Blog Archive

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Live A Live Beaten:

It was the 'bad ending' because I slaughtered Oersted instead of redeemed him, but it's good enough for me.  This game was awful.  Endless, unavoidable, random encounters.  An impossible to navigate world with no maps that could tell you where your next quest objective was.  Boring fights where your strongest move is the only reasonable option every turn.  Corny dialogue that you could hear anywhere but doesn't actually mean anything.  Of course the graphics are '2d HD', which means slightly better looking than they looked in the 1990's.  Nothing like the graphics you'd expect from a current gen title, like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 or Fire Emblem: Three Houses.  I thought any and every old Squaresoft RPG would be good.  In fact, Live A Live was made by the same people who made Chrono Trigger (and Xenoblade 3 for that matter. . .).  What could go wrong?  Well, basically everything could go wrong.  All the primitive features of old games with none of the benefits -- fun turn based combat, deep and interesting worlds to traverse, lovable characters -- nothing like that here.  Yoko Shimomura did produce a nice soundtrack, but compared to Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 4, which were games contemporary with this one, actually this would count as a dud too.

Final Fantasy 8 Remastered was so much better.  I kept wishing I had an 'accelerate' button that could skip the boring repetitive long attack animations like FF8 had.  I kept wishing I could turn off random encounters like FF8 could.  I kept wishing I was playing FF8.

I also rewatched the Bastard!! tv series, so now I'm all ready to watch the second cour that comes out on the 15th.  It's pretty and funny but the intellectual level is so low.  Everything is repeated and explained over and over again because we're apparently too stupid to understand what they say the first, second, or third time.  Is it great art?  Yes, Bastard!! is still a classic work everyone should see, a fantasy comedy that no one else has managed to emulate.  Just don't expect too much from it.

The entire SEC won this week of football except for LSU, who only lost due to a freak blocking of an extra point which is so rare in football it essentially proves how impossible it is to beat the SEC.  If it takes accidents like that then the rest of the country is doomed overall.  It was still a fun event to see though.  I've never seen such a wacky ending to a 4th quarter before.  Of course, North Carolina vs. Appalachian State had a pretty wacky 4th quarter too. . .

A bunch of good light novels are slated for release this September, but they keep getting delayed towards the end of the month.  As a result, until football resumes this Saturday there isn't much to be enthused about.

I was surprised when the James Webb Telescope actually worked, but now modern America is predictably failing like always with the Space Launch System.  Yet another overlooked error has led to yet another delay, for a program that's already been delayed 20 years or whatever and still has yet to launch a single rocket.  $40 billion dollars with nothing to show for it.  In fact, each launch costs a cool billion a piece, that is if they could ever launch.  What tremendous value these launches must be producing to be worth $1 billion each and every time.  Except, what value is produced?  A trip back to the same Moon we've been to dozens of times already?  What is the point?  If you can't reach Mars then don't bother at all.  What a waste of money.  But don't worry, Biden has recently hired 87,000 armed IRS members who will squeeze the country for everything the government needs.  While making speeches about half the country needing to be stomped out while flanked by menacing marines and a black and red colored backdrop. . .

Speaking of 80,000, that's the number of excess deaths among Millennials in America this year compared to last year.  So the year we all have vaccines is 80,000 deaths more deadly than the year we didn't have vaccines and Covid-19 was totally unchecked.  Funny how that math works.  By requiring people get these vaccines to keep their jobs and go to college, the USA government is directly responsible for the mass murder of ~100,000 otherwise healthy young Americans.  Pol Pot would be proud.

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