Finishing Mass Effect 2

You know, there was once upon a time when stores like Game Stop, where you could sell your old video games or trade them in for new or other used games, made no sense to me whatsoever. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've always understood the point behind places like Half-Price Books, which is essentially the same thing, in book form. It is just that I could never figure out how a trade-in video game place could do such a brisk business. I didn't understand how enough people were bringing in enough relatively new used games for the model to be sustainable--because unlike books, video games do have a shelf life. Consoles weren't always backwards compatible, you know.

This is because I didn't know until high school that there was such a thing as "beating" a video game. Even then it was only a barely conceived realization. I remember one time in eighth or ninth grade I spent an entire holiday weekend holed up in my room playing Super Mario 3, and trust me, I never even came close to beating that game. I didn't finish an entire video game until I was well out of college, people. Sure, part of that is due to the fact that after eighth or ninth grade I didn't play any video games until after college, but still.

Now, however, I totally get it. Some games are fun enough to play through once, but after you've finished you know you're not gonna really want to play it again. Some games *cough*KingdomHearts*cough* become your white whale, and once you finally beat them, you just want to shove them across the counter, get your in-store credit, and get on with your life. So the games that you end up actually holding on to are the games that you want to play again. For a game to fall into that category it needs to either have a really fun and engaging gameplay mechanic or it needs to have a fantastic story. Preferably, it should have both.


Mass Effect 2 is definitely one of those games to keep and replay. It has an engaging gameplay experience and an outstanding story, making it full of awesome and win. It is also very replayable, because there are numerous variables that can alter your experience with the game, and make sure that every time you play is a little bit different. Some of of those variables might be the choices made from your imported play of the first game (or the backstory choices you make when you start the game if you didn't play the first one), the background, class, gender, and skills you choose for your character. There are many different romance options for your Commander Shepard. The order in which you carry out Shepard's missions comes into play as well. There is also the choice to play the game as a paragon (good guy) or renegade (self-explanatory), which will affect your interactions with others throughout the game.

Then, of course, there is the game's final mission.

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The first time I played through Mass Effect 2 I went straight through the Omega 4 relay once my crew was abducted by the collectors. My team and I went in there and rescued them all, kicked the bad guy's butt, and went home, every single one of us. I thought nothing of it at the time and was just happy to have completed the game and pretty satisfied with the story. I moved on to play Dragon Age: Origins, and  well, you know what happened to me after that. 

Then my husband played Mass Effect 2.

We share an office, my husband and I, and one of our favorite things to do of an evening is to hang out in the office and play our games "together," by which I mean, he sits on his computer and plays his game and I sit on my computer and play my totally different game, and we snark back and forth with each other commenting on what we hear coming from the other person's monitor. What? Don't look at me like that. It's fun. Anyhoo, point being that I was more or less following along with his playthroughs of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. I had actually gotten him the first game as a Christmas present the year before our daughter was born, but somehow I ended up playing it first and getting hooked (I think because I found out Seth Green did a voice in the game). I was really excited that he was finally getting the chance to play it, partly because I wanted him to experience the awesomeness, but also because it afforded me the chance to see how the game was different through his playing style as compared to mine. For example, I was delighted when he opted to romance Tali in the second game, an option not available to my female Shepard. 

I was in the office when he went through the Omega 4 relay and embarked on the final mission of the game. I was only half paying attention to what he was doing and looked over at a sound of dismay, appalled to see Garrus dead, actually, permanently, in-game dead. "What did you do?!?" I asked him in shock. He shrugged that he didn't know and kept on playing. I watched in horror as more members of his team kept dropping, dying permanently, including beloved Tali. Again, I asked, "What did you do?" I couldn't believe it. (He wasn't too happy about it either.)

It turns out that, unless you cheat use a walkthrough or hints, the odds of your entire crew and team surviving the final mission on your first playthrough are pretty darn slim. There's a whole series of variables you have to do correctly to make that happen. You can't traipse across the galaxy after your crew gets abducted, for example, and expect them to survive to be rescued. If you go on one or two missions before going through the Omega 4, half of them die (one of your buddies gets dissolved into goo right in front of you just as you arrive to save them). If you go on more missions than that, the doctor is the only one left to be rescued. Your entire party has to be loyal (you get missions throughout the game to complete to earn each character's loyalty). Anyone not loyal is pretty much just so much cannon fodder. You have to have installed all of the available upgrades to your ship, or people don't make it. Finally, at each step of the final mission, you have to choose wisely when assigning your party to do the various tasks required to infiltrate the collectors' base. Looking at the list of things required to ensure complete survival can be more than a little bit daunting. My husband was pretty impressed I had managed it on my first try pretty much by accident after we found out what the deal was. Hell, if enough of your party gets killed off, Shepard doesn't survive the final mission at all. 

This is the kind of thing that makes this game one you will want to play multiple times though. There are just so many ways the final moments can play out.

I can't imagine why anyone would keep a playthrough where they lost party members to port into Mass Effect 3 (my husband fully intends to go back to an earlier save and replay that part of the game and see if he can have a happier outcome). But if they do, then anyone who died won't be available in game three. At all. Yeesh.

Knowing all of this made me really nervous when I approached the Omega 4 mission the second time around. All of a sudden, I was paranoid as hell that I wouldn't be able to finish everyone's loyalty missions before the crew got abducted. I was worried I would choose totally the wrong person for one of the assignments on the collector base, and so on. It is possible I had a guide pulled up on iPad so that I could check it, just in case, while I was playing the final mission. It is also possible that I might have used it once or twice, and was relieved to find out that my instinctual choice for each mission had been a good one. In the end, I managed to rescue my whole crew and my entire team walked (well, ran) out of that base alive. Then I got to tell the Illusive Man to shove it. I texted my husband in my excitement and there may have been a celebratory fist pump or two into the air. Good times were had by all.

Then I moved on to play Dragon Age: Origins again...

Final Thoughts on Kingdom Hearts

I did indeed finish up Kingdom Hearts II on Friday, as I had hoped that I would, yay! The final battle was both more and less ridiculous than the final battle in the first Kingdom Hearts. I wouldn't have thought that was possible, but apparently I was wrong about that. Overall, I think I would give the game a C ++ or a B -. It is really somewhere in between there. Honestly, I think if there hadn't been so many cut scenes, and if they hadn't, all of them, been so long, I would have enjoyed this game a lot more.

The general plot of this game was kind of interesting, actually. A quick refresher of the back story:

In the first game, Sora's world is destroyed by the Heartless, and he is separated from his friends Riku and Kairi, so embarks on a quest to find them. The Powers That Be decided that he is a Chosen One of some sort, and the only person who can stop the darkness, so he is granted the ability to wield the Keyblade, which releases the hearts stolen by the Heartless as they destroy worlds. He teams up with Donald and Goofy, who are searching for King Mickey (who is also trying to stop the Heartless and restore the worlds they have already destroyed). Together, the three seal off many worlds infiltrated by the Heartless (using the Keyblade), saving those worlds from destruction. There are also seven princesses (of which Kairi is one) who are being kidnapped by the Disney villains because their hearts combined can unlock a door which leads to Kingdom Hearts, the heart of all worlds (I think). Possessing Kingdom Hearts means great power, which all villains are after. So, Sora stops the villains, saves Kairi, and finds Riku and Mickey, only to be separated from them at the last moment, in the act of sealing the darkness away.

In Kingdom Hearts II we learn that when a very strong-willed person becomes a Heartless another kind of entity, known as a Nobody, is created from the body left behind by that person. These Nobodies are under the control of Organization XIII, a group of alpha-Nobodies who want to gain control of Kingdom Hearts so that they can be granted hearts of their own and therefore become real people, not shadows. Sora knows that Kairi has been safely returned home, but he is still seeking out Riku (and Mickey). In his search, he keeps running into Nobodies and Organization XIII, who have begun using the Heartless to attract the attention of the wielder of the Keyblade. They are harvesting the hearts released when Sora kills Heartless with the Keyblade, attempting to create their own Kingdom Hearts. So Sora must go from world to world, trying to find a trace of Riku, and fighting off Heartless and Nobodies, and the members of Organization XIII, eventually realizing he must defeat Organization XIII on their own ground--which he does with the help of Riku, Kairi, and Mickey, who he, Donald, and Goofy do find in their travels.

I am probably not explaining it that well, there was a lot going on here. Maleficent and Pete were running around too, but I am still not quite certain what their endgame was. I think they may be leaving that for the next game. As I said, a pretty good basis for the plot, but I am not sure it was executed all that well. I feel like the story and the game play were actually two separate elements. The game play didn't seem to further the story along. It just moved you from point A to point B so you could get to the next cut scene. Even on the world map, when there was something new to do on a world you had already visited, the verbiage they used was "New episode available!" In a truly good story-based video game, the story needs be integrated into the game play itself, not a separate entity, at least in my opinion.

So, that's the story aspect of the game. Now, how about the actual game play? Hmm. I felt like this game was a little schizophrenic. It is as if the game designers were trying out several different ideas that really would have been better suited to be in several different games. Maybe there would have been a better way to get them to work with each other, but if so, they did not nail the formula in KH II, I can tell you that. It was just all over the place.

Some of the ideas were "upgrades" to the gaming system in the first game, tweaks here and there to how you could access items and magic and summons. They also added in "reaction commands" which meant that you pressed a certain button at a specific time when you got the right indicator on the screen. For many enemies, the only way to beat them was using reaction commands, and I feel like that takes some of the fun out of it. There is no developing and playing with your own set of skills, be it certain magical attacks or weapon combos, or limit commands. The limit commands were interesting, you could get skills used in conjunction with the other members of your team. My favorite was Donald's "comet" command, which would allow you to surround your enemy with fireworks that did lots of damage, and was also fun to look at.

There were a few puzzle-solving points in the game, which were okay, but seemed to be awkwardly placed. There was also the Little Mermaid level, which was entirely just about teaching you to hit buttons at the right time. You were helping Sebastian and Ariel put together the musical, and so had to sit through lots of random songs, hitting buttons at the right time in order to get past the level (kind of like Guitar Hero, but nowhere near as fun). It was weird and random and really had no place in this game.

As far as the actual combat goes, I don't even know where to start on that one. As I said, most enemies had specific reaction commands, and that was the only way to defeat them. The actual difficulty level of each enemy seemed to vary widely, and not in a way proportional to your experience level or how far along in the game the enemy appeared. There was, for every non-standard Heartless or Nobody a "trick" for how to defeat them. This was more puzzle-solving I guess, but less overt. Once the trick was figured out, it was usually just a matter of patience to defeat the enemy, but as someone who prefers to just run in an wale on things with my sword, I did not really enjoy this kind of combat at all. Also, the actual in-game reaction time was really skewed by all of the special commands and actions, so it was kind of hard to tell at any given point whether or not I was actually in control of my character. An "information" bar was added at the top of the screen with hints or instructions about your objective scrolling by. When it wasn't as distracting as all get out, it was usually information that was painfully obvious. I know this game was probably designed for a younger demographic than me, but I am pretty sure younger gamers are way better at this stuff than I am. They probably don't like being spoon-fed either.

I think the big problem was that there was just so much stuff on the screen you had to keep an eye on aside from your character and his foe. I never knew where to look. If I was paying attention to the actual fighting, I missed crucial information from the scroll bar, or didn't see when a reaction command became available. If I tried to read the scroll bar, I totally got my butt kicked while I was looking the other way. If I kept my eyes on the command box, then I missed moments when I should have been blocking and got more damage than I would have otherwise taken. It just felt like a no-win situation. In many cases, when the battle ended, I was sitting there looking at the screen with no idea what had just happened. I can only look at so many things at once, and this game wanted me to be looking at two more at least at any given time.

I don't know how much of the engine for this game is based on the Final Fantasy series, but I suspect a lot. I am wondering though, how players of FF would stack this game up against their franchise. I find myself hoping that the problems with KH simply arise from the designers trying to take the FF engine and gear it towards a younger demographic while trying to make multiple Disney stories fit into their already kind of contrived plot line. Maybe when they are making up their own world it feels more cohesive. My husband has asked me to give Final Fantasy VI a try, he says that is considered the definitive entry in the series. So after I play that maybe I'll have a clearer view of what went wrong with KH, or if I am just not cut out to play in that pool.

Either way, my copies of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II will be going along to be traded in the next time I visit my local Gamestop.

I started Star Wars: The Force Unleashed this weekend and already feel much more in my element. Maybe I am just a PC RPG gamer and I needed KH to make me see it. Also, the graphics on this thing are freaking fantastic. Wow.

Final Thoughts on Kingdom Hearts

I didn't get around to mentioning this in yesterday's post (went off on a little rant there, sorry folks), but I wrapped up Boxing Day by finishing Kingdom Hearts!  That was an excellent, excellent way to finish up the holiday weekend, let me tell you.  Today I am going to dive right into Kingdom Hearts II, but before I get that underway, I thought I would share a few of my final thoughts on the first KH with you guys.

Be warned, today's posts will contain spoilers for the story of the game.

First off, I know I griped about this game a lot while I was playing.  I am sure many of you wondered why I even kept it up.  Well, those of you that don't have first-hand experience of my stubborn nature, at any rate.  But I think the primary reason that this game was so frustrating for me was that at its basic core, the concept of this game is truly awesome.  The execution of that concept, however, was frequently flawed.  Running into those flaws so often managed to just take me right out of the joy of the game, and those were the moments I tended to focus on afterward when I was thinking and talking about KH.  The secondary reason was that I had played most of the game (poorly) before this attempt.  So I was running over old ground.  While my real-life game playing ability has leveled up considerably since my last stab at KH, that actually only presented a new crop of problems for me this time around.  Certainly, some of the things I had issues with previously were no longer an issue and I was able to deal with the in-game challenges much more easily.  But the flip-side of that coin is those flaws in execution that I was talking about earlier.  They stand out so much more obviously to me now that I actually have some idea of what I am doing, and have also played some really, truly, excellently designed and executed games (*cough* Bioware *cough*).  Once I hit new territory, however, and got to the points in the game that I had never played, I will admit that I started having a lot more fun playing.  My obsession was no longer a drive to conquer this challenge that has beaten me for so long, but simply excitement to play the game and find out what happens next.

I wish I could say I was able to make 100 % completion of the game, but that would be a lie, and a laughable one at that.  I did find all 99 of the dalmatian puppies though, as well as complete the other two requirements to unlock the secret "ending" after the game credits.  I am fairly certain I will not be playing the game again though.  I have finished it, finally, and I am done.  I am glad I played it, but it is not the kind of game, for me, that drives me to seek out more.  Perhaps it once did, because that is definitely why I own KH II, but no more.  My own playing style and choices have certainly evolved.  I'm not saying I am better than KH, but it is no longer the kind of game that gets in my brain and stays there, begging for a replay or the next installment of the franchise.  It is not a true RPG to me, and I think that seems to be more what I lean toward these days. 

Despite this, I am kind of excited about jumping in to the sequel.  I was reading the game booklet yesterday a little bit on my way to visit our family and some of what I read gives me hope that a lot of the issues that drove me nuts in the first game were addressed in the second.  I'll have to get in and actually start playing to find out, but my fingers are crossed.

There are three final things about KH I want to address.

First, while the story driving the game was actually a pretty interesting one, I felt that the way it was wrapped up at the end of the game made no sense whatsoever.  I don't know if this was me being so tired I didn't pay close enough attention during the cut scenes and so missed some vital piece of information, or if it was a bad translation from the original concept script (the game was largely designed in Japan), or if it was just a poorly executed story finale.  Okay, this is the part that is about to get all spoilery.  Highlight the blocked text to read if you aren't concerned about spoilers, otherwise, you can just skip it.

Once the princesses and Kairi have been saved, the story kind of seemed to go off the rails.  At this point the keyholes to all of the worlds we have visited have been closed.  What did make sense:  Sora still wants/needs to find Riku, and hopefully save him from the darkness; Donald and Goofy still need to find King Mickey; now that we know from all of the assembled reports that Ansem is actually the bad guy, we should probably find him and stop him from destroying more worlds; stopping Ansem might actually restore all of the worlds that have already been destroyed.  Okay, good.  All of that seems like proper motivation to move forward, certainly.  So, we track down Ansem at "the end of the world," and beat him down, along with the weird crazy Heartless beast he rode in on.  Cool.  Then, there's one big final door, that seems to lead into...some weird darkness that has a whole bunch of Heartless spawning inside?   Okay, um, I guess that makes sense.  This is Ansem's handiwork after all.  But we're having a hard time shutting the door, and we aren't trying to use the keyblade.  I guess it doesn't work in this scenario?  Then, oh hey, it's Riku!  He's there behind the door, helping us!  And so is King Mickey!  WTF?  Where did he come from?  Where has he been all freaking game long to just suddenly pop up out of the middle of the Heartless, spouting about light, and it's okay to leave him and Riku behind the door.  It seems to me the only real reason to leave Riku and Mickey behind this door is to give us a plot for the sequel.  Because Riku, Sora, and Mickey have a big long conversation through the wide open door that at any point Riku and Mickey could have run through and then everyone could have shut it from the outside.  But whatever.  No, we're just gonna leave them in there to fight all of the Heartless, even though we have been looking for them both all game long.  Now there's a door to the light we're supposed to find.  Apparently, Ansem thought Kingdom Hearts were darkness, because all hearts start in the darkness or something, but Sora says he knows Kingdom Hearts are light.  Wait, what?  Sigh.  Oh, and there's Kairi, suddenly at the end of the world, even though we left her back in Traverse Town, without a Gummi Ship, so how did she get here?  And why, if she is here, does she get sent back to Destiny Islands when the worlds are restored and Sora doesn't?  I am so so so confused.  Sigh. 

I guess my point here is that I feel like either I totally missed some fundamental groundwork that explained all of those things that happened at the end, or nothing was actually set up throughout the game to explain why those things happened the way they did.  If that is the case, then that is a huge flaw in the game design.  That's all I am saying.  Hopefully, some of these questions get answered in KH II, but I am not actually holding my breath.

The second thing I want to address is the system of magic.  I was talking this over with my husband last night and I am actually glad I picked magic as my focus in the game, rather than strength, even though I still proceeded to hack and slash my way through most of the battles.  This is because it allowed me to use the iterations of "cure" to heal myself and my party.  I also really liked the gravity and fire spells, and those are the three I had equipped to my magic shortcuts.  But.  I feel like the system of magic for this game had so much potential that was just wasted.  For instance, the summons.  I chose magic as my focus this time around planning to use the summons a lot more, but I used them maybe twice in the whole game.  Why?  Because the process of summoning a character is so clunky it is almost counter-intuitive.  While in the middle of battle, you have to stop and stand still (while remaining completely vulnerable to your enemies) and scroll down to the "magic" menu listing, then scroll down that listing to "summon," and then scroll down yet another listing to choose the character you want to summon.  It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.  I mentioned that you get three shortcut buttons for magic, but you learn a whole lot of spells, some of which are pretty useful, or, in some cases, required in certain battles.  You can still use them even if they aren't set up for a shortcut, but you have to go through that scroll and choose thing every time you want to use that spell.  It just takes too long and is too many buttons to press for a game where the combat is in real-time.  You can change your shortcut items whenever you want, of course, except for when you are in the middle of a battle and have just figured out which particular spells you need for said battle, at which point you cannot access the menu at all.

I have some hopes that this is a little better in the next game, from the booklet it seems like it might be.  Fingers crossed.  I am just sad that such a potentially cool system got in the way of itself so easily and made itself too big a pain to actually use while playing.

The third and final thing I want to address is the items.  As I mentioned, you can't access your menu, and therefore your item inventory, when you are in the middle of a battle.  That means you've only got access to what is in your personal stock, which is, at most, six or seven items.  Those items can be accessed during battle, but only by stopping what you are doing, standing still (while remaining vulnerable) and scrolling the command list to items, then scrolling the items list to choose the one you want to use, and then usually scrolling a third list to choose which member of your party you want to use the item for.  It is just crazy.  Thankfully, as I mentioned before, I had enough magic points by the end of the game that I could just cure myself (or other party members) magically with a shortcut button, rather than have to scroll around trying to select a potion.  Also, while Donald and Goofy can hold more items than you can, they use them automatically and run out much more frequently, which means as soon as any battle is over, you need to be sure to restock them so they can help you out the next time you get into a tight jam.  You could have 30 Megalixirs (the instant complete-cure potion) in your stock, but if all of your party is out, then you are still gonna die.  Also, the really useful items like Tents and Cottages can only be used from the menu, and usually, where I would have wanted to (and been able to) use one, I had found a save point, which automatically restored my full health and magic points.  So those items, while awesome, were kind of redundant.  But once again, the tidbits I have gleamed from the KH II booklet give me hope that this has been improved in the next game.

So really, that's it, my thoughts on the first KH game.  I am glad I played it.  I am glad it's over.  I am glad I found all of the puppies.  I mean really, those poor puppies, crammed three into a chest and left strewn all over multiple worlds.  I am looking forward to the new game because it is just that, new.  To me at least.  I am hoping it will be a lot more fun.  We shall see though, we shall see.

Stuff That Happened This Weekend

I finished my "last" secret Christmas project.  No pictures of it yet, but I am really really happy with how it came out.  I will be posting some as soon as it has been given.  I hope the recipient enjoys it as much as I enjoyed making it!  (I say last in quotation marks because my husband pondered earlier as to whether or not our daughter would wear mittens if she had them, because she keeps taking off her shoes and slippers and putting them on her hands, and I got it into my head to see if I could hunt down a real quick pattern for crocheted mittens to make for her.)

I got both the front panels of my official current crochet project done, huzzah!  Now I just have to do the skirt part of the sweater and then assemble the pieces.  Hopefully I can knock this one out this week.

I made some pretty significant progress in my video game.  I blew through the first part of the Olympus Coliseum level in twenty minutes, I kid you not.  I even beat Cloud, which I had never managed to do before!  For those curious, the Olympus Coliseum level is a series of tournaments against various Heartless and other opponents.  The initial part is five battles against Heartless (in a row, with no stopping to save or go to the menu to restock items), then Cloud (who I think is a FF character), and then Cerberus.  After that, you can (and should) come back to the world periodically to compete in new tournaments, eventually fighting Hercules and Hades.  You get extra loot if you complete each tournament by yourself and within a time limit after your initial play-through.  So far I have completed the second round by myself, and I got to the last battle of it a couple of times in the time limit but haven't finished it yet (it is nine battles you have to complete inside of three minutes).  Yesterday I got to the Monstro level, which is where I got stuck the last time I played.  I am going to try to power through that today, so fingers crossed.

I will note that a few of the issues I have with the game that I complained about last week, I have already learned get corrected with extra in-game experience.  Mainly the number of items your character can equip does increase (and I also learned the healing spell, so I can do that instead of potions if I need to, as long as my magic holds up).  Also, after a while, you earn the ability to recover your magic power naturally over time.  It is slow, but you can equip an ability to speed it up a little bit.  It makes sense that this is something I would have missed the first few times through though, because I really wasn't paying attention to the abilities and I hadn't yet figured out the strategy involved in leveling up.  So, that has made playing a lot more fun again.  The camera still blows though.  I will be running toward a target and as soon as I get close, the camera will just swing around and I won't be able to see anything.  This seriously slows me down in combat, because I spend half the time running in the wrong direction as I can't see where my character is or is going.  Sigh.  Oh well.  I am trying to ignore that part and enjoy the bit where I am actually having fun.

One of my very best friends had a birthday this past week, so on Saturday my daughter and I went out to dinner with her, her husband, her parents, and another friend at one of my very favorite restaurants, King Tut.  If you like Mediterranean food and are in or find yourself in the Fort Worth area, please do give this place a try.  The food is fantastic, the atmosphere is the perfect amount of cheesy, and the staff (it is owned and run by a family) are just super friendly.  Dinner was a blast, and Baby Girl performed admirably, impressing people with how well behaved she is in restaurants.  We got lucky with this kid, I tell you.  Also, she continued her tradition of eschewing bread, sadly, but she did like the hummus even without the bread, so there's that.

I definitively decided that I do not want to get a dog.  I know that may seem like it came from out of nowhere (it certainly did when I told my husband the other day), but I actually have, for the last few weeks, been thinking about getting a dog.  Not seriously or anything, just idle thoughts.  I think I am just dreaming of a new pet, even though I think right now the two cats we have are more than enough.  I am an avowed cat person, and while I don't mind dogs, I much prefer them to belong to other people.  But for some reason lately, getting a dog has seemed like, if not a good idea, then at least not a terrible one.  But at dinner on Saturday there was a conversation about dogs and crate-training, and the kinds of accidents that are common when one has dogs...and after about ten minutes of listening to that I realized that nope, sorry, no dogs for me.  If the kiddo gets older and wants one, there will be a lot of thought and proving levels of responsibility before it happens, but it will only be upon her request.  I'll stick with my cats.  There may still be accidents from time to time, but they are the kind I am much more used to handling.

After dinner on Saturday, Baby Girl and I went home and curled up together to watch my second favorite Doris Day movie, Lover Come Back.  I hadn't seen that movie in at least ten years, and thought I would order it from Netflix to see if it was as awesome as I remembered it from my childhood.  I have to say that despite the horrible gender stereotypes, it totally lived up to my expectations.  I will be getting that to add to my permanent collection soon. 

(For those of you wondering, my favorite Doris Day movie is Calamity Jane.)

Yesterday was just kind of a quiet day.  Went to church (where my daughter somehow managed to escape from the nursery, but was thankfully found and returned by a nice couple before she could exit the church completely), then came home and spent the day with my husband and daughter.  My mother-in-law had been out of town visiting her parents but she got back in yesterday and swung by for a quick visit on her way through Fort Worth.  It was really nice to get to see her again.

All in all, it was a very good weekend.  Plenty of time with friends and family, lots of time spent hanging out with my daughter, and I was still able to sneak away for some gaming and crocheting.  Life is good, my friends.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some laundry to tackle, and I have to attempt to trim a 16 month old's fingernails.  Wish me luck!  Here, I will leave you with this awesome cartoon from The Oatmeal to start your week off right:  Cat vs. The Internet

No Daddy, you can't have my Christmas bear!

Playing Kingdom Hearts (Again)

Well, I am a little over seven (game play) hours into Kingdom Hearts now.  I have finally beaten the boss in Wonderland and just dropped into the Deep Jungle to play with Tarzan for a while.  To be clear, I beat the Trickster (Wonderland boss) on my first attempt.  I just had to spend an hour running around a heartless infested level trying to figure out what bloody little step I had missed that was crucial to triggering the boss fight to actually start.  Sigh.

Already I am starting to remember some of the things that I love about this game.  I am also starting to remember some of the things that I absolutely loathe as well. Then, there are the truly bizarre aspects of this game that I had completely forgotten all about.  Guys, this is a seriously weird game.  Every time I don't play it for a while, I totally forget that fact, and then I start it back up and...wow.

Okay, let me backtrack a second.  First off.  This post is probably going to contain spoilers for the game if you have never played it before.  But, considering that it is around ten years old, well, I feel that spoilers are kind of moot at this point.  Also, bear in mind that I have never actually finished the game, so if there's any big huge reveal toward the end, then I can't spoil it for you because I haven't gotten there yet.  So, there's that.

Kingdom Hearts (henceforth to be known as KH) is a crazy blend of Final Fantasy-style characters (including a few actual FF characters) and random Disney franchises.  I have never played any FF (I know, I know, shocking, but way before my time, gaming-wise), but from what I can tell the game engine and game play are set up pretty much like a FF game.  I am still noob enough that I don't really know how to talk about that stuff in technical terms, so I am gonna mostly just leave it at that.

The story is this:  You play Sora, a 14 year-old boy who, along with his friends Riku (15) and Kairi (14, and his fervent crush), longs to explore worlds beyond his own.  One day, Sora gets his wish, though nothing like he had hoped or imagined it.  His world is overrun by a kind of foe known as the heartless and pretty much destroyed.  Sora somehow manages to wind up on another world, Traverse Town, after his own is destroyed.  He thinks Riku and Kairi got out too, but they are nowhere to be found.  So he decides to embark on a quest to find Riku and Kairi.  He also ends up with a weapon called the Keyblade (which actually is a giant key.  Yeah).  There is a lot of mumbo jumbo "You are The One" exposition.  Apparently the Keyblade is crucial to defeating the heartless and it has chosen Sora to carry out that work.  When Sora sets out, he teams up with Donald Duck (a magician) and Goofy (a knight).  They come from from the Disney Castle world and are looking for King Mickey, who has gone missing.  He left a note saying something strange was going on and they should find the one with the "key."  So, your party is formed.

The villains from various Disney films are the major villains throughout the game.  I'm talking about Ursula, Jafar, Hades, Captain Hook, and, of course, the biggest and baddest, Maleficent.  She is my favorite Disney villain of all time, so I love that she is the Big Bad of this game.  Anyway, the evil league of evil bad guys, for reasons I haven't quite determined yet, are kidnapping "princesses" from various worlds to do something with their hearts.  So along the way, part of your quest is to collect clues about what that is all about.  Since Donald and Goofy are looking for Mickey, so are you--and we learn early on that Mickey is looking for the research someone called Ansem did on the heartless, which has been scattered throughout all of the worlds, so you're also looking for that research.  And the final major plot-related quest (that I've stumbled across thus far) is that you are working to stop the heartless from getting to and destroying any more worlds.  So, with each world you go to, after you defeat the boss for that level, you have to use the Keyblade to lock off that world, closing off the heatless' avenue of access.  Phew.  That's a lot going on.

The first time I played this game, my husband (then boyfriend) and I rented it one New Year's weekend when his youngest brother (at the time still in high school) was spending the weekend with us.  The three of us played it together.  It is a single-player game, but we took turns on the different levels and stayed up all night for a few nights in a row playing.  We didn't get very far and then had to return the game, but I was hooked.  After my husband and I got married and had our own place, we used some of our wedding present cash to buy ourselves a Playstation 2 (that is the format on which I am playing this game, by the way).  We actually bought it on our wedding night--had an early morning wedding and didn't leave for our honeymoon 'till the next day so we opened gifts and went on a random shopping spree that evening, it was awesome.  I digress.  Anyhoo,, after we had the PS2, we bought a few games for it, including KH.  So then I started my first epic play through.  I played fairly steadily for a while and actually got pretty far in the game--I think I had cleared all of the worlds except for the final showdown on Maleficent's turf and was just running around trying to complete all of the side quests (I will find all 99 dalmatian puppies, dangit).  But then I got stuck trying to clear a tournament on the Coliseum level and walked away for a few days that turned into years.  There was no way I was going to pick it back up again and be able to remember enough to keep going against the Big Bad.  So last year I started playing again and got stuck in the Monstro level (yes, there is indeed a level where you get swallowed up by Monstro the whale.  It is frakkin' trippy because it looks like the inside of no whale I have ever seen, that's for dang sure) and walked away again.  

So.  Here I am now, on my fourth go through, and this time I am determined to finish it.   The obsession kicks in pretty quickly, and now that I've got a structured approach to playing video games, I find it a lot easier to break through those barriers that used to cause me to just walk away.  I am really not going for one hundred percent completion of all of the side quests or anything.  I just want to finish the main story line (and fine those darn dalmatians).  Then, finally, I can play the sequel that I bought ages ago and still haven't touched....and then I'll be done with KH and probably will be making a trip to Gamestop to trade them in, truth be told.  But still.  It is an unfinished chapter in my life, and I have really been motivated this year to clear some of those up.  I don't think I will finish the game before the year is out, sadly, but I do think I will finish it.

So, some of the things I love about the game:

The Disney Worlds:  As I said, each level is basically the world from a different Disney movie.  In the first KH you get to play through Wonderland, the Deep Jungle (Tarzan), the Coliseum (Hercules), Agrabah (Aladdin), Monstro (Pinocchio), Neverland, Halloween Town (The Nightmare Before Christmas), Atlantica (The Little Mermaid), and Hollow Bastion (Sleeping Beauty).  You do get to pick up a couple of characters from these worlds to join your party too (like Tarzan), though not a lot.  Mostly it's just you, Donald, and Goofy.  But it is really cool getting to run around in these worlds.  You are not by any means playing through the stories of the movies, though there are some elements from those that shape the goals of each level.  They are a lot of fun though, mostly.  I have to admit, both Wonderland and Atlantica annoyed the crap out of me.

Merlin and The Fairy Godmother:  They are your magic instructors.  How awesome is that?

The progression is not completely linear.  You get some wiggle-room in what order you get to do things, which I think is nice, especially for this type of game.  While there is kind of a story unfolding, it is hardly Mass Effect, so while there are some levels that are definitely easier than others, and some you should wait to do until you've done other specific levels (because of the loot or XP you pick up there), you still mostly get to have a say in where you go next.  Also, you can go back and revisit most worlds.  They are, in fact, set up so that you have to do this in some cases, if only to get all of the loot or fulfill all of the side quests, but that's okay.  It allows you (most of the time) to go back and check stuff out that you might have missed as well, or to hone skills you need to improve.

The puzzle-solving element:  Most of the console games I really enjoy all have a bit of a puzzle-solving element to them, and this is definitely no exception.   In order to get through some levels, or to find certain objects you need to examine everything around you and sometimes think outside of the box. 

I think really the big thing is the Disney characters and settings though.  I grew up on that stuff.  The release of The Little Mermaid was an epic life-changing event for me.  This takes those worlds and makes them interactive, which is really just cool.  Also, it gives you a variety of environments to play in, so there is a bit less monotony as well.

Before I get to the things I loathe section, I want to talk about some of the flat-out bizarre aspects of the game.

Monstro.  Okay, I mentioned earlier that I got stuck on Monstro during my third playing of this game.  At some point, you are traveling between worlds (in a spaceship, so presumably in space) and a big ol' whale comes along and swallows you up, a la Pinocchio.  There you run into the wooden boy himself, along with Geppetto, of course.  You get to rescue them from the whale, thankfully, but the doing so is...complicated.  The first part of the level, where Geppetto's got his ship, looks perfectly fine, it's what you'd expect the mouth of a whale to look like.  But then, to get out, you have to go run around in his innards (yeah, that's strange enough), which look like the inside of a black-lite riddled rave.  I am not kidding.  At all.  This is the part of the game where I always start to question the recreational habits of the art team, if you know what I mean.  It gives me a headache. 

Here is an image (found here) to demonstrate what I am talking about:

The whole frikkin' level looks like that.  It's freaky.

The Gummi Ship:  Okay, this, I just...do not get.  To travel from world to world (to start out) you have to use the Gummi Ship, which is piloted by Chip and Dale, of all people.  First off, I don't understand the name of the darn thing.  There is no reference or explanation.  Then, there is the artwork of the ship.  This whole game (even the Monstro section) is full of beautiful detailed graphics.  But the Gummi Ship?  Looks like a bunch of hastily assembled children's blocks.

Plus, you have to fight off rival Gummi Ships and wade through obstacle courses when you fly between worlds.  And you eventually unlock the ability to be able to make upgrades and customizations to the ship, or even build your own.  The ship that is only used to get from point A to point B.  Even more confusing to me is that by the time you learn to unlock the customization ability, you already have access to Warping, which allows you to avoid all of those in-between flight sequences in most cases.  I just don't get this.

The Magic System:  Oftentimes, it seems as if this game was designed so that your character has to be extremely proficient at magic.  But the system for using magic is clunky and inconvenient at best.  It's like the designers said, "Let's make magic the key to beating this game!" and then followed that up with, "But we don't want it to be too easy, so let's make it crazy difficult to actually use the magic."  You don't even start to learn how to use magic until just before you're off to your first quest world.  There are a lot of cool ideas in the magic system--you learn to summon various characters (Bambi, Simba, Dumbo, etc.) who will attack your enemies for you, for example--but they are just such a pain in the butt to use.  And your magic power runs out ridiculously quickly even if you make magic your character's focused strength, and doesn't replenish automatically over time.  You have to physically take a potion or collect dropped MP balls or go find a save point.  Grr. 

Okay then, now moving on to things I loathe about this game.

There is no exit.  The menu for this game contains no option to exit.  You have to save and then just turn the console off.  Not only is that annoying as heck, but it also makes me incredibly nervous that something will go wrong.  This...this was a horrible idea.  Whoever decided on that, or just forgot to build an exit command, needs a good kick in the shins.

The Gummi Ship:  I know, I know, this made two lists!  But here's why.  This is, to me, a primary example of RPG designers thinking that anyone anywhere playing a video game wants to drive something at some point in every game.  Okay, this is just not true.  Apart from Mario Kart I really totally hate driving games. If I am playing an RPG I want to run around with my character hitting stuff with a sword.  I don't want to be flying a space-ship through an obstacle course.

It is kind of too complicated.  Maybe convoluted would be a better term.  While I enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect of things, stuff is really not clearly spelled out and often hard to figure out.  And I'm not talking stuff for side quests.  I'm talking about key actions you need to take in order to trigger the next part of the plot and move the story (and game) forward.  I had initially thought that on this run-through I would try it without using a Walkthrough, because I have actually gotten pretty good at figuring stuff out, only needing to look up hints every now and again in games.  I quickly had to abandon that notion, however, and now have two Walkthroughs bookmarked on my toolbar.  And I often have to go do extra searches in the middle of playing when I get stuck.  And I am on the part of the game I have successfully played through four times already.  Come on folks.  Sadly, there is no easy setting on KH.  Just expert and normal.

Using items is a huge pain in the butt.  I don't know what else to say about this.  Your stock can hold a large (possibly unlimited, but I haven't tested that) amount of stuff, but you personally can only carry three items at a time, and once those items are used up, you have to stop and go to the menu to give yourself more, and the menu can't be accessed during battles.  You can equip items on the other members of your party, and you can configure their settings so they can use the potions on you during a battle, but that's tricky to find the right balance for.  Actually accessing an item you are carrying is a several step process, which is really freaking inconvenient if you are in the middle of a battle, need to drink a potion, and can't find a quiet corner to hide in while you do so, because there is no stopping the battle to issue commands or select items.  Sigh.

The camera.  Holy mother of God this thing blows big fat chunks.  That is all I am going to say about that.

So, I know that seems like there is a lot about this game that I don't like at all, and you're probably wondering why I am even still trying to play it.  Part of it is sheer stubbornness, I won't lie.  But it really is actually a fun game to play when everything is going smoothly and you aren't wandering around trying to figure out what to do next.  Also, now that I am coming at it with a slightly better understanding of basic game play (like leveling up, buying better equipment and weapons, and upgrading items), I am finding new aspects of it to enjoy.

It's going to be a long haul, but I am looking forward to that feeling of accomplishment once I finally put this sucker to rest.

 

Bits and Pieces

Ooh, ooh!  I totally finished Towers of Midnight yesterday and it was so freaking awesome.  I love Perrin so much.  He's cool again, huzzah!  Also, Moiraine!  And I'm very annoyed that there are now Whitecloaks that I like.  What's up with that, seriously?  Plus, it's going to suck to be Aiel in the future, apparently.

Um, that's pretty much the extent of the review I am going to do on that particular book, other than to say oh wow.  I loved it.  I can't wait for the next (and last!) Wheel of Time book to come out.  I suspect my husband and I will be fighting over first-read dibs ferociously.  But if you'd like a more in-depth review, Leigh Butler over at Tor has two, one that is spoiler-free, and one that is so totally not spoiler-free.

This means I can start playing Kingdom Hearts today during nap time.  Sweet.  I've got my walk-through saved, and I am determined to get this damn game played, y'all.  Reading-wise, I have two months worth of comic books and graphic novels (including the Serenity GN about Shepherd Book's backstory, which I may actually review for you if I get motivated) to read through, so I am gonna get those all read up (just in time for my December shipment to head my way) before I dive into my next book.  I have two clamoring for my attention right now, so I am going to use the time to decide which one to dive into first.  I'll let you know when I do get that figured out though.  I know you're desperate to know. 

Oh, hey, did you notice?  It's Friday!  That means time for a new installment of Gronk, yay!  Please to check it out and enjoy, here. Poor Gronk may not want to watch Battlestar for a while, but hopefully she'll give it a chance eventually!

Speaking of web-comics, one of my all-time favorites is called Looking for Group.  It is completely and utterly fantastic.  Basically, it's an RPG that you read instead of play, if that makes any sense at all.  The story centers around an elf named Cale who is good and pure and always wants to do the right thing.  This is a bit of a problem because all elves are evil in the world Cale lives in, but apparently nobody bothered to tell him that.  So, as he goes along, looking for adventure, he picks up a group, made up of really awesome, really not-nice people.  This includes one of my favorite characters of anything ever, Richard the warlock (or, Dick).  It is updated two times a week (Mondays and Thursdays) and each installment is basically a fully colored page out of a graphic novel.  There is an overarching story-arc, but there are smaller story-arcs as well.  So far, they have released three volumes of the series in really nice hardcover graphic novel format.  I'll admit, it makes a lot more sense when you sit down and read big chunks of it at once, but it is still highly amusing and entertaining on a page by page basis.  If you're interested in giving it a try, you can check out the first couple of pages and then decide where to go from there.  Here is a link to page one. 

Anyhoo, the reason I am telling you this is because I wanted to share an awesome moment in my life with you.  A while back I was telling my friend Miss T about the comic and when explaining it to her I mentioned the bunny that ends up being the constant companion of Richard the warlock.  I'm not going to explain why, or go into the bunny's story line (yes, the bunny has its own story line) here, because, well, spoilers.  But suffice to say, the bunny is totally awesome.  I was telling my husband this past weekend about my conversation with Miss T, and was amused that she was interested because of the bunny's story line.  I was saying how wonderful it would be if the guys over at LFG decided to make a bunny plushie (there is already a Richard plushie, which yes, I own).  Then, two nights ago, I click on a link to LFG in my feed reader and find this. My reaction may have caused my husband to come running in from down the hall to see what the heck was up.  Seriously, I must own this, and soon.  I just love when stuff like that happens, when you are saying to someone, "Wouldn't it be so awesome if X existed?" and then the next day you find out that someone just went and made X!  So splendid.

Proceeding in the random flow of this post, I also wanted to share one of my most recent addictions with you.  I am sure you have seen it around on the internet (Facebook, most likely).  It is the site Damn You Auto Correct, which I finally caved and added to my feed reader the other day.  I am so glad I did.  Some of these things are just weird, but some of them make me seriously fall out of my chair or start crying from laughing so hard.   It also gives me a weird sense of not being alone in the universe.  Because really, who owns a smart phone and hasn't had one of these moments, seriously?

And finally, I realize I haven't talked about this yet this month, but yes, I totally finished my novel on Tuesday, huzzah!  Total page count for the first draft was 137 pages (which is an excellent number if I do say so myself) and 76,487 words.  I feel so amazing for having done that.  I will definitely be revising this story and expanding upon it in the coming year.  I can think of a few dead-end plot elements I'll need to to through and excise, and a few scenes (mostly from a certain character's point of view) that I want to go back and add now that I know what the actual story  arc for this first novel turned out to be.  I do definitely want to write at least one, if not two more books in this universe as well, because, well, while I feel like a lot of stuff did happen in this book, it largely set the stage for a lot more other, bigger, stuff to happen next.  Also, the conflict that I thought would be the big final conflict in this book?  Totally didn't happen yet, it's got a little while before it comes to a head, I think.  So, there you are.  NaNoWriMo, it rocks.

I am off to have lunch with a friend from my former job and then to have a spectacularly relaxing weekend.  Maybe, just maybe, I'll get motivated and put up some of the Christmas decorations inside.

I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend as well.

Hey! I Think I See a Way Out!

First things, first, announcements!

Don't forget to watch the new episode of Stargate Universe tonight on Syfy at 8 pm CST!!!

There's a new episode of Riese:  Kingdom Falling up today.  Check it out here.
 

~*~

Wow, I am having a hard time believing that it already the week of Thanksgiving.  Where did my November go?  Oh, wait, that's right, I spent it writing.   Mostly.  I mean, yeah, I sort of remember some other stuff sneaking in there, but mostly it was just writing.

Now that we're past the two-thirds point of the month, I thought I would give you a little "state of my novel" entry.  I remember saying after the first week that I thought I might be able to actually finish my story (or at least hit my 50,000 words) by November 20 or 21.  Well, clearly, that hasn't happened, but mostly because life kept getting in the way.  I have broken 40,000 words though, so I have no doubts that I will hit the 50,000 mark by or before November 30.  Whether I actually finish my story by then, well, that's another matter entirely.

Heh.  Remember when I was agonizing that my story might not even lend itself to 50,000 words?  Silly Past Me.  The more I wrote in this world, and the more I stopped to sit down and actually build this world, the more ideas I came up with for what was going on in the story.  I think I may have actually tried to do too much.  I've got about three possible big final conflicts, that, ideally, would all happen and play nicely off of one another.  In reality though, I think I am about to have to pick one and write towards that conflict and wrap up the story.  I would like to figure out a way to do that without those other plot points just fizzling away into nothingness though.  So right now, my primary goals with my story are:

1. Start ending the story.
2. Wrap up what can be wrapped up.
3. Provide plausible reasons for why what was left hanging was left that way.

I have so many cool ideas that I have been kicking around that I fear I am just going to have to leave be.  But, I am making sure to take notes on them.  Maybe if I write another story in this world, I can work those in somehow, and provide resolution to the unresolved issues from this story.  As I am sure you can imagine, since I've come up with so many new ideas while writing, my story has started to stray a bit from that shiny outline that I sat down and hammered out back in October.  Granted, I tried to leave that outline slightly vague in the first place, because while there were some specific scenes I envisioned that needed to be included, I didn't have the entire story worked out beyond where I wanted it to more or less go.  So, I am not completely off the rails, but I am getting to that point where I haven't referred to my outline in a while, and I am just a teensy bit scared to look at it and see what I've totally left out and how much I've veered from my original plan.

Not that veering is a bad thing.  An outline is just that, an outline.  It's a set of steps, a path, if you will, for your characters to try to follow over the course of the story.  But just like any path, there are forks, and detours, and you can't always know where or when those will crop up.  Sometimes you just have to leave the established road and hope that you end up where you need to be, whether that's where you thought you were going or not.  I honestly have never really been big on using outlines in my story-writing in the first place, so I am really not surprised that this one has ended up not dictating my every scene.  Still, just having it has been more than helpful, especially when I would find myself stuck on where to take my characters next.

I do think I need to sit down and do one more review of my outline, and of my story notes, and then compare it to where my story is right now.  From there, I am going to make new,  retroactive outline of what has actually happened, and what there is left to do, and hopefully I can bring this puppy home.  As I've said before--starting stories is never something I've had a problem with.  Finishing them, well, that's my challenge.  That's why I am doing this.  But, that means that I have now officially entered the hard part of the process.  Whee!

I do have to say, I truly am really really glad that I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year.  The reason I started this blog back up was because, in not writing regularly, I really felt like I was missing some crucial element of me, and doing this, as stressful as it has been at times (self-imposed stress is still stress), has really made me feel so much better about myself than I have in a very long time.  I've learned something very important about myself this month.  Writing is in my soul, and writing stories, whether they are excellent, or complete crap, or even unfinished, is something that I need to be doing on a regular basis. 

Of course, so is playing video games, apparently.  I am just itching to jump back into that particular part of my life.  Finding a balance between that and story-writing should prove an interesting challenge, but as we start to close the books on this year, I feel like it is one I am up to.

I have been debating with myself over which game to pick up and play once I finish my story, and I think I have chosen Kingdom Hearts.  It is the "great unfinished" challenge in my video game playing history.  I have started this thing so many times.  Seriously, I've been trying to beat it since 2002 or 2003.  (Look, I have never once said that I am a good video game player.  This game was actually one of my gateway drugs into the pastime, and I have leveled up considerably since then.)  I had already decided that 2011 was the year that I was finally going to finish it.  But, in the wake of setting a goal and finishing a story within a given period of time, I am wondering if it might not be possible to actually do the same with this video game.  If I could manage to beat it before the year is out?  Well, that'd just be the icing on the cake.

Word Count Update: 42,116 out of 50,000