Sload Soap wrote:I got a PS2 slim recently so decided to play a few games that slipped me by. First up is Shinobi. Gonna be honest, it's not that great which is a shame. Lots of straight corridors filled with indentikit enemies, bad camera work, so-so combat, looks kinda crappy. Not a great jump to 3D. I'm about 5 stages in but honestly might jack it in.
Yeah, I actually finished that game last year, and it made me feel very different about it than when I first played it when it was released. It kind of sucked, really. The second half of the game, and especially the last level, are just a bunch of gauntlets over wide-open expanses of insta-death. If the camera, and dashing (in the air, anyway) weren't so junk, it might almost be reasonable. I think Shin Shinobiden is still objectively a worse Shinobi game, though.
I've been making slow but steady progress in Xanadu. I'm only on floor 6, but I've sussed out the map of the floor pretty well. Found the couple of dungeons, and the doors to the next floor. So I'll be scouting out the dungeons, and progressing on. Floor 5 gave me the second crown, after I took out another horror of the deep. This time it had crystals on the tips of its tentacles, only one eye, and a bunch of knarled, gnashing teeth. I beat it's face in almost instantly though. I'm feeling a little more confident now, partly because the game has been just unloading gold on me lately. I also found a +2 Large Shield (or "Shiled" as it's misspelled in the inventory menu), and a boatload of pendents in one of the dungeons, so that's helpful. I cracked 100,000 gold, and at that point I decided to go shopping. That is, after upping my charisma by downing a bottle, of course. I was able to get the best weapon money can buy (the Halberd), the second best armor money can buy (Half-Plate), one of the upper tier magic spells (D-Thunder, which targets all enemies), like 20000 food, and 50 keys. After all that I still had 9000 gold left, and was able to quickly bump that up to 29000 with a few lucrative enemy encounters that I happened to get. I went ahead and did a bunch of leveling up at the church, as well. So now, if I needed to buy keys again, they would be 1200 gold each, instead of the 875 I last bought them for (after the CHR boost). I'm not quite as concerned about that now that the gold seems to be flowing in (I'm already back over 100,000), but I am still a little worried about what kind of nightmares lie in wait in the lower floors. I've been pretty much blocked off from returning to the fifth and higher floors, without using items to jump floors. The Nagas down here are scary, too. With the Halberd, and D-Thunder (which Nagas are unfortunately resistant to) I can basically mop the floor with everything right now, but if they do catch me, they can pretty easily kill me. I haven't capped the proficiency on my armor yet, but I am still a little worried about later floors. I'm still holding back on leveling up as well, though. I could probably roll through another two rounds each of levels for Fighting and Wizardry, but that would continue to up the price on keys (as well as the clinic, although I never actually use that anyway).
With the first three bosses appearing on floors 1, 3, and 5, and considering that the ones on 3 and 5 were guarding crowns, I'm assuming the last two crowns are going to be on floors 7 and 9. I think there are ten floors in total, but I'm not totally sure. So, I'm probably only about halfway through, but I feel like I'm picking up some momentum, at least. Here's hoping that I don't suddenly start running into a bunch of unavoidable enemies that raise my karma, or something.