really slowly...

Oooooh, Ahhhh, pretty...

I've got this old forum that I used to run (it's still around, just not being used at all) and I spent a lot of time there changing the way it looks to something that I still love to look at (but I think that's just me because other people always disliked things here and there).

But I've decided that I'll try and change the look of this page as much as I can to the look of my other page, just a little every now and then.

Curiosity

Apparently the main character in Megaman ZX is curious about his enemies and what is going on, since each time you're beaten by that flying monkey of a Model H it tells you that curiosity killed that cat and now it's killed you.

I found out that at one point you could jump onto some kind of huge gears that would allow you to jump over a big chasm like structury thing that I always jumped right into and just walked by, but atop the other side of this structure (a place I couldn't get to before because of my own personal denseness) there are a few semi-secret passages that eventually lead to some kind of power cell that you can destroy, thus disabling the little shock things you see and some other thingies such as the shocks that I ran into last night and didn't know how to get past.
So now I got past all that and ran into that Model H dude. I've seen tough Megaman bosses and this isn't one of them, sure I need to try a few times and the fact that I only have 3 lives at my displosal is a little frustrating, but I'll make it soon and then I'll be a happy little camper and perhaps be able to fly or jump a little higher.

This game might turn out to be even more fun then I thought it would.

Salt Lake Tower

I collected the other blue ring, which was way easier then I had expected, not even a single fight was needed.

Now I need to unlock the blue power to counter the red power so that Lady and Killer don't get their wish of her becoming human again (which is downright silly because she just wants to destroy the world!). I don't know if he likes her and is gullible or that he knows that what he's doing will mean the end of all living things on earth, but he seems convinced that he's doing a good thing and that the 'kids' are the evil-doers, even though he's the serial killer named Killer.

So I'm pretty sure that once I get up upon that tower I will have to beat (and possibly kill) him again. All this in a tower made of holy salt, I wonder if it can take such stress.

Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth

Having been interested in this game for a very long time now and never finding either the energy or the time to play it, I decided when I finished my last game to actually try and get through it.

Right now I'm in some kind of tower, it's actually a story part, where someone is apparently in love with Lenneth and is thus killing beings and turning them into 'ghouls' in order to get her to come to him, presumably so that they make sweet love on the ancient wooden desk thingy that he uses to dissect his 'pray'. He might throw an elf he just captured in the mix to get it extra freaky, who knows with these people nowadays.

The tower is pretty damn rough from time to time, last time I tried I ran into some kind of Cerberus thing that had an attack that hit 3x and did both poison and freeze, so most of my party was incapacitated. This time around I met with a Fatal Glow thingy that used explode one too many time and 3/4 of my party died, somehow I recovered from this (using my last revive drinks) and am now on my merry way down to the damn sicko.

Too bad really that it is bed time and my girlfriend seems to be in a foul mood, because if that had not been the case I might have advanced my tries to get through it and found some freaky action on the way. ViMhoe is the word!

Descet

After having tried that boss thingy I talked about earlier in Shadow Hearts 3 once more I can safely say that he won't bother me again. I killed him and I got the nice shiny blue ring. Unfortunately that was also the exact time I had to stop playing, because House was playing on TV and my girlfriend wanted me to watch it with her and her mom. We're all big House fans in this house.

Megaman ZX

Yesterday I started playing Megaman ZX. I've always enjoyed playing the X series of Megaman and the Zero series too. Not so much the originals because they were just way damn tough.
So I decided to try the DS installment of this franchise to see if it was as much fun as the ones on GBA and PSP.

Fortunately so far it seems to be, but again it's pretty damn tough. Having trouble getting through the 3rd mission already. I don't care though, with some endurance and through trial and (mostly) error I will get to atleast a point in the game where I can say "I've played it".

I have to go to this powerplant right now and there's this one part where you have to jump on some kind of breaker that get electrocuted when it falls down because of your weight. This isn't all that tough were it not for the enemy that's floating there in mid-air. This beast is just a little too far to hit with your blade and I don't have full control over my cannon yet (this being due to my personal inability to grab the DS right).
I died a few times there and apparently went through all my lives, so I decided to try again some other time.

Kirby Squeak Squad

Lol, had not expected it to go this quickly, but I started playing a little more of Kirby and I finished it! 100%
So this is my last post about Kirby.

I've been playing Kirby games since I was about 11 and I first found my cousin's copy of Kirby's Dreamland for the GameBoy. I started playing that and I couldn't keep from trying to get to and through that last level. After several tries I finally did ofcourse and this time with Kirby Squeak Squad I had nearly the same feeling as almost 10 years ago now.
It's a very fun game, with cool extras such as coloring your Kirby and getting extra life and such and even 1 extra transformation which I think might be my new personal favorite (Ghost).
The story is pretty funny, but it kind of turns out to be nothing, you set out to get your cake back and end up releasing and defeating the lord of the underworld and forgetting all about your cake. The evil-doers in this game just go away after that and they send you a new cake as an apology.
It's a very kiddy game, with not-so-subtle messages worked into the story, but this is always the case with Kirby and helps make it fun(ny).

Kinda too bad it is over already, but to date it's the most fun DS game I've finished (also the first one). Now on to other things!

Final Fantasy III

Well, I've been playing Final Fantasy III over the last 3 days and I've been having a lot of fun. When I got it I didn't realise that they'd also made it 3D (as they are doing with FFIV now), which is cool since I'd never played FFIII before, but have played FF, IV, V and VI all in 2D and although 4 through 6 pull it off very nicely, 1 just didn't cut it. Now 3 being 3D I'm pretty sure it makes it quite a bit more accessible to me.

Yesterday though I was sent to retrieve the Ice horn from Gutsco the Scoundrel. But when I faced him, in the 2nd or so turn he used mini on all of us, I couldn't turn us all back in time and we died miserably.
Today I have tried again and this time I kicked his but. Good thing though that his mini spell missed a lot, that really helped. Too bad though Arc died right before Ingus tore him to shreds.

Ater that I noticed that I had something following me, which of course later turned out to be none other then Gutsco himself. Now I gotta chase him in another cave in order to get the crystal of fire.
I wonder what will happen when I have all 4 crystals, at this rate that won't take too long and afterwards what will I have to do?
Well, we'll see...

Kirby Squeak Squad

Another day another world. I've been sporadically playing Kirby Squeak Squad on my girlfriend's DS for a while now and these last few days I've been playing it a lot more (been allowed to touch her DS more too).
I play a level (or World) and then I grab all the treasure chests there. So far they've been really easy to find. And I'm in level (world) 8 now! The one that doesn't originally show up on the map.

Well, I played through level 7 and the game is getting just a teensy bit tougher, I get hit a lot more, which is my main notification of it getting tougher, but it could also be because I'm getting more and more impatient to get through it or something.

The story is pretty funny, I mean saving the world (universe?) just because someone stole your pie!

Well I might play more this day so you might see another post about Kirby later on!

Shadow Hearts From the New World

Well, I've been playing Shadow Hearts 3 for a while now and I'm still really bummed out that the original main character(s) aren't in there anymore. My hopes are still high that they might someday return to this franchise and kick ass again.

Of course it's typical that the day I think up this idea of posting what I'm doing in games would be the day that I spend an hour and a half playing, only to advance even a tiny bit in the last 5 minutes. So I've been walking around in circles all this time trying to find a ring in the Aito cave. Damn labyrinth with it's watchmen only allowing you through one-way.
Anyway, in the beginning of that cave it is explained that the red statues (magicians) would send you back, or atleast that's what I thought they said, but you're actually just transported somewhere else. So I also found out there that I've been walking around whilst already knowing the way to the next part, just without knowing that I knew this. So I tested it and the first thing that happens is that I'm sent right where I'm supposed to be.
Unfortunately given my current location (in the real world) I was only allowed to play for 1 hour and I had already passed that by far. Still, I was very curious about what I had to prepare for so I went on and saw the big centaur-like demon thingy protecting the itty-bitty ring.

There is something seriously wrong with these bosses. Always allowed to hit twice or more or just jump-start their stock on their own and stuff. I usually need atleast 2 tries to beat them now.

Anyway, I kinda lost after 3 or so turns and then decided 'What the hell, my time is up anyway' and turned off my PS2.

I am not looking forward to this fight whilst my last fight with Killer is still so fresh in my memory.

My new idea...

Since I seem to love writing and think that I don't nearly post enough around here, I thought I might post my gaming experience to a more full extent. I hope someone might read it and perhaps even find certain things usefull or interesting, but I don't expect this. As always I know no one is reading or listening.

Sleep IS Necessary...

I need to keep busy for a while. I haven't slept all night last night, and now I'm facing the concequences at work. I'm so dead tired that I can barely keep my eyes open and I'm pretty sure that my co-workers are slowly catching on that I'm just waiting to go home and that I'm constantly dozing off and stuff. Train back home is going to be a bitch again, I was constantly falling asleep on the way to work, suddenly woke up and realised I only had one more stop before I had to get off and I was still falling asleep constantly.

Now I just gotta keep looking busy for a while and keep myself from actually falling asleep for another 75 minutes. Torture...