*burp*

Thanksgiving was good to me, but not the waistline. Hope both of my readers had a good turkey day.(actually, according to the usage, I may be overstating my readership there...)

Tomorrow is the post-Thanksgiving-Thanksgiving with my father's side of the family. Now that I think of it, the last time I can remember both of my parent's family's together was my sister's wedding in 1999. I really have no idea why they tend to be distant, but on the bright side, that means another feast tomorrow. I think I definitely need to start hitting the gym again after this.

No real deep thoughts tonight, but I am repainting my Seraphims. They were some of the first models I painted and honestly, not the best looking now. I am going to see what I can do to make them shine since they spearhead the army. I stripped the paint off of a few of them, and I think I will try to do some old vs new pictures after I finish the first batch.

Meanwhile, inside Best Buy.

It is hard to tell from this photo, but that is a Playstation 3 stand that locked up and crashed. Oooops!

Here's hoping I can get one of those $100 Xbox 360s from Amazon!

For the Emperor!

SistersWin, originally uploaded by dragonpup.

Alright, so I didn't update yesterday, being a bit under the weather at the moment. I did get in a game of 40k on Thursday, however. My Sisters of Battle were up against a Deathwing army. It went remarkably well for me, the Exorcists were pounding an unusually large numbers of missiles into the terminators, and Divine Guidance makes a mockery of the 2+ Armor save. This photo was taken in the top of turn 3 and was really all that was left of the Deathwing before the shooting phase.

At some point, I need to grab some Simple Green and strip the paint off the Seraphims and redo them now that my painting skills suck less.

That's all for now. Taa~

Gambit? You mean that guy from X-Men?

So, Final Fantasy XII. There is a lot to say about this one since it has the most radical departure from the previous Final Fantasy games since FF7 went 3D. I will try to break it down by its parts.

Combat: The most controversial change is the gambit system. Basically, you don’t have direct control over your characters and let the AI do most of the actions. For example, Ashe has 4 Gambits set up.

If Ally’s HP <60% Cast Cureaga
Attack Leader’s Target
Attack enemy targeting Ally
If Ally’s HP <80% Cast Cure

So she is set to attack my leader’s target, and if the leader has no target, she will attack an enemy that is going after a friendly. But should an ally fall below 60%, she immediately begins casting a heal. And after the battle is over, she will use Cure to get party members above the 80% marks. You can also change these on the fly, even in the middle of battle.

Overall I think the gambit system helps reduce the micromanaging of your characters, and helps save controllers in dealing with all the trash mobs fight(although this time you see those fights coming). When dealing with bosses, however, you need to actually manage your triad of team members since those fights are actually tough and usually throw enough at you that even the more complex gambits can’t handle the fight alone.

My complaint with the gambit system is twofold. First, you only start with the basic gambits. Other ones are either bought from stores, or found in the field. It’s rather silly. The second problem is that the system is a tad simplistic. I can tell it to cast Blizzard against ice vulnerable targets, but I can’t tell the system to do that, and to stop once the character’s mana level drops below a certain point. Despite these problems, I feel Square did a rather good job with the gambit system.

Travel: The world feels big, and zones feel very MMOish as opposed to the classic moving on the world map. Generally there are more than one correct path between points A and B. There are teleport crystals you can use in exchange for a teleport stone. Balthier also has an airship, but what do you know, it breaks early and you can’t use it for a very large majority of the game. He should have signed up for AAA.

Story: Ah yes, the story. As many have said elsewhere, it feels very epic as the two largest military powers in the world prepare to duke it out, and you are the monkey in the middle. You will need to be patient, because when the game starts off, it is a bit slow until you run into Fran and Balthier. While the story of what is going on around you feels very well done, your individual characters feel 'meh'. Save for Ashe or Balthier, little to none is a good description of how in depth the story goes with each of them. Also, no one actually wears a full shirt, except Balthier, but his shirt is puffy.

In the end, despite all the changes to the standard fare of the series, this still feels like a solid Final Fantasy game.

I'll give my bitch about the magic system some other time, however.

Now if you excuse me, I need to take pics of those losers in front of Best Buy. Also, it has been raining all day, which makes me happy. Good 'ole schadenfreude in action.

Meanwhile, outside of Best Buy.

PS3Line2, originally uploaded by dragonpup.

This was taken roughly 40 hours before Best Buy would start selling the Playstation 3. One can only wonder how many of these are destined for eBay. Good to see fanboyism alive and well after the fall of E3.

Ooo. I think this is an opportunity to share something about myself. For about a year or 2, I was a team leader for Mythic Entertainment's Dark Age of Camelot for the Reaver class. Basically, I communicated between Mythic, and the people playing the Reaver class. As a thank you for my work, I was able to attend Mecca in 2003, 2004, and 2005. The expo was a magnificant deluge of decadence in the gaming industry. I could easily see multiple millions dropped on just the booths for an expo that was supposed to be limited to the industry and press.

Each of the years, E3 got louder, bigger, and smellier(seriously people, shower in the morning and use deordorant. it is not hard.). Walking past Blizzard's booth would often leave a ringing in yours ears, while Nintendo's booth had a sign marking the 6 hour wait point to watch a clip of the new Zelda game. And each year, the signal to noise ratio of legitimate people to EB counter jockies got worse, it was clear that it would be unable to sustain itself. And shortly after the 2006 E3, it had indeed imploded.

Do I have some deep, thought out point about the evils of fanboyism? Nope, just a tale I thought that might be interesting.

Tune in tomorrow when I talk at length about Final Fantasy XII. Unless I decide to slack off and leaving you waiting for more so you visit more often and click on my adlinks(see corporate whore post below.)

I'm a corporate whore now!

Messing with Blogger, I found I can place adsense ads by Google. This is great, now I can quite my job and be a professional blogger chronicling how I am not working.

I hope in 3-6 months after beginning this, the homeless shelter has internet access so I can make posts to my blog or this plan may not work very well...

ZOMG, the interwebz!

So I finally broke down and got a blog. I guess I should start this out by a little bit about me. Well, I'm Henry, 26. and live in Massachusetts working for a large cable conglomerate. I also tend to go by DragonPup, but some dink already took that here. At least I am still #1 on Google, take that wannabe!

I could go on for hours about all of this , but I think we'd all appreciate brevity for this post and learn as we go on. Or until you get bored, and stop reading. Please don't stop reading, I am so lonely :~(. Oh god, I promised myself I wasn't going to cry.