albus vs barlowe, hard mode (max 50)

Because tips for this battle are hard to find (most FAQs focus only on Shanoa mode) and this took a stupid number of tries, my suggestions to anyone else trying this:

1. Grind up to level 25 if you're not there yet. I was at 22 when I started this and getting nowhere. This makes a big difference, because:

2. When you first enter the boss fight room, if you do enough damage quickly enough, he will disappear without attacking. So if you've leveled up enough, jump when you enter the room and use your rapid-fire gun on him, and he should spazz out and disappear without doing anything.

3. You can *repeat* that several times once you know the timing. Don't chase him after he disappears - wait a moment, then fire off a Max Shot to the right. He'll start to come onto the screen and get hit by it. Jump and rapid-shoot him again and he should, once again, disappear. As long as you can hold this pattern you can get in damage to him at no danger to yourself.

4. Eventually he will manage to attack, and obviously each attack has its own pattern to dodge. For the Fire attack I found that running a little ways to the side, then double jumping into the air and warping the other direction is an easy and repeatable way to avoid all the fireballs. Step left, hop hop, warp right, hop hop, warp left, etc. The Ice attack you have to stay off the ground, and the Globus attack, if you time it right you can use the invincibility aspect of the flame-kick.

5. Stay on the left side of the room; if you ever get away from it run/warp back there fast. Because if he ever does his Electrical Cage attack, you must warp to the far right of the room and duck in the corner until he's done - and this only works if he started his cage move by moving to the right. Which he'll do if he was on the left side of the room. If he starts electrifying on the right, you're screwed.

6. When you get him down enough to start using the rush attacks, invincible fire kicks all over the place should protect you.

Order of Ecclesia

So, I have finished my first run through. It did involve a lot of walkthrough-checking. I don't really feel bad about that; I like finding all the Stuff. Sometimes I will play sections or fights without having read ahead and then go back later with the guide to see what I missed.

I have a minor twinge of stubborn annoyance that I had to rely on an insanely cheap trick to beat Dracula in the end... I don't know if I would have felt better if I'd thought of that myself, or if only beating him the way I was originally trying to fight would have felt like 'enough'. I could do the first half of the fight with no damage easily enough but I could neither get the hang of the patterns of phase 2 nor, on my own, deal enough damage fast enough to be able to overlook them.

(Cheap trick: Light+Dark Union, Union-boost ring, Death ring, Dominus. Deals obscene damage at a safe distance... and that 'distance' part is pretty important when you have the Death ring on.)

Final stats: lvl 40, about 15 hours, 99.something% map completion (see, I wasn't scrupulously checking the guide!)

giant enemy crab

IT KEEPS POKING ME

slowly picking up the attack patterns. got through to what may be the last stage but my thumbs were getting too tired to master the art of climbing via slingshot effect.

It's not actually HARD when you read the patterns right, but it takes long enough to get sore fingers.

Order of Ecclesia

This is actually my first Castlevania game ever, although I'm familiar with the basic idea. My first life was soon wasted partly because this game is a little bad about feedback - maybe it's obvious if you've played previous games, but it wasn't that clear to me that all my attacks have costs of some kind. When I press a button that moments ago Did Something and now Does Nothing, I tend to stand there in confusion pressing the button over and over again trying to figure out WTF is wrong (is the game not registering my keypress or what?) But if the problem is actually that I'm out of X, pressing the button more is not going to help, and I'm going to be very quickly overwhelmed by critters.

Now that I'm aware of the attack gauge and the separate heart cost of unions, things make more sense.

And now I can experience GoddamnedBats firsthand! (The bats are not NEARLY as annoying as the things that try to eat my head.)

Fly'n

Another interesting item spotted through someone's greenlight thread:



This isn't quite a complete game yet though, it's due out this fall. I think. But it looks adorable and the sort of thing I'm into.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

Been playing this a little bit on PC (cursing the thoroughly obnoxious Games For Windows requirement every time; having to launch steam was bad enough, having to log into both is REALLY ANNOYING) and have gotten far enough to splash into some underwater sections.

Which may have been a bad idea on the dev's part, as it suddenly makes the comparison to Aquaria inevitable in my mind. They are, after all, both fun cool stylish 'metroidvania' things where you are flying/swimming around instead of walking and jumping. On the other hand, neat as this thing looks, drawing the comparison makes it jump out to me that Aquaria was better in most respects.

If the title screen is accurate about how much of the game I've covered, this thing can't be very long. And while it's cool to fly around in, it's sort of lacking in even a pretense of a plot. I mean sure there was a tiny bit of setup at the beginning but it pretty much vanished immediately, along with all my fellow ships.

It also seems a good bit easier than Aquaria, at least when you're not doing something insanely stupid by trying to use the wrong tool for a section. This isn't really a bad thing, as you may recall me sulking that Aquaria's difficulty seemed at odds with its potential joy of exploration, but... in a way it's the inverse. Aquaria was a pretty place where I wanted to spend more time just chillin'. This place LOOKS so dark and scary that it's surprising to me that it hasn't, so far, presented much of a challenge.

oh, and

I got my internets back, but also developed a mild infection, and couldn't stop playing Monster Tale. So I've finished it now.

It's difficult to say how balanced or unbalanced the monster skills are. Certainly there were only a VERY small number that I ever used. I don't know if they were really overpowered or if it's just a playstyle thing. Most of Chomp's attacks just didn't seem worth it, but it may have been different for other people who naturally gravitate to different styles? I don't know. I was pretty much using nothing but a vertical spike until I got the extremely awesome drill power, and then it was that and Healing until the end of the game.

Still, Monster Tale is great and if you have a DS you should play it. :) Heck, it's currently listed stupidly cheap, buy it even if you don't have a DS and you'll find one or someone to give it to eventually!

a sudden silencing

I have not been posting because my internet was suddenly cut off. It is still cut off. I am still pissed off. It is a long and boring story which involves little but average everyday paperwork and incompetency, but which was not in any way my fault. :)

In the meantime, I have been working on writing a project which I have shown hints of here in the past but never quite publicly announced (and still can't, because I can't upload anything)... it's at about 26K words now.

I have also been playing lots of Icewind Dale. I am in Lower Dorn's Deep feeling a bit guilty about the nameless neutral svirfneblin who KEPT spawning and walking straight into the lingering effects of the cloudkill I threw at the armored sentries, thus instantly dying and leaving me with a nice neat row of dead gnomes. Big green clouds should be a giveaway, guys!

Today workpeople were SUPPOSED to come (and didn't) so I was off the computer and digging into my DS backlog. Monster Tale is adorable. It is really more in the Metroidvania category than Wacky Puzzle Platformer but I don't currently have a tag for that (edit - but now I do kinda). But really, it's just what I needed - not too difficult, not patronisingly easy, fast-moving enough that I don't get fed up with being on a console (console RPGs often feel really draggy to me) and cute. The amount of available world is a good size for me to mentally keep track of places I wanted to go back to and check again when I got new powers, without needing the ability to notate maps. The only downside is that I suspect it's not all that long. (Well, and the lack of any ability to warp around. But the world's not THAT big so at least so far I don't mind.)

Monster Tale

Reviews for Monster Tale" (yes, that's a DS game, not 3DS) are coming in, and all the ones I've seen so far are positive.

You might remember hearing it described as pokemon-meets-metroid (raising your own monster to do platform exploration with varied skills). You might also remember it as the game that fought hard to have a young, non-sexed-up female protagonist.

I'm a little oversubscribed at the moment, but it is on my list of things to pick up at some point. (And considering that the 3DS is region protected scum of evil and I can't buy one, my DS wishlist will doubtless get picked up over time.)

performance anxiety

I have fought my way to the final boss in Aquaria, but I'm sufficiently afeared of my ability to actually make it through the whole multi-stage fight that I'm tempted to just watch the ending videos. :)

fading lustre

Over the weekend, I was really obsessed with Aquaria. I got bunches of new forms and ran all over the place exploring stuff and digging up treasures. Was stumped a few times and looked up hints, but generally kept playing and hearing the music even in my sleep.

For some reason, my enthusiasm dropped off completely on finding Li. I dunno, running around the ocean just doesn't feel the same with this weird guy tagging along. From the descriptions, Naija is experiencing stuff I can't experience or understand... I feel no kinship here, I'm unimpressed. Especially since I can't ask him anything. Finally finding a person should mean being able to share stuff and get reactions! But he's just a lump. He'll probably do something eventually, especially when I find the right location to drag him to (guess that wall wasn't it). But the obsessive need to swim around and find more stuff has dwindled. I didn't even launch the game for a day.

(Also, I complain that wall-climbing is TOO HARD. Whine whine whine. And even if I finally made it through the passage and across the bubbles there'd probably be some dumb monster there that would totally kill me as a reward for spending hours trying to reach it.)

blundering through aquaria

As I may have mentioned earlier, I am a walkthrough kind of girl. I used to buy strategy guides. I have no shame about looking things up. If the game is hard and I am not having fun thwapping it, I have no problem with playing straight through the game from the walkthrough without even trying it alone. (That said, I prefer walkthroughs written in a way that following their instructions also teaches you how to play and shows you where the hints were.)

However, I haven't yet sought help on Aquaria since the demo. I die a lot, and it really pisses me off, and I have found a few things that I have no clue what to do with, but I haven't run out of places to go and things to try. And I can 'read the gamestyle' well enough to often have some clue whether I *should* be able to get past an obstacle or not. Some stuff seems clearly to be waiting for me to gain extra powers and come back later. But I solved a puzzle I didn't completely know was there simply by getting the idea that I was meant to be able to go there at this stage, so there must be a way to do it, so what tools do I have? Aha!

Reached a boss monster, got killed by it, but as far as I know I had figured out the strategy, just gotten tired and failed to pull it off on my first try. So I'm not looking for help on her yet either.

I do get really tired of that auto-zoom-in thing though. For one, it bugs me when I'm pausing to look for monsters and the scope is trying to hide them from me (although maybe that's the point? Keep swimming or die!). For another, after playing the game, I find that looking at the computer screen tends to make me dizzy, as I feel like the computer is trying to zoom in and out at me...

EDIT: Since beating that boss failed to give me any idea of what to do next, I did have to start searching for hints at that point. Foo. Things I looked up: what the metal balls are for, where to find fish form, which I already knew existed because of food items.

whereami

Playing through The Ancient Quest of Saqqarah - yes, that's right, the one with the monkey - as my casual game of the month. Have completed two temples on the first difficulty level so far. Really hate the temple of bast. And not only because the game's female archetypes seem to only come in 'madonna' and 'whore' :)

In Aquaria, have found the kelp forest, sections of which have slightly fewer things trying to kill me. Found my 'first' turtle, which surprised me as I knew I'd found one before... but it looks like that was yet another bit of exploration which was wiped out by a Stupid Pointless Death at some point early in the game. So I trundled all the way back to my home cave (and checked on the chest of bubbles I'd managed to find in a completely black offscreen area) to 'find' the other turtle. Then wanderered around to check out the bits near my home cave that were still showing up as unexplored on the map... and had yet another stupid pointless death. Sigh.

I think what bugs me is that it's exploration and happiness specifically which are dangerous. If I'm in a hurry to get from point A to point B (and know roughly what path I'm taking), I can generally outswim and outdodge most monsters in my way, even those firing projectiles. But if I'm going "Oo, look, a big snail!" and pausing to take it in, or crawling every nook and cranny for stuff, I have to kill everything that moves or die myself. Which wouldn't be strange in some settings, but feels weirder with all the pretty around me.

aquaria

So I noticed the price had been lowered and therefore bought myself a copy.

Jumping back into the game after a long break was a bit disconcerting.

Swim swim swim, ooo pretty shiny ocean! Look, an interesting object to mark on my map! Look, a glowing thing that will love me! Look, some fish that are swimming ACK STOP OH GOD MY LEG

... basically, my happy mood of going around looking at stuff keeping being interrupted by stuff randomly deciding to kill me. I say randomly because it's not at all clear when looking at the visuals what is and isn't hostile. Some things are just art and will dance around happily with you as you swim and spin. Some will leave you alone if you leave them alone but if you happen to swim up next to them they will leave spikes in your flesh and you will bleed. Some will chase you down, spitting fireballs and ramming into your swimsuit-clad body at high speed.

To survive, I find myself stuck in my 'DARK POWER' form, firing energy bolts like they're about to expire. Sometimes, my dark power form laughs an evil laugh. I suspect some later plot development will tell me that I am a terrible person who is responsible for destroying the ecosystem or some crap like that. Look, no matter how much you want to save the whales, it's not the top thing on your mind when the whale is CHEWING THROUGH THE COASTLINE TO GET TO YOUR HOUSE AND EAT YOU.

Every time I get killed when I was happily exploring, I get more annoyed and return to the game in an angry hurry to try and get to where I was, therefore failing to 'explore' the same areas that I've already been to, potentially missing out on important thingies. And eventually I get annoyed enough to exit the game entirely. Bah.

more aquaria thinking

I think part of what's making me nervous about the game is a lack of sense of stable-progress.

Thinking about Mario, in the earliest games there was no way to preserve your progress. You ran on and on and on and maybe you won the game and maybe you didn't. There were warps to make it easier, but you couldn't really see an overview of things. Mario 3 / Super Mario World changed that a lot. There was a World Map. You could see the levels stretched out in front of you. You could easily back up to revisit places you'd been before. You could make choices about which direction to go and clearly see what difference it would make.

Not that there's anything wrong with wandering around exploring a mysterious landscape!

But with limited save points and a minimap that is not always all that helpful...

You don't know where the next save point will be. You're not sure how easily you can reorient yourself if you restore a saved game later. Will you be able to tell where you were and where you were going? There are multiple save slots - why? Will you ever need to restore an older game to fix a mistake you made in your newer game? What sort of mistakes can you make? When I tried to zone dragging a mysterious object and it didn't zone with me, what happened to it? Is it lost forever? Will I have to start over?

I don't have a sense of *stability* yet. I don't know whether I will have to slowly backtrack through dozens of levels to get back to where I was. And I don't know how far it will be to the next save point. All of this adds extra nervousness and uncertainty to my wandering around in the water... it makes it tempting to just stay curled up in my nice pretty cave. (You know, I would happily play Underwater Harvest Moon in this environment, planting and sowing and tending pets...)

Also, it's fun to explore but I'm nervous about the prospect of boss-battling like this... My only attempt at fighting was met with *total* confusion and instant death, even with the walkthrough. Oh well.

edit: After discovering that the walkthrough was not very clear and the place I was supposed to be was THAT WAY, I managed to fight something properly. Okay, that's better. Still, this would work fine as a wandering adventure game without death really...

Also, sometimes I have real trouble picking up objects, because they fall near me - too near for me to MOVE if I click, but not near enough to touch.

whine about demos

Okay, so Aquaria is out now.

Of course, at least when I tried, the top two links on that page didn't work. (Having your OWN version of the demo be down? Huh?)

Also, the demo wails at me in anguish when I quit. Which doesn't really encourage me to launch it again, especially since I don't feel up to buying it at the moment.

And console-style save slots? Argh!

It's very pretty. And neat. And interesting. It just has many little details that make me whine. Like, maybe it's just that I'm not very awake at the moment, so my eyes aren't 100%, but I'm having trouble telling some of the colors apart. This means a lot of awkward fumbling around with the singing, trying to guess what color I'm supposed to be using.

It's pretty. I'm sure people will like it. I don't have time to own it right now.

Also, I think I may have broken it by trying to drag an item across room borders, making it disappear...




Also, to Parhedros - I want to try out your RPG and find out why it is flying under the radar. WHY ARE YOU INSISTING ON INSTALLING TO MY C DRIVE? My C drive does not have ROOM for a big 3d game. Now I have to write the makers and complain before I can even manage to install the demo... IF they'll make another one.

OTOH the screenshots don't look that great and they're in 3d, so... maybe it's for the best?