Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)

I've spent the last hour and half trying and failing to do a mission called "n.o.e". It's very annoying indeed, especially because there's no good reason why I'm failing all the time - it's just flying a plane - but something always go wrong every single time I try it. Gah.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)

Hooray, I stole the helicopter without cheating or anything. Parachuted in out of a cropduster, grabbed it, escaped. After that the mission got awkward, but I did it first time. Then I managed to get the key card I needed from a girlfriend. Then had to turn off the console because there wasn't time for another mission before America's Next Top Model.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)

No, I can't steal that helicopter.

Stupid game.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)

A good few more missions done.

I was having fun until I got to an annoying one that involves stealing a helicopter from a military base, which made me growl.

Still, I seem to have played for five hours since I restarted the game last night, which is quite something.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)

The wait for GTA IV got too much this evening, so I had to start this up for the first time since 2006. Three things shocked me most -

1) The graphics look jaw-droppingly horrible for the first two minutes. This new generation of HD gaming has spoiled me. Luckily, within a few minutes I'd forgotten the technical deficiencies entirely.

2) The aiming on the Dual Shock stick is completely awful. Didn't really notice until I tried a shooting mini game in an Ammunation, but, ugh.

3) I can remember huge amounts of the map. Gun locations, safe houses, Cluckin' Bells, etc. I don't know all the map, but I'm sure I shouldn't remember the layout quite so well two years after I last played.

Anyway, it still plays brilliantly, it's great and while the aiming was never good and the years haven't been kind to the graphics, everything else has stood the test of time immensely well. I was worried I was going to destroy some precious memories, but I didn't. Yay.

And I completed the mission I'd been stuck on when I last played. Hooray!

Singstar '80s (PS2)

You know, I can't sing. I really, really can't sing.

But I can rap.

The Reverend Run would be proud of me.

Gran Turismo 4 (PS2)

I'm not sure what possessed me to play this after all these years, but it may have had something to do with the double bill of Cars and Talladega Nights that I watched last night. I decided to clear some Beginner Events, as I'd not played in a long time, so ended up spending all 180,000 credits I'd built up to buy and tune three new cars - a Volvo S60, a Ford F-150 and a Lotus Esprit.

The tuned Volvo - which I bought because it's the nearest thing to my real car, an S40 - ate up the FF championship without a problem.

The F-150 - which I bought because Ford marketing infected my brain when I was living in Houston - didn't much like going round corners, but was still fun to drive and won every race I put it in. All three of them. I can't find any more yet.

The Lotus - which I bought because it was the best MR car in the used car showroom - isn't so good. It's not as fast as some of the cars it's competing against and I can't afford to tune it any more. Oops.

Singstar & Singstar Legends (PS2)

It took a while, but I found my PS2 component cable, my two Singstar mics and - after a good long search - the little box that goes between the mics and the PS2. I took the blue mic and my better half took the red one. Several hours later we'd exhausted both Singstar Legends and the original Singstar disc.

One thing became very, very apparent over the course of the evening. I can't sing. I simply cannot sing. Not one bit. Asking me to sing is like asking a blind man to do a paint by numbers. I just don't understand what I'm meant to do. There's a bit missing in my brain. I get the right sort of pattern - everything goes up and down at the right time, mostly - but I can only hit notes through pure fluke. I don't know how to tell what's correct or what my voice should be doing.

I do have good fun, yes, but it's somewhat demoralising. Sometimes I wish someone could explain it to me and then I'd be able to do it, like long division. But I think it's like riding a bike. Either you can learn or if, like me, you've got no sense of balance, you'll never be able to do it.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)

Ten months since I last visited. I've just spent a good couple of hours doing bugger all. Mainly just cruising round the map listening to K-ROSE. Killed a few people and got wasted a few times, but that's to be expected.

It really does look a bit a shit these days, but who really cares?

Dragon Quest VIII

Final completion time 63:18.

And I know there was a whole sub-game I missed out.

Ending left one or two things dangling, but was nevertheless most excellent. A real, proper ending to the adventure.

Moments of frustration, yes. But in the end no boss actually took me more than two tries, as far as I remember. (I think looking for boss tips in the FAQ was a bad thing, given that I finished below the recommended level and without any of the uber-powerful items and weapons it said I should have with me.)

So apart from odd difficulty spikes and having one boss at the end of a long dungeon, it was all very well put together. Great stuff overall... as long as you're willing to push on when it threatens to become overwhelmingly frustrating.

Dragon Quest VIII

I did it!

I only went and bleedin' did it!

Thirty-nine minutes it took. All my skill, all my cunning. Items and abilities and spells and attacks. Omniheal! Kerplunk! Sage's stone! Oomph! Kabuff!

I was magnificent.

Oh man, there's not many feelings like seeing that bastard (who looked a lot like me, disturbingly) go down.

Ignore what I said earlier.

Best game ever!

Now to see the end! Well, I assume it's time for the end after that...

Dragon Quest VIII

Six minutes. That's how long he took to kill me.

I barely scratched the bastard.

I don't think there's anything I can do about it, either. His attacks are too powerful. If I play a purely defensive game without trying to hurt him I'd still die. He just throws more damage around than I can deal with.

So I guess that's it. All this way and I'm not going to finish it. Sixty two hours or so and that's it.

Really, what the fuck it the point of upping the difficulty so much at the end? It's a long enough game as it is. It really, really doesn't need to stretch itself out by getting you to level up for hours on end.

It's Vagrant Story all over again. An object lesson in how to ruin a great game. Just make that last boss easier and I'd have had fond memories of a great game with the odd annoying bit in. Now I'm just going remember it with annoyance.

Okay, okay, because it's been so long, I'll try it one more time. Maybe the game will adjust the difficult or something now I've lost once...

Dragon Quest VIII

HEY! WARNING! I'VE NOT GONE INTO SPECIFICS, BUT IF YOU'RE PLAYING THE GAME YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO READ THIS ENTRY, JUST IN CASE YOU THINK IT CONTAINS SPOILERS! OKAY?

You have been warned.

ARGH!!!!!!!!!

HOW MANY FUCKING BOSS FIGHTS ARE THERE AT THE END OF THIS GAME????????????

WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE IN ANY FUCKING WAY ANY FUCKING FUN AT ALL????????????

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Again, I say it!

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bloody hell, really. This is just stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Okay, I've just checked a FAQ and I'm now at the final, real boss fight. Unfortunately, it's apparently a much harder version of a battle I only just scraped through earlier. As I used items in that battle that I consequently no longer have, I'm not at all sure I actually sure I can win this battle, at least not without about many more hours levelling up. (I've been playing for about seven hours today and my main character has gone from level 38 to level 39. That's how slowly levels come at this stage in the game.

After I got past the boss I was moaning about earlier the game got good again for a while. Why? Because it wasn't just throwing stupidly powerful enemies at me to slow down my progress, that's why.

Argh. Argh. Argh. Argh.

Right, okay, let's try this boss...

If I can't kill him after over sixty hours of playing this stupid bloody game I'm going to be even more bloody annoyed than I am now. Why? Why ruin a perfectly good game like this? It's just difficulty for the sake of it. I don't want to have to wander around places I've already been for twenty more hours building up experience and money. I don't want to be at a complete disadvantage because I didn't build my characters correctly right from the start, didn't look up alchemy FAQs to get all the receipes for the best weapons, didn't cheat the casino.

And, let's face it, I've been doing fine. But why throw all these bosses at the end of the game? And that bloody test of how well you remember the story that came in the middle of them? Why? Why? Why?

Hmm, should probably go back to the top and add a spoiler warning.

Dragon Quest VIII

Fifty-nine hours.

I'm really not enjoying it any more.

I've got to the last boss - well, so I assume - and I've not been able to kill him. I guess he's got multiple forms, as these bosses generally do, but I hope he hasn't because I've not been able to kill the first yet.

You know, I started today's play with a boss fight. And if that had been the end of things then I'd have really enjoyed the game. But, no, the bastard developers decided to shove in an extra dungeon - a very long dungeon, which the boss is at the end of - and a difficulty spike.

I want to have fun and see what happens to everybody in the end. I don't want some huge challenge, especially not at this point in the game. This should be the glorious finale, not a teeth-grinding annoyance that I'm only prepared to put up with because I've got this far.

Mind you, I left Vagrant Story at the last, impossibly difficult, boss, but I really, really want to finish this. I just don't want to have to play this horrible fucking last bit in order to do so.

Dragon Quest VIII

Fifty-four hours.

Things are coming closer to a close, I believe.

Not there yet, though.

I must say, the story is a lot more compelling and a lot more, well, more like a story than at the beginning of the game.

Only one boss this evening. He didn't seem to difficult, but with a few more points of damage from him on a couple of occassions it could have been different. And it took a while, because he had a lot of hit points. I really didn't make my early game choices too well, so things are more difficult for me than they should be, I think, but not enough to really annoy me. I think that generally the balancing in this game is really very, very good. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it had some sort of adaptive difficulty built in. It would explain why the boss fight strategies I checked online didn't work for me and why everything seems to be just hard enough. Either that or my play style - explore everywhere but don't specifically stay anywhere to level up - is the expected method of going through the game.

Dragon Quest VIII

Got past that boss. Took a couple of attempts, but I got there. Totally ignored what the boss tips in the FAQ suggested, as the strategy put forward there just seems impossible. I don't know how often the boss used the status-cancelling ice attack when they played, but it used it every other turn or so when I played, making psyching up impossible. I got there in the end, mind, though I did have to use some items I'd been hoping to save.

Ah, well, got there. And then it was straight off to a tough dungeon, with another boss at the end. So, yes, the boss I was having trouble with was a sort of start-of-dungeon boss. Insanity! Luckily, the end-of-dungeon was pretty simple, not having any annoying attacks.

After that, I was rather at a loss, so I wandered around the map for a while until going to get a hint from, er, the place you can go to get a hint. (I know I say this diary may contain spoilers, but I'll avoid them where possible.) That pointed me in the right direction, so I went off where I'd been pointed, found some new, tougher enemies, realised it was ten o'clock and went back to a town to rest up and save.

Fifty-two and a half hours in now. There's not a lot of the map I've not been to, as far as I can tell, so maybe I'm getting close to the end...

Dragon Quest VIII

Fifty hours now.

No, still not done. Not by a long way, I don't think.

I got to a boss who slaughtered me in about six turns. Ouch. I assumed it was a battle I was meant to lose, you know, they happen in RPGs now and again. But it wasn't. Somehow I was meant to win it. So I went back. And lasted quite a long time, but half of that was me hanging on hoping for a miracle while half my party lay dead.

So I decided to look on GameFAQs for boss tips. Before I got that far, though, the section headings made it obvious that I'd missed out a huge chunk of the game.

A-ha! That'll give me an item I need to deal with this uber-boss!

That's what I thought.

I was wrong. I checked the first sentence or two of the section I missed, which got me started, but I didn't really get anything for doing it. Just a sub-quest, I suppose. I wonder if I've missed many of those?

I've gone up a level now, though, so maybe I'll be able to cope with the boss now. Maybe. I don't know, though. It had incredibly powerful attacks.

Dragon Quest VIII

I've played for forty-seven hours and sixteen minutes.

That's nearly two complete days of my life.

Dragon Quest VIII

Hmm. I didn't think this worked off the hard drive, but someone on a forum said it did, so I copied it and it does. Hooray for even shorter load times! Putting the disc back in its case I found the FFXII demo, which I'd completely forgotten about. I'll have to try that sometime.

Anyway, another five hours. Started off with a boss fight that went on ages but which wasn't too stressful. Lots of wandering around and exploring. I did one dungeon and then got to another one, but it was proving a little tricky and my resources were dwindling, so I used Evac to get out and then used Zoom to get back to Farebury, because I'm a cheapskate and it's got the cheapest inn. I'll try the dungeon again tomorrow. I got to a bit where I couldn't progress and so would have to backtrack to try and find a switch or lever or cutscene or something to let me go on.

I did die once this evening, actually. Just out in the field. Wasn't my fault. Some enemies have a spell that goes through your entire party and has a small chance of killing anyone it touches. I'm not sure what the odds are of it wiping out your entire party in one sweep, but I bet it's high. Not high enough to stop it happening to me, though. I lost about 3,000 gold because of that, too. It's not like I've ever got much cash, because I never sell anything. You never know what you might need. And I can never remember which items are greyed out when using the alchemy pot. Anyway, I did buy Yangus his first new weapon in about thirty hours this evening, so that was nice.

Dragon Quest VIII

Forty hours in. Still so no sign of it coming to an end. Nowhere close.

Didn't help myself by getting stuck in one spot for well over an hour earlier. I thought I was missing an obvious solution to a puzzle and when I found it I assumed I'd kick myself. Instead, I felt like kicking the game because it turned out I'd tried to do the right thing but rubbish controls had meant that it seemed to be impossible.

(Basically as soon as a moving platform stopped moving I'd step off it, even though I wanted to continue walking across it. I assumed the game was making me step off it in a kind of mini cut scene way, but no. If I left the controller for a while and waited for the camera to stop rotating round and then tried to move I walked across the platform without a single problem.)

Still, it got me more XP so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Anyway, after that sticking point everything went smoothly and progressed nicely until now, which is bed time. Tomorrow I know exactly what I need to do when I switch on, which is nice.

The translation is great in this game and there are some ace voices but, oh my, some of the accents are utterly awful. In a kind of brilliant way. One in particular today was just so, so terrible. It was ace.

Dragon Quest VIII

So I made my way back to the boss. Luckily, the dungeon before him hadn't reset, so it was pretty easy to get back to him. A tough fight, but I defeated him. And then, as is the way of these things, he transformed into a different form and splatted back to church. So I decided to try one more time to kill him. As luck would have it, he doesn't reset back to his earlier form so I only had the second form to deal with.

I checked the boss tips on GameFAQs, which scared me. I hadn't set myself up properly, didn't have any of the recommended attacks or weapons and thought I was going to die. I nearly did, too.

We were twenty or thirty turns in. My main healer was on the floor dead and my secondary healer was near death and running out of magic, fast. He could have died that turn but the boss chose another target. And after the boss's turn it was my turn. A fireball in his face and then a huge scythe chop and... down he went! I couldn't believe it.

Far easier than GameFAQs had led me to believe... though I could have died had things been slightly different. I guess I was a bit lucky.

Anyway, after he was defeated the game got back to normal... more or less. Harder now, for reasons I won't go into, and darker than it's been previously. Things are getting serious.

Thirty-seven hours in and still a lot to do.

Dragon Quest VIII

Not played it again but I did go to GameFAQs to see if it was possible for me to do this fight.

Apparently, I'm at the exact recommended level to do it. Hmm. One problem seems to be that my main character is a boomerang user, which means damage is spread across multiple enemies. Great out in the field. But not so good against a boss.

Anyway, I'll try again. If I was way too low level I'd probably have binned Dragon Quest VIII now. I've still got loads to do, too. I didn't check to see what it was, but this boss fight is part 41 of the FAQ and there are 67 parts in total. So I've probably still got fifteen hours or more after this boss.

Maybe I should just give up and accept the fact that lengthy RPGs aren't for me any more. I'm too much of a magpie gamer.

Dragon Quest VIII

Oh hooray.

A lengthy dungeon followed by a boss battle far harder than anything else ever seen. And when you die you start off from a church in the nearest town, so I'm going to have go through the dungeon every time I want to try to kill the boss again.

I have no idea if I'll even be able to at this level, or whether my tactics are at fault or whether I just need better equipment.

Suffice to say, I did hundreds of hit points in damage to the boss without it blinking while it used its three goes per turn to stamp me into the ground.

Dragon Quest VIII

I've just met the most intentionally annoying character in RPG history.

No, make that gaming history.

No, make that plain, simple history.

Luckily, I doubt I've got to put up with him for too long.

Dragon Quest VIII

Thirty hours in now without any sign of the game coming to an end. It's just huge. Good thing it's such great fun.

There's nothing I can really say about it that's not full of spoilers, though. Even if I said I'd just got access to a... no, better not. Or that there's a... yeah, better keep quiet about that.

Dragon Quest VIII

Well, after an hour or so picking fruit and arranging furniture in Venture I decided to play some Dragon Quest VIII. I played it rather longer than I'd meant to, because it took me about an hour to get to a save point after I decided I wanted one. Partly my fault - going to where I thought there'd be one, not where I knew there was one - but still.

Phew. I'm exhausted. By the time I finally found a church and inn I was on my last legs. My health wasn't too bad, but my magic points were pretty much exhausted, which was making fights much more tense. Under normal circumstances I'd have used to Zoom spell to get straight to a save point - I wasn't in a dungeon - but I've just got a new mode of transport and I'm not sure how that reacts to the use of Zoom spells. I guess I've got to find out some time, why not tonight? I don't know. Maybe I subconsciously wanted to play for as long as possible.

Anyway, I'm safe for now, but I've got a long journey into the unknown next time I play.

Dragon Quest VIII

Another couple of hours.

It's a really great game and tonight the time between saves was pretty much perfect. I wouldn't turn it on if I had less than two hours to play, though.

Anyway, I got past the sticky bit and went through a 'dungeon' and - because of my wrongness last night - I think I know exactly what to do when I restart tomorrow. So everything's worked out okay.

Dragon Quest VIII

Well, Boling Point and Ridge Racer 6 arrived today. I was trying to decide which to play first when I remembered how many unfinished games I have. And not games that are unfinished because they're too rubbish or too hard, but games I love but have stopped playing.

So I leapt back into Dragon Quest VIII, which was dangerously close to being left forever for no reason. Played it for another hour and a half, but now I'm stuck. I've got to go somewhere, but I've no idea how to get there. I don't think I got any clues when I last played a few weeks ago that I've forgotten, but it's a possibility.

I think I may have missed an entrance to a passage somewhere I was a while back. I'll go back and check, but the game's stupid save system means I haven't got time to investigate properly tonight. I wish there was just a quicksave option you could use at any time.

Dragon Quest VIII

I've just played for four hours or so without doing any story stuff at all, just exploring.

I've actually got ahead of myself, I think, and visited places I'm going to have to return to when the story requires it.

I've just got to where I should be, story-wise, though, and I've saved. I'll dig in a bit later, after my eyes have had time to recover from extended screen-staring.

And I hate being really proud of a reciepe I've made up only to find it written down somewhere five minutes later.

Dragon Quest VIII

Well, I'm home on New Year's Eve as a result of plans falling through and the Tube strike, but I don't really mind because it's given me more time to play Dragon Quest VIII, which is quite incredibly excellent for no obvious reason.

I mean, the music is superb and the graphics are lovely, but as far as I can tell it's not doing anything more than millions of other RPGs. In fact, the story is actually weaker than most RPGs. So why's it so playable, joyous and addictive?

I have no idea whatsoever. It's very strange. Must be secret herbs and spices, or something.

Dragon Quest VIII

I cannot think of a single thing to stay about this game...

Um...

It looks very nice...

And...

Monster designs in particular are wonderful...

Er...

It's very playable...

And...

Very traditional...

And...

Um...

Nope, there's really nothing to say about it at all. Except maybe to moan about having to go back to town to find a save point. But that's less of an issue now I have spells that let me teleport around. (Not that I've used them much, unless one of the party's dead I tend to run everywhere so I can get some more of that lovely, lovely XP.)

Dragon Quest VIII

Popped it in for a 'quick go' that lasted well over three hours.

Seems like a decent RPG, if nothing very special yet, but the almost complete lack of save points is an act of utterly idiocy which may well mean I don't play it much once I'm back into a normal routine and not sat on holiday.

Why can't we at least have a suspend option if there are any actual reasons for us not saving anywhere we want?