25
Jan
2020

We’re making progress filling that microSD up.

categories: RPGs; word count: 361 words

I decided to pick up the Atelier Arland series deluxe pack to have on hand to be able to play portably with Bub, as did I decide to pick up the Atelier Dusk series deluxe pack for the same reason… and I also got the Atelier Firis game on the Vita for that same reason, not knowing that the first two sets of these games had been released on the Nintendo Switch when I made the decision to get them, and not knowing that Atelier Firis was actually available on the Vita. The deluxe packs might have taken awhile to download on a decent connection, but we eventually did it, and I’m glad that I eventually did come to the conclusion that I should make those purchases. Bub likes games where you go out, scavenge, collect items to make items, and I like cute games, so these intersect in an awesome way for both of us. Each game also has about a hundred hours worth of play time if you play the base game through and then turn around and do some of the optional things in the game, so there’s also that… meaning that if we have them on a portable console we can take them with us to doctor’s appointments, on commutes, have them on hand in waiting rooms, so I really saw no downside to making sure that we have the Atelier franchise in portable form once I realized that we could actually do that. (And I mean, I can get past the whole “timed” aspect of these games. I can.)

The Atelier franchise is adorable enough that I can look past them being timed. Seriously, folks.

I know that I’ve mentioned the bane of my existence in the gaming world being timed games, not being allowed to explore to my heart’s content, but if the game is cute enough, I can manage to look past that. This is an example of a franchise that allows me to do so. Now, I might still voice complaints about the timed aspect of the games making… certain things difficult, but I can manage to look past that for these games.

24
Jan
2020

Persona 5 Royal: DLC for the price of a whole game.

categories: RPGs; word count: 347 words

And because of brand loyalty and my child’s cute face, I’ve been suckered into buying it.

This did spawn a bit of an interesting discussion amongst people in a chat that I frequent (friends? I can call some of them friends): games that I play with Bub. I don’t mind playing some slightly higher rated games with him, seeing as how he’s autistic and internalizes a lot of the experiences much differently than a neurotypical child his age might. A lot of conventionally frightening things do not frighten him. In fact, many of them amuse him. Things that “go bump in the night” don’t bother him one bit. Zombies make him laugh. Although I take care not to play particularly bloody or violent games with him because those games tend to bother me as much as the idea of playing them with him bothers me, there are certain games that may carry a slightly higher rating that I don’t mind playing with him on my lap or beside me, although that depends on the specific game itself… I put a lot of research into games before making the decision to play them with him. For instance, I care more about games that have characters heavy into cigarette or drug use. I care more about games with plots that involve child abuse or child death. Among the Sleep might be the only game to date that I have banned in our household for reasons having to do with plot. But Persona? I don’t mind that.

Well, except for the bit about “DLC for the price of a whole game”. I minded that, let me tell you. I really did.

But let me tell you, I wish that the DLC for this had been released as just that: separate DLC, and not for the full cost of a game. I feel like this makes those who plays Persona 5 play twice for it just for the DLC, and I feel like that penalizes the biggest fans of the game and the series… the ones you want to keep coming back.

23
Jan
2020

In case anyone is still wondering, yes…

categories: RPGs; word count: 449 words

Lightning Returns continues to annoy me, but I am going to see it to the end.

At some point. I’m not quite sure when that point will be right now, but I will see it to the end.

I suppose one of the biggest annoyances about games like this is that I like to explore and find things on my own time, and having the perpetual annoyance of a literal “Doomsday Clock” there reminding me that I only have so long to complete certain tasks (unless I want to fail the game and have to start all the way over) is literally rushing me around, and at that, forcing me to rely on a walkthrough when I mean, I could have just moseyed on around at my heart’s content… at least until, or unless, I needed one. There’s the fact that I want to see this whole storyline to the end, having liked both Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 as much as I did, even though I liked both of those games for different reasons. But one of the biggest annoyances to me, if not the biggest annoyance, in a game is being forced to do something on someone else’s time, even though Chronostasis does make it a bit easier to… stall things, by literally stalling things (by literally stopping time for relatively short increments, even though you have to “earn” that by killing so many enemies that you have enough EP to stall time, which can be a bit difficult to do at certain points in the game, is this just me?).

Timed missions, I can tolerate. Where nearly the entire game, or the entire game, is timed, not so much.

Maybe I should have mentally prepared myself for this by mentally preparing myself for this.

For the multiple reasons that I have written about, I do intend on finishing this at least once, but I think that is honestly all I am going to give this game. This will probably actually be my least favorite Final Fantasy game for that one reason, and that one reason alone: the Doomsday Clock forcing me to practically rush through the game so as not to mosey on through so slowly that I actually got a Game Over and had to start the entire thing over again because damn it, that is what I like to do in games when you give me the chance, I do like to explore if you let me. And clearly this entire game is structured around not letting you explore because you have a clock constantly reminding you that the world as you know it is going to end in how many days?

22
Jan
2020

Something hilarious that I noticed.

categories: personal; word count: 244 words

For a little while, when I was checking my “DNA Story” in Ancestry, it had my ancestral computations as:
“AngloSaxon”
“Celtic”
and “German”.

Just those things. That amused me to bits. I’m not even going to lie.

I thought that they were going to keep things that way, but when I went to check on them the next morning to see if they were going to continue to name things… that way, everything was back to the way it had been. (“England, Wales & Northwestern Europe”, “Ireland & Scotland”, and “Germanic Europe” for me. I wish my DNA Story was a bit more interesting given what I’ve seen other people’s Ancestry results to have been…)

I like to periodically check my computations in both 23andMe and Ancestry to see if anything has changed, because they have been known to change as more research is done as to where genes are most likely to have come from. And it’s still interesting to note that Ancestry thinks that I am a quarter Irish and Scottish, whereas 23andMe is convinced that quarter is Germanic. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my DNA is getting into a fistfight as to where this portion of my ancestry actually comes from, and I stay living for finding out where that portion of my ancestry actually comes from, because it’s amusing to study this, and it’s just as amusing to note the discrepancies between 23andMe and Ancestry. I am that kind of person…

21
Jan
2020

Another reason why I hate smoking.

categories: personal; word count: 452 words

When I was a young child, every adult that lived in my household smoked cigarettes.

I distinctly remember being bullied, and made fun of, because my clothes smelled like cigarette smoke no matter how thoroughly they were washed. Peers of mine that I wanted to be friends with were actually told by their parents that they were not allowed to play with me, or befriend me, because of how… thoroughly I smelled like cigarette smoke. They made sure to let me know this. I knew that I smelled like cigarette smoke because I could smell it on my clothes even after they had been washed. This continued to persist well into high school, although I did manage to make some friends who would associate with me during lunch and while we were on campus together. (I think by that point, people just assumed that I was the one smoking and that was why I smelled like cigarette smoke, rather than the smell being secondhand as a result of the adults that I was living with smoking in the house. I didn’t realize that, or even think about it, until well after I had graduated high school, but it would not surprise me if a large swath of the student body had just begun to assume that I was the one smoking at that point or speculated that I had just picked up the habit myself.)

One of the memories that stands out in my mind was me, as a young child, asking my mother — who was one of the household members that smoked the most — if she would “stop smoking so (that) I could have friends”. It pains me to think about that, let alone the fact that as a young child I felt like I had to ask her this one small thing, something that was, comparatively speaking, reasonable. It wasn’t as though I was asking her for extravagant material possessions. I was just asking her if she would stop smoking so that I could stop going to school smelling like cigarette smoke. Unsurprisingly, her response to me was to refuse, and then to tell me that she too was bullied at school, and to try to console me about being bullied… when she could have helped mitigate the fact I was being bullied, and that students were being told by their parents not to associate with me or to be my friend, because my clothes reeked of the stench of cigarette smoke.

My mother was diagnosed with a metastatic brain tumor at the age of fifty-nine stemming from lung cancer, likely brought about from decades of smoking. She died at the age of sixty, a year out from initial diagnosis.

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