Wednesday off!

So, so very glad that I didn't go into work today and instead took it off to do my paper for class. After the stress of not being good enough yesterday, I really needed a breather to take my mind off of things. Today's been an interesting one, too -- I feel like I got stuff done. Another game was finished, a demo was enjoyed, a paper got written, food was ate, and so on!

I finished Phantasy Star Portable 2, which I've been playing for a few weeks tops. I wrote about it in one of my earlier posts, and so I guess I should wrap up my thoughts on it. The story mode was really quite enjoyable if you're not picky about having an extremely varied game play experience and like action RPGs. It follows a pretty basic pattern of "do a free, non-story mission", then possibly "okay now do two story missions", and rinse and repeat for about 10 or so chapters. The non-story missions are thrown in to give you some choice of what to do, and to also level you up and prepare you for the next group of missions. They could have just toned the story-related ones down in size to make that a non-requirement, but the game would have most likely been far too short if that were the case. During the story, there are times where you can say different things to influence conversations, but it was mostly "right answer" and "wrong answer" options, so you never really feel like you have much of a say in things.

The characters are generally pleasant and enjoyable, although at times they may make you just want to roll your eyes. You've got a moping, mercenary-leading drunkard with lots of hair, the over-cleavage robot chick (?!), a young-and-mostly-useless partner, a spunky-retarded-tribal boy, and some others as well. For me, having played all the previous PS Universe games, this definitely ended up being my favorite story-wise. It's got quite a few nods to the previous games in the series, and it's pretty interesting seeing how the universe turned out after the previous games' events. It's unfortunate that you can't explore the cities like you can on the 360/PS2/PC games, because I really enjoyed those places even if they wouldn't really serve much purpose.

The story has some pretty awesome moments, and a fair share of pretty awful moments. You'll end up with your standard POWER OF FRIENDSHIP uniting, but there are also some really interesting parts as well. If they would have taken out some of the cliche and focused more on the darker side of the story, it would have been absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, Sega doesn't really seem to work that way, so I'll just imagine it as more thought out in my mind instead!

Emilia is visibly upset.

I would talk in detail about how much I love the whole game, the RPG elements, customization and other things the game has going on, but let's just say I have been known to enjoy this game! I was planning on taking some more photos of different CE versions of games I have, but then I realized: do I want to just post photos? Should I talk about them? Talk about why they may be good or bad? I'll have to ponder this later.

I was able to play some Team Fortress 2 with my lady earlier, and it is just so much fun when things go right. When we either get to help each other out by being battle buddies, or I heal her (or vice versa), or we help build each others' engineer buildings, et cetera, it's fantastic. Sometimes, we end up as enemies but then we duel each other instead and we're like FRENEMIES then! It also ends up for some amazingly hilarious times. For example, she was playing as a spy and stalking me, trying to find me and back stab me amongst my teammates. When she had finally gotten into a good position and was practically right behind me, she got hit by a stray arrow from my friendly sniper and promptly keeled over from it! Bloody wanker! Or there was a time when I was the spy, and had myself firmly parked outside of their respawn area. When she stepped out, I tried to stab her, didn't kill her, she hit me, and I was accidentally sent through their teleporter out to the front lines, where I instantly was blown up and she got a point against me. Not awesome. The arrow thing? Awesome. I traded an item to a guy for five (!) keys to open boxes that you find in the game, along with some scrap metal. Personally, I was pretty happy about that because a key is around 2.50$ for one, and the metal would help build a hat (metal becomes a hat?), so it worked out nicely!

Nothing more disgusting to an engineer than a spy. Or maybe a demoman.

After some musical messing around, talking to people online, and setting up a trade (daring!) online, I'm ready for sleep. I will attempt to listen to noise I made while I lay down, in hopes of passing out quickly. Night!