Life without FFXI so far

These post are pretty few and far between... /slacks.

From the sound of things I'm not missing much in FFXI, and so far I'm not missing playing it much either. It's been a little over a half a month since deactivating and I'm getting by just fine without it. I've been keeping myself busy with other stuff~

I'm mainly playing PS3, and still trying to keep up with TV shows. PS3-wise, it's been a transition from Killzone2 > Street Fighter 4 > Valkyria Chronicles, with some CoD5 Nazi Zombie mode thrown in there randomly when my friend wants to play. Been a while since I've focused on console gaming, but I find it more relaxing now since I don't have to worry about keeping my hardware up to date. Games will continue to run no matter what on PS3, whereas I used to routinely upgrade my vid card in my PC >.>

Street Fighter 4 has been pretty fun and had a lot more replay value than I thought. I'm semi-obsessed with collecting trophies on the PS3, and there's plenty for SF4. They made me want to play through arcade repeatedly with each character and unlock them all. Then there's Time Attack and Survival mode where I just had to keep playing to unlock all additional 8 colors for each char, which also awards trophies~ =D And lastly there's online play, which for any game adds a ton of replay value. I started to try my luck with ranked matches, which use a point system to track how well you do. For the most part, it's fun trying to get my rank increased... though it sucks losing since you lose points too! At one point I got up to 2300 battle points, then went on a big losing streak due to changing characters from Guile to Rufus. As much as I like winning (with Guile), it was getting a little boring and it was nice trying someone new... even if it cost me a bunch of points D=

But lately I haven't played much of SF4 due to picking up Valkyria Chronicles at GameStop for $29.99. It's a steal at that price, but the downside I ended up supporting GameStop which I've grown to dislike in recent years. One of the reasons is due to this one of it's policies that sometimes sells used games as new. I've known that practice existed a while ago, when EBGames was around, when I knew someone that worked there. He used to barrow games from them and then reshrink wrap them and sell as new. I've suspected this practice has carried over to GameStop after the two companies merged, and now seems like it's kinda public knowledge now. Shady GameStop. I also hate how everytime I go into the store I get harassed about trading in my used games or how I should pre-order a game with them. If I wanted to be hassled about buying something, I'd go walk onto a car lot! I just want a game, leave me alone! And I find it strangely suspicious that everytime I go in there to buy a game, and this happens to my friends too, that they always seem just to have 'one last copy'. Are they trained to say that!? I can recall that at least the past times I've asked if they had a game (FFXI WotG, ToA, FFT for PSP) they said it was the last copy.

But anyways, Valk Chronicles was a good buy and turned out to be more fun than I expected. Although I'm still working on it, I do hope that they do make a sequal to it. It has a very anime feel to it (no surprise they eventally made a series out of it), and put a new spin on strategy RPG. Guess I'm a little more open to shooter RPGs after playing Fallout 3. One complaint I have against the game is that I think it's pretty easy. On most levels you can get buy without very much strategy. Most of my losses were my own fault trying to get the level done in as little turns as possible. But if you take your time and not worry about beating it fast, it's near impossible to lose a map.

I've been slacking on TV. I've been keeping up to date only on a handful of shows right now, although I've downloaded others so I can catch up later. I've lost interested in Terminator and Dollhouse and at least 5+ episodes behind on both. For me, a needs to either be story driven or character driven to keep me interested enough to keep watching and both of these shows in my opinion are lacking both aspects. Story driven meaning that there needs to be a central underlying storyline across the episodes. Self contained episodes are fine, but a shows also needs a main storyline. If they don't have that, at least make the character(s) interesting, like House.

Terminator I'm just downright annoyed by John Connor's character. He's just so whinny! Storywise, I lost all interest. There doesn't seem to be any focus and nothing that I would care to keep watching for. I heard that the series does pick up so I'm building my queue so I can get around to it later. I do hope it gets better. Dollhouse also was a bit of a letdown. I've like past Joss Whedon stuff, Buffy and Angel namely, and am a fan of Eliza Dushku, anyone heard of Tru Calling? Didn't think so, it didn't last too long >.> I'm only 3 episodes in, but I don't care enough about either the story or the characters at this point. But I'm still downloading those too.

That's enough rambling for now, until next time <.<;

Tune of the Moment: Nadia Ali - Love Story