On the Road

So, yeah, I'm visiting the in-laws w/ the wife 'til Friday. It's good times, even without a wifi connection, which can be terrifying for one such as myself, who is ostensibly plugged-in. I'll talk more about that on this weekend's podcast, when we wrap up CES 2010 and all the tech/gaming goodness that's come out of it.

It's been a little tough keeping up w/ CES while in the remote reaches of northern Illinois, but I've been using my in-laws' much-improved, if still slow-as-hell-relative-to-my-fiber-optic connection (which freaks the fuck out if I connect a router to it).

Anyway, I might try to hijack their connection tonight w/ my gaming machine to get rolling on the Star Trek Online beta, but we'll see if that's even feasible. I also don't know how much I can talk about my experience w/ the STO beta, but I'll look over my agreement to see if there's an NDA.

I spent quite a bit of time with Final Fantasy VIII on PSP last night, and I kind of enjoyed it. First, I figured out how to resize the screen, and this should work for PS3, as well. It seems that with any PS1 download, if you hit the Home/PS button, there's an option towards the bottom of the screen to resize the screen, and you get many options, one of which is a manual resize. This helped things quite a bit.

Anyway, I played all the way from the Fire Cavern to just after the Dollett mission, and spent a ton of time drawing magic and level-grinding. I know that level-grinding can be ill-advised in FFVIII, but I really wanted to get Squall at least somewhat pimped-out before I reach the 'open-world' part of the game. I've got close to 2000 spells drawn, and I think I'm ready to start rolling, for real, in the game.

I think that one part of FFVIII that really doesn't jive with me is the way that I play RPGs. I craft each character to be a unique person that brings something different to the battle, and FFVIII punishes that by insisting that you only have three character loadouts that you swap to the three (or fewer) active characters, and will kill the shit out of you at times if you don't have every GF available in the battle. I like assigning a GF & magic to a specific character, and assigning them based on that character's personality and battle strengths, and just leaving them there. The game's designers find this approach to be anathema to their love of generic vessels that substitute for 'characters,' and have built systems into the game to take punitive measures against anyone 'playing it wrong.'

My mission is to thwart this hateful design and make this game enjoyable to someone like me, who has better tastes in games than those who nearly single-handedly toppled the greatest franchise in gaming history with this entry in the series.

More on this as it develops.

Remember, Tony & I will be back this weekend with a new podcast.

Now, some questions!

01 - What did you think of Final Fantasy VIII? How did you play it?
02 - Are you on the Star Trek Online beta? If so, lemme know how to hook up with you in the game!
03 - What do you wanna hear about from CES on this weekend's podcast?

Lemme know, and we'll talk. I'll be back tomorrow!

-Blaine