Building Up Bonuses

The past few weeks certainly have been slightly more active on the site lately, and even though I said that I would be doing more shorter posts, they seem to have maintained the same amount of content as before. Well, whatever works, I guess. Perhaps that's just my natural amount of work I put into my posts. Sometimes they feel like some of the essays I did in school, in terms of how they're written. It certainly isn't mind numbingly boring or anything since they're topics that I wanted to talk about anyway. Regardless, I wonder if I can break out of my essay-length posting habits? Have them be a once in a while thing, maybe?

Anyway, this post is going to be one of those personal progress posts again, since it's been a while since I did one.

As you can see, I finished Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and that certainly was a fun game. I also finished Space Pirates and Zombies as well, without realizing Chapter 4 was the last chapter. I expected the end to have a little more stuff at the end, kind of like how there was still quite a few battles beyond the point-of-no-return at the end of Infinite Space on the DS. Maybe I'll write a review about Infinite Space too, one day when I feel like reading up on the summaries for it, since it's been a while.

Speaking of reviews, I'm kind of surprised to see how big of a difference I'm seeing in the amount of page views I'm getting for some of my reviews. The Duke Nukem Forever DLC review actually got some decent amount of page views, but Star Ocean: Second Evolution is getting almost 4 times as many views now. It's crazy. I guess that many people are more interested in the game to begin with than some of the lesser known games I've been reviewing, like 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors? I hope some of these people will also check out some of the other reviews I've written and consider trying some of the other games out there too. Most of which I write about tend to be games that I have positive things to say; the exception being Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Also, if you guys haven't noticed already, Diablo III was released, and I played through the free, friend-invite, starter version of the game which leads up to the first boss, Skeleton King in Act 1. I see that they did away with the skill points on skills, and instead, just gave skills a level requirement. This certainly makes the game more newb-friendly, I suppose, where you get to try out all the skills as you learn them from leveling, without getting punished for putting precious skill points into skills you may not even use. For the arcade-y feel, that's probably the right way to do it, but certainly does take away from the MMORPG feel that Diablo II had. What about the equipment bonuses that gave additional skill points to certain skills or skill trees? I wonder if there's an equivalent bonus in Diablo III? Having some really powered up skills might be neat, but with skills not really having skill levels anymore, it just becomes a matter of how effectively you use them in combat.

Anyway, Diablo III is huge. ... file-size-wise. 15.1 GB to install the game, and with how I've been struggling to find a good external hard drive on sale, I had to uninstall and delete a lot of things off of Pugyuu to make Diablo III fit. A lot of which were stuff that I had finished or didn't plan on playing any time soon, like SPAZ, Spiral Knights, Garry's Mod, Counter Strike: Source, Frozen Synapse, Magicka, and some other things that I deemed unnecessary. I'll see whether if I'll be getting Diablo III or not, but... yeah. I don't think I can justify spending $60 for Diablo III right now.

Well, onto the usual stuff.

Kingdom of Loathing - The Bugbear Invasion season run had started, but I've been working on getting Avatar of Boris to level 30 for the trophy. @_@ I just got that yesterday, but while I'm at level 30, I decided that it would be a good time to do some basement diving to get my 3rd telescope upgrade, and get an edge in some PVP fights too with some of these advanced areas. I'm sure as soon as I get my telescope upgrade, I'll jump straight into the Bugbear Invasion.

Guild Wars - So I started playing this again since CrankyCrab wanted to play, and I needed to play it too anyway. So we rushed our Legendary Defenders of Ascalon characters to Lion's Arch, but then we decided to work on Nightfall after that. So now I'm working on my least played character so far, my Paragon, along with his Dervish, while I look for a better party build with heroes. My Elementalist is still having trouble near the end of Nightfall, so I really need to find a team build that works better for the area. Hopefully I'll find some more decent skills throughout the game, particularly Elites... Also, I may consider deleting my other least played character, the Warrior, to make another class that I may be lacking skills with; probably Necromancer.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope - Well, I just unlocked the Arena in Roak, so I'm fighting some battles to rise up in ranks there, mostly to build up the bonus board before I move on to the next area. Just that I haven't had enough time to actually go anywhere with the bonus board that I've built up, with dumb, surprise plans to go out somewhere that inevitably fail. The arena's solo battles are a nice way to get some battle trophies naturally though.

Kirby Mass Attack - Eh, just casually playing through the second world, Sand Canyon. Originally, I was going to try to collect all coins and gold star all the levels, but going for all gold stars got boring. So for now, I'm focusing on collecting all the coins as I play through the levels. The mini-games you unlock with them are very worthwhile; might even be more fun than the main game.