Now Playing – August 24

Sup, huge gap between entries! I suppose after the initial “omg new blog to fill” novelty wore off, I was bound to slow down. Regardless, I still want to keep up with my Now Playing entries. Not that I’ve really been doing all that much, hence the general inactivity. :(

Left 4 Dead 2 (Xbox 360)

Sadly, I think the day after I wrote my last entry, while I was at work, my brother’s friend took back his copy of L4D. (This was very unfortunate as I’d scheduled time with my friends to play it… only to finally get each other together to realize that, oh, I didn’t actually have the game ffffff.) Within a few days, my brother and I were going into withdrawal (well, not really) so we agreed to split the cost of the sequel, since we’d already plowed through all the campaign modes in the original game and wanted something new.

Of course, I’ve played almost all the campaign modes in the PC version–though I believe I’ve only managed to complete one or two. So it wasn’t totally new for me but more of my close friends have this version of the game so I can play with them now. I am slightly regretting this purchase, though, since I definitely prefer the original game over the sequel (I prefer the characters, the campaigns, etc.) and my roommate for the next year already owns this game. orz. :(

Anyway! Been playing a campaign or so every other day. It’s lots of fun, even if splitscreen is a little hard to get used to. I suck at Versus mode, which I tried briefly before giving up and just going to bed the other night. XD Will probably end up buying the original L4D soon enough.

Final Fantasy XIII (Playstation 3)

I’m a bit surprised I actually decided to go back to this–I felt a bit of regret when I set the game aside to concentrate on unfinished titles. I’d been doing a lot of missions before I beat the game and maxed out most of my Crystarium. So that’s mostly what I was doing when I tossed this back in the PS3 the other day.

I finished all missions except the final mission after the Titan’s quests. And the final… 3 or 4 really hard missions. I decided I’d ~max out my crystarium~ for those ones. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m grinding in that fight against the Behemoth King & the Megi…thing. The two beasts fighting before the… I want to say Meggiora Highlands but that’s Tales of the Abyss, lmao. :( Anyway, with the Growth Egg I get about 13,200 CP each time I battle, and using Lightning, Fang & Snow as Commando, the battle takes 5 or 6 seconds each time. So I get quite a bit! But it’s really boring so I tend to watch TV on the TV next to the TV I play it on. (Y-yeah we have a congregation of TVs in the basement…)

It’s dull work but I get so excited each time I finish off a Crystarium! I’m currently working on everyone’s 5th Crystarium. :) I’m about halfway through that and then just the one more and I’m done! And then I will have no excuse for failing repeatedly against the last missions. *wibble*

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (Wii)

I can actually put this on here this time because I finally sat down to play it this afternoon! And I am even more frustrated with the game than I was last week! HOORAY!

So last time I left off in the Temple of Lightning. Which has a ton of backtracking. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t filled with narrow pathways with basically unavoidable battles (the monsters for which respawn as soon as you’re out of sight, pretty much) that take forever. And to top it all off, the annoying walkways in the dark where if you fall off, you start over at the bottom are still there. UGH. It took me three sittings to do this temple because it was so frustrating.

I manage to make it out of the place, go through a million cutscenes and I’m immediately tossed off to the Earth Temple. Uggggh okay. Okay, I can do this. No more flying enemies, right? Well, that was right. Annoying enemies, sure, but not nearly as bad as the other temple. I make my way through and manage to get to the altar relatively quickly. Success!

Cue an annoying minigame where you have to predict falling tiles and make sure you’re always standing on a safe tile. Took me 3 or 4 tries. Annoying. But I did it! So I walk through the secret pathway that opens up and take maybe 3 steps ahead and… oh. A battle. With those stupid caterpillars that sound like horses that my brother and I have been bitching about the whole time. Whatever, big deal. Except… these are boss caterpillars or something, because one rolled into my brother and K.O.’d him instantly. So I revive him with a Life Bottle only to find I haven’t restocked and I have 4 left. Then Regal dies, so I attempt to revive him with Resurrection to save Life Bottles. In the same second, my brother and I are both steamrolled and we die. And that’s it. Game over.

….and I hadn’t saved until sometime in the Temple of Lightning. FFFFFFFFFUUUUU– To be fair, I think I saved just as I was leaving. But there were NO SAVE POINTS between that and where I died! What the hell! :( In these kinds of games I only ever save when I see a save point… very rarely do I remember to save when on the World Map (especially since this map is just a point-and-click one). Just. uggggh. We both looked at each other with disgust when we saw the location of our previous save and agreed to just turn off the Wii. We’d had enough for the night.

Hopefully I’ll go back to this soon, though it wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (Nintendo DS)

Okay remember how I said this game wasn’t so bad? After actually going through the Fire Temple and the last (??) section of the Tower of Spirits (or whatever it is), I’m tempted to take that back. It’s getting pretty tedious and I’m getting pretty tired of it. XD; But I’m near the end so I must persevere! Especially because it’s the only handheld game I’m playing at the moment. :|

I’m currently searching out the Sand Temple and I can’t figure out the clues so I’m just going to FAQ it, I think. It certainly doesn’t help that I really only play this on the way to/from work nowadays and can barely see the screen, so even when I am doing the right thing, I’m usually doing it wrong or missing a minute detail that would be obvious if I were playing it… properly.

Regardless, I will definitely not be going for completion in this game. I will be content to ignore its existence after I’m done with it here. But maybe I’ll pick up Phantom Hourglass and keep grinding for those last Ship Parts to get complete in that. :) Sounds like a plan! So let’s just hurry this up and get the game over with.