Star Ocean: First Departure

Star Ocean: First Departure is, of course, a remake of the first Star Ocean game which was released on the Super Nintendo. It is not unexpected that Square Enix once again did a good job at remaking an old game since they have been gathering as much experience as they possible can in it.

Talking of course about games such as Final Fantasy III & IV and even I and II.



This is not the best game they have ever made and it is highly reminiscent of the Tales of Phantasia game, which was also first released on the SNES, with it's main difference being that Star Ocean employed an eagle-eye (now isometric) view of battles.

Both these games seem to start out very similarly too, since you are just hanging out in your peaceful village when, out of nowhere, bandits (or other evil people) show up and start trashing the place. But that is where similarities end.



Compared to the old SNES system these graphics look like an impossible improvement, I'm a big fan of actually re-writing a game for a remake. It would have been fine for them to do the same as they did with Final Fantasy I & II, just update the pixelated low-res graphics a bit to be less pixelated high-res screens, but apparently this was not enough for them.

Even though they did this it still looks like it predates even the first 3D playstation games, which is kind of shameful after presenting a game like Crisis Core, which looked almost like it could have been one of the better looking PS2 games (FF XII), but then again you don't want to spend too much money on an easy money-maker, do you?



Gameplay is nice. The battles are never really hard as long as you train enough and the idea of specialties and skills (not to be confused with special abilities) has always been a nice addition in my opinion. These skills, when used properly, can very easily make your characters very strong in the usual way of nicely upgrading your stats, but also by giving you skills to get more exp and find more/less enemies and gain more skill points per level. These come in handy in almost any situation. Walking around an easy area where you only get 7 exp? Just avoid enemies. Need a copy of an accesory so that you won't be petrified all the time? Make one. Very nice.



Sounds are quirky. During battles there is a lot going on at the same time, which is not unusual of course, but the things they choose to play and keep out seem far too random to be intentional. When 2 people cast a spell only one can be heard, for example, but after every battle 2 people always have a little victory speech.

The music is nicely done though, in my opinion, it suits the game and during the somewhat more exciting parts of the game it will slightly elevate your adrenaline levels if you are susceptible to such things.



The FMVs they made are awesome. It has the perfect anime look and feel and it suits the game very well, my only regret and complaint about these clips is that there are not nearly enough of them. And they started out so very promising with the entire first scene having transformed from a gameplay scene to an FMV.

The characters really come to life in these in my opinion, kudos.



The game isn't tough. It is not even really annoying at any point. Though of course you can increase difficulty for yourself by not training as much as I did (I had train and look for enemies on almost all the time), or trying to solo it with your main character.



Private actions are another nice thing. They show funny/nice/intruiging/sad scenes between your party members, it is fun to watch them sometimes and they will affect certain scenes in your story.



All-in-all this is a very nice game and it is a nice distraction from your everyday dealings. If you are a star ocean fan then you can't allow yourself to leave this one and if you just like RPGs then your should most definitely give it a try. If you neither like Star Ocean or RPGs then you are probably better off not bothering.

These are some 30 hours that I have enjoyed very much.

Gfire on Fedora 9

Updating or installing software that does not come from the regular rpm repositories can be a big pain in Fedora. Especially if you don't have a lot of experience, like me.
I've only been using Linux for a few months now, and I don't have the time to find everything out from the beginning, I'm just doing what I can when I need to.



Now today I wanted to update my version of gfire, since I hadn't in a while and it had been acting up. Most likely since every time xfire updates it changes something in it's protocols which make all other things just act wacky.



I went to the website and downloaded the RPM, which started complaining about missing a certain rpmlib. This told me that I might be using an older version of RPM (which I found out after some googling), so I updated my system in the hopes of getting a new version of the RPM package manager, but alas this was not to be.

Found out later in the gfire forums that it was because the RPMs they offer are made for Suse.



Somewhere along this path I had already tried installing it from source, but the source files kept complaining that the pidgin package was not installed, even though it was.



The fix in the end was simple.

If you are having the same troubles as me then just install pidgin-devel and libpurple-devel and try to configure/make/install. This worked for me, it might too for you.

su -c "yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel
or
sudo yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel

Depending on which you prefer to use.

And then to install gfire from source go to where you extracted the source files (for me this was '~/Download/gfire/gfire-0.7.1/' and type:

su -c "./configure;make;make install"
or
sudo ./configure;sudo make;sudo make install

Non-presenter ServiceDependency

Well, ASP .Net developing can be a pain in the a$$ if you only have experience with windows applications in any language, but when the boss wants to use WCSF and the view-presenter model AND foundational modules, things can get even rougher. And don't even think about using Opf3 with that, it's fun, but you'll spend many hours researching stuff.



Case:

Opf3 uses an ObjectContext class to connect with the database and work with your business entities and such, so generally you should be able to access the static method you need to get this object from every single part of your application imaginable, right? So if you're working with WCSF you'll probably need to use a Foundational Module.
This all shouldn't really be a problem if you have presenters and views everywhere that derive from the Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb.Web.UI.Page class. Even if you have some pages that don't have a presenter you can make them derive from the CompositeWeb's Page class, so then your problem is fixed too. But what to do when you have a class that derives from MembershipProvider, or custom server controls?



Theory:

The ObjectBuilder goes through classes that derive from certain CompositeWeb classes and searches for attributes like ServiceDependency, InjectionConstructor, CreateNew and such. You can make a public property with a ServiceDependency attribute so that any dependencies are handled and your compiler won't complain about there not being an argumentless constructor.



Problem:

Classes that don't derive from CompositeWeb classes don't get the benefit of this ObjectBuilder.



Solution:

After many hours of trying, searching, researching and asking around I finally found out how to fix this. Being inexperienced as I am, though, doesn't make me at all certain if there's something wrong with this approach, but if you create an argumentless constructor and call the Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb.WebClientApplication.BuildItemWithCurrentContext(this) function, the ObjectBuilder will run through your class and use these attributes.



Code:

using System;
using Microsoft.Practices.CompositeWeb;
using Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder;
using Chili.Opf3;

namespace Your.Namespace.Here
{
  class MyClass : SomeClassItDerivesFrom
  {
    private ObjectContext _objContext; // The ObjectContext Opf3 uses to work with the database.
    private IContextService _objContextFactory; // The Service you made with the static function.
 
    [ServiceDependency] // This won't work without the function we call in the constructor
    public IContextService ObjContextFactory
    {
      set
      {
        _objContextFactory = value;
        _objContext = _objContextFactory.GetObjectContext(); // The static function you should have made.
      }
    }

    public MyClass()
    {
      WebClientApplication.BuildItemWithCurrentContext(this);
    }
 
    private SomeFunction()
    {
      ObjectSet objectSet = _objContext.GetObjectContext();
 
      // Well, you should know what to do next.
    }
  }
}

Comments:

Well, having never done anything like this before in my life I hope this is all and it might help someone. I've searched the internet for hours without any luck really, so maybe it will be helpful

Damn Apples

I don't know if any of you remember or know the fiasco that was Windows ME (Millenium Edition), but it seemed to be pretty much a gamble on whether it would work. Of 4 people (including myself) that I know used it and of my own experience installing it, you had about 50% chance of everything working absolutely 100% fine (as far as possible with windows), and 50% chance that it would just barely start every morning.



It seems that Apple, known for their iMacs, iPods and of course the macbook air (among other things) liked this idea because they seem to have adapted it to their own stuff. I've had nothing but trouble with my aunt's iMac, which is of course mostly her own fault since she doesn't know the first thing about any kind of electronical appliance, so she messed it up a lot. But it was unfixable.

A friend of mine on the other hand has no trouble at all with his macs. Then my mom's fiancée can't get his macbook to work at all, my sis had 2 iPods die on her already within 1 year, though my girlfriend's old iPod lasted nearly 5 and her new one is already showing problems after a single day.



I seriously wonder how these things happen? Are they pressured so much as to bring unfinished products onto the market? Of course they're not the only ones who do this, Microsoft just did it again with their Vista.



Well, highly annoying, a brand new iPod given to her by me for her birthday and after a single use it seemed to have died (luckily it hadn't). They can't do this to people, it's shocking.



----------------

Now playing: After All - The Shadow Wall
via FoxyTunes

I beat my boss at Tekken

And now I'm afraid he might fire me!



Naaah, but we have been playing Tekken on the train lately, he has to go a few stations in the same direction, so it's a nice 20 minutes or so of fun.

Usually, so far, he starts with winning big and often. But then when I've 'warmed up' after about 10 minutes or so, it becomes a real challenge for him.



I've always only had friends who were really good at Tekken, well, except in the beginning. When a friend of mine first got his Playstation and then got Tekken 3. We played that game to no end and he usually won, but after a while we played so much together that we did stuff we didn't even know was possible. I'd duck under a punch and grab him and stuff, it was crazy.

Now though I understand what I'm doing and we're up to Tekken: Dark Ressurection. In the beginning my boss would first beat me to a pulp and then I'd get my revenge after a while. Now he beats me to a pulp and only by the time he gets to his station I start winning some. But those few are very exciting. It's cool to finally have met an equal match instead of someone who's waaaaaay above me in skill.



I shouldn't beat him too much though I guess, otherwise he might just fire me, he got pretty pissed at me today because in the end I started beating him with a PERFECT. Ouch.



A lot of fun though!