I was listening to the Gamers with Jobs podcast again this week and heard one of the things that annoys me to no end. They first talked about another game, saying that it was “really good once you get to X hours in” at which point they said that they hate it when people say “FF13 is a great game once you get 30 hours in” because their opinion is that that means it isn’t a good game at all.

Finished FF13. 61:49. That places it fairly low on the time costs for a Final Fantasy game recently. FF9, FF10, FF11, and FF12 were all longer. Still one of the longer RPGs I’ve played recently. It was a bit odd though. The first form of the final boss… It didn’t seem like I was anywhere near beating him, and I was in full out heal mode (3-medics) when I beat him.

The series of Clannad is a bit divisive, and while reading it I read a number of things on both sides of the debate. There were some that found it uninteresting and quit a few episodes in, there’s legions that thought it was the best series ever, and still others who thought it was just altogether bad. Given that some of the people I go to for anime advice panned it, I probably wouldn’t have watched it if not for the fact that it was on Netflix watch instantly.

Fairly active month for games and video, but not very active for books. Only managed to get half-way through one book. Probably because I was reading it on paper instead of on my phone. Games: 7. Dragon Quest 5: I’ve already posted DQ5 Review on my site. 8. Sam and Max: The Tomb of SammunMak: Yet another great episode of this season of Sam and Max. The astral projection gimmick was great, and even though the rest of the toys weren’t as good as the first episode, the whole of the storyline was excellent.

The day after I finished Dragon Quest 5, I also reached the final boss in Final Fantasy 13. Of course, as is the case most of the time in Final Fantasy games recently, I wasn’t able to beat it on the first pass. This is actually pretty unusual for me. Dragon Quest 5 was one where the final boss went right down. Most Grandia games, most Dragon quest games, even the older final fantasy games I was able to finish the game on the first try, but starting with FF9, I’ve had trouble either with the final boss, or with battles leading up to the final boss.

They make a good case, on gizmodo , trying to replace facebook using a distributed network of sites. Of course, others have rightly stated that really, the web is already a social network. There’s tons of sites for doing individual pieces of what facebook needs. The main problem I see with that vision is that it doesn’t seem like we have unified privacy and access controls across sites. I can publish stuff and share it on google reader, but the only ones I can give access to read and post to it are other google reader users.

I finally finished this one. It just goes to show how incredibly slow I am at completing games. This one was released in February of last year… What can you say about DQ? The entire series is considered Casual in Japan, and is the gaming equivalent of comfort food. It has many features that modern rpg gamers consider to be throwbacks and hard, but as a whole the game isn’t a huge challenge.

I was busy this month on episodic games mostly. Only managed 1 book.Books:8. The Multiplex Man, James Hogan. Interesting book for being written in the very early 90’s. Talks about the US turning into a green socialist monstrosity, while the former Russian held countries went off into space without us, and had significantly more freedom.Games:3. Wolfenstein 3D. Played the PS3 version of this. Took about 8 hours to get through all 6 episodes, but I was trying to be thorough.

I’ve started using Google Reader on things. It makes everything so much more convenient and reduces the amount of time I spend on the internet… I just started putting my video series I watch into RSS as well, under a separate folder…The next step, of course, is to get all of my comics in, relieving me of the drudgery of hitting comics pages that have no updates, or trying to remember the last time I read all of my comic pages.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/30/steve_jobs_claims_ogg_theora_attack/I think Apple, if they hadn’t already crossed over into the evil category, has definitely done a cannonball into lake Evil with this one.And this…http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/html5-video-in-internet-explorer-9-h264-and-h264-alone.arsIt seems like Apple and Microsoft are definitely stepping up their collaborative effort that they’ve been doing while pretending to compete through the 90’s and 2000’s…