Red Mage Needs Food Badly

Surprise, surprise. The two games getting the heaviest rotation in my DS and Wii this week are new spins and/or updates to classic franchises.

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen came out on the Nintendo DS last Tuesday. The shipments to my local Gamestop stores usually get there a day after the announcement date, so I went out to the store in Wynnewood that Wednesday to pick up my copy. I could have put a few dollars down to reserve my copy, but I was pretty sure there’d be at least one or two, because while DQ is popular among RPG fans, it isn’t nearly as big a phenomenon here as it is in its native Japan.

Graphical update aside (the remake was out on Japanese PlayStations right around the time Dragon Quest VII was released, so the style is similar to that game), this game is just as good as I remember it. It also seems somewhat easier, too, because I’ve already made it to Chapter 5 and haven’t gotten a “Game Over” yet, and only ran away from battle once in 250+ tries (it keeps track). I’d like to assume it’s because I’ve gotten better at the game over the years, since nothing appears to have been changed stat-wise. The only challenge I have to meet to prove that point is beating Marquis de Leon, something I wasn’t able to do in the NES version.

Speaking of the NES, Mega Man 9 (released on Monday) could easily be mistaken for a Virtual Console title…but it’s actually a brand new WiiWare title. I’m not sure why Capcom decided to go this route, since the last official game in the timeline was on the PlayStation over a decade ago. Hasn’t stopped me from wanting to pick it up. Besides, it’s only $10, and a small download compared to other WiiWare games. So far, this game and Mega Man Powered Up are the only games where I’ve been able to beat every Robot Master with nothing but un-charged Mega Buster shots. The other games don’t lend themselves well to that strategy because of the added “invulnerability time” the bosses get after being hit. I’m about ready to take on Wily’s Castle, now. Once I’m done with that, I’m going to try to knock out as many of the “challenges” (something tailor made for you Xbox Live Arcade freaks) as I can. Four down, 46 to go.

Tags: classics, dragon quest, mega man, nintendo ds, nintendo wii, nostalgia, wiiware

Apart from my misadventures in computer modification, I started re-watching Mai-Otome over the last week or two, and searched the web for fanfiction and fan art for a side project I’m working on for LiveJournal’s “ship_manifesto” community. In my search, I found a thread on AnimeSuki with 100+ pages worth of pictures, including one of a complex relationship chart between most of the cast members. All of them appear to be one-sided, but I’ll just assume that’s because bi-directional arrows are harder to draw than normal ones.

So, what exactly does this have to do with the picture of Natsuki and Mai above?

Continue reading “That reminds me of a song…”

Tags: love charts, love triangles, mai, mai-otome, natsuki, plot bunnies, reading too much into it, shipping, shizuru, shoujo-ai, subtext, wild mass guessing, yuri

So I actually got that new hard drive installed, no problem, on Saturday, and it’s running clean as a whistle. Now, I have more room to store all of my good crap in case the first drive goes boom for some reason. I got all panicky because I thought the monitor had given out because I kept getting sparks when I tried to plug it back in. Now, I think I may soup this puppy up even further…get a new graphics card, replace the processor…and then I’ll be (to borrow a saying from an old Nintendo commercial) playing with power.

Tags: geekery, hard drive, modding

A-ha! I think I’ve figured out the source of my computer’s irritation over the last few weeks. Spybot has a program called TeaTimer, which monitors all unwarranted changes to the system registry. However, it sounds like monitoring the computer for changes 24/7 has put quite the strain on my hard drive, and would produce a loud screeching noise every time I started up Mozilla Firefox. After I uninstalled Spybot this morning (and TeaTimer along with it), the screeching appears to have stopped. I sure hope this lasts…

Tags: spybot, stupid computer

Man. I really fell behind the curve in not doing any work in RPG Maker VX. I’ve been screwing around with my fanfic projects and failed to realize that the game maker was released worldwide back in February! Sheesh. There are probably handfuls of games that I’ve missed out on playing/testing in those last six months. Now, I have to learn how to use the Ruby scripter again, because none of the scripts from RPG Maker XP work in the VX version.

It also looks like VX has gone back to RPG Maker 2000’s sprite and battle systems, but the menu and event commands have been cleaned up greatly from that version, so I should be able to make something decent out of it this time. More on that in a later post, though.

Tags: enterbrain, rpg maker