as for the monstrosities

That would be this:



Secret Flirts - Nintendo DS


Do not buy this game unless you are addicted to collecting terrible games just so you can impress people with how bad your taste is. Which is okay. Some people are into that. Some people gift Secret of the Magic Crystals to each other.

If you want to know why I'm mocking it, check out this Let's Play thread. Nuff said.

NONSTOP KIRBY

I've only had this game for like a day or two and I'm probably going to have maxed out all stars within the week I can't help it I love Kirby.

It does seem a little on the easy side even for a Kirby game but who cares, KIRBY.

(It's Squeak Squad I'm playing at the moment.)

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!)

where did that come from

Apparently there's a PC version of scribblenauts now? Although their website didn't want to tell me it existed and was only pushing WiiU (not bloody likely considering the day one bricking) and 3DS (obviously no, not until they drop the region-lock) at me.

It's sad when people searching for pirate copies and thus tripping some of my flags do a better job of advertising than the actual sales team...

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.)

gloombuckets

You can tell I'm moody because I've been playing Spirit Tracks again. "Life already sucks, so shitty game can't make it worse!"

(No, nothing's actually wrong, just general bleh.)

I HATE YOU

So after a long delay I tried to pick up Spirit Tracks again while waiting for something to download. I had time to kill. I could put up with some really pointless filler. Right?

... that was before the next quest it threw at me is something that if you take even a single point of damage you have to start over from the beginning and each attempt takes about half an hour. Half an hour of staring mindlessly at the screen waiting to reach your destination, with one or two attacks to dodge sprinkled somewhere in there.

Back into the SHIT GAME pile you go, then.

stealing my groove

Apparently there's an interesting 3DS title called 'Rhythm Thief And The Emperor's Treasure' due out soon, but due to Nintendo's shenanigans, I still can't buy a 3DS.

I don't want to buy shitty pirate carts, I don't want to steal games, I want to be able to buy them. WHY YOU HATE ME NINTENDO?

why do i keep playing this game?

I *hate* this game. All its mechanics were designed to annoy me. It makes me want to punch it repeatedly. WHY AM I STILL PLAYING obviously i hate myself :(

stupid train

actually made me hit the power-off button in disgust

Trying to reach the stamp stand in the sand temple. That is NOT the SLIGHTEST bit fair. That is not a clever puzzle. That is something that would be achievable IF THE CONTROLS WEREN'T HORRENDOUS.

I am not sure whether I'm going to continue with this game at this point. My extreme fed-up-ness with the trains combined with the number of puzzles now that don't feel at all like I'm doing something wrong but more like the controls are designed to make my character randomly kill himself all the time...


edit: okay, fine, I got past it and stamped my book, but the point remains that I don't enjoy puzzles where I feel like I'm wrestling more with the controls and their blatant refusal to do what I clicked than with my reflexes and decisions.

dear nintendo

I do not care about bigger screens.

I don't even care about longer battery life.

Make a 3DS without region lock and I'll buy it despite hating 3d.

Continue having region lock and I'll continue playing my old DS. There are still lots of games for it I haven't played yet!

EAT FLAMING LAVA

So, I've been poking my way through the fire mountain temple dungeon whatever. The puzzles in this one are pretty straightforward. It's the controls that are driving me batty. I don't *normally* find the stylus controls this awkward, but the imprecision of stylus-based movement has led to things like Link deciding to walk straight forward into lava instead of making the short hop to the safe ledge I am indicating, or Link's speed changing randomly when trying to dodge moving fire barriers / blade thingies.

But that's just general stylus movement. The real pickle and place where I died multiple times is something I think is downright annoying design.

There's a locked room you enter where you end up on a narrow platform with lava on both sides. On the other side of the lava are four skeletons. The skeletons throw things at you.

A skeleton can be 'easily' defeated by first shooting it with the bow, then grabbing and throwing its skull with the whip.

Problem: This requires selecting the bow weapon, clicking on the 'activation' circle in the corner of the map, holding down the stylus at the skeleton to aim, releasing the stylus in the right place to shoot the skeleton and make its skull fall, clicking on the activation circle to switch out of bow mode, clicking on the menu button to bring up weapon-switching, clicking on the whip icon to change weapons, clicking on the activation circle to switch into active whip mode, clicking the whip on the skeleton, then clicking the whip somewhere else to throw the skull. That's a lot of fiddly selections.

While you are doing this, the skeletons are THROWING THINGS at you. If any of these missiles hit you, the game is likely to suddenly change the 'mode' you were in, so that if you were following the above sequence of clicks, the next click you make will suddenly do something completely different than you had intended. Like, say, making you walk into the lava for damage. Or leap across the lava to 'attack' the skeleton with your sword, which does nothing except drop you into the lava for damage.

Did I mention that while you are in active whip or bow mode, you can't move? So you can't DODGE the missiles that are about to completely screw up your action.

Did I mention that after shooting the skeleton, there's only a brief time limit before the skull reforms into a full skeleton and you have to start over?

Did I mention there are multiple locations where you can hit a skeleton with a bow but not with a whip, meaning that after you switch into whip mode you'll flail uselessly for a while before realising that you can't hit anything and have to start over?

Did I mention that large 'activation' circle in the corner of the screen, which conveniently happens to position itself right OVER one of the four skeletons, so that when you try to whip it, if you're unlucky, you just keep switching in and out of whip mode?

There may well be an easier way to do this... everywhere else in the castle I used ONLY the whip against skeletons like that and it did fine. It didn't seem to work here, because there were too many of them and they kept throwing bones at me so I couldn't manage to get enough progress using just the whip. I may simply be dumb. But MAN that was annoying.

there'll be another along in half an hour

While I generally enjoy the Zelda DS games, I am resentful of the sheer amount of time I have to waste riding this train around. Especially when I'm having to do things like ride around flipping switches so I have a loooong wait before I get back to the game... and I can't zone out because there are stupid enemies around and sometimes the train will randomly not go the way I told it to...

I can't relax and enjoy it, and I can't enjoy it as a challenge because it's stupid and limiting and (of course) literally on rails.

And there's this grumpy voice in my head complaining that if I put more MINDLESS PADDING like this in my games some people would cheer that I'd made the playtime longer...

fits and spurts

Been a bit unwell for the past week, so I haven't really been doing much except trying to keep up with all the Let's Plays and occasionally clearing a bit of Spirit Tracks.

The last stages of that fire-and-ice boss got rather annoying!

In other portable news, I've heard that Hakuoki still isn't out for the Vita, and the 999 sequel doesn't play very well on it, so I guess there's no reason for me to buy one. We should all be well aware of why I'm not buying a 3DS. Alas.

i accidentally a purchase

I really didn't need more games.

But Spiky dropped his silver DS a while back, shattering the hinge, and after he managed to wire it back together discovered that the wireless receptor seems to be kaput, so in order to keep playing 2-player games we needed a new DS. And in the process of finding one for sale locally, discovered someone selling a stack of pretty decent DS titles for $10 each.

So now I have:

Chrono Trigger (I played a little bit of this once a loooong time ago but never finished it)
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Oddly I'm not sure I've ever actually played a Castlevania game)
Mario & Luigi Bowser's Inside Story (I played the last entry in this series and had fun with it)
KORG DS-10 Plus (... I don't actually know what I'm going to do with this, BUT IT'S AWESOME and I couldn't resist the price.)

GAME

So, if you're in the UK and a gamer you've probably heard about the big GAME/Gamestation meltdown.

Our local shop has NOT (yet) closed, but the looming disaster was enough to get us to go in and grab stacks of cheap console games while we still could. Mostly him getting PS3 stuff (Man, those games discount fast) but I also grabbed a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon title (I know NOTHING about pokemon, but I know someone who's enjoyed a Mystery Dungeon title, and it was five pounds) and Zelda Spirit Tracks. I would have gotten Henry Hatsworth if I could find it but they didn't seem to have a copy.

And a larger DS card carrying case because I've been needing one for ages, and if the shop DOES close then hey, branded keepsake! :) (Although I'll probably decorate it sometime when I'm bored enough. It's black, so perfect for painting on.)
(edit - hit the wrong tag there, sorry)

hand-wringing for headlines

Won't SOMEBODY think of the CHILDREN?

That's what the newest frantic attempt to raise a moral panic is, once again, aiming for. To quote the BBC article:

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers raises concerns about children spending hours a day playing inappropriate computer games.

ATL head Dr Mary Bousted acknowledged such activities could be difficult to police.

But added that parents needed reminding of their duties

Members of the union are due to debate a resolution at their annual conference in Manchester next week, which calls for tougher legislation with regard to such games.

Dr Bousted said some of these games were "very violent" and could have an effect on "tender young minds of children and young people".

And she was sure her conference would hear how parents are ignoring age restrictions of computer games.

Now, it's possible that the journalists are the liars here, as it's certainly not the first time journalists have gone out of their way to give the wrong impression. But it sure sounds like what's being said is "I don't have any actual evidence, but I'm sure it's a problem! And I know that nothing can actually be done about it, but we need new laws anyway! Pay attention to meeeeeee!"

And what does the BBC use as a graphic to accompany this story? An image of a little girl playing a Nintendo DS, the least violent games console in existence.

Then it rambles on about how kids playing computer games are 'not interacting' (A much more realistic problem is that many computer games ARE letting kids interact with each other, but in negative ways. Social culture in MMORPGs is often beyond toxic and little has been done about it. Approaching that problem in a positive direction might actually be useful, and thus is of no interest to her) and 'not exercising' (Fair point for computer games. Of course, many people use their Wiis entirely for exercise, and some portable games have mechanics based around going out and walking...) and 'not playing' (.... um. ma'am? I think you're having a problem with words here.)

It's just typical generic "kids are doing something different! society is collapsing!" panic. Sigh.

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!