Last week, Blizzard tried to introduce a new feature in its forums: forcing users to post using their real name. Of course, this was met with a lot of controversy about the dangers and negative impacts of having your real name being associated with a comment on a gaming forum (employers having prejudices against gamers, stalkers or just crazy people wanting revenge against other players). I won’t go into more details about why forcing users to use their real names is a bad idea, this topic has been covered enough.
PC gaming nightmares
21Mar10In the last few months, I acquired a few games from Steam because of their sales. They were all games I actually wanted to play but until today I hadn’t found the time to play them. It did not go well.
My first try was Freedom Force which I had bought for 2$. The game was unplayable at first, but I managed to get it working after a looking for solutions to the problem online. However, I only managed to finish the tutorial because the controls were unresponsive in the second mission.
My second try was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic which I also got for the low low price of 2 dollars. Unlike Freedom Force, this was a game I was really looking forward to playing. Just like Freedom Force, the game was unplayable at first and I had to find a hack somewhere to get it to load. I managed to create my character and see the initial cinematic, but the screen was totally black after the video. I will try a few more things (like playing on a Windows XP machine) before giving up because I really want to experience this game.
After failing with 2 old games, I figured I’d try with a more recent title: Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (I do not understand Tycho’s love for prose). I had actually tried playing this game on my previous machine with no success. I attributed the failure to my PC because it was crap and never played any games well. However, my current machine is well built and plays modern games without any issues. This game was different, the audio would simply not work. The official FAQ mentions crackling noise (which is exactly what I was experimenting) however the proposed solution was not doing it for me. I contacted support and am still waiting for a response (it’s the week-end, so I wasn’t expecting an answer yet).
My last try was Flock. It played correctly for the first 7 or 8 levels but froze for no reason at some point. I haven’t tried playing it again, but I suspect I could continue playing and finish the level without issues. I was just too frustrated with my PC experience that I stopped playing for the day.
Thoughts on PC gaming
With that kind of experience and all the DRM fiascos going on (Spore, Ubisoft, etc.) it’s no wonder that console gaming is more popular. You just have to put the game in the console (or just run the downloaded game) and start playing: no setup, no issues (most of the time), just fun.
Thoughts about the upcoming Lego Universe MMO
03Feb10If you follow gaming news, you’ve probably come across this little video:
The game looks great, but the developers keep telling people that it’s aimed at kids. Still, gaming news sites can’t wait to get their hands on this game. I’m a little scared that the game truly is targeted at young kids and that plenty of grown ups are going to be very disappointed when this turns out to be just what it was meant to be.
However, I think this is a great opportunity for the developer to start thinking about branching the game for a more adult audience and deliver a great gaming experience for the adults that grew up playing LEGOs.
Please Net Devil, make it happen, we want a grown up LEGO Universe.
The gamer’s quarter-life crisis
03Jan10Remember when you were a kid? All the time in the world to play video games, but no money to buy them? You would constantly ask your parents for games?
Once you reach your twenties and start working, the problem is reversed. Enough money to buy the games you want, but no time to play, I call it the gamer’s quater-life crisis.
I currently have a backlog of 11 games that I bought waiting for their chance to be played, 6 games that I have started playing but haven’t finished yet and over 15 released games that I want to purchase. I can’t even keep up with the new releases.
Farming in Patapon 2
24Sep09I’ve been playing a lot of Patapon 2 lately and I just recently finished the main story. As all real gamers know, the game is not finished until you’ve done all the side-quests, upgraded everything and beaten the hardest monster in the game. So I started defeating bosses again to unlock new levels and gather materials. If you don’t change your army at all, you will get between 2 and 5 materials per fight at the earlier levels. The bosses will level up quickly and you won’t get much stronger in the process. However, with some little adjustments to your army you can start bringing home 10-20 (and more depending on the boss) items per fight including rare items from time to time. That’s called farming!
Farming
The principle of farming is to get the most out of every fight. To accomplish that you have to maximize (or minimize) various stats and status effects.
Stagger
Bosses drop items when they are staggered. Your chance to stagger is indicated by Cnc% in the stats. This is the most important stat to boost when farming. Divine and thunder weapons usually have good staggering abilities.
Damage
The next most important stat is damage (Attack), keep it as low as possible! Especially for the weaker bosses like Dodonga otherwise they will die too early. Your goal is to finish a boss when your HP is as low as possible. To keep your damage low, you can do two things: equip weak weapons and most importantly do not bring all your troops. A great farming setup is to bring your Hero with a team of Kibapons, that’s it. This keeps the damage to the minimum and you will get plenty of stagger and other special attacks with them. Divine weapons increase the damage a bit, but their staggering is too good to not equip them. Be careful with the Critical % of some weapons and rarepons, don’t get it too high.
Status effects
By status effects I mean effects like Stagger, Knock-back, Sleep, Freeze and Ignite. Every boss has a weakness to one of these and using this weakness will let you gather better materials and items. Here are good ways to boost those effects:
Stagger: Tree-pons (Menyokki, Kisuk, Moriussoo) and divine/thunder weapons
Knock-back: Mushroom-pons (Mashu, Mashuro, Mashuriro) or huge weapons (those that slow your attack speed)
Sleep: Mushroom-pons again
Freeze: Penguin-pons (Koppen, Suppen, Supengu)
Ignite: This one is tricky since the Dragon/Fountain-pons (Gyaba, Gyabaan, Wagyanba) have a good ignite rate, but add a lot of damage (too much in fact to be good at farming). The second best rarepons are Monkey-pons (Uhoho, Uuhoho, Uhokkya) but they don’t help much. Use the fire weapons to boost this stat.
Materials
Here’s a list of which boss to hunt to get each material, I’ll also mention their weakness to help you:
Rocks (stones, hard iron, titanium ore, mythril, adamantine)
The rocks are dropped by the dragons (Dodonga, Majidonga and Kachidonga) which are all found on the same stage depending on the weather).
All the dragons are weak against knock-back.
Bones
The bones are dropped by the birds (Motiti and Phoeniti).
Motiti is not especially weak at anything (except damage), Phoeniti (the “phoenix”) is weak against ice (obviously).
Fangs
The fangs are dropped by the spider things (those in the fog, so annoying to fight so farm them well).
They are weak against sleep and fire.
Wood
Wood items are dropped by the robots (those that shoot lasers from their mouth).
They are weak against knock-back.
Meat
Meat is dropped by the mammoths.
They are weak against fire.
Vegetables
Vegetables are dropped by the sand worms.
They are weak against sleep.
Seeds
Seeds are dropped by plants (makes sense).
They are weak against fire.
Hides/Skins
The hides are dropped by a Garuru (the boss from Patapon 1).
He is weak against knock-back and fire. Go with knock-back.
Juices/Liquids
Juices are dropped by the crabs.
They are weak against ice.
Alloys
Finally, alloys are dropped by the living fortresses and are quite so easy to farm.
They are weak against knock-back.
Farming Dream Team
The “Farming Dream Team” ™ consists of your hero with 3 Kibapons (horse-riding patapons). Your hero should be level 10 Tree Yumipon with either a normal bow (for low level bosses with low HP), a thunder bow or the Divine bow for maximum staggering abilities. The three Kibapons should be made into level 10 Tree-pons, Mushroom-pons, Penguin-pons and possibly Monkey-pons (although they are that useful). Switch their type depending on the boss you are about to fight.
Building the Dream Team
You do not start with a Dream Team so here’s how I suggest you get there:
- Level-up a Tree-Yumipon (archer) to level 10
- Consider taking a Kibapon to a level 5 Tree-pon in parallel
- Level-up a Kibapon to a level 10 Tree-pon
- Level-up a second Kibapon to a level 10 Mushroom-pon
- Level-up the third Kibapon to a level 10 Penguin-pon
- Level-up all the Kibapons to level 10 Tree, Mushroom and Penguin-pons.
Make sure you get the Divine weapons for the Patapons that you are using as soon as possible (Divine weapons are made by playing the level 2 smith mini-game and using a Mythril).
Once this is done, consider leveling-up the remaining Yumipons (archers) to level 10 Tree-pons. You might want to use them once the bosses get more HP. Also consider using the Mahopons (magicians) for staggering and for healing. Give one or two Mahopons a healing staff (one that does not attack on the Pon-Pon-Pata-Pon song like the Defense staff or the Soothing staff). The other Mahopon should be a Tree-pon and use a staff that calls thunderstorms for multiple hits (switch the staff if you want to freeze or ignite the boss).
Farming for money
Leveling-up Patapons costs a lot of money a good way to get a lot of money rather quickly is to do the second training over and over.
Sources: GameFAQS & Gamestop Patapon 2 Forums
Half-Minute Hero (Yuusha 30) coming soon to North America
09Sep09
Looks like I missed quite an important news at the E3 this year (2009).
Half-Minute Hero (which was named Yuusha 30) is coming to North America this fall. I talked about this game previously, it’s an RPG with a twist: you have 30 seconds to grind, buy equipment and defeat the final boss. There are many stages and a few other games modes too (one where you play the villain and one where you play a princess surrounded by body guards).
It looks like XSEED Games is doing the job of bringing us this little game that looks like a ton of fun, 30 seconds at the time.
There’s also going to be a demo released tomorrow (september 10th)!
The day a fanboy died
13Jul09Birth of a fanboy
The boy was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy games. He first learned about it when the first Final Fantasy came to America. He was too young at the time to know what it was about but his father seemed to enjoy it. He heard about Final Fantasy again when Final Fantasy II (now IV) appeared on his Super Nintendo. He was still quite young to be able to play but he could understand what was going on. Then came Final Fantasy III (VI) which was a gift from his father to his mother (obviously a joke). He was now old enough to play, but he was too shy to take the controller from his older brother’s hands. Instead they played together, the little boy would observer and advise his brother. He had a fantastic memory and everything that happened on screen was embedded forever in a part of his brain. This would help him play the game himself once he would dare try the game.
A year or two passed, he now had enough confidence to try the games he only saw others play. He first played Final Fantasy III, then II. He played a bit of FFI but it was too hard for him. His parents even bought Final Fantasy Mystic Quest which he enjoyed even though it was not really like the other games. As the time passed, he learned to love those games and the consoles they were made for. He was not only a Final Fantasy fanboy, he was also a Nintendo fan. He made his parents buy the Nintendo 64 along with the excellent Super Mario 64. Then Squaresoft decided to leave Nintendo (rather, Nintendo decided to use cartridges that could contain a tiny fraction of what CDs could). The boy followed Squaresoft and sold a bunch of old games for the privilege of playing the newest Final Fantasy game.
A seasoned fanboy
In the following years the boy would play everything related to Final Fantasy. When he couldn’t find the original game he would find the ROM. He played and replayed the classics he had learned to love in his youth, he learned the correct numbering of the SNES games, he played the real Final Fantasy II and III. He played Final Fantasy V and bought all the remakes (Final Fantasy Origins, Chronicles, Anthology, Dawn of Souls). He tried Final Fantasy Adventure (which turned out to be a marketing name since it was really a Mana game) and the Final Fantasy Legend games. Even when a game was not really fun, he forced himself to play it just to know more about the fantastic universe of Final Fantasy.
He played everything.
The enlightenment
He loved the series so much that he spent a lot of time in forums discussing the games (released and announced). He learned about all the re-releases of his games, how plenty of games were first released in Japan, then in North America then re-released in Japan with just enough additional content to make plenty of fans buy the games again (and make the North Americans envy them). He learned about the shady marketing tactics the company had used to sell games. They used the Final Fantasy name to boost sales of other series.
One day they announced what fans everywhere were hoping for since the release of Final Fantasy VII: more Final Fantasy VII. They announced a mobile phone game, a movie and a spin-off game based on a character from the original game.
It was really that one game that put the last nail in the coffin. The game didn’t appeal to the boy (who had become an adult) at all and the reviews didn’t help either. The low scores confirmed the boy’s suspicions: SquareEnix could make a bad game. The fanboy in him had died. He was still very much a fan of the series, but he no longer bought games just because of a name stamped on it.
Why are stats capped to 255?
26Jun09As a lot of other games, Final Fantasy has a limit of 255 for it’s character stats. You may have wondered why such an arbitrary limit? Limits of 99 or 999 (or any number of nines) make sense because they are limited by the number of digits used to display the value. 255 uses 3 digits, so why not go up to 999?
The reason behind this has to do with the way the data is stored in memory. Computers only understand binary numbers so every number or word of anything used to communicate with a computer is encoded in binary, each binary value is represented by a bit. The bit can either be 1 or 0.
Here’s how bits represent values:
0000 = 0 0001 = 1 0010 = 2 0100 = 4 1000 = 8 1011 = 11 ...
Since only one bit doesn’t give much information, bits were grouped together to make a wider array of values available. This group was named a byte. Typically, one byte is a group of 8 bits. Every information transmitted to and from the computer or console is transmitted using this byte format. Nowadays, computers send multiple bytes at the same time to improve the efficiency of communications, a 64 bit computer transmits information using 8 bytes (8 * 8 bits = 64 bits) at the time.
Now let’s take a look at the range of values one byte gives us:
1000 0000 = 128 1111 1111 = 255
As you can see, 255 represents the biggest value that can be represented by a single byte and that’s why Final Fantasy (and other games) have used this value as the limit for stats. Nowadays, most information is stored using at least 32 bits at the time so we could technically use values up to slightly less than 4.3 billion, but that wouldn’t be so practical.
Final Fantasy updates
04Jun09As you may know, there have been quite some news about Final Fantasy games lately.
First of all, coming from E3:
Final Fantasy XIV
- FFXIV is the sequel to FFXI in the sense that it is a MMO
- They currently want to make it a global game, meaning no separate servers depending on the region: Japanese players will be able to play with American players
- They are aiming for a release in 2010
Final Fantasy XIII
- Summons are once again a central part of the story. Characters will be attached to one summon (not selectable by players). It is not known if more than one summon will be attached to characters or if all characters will have a summon (or more). The attached summons seem to be fixed by the story.
Final Fantasy VII
- It’s a direct port of the PlayStation game.
- It costs 9.99 US$
- Available for download now (1.32GB required)
And finally, news coming from Nintendo:
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
- The sequel to the excellent Final Fantasy IV (also known as Final Fantasy II in North America)
- Released on WiiWare at the beginning of the week
- Contains all the episodes (9) from the cellular game from Japan
- Costs 800 Wii points