Today I had some pretty spectacular morning hair, and so I took the liberty of taking a picture for you all.
Pretty amazing, isn't it?
I didn’t do anything to make it like that. Just got out of bed, staggered toward the mirror and noted its spectacularity, then grabbed the camera. I did have a rough night last night, tossing and turning and nightmares and waking up randomly at loud noises outside my window, so that’s likely the culprit.
Anyway, today I’m going to talk about video games, because I am a gamer girl and I love them. Now, mostly I tend to play RPGs, both of the Japanese and of the American types. I have been known to enjoy other games as well, however, such as Lego Star Wars or Yoshi’s Island. Still, I’m most comfortable in games that don’t require tons of complicated button combos to activate a special move or what have you. Beyond the general specification of RPG, however, I’m fairly loose in what I can handle. I like strategy. I like calculating my opponent’s next move and seeing how I can change things up. I also greatly enjoy most board and card games, at least the ones that require strategy and luck as opposed to brute force (slapping your opponent’s hand so hard it turns red isn’t my idea of a fun time). Really, any kind of game that makes me think is ideal.
The kind of games I enjoy involve such classics as Chrono Trigger (bought the DS version a few months back), Earthbound, Final Fantasy 3 (the good one for SNES), as well as more recent fare such as Dragon Age and Star Ocean: The Last Hope. The Kingdom Hearts series I enjoy as well, although I’m hesitant about the third installment of the main series (I would’ve been quite happy if they’d just stopped after the second one). Final Fantasy 9 is my favorite FF game, and I don’t care for FF7 at all.
My favorite RPG of all time is Skies of Arcadia. It was originally for Dreamcast, which means very few people know about it or got to play it, but it’s amazing. Luckily they made a Gamecube port, and I just so happen to have a used Gamecube that I got from a friend a few weeks back, so sometime in the near future I will hopefully be able to get my hands on a used copy of it (it retails new at about $175, because it’s so rare). It’s set on a world (Arcadia) where people live on floating islands in the sky, and the six moons float over six lands, imbuing each land with their own particular magic. You’re an Air Pirate who sets out on a quest of exploration, and ends up saving the world in the process. The graphics are beautiful, the characters are very relateable, and the amount of gameplay is epic (I’ve spent hours just flying around randomly, fishing or discovering new things). My older brother actually blames me for breaking his Dreamcast, as I played it too much. >.> It’s an amazing game and I adore it whole-heartedly.
Recently I’ve been fiddling about with Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Eternal Sonata. Both XBox 360 games, and fairly new RPGs. Eternal Sonata is a bit iffy to me. It’s pretty, I guess? And I like the classical music background, although Chopin isn’t really my favorite composer for piano. But the plot is so nebulous so far. All I understand is there’s a girl who’s dying and that gives her the ability to do magic? And something about mineral powder making people into zombies. @.@ Nothing else makes much sense. This is fairly typical for JRPGs, which range from somewhat ridiculous to utterly WTF, but it’s definitely closer to WTF range for me right now. By contrast, Star Ocean is fairly straightforward. You’re on a spaceship, your mission is to find a habitable world since Earth has been razed by nuclear war and everyone lives underground. Weird ass shit happens, and you find out some of the main characters are basically living weapons, but that’s not unusual at all for RPGs (really, if traveling back in time to the 1940s is the biggest twist you can come up with, that’s kinda weak). Also since I played a good bit of Star Ocean: Til The End of Time (the previous game in the series, The Last Hope being a prequel to it) and found the OMG HUGE TWIST in that, some of the urgency and importance of events is muted. And the animators seemed to have a phobia of making their characters’ faces move, because everyone basically has two or three facial expressions, and the voice acting isn’t good enough to make up for it (if I was a voice actor having to work with those faces, I dunno if I could bring my A game either). However, the plot is interesting enough that I want to continue and see what happens.
It’s interesting, really. The last game I played that I really enjoyed a lot was The World Ends With You for DS. It’s a Square Enix game, which was enough to make me somewhat wary (just look what they did to the FF series, after all), but it ended up being really good. By contrast, all of the newer JRPGs I’ve tried on my XBox seem to fall a bit short. I do enjoy the hell out of Dragon Age (I ended up playing through it five times before getting bored and moving on to a new game), but that’s not a JRPG. It seems like DS has some solid offerings, while XBox is all meh. I understand that XBox is mainly the game system for manly gamers who want to shoot the shit out of stuff without having to worry about plot or anything (or at least that’s how it’s marketed) and the main reason I got an XBox in the first place was to be able to play Rock Band, not even thinking of RPGs, but still. I feel a bit shafted, over here. I mean, if I have to go back to my PS2 and Gamecube just to find games I can enjoy on a TV screen, maybe something should be changed here.
Of course, I’m just a girl gamer. According to most game companies, I don’t really exist, and they certainly aren’t going to try to market anything to me other than Cooking Mama and the newest Barbie piece of shit. No reason for them to take any notice if I find their game offerings inadequate. Even though Bioware’s newest RPGs in Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 ended up selling way more copies because you could a) play as a woman and b) romance cute guys. No reason to pay attention to those numbers. 9.9
Whatever. I’m gonna go play The Sims 3 and make my guy the Emperor of Evil.
MirrorMe 