Hey, These Aren’t The Smarties I Wanted

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Rock Band 2 isn’t really going to be a primary game for me, so I’m also back to playing Giants: Citizen Kabuto. I had to reinstall it and didn’t save the old save games (there’s some registry dependency that makes keeping them difficult), but it didn’t take too long to get back to where I was.

After that there was still a variety of other MECC missions to go, including collecting 20 pieces of meat (shades of WoW…) for some cranky old Smartie, sneaking into a reaper base by disguising ourselves as bushes in order to rescue his wife (if the Reapers catch you moving around, they often run up and go “hrh?”, but remain confused), and taking out some strategic targets with heavy weaponry in order to break into a prison. And now I’m apparently off to Torture Tower to rescue this Timmy guy.

So far what makes Giants different is a somewhat offbeat sense of humour, and fairly large, wide-open environments. And the three different types of main characters, but I haven’t gotten to the others yet.

Reigning In Seattle

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I got in a bit of Rock Band 2 before lunch today and managed to finally get a plane, letting me play in North America now. There’s a long ways to go though, as there’s six or so cities visible but still locked.

I also did another music video, and switched to another character for a while so she could earn some money for clothes. You don’t share money with bandmates or stand-ins, so they have to earn it on their own, and I’m going to fill out the rest of the band with my own characters. So far we seem to be leaning towards “nerdcore”…

Not Yet Playing In Fresno

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I made a fair bit of progress in Rock Band 2 tonight, getting a tour bus, a new manager for Western Europe, a merchandising girl, making two music videos, and unlocking a bunch of other cities (all still in Europe so far).

I’m mostly doing the single songs right now, rather than the multi-song gigs. The multi-song ones often have random songs sprinkled in them, so I’ll save those for ‘off’ days to lower the chances of inadvertently running into the same songs too closely together.

Picking Nits Instead Of Guitars

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Didn’t really have time for more than a small handful of songs in RB2 tonight, as I spent most of it getting things set back up again on the PC.

One thing I wish they’d improved that they didn’t is the stats collection. At the end of the songs it still doesn’t tell you things like how many total notes there were, your percentage isn’t permanently tracked, the setlist in tour mode doesn’t show your score, the five-star range is still fairly large… It makes it hard to tell later on which songs you still need to improve at a lot and which you’re already close to the best you can do. (Expert difficulty has the gold stars, but that’s a looong ways away for me.)

Starting From Scratch

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I spent the rest of the night wiping and completely reinstalling everything on my gaming box. Well, not everything; tonight I could only get the OSes (XP SP3 on one drive, 64-bit Vista on the other), the usual updates, drivers, and Spore installed.

Spore was one of the reasons I did this wipe in the first place, since it and Mass Effect hated something about the previous install, and now…it works. No time left to actually play with it tonight, though.

I Wanna Rock And Roll All Evening

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It was finally time to fire up Rock Band 2, and it’s turned out to be more than just another set of songs to play. The solo mode now works within the band’s world tour mode, where you’re gaining fans and stars to unlock more gigs and venues instead of just playing through a bunch of tiers. You also get the option of playing bass and still advancing the tour mode, whereas in RB1 you could only do solo bass in quickplay mode. Some of the gigs are also random picks out of the entire library, RB1 and DLC included.

There are also a bunch of challenges that I didn’t get around to trying; I just played enough songs tonight to unlock a few more cities, but probably still have a long ways to go. The mix of songs seems to be decent so far, though nothing’s really stood out yet.

Somebody Needs To Take My Debit Card Away

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I really have to stop buying more games that I don’t have time to play…

Though I will make time for Rock Band 2, and I wound up buying it today even though I won’t actually play it until I finish off Persona 3. But while I was there I couldn’t resist picking up a copy of Burnout Paradise (it was cheap, and there have been lots of updates), and Spore. Spore was the one I had preordered at Amazon and still hadn’t shipped yet, but I wound up finding a Galactic Edition copy in the stores and canceled the preorder.

Unfortunately, Spore has a problem — it won’t run on my machine. It just crashes when I try to launch it for the first time, and I suspect it’s related to the copy protection system it uses: SecuROM. It’s the same system used by Mass Effect, and that one also won’t run on my system; it doesn’t crash, but it does give me a ‘failed to load’ error when it tries to start.

Usually these copy protection problems are caused by virtual CD drives on the system, but I’ve never had one installed under Vista, so I’m not sure what the problem is. I’ve tested a whole bunch of games on this system, so maybe it’s conflicting with the copy protection or drivers of some other game, but damned if I can tell which one it is.

It’s just another example of how modern PC gaming sucks, alas, but it’s still my preferred platform for a lot of things. Maybe it’s just time for another wipe and reinstall and hope that clears up these problems…

I Don’t Get All The Girls In RL Either

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I hurried through remaining days in Persona 3, mainly working on finishing off the social links I could and a last few weapon fusions. I maxed out the link with Bebe; I didn’t really want to help him sew a kimono, but his was the only one I had a chance at maxing out, and I had to abandon the links with Mitsuru, Chihiro, and Aigis. I was a total of 19 ranks short, out of about 220 total, but I screwed them up early on by spending too many school days working on non-school links when I could have left those for holidays instead.

With Bebe maxed I could get the Yurlungur persona, and I realized that I was also still missing Masakado, and with them the compendium is now 97% complete, and that’s as far as it’s going this time. I also couldn’t do any more of Elizabeth’s quests, since the only ones left are the joint skill ones, and I can’t get past the current one because I can’t make Metatron.

I popped back into Monad for one last grind session to earn cash, since that carries over to a New Game+, but I’ve saved on the day before the final battle, and that should only take one more day to go through.

Okay, Maybe Now I’m Slightly Overpowered

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I found some lists of good fusions in various forums and FAQs, but most take a lot of time, effort, and money in merging a whole lot of steps together, often requiring low-chance combinations that you have to keep retrying over and over and over. So, I just put together a good Helel one, with Victory Cry and Spell Master.

That’s pretty powerful as it is, though; when I also have the Satan persona around, I can cast the Armageddon spell that does 9999 damage to all enemies, which is good enough to kill them all but one special one (which I can’t fight on the first playthrough anyway). Normally Armageddon has a mana cost equal to your entire mana pool, but Victory Cry replenishes all of my health and mana after each fight, so I can keep casting it in every fight. And Spell Master halves the mana cost, so I could spend some mana out of combat and still be able to cast it in the next fight. So, yeah, I’m pretty much unstoppable now.

I also got tired of farming heart items from Messiah, since I kept getting the same ones, but I did at least get one Omnipotent Orb out of him, which blocks all physical and magic damage. Which isn’t quite full invulnerability since I can still take ‘almighty’ damage, but it’s not like they’re going to get a turn to attack after Armageddon…

Anyway, I could continue futzing around with personas for ages. Tomorrow, I start heading for the endgame in earnest. Oh, and apparently Chidori is alive again now, but has amnesia. Original!