Saturday, May 23, 2009

RPG Mania in Full Swing

I seem to be a gamer with polar attitudes, shifting from completely not wanting to play something for a while, to tearing into it like a starving canine on a T-bone steak. The new obsession is RPGs. I've always loved the genre, but the time consuming nature of the genre, and the fact that most of them rely of save points spread out too far apart for casual play, has made the genre ill-equipped for play on the chaotic schedule of a college student. Therefore, I've virtually avoided JRPGs for most of the last year. Now that I've graduated and have a little too much time on my hands while I job search, my schedule is open and flexible enough to allow me to dig into RPGs more easily.

I've been trying to advance my 2nd play of Eternal Sonata, but that first Dolce fight is seriously hard, and level grinding hasn't helped much. I'm taking some time away from it, then I'll check a guide, and do some more level grinding if necessary. I really hate being bottlenecked by one brutal boss. I've been stuck on this boss off and on for months now...

I've been spending most of my play time playing Infinite Undiscovery, which is better than I had expected it to be. I like the battle system, though I'm not as good at this type of system as I am the traditional turn systems used by Mystwalker. I'm taking the majority of the weekend off from job hunting duties and spending it making all the progress I can here. I missed one achievement for rescuing prisoners because I didn't realize there was a time limit for it, but since I need 3 plays for the full 1k anyway, it should be easy enough to get when I play on Hard.

Although he probably doesn't read this, I want to extend a public thanks to jukkakahn for his spreadsheet checklist for the "Compulsive" achievement (available in the x360a forums). It's absolutely brilliant, super helpful, and clearly took a lot of time and effort to make. It really makes hunting this achievement so much easier, so thanks! I'll be sending him a more direct thanks later.

Though I probably won't get it until the middle of next week, I'm almost foaming at the mouth to play Sacred 2. I've heard it has some issues, but this style of dungeon-diving RPG is virtually missing on the 360 (except for the arcade game Arkadian Warriors), and I'm jonesing for a fix on this type of game. Even if it turns out to be mediocre, I'm looking forward to it. Sabre has it, so I might be able to play some with him, and possibly coerce my brother into getting it too.

So, those three RPGs have my immediate focus. Once I'm finished with one of those, I'l like to restart Lost Odyssey. I know I've missed things that would cost me a total of 100 points, so rather than finishing the story and playing through a second time, I'd rather just start over, since I've forgotten a lot of the game's story, anyway.

On the job-hunting front, I've applied for a news editor position at a small local newspaper in Wisconsin. I've followed the rabbit holes to find out who owns IGN (Fox) and Gamespot (CBS) and bookmerked the pages on where to apply for those sites. Neither is currently hiring, but on I'm planning on putting my resume up there anyway. I'll also be sending a prospecting letter and resume to Ziff Davis (owners of 1up, EGM) at the end of the weekend, and I'm looking into headhunters to help this whole job searching along. I'll also be applying to a few government jobs next week. As you can see, I've been busy, and hopefully some of these avenues will develop into something good. I'm also waiting back from Webb to see if he knows anything that could be helpful in my search. At the very least I can say I'm getting a little more comfortable with the job-hunting process each day, though it's terribly boring. I can't wait to have a job and a regular routine LOL =P

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