It's been a while...

So now that I have keyboard access again, I thought I'd write a blog about some of what I've been playing since May (7 months?!). A lot of it is a bit rusty upstairs so I'll write what I can.

The first game I got absolutely addicted to since Soul Hackers was Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which I played every day pretty much until August, after which I didn't pick it back up until December 5th. I've gotten re-addicted to it, though. That was kinda the idea when I bought the game digitally. Stupid as it may seem, I knew I wasn't going to remember to go grab the cart when I wasn't playing because I wouldn't remember to, meaning when I get addicted to a new game (like the next game I'll talk about) Animal Crossing probably would be done forever.

But I kept playing. What's nice about this Animal Crossing is it lets you customize the town as well as your house and clothes and all that. What this means is you can not only plant flowers and trees but also erect statues and buildings and illuminated arches and fountains etc. This is great because now, every time you visit someone elses town, there really is a lot of variety. When I go to a buddy's town, I may see some structures I'd never seen before and think "Wow, I would like one of those for myself!" This pretty much happened to me when, after I picked the game up again for the second time, a buddy of mine was randomly online and made me visit his town. He had played quite a bit since I had last played with him and his town was quite customized. I was jealous and wanted to make my town as good as his too. This has (apparently) happened to another buddy of mine after visiting my town, too. This is great because I would really like to complete the museum and paintings are SUPER hard to find and having mulitple friends play means more chances to exchange duplicate paintings.

Anyway, Zebes is chugging along just fine. I've put about 178 hours and 15 minutes into the game as of this post, which is an additional 45 or so hours since I stopped playing back in August. I'll probably easily crest over 200 hours in early January. I've been customizing my town pretty heavily since I redid my house and stuffed it full of custom furniture from Cyrus, another feature I've fallen in love with. The idea that there are several variations on the "modern" line of furniture, for example, is great because now my favorite furniture lines can become even more my own rather than seeing someone else's house and going "Oh, you have the modern set too... Yay."

I just realized I wrote a couple paragraphs about interior design, gardening, and architecture in a video game. I'm going to change subjects now before some jocks bust in the door and start beating the hell out of me.

Sometime in July, Shin Megami Tensei IV came out, and I alternated between it and Animal Crossing but mostly played SMT IV. The game grabbed me right at the beginning, with quite a high level of difficulty early on but with some pretty cool story hooks and the demon fusing I've come to love so much. I haven't played it since late July/early August so I'm a bit foggy on the details, but I remember really enjoying trying to trick out my demons. Like in Persona 4 Golden, you get to choose which abilities pass on to fused demons, meaning you don't have to reroll them every time hoping for a perfect combination like in Nocturne (that game would probably be one of the best games EVER if they made it so you could choose which moves to pass on). This meant that I quickly tried to create demons that couldn't even be touched by certain types of attacks, something that was pretty hard to do before you could choose which abilities to pass on. It resulted in several demons that couldn't be hit by anything besides debuffs and Almighty attacks, which can never be blocked anyway. Since the turn system meant that every time one of the enemies whiffed an attack they lost a turn, this quickly made most of the game a cakewalk, besides the occasional difficulty spike here or there. After you get to a certain point about ten, maybe twelve hours in, the game gets pretty easy, which is disappointing because it's still such an interesting setting and has a pretty cool story. I quite liked unlocking more and more demons, too, and tricking them out as much as I could, which is something I've really only done in SMTIV and a little in Persona 4 Golden.

Next up, after messing around with getting a perfect game in Wario Land 3 which had come out on Virtual Console as well as the two Oracle Zelda games, I played Pokemon Y. This was the first Pokemon game since, well, Diamond to make me think I liked Pokemon again! I doubt there will ever be a situation where I catch them all again, unless they stop doing that crap where you have to live in Japan and go to certain events to get certain Pokemon, but oh well. The single player game itself was a breeze, the Exp Share spread experience between all the Pokemon, and if I were into competitive battling, the functions they added would have helped the awful grind that portion of the Pokemon experience has. Alas, I beat the one player game and moved on, not really looking back too hard because, well, meh to the competitive stuff.

I then started a new game in Fallout: New Vegas in Hardcore mode, and was able to finish it in that mode, getting the achievement (one of the rare times where an achievement actually made me want to play a game different, which only took them, what, 8 years? Grats, Microsoft!). I played as a primarily unarmed fighter, because I was going for the "Do 10,000 Points of Unarmed Damage" achievement as well, which I got. It made the hardcore mode of the game probably quite easier since I didn't have to worry about ammo or worry about the fact it had weight now. Really, managing the sleep/hydration/hunger meters wasn't too difficult, it was the fact that stimpaks and food didn't instantly heal me anymore - I couldn't just slam a bunch of needles into my arm anytime I was getting brutalized, meaning I had to play smarter. This was a good thing, since the game actually had challenge again, since all my previous playthroughs besides the first weren't too difficult since for the most part, I knew what was coming.

Fallout: New Vegas is definitely my favorite 360/PS3 game by a wide margin, that's for sure. All I have left achievement-wise is the stupid Caravan card game stuff, which I probably will never do, and some of the DLC ones, mostly in the later DLC that I kind of rushed through the one time I played it.

And finally, I just began playing Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, which is hitting all my nostalgia nodules for Link to the Past pretty squarely. I just pulled the Master Sword out of the Lost Woods, and have quite enjoyed everything the game has thrown at me so far. I don't want to say too much about it yet, other than after you pull the Master Sword from the pedestal, when you re-enter the Lost Woods, the FANTASTIC MUSIC STAYS, which is one of the few complaints I have of LttP, because it's one of my favorite video game tunes of all time.

Whew, that was a lot. The keyboard performed pretty well throughout this update, so hopefully I'll write many more blogs in 2014 than I did this year. Glad I could pump out one more.