So, another month or so has gone by. Georgia's playing Florida tomorrow and that's always a good game if I remember to watch. Anyway, school's going fine, but getting up at O'Dark Thirty is getting to me. Not much to talk about there.

I bought the original Ace Combat (Air Combat here) and Ace Combat 2 the other day. I've played through the first one and I'm on the last mission of the second game. The first game was a Playstation 1 launch title from back in '95 according to GameFAQs and the second game came out two years later. Air Combat is pretty dreadful, especially in the graphics department. Backgrounds are extremely basic and it's real easy to get terribly lost. The original Ace Combat Canyon Mission (TM) is absolutely terrible because of the graphics: it's nearly impossible to distinguish the two walls of the very narrow canyon so I had a hard time judging turns. The game also predates analog controllers for the Playstation and the D-pad is not ideal for controlling aircraft. Oh, and all your planes get a hideous red and purple paintjob since the series originally had a phoenix logo. It might be the only game in the series where you can pick your missions from a world map.

Neither game has much of a plot. You're a sorta generic but very good pilot hired to put down a rebellion of some sort and they hand you money for blowing stuff up. You can pay wingmen to accompany you on some missions, but it's not worth the money since they suck even more than the guys from AC5 and AC Zero. You also have to pay to have damaged planes repaired or replaced, but it's pretty cheap in AC2; you have to pay full price for a spare plane in Air Combat and you can only have eight at a time.

AC2 added a lot of features that made the game much better, including analog controls. And missiles showing up on your radar, and graphics that are actually pretty good for their age. Planes with different missile capacities also make their first appearance (Air Combat just gave everyone 65 missiles and a ridiculous number of bullets), as do branching missions and named enemy aces. One of them flies a FALKEN and it looks a lot like the superplane in AC5 and AC Zero and he's a real bitch to put down.

It's still missing the ability to look around you with the right analog stick, which I miss from time to time despite hardly ever using it. Also, a lot of planes stall if flown upside down and most of them will stall very easily in one particular mission that requires you to intercept enemy aircraft at a high altitude.

From lennoxmacbeth

1. Comment to this entry saying 'ICONS!' and I will pick 6 of your icons.

2. Make an entry in your own journal and talk about the icons I picked!


1.   This is Rally Cheyenne from the anime and manga Silent Mobius. She's the main characters' boss and a pretty mysterious woman. She's my favourite character from the series and I got this image from a poster or CD booklet or something. It's a peaceful shot of her, which is perhaps a little unusual given her jobs. And her hair is usually a silvery white. I'm using it as my default icon here and at one or two other websites.

2. This is Alouette from the game La Pucelle Tactics. She's a nun who goes around beating monsters (and Prier, the main character) over the head with a Bible. Oh, and wears a miniskirt under her long coat. This is a shot of her being a bit embarrassed and comes up a couple times in the game. I don't use this one all that often.

3. Despite the similarities to the first icon, this is Madoka Ayukawa from the anime and manga Kimagure Orange Road. She's one confusing character with many moods and often acts a good deal older than her supposed age (Middle school. Really.). She also plays a mean sax. This shot of her comes from an image of her embracing her (female) friend Hikaru. Another soothing image.

4.This is Isadora from the seventh Fire Emblem game (the first released for GBA Stateside). She is not the strongest or most durable Paladin, though she gets good speed. Perhaps not the best character in terms of fighting ability or most interesting personality since she joins pretty late and has little personal plot, but I've always had a thing for women in armour. With a little luck, she can be a decent Paladin, but it's just not really a power class. I mostly use this one when I'm posting about games or feeling fighty.

5. This is an Air Force patch for a unit involved with the B-2, I forget exactly how. The Latin at the bottom means 'Tastes like Chicken.' I think I got the image from the Newsweek website and I use this icon when I'm feeling silly or random.


6. My newest icon, this is Quon from the anime RahXephon, wrapped up in a blanket on a snowy day if I remember right. I mostly use this one when the weather turns bad or cold. Like now, when the rain's coming down and there's a flood warning for a good piece of the state.

Well, that was fun. Stuff happened, not worth writing about. Met some old friends, saw some interesting cosplayers, took next to no pictures. Some days make me wish I had no sense of smell, and being around some of the larger and more enclosed crowds in that con definitely makes the list.

I went to a couple panels and they were fun. The hentai panel showed a couple episodes of Ogenki Clinic and it's very funny dubbed. You get some interesting crowd responses in panels like that. The panel on anime princesses was a little Code-Geass heavy even if Cornelia is awesome, but I understand that no one wants to read the Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind manga on a projector. The guys running the panel admitted to liking the manga Kushana a lot and that's cool. Another panel on the Craziest Anime Deaths was also kinda funny in the grotesque way you'd expect, with quite a number of children dying and a lot of Fist of the North Star clips.

I watched the Macross movie and it was interesting; a guy pointed out plotholes afterwards, but stuff happens when you try to cram quite a large number of episodes into an hour and a half. It says a lot about how the fandom sees Minmey that most of the room applauded when Hikaru slapped her towards the end. Her song at the end is actually kinda catchy. Also watched a couple episodes of the Dirty Pair TV series and it's ok. And I also watched something called Cobra: Drive Time that's one ridiculous time travel story where nothing makes sense.

Stuff I bought:
Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory because I loved that particular Gudam series and I wanted to watch the episodes I kept missing while it was on Cartoon Network
Martian Successor Nadesico set because I remember liking the first few episodes and I really want to watch the rest.
CDs with music from Kimagure Orange Road and Utena because those series had great music and it's not necessarily easy to find.
2 volumes of You're Under Arrest; very funny, don't know if there's more.
Iono-sama Fanatics because it's funny, silly lesbian fun and the dealer was selling manga at half-price.
Poster for Momocon because I have some nice memories of that and the poster had the image from a great shirt.

Fun but exhausting, not sure I'd do it again next year.

Just got linked to this from TVTropes and thought it was funny. This goes out to all the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha fans out there:
This is the opening narration to Ace Combat Zero with some Lyrical Nanoha clips. I think it mostly plays on both series' use of the name Belka. Not sure if the names Solo Wing or Pixy have anything to do with it, though.

Oh, and there seems to be another one based on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

So yeah. Been busy lately, and I'll probably get more so from here on out. I'll definitely have less late night stuff, though, because I need to get up early now.

Ah, four sheets to the wind and no one's online for me to talk to. C'est la vie. Anyway, the post title's more or less a line from a song from LEXX. I like that series a little, but it's not my favourite Sci-FI Channel series by any means. And now they've renamed themselves SyFy, which is Polish for syhpilis. What does it mean for LJ that there's a drunk emoticon?

Didn't even have much tonight. A beer with pizza for dinner, some bourbon on the rocks, bourbon + American Honey (bit sticky sweet straight, but decent mixer), and a martini. And that all leaves me singing Jackaroe and other random songs. Oh, and feeling very sleepy. Kinda sad that the best 'warm and fuzzy' feeling I know comes from liquor. Ma... nusuth.


I promise, the teal deer will be back soon. Just as soon as I find something I feel like posting about.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone who doesn't read this journal.

I've been watching Bubblegum Crisis and Babylon 5 DVDs over the past few weeks. I spent a couple episodes with the dubbed version of BGC and it's not half-bad. Nene's English voice is pretty annoying (ok, Nene is annoying, but that's just me), but the rest of it is ok. Some of the dialogue is pretty bad, but it's more a writing thing and maybe a bit of delivery. One small thing that got to me is the Gulf and Bradley executive from the beginning of episode seven: White suit, cowboy hate, walking fat Texan stereotype, not even an half-assed attempt to tack on an accent.

Anyway, the English versions of the songs range from bad to forgettable pop to pretty decent , kinda like the original versions. Hey  Mr. Dandy is terrible in both languages. It's just unsalvageably bad. Never the End is sappy in Japanese, cringe-worthy in English. Rock Me is kinda embarrassing. Say Yes is actually pretty good, as are Victory and a couple others. Unfortunately, most of them are just played in the background for a minute or two and it's very hard to make out the words or make any kind of judgment about quality. They also seem to have fallen into a black hole of obscurity and I almost regret that. They are at least better than the things Anime News Network put up as examples of what happens when you force the voice actors to sing... like the Ranma movie.



I've been doing some poking at Anime News Network and it's pretty interesting what the cast of BGC got up to after the series. Sakakibara Yoshiko (Sylia) had played Taeko Yasuko in the Area 88 OVA and Kushana in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind... and Integra Hellsing. I knew there was a reason I liked Sylia. And Linna's actress was Sumire Kanzaki from Sakura Taisen, Sailor Mars, and Manami Kasuga from KOR (all that threw me for a loop... I must be pretty bad at  placing voices).

I've just finished the second season of Babylon 5 and it's pretty good. Some of my favourite episodes are in this season: Knives, The Geometry of Shadows (and hilarious commentary from Sheridan, Ivanova, and Garibaldi), The Fall of Night. Some of my favourite moments are also in the season: Sheridan spacing a teddy bear, Ivanova dealing with the Lumati ambassador, the Psi-Corps commercial from And Now For a Word, a couple others. Am I the only person who gets cheap laughs by replacing 'telepath' with 'gay' in the context of that commercial? 'The other kids hate me because I'm different and they know it' (or something like that).

Season 3 has a lot of episodes I like and this is where things really get moving. The first two seasons seem mostly about setting up the world and getting the cast into place, which was not helped by replacing the station's commander. Looking through the episode guide, I find a few episodes I thought were in season 4 for some reason. Have I mentioned I have a very poor sense of time?

Anyway, it'll be a good season to go through and I have season 4 after that, which is where most of the heavy fighting occurs. I got it for $25 at Best Buy, which is pretty good. Still hard to believe that it's already been ten years since the series ended. I don't know if I'll buy season 5 at any point. The episodes I've seen were pretty bad and season 4 wrapped up most of the major plotlines pretty well.

Another year older, another year closer to the grave. You've heard all the cliches.

So yeah, happy birthday to me. DeepDiscount.com has a sale on right now, so I ordered the Bubblegum Crisis box set last Friday for just under $30. It just got here so I'll be watching that over the next few days. It comes with a whole heap of music videos for the songs from the series. Great songs, too, if you don't mind a bit of 80s. And the series is very very 80s. Probably won't post anything about it. Great series, everyone should watch it. Well, everyone who likes anime.

I finished Fire Emblem 7 a few days ago. I got all the extra chapters and 32x comes right before the final battle and is basically an excuse to give Hector a huge pile of EXP. Spiral maze filled with Snipers and Generals? Hand him a Hand Axe and a Wolf Beil (got at least two spares from his quest to get Armads) and let him rip. It was a bit of a push to get 32x since chapter 32 has a large map (for this game; it's not a patch on FE4's maps) and Hector walks slowly. Like I said in my last post, I decided to train Nino this time around and she turned out ok, with great dodging and decent Magic power.

Chapter 32 basically requires a three-pronged attack: one group going due north, a second due east along the southern edge, and a third northeast through the mountains. Pegasus or wyvern units can roam at will to take out the long-range magic and ballistas on the map. The northern route has cavaliers, some infantry, and pegasus reinforcements. A well-trained Raven can take it with a little backup. The southern route just has cavalry, which Hector and Oswin can munch on for EXP. The center is a bit odd, but not too bad.

Once you move in on the boss, some Generals will spawn at the fort below her. If Hector or Oswin can move up in time, they'll rip right through them. If not, just use magic.

The last chapter has some tough enemies, who take a lot of effort to kill but drop great weapons. Nergal is a bit tricky to kill, but Athos with Luna is always a good last resort. Same goes for the Dragon, but Hector with Armads and decent speed works at least as well. Anyway, before taking Nergal himself, you have to take out a Druid with a Berserk staff, one of the most dangerous status staves in the game. I completely forgot about that and he hit Dart, my Berserker (yeah, yeah, stop laughing). That...ended messily.

So that wraps up this run through Hector's campaign. I might do Eliwood's campaign some time. Hector has a few extra maps, two more recruitable characters, and a general increase in difficulty. But I don't want to do Hard Mode because it cuts EXP gains down sharply, which is the most BS method of increasing difficulty they could have chosen. Extra enemies, stronger enemies, better equipment for enemies would all have been ok. But cutting down on EXP is just cheesy.

Then again, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones was too easy because it had unlimited EXP available if you just went monster hunting long enough. And had the cash to buy weapons for it. I booted up a Creature Campaign and (almost) soloed the Tower of Valni with Lute (a Sage, and a very good one); I had to take Colm (Rogue; basically a thief who doesn't need lockpicks) along on a couple levels to open chests. Lots of drops, lots of cool stuff. Then I tried to solo the Lagdou Ruins. She can one-hit most Tower enemies, so that was ok. Ruins enemies are a good bit stronger and much much more numerous so that was not so ok unless I just gave her five Fire tomes (200 shots) and prayed for lots of criticals. Also, the Ruins seem to love destroyable walls, which just eat up even more ammo.

Or I could've cheated and used a certain special Dark tome that has unlimited uses and absurdly high power, but the characters who can use it aren't as good as Lute. So, yeah. I'm thinking about running through Sacred Stones again at some point. The storyline's decent for a Fire Emblem game and I don't remember the characters being much more annoying than usual.

Rhapsody's coming along ok. I'm not consulting any FAQs unless I get really stuck, so I'm probably missing stuff left and right. The dungeons are almost all cut-and-paste rooms in two flavours: cave and generic stone. Maybe the cave will be blue coloured for ice or red for a volcano. Enemies are mostly palette swaps and combat is pretty basic. The game layout is pretty interesting: status information and a map on the top screen, actual playing on the bottom. And I only just noticed that you can play with the stylus; Cornet will follow it around the screen and most of the menus are stylus-compatible.

Week and a half until Chrono Trigger comes out.

Can't sleep, so I'll ramble about games. And that emoticon is not at all how I feel on nights like this.

Just one five-turn shopping spree and two or three chapters from the end of Fire Emblem 7. Despite what I said in my last post, I'm training Nino. I gave her the Drops and raised her from level 6 to level 20 in one chapter. Admittedly, this took up a lot of EXP that could've gone to other units, but it was more or less worth it. She's a good fast unit, though plagued by lowish magic growth like all my magic users not named Lucius this time around. And that guy doesn't dodge very well without a cover save due to hideous luck (slightly offset by high speed, but lack of luck can break a dodger).

Vaida is dead because I didn't bother to recruit her. Or rather, I forgot she showed up again in that chapter, didn't remember how to recruit her, and didn't want to play the whole bloody chapter over again just to recruit a subpar character in a class I don't like. For some reason, I just don't like wyvern riders very much. The only reason I used Altenna in FE4 was because she was incredibly awesome and used the Gae Bolg, a legendary weapon that was just as much of a gamebreaker as the others. Pegasus knights are dodging machines and I'm very much partial to those. They're also good against mages because of their high magic resistance, which wyverns trade for higher defense and strength. Or maybe it's a personality thing: I just like Fiora and Farina more than Heath and Vaida.

Anyway, Eliwood has turned out surprisingly well this go around. He is basically a cavalier/paladin with a different job title. He's also pretty similar to Celice from FE4, though Celice was immune to critical hits, got a gamebreaker of a weapon, and had some pretty crazy stat growth. Eliwood is...average, like the cavaliers. And for some strange reason, 'average' stat growth in Fire Emblem either produces stellar characters or nearly unusable ones.

Anyway, I need to get lots of kills for Hector in the next few chapters if I want him to be useful at the end. The main lord of the story is at a serious disadvantage since he promotes so late. And in the case of Hector, his movement is also pretty short so it's not as easy to get him into the action. But I have a plan for the second-to-last chapter that should net him a few levels.


I gave Rhapsody a try today. It's basically a musical dressed up as an RPG. Not a particularly difficult game, certainly not as difficult (so far) as Nippon Ichi's later strat-RPG titles. The art style is closer to La Pucelle than Disgaea and those bloody cats show up. The main character's special attacks are kinda silly: food rains down from the sky to crush your enemies. I'm not kidding. Slices of cake, spiky hard candy, a giant flan, and apparently a stack of pancakes are all options.

The plot so far is about an ordinary girl named Cornet who can talk to puppets who has fallen in love (or just developed a crush on) the local prince and among other things enters a beauty contest dressed in a giant bear costume. Kururu, her companion, is basically Papillon in purple (though I'm pretty sure Papillon wasn't a puppet) and shares her love of giant paper fans. The resident rich bitch Etoile looks oddly like Relena from Gundam Wing for some reason and after meeting her father Sir Rosenqueen, I understand why that store has Netherworld branches.

Nippon Ichi's sense of humour is strongly present. A lot of the jokes are music based, such as Etoile saying 'Money, money, money/ Always sunny/ In a rich woman's world.' It's a decent game if you really really like Nippon Ichi or want a funny slightly odd RPG to pass a few hours. Otherwise, it's just a funny slightly odd RPG that's more a niche title than anything else.