Lost and Dissasembled

In this installment of "How I Waste My Time and Money" we talk about modern classics of the Marvel Comics Universe and mainstream television, Oh the HUMANITY!!!

I saw the finale of Lost. I'm just glad I didn't spend the last six years waiting for that. I started watching the show on Hulu back around the beginning of the year and finished season five just in time for season six to start in February. It wasn't a bad ending per say. It just left to many things unanswered; answers I'd been waiting for from the beginning of the show. The final big reveal only has to do with season six, not the rest of the show, and when you find out what has been going all all season it's a big WTF moment. Frustrating.

On a more positive note I picked up the TPB of Avengers: Disassembled. This story is supposed to be the beginning of all the major Marvel Universe events that took place over the last seven years, culminating with the Siege storyline that just came out. I had heard that this was a great story and I was not disappointed. I'm not really a big Avengers fan. I know most of the characters but as a team I wasn't really aware of their backstory. My lack of history with the franchise didn't matter, it turned out to be the best comic I've read in a long while. This book starts off with a bang and the shit just doesn't stop hitting the fan until the last page. It sets up the events in the reality-altering House of M storyline which is next on my list. I'll let you know how it is.

Tetris Attacks My Wallet

Went to Play N Trade the other day to satisfy my hunger for old-ass games. In The Human Animal Desmond Morris says that people collect things to satisfy an innate instinct to hunt. I'll buy that. Haha, pun! Anyway, PNT had just received a wealth of trade-ins and were fully stocked in the awesome classics department. I picked up Tetris Attack for the SNES and Crimson Skies for the Xbox.

Crimson Skies is the first game for the original Xbox that I've acquired. A while ago I made a short list of titles that I would consider buying. I looked for titles that I felt were icons of the system, highly acclaimed, and held at least some game play appeal (I didn't want to just keep them on the shelf after all). Also I wanted to make sure they were known for working well on the 360 (since I don't have an actual Xbox). The list was short primarily because like the current generation, the last one saw most AAA titles come out for both Xbox and PS2. Since the PS2 is my primary system for that generation (again, I don't even have an Xbox) It makes sense to me to buy dual system games for the PS2. Here are a few notable titles from my wish list:

Jade Empire
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2

... um actually that's it. I told you it was a short list.

Crimson Skies is pretty fun. For about and hour. The air combat is fun but you follow a fairly linear set of missions, and they degenerate into bullshit fairly quickly.

Tetris Attack on the other hand is a true classic. I wasn't really aware of it as a quality title until recently when I was looking over a SNES top 100 list on the net. The authors were hailing it as one of the best puzzle games on the system, so when I saw it at PNT I gave it a chance, despite the $15 price tag. The game play is solid. It's a match-three game like Bejeweled, but your moves don't have to result in a match, so there is a lot more strategy involved as you set up big combos. On top of that there are a crap load of modes and even tutorials, which was pretty unheard of back then. My questions is, how is it they got to call it Tetris Attack when it had nothing to do with Tetris?

The best part of the game is the multiplayer. I say this for one big reason: MY WIFE WILL PLAY THIS WITH ME. In case you don't know my wife let me assure you this is huge. She'll play games every once in a while but her attention span for them is like my attention span for everything else. After about 15 minutes she's had enough. I got her to play Tetris Attack with me... FOR OVER 2 HOURS! That's right, 120 whole minutes. Amazing.

It's not surprising that the game is so good. It came out in 1996, the end of the system's life cycle, and was made by a first party developer. The developer, Inteligent Systems also programed Super Metroid, and were the developers behind the Fire Emblem series.

On a side note, apparently someone had come in to PNT a few days before me and traded in their N64 and all their games which included pretty much every good game for the system. It was very hard for me not to drop the cash and walk out with it all. Maybe next week.

Impressions: Final Fantasy XIII: Part 4: Finally Finished

With story mode anyway. Story mode... not sure why I called it that, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. FF13 is two games. First you play through the linear story going from chapters 1 to 13, and after you beat it you get to play the second game. You can play the "other game" a little bit in chapter 11 but you aren't really supposed to. What you are supposed to do is wait until after the credits have rolled, and only then can you play what sometimes seems like the REAL Final Fantasy.

I knew from the beginning that you could continue playing after defeating the final boss. I knew this because the strategy guide told me from the very beginning. It's authors went out of their way to tell me not to bother power leveling my characters or items until "much later in the game" (Chapter 11). Once I got to "much later in the game" they encouraged me to quickly return to the main plot. It's not until after you beat the game that you are supposed to do the side quests.

Why wait? Because the final level of the crystarium isn't unlocked until after you beat the last boss. I knew this, but I was under the impression that the game just continues after the credits. I thought it would let you keep on running around doing shit and explain it as, "you beat the evil boss and your reward is to run around Pulse killing shit." This isn't the case however. After the credits you are asked if you want to save your game. When you do, you are transported to a save point just before the last boss, and it's like you never fought him! There's nothing wrong with this I guess, it's just so ass-backward. Why did they do it that way? Maybe they wanted you to be only so powerful for the last fight. It's a little jarring that's all.

Anyway the game is great. Not GREAT great, just regular. I've had fun with it and I'm sure I'll put just as much more time into it as I already have.