What are you playing?

[PartridgeSenpai]

Tried out Titanfall 2 and Viva Pinata in the past couple days. Both good games, but not ones in genres that I particularly care for (FPS and farming sims). I'd probably enjoy both more if I played them on PC, tbh, but I chose to just put them down. They just weren't really grabbing me.

What I started playing today which has grabbed me is Katamari Forever! This game is a remix of the best stages from the previous 4 Katamari games, and it's great fun so far. It's really nice to play the old Katamari 1 levels, especially, as the better physics in this really make those SO much more playable than they were on the original. At the very least, the much faster load times and inclusion of some of the DLC levels from the Xbox 360 game make this an easy recommendation so far, as it doesn't really have truly original content from what I can tell.

[korvd]

Farming the fire spirit stones in Lineage Classic. Kinda chilling gameplay.

How do you farm them, are there any special rates at the Skelth during the Christmas holidays?

[Arenegeth]

For the last few days, I took a bit of a break from Shenmue and started the original Spyro the Dragon on the PS1.

I'm already about 56% complete, and I complete a world a day on average, so I should be done within the next three days.

Spyro is one of those 3D platformers that allows you to 100% a stage from the first visit, since there's no power upgrades like with games like Banjo-Kazooie, so no backtracking is necessary. And with my experience with the genre the game seems awfully easy so far and I doubt that's going to change. But I'm still loving it, I have a soft spot for 3D platformers from that era, and I've been meaning to play this game and its sequels since they were released, so I'm glad I got a chance to do it before I croaked.

But last night I returned to Shenmue. My break wasn't just because I was tired or so I could start Spyro, it was also because I was procrastinating about the Warehouse choice, which I ended up doing in three different ways.

First, and as I already said, I did it without failure, though that wasn't my original intention. But I quickly realized the next day, that my money had dropped to pitifully low levels, to the point that I couldn't afford to go to Lapis (well technically I could but I think the game doesn't let Ryo drop under 500 Yen).

Then I went back and did the Warehouse again, only this time I spend as much time as possible to get the complete map and all the scenes, thinking that the allowance from those days would solve my money problems forever. Well, the game is smart enough to subtract the bus fares to and from the Harbor every time, so instead of 500 Yen a day you got 180 Yen per lost day. So that ended up not really worth it, since I did get a less than expected boost in funds, but at a great price, since I wasted a week of in-game time.

So I decided to go for the middle route, I went back again and missed the minimum days necessary to get the complete map, that way I kept some days, and got a little money boost to see me through the immediate Lapis entries, and I can live with missing the two short bum scenes. This also allowed me to keep the days before Christmas, which I was planning to use for the Raffle at Abe's.

Speaking of which, I am a proud owner of a shinny new Dural Gold!

It took 198 attempts by trading the 5 winning cans I save scummed in the previous two days over and over again. That was in the 24th of December. And yes it was the exact 198th can that got me the Dural Gold, I was actually writing them down as I was trading them, since the odds are officially supposed to be 1/400, but someone at the Shenmue Dojo after some testing says they are supposed to be 1/600 so I was only going to try for 300 trades on the 24th and go for 300 more on the 25th to see if I hit the average.

Hopefully, I won't have to revert to an older save again and have to deal with those odds all over again, but as far as I know, and ignoring the two bum Warehouse scenes, there's nothing I missed including minor scenes or Notebook entries, so if I do restart, it will be to trim down my total time, but hopefully that won't be necessary.

Have you gotten into slot house grinding yet?

Not yet, though I will be getting to it soon. I forgot about the whole bank deposit money thing you get for the Hong Kong ticket at the end of Disc 2. With that money I should be able to cover a lot of issues, and the 777's should be save scummable, which might cost me in real-life time but not in-game.

So other than Shenmue and Spyro, I finally installed Harvester on my PC and set it up on Dosbox properly, which wasn't that easy. I could always fall back to the GOG version, which is also running on Dosbox but is already optimized, but unless I get an issue on Disc swap or later down the line, I'm good to go.

Though I'm not sure when I'll be starting the game, this is one of those Adventure games that could benefit from multiple playthroughs, so I'll probably wait until I'm done with Shenmue I or at least the Dreamcast version, before I start.

[pierrot]

Speaking of which, I am a proud owner of a shinny new Dural Gold!

You lucky son of a.... Congrats on the Gold Dural!

Yeah, the slots are save scumable, but I find that it can't quite be done in one or two in-game days. With your luck, maybe that's not as much of an issue. By the way, did you get one of each of the Yukawa figures to encounter him in the restaurant on Christmas? I can't remember if that was removed for the Western releases or not. I remember reading that if you have more than one of each, he doesn't appear, or has a lower chance of showing up, or something like that, though.

[Kowalski]

Farming the fire spirit stones in Lineage Classic. Kinda chilling gameplay.

How do you farm them, are there any special rates at the Skelth during the Christmas holidays?

No special rates, location is pretty unpopulated during winter holidays, so it's a good chance to bite off more than you can chew.

[pook99]

Currently playing God of War on PS4 again, in the past I could not get into the game at all but decided to give it another go and I am really enjoying it. I am not sure what changed, I bought the game day one(which is rare for me) and was super hyped for it. Played it for a bit but never enjoyed it, I would go back every couple of weeks and play for a short time, disliking it each time I played.

Decided to fire it up one last time on New Years day and I got super into it, I don't know why I didnt like it in the past but I'm glad I gave it another chance.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Currently playing God of War on PS4 again, in the past I could not get into the game at all but decided to give it another go and I am really enjoying it. I am not sure what changed, I bought the game day one(which is rare for me) and was super hyped for it. Played it for a bit but never enjoyed it, I would go back every couple of weeks and play for a short time, disliking it each time I played.

Decided to fire it up one last time on New Years day and I got super into it, I don't know why I didnt like it in the past but I'm glad I gave it another chance.

Most times, I find that the environment around me just isn't conducive to a specific game. My mind is distracted, I can't dedicate time to it or there are other real-world issues pressing on me. Sometimes it is just personal desire, where you were hyped and then kind of burnt out by the time it got in your hands. A lot of folks never get to the second stage of the retry and it is a shame. We act like our experiences are some rigid, set in stone, unchanging moment when in reality, our perspectives shift and change and things we may not have liked, could turn into some of our most favorite moments.

I know that was the case for me with Shenmue. Fun fact folks, I hated that game when I first played it. I found it dull and unplayable. Now it is seriously my second most favorite game of all time. The same can be applied to other games like Samba De Amigo, Space Channel 5, Final Fantasy IX and Metal Gear Solid. All games that I just despised at first and did not click with me in the least and later become some of my personal favorites. So I salute you Pook for giving it another shot and finding entertainment in it. I hear that God of War is an absolutely spectacular game and one I hope to play when I finally get a PS4.

[pook99]

Currently playing God of War on PS4 again, in the past I could not get into the game at all but decided to give it another go and I am really enjoying it. I am not sure what changed, I bought the game day one(which is rare for me) and was super hyped for it. Played it for a bit but never enjoyed it, I would go back every couple of weeks and play for a short time, disliking it each time I played.

Decided to fire it up one last time on New Years day and I got super into it, I don't know why I didnt like it in the past but I'm glad I gave it another chance.

Most times, I find that the environment around me just isn't conducive to a specific game. My mind is distracted, I can't dedicate time to it or there are other real-world issues pressing on me. Sometimes it is just personal desire, where you were hyped and then kind of burnt out by the time it got in your hands. A lot of folks never get to the second stage of the retry and it is a shame. We act like our experiences are some rigid, set in stone, unchanging moment when in reality, our perspectives shift and change and things we may not have liked, could turn into some of our most favorite moments.

I know that was the case for me with Shenmue. Fun fact folks, I hated that game when I first played it. I found it dull and unplayable. Now it is seriously my second most favorite game of all time. The same can be applied to other games like Samba De Amigo, Space Channel 5, Final Fantasy IX and Metal Gear Solid. All games that I just despised at first and did not click with me in the least and later become some of my personal favorites. So I salute you Pook for giving it another shot and finding entertainment in it. I hear that God of War is an absolutely spectacular game and one I hope to play when I finally get a PS4.

Its funny what you said about Shenmue, I had a similar experience with a game called Wings of vii. It is an indie game that is probably the hardest game I ever played. The first time I played it I was in a bad head space and got easily frustrated and completely hated it. Decided to give it another go a few months later and to this day it is probably my all time favorite indie game. It's amazing what a difference approaching a game at a different time can make.

[Arenegeth]

By the way, did you get one of each of the Yukawa figures to encounter him in the restaurant on Christmas? I can't remember if that was removed for the Western releases or not. I remember reading that if you have more than one of each, he doesn't appear, or has a lower chance of showing up, or something like that, though.

I wasn't aware of those appearances, and none of the guides I looked into mentioned them, so thanks for bringing it up.

So I did look into it, and it looks like there's two appearances of Mr. Yukawa in the game.

One happens in the Yokosuka Bar the night where your friends come to visit (I'm already passed that point in this save) and the other is at the Sushi Restaurant at the 9th of each month (any month). There's no mention of any encounter at Christmas.

I couldn't find any confirmation that the Bar scene is in the western versions of the game, all the videos online seem to be from the Japanese version. But I do distinctly remember there was some dude sitting next to Akemi during that scene when I did it, so it doesn't look like this appearance is missable or in any way affected by possession of any of the figures (had 0 at the time). But the scene itself is pretty easily missable, but of course since I'm actively going after all the missable scenes, I didn't miss it.

The Sushi encounter is in the western versions, but it doesn't play out properly like in the Japanese version, you just see him, press A and then he runs away with no dialogue.

Apparently, having more than one of each figure may mess up the chance of him showing up, but having one of each guarantees it, as you surmised. Though there was a low chance of me having more than one of any of the raffle figures since I save scum them to preserve time/money.

Both encounters play properly in the western HD version apparently, probably due to the addition of the Japanese voice track for Shenmue I.

I have now a single copy of both figures, and I'll wait until the 9th of January to get the second appearance. Though this is more of an Easter Egg than a missable scene, especially the way it plays out in the western version.

Other than that, I'm trying to get Dural Silver while I still have the Christmas day supposed bonus (well it worked for Gold) but I only have 3 cans to cycle through instead of 5 due to the ones spend on Gold previously and the two Mr. Yukawa figures. I'm at the point where I'm supposed to take the Phoenix Mirror to Master Chen so I'm about to solve my money problems, but currently I barely have enough for the bus fare so I'm keeping it tight. If I have the cans to spare I may attempt to get one or both of the Saturn games from the Tomato Mart Raffle, especially since I already don't have enough time to fully max out a move by training today, so I may as well spend the time on save scumming raffles, since I'll have to do that at some point anyway.

[Tiduas]

So I recently wanted to start with my Japanese studies again. I went straight into Super Robot Taisen Alpha 3 on the PS2, although it went quite well I still had to struggle a little bit too much with some pronunciations on many words that I should remember but didn't which made the reading twitchy to say the least.

Two chapters into the game, I instead decided to go a route with more voice acting while still keeping the Japanese level on about the same level (with both wacky scenarios as well as some political conflicts etc.). That's when I started with Tales of Rebirth for the same format! As the game is completely voiced throughout the story, it helps with my previous problem regarding the pronunciations with words I know the meaning to. There's also a severe amount of non-voiced dialogue in the cities for just practicing reading without any "cheating".

In fact, Tales of Rebirth houses one of the most insane amount of descriptive texts I've ever seen in a traditional JRPG. When you enter a house for example, there exists paintings, drawers and tables with "nonsense" stuff on them like teacups, food or decorative objects. I would say that about 70% of these have descriptive texts to them describing the smell, what they remind of or just how they are a solid foundation to what build the current city that the party resides in! These are however written with a much more book-ish feeling which also makes reading them a bit trickier so I haven't given them too much attention as I want to preserve my learning energy to actually progressing through the story.

I have only gotten a few hours into the game, so my party still only consists of three party members (Vague, Eugene and Mao). The dynamic between these three are actually quite nice and strikes a good balance between being serious and whacky. I have a hard time with 3D Tales of whackiness as it many times just feels out of place and unnatural, but in 2D I think it's just a little bit more cute. The story that goes on at the moment is also engaging to the point that I actually care about what happens.

The game is absolutely gorgeous and has aged like a fine old wine. I dare to say that it's one of the best looking games I've ever seen. The 2D sprite art are amazing, but what really gets me are the ridiculous background art in both towns, dungeons and inside locations. Almost nothing is reused (so far), and most of it is just pixelated godness. It's up there fighting with the Metal Slug titles, but judging by the length of the game (which I guess will go on for a while as with most JRPGS) compared to a Metal Slug title, I'm even more impressed with how much care went into the creating of the graphical assets.

Fighting is already quite engaging with a few systems to mess around with outside of battle. I tend to like taking the battle to the menues, so it fits me quite well. I strongly remembering Tales of Eternia being just okay through half of the game battlewise, but then going full turbo into AwesomeLand through the second half of it. I'm wondering if Rebirth will continue to develop in the same fashion?

I am still naively believing that I will finish this game judging by how much I like it now. I sure it doesn't let me down anytime soon.