I've finally completed Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. While yet again, the game reminds us of the nagging problem with the game - that for some odd reason, you have to prove someone else did it, instead of just creating reasonable doubt - even poking in the eye with it by telling us blatantly that we can't acquit our client using the same circumstantial evidence the prosecution is using. It's still a great game and the story is still entertaining as ever.
Realisation of Where I Wanted to Go With the Fantasy of War
A few weeks ago, after playing Devil May Cry 4, I realised where I wanted to go with the combat system. I was looking for a system in which both player skill and knowledge, together with the player character's own growth in skills and statistics would lead to the battle system I was looking for. I had already established that every battle had to be its own instance a very long time ago. While I'm obviously sticking in a 2D world (since 3D worlds are out of any single-person development team), I realised that DMC had hit that spot that I wanted - and I now had some vision of what I wanted.
I wanted timing to be part of the equation, variety of attacks, real time tactics, relatively unique enemy behaviour, a difficulty increase not just by number of enemies - but numbers of certain kinds of enemies. To get this kind of system working well, limits of peculiar kinds have to be set - which Fantasy of War is highly suited for. The game has need for growth, but not that same kind needed in an RPG - but one needed for something like DMC. This also revealed that my experience block system was perfect for Fantasy of War, not Sword Fantasy.
The concept of experience blocks was originally so that it could be easily reallocated between statistics - but I now find that having them reallocatable between skills as well as statistics - could be a real interesting system of tradeoffs. Having them freely move about in an RPG was grossly impractical and unfair, but having them move about - when there is a limit to how many of these blocks you can have around - and more skills and statistics than you could possibly buy, with plenty of unique and different battles - leads to what I believe is a very flexible system that's loads of fun.
That being said, there is a very good possibility of me suspending Sword Fantasy to pursue this new battle system. And so begins the Fantasy of War.
3 Day Uni Week!
Woo-hoo! I only have 3 days of uni per week! What a luxury compared to those past two years where I've had to haul my ass off to uni every day. A day of rest for every day I go to uni. Hehehehe.
Switching of Schedule - And About Wasting Time
Obviously, a daily schedule doesn't fit one who procastinates like me. While I did like posting something every day for a week or two, as with every time I start such a stint, I already know I can't keep it up for very long, even if I wanted to. For the foreseeable future, I'll try to keep to a long post every three days, so that I post at least ten posts a month. In truth, I could keep up the daily rant thing, but I figure that I shouldn't. Number one - I'm unfortunately someone who easily succumbs to writer's block, and literally can't write anything for long periods of time. Number two - I'm going to be busy soon. I'm involved with SIFE, an unnamed project, and a new section of the cfgt.net site (from the looks of it, it'll have some kind of story going - still part of my Fantasy of War ;) ).
This is not even taking into account my university work (bound to pile up since this year is supposed to be a difficult and challenging year), my gaming (required to keep me sane) and constant long periods of zero productivity of any sort. I'm trying to cut off those long periods of doing nothing, but I get them a lot. There are just those times when you feel like doing something, just not programming, not studying, not blogging, not gaming, not watching anime, not watching reality shows, not watching TV, but just sitting around chatting with people online, surfing the net for funnies or even doing research on something you're ultimately not going to buy.
This waste of time ultimately hurts me - but is somehow necessary. I've been trying to cut it down since last year, but with no success - my consoles are a good example of this attempt, as well as my reentry into programming. While I have cut into it somewhat significantly, there are still a good number of spoilt days (usually due to classes being in strange gaps). I'm hoping the section of the site will soon remedy that, since I intend to work on it in those strange gaps - in addition to the now new music games filling in those gaps (being the only games I don't have to get into a particular mood to play).
While I can't truly be considered a procrastinator, since I plan my work very well. I've never actually had to rush for a deadline before, and I do work in chunks what I'm never interested enough to do in one shot. I even plan days around those last few days when my motivation to finish the assignment takes over to be free of any other distractions - or if there are those I can't avoid - enough time to do it anyway.
I've realised after so long that I enjoy doing computer work. Programming is really fun for me - and I'm good at it. I love putting parts together and getting them to work - be it software or hardware. Problems and puzzles while trying to solve problems interest me greatly, and I now realise that I could've gone and studied IT. Years ago, I was afraid that I'd end up doing nothing but massive amounts of coding - and what if at some point, that became deathly boring? Now, I'm a little more certain that boredom won't be too much of a problem. If at some point, I fail to shave off more dead time, I'll consider picking up a more intensive programming project - and if I do, expect it to be the battle system for the Fantasy of War!
The Wonkiness of Bias
I'm probably among the biggest culprits of being biased. You can probably see it all over my blog. I think. Why I am biased: I spare no popular game I don't like serious criticism. Final Fantasy XII is a good example. I hate the game. I have no idea how it earned so many honours by doing NOTHING well. It wasn't fun, the story was bad, and it was draggily long. I couldn't even go past five hours on it. That being said, I could easily and happily play what most review sites call an 'average' game - .hack//G.U. I can spend hours on Dynasty Warriors and Ninety-Nine Nights just because I find it fun.
I cannot for the life of me see why people like Zelda. It still hasn't clicked, and probably never will. Why is it fun? I don't know. There's just obviously something I'm just grandly missing. I think I just have this dislike for platformers. Okami didn't charm me, and neither did Super Mario Galaxy. I know they were good, but not that good. Maybe I'm just too much of an old-school gamer.
Why I might not be as biased: Even consoles I own don't escape criticism. I hold no true favouritism over any console just because I own them. I badly want the Wii to crash and burn. I like my PS3 over the XBox 360 because I can run Linux on it. The PSP just beats the DS because the PSP is just that much better of a handheld device. I switched to Windows Mobile because Palm OS was just too archaic for my liking. Just because I own the console doesn't mean I have any interest in it being successful. It just means I have an interest in games that are already out for it - the GameCube is a good example.
Graphics are nothing to me if there's no gameplay. Even if I could play Crysis at maximum settings, I'd still give it a 6, at most. Crysis' level design was poor and the ease at which one could lose their way despite having a minimap was appalling (don't even get me started on the interface and gameplay). I'll happily trod through Disgaea and Atelier Iris, and shelf away any of the PS2 Final Fantasy games. I'd play Ninja Gaiden Black while immersing myself in Folklore. Command and Conquer: Red Alert is still fun despite everything looking like sad blocks of pixels now.
Why I might be biased: Graphics still do matter. Now that UT3 nearly matches the pace I'm used to from Quake 3, it's probably no turning back. While gameplay occasionally does trump graphics, it's difficult for me to see myself going back to playing Freecell XP after playing Freecell Vista or Dynasty Warriors 5 after Dynasty Warriors 6.
(I wanted to say more. But writer's block hit again. Dammit.)