Rating Pending

I just finished playing Final Fantasy XIII.  I say “finished playing” because I “finished” it two weeks before.  I haven’t enjoyed the extra content in a Final Fantasy since Final Fantasy VII.  I think it helped a lot that I essentially skipped Final Fantasy XII.  I played about 4 hours, felt overwhelmed, and quit.

I have a single tip for anyone who is getting tired of JRPGs, but would still like to get through Final Fantasy XIII:

Read the Datalog

I think there is a lot of storyline lost in translation.  Reading through the story recaps every once in a while will get you back on track.  Also note that the character biographies change as the story progresses.  It’ll put an exclamation mark next to the new stuff, though.  I essentially made it my goal to make all the exclamation marks go away.  It’s felt like storyline upkeep to me, almost.

Anyways, just wanted to mention that.  I approve of the game’s responsiveness, too.  All the previous Final Fantasies had too many black screens while things loaded.  Apparently all I needed was a menu that loaded in a reasonable amount of time…

Photos here.  After five years, my good ol’ A8N-SLI Premium has been retired. It had itself a long run, but it’s now been replaced with the following wolf in sheep’s clothing:

Specs are as follows:

• Lian Li A05NB case
• Asus P6X58D
• Intel i7 930
• 6GB 1600MHz RAM at 7-7-7-24
• ATI Radeon 5770 1GB
• 80GB Intel X25-M SSD
• 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green
• Sata Lightscribe DVD burner (I didn’t know about Lightscribe until now… neat stuff)
• Front panel card-reader/fan controller/temp monitor
• Seasonic X-650 modular power supply
• Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler (It’s huge, but it DOES fit inside the Lian Li A05NB)

I’ve posted a gallery of all the parts and the build process here.

I HIGHLY recommend the Lian Li case.  It’s a joy to work with, it’s compact, and it’s light.  It’s also interesting because the power supply goes in the front, and the airflow is back to front.  This is good because the fresh air hits your CPU first, rather than last.

The Seasonic power supply was also a very nice surprise.  It’s my first modular supply, so it has that going for it, but it’s also very quiet.  I should mention also that the packaging is something worth experiencing.  Totally fancy.

And of course, having an SSD make for some really fast startup times (for Windows and applications in general).

I have been playing a lot of Rogue clones lately. Since the original Rogue is all ASCII and keyboard controlled, it’s a bit hard to just jump in and play. I thought it would be useful to put together a list of the Roguelike games I played as I gradually learned to play.  If you’ve never played Rogue before, and you’d like to try it, this list should be a good starting point.  It will start you with full mouse control and work all the way towards full keyboard control.

Info About Rogue

• Rogue is a dungeon crawler game.  Your general goal is to collect gold and items and defeat monsters as you descend the floors of the Dungeon of Doom.  The ultimate goal was originally to find the Amulet of Yendor.
• Rogue was created in the early 80s.  Check out the wiki if you want to read about it.
• Rogue is turn-based, which is usually synonymous with slow in the gaming world.  With Rogue, though, once you are used to the keyboard commands it can play really fast.
• There are a ton of Rogue clones, termed “roguelike” games.  I built a timeline of the more famous ones here.
• You get one life.  When you die, you have to start from the beginning.
• Most roguelikes are free, and a lot of them are open source.

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Incoming search terms:

• how to play rogue mouse
• rogue game key commands