Programming Contest

I know this isn't exactly video game related, but I just have to brag a bit about it. Yesterday night, a friend of mine and I won our division in a programming contest put on by our college's computer science club.

The contest was a series of 5 problems composed by one of the proffessors, and each team of two people was supposed to write a program for as many as possible. The winners were whoever got the most working programs in, with how long it took them being used as a tiebreaker.

There were 2 divisions - one for people who were in or had taken programming I and those in programming II (me!), and the other division was for people who were in programming III or above. Both divisions got the same 5 problems.

There were 3 teams there in my division, and of the three I believe we were the only one to turn in any working programs. Not only that, though, but we also turned in a second ... and we were going to turn in a third but the formatting wasn't working (we looked it up later and it was the first thing we tried). So, officially we got 2 programs in and by my count we got in 2.5, compared to the 0 or possibly 1 of each of the other teams in out division.

Furthermore (and this is the part I wanted to brag about), not only did we beat some of the teams from the higher division, but also if we got that third program in then (not counting time) we would have been tied with the best people there, since nobody got in more than 3 working programs.

So my friend and I got 2 GB flash drives as prizes (as did the winners from the other division, and one guy who was paired with an alumni because there was an od number of people). Far more valuable to me, however, is the right to brag about it ... now I just have to think of who to tell next...

Halo 3

I finally got around to playing Halo 3 the other day, and it's better than I though it would be (definitely better than Halo 2). For starters, they brought back the pistol and assault rifle from the original Halo, and they also fixed my biggest complaint about the previous two in the series: the flood. For ages I have hated them and avoided with a vengeance anything that would make me fight them, but in Halo 3 the flood are no more annoying (to me) than any other enemy.

Then again, I think I heard that the difficulty settings in Halo 3 are easier than the corresponding setting in one of the other 2 Halos. Actually, what it might be is it seems like the damage of, well, pretty much everything has been boosted, so enemies are easier to kill (but you die more easily). Whatever it is, the flood take 1 melee attack to kill (and I believe that in the previous Halos most of them took two).

Then again, it might have something to do with the fact that you can now rip turrets off of their mounts and run around with them...

Whatever the reason, I plan on going back and re-beating everything on a higher difficulty setting, since the first (and so far only) time I played through it I beat the normal campaign in 2 days while dying only, maybe, 5 times. Plus, the first time I forgot about the movie after the credits, and I want to see it...

MMORPGs

Recently my friends and I have gotten into finding free MMORPGs online and playing them. We've found some pretty good ones, and one in particular is extremely addicting (even though it is technically just a MMO).

For those of you who don't know what a MMORPG is, it is short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, and it includes games such as EverQuest and the now infamous World of Warcraft.

But about that one MMO, it's called Ogame and the point of the game is to colonize planets and gather resources. In fact, I am logged into it right now, waiting for my colony ship to arrive at the next planet I want to colonize (so that I can have a stopover point to allow my warships to travel between my planets in Galaxy 1 and my planets in Galaxy 3).

Ogame, though, is very popular, as evidenced by their 33+ servers for the english version alone, and the fact that the server I am on has something like 7,000 accounts on it (of which I am ranked somewhere in the vicinity of 4,800th after starting a few weeks ago)

Two other games that have proven to be rather addicting as well are Metin 2, an asian-themed fighting game where you mostly run around in the middle of nowhere looking for that one more monster of whatever type you need to kill, and Rappelz, where you run around on similar hunts but the focus is less on finding the monsters as it is on killing them.

These 3 games are all very fun as well as completely free (the companies that run them get their money from having an option to pay real-world money for in-game advantages), and for me the only downside is that for a couple of them the installers are somewhat annoying to deal with (as with Rappelz how you need to run the updater BEFORE you double-click on the icon it puts on the desktop or it makes you reinstall the game), but Ogame in particular has proven to be so addicting that it is becoming an inside joke among my friends and I who also play it.

Final Fantasy 12

About a month ago I got a game called Final Fantasy 12, but it took me a week or two to start playing it. My advice to you is to just not get it unti you know you are going to have a lot of free time, because it is one of the most addicting games I have played.

The plot and characters are fairly typical of the newer Final Fantasy games (androgynous 17 year-old boy and his various friends run around killing monsters and people to save other people from them). The gameplay, on the other hand, is what is so addicting. Unlike the other Final Fantasy games, you run around and can actually see monsters (and avoid them or not) whereas in previous ones you were just walking around and after a random number of paces you get attacked by monsters.

Plus you have the gambit system, which allows you to give your characters AI and then fine-tune it. My characters, for example, are set to immediately attack any hostile creatures that they can see, as well as to heal each other and various other, somewhat hard-to-explain things. In boss fights, for example, I just turn on what I call my 'boss gambits' and so they have 4 or 5 spells that they automatically recast after the duration runs out so I can focus on the tactics of the fight rather than watching all of the effects that are on them all the time.

There are some really cheap effects in there, though. Thing is, the game is designed for players who use them, so if you don't, for example, cast bubble on your characters to double their health for about a minute, your characters will be dying a heck of a lot more than they should be. And if you don't resurrect your characters after they die then you will run out of characters in no time during many of the boss fights and possibly even during the non-boss fights (and that would be VERY embarrassing).

It is a fun game though, and actually the only thing stopping me from playing it right now is the fact that I really want to improve my win:loss ratio in Minesweeper (another extremely addicting game that you should play if you haven't already).

Computers

Recently I decided to start building my own computer. Mostly because my current computer's video card is integrated into the motherboard (which means that to upgrade it I have to buy a new motherboard too).

I just got the first part today, the case, and I must say that it is a sexy beast. It's huge, with lots and lots of room inside, and the best part is that it's solid aluminum, which means that it is only 15 pounds. The really cool part about that it that my friend Eric got his solid steel case at the same time, and even though the two cases are about the same size his weighed 42 pounds.

Both cases are totally pimped out, too - they have locks one them, Eric's has a drawer, they both have built-in blue LED lights, and so on.

Now we just have to get jobs so we can pay for all the other parts (quad-core processors don't come cheap, after all).

Battlefront 2

I recently went off to College, and I am staying in the dorm, which for me means that I am staying in a suite with 2 2-person rooms. As luck would have it (whether this is good luck or not) two of my suitemates are big video game players. We set up a TV and several video game systems and started playing games.

Now, I always knew I wasn't the best at Halo or Halo 2, but I thought I was pretty good at Battlefront 2. Apparently, though, I am not as out of all the games of Battlefront 2 that I have played with them the least that I lost by was 2 (out of 150) and the average is something like 50.

And of course it doesn't help that one of them (the one I usually play against) has been shooting at the AI between classes so that he can make the various upgrades permanent (when you perform some significant accomplishment, such as killing a bunch of people with a shotgun in one life, you get an upgrade such as your shotgun that does twice as much damage).

On the plus side, though, I seem to be getting better. I can actually kill him sometimes, and I am losing by less these days, so I am going to turn up the difficulty all the way (which isn't much - I think the options for it are 'normal' and 'hard') and practice on them for a while. Then maybe I can win a game or two.

Call to Power 2

Recently, one of my friends and I were talking about turn-based strategy games. More specifically, he was talking about how when he plays Civilization 4 (I think it's 4) the English or the Iroquoi always kill him.

I, personally, don't really like the Civilization series. I bought Civ3 a while back and played it for a while. I like the diplomacy function, and the hunting for resources was cool, but militarily and technologically speaking I suck at it. If I focus on building up my army, my enemies defeat me with a few advanced units. If I focus on technology, my enemies defeat me with an army of fairly low-tech units. And if I focus on both my army and science my enemies defeat me with a lot of advanced units.

Nowadays whenever I want to play a turn-based strategy game I turn to Call to Power 2. I think it's pretty old (don't know how old exactly, though), but despite that I still like it. You can adjust the map (how much water, focus on continents or islands, etc) and it's pretty challenging. Plus it's customizable - when you start a game or anytime in-game you have the option to open up the editor and change just about anything that you like. Want to switch to player 2? Give yourself a few tanks in 2000 BC? Maybe you don't like the terrain?

If you have a thing about cheating, there is another option that you might like. There are 4 built-in scenarios, my favorite being the world map one. The other 3 are where you have some sort of mission, and you start with at least a bit of an army, and so on. The World Map is a regular game, except the map that you play on is as closa a replica as possible to the world. Plus, each player starts at a location that represents their capital city. A word of advice, though: don't play as any european country in this particular scenario: our of the two world map games that I have played recently the AI players  both times have featured 4 nations based out of europe, plus Russia (their capital is near Europe).

As you can probably imagine, things get pretty crowded in Europe during those games. Which is the main reason why I like to play as Japan. That way, without cheating I can gain control of Japan (duh) as well as China, the islands south of India, Australia, Alaska, and Northern Canada without having to fight for them. After that, I focus on science, don't pick any fights with anyone, and by the year 0 I am in the modern age and and very close to being able to develop the units for my favorite tactic for conquering cities: have aircraft carriers launch some bombers which then proceed to destroy all or most of the defenders in the offending city, and then I have my helicopters fly in and drop paratroopers directly into the city. It's far from a foolproof strategy, but it's a lot easier than having a bunch of tanks drive through 3 countries to get there.

All in all it's a fun game, with a lot of stuff to do, especially in your cities. You have to worry about crime, pollution, happiness, production (both of whatever that city is building and of food), science, and managing the area around the city. And, the game has some pretty interesting end-game technologies - underwater citites, hovering tanks that can fly over shallow water, even a unit that is basically a city on tank treads (with lasers).

X-2 New Game Plus

During this past week I talked one of my friends who has beaten Final Fantasy X-2 to give me a new game plus file, so I have been playing that. I already am in chapter 2 and have gotten one of the Leblanc Syndicate uniforms.

In a new game plus (at least in X-2) means you get to keep the percengate of the game that you have completed as well as your money, items, Al Bhed primers, garment grids, and your dresspheres (and how far you have progressed through them).

It really changes my tactics, since I prefer to use a dressphere that I have not mastered yet, so since my friend maxed out the white mage and fighter dresspheres for all the characters I never use them. Also, since I get to keep the abilities they have learned, I can easily defeat bosses. For example, when I fought the final boss of chapter 1 (I believe it is known as the YSLS-0), it was oversouled (more powerful, drops better items, etc). I waited a litle bit for Rikku to steal from it, and then I had her swap dresspheres to gunner so that I could unlock her dressphere's ability (cast 'flare'). One casting dealt over 6000 damage to it, and I looked it up later using my copy of the strategy guide, and apparently the oversoul version of the YSLS-0 has a little over 4000 HP.

Then there was the everyday monsters I fought while I was training Yuna to be a black mage. She was equipped with an item that reduced all her MP costs to 0, so I could just blast away with all her most powerful spells all day and not have to worry about her MP. Plus, she has a dressphere equipped that lets her cast her white magicks in battle without changing dresspheres.

Next, Payne is currently learning the Alchemist's Elixir ability. She had already maxed out all her other alchemist abilities while my friend was playing, and so at any point during battle she could create (for free) any kind of potion, ethers, remedies, phoenix downs, and even mega phoenixes (revives your whole party). I didn't have to worry about healing inbetween battles, since I usualy just have her mega potion the party around the end of each battle (mega potions heal 200 HP to all party members, and my people still don't even have 1000 HP)

But there is the occasional downside, as you apparently keep your progress through the mini-games: there is this one part of the game when you must score 500 points or more on a mini-game called 'Gunner's Gauntlet' in order to get 100% completion (and my friend gave me a file with 100% completion). All the dialogue said I had to beat 500 points, but the objectives said that I was on level 2 and had to beat 590 points. Thankfully it wasn't difficult, after my first game, and I easily scored 638 points even though I made a few mistakes.

Finally, there is the matter of the money. Apparently you run out of things you need to buy somewhere near the end of the game, and so I inherited over 1.2 million gil (one character you meet paid 100,000 gil to buy his shop)

So I am a bit better off than most people starting a game, but not as much as you may think - when you start a new game plus your characters' levels are reset to 1 (so in the battles at the beginning of the game you can't use your really powerful stuff as you don't have enough MP).

Final Fantasy X-2

All my playing of FF2 recently made me start thinking about FFX-2 and how I have never gotten around to beating it. So I started playing it over the weekend (I was going to start a new game, but I don't particularly like the beginning and I found a save file on my memory card from just after the beginning, so I used that).

I started this at level 4, but now I am level 22, and (to be honest) I am farming a bit. If you don't know what farming is, it's where you fight weak enemies that have no chance of victory so you can collect gold and XP and whatever. Right now I am in the moonflow area just south of Guadosalam, mostly fighting those wierd chimera things (I think they're called Protochimeras). Yuna has almost mastered Black Mage, Rikku has almost mastered white mage and is learning thief, and Payne ... has worked on thief but is now learning gun mage.

I am going to start the missions again sometime soon, if only to get the dark knight dressphere (I looked it up in the strategy guide and it looks really cool). Another reason for starting the missions is that all the areas I can go to are now rated 1 or 2 stars (out of 5 possible stars - a way of rating the strength of the monsters in an area). Finally, since I have been wandering around Moonflow for a while, I have run into a few oversoul Protochimeras and from them I have acquired something like 4 NulFrost rings and 3 NulShock rings (which is good, since you only have 3 people in your party and they get nothing from wearing more than one NulFrost ring or whatever), and basically the only foes areound there that give me useful amounts of gil and XP are shell shockers (they are a fairly strng monster in that area but no one seems to know that - not even the people who made the strategy guide), so I am thinking of going back to Macalania Woods or the calm lands to fight some of those amorphous blob things.

Right now the main reasons I am fighting are for the AP so that I can max out Black Mage and whatever and for the gil, because I believe that the shop in Guadosalam has a couple of pretty good items that cost something like 15000 each (I have about 12000 right now).

After I stopped playing X-2, I played other games (most notably Chrono Trigger), and I got used to not dealing with the chain of attacks thing that X-2 has. It took me a little bit to get used to it again, but now that I have it's pretty fun. Basically what this is, is anytime you deal damage to a foe before they have recovered their stance from a previous attack it will do more damage, and if you can get a whole chain of these things they should keep increasing in damage. One of the funnest things to do with this is (if I can time everything right) where I have Rikku attack as a thief (so 2 attacks very close together, starting the chain and dealing maybe 200 or 300 damage), then have Payne shoot the thing with her gun mage pistol, another attack for something like 150 damage, and finally have Yuna hit the thing with a firaga or something to deal another 1000 or so damage.

Since I have my experience from farming in this area on previous occasions as well as the official strategy guide, I can plan my moves pretty well (I already have Payne's special dressphere and I have paid off something like 12% of Oaka's debt through buying the generic potions and things that I need. For those of you who haven't played X-2 or never run into Oaka, he is a merchant who borrowed a bunch of money to buy a shop right next to a tourist attraction ... right before it sank and the surrounding forest started dying. You meet him, and if you let him stay on your airship until he pays off his debt you can buy potions and things from him at a higher price than normal, but once you have spent 100,000 gil there his debt will be paid off and he will start selling the same stuff at lower prices than other shops. Eventually, later in the game, he will take back control of his shop and then start selling some very good items at reasonable prices ... but only if you helped him pay off his debt.

Personally, I just go to him to buy the potions and antidotes and whatever that I usually just carry around in case my white mage(s) run out of MP or something, and I usually finish paying his debt before the end of chapter 2. (I don't rememebr exactly when since it's been a while since I played).

Actually, though, Final Fantasy games in general (in my experience) tend to get your level back where it should be pretty quickly if you do the missions, by having the XP given to you by monsters increase very quickly as they get tougher and have the XP required to level up increase just as quickly. I already mentioned that I am at level 22, but I probably should be level 10 or so, and the amount of XP required for my characters to level up will keep them from leveling up for a while, and pretty soon I will be only a few levels above where I should be.

Basically, I think that the thing holding me back from doing missions right now is that the only one avalable takes place in the ruins of Zanarkand, and I don't feel like going there right now. Spira (the world X-2 takes place in) has so much bright, cheery places and challenging battles in it that I don't want to go to what is (I believe) the only dark and gloomy place in the world. Plus, I believe that it has some pretty unimpressive foes, since it is the third mission in the game. I am not sure, but I think it doesn't even have much of a boss fight...

Personally, though, I am looking foreward to starting a new game plus, which is where you can use some file or something in the game clear data to start a new game with all your dresspheres and probably some other stuff. Your levels, thankfully, are reset to 1. The thing I am looking foreward to about it is the possibility for me to do the first couple of fights as something other than a thief, a fighter, and a songstress (I don't like songstresses - they seem pointless and they can't even attack. Black mages can attack with their spells, and white mages heal people. Songstresses just temporarily stuck your enemies into darkness or something). It will be really run to do that first boss battle as a couple of dark knights and a white mage, or something (dark knights do  that thing where they sacrifice HP to do lots of damage, white mage heals them. repeat).

I will have to beat the game first, though, and I am looking foreward to some of the later boss battles. The ones around chapter 3, for example, I believe some of them at least have something like 10,000 HP, which should make for some interesting battles.