The new version of Selatria is now online. It will be up until the end of August.
Current Issues:
-Selatic Stones have no effect.
-Commander fight has an issue where the spell name doesn't disappear during the fight unless Mage or Melodia casts something to overwrite it.
-When casting "Bolt", it does not appear as a title header.
-In some cut-scenes, leaving the area and coming back will cause Melodia to return but not do anything.
Download: --Taken down 9/1/2011. Stay tuned for Phase III on 9/17!--
Phase II: (July 31st-Late August)
New Features:
Smoother battle animations
New monsters on Overworld
Inclusion of cut-scenes in battle
Secret 'Wanted Species' on World Map
Map/Menu fixes
Changes to healing items
Save gates are now usable
Phase III: (Late-August/Early-September)
Testing arrow/ranged attack animations.
Voice acting in battle (*NEW) To be announced
System Requirements: Operating System: Windows® XP / Vista / 7 CPU: PC with 1.0GHz Intel® Pentium® III equivalent or higher processor RAM: At least 256MB of system RAM HDD: 100MB available hard disk space - Other 1024x768 or better video resolution -
Some good and bad news coming from the Nintendo world. :| Being a hardcore Nintendo fan-boy for the longest, I always buy their newest consoles and hand-helds. I'm a very loyal person in that regards.
Operation Rainfall:
As I stated in a blog post at the beginning of the month, Nintendo of America is refusing to release The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Pandora's Tower state-side. Now that Xenoblade is about to be getting a European release, I feel shafted big time. :( Kinda wished Wii didn't have their consoles region locked. This guy says it best.
His voice kind of reminds me of Seth MacFarlane.
Nintendo 3DS:
A few days ago, a massive price drop for the 3DS was announced, from $250 to $170. I really, really, ... REALLY want to get one now. And for the people who feel that they got shafted, they get 20 free games for their 3DS.
...And if that wasn't enough, GBA and NES titles are coming too. The gamer in me just died and went to a far better place. I will literally have no more reason to have a DS Lite (or a GBA for that matter) if I can get the entire library to my 3DS... eventually.
I've never beaten the original Yoshi's Island for SNES/GBA, and I would like to. I got to the final area before my save file was deleted. (Battery fail?) -- But yet, Nintendo has no plans to release it outside of people who have or buy a DS before August 12th. Frustration!!!
You can see the whole GB/GBA Virtual Console list here.
I will most likely get it in October. (Or before then?) I'll be ready to buy this. Excitement!
_
(I was expecting this blog post to be a little longer.) Anyway, what the deuce, Nintendo? You wait until your sales to start lagging before actually listening to what their players want? :| It's no mistake that the 3DS launched with an unprepared Virtual Console lineup and it's just now getting titles from the GBA generation onto the device.
Then there's the whole 3DS lineup. Street Fighter IV is fun, sure, but where's Kid Icarus: Uprising? Smash Bros 3DS? Mario Kart 7? Super Mario 3D Land? All of these were just announced, but they should have been launch titles. Very disappointing. I'm not going to buy a handheld when all of the core titles aren't out for it yet, that's just dumb.
Not to mention the whole Operation Rainfall. I really want to play those role-playing games, and they didn't even get E3 time earlier this month because of their "perceived" sales failure here in the states.
You guys want to appeal more to the real gamers, the hardcore crowd, yet are making no real effort to do so. To that I say: You're only shooting yourself in the foot. (And I'm still getting a 3DS -_- )
I'm feeling confident about this one. I laughed all the while editing it. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did filming it. I only make a small cameo in the skit itself, but I wrote some of it and came up with the skit concept.
There are some more BETACinema skits coming in the near future. Damn, I love this group.
Anyway, most of this blog entry was focused on editing of the actual skit than writing a new entry.
Next big project will be Phase II of alpha testing for Selatria, and that will be posted on Sunday's blog post.
I'm honestly not sure what to write about today, but I feel like I should write about something... so here it goes.
My Saturday:
Saturday was a pretty busy day. I woke up very early in the morning (7AM my time would be the equivalent to 2AM for a normal person -- I normally don't get up until at least 12.) I took some of my friends to Frank and Son Collectible Show in the City of Industry and they had a blast. It's always fun to take someone new to that place, it's seriously the place for nerds.
I'll probably go by myself, but I think I may make it a monthly thing in the future. But still, even getting there at 9AM, traffic was still hell and getting a park was almost impossible. I remember years back when it was unknown, you could get a park near the front. Not anymore!
On that topic, I need to go back to going to swap meets and video game hunts. I used to do it often, but I have so many games on the palette that need completing that I took a break from it.
I went there thinking I wouldn't get anything, and I left with a hard drive for my 360. Time to fix up the Xbox and actually update it to 2011 standards. Maybe I'll get Xbox Live too.
After, we all enjoyed lunch, played a quiz game called "You don't know Jack" (I really don't know Jack), and then had the BETA Meeting!
We filmed a new skit, and it'll be up soon. By soon, that may depend on if I wait for Ryan to edit the parts, or if we actually work together to get this up in a reasonable manner. Meh, we'll see. It's funny, to the point where I laugh about it. You know when I write these scripts, I worry that the skit is going to be bland or lack humor, but I'm glad to have such creative friends and we really expand the interpretation and go way off the script. I guess you can say that's what makes us so awesome. Hence the 'A' in 'BETA'.
In the topic: I also made this movie out of boredom. Well, actually Ryan did the visuals. He had the whole interview with the song "What is Love", but I much preferred this theme. So, here's my version:
Anyway, did I mention how much I enjoy the BETA meetings? If I had a say in the matter, I'd like to film more skits outside of meetings, but everyone has conflicting schedules (yay work/school/commitments) because if I could, I'd do it every week. ...Probably would if got revenue for it, but then that'd take the fun out of it.
..That rant aside.
_
Selatria:
The game is on track for a July 30th public alpha testing. I put some of what I'm working on in a nifty 30 second YouTube video.
I'm going to upgrade to a full version of Fraps before I start doing any real trailers. Ugh, that's going to take a while.
_
Final Fantasy XIV:
Changing topics, the rank 45 dungeon in FFXIV is damn near impossible. Well, at least our methods aren't working. I stupidly suggested we charge through and let the aggro run back. When we got to moles and had to start over, we had to fight through them again, and it would have just been smart to do that in the first place. In any case, I'm going to stop derping around and actually do some hardcore runs and find a worthwhile strategy for completing the DD dungeon.
It reminds me of Einherjar LS leading, only this is more predictable. I know what to freakin' expect, so not learning anything between runs would be stupidity. In Einherjar, it would be random and you'd not know what to expect, but here I at least expect improvement, and that's what I'm shooting for.
So it's finally here. (And some people thought we never would see the day.) Final Fantasy XIV starts to see some of the new features and reforms of the new development team since they were brought in place December of last year.
I was kind of surprised to see some original music for the game: Here is the themes for the three companies. I'm guessing they were composed by Uematsu, but I'm not 100% positive.
Order of the Twin Adder:
The Maelstrom:
Flames:
Doesn't it sound very Final Fantasy Tactics-y like to you? I really like the new tunes. I was personally expecting some recycled music, but they spent no expense on coming up with something new for this.
Speaking of which, that was the very first thing I did when playing. I went to Gridania and put in my application for the "Order of the Twin Adder". Upon zoning in, I noticed that the city has a giant increase in the number of flags showing in the city, there's a new sense of pride, if you will.
I was given a quest to do the company quests at the table. Had to go to Camp Tranquil and do a task and come back. When zoning into The Black Shroud, I noticed that that too had new music. In fact all the zones have new music... Well, correction, it depends on the area of the zone. When you get near one of the new encampments, it plays a different theme, and plays a different theme when you're on the field. Only zones that I've seen that doesn't have new music is the towns, Coerthas, and Mor Dhona.
Anyway, long story short the quests (there are three main ones for each company) go on to show this man at the ending.
Don't recognize him? It's (highlight) Cid .
Dungeons:
Probably the biggest aspect of the patch in the 'fun' department, the dungeons. I ended up trying the rank 25 dungeon twice and the rank 45 dungeon twice.
One thing I immediately noticed is that theres a cutscene when you enter that shows the area name in really fancy letters with some of the monsters lurking around, and then this epic theme pops up:
On top of that, it dramatically changes to a different key when you get into a battle, it's pretty interesting how they did that. I was skeptical that the theme would match with the very epic feel of going through a timed dungeon.
As for the dungeons themselves, I'll split it up by the zone: Rank 25: The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak
This dungeon is very easy in terms of the monster hoarde, though it seems near impossible if one were to do it with strictly rank 25 adventurers. Anyway, the dungeon is capped at four party members and you can't have more or less. What the linkshell and I did on my clear is that we went in as rank 25-27 classes and got decent SP and changed to higher levelled classes when we got low on time.
It seems that everything aggros (even at rank 50) so running through trying to wing it when low on time means that I had monsters from all over the damn place chasing me all over.
These blue teleporters are used to open up gates in the dungeon. In the case of the R25 dungeon, you need four of these magitek pieces to open it up further. A boss was at the end, and they even implemented victory dances (with appropriate FF theme) that play at the end ala FF7-10 and 12. That made the nostalgic side of me really happy.
Rank 45: The Dzemael Darkhold
This one was undoubtedly much harder than the 25 one. This had aggro everywhere and a floating eye that used AoE on occasion. I was under the impression that he chased you if you were going too slow from the trailer, but nope, he goes back and forth. Even worse, he can't be damaged any.
I admittedly screwed up this run big time for my LS mates. I had connection issues and ran into mobs that haven't popped up on my screen almost killing the group four times.
In the future, I'm going to lead strategies more from the sidelines and tank only after mobs are claimed. I don't want to screw up things due to my bad connection. (You can tell from the red rings near my name, I was constantly on the verge of d/cing. They call it 'Groving'. LS joke, if you will.)
Haven't won the raid yet, but I'm going to give it another go on Sunday evening. No rush to complete it. I'm just taking my time and going with the flow. What bugs me about the dungeons though is that you can't mark mobs, so it's hard to communicate with the party on what to kill first.
Battle System:
I'm iffy on the changes to the battle system. There has been a lot of outcry everywhere because the usability of magic got DESTROYED in this patch. Thaumaturge went from the best healer in the game to borderline useless in the healing department. While I agree with this, THM shouldn't have been a better healer than Conjurer, S-E made this perfectly clear. They split Cure from being single and area spells to Cure and Curaga (just like how FFXI is). And removed Sacrifice to be AoE and only single target.
MP costs for spells also skyrocketed, so it's much harder for everyone to solo mobs that used to be, so a Conjurer in the group is probably going to be much more vital to success in the future... at least until Black and White Mage is released.
As for Auto-Attack, the way they implemented it is a little awkward, it's hard to tell and know if I'm actually attacking or not, there's no button to start an Auto-Attack, you just go in active mode and get near an enemy and it just...happens. I don't know if they tried to make it like Final Fantasy 12 in those regards, but I'm just not used to it, maybe I just need more time.
Oh, and new battle animations.
_
In conclusion, I think the game took a giant leap forward, but some steps back. I'd have to say the game is clearly going in a positive direction. I've seen the population shoot back to a decent size in a few days to check things out. LS members I haven't seen in forever have popped in and said hi, and I'm looking forward to 1.19 in September where we see more changes such as Airships, Chocobos, and the like.
YTMND was recently re-launched with a new site look for its 10th anniversary. Being one of the biggest sites I used to frequent in my younger years (before YouTube), this post is going to be devoted to some of my favorite posts in the last ten years. I remember frequenting this website way back in middle school. Damn, how time flies. I also blame this website for creating my very surreal sense of humor!
One of my favorites of all time is 'We didn't start this website' which appropriately explains what YTMND is in one fitting song.
Anyway, on to some of my favorites. If it has adult material, I will tag (NSFW) at the end.
So, Monday morning on my lack of sleep decided to go finish up the current Conjurer storyline in FFXIV.
I was sent near Humblehearth in the Black Shroud to go rescue this guy. He's kind of helpless. You'd think the NPCs in this game would have a little more spunk. But nope, he sits there and takes hits and makes me do all the work.
As you can see, he's kind of a pansy. This part required guiding him in an instance through a path in the forest to The Black Shroud-Coerthas zoneline. While keeping him alive. I learned the hard way (since I ended up having to do this twice) that you fail the escort if Morys gets to 25% HP or lower, and not if he dies. Ugh, how annoying. Did I mention I hate being healer? I can't wait to be a Black Mage!
After this whole escorting fiasco, I had to use the powers of the Echo in which I was treated to another boss battle, only now I'm in a flashback of when Morys is a little kid. He was clenching to this golden statue and four wolves came up to attack him. I had to keep his helpless self alive in that battle too.
And with that, I was sent back to the Conjurer's Guild where I was rewarded with 3000 Marks, and completion of the CON storyline, for now. I guess you could say these quests are equivalent to the AF storyline for FFXI, only that these are far more cutscene intensive. If it's one thing this game got right at the beginning, it's these. But only three for each class right now, is kind of depressing.
Anyway, now I need to get Conjurer two more ranks for Raise.
