Kingdom Hearts II - the final verdict
(This is a follow-up to my first Kingdom Hearts II post.)
I finished KHII this morning so I thought I'd retouch the discussion. Did I finish Jiminy's Journal? No I did not. There was a bunch of annoying mini-games that I needed to go back and redo. I probably would have done that, but along the way I ran into Sephiroth. Here's the thing - Sephiroth hit me once and I dropped to one hit point. I tried it a few times and finally went and went to see what GameFAQS had to say. There's a whole FAQ for Sephiroth, and it talks about how you should probably be level 99 and compares how difficult he is at level 75 to level 99.
My save at the final save point I'm level 52. So in order to beat Sephiroth I need to just fight random encounters for somewhere between 30 - 50 levels. Screw it. So I'll give you the sane person's method for finishing KHII.
- Play the game through to the last save.
- Fight the final boss and see the ending, minus the "secret ending"
- Close your eyes and imagine that you spend 40 hours or so grinding out miserable random fights in service to the crazy Square bastards.
- Go to YouTube and search for "Kingdom Hearts II ending". Watch the secret ending - which doesn't even really make sense anyway.
- Play two or three decent games in the 40 hours of button-mashing I just saved you.
Don't get me wrong, I like the game overall. But Square has this odd desire to force you to battle endlessly in their games. At least in KHII it's optional - as opposed to say Final Fantasy VII.
Anyway, back to Gamefly it goes. Hopefully I'll get Dead Rising as a replacment.
technorati tags:Kingdom_Hearts_II, gaming, PS2, Square-Enix
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(This is a follow-up to my first Kingdom Hearts II post.)
I finished KHII this morning so I thought I'd retouch the discussion. Did I finish Jiminy's Journal? No I did not. There was a bunch of annoying mini-games that I needed to go back and redo. I probably would have done that, but along the way I ran into Sephiroth. Here's the thing - Sephiroth hit me once and I dropped to one hit point. I tried it a few times and finally went and went to see what GameFAQS had to say. There's a whole FAQ for Sephiroth, and it talks about how you should probably be level 99 and compares how difficult he is at level 75 to level 99.
My save at the final save point I'm level 52. So in order to beat Sephiroth I need to just fight random encounters for somewhere between 30 - 50 levels. Screw it. So I'll give you the sane person's method for finishing KHII.
- Play the game through to the last save.
- Fight the final boss and see the ending, minus the "secret ending"
- Close your eyes and imagine that you spend 40 hours or so grinding out miserable random fights in service to the crazy Square bastards.
- Go to YouTube and search for "Kingdom Hearts II ending". Watch the secret ending - which doesn't even really make sense anyway.
- Play two or three decent games in the 40 hours of button-mashing I just saved you.
Don't get me wrong, I like the game overall. But Square has this odd desire to force you to battle endlessly in their games. At least in KHII it's optional - as opposed to say Final Fantasy VII.
Anyway, back to Gamefly it goes. Hopefully I'll get Dead Rising as a replacment.
technorati tags:Kingdom_Hearts_II, gaming, PS2, Square-Enix
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Pirates! On the Cheap
(Kudos to Tony for finding this)
If you're somebody who wanted to play Sid Meier's Pirates but were unwilling to shell out the $50 to buy a new copy . . . well for the most part you're a goddamn cheapskate and you'd better not work in the industry or I'll mock the shit out of you. If you can't be bothered to buy the good stuff then I don't want to hear the complaints when you're stuck working on Movie-Tie-In 3 or Sequel-To-Random-Sucess-In-The-Past 17, or Derivative-Just-Like-Last-Year's-Surprise-Hit-But-Rushed-Crapfest. But in my case I had bought the PC version, so buying the Xbox version a few months later seemed a bit steep.
Amazon now has the Xbox SKU for $12. I don't know why, don't know how long the price will last, etc. etc. But if you want a copy of Pirates for crazy-cheap click the link. If you're into the PC thang, it's $20 - but that's still a great buy. Check it here.
I've only played a bit of the Xbox version, but it seems to be almost identical. Load times are more noticeable, but that's to be expected. The only substantial difference I've seen so far is that they seem to have cut out the "explore on land" game. When you hit land it just tells you "you searched for days" and either gives you the treasure (if you were close enough I guess) or tells you that you found nothing.
technorati tags:games, Xbox, Pirates, sale
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(Kudos to Tony for finding this)
If you're somebody who wanted to play Sid Meier's Pirates but were unwilling to shell out the $50 to buy a new copy . . . well for the most part you're a goddamn cheapskate and you'd better not work in the industry or I'll mock the shit out of you. If you can't be bothered to buy the good stuff then I don't want to hear the complaints when you're stuck working on Movie-Tie-In 3 or Sequel-To-Random-Sucess-In-The-Past 17, or Derivative-Just-Like-Last-Year's-Surprise-Hit-But-Rushed-Crapfest. But in my case I had bought the PC version, so buying the Xbox version a few months later seemed a bit steep.
Amazon now has the Xbox SKU for $12. I don't know why, don't know how long the price will last, etc. etc. But if you want a copy of Pirates for crazy-cheap click the link. If you're into the PC thang, it's $20 - but that's still a great buy. Check it here.
I've only played a bit of the Xbox version, but it seems to be almost identical. Load times are more noticeable, but that's to be expected. The only substantial difference I've seen so far is that they seem to have cut out the "explore on land" game. When you hit land it just tells you "you searched for days" and either gives you the treasure (if you were close enough I guess) or tells you that you found nothing.
technorati tags:games, Xbox, Pirates, sale
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That was weird
So I woke up this morning, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Made my way downstairs and . . . hang on that's a Beatles lyric. Let's try again.
This morning I fired up my browser and it said it couldn't find www.hiddenjester.com. Rubbish! The cat is sitting on it - I can kick the box from here. The machine itself was still online, so I went in and tried to restart the server - seg faults. Reboot the machine - still seg faults on startup. Look at the logs, not much there. at 4:03 AM it says "Graceful restart request, doing restart" (I think this was for log rotation maybe?), then it says [error] (9)Bad file description: apr_socket_accept: (client socket) - which is a great error message, very informative to the average user (rolls eyes).
So I dunno. Ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the web server. Seems to be fine now. I did compile some new stuff yesterday, but it was all GUI thing-a-ma-bobs - nothing that should have impacted the web server. Let me know if anybody has an issues with the server and apologies for the outage.
technorati tags:Apache, web, crash, administration
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So I woke up this morning, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Made my way downstairs and . . . hang on that's a Beatles lyric. Let's try again.
This morning I fired up my browser and it said it couldn't find www.hiddenjester.com. Rubbish! The cat is sitting on it - I can kick the box from here. The machine itself was still online, so I went in and tried to restart the server - seg faults. Reboot the machine - still seg faults on startup. Look at the logs, not much there. at 4:03 AM it says "Graceful restart request, doing restart" (I think this was for log rotation maybe?), then it says [error] (9)Bad file description: apr_socket_accept: (client socket) - which is a great error message, very informative to the average user (rolls eyes).
So I dunno. Ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the web server. Seems to be fine now. I did compile some new stuff yesterday, but it was all GUI thing-a-ma-bobs - nothing that should have impacted the web server. Let me know if anybody has an issues with the server and apologies for the outage.
technorati tags:Apache, web, crash, administration
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More pics
Some more pics up at Flickr - these are of the Japanese Garden in Portland. Not as happy with my picture work there today - the lighting was a bit tricky and I was using my older camera as opposed to Karin's new tiny camera. Also the flash kept turning on for my camera - even though we were outdoors. (grumble). It's utterly ridiculous that this huge, dense garden exists smack in the middle of the city like this.
I really need to learn what I'm doing with Photoshop Elements. I wonder if I couldn't fix up more pictures if I had more skill . . . .
technorati tags:Portland, Japanese_Garden, Oregon, waterfall
Blogged with Flock
Some more pics up at Flickr - these are of the Japanese Garden in Portland. Not as happy with my picture work there today - the lighting was a bit tricky and I was using my older camera as opposed to Karin's new tiny camera. Also the flash kept turning on for my camera - even though we were outdoors. (grumble). It's utterly ridiculous that this huge, dense garden exists smack in the middle of the city like this.
I really need to learn what I'm doing with Photoshop Elements. I wonder if I couldn't fix up more pictures if I had more skill . . . .
technorati tags:Portland, Japanese_Garden, Oregon, waterfall
Blogged with Flock
On Vacation
I'm on vacation, so by rights I don't have to post at all. Suck it! But I will post, at least once. :-) Karin and I road-tripped to Portland, OR. This morning we drove around Crater Lake. It was quite gorgeous. For what it's worth, I have a Flickr account now, and I uploaded some pics. In other interesting news I posted the pics and this blog entry using the latest Flock build. Maybe I'll post more pics later, we'll see how time runs.
I created a thumbnail for one Crater Lake pic, but apparently I can just drag and drop from the Flickr page, so let's try this out, shall we?
technorati tags:nature, Oregon, Crater_Lake
Blogged with Flock
I'm on vacation, so by rights I don't have to post at all. Suck it! But I will post, at least once. :-) Karin and I road-tripped to Portland, OR. This morning we drove around Crater Lake. It was quite gorgeous. For what it's worth, I have a Flickr account now, and I uploaded some pics. In other interesting news I posted the pics and this blog entry using the latest Flock build. Maybe I'll post more pics later, we'll see how time runs.
I created a thumbnail for one Crater Lake pic, but apparently I can just drag and drop from the Flickr page, so let's try this out, shall we?
technorati tags:nature, Oregon, Crater_Lake
Blogged with Flock