This is an alternate sub-account for kjorteo. If you like my writing or want to start watching me more closely or something, that's really where the action is. This journal is basically for reviews, reactions, rants, and general commenting on whatever video games I happen to be playing at the time. I make no promises that any of it is anything other than pointless, but it was that or keep spamming my main journal with it.

All this talk of Crystalis in ravenworks' journal made me nostalgic, and made me remember that I was actually playing through it again the last time I got nostalgic, and still had a save from fairly late in the game (somewhere around Goa Fortress, to be precise) before it randomly fell back into the backlog. Well, I still had the save assuming the battery hadn't died yet or anything. I actually have yet to lose any NES/SNES/Game Boy data (or at least confirm that it's lost, though I will admit that there are a few games I haven't checked in years, so who knows,) but the batteries on just about all of them have to be on "any day now" status by now, I would think.

Anyway. Played it again, still had the save, so I beat it. The endboss is almost insultingly easy compared to the three or four That One Bosses and hellish final dungeon you go through first. I actually remembered "okay, I beat this game years ago and don't remember too much, except I think I remember the endboss being a bit of an anticlimax" and was still surprised by how quickly and effortlessly victory was attained.

But, I mean, the journey, everything along the way, that entire game (which has good length for an NES action-RPG, by the way.) And then there's all the music...God, I love Crystalis.

Playing Disgaea is like having TV Tropes on your DS. I fell in 22 hours ago, raided the Item World countless times, reincarnated everyone to super-awesome multiclasses countless times, got them up to level 17 or so, got some insane equipment upgrades, and just finished the tutorial. Please send help.

When deciding on which version of an upcoming Pokemon game to get, I tend to wait for a list of differences and version exclusives to come out so I can tell which one has the content I'd prefer.

HG/SS list is out now.

See if you can guess which version I'll be getting, and why. Go on, you'll never guess.

Super Metroid Redesign is BULLSHIT.

Altering the physics to make you heavier and fall faster to be more like Metroid Prime than the significantly floatier Super Metroid? Sure, that's actually an interesting idea. Turning the wall jump into an actual part-of-the-main-game legitimate mechanic (you need a powerup to do it, and even then it doesn't work on some surfaces?) Fair enough. Wall jumping is a bitch now with the new physics, but it can be done, I guess. Making the player go up that ridiculously long a chasm to proceed, though? I would still have gotten the "you need to be cool enough to know how to wall jump to proceed" message in a shaft half that size. All this much overkill brings to the table is just making it more and more inevitable that you'll screw up one of the jumps, probably near the very top of the shaft, just so you can fall all the way back down thanks to hyper-gravity and have to try again from the beginning again and again and oh my God, I don't care if it's a ROM hack and therefore you're fully aware that everyone's playing it on an emulator; savestates should never be required to pass anything.

That's not the best part, though! Naturally, when I got to a room with an impassable gap full of killer acid (the kind the Gravity Suit gleefully ignores, which was integral to progressing in Ridley's Lair in the original Super Metroid, just for the record) and a diagonal glowing thing of some sort what the hell is that that's never been in a Metroid game before, I naturally assumed it was a dead end and I'd get something cool if I came back later, you know, with the Gravity Suit. But oh no, it turns out you actually shoot a missile (and it has to be a missile) at the thing, which reflects the missile which makes a drawbridge appear out of absolutely God damned nowhere. Of course. Why didn't I think of that. And literally five seconds after that (just keep watching :D) we're treated to a jump-while-rolling-into-Morph-Ball trick which, like the wall jump, was an optional thing you could do to show off or sequence break in Super Metroid but is apparently required now. Actually, like the wall jump, I honestly could have accepted that as legitimate if there had been some sort of warning (so I wouldn't just be stuck there wondering what to do and assuming the shaft was just a one-way passage on the way back out or something, because the game hadn't made it clear that it seriously expects you to be able to Morph Ball jump up into the shaft like that) and if the execution were better. Paired with everything else, though, it's just more damning examples of this game's nonsense.

This game seems to base puzzles around taking the extremely clear "you should not be here yet" signs that have been well-established by every other Metroid game ever and disregarding them, instead expecting you to suck it up and just be awesome somehow. Case in point:

Every other Metroid game ever: if you take extreme damage over time just from being in a room, it's because the room is too hot for you to be in without the Varia suit, you moron.
Super Metroid Redesign: Quit whining, go faster.

It might have worked better if the instructions were a bit more clear--doing something once I actually know what to do is the easy slightly-easier part (God damned wall jump shafts D:)--but I just can't handle the leaps of logic and disregard for clearly established Metroid tradition to figure out what the game wants me to do in all of these ridiculous moments.

Oh, also, event door abuse. I never liked event doors--there's just something incredibly heavy-handed about the magical grey doors that literally cannot be opened by any means at all until they are activated by the plot, at which point they can be opened with anything. I understand you want there to be a certain sequence in a game like this, but there are less blatant ways--I mean, make it a Power Bomb door or something if you really want me to not be able to go through it yet; it's not like you get Power Bombs before you're about 80% done with the game anyway. The real Super Metroid only used event doors for Zelda-style clear-the-room deals, where the doors would be locked until you killed every enemy in a room, at which point they would unlock. I've lost count of how many locked event doors I've seen in Super Metroid Redesign with no visible means of unlocking them--clearing the room did nothing, so I can only assume they're plot-related somehow. And really, if I wanted a game that pretended to be Metroid but actually just directly told you where to go by always locking every door but the one it wanted you to use, I'd go replay Metroid Fusion.

Hell with this, I think I'll go back to Metroid Prime. Although, if anyone knows of any Super Metroid hacks that aren't bullshit, let me know!

The problem with building a party in Disgaea is that you have room for 10 people but there aren't 10 unique classes in the game that are all good enough to be worth using, and it being Disgaea makes the lines between all of them blurry enough that trying to build a party of unique specialists meaningless and impossible anyway. I could say I want an offensive mage and a healer, or since both are good with INT and spells and stuff and can freely reincarnate into each other and take the spells they've learned with them, I could just make two identical attack-and-heal-and-do-everything spellcasters. Or just get 10 Majins since it really doesn't matter at that point anymore anyway.

Not counting Majins, I've come up with about eight classes I want, six of which I can actually make right now (let's not talk about the unlock requirements for Angels and EDF Soldiers right now.) That leaves 2-4 slots of "uh...."

Four identical spellcasters, maybe? :(

Picking on almost-dead Space Pirates seems wrong, somehow.

Really, I'm getting seriously mixed messages as I explore the ruins of Frigate Orpheon. I mean, I'm here because I received a distress beacon, and the first thing I found were dead Space Pirates, and the second thing I found were parasites. The game does a really good job being atmospheric with all the scanning, and it very thoroughly drills into your head the fact that the Pirates where overwhemled and mostly wiped out by the parasites and you're just slogging through what's left after the massacre. Especially with all the creative descriptions of Pirate deaths from the scanning--"Space Pirate. Status: death caused by blunt cranial trauma." "Death caused by severe lacerations to abdomen." "Death caused by acid burns." The list goes on, including my personal favorite so far, "Death caused by removal of internal organs."

I realize that Space Pirates aren't exactly the nicest things in the universe, and even the parasites that killed most of them on this very ship are mostly their damn fault for the Phazon experiments and such, but I still don't know if I'm comfortable with "finish off any Pirates that weren't already dead when you got there" being part of the mission. For one thing, Space Pirates are cute, and for another, surely any species capable of space travel, scientific experimentation, and freaking data encryption is smart enough to negotiate. It's almost like a less survival-horror-y Dead Space in here with the "something wiped out the crew, have fun examining all the bodies while fighting the creatures that killed them" theme, only I paradoxically also have to fight all the surviving Pirates, too, including the injured ones. It was quite a surprise the first time I saw one sitting on the ground, leaning against the wall pitifully, only for him to take out a blaster and start shooting at me after I scanned him. "This one has both his legs broken. That's pretty messed up, but it doesn't actually say he's de--ow!! Hey, why is--ow!! Wait, do I seriously have to kill the--ow!! Fine, then! ^O.O^;;" One had a brain hemmorhage, which just meant that he stumbled around like he was drunk and had really terrible aim before I shot him in the face, and now I feel bad.

Last night: Spent 45 minutes or so in the Item World in Disgaea DS because I enjoy setting up and then setting off the stupidly complex geo panel chains whenever I can and reaping the ensuing bonuses, then had to quit and lose all progress because I'm a moron and aimed wrong and killed my own guy with a fire spell (because you can't get the good ending unless you have 0 team kills all the way through.) My Rogue tried to attack someone and didn't kill him because Disgaea Rogues are like the weakest things ever, so I sent my Skull (mage) to take care of him, or so I thought. I literally ended the turn and was like "wait, why am I being attacked from over there? I could have sworn I just killed... wait, where's my... FUCK."

This morning: Saw not one, not two, but three Long Locusts in Animal Crossing (one of the dwindling number of bugs and fishes that I have not caught yet,) and managed to mess up catching all three of them, just flat-out missing one with the net until he faded away (because you apparently only get so many tries) and accidentally driving the other two to suicide when running away from me made them run straight into the river, where they fell in and disappeared forever. I hate when bugs do that.

I've just been full of failure lately!

I have bested lung sharks, stomach wisps, pancreas weeds, stomach squids, lung amoebas, heart worms, and heart spiders!

In other words, I beat all the X missions, thus mastering Trauma Center. (If you define "mastering" as completing all the X missions. I'm not crazy enough to try to S-rank everything.) That game was sadistic, but it was made by Atlus, and we all know "hard Atlus game" is redundant.

Interestingly, the X missions were not scaled in difficulty equal to how much trouble I had with the various GUILT strains during the main game, and neither have any bearing on the chronological order in which you face them. From 1 to 7, 1 being the hardest and 7 being the easiest, I'd rank the strains in the main game as follows:

1) Deftera (second strain) is an evil bastard.
2) Pempti (fifth strain)
3) Savato (seventh strain)
4) Paraskevi (sixth strain)
=== Easy/hard dividing line -- anything above this I would consider hard, anything below is easy, at least by Trauma Center standards ===
5) Kyriaki (first strain)
6) Triti (third strain)
7) Tetarti (fourth strain) in very very distant last. These guys were almost insultingly easy compared to the rest of the game, though the fact that you have to beat them by correctly matching the green, yellow, and purple serums to inject into the correctly corresponding squids might be a bit of a hangup if davidn ever plays this game. I don't know, is this doable?

Whereas after being adjusted for X mission difficulty, the X missions are as follows:

1) X1: Kyriaki, by far. I was almost ready to say X1 is harder than all the other X missions combined, until I ran into X7. It's still easily harder than X2 through X6 combined, and easily harder than X7, but it's not harder than X2 through X7 combined.
2) X7: Savato
3) X5: Pempti is a bastard, especially after being made even harder. The only reason it's not still in the number two spot is because Savato got an even bigger boost than Pempti did.
4) X6: Paraskevi
=== Easy/hard dividing line ===
5) X3: Triti
6) X4: Tetarti, still insultingly easy, only rising above last place this time because how badly Deftera was nerfed.
7) X2: Deftera. For as much as it's still my least favorite GUILT strain overall when facing them all under equal circumstances, and even though every other X mission is improved somehow (not everything is twenty times harder like X1 is, but even Tetarti was at least a little harder,) I swear X2 was actually easier than the last time I faced Deftera in the main game.

I think someone somewhere along the lines of Trauma Center's development lost sight of what a "toxin" is. Sure, I will admit that if you don't call it that, then GUILT doesn't stand for anything, but...when the patient is suffering from lung sharks that you need to kill with a laser (warning: somewhat graphic for a DS game), that's not a toxin.

Also, this game is hard.