CUTE RPGS FOREVER

So, I think Halloween is now officially my favorite holiday. I mean, Christmas kind of becomes meaningless when you can afford to buy video games pretty much whenever you want to anyway, but it still remains an excellent occasion to receive Legos. Halloween, on the other hand, is a convenient excuse not only for girls to dress slutty, but also to play Castlevania games all day and eat nothing but candy. Santa's going to have to step things up if he's going to compete with that.

I actually don't have much of anything else to say besides that. Obviously I've been playing the newest DS Castlevania game, I just beat Shining Force II on the VC, and I have begun to play Baroque for Wii, which I picked up a couple of weeks ago on the cheap. I literally have no idea what is going on in Baroque so far, but I kind of like it like that. Also, krile won our game of Dokapon Kingdom and married the princess, who was more than willing. I think that pretty much cements the game in the realm of awesome, as if it wasn't already.

I shall, however, share my favorite internet secret: the amazon.com Video Game Deal of the Day. Basically, every day Amazon picks some game and sells it for a ridiculously low sum of money, even lower than it would go if it were a Greatest Hits game. They also sometimes have peripherals on sale, too.

I've picked up quite a few games using this, which theoretically defeats the purpose of saving money if you're going to end up spending more of it anyway... but whatever. I've been using this RSS feed to easily check what the deal of the day is, but now it seem to be kind of stuck on October 30th. Maybe they died on Halloween. Uh, anyway, there are probably other RSS feeds out there, or you could just check the actual link to Amazon every day. I've seen games that sell for $50 get cut down to half price or even more, and portable games go for less than $15 when they're normally $30-40. I figured it was my duty to be an enabler to all my video game addict friends out there, you can thank me later~ (after they shut off your electricity)

*BAM*

That is the sound of me beating Wild Arms Alter Code:F. Finally. But it was a very fun, entertaining game with a unique charm to it. It's funny because all the reviews basically said "well, you'll like it if you're a fan of the original.." and I never played the original but still loved it. So... there!

Wild Arms 5 now comes with a preorder bonus of an artbook spanning the whole Wild Arms series, so I'm just forced at gunpoint to preorder it. You bastards.

On a more classical note, I recently downloaded Shining Force on the ol' Virtual Console. You know, the game that isn't as good as Shining Force II but you play it anyway because it's fun. I actually got to play these games and Phantasy Star and many others on SEGA CHANNEL back in the day. Man, that was a kickass service. You got it through your cable company, plugged it into your Genesis (with a coaxial cable plugged into this weird cartridge kind of thing) and you got to pick from 30 or so games every month. Back then this was quite an awesome thing, even though if your cable went out your game supply got cut off. (And if there's nothing on TV, playing games is the next logical thing to do, right?)

Considering I was a SNES kid and my brothers only got a Genesis because 1. I wouldn't share my SNES with them most of the time, and 2. My parents didn't let us get two SNESes because we were supposed to share, and yet got a Genesis for them because it was different, this was a great opportunity for me to sample Sega's finest. Good times, man, good times.

Aaanyway, Shining Force. Yeah. My first Strategy RPG. Actually I played the second one first (because they offered it up on Sega Channel first for me) but both of these games got me addicted to the genre. I think it was also one of the first (if not THE first) games I played that had anime-style art in it, which is very commonplace nowadays. A game of many firsts for me! Here's hoping SFII comes to the VC soon as well.

Also I'm still mad that Tales of Legendia doesn't have any voice acting during the second half of the game. This is the most retarded thing ever.

*slight spoilers, nothing specific*

Basically once you "beat" the game and the credits roll, there's a whole other half of the game to play called Character Quests. I guess the localization team thought it was just some random sidequests which they didn't need to bother with, but it's actually a whole huge chunk of the game. So suddenly everyone's silent, and it's just kind of lazy on their part and it sucks. It's bad enough that every freakin' Tales game gets its opening song cut out of it *shakes fist*

This makes me very unmotivated to play the rest of the game, because I actually quite liked the voices in this game and it was very nice to see so MUCH voice acting instead of just reading text. I'm going to miss Moses' "y'all" ;_;