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Persona 4 is crack

I finished Sticker Star and started playing Persona 4 Golden shortly after writing my previous blog post, and after that Persona 4 has mostly replaced most other gaming for the last month. The game is strangely addicting for being a game where you spend several hours playing through some kind of “school sim” game before you even get to anything like a dungeon. But then again, that “sim” part is probably the actual reason why it this game is so addicting and considered a great game by many. Because secretly everybody loves to play The Sims, even though most people don’t want to admit it. Or something.

Persona 4 Golden School Lecture

This is a game where part of the gameplay consists of listening to school lectures. How can it be any good??

A friend asked me if I recommended this game, and I was cautiously saying something like “it’s not like standard RPGs so you may or may not like it”. After all I do enjoy playing visual novel style games like Virtue’s Last Reward, Corpse Party and Ever 17, which may also be part of the reason why I like this game, which also has a lot of dialogue.

I do also love the music, although once I start listening closely to the lyrics it does seem to be some kind of broken Engrish. But the tunes are nice! I’ve been looking into buying the soundtrack, but ordering the CD from a store in Japan feels like a pain. I wish there was an easier way to buy Japanese MP3s outside of Japan, most western music services/stores just doesn’t seem to have much access to those. (Spotify, WIMP and iTunes though I haven’t tried that last one lately since I don’t want to install it.)

Other than that I’ve also been buying every single Humble Bundle ever, even those for games that I don’t know if I’ll ever intend to play. My Steam account is bursting with random games. Some of them seem quite good too, just don’t know when I’ll get around to play them. Oh well, not a problem just leaving them there “forever”.

 

I visited some friends and family in Stockholm in May, had quite a bit of fun!

Grumpy bear and happy slimes

Happy slimes and grumpy bear! My friend thought that the contrast between their facial expressions was rather hilarious.

One of my relatives had a childrens birthday party for her young daughter. Some of the kids came over and gave me a hug when I arrived even though I haven’t met them before, so adorable! Also apparently my grade school age cousin is into Minecraft.

Exhibit A

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit B

I don’t want to start playing this or WoW. Just playing “single-playthrough” games is already taking up enough time.

I went to two grilling trips with my church, once with just the youth group (we actually had an orienteering game first, my group won!) and once with the whole church. Was quite lucky with the weather both times too.

My excellently rare steak "burger"! It was delicious!

My excellently rare steak “burger”! It was delicious!

And we had a bachelor party for my brother who’s getting married! Made him do a bunch of embarassing stuff, also went to Ekeberg to play frisbee golf, though I must say the highlight was climbing trees at the Climbing Park at Oslo Summer Park! (Even though we went to Big Horn Steakhouse for dinner.)

Oslo Climbing Park

It’s perfectly safe.

I bought a portable hammock. It is awesome. Bought it from Coolstuff.no, but my uncle actually found it cheaper at Finn.no.

Transformers hammock!

Transformers hammock! Sorry about the mess in the background, I just ripped the packaging material off the hammock the fastest I could so that I could try it out right away.

 

Posted by on 2013-06-21 in Games, Rambling

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Gourmet Sandwiches and Games

I recently saw someone posting the “A Sandwich For Every Day of the Month” poster on Facebook, and decided that I wanted to actually try each one of them (or at least as many as I can). Because reading all kinds of great ideas on the internet is of little use unless you try at least some of them right? So far I’ve tried 6 of them, though not all the attempts turned out looking as good as on that poster. But they did mostly taste great!

Grilled eggplant with mozarella, tomato, parmesan and basil

Grilled eggplant with mozarella, tomato, parmesan and basil. One of my “better-looking” attempts.

Watched Iron Man 3 a few weeks ago. It was a great movie and I think better than the first two Iron Man movies, though not as spectacular as The Avengers. Two of the movie trailers before the Iron Man 3 movie was for other Marvel movies, The Wolverine and Thor: The Dark World. With that, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 coming up, I must say that Marvel is doing rather well lately. Kind of curious whether DC Comics will be able to “catch up” at all, with only the new Batman movies being successful. I haven’t really heard much hype for the Man of Steel movie, and I’m not even sure if their Justice League movie project is dead or not. Oh well.

Iron Man 3

Bought a few games last month:

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

This one is really quite an enjoyable game! Nintendo has a quirky sense of humor in their RPG-style Mario games that is fun to read. And the game is also surprisingly difficult, there are a few puzzles that took me a few plays to get. But it’s also a good thing, it does mean that the stages are actually quite varied. Even though the game is set up with a world map with stages (like Super Mario World), not every stage is just about running from one end to another.

One stage makes you find your way through a forest where some of the exits takes you back to the start of the stage, kind of like the Lost Woods in the Zelda games. Another one is set up like a game show, where you have to answer questions and solve challenges quickly to not lose all your health.

You don’t need to play the stages in a strict order either. Three of the levels are available after the start scenes, and you can to a certain degree play them in any order. Though some of the stages require you to find special stickers in order to progress. In any case, I am enjoying playing this game.

Persona 4: Golden

The PSVita really feels like it has dried up when it comes to games. This game is actually a remake of a PS2 game, but I’ve heard lots of great things about it (and about the Persona series in general). Will probably play it once I finish Sticker Star.

Persona 4: Golden

Assassin's Creed: RevelationsAssassin’s Creed: Revelations

I didn’t actually buy this game, just borrowed it from a friend. It’s not a bad game, but as with the previous games, I still kinda feel like the side quests end up distracting from the main story. And I’ve also found out that I really, really hate tower defense by now. (I suck at that part of the game…)

The PS3 version have 3D support, but it’s some kind of “fake” 3D, where they just render the graphics “flat” first, then add 3D with post-processing (using the depth information in the game, so it’s at least somewhat accurate). Still it doesn’t look nearly as good as when the graphics are actually rendered once for each “eye”.But it’s not a bad game. I do like the battle system/mechanics in the game, and it’s mostly enjoyable whenever you manage to complete a mission by using some cool maneuver. I still am not very good at using every gadget that he has though.

Darksiders II

The first game wasn’t good enough for me to really want to play the second one, I only bought this because it was on sale on Humble Bundle. The 3D works all right though it still has the problem with the sides of the screen not fully rendering. Just played through the intro and left it on hold for now.

Tomb Raider

I bought the collector’s edition of this game, I must admit mainly because it comes with a Play Arts figure. So the limbs can be moved for making poses, and the figure comes with various weapons and replacement hands for holding the weapons. Which makes this collector’s edition at least somewhat more interesting than the previous collector’s editions I’ve bought. (I guess the Skyward Sword’s special edition Wiimote is still the most useful one though.)

Anyways, I must say the game has gotten quite cinematic. Yet it is less linear than say Uncharted, because you can actually go back to the old stages to look for collectibles, in order to get experience for unlocking skills and upgrades. While the story isn’t original enough to make me want to play just to get the rest of the story (like Bioshock Infinite), it does have some mystery elements.

The game looks amazing and works great with nVidia 3D Vision! It has “native” 3D support, so unlike games that just rely on nVidia’s own 3D support, the game is mostly rendered correctly and fully even in 3D mode. The movie cutscenes are in 2D, but regular rendered cutscenes are in 3D and there are more of those so far. In any case, I’m happy to have a game that works great in 3D!

Tomb Raider Collector's Edition

Cut the Rope: Time Travel

I do quite enjoy the Cut the Rope games. The stages are short enough that you can play the game whenever you have a few minutes, yet each stage is varied enough that you don’t feel like you’re doing exactly the same all the time (*cough*Angry Birds*cough*). So when I saw they had a new game out, I bought it for my phone this time. (The previous ones were bought on the iPad, which I don’t really bring with me much anymore.)

Cut the Rope: Time Travel

 

Man, it’s quite a list once I start listing them up. I must admit I just buy humble bundles without even considering what the games are, just to get them on Steam. So most of those games I don’t really plan to play unless I somehow “run out of other games to play”. Which is probably never. Hmm did I already write that earlier? Meh.

In other news, I “modded” an old wall lamp into a Bioshock Infinite lamp.

Bioshock Infinite lamp

My cheap Bioshock Infinite lamp

Oh also today after church we went to a friend’s place to make dumplings. Making dumpling doughDumplings!

 

Posted by on 2013-05-12 in Rambling

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Hong Kong and Taiwan

I went to Hong Kong and Taiwan with my parents the last two weeks of March this year, had a good time eating and shopping! It seems like spring is a perfect time for going to Hong Kong since it’s warm but not too hot. At least the first week – the second week was rainy and kinda chilly though.

Siu Mei and bunny bun

Siu mei and bunny bun bought at a night market in Kaohsiung

Went sightseeing in random places in Kaohsiung and Taipei, and didn’t really do much sightseeing in Hong Kong since we were there for such a short time. Spent most of the time seeing my parents’ friends and shopping.

Strawberry (sweet and sour) ribs!

Strawberry (sweet and sour) ribs

Mostly bought two pairs of shoes and clothes. But only because some of my older shoes have started falling apart. I need to make myself throw them away and only use the new shoes. Also bought some snacks, some computer stuff and a few things that I thought were funny/cute.

Bought a new lid for my coffee/tea cup because the one I used before stopped sitting properly on the cup

Bought a new lid for my coffee/tea cup because the one I used before stopped sitting properly on the cup

 

I finished playing through Dead Space 3, also the story DLC “Awakened”. I must say that it’s mostly correct that it’s not really much of the horror feel of the first game left, it’s really much more an action game now. While it did have a few jump scares that got me, it just doesn’t quite feel like the first game where you would walk around in suspense because you have no idea what would happen next. Though I guess it might be harder to surprise people in the sequels since the players already know about most of the monsters and what happened before…

Isaac Clarke needs a new job

“I need a new job.”

Still, it’s kind of interesting to see where the story goes, even though the ending is somewhat sad. And then I played the DLC, where the ending was even worse. Kind of reminds me of Prince of Persia (2008). Well I guess now I’ll probably buy Dead Space 4 if it comes out, no matter how many people say that EA has ruined the game, just to see if Isaac will ever get a break.

Ni No Kuni took surprisingly long to finish! I thought I was almost finished about 35 hours into the game, but I was completely wrong. I think the save for my finished game was about 60 hours. Not counting the couple of times I died and didn’t want to save I guess. Anyways the story was enjoyable and quite Ghibli-like.

Ni No Kuni cutscene screenshot

“Not another monster encounter! The last one almost killed us!”

My biggest gripe with the game is the difficulty… Even after I thought I had “leveled up” quite a bit, I still got my ass kicked whenever I finished an area and went to a new one! The helper characters AI isn’t really helping much either, tending to spend all the MP on spells so that they don’t have any left for healing when needed. Oh I already wrote a bit about this in the last post. Yeah the boss battles weren’t the only battles that were difficult in any case.

Started playing Bioshock Infinite now too, it really looks quite good, and the story is very good! I really want to continue playing because I want to find out the reasons/answers to some of the mysteries in the game.

Elizabeth, the girl you're trying to kidnap in the game.

Elizabeth, the girl you’re trying to kidnap in the game.

I wish the game would work with Nvidia 3D Vision but as far as I have found out online there is no real way to get it to work properly. Oh well, it’s not as if I ever complained when I played Ni No Kuni and it didn’t have 3D either. Still, the graphics are so well designed in Bioshock Infinite that I would’ve loved to see it in 3D!

Went to Bergen last weekend too, it was nice meeting friends there and eating with them. We watched Oblivion, which has nothing to do with Elder Scrolls, but has Tom Cruise saving the world from aliens again. The story had some twists some of which I already guessed from watching the trailer, but some other twists were slightly unexpected. Still, I kind of feel like the movie tried to get a happy ending in a way that was too forced or too “simple”. It was okay entertainment, slightly smarter than most generic action movies but still taking storytelling shortcuts.

Oblivion Movie screenshot

Microsoft PixelSense? (Formerly Microsoft Surface, before they decided to use that name for their tablet instead.)

I have also spent a lot of time watching YouTube lately instead of trying to catch up on 24 on Netflix. Been watching Strip Search (a reality show where web cartoonists compete against each other, created by Penny Arcade), PewDiePie‘s playthrough videos (mostly the Pixel Horror series) and also various Geek and Sundry shows. Maybe I should reconsider my Netflix subscription… Though I did watch a few movies so I guess at least I haven’t left it completely unused. Still watching Gintama a lot on Crunchyroll.

I considered subscribing to HBO Nordic to watch Game of Thrones, but in the end it just doesn’t feel like it’s worth it because the subscription model doesn’t allow for flexible pausing/resuming your subscription. It’s just too expensive subscribing just to watch one show. Maybe I’ll wait for the DVDs/Blurays and buy those instead. *sigh*

 

Posted by on 2013-04-14 in Rambling

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