I think I’m shelving Crimson Gem Saga again. I just can’t get back into the game after all this time… I can’t find a single thing the game does superbly. Everything is either moderately bad or moderately good. But I also looked into all of the other things I currently have for my PSP and found that I didn’t really feel like playing any of them at the moment. Maybe I need to just go ahead and grab Persona 1 at the $30 price on download even though I usually set my limit at $20 for a single game on download.

A week or two ago I heard that Gamestop was doing a promotion where you go to their store between a certain time frame and get a quest map for your DQ9 game. The only problem being that they had no stores within 200 miles of me that had the map. I briefly debated driving all that way, but spending $50 on gas seemed a bit excessive. Now I find out that Best Buy is doing a similar promotion, likely with a different map entirely, and they had a list of stores that were participating.

My last 2 weeks have been utterly consumed by DQ9. I completely forgot about all other games for the entire time since that has been released. Forgot about blogging too… Of course, Sam and Max 304 came out today, which punctured by DQ9 balloon slightly. I’ve already finished the episode though, so I’ll probably go back to DQ9 soon. I figured though… While I was at it I should take a small break from DQ9 and try something else different.

Layton puzzle 076 I ended up having to resort to looking at this to solve it because I found a solution even lower, and had to figure out which one they had decided to use of the higher ones. The lower method? Stack 4 tiles as they show, then hold another one perpendicular to the rest, giving you a 12x12 square… Maybe they forgot to say that all of the tiles must be oriented in the same way…

Blizzard had this bright idea recently to make it so everyone exposed their real names when posting on forums and talking across world boundaries. People were predictably upset at this. I think that the perfect time to implement this would be right around September 22nd. That way all the disaffected WoW players will go pick up Final Fantasy 14… Kidding aside, the real question is both why Blizzard didn’t see this coming, and the other is why people are so upset about this, and what alternatives are there?

Books: 9. Temple of the Winds. I read through this mainly because someone on IRC kept preaching about how bad the series was, and trying to pull out the absolute worst parts out of context to prove his point. I’ve read the first 3, so I figured I would give the 4th one the benefit of the doubt. I actually enjoyed this one more than the 3rd one. Games: I can’t believe how many I finished this month… But many of them were really short.

I’ve finally finished this game at 51 hours. Here’s a little mini review. It’s a rather traditional RPG in the Suikoden vein with a huge number of collectible characters. More characters than you could possibly use in fact. I think the biggest battle in the game only uses about 24 out of the 90 some characters that are playable. You actually need to collect 108 characters to get the best ending in traditional Suikoden fashion.

I think it may be time for me to buy new glasses. I’ve had these for 4 years. They are in excellent shape, but I’ve noticed recently that I have been having rather sore eyes. At first I thought it was a cat allergy, but it’s continuing to happen even when the cat isn’t in my room, and we’ve had cats in the house for years. I have been spending long hours on the computer and PS3 recently, but not that much more than normal.

I had to think more about the economics that the E for everyone except me article. What is he suggesting that we do? His complaint is that the market can’t support AAA titles outside of a few genres, but it seems that the real reason he’s complaining is that AAA games in genres that he doesn’t like make games in genres that he does like look worse by comparison. Given this, what does he suggest be done about it?

Awhile back I played a game called Last Rebellion. It was from a small developer who had almost entirely worked on handheld games prior, as well as being a Niche developer even in their native Japan. The game wasn’t great, but it had some interesting ideas and was enjoyable at its $40 price. What struck me about the game was the reviews it got. Nearly every one trashed the game about its graphics.