Guess I've only really been playing three games in the recent past. This is always a chaotic time for me as I love the NCAA basketball tournament, so I've spent much of my free time the past two weeks either (a) drinking and watching the conference tournaments leading into the NCAA one or (b) drinking and watching the NCAA one.

So, here we go!

1. Resident Evil 4: Just started this one at the urging of a friend who owns the GameCube version and absolutely love it. Since I paid like $6.50 to rent it from Saturday to Thursday, I'll be driving to a used game shop either Thursday or over the weekend to pick it up cheap.

2. Emerald Dragon: Finally, a challenging moment! After breezing through the first good-sized chunk of this one, the back-to-back fights with Ostracon and Demon-Form Ostracon are brutal, mainly because both forms of Ostracon get many moves per turn and are fond of casting a certain very powerful magic spell that takes off up to 500HP (of the 2000-3000 my characters have) a pop. And it doesn't help for the second fight, that you only have four guys instead of 5 in your party....

3. Fire Emblem (SNES): God, if you want to not lose party members to death, this game is totally brutal. Makes the GBA one seem like a walk in the park. You have very little storytelling right here and then you just get deluged by foes after a certain point. I'm on the seventh chapter of the first book and this fight is merciless. All of you characters start at the bottom of the screen and have to move to the top and then to the right. Moving down at your are two groups of eight enemies, evenly balanced between melee and archers. It's very easy for you to get one of your guys ganged up on by the archers and killed. And if you survive that, reinforcements start streaming out of the forts. Now that part will be easy, if time-consuming, as you can put your guys on the forts to block them off -- which means you can block off four of the five and kill all the reinforcements from the fifth and then repeat with the other four. Great way to not risk anything AND pick and choose who gets how much experience. But getting to that point --- that'll be the tough part...

Most recent blog posts from Rob Hamilton...
Back to the Erdtree The latest in my really infrequent blogs An update on gaming

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	wolfqueen001 - March 25, 2008 (04:19 PM) You haven't played RE4 yet? =O But that game totally rocks! >.> I hope my review helped. =D It really is a great game, though; you should play it. Like now. >_> I've never played the other two... they look pretty good, though. Might have to check them out sometime... if I can.
	Felix_Arabia - March 25, 2008 (05:06 PM) RE4 is the great game from the last generation, beating out such timeless classics as ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and Horsez.
	bluberry - March 26, 2008 (01:09 PM) but not DMC1. if you don't agree then you can flock off, featherface!
	sashanan - March 26, 2008 (11:53 PM) Fire Emblem in general kicks my ass. No matter how carefully I play it, even if I take 20 minutes per turn to painstakingly calculate which enemy could hypothetically move where and attack what character and if it would be even remotely possible for them to kill someone. If I make no mistakes whatsoever in terms of exposing my healer or letting somebody get ganged up on, some enemy reinforcement or another will appear next to a vulnerable unit and, of course, instantly get a turn.
	overdrive - March 28, 2008 (11:47 AM) Sash You know, I remember during the brief time I had a LiveJournal account and maintained it before losing interest in the whole thing, I remember you were talking about your struggles with that game -- mainly with one level where you finally gave up the ghost on getting through without losing anyone. When I played that GBA one, I remember thinking "man, what was he doing wrong". With the exception of the final two battles (against the clones of virtually every Black Fang boss and against the big dragon), I'd thought the game was fairly easy. Had to restart a few times and I did lose a few characters I deemed unimportant, but I just chalked it all up to stupid tactical moves. Like, I lost axe-guy Bartre because I sent him against a quicker unit with a weapon class that works well against axes because that unit was nearly dead. Great idea.....except that, due to terrain, Bartre's hit percentage was horrible, he missed and the other guy killed him. And I lost a couple more units mainly because I got too cocky and put them right into harm's way even though they weren't high-defense units. But after playing this SNES one, I'm not so sure it was just a few "tactical errors" that caused those problems. Playing with a bare minimum of freeze-stating (as in, only after starting a battle, so if I fail, I don't have to do the preliminary busywork AND if I have to stop playing in the middle of a fight) while trying to honestly keep everyone alive is about enough to make me want to pull my hair out. It took something like four tries just to get everyone past those knights, archers and armor knights on the level I was talking about to get to the level-building point where you just take out a gazillion or so reinforcements (which you can dictate by simply having your guys step on and off forts to control how many spawn per turn). And all those deaths were of the sort you mentioned. I'd have a good turn and feel good about things, then four different enemies would all target the same guy and kill him. Crap, I got lucky the last time, because I would have lost a guy, but an enemy missed despite having a 90+% hit probability.