Video game health restoration, in general

After I finished writing about herbs and health restoration in Resident Evil in a previous post, my mind drifted off like “yeah, herbs are so unorthodox and illogical, unlike health items in other video games wait

And so I began to think about health items in varying other games, and then inappropriately applying them with real world logic. Doing such basically takes a lot of fun and imagination out of them in one regard, but in another regard, creates a whole lot of funny theoreticals and imagery.

Like take for example, food. Food is pretty much one of the most commonly used things designated as a health restoration item in a wide expanse of video game genres. It’s mostly because food is awesome, and for all living creatures, a necessary staple for living. But apply some real world logic to how food is presented in video games, and then it makes absolutely no sense at all. If anything, eating food amidst the throes of combat should probably be considered detrimental in the big picture.

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How to break Final Fantasy Tactics

The following was accomplished on Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions for iPad, but is capable of working for all other iterations and platforms of FFT.

Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty much one my favorite games ever. It’s challenging, has a fantastic story to those invested into the game enough to decipher it all out, and is a long, rewarding journey of a role-player. When they released it for the iOS, I purchased it immediately, and it has been my go-to way of killing time on my iPad when I don’t have wifi, and don’t feel like/ are out of books to read on Kindle. I would be Tom Cruise on Oprah or Nintendo 64-kid levels of ecstatic if Square would go on and re-release FFT Advance and FFT Advance A2 for the iOS in the future as well.

Anyway, the game mechanics allow for the player to grind levels from the very start of the game. Due to the fact that all enemies scale with you throughout the duration of the game, there’s never the disparity of exceeding your opposition and being incapable of efficiently leveling. A popular belief is that if you grind yourself to way too high of levels too early in the game, you basically screw yourself, because some of the boss characters become unbeatably overpowered once their levels and abilities are scaled to match your own.

Such is true to some degree, but in the end, no enemy with a finite amount of hit points is unbeatable, and as long as they’re controlled by a fairly predictable AI, they’re still dog food on legs. Personally, aside from my very first foray in playing FFT, I have never had any difficulty in overcoming the game, no matter how much I have maxed out my characters as early as the first chapter.

Once you break FFT, the rest of the game is a breeze. No boss or any particular fight is necessarily difficult once you create at least three or four completely maxed out characters, because you will be able to run roughshod through anyone if you play your cards right.

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Sexism hypocrisy

I can’t say that in spite of my enjoyment of League of Legends, I’m not an active member of the LoL community in the least bit.  I don’t participate in forums, and I don’t take “the sport” the least bit seriously.  However, I admit that I’m more aware of LoL-happenings on a somewhat regular basis, because I do find enjoyment in LoL-related memes, and I frequent a couple sites that update fairly regularly and frequently, providing me some sometimes ok LoL-related content.  However, amidst the funny pictures is the occasional nod to current events in the League community.  Usually it’s something involving a professional player and their non-League activities.

But recently, there’s been a lot of buzz about a “pro-team” that consists of nothing but female members and is boasting that they’re the first all-female League of Legends professional team.  But most importantly, they made this overly-produced promotional video of themselves, that the community has apparently taken a great amount of relish in ripping apart and making fun of.

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Is commitment the key to greatness?

Generally, when I think about myself and what I’m doing with my life, I like to think of myself as a pretty versatile person.  My interests are pretty varied, and I like to think that having versatility in my knowledge, talents and things I like to do is a good thing, and I still do think such holds to be true.

But at the same time, I don’t particularly think I’m necessarily the greatest at any one thing I do on a fairly regularly basis.  I work out every day, but I’m not massively muscular, chiseled or have unlimited stamina.  I play League of Legends on a fairly regular basis, but I’m not going really reach a level where I could become a professional or anything.  I make stuff for a living, but aside from the attempts to be humble about it, I know I’m not the greatest graphic designer on the planet.  I’m a pretty involved baseball fan, and still do a decent bit of baseball-related writing on a regular basis, but I’m not really going to get to a point where I could brog about baseball for a living, or make my own publications.

Long story short, I’m involved with several things, dabble in many, but I don’t necessarily think I’m truly great at anything in particular.  And sometimes I wonder if I want to be great at something, I need to fully commit to it, and give it my primary and majority attention and effort.

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RPG logic lol

For some reason, I was thinking about the original Final Fantasy, the super difficult original one on the NES when you didn’t recruit four black belts and spam your way through the game. The game was so difficult, that while trying to grind out levels and gold in one of the many ogre/creep forests, I got to a point where I was LITRALLY. Going back to town and using the inn after every single battle.

By this logic, at least three years worth of in-game days were consumed just so I could buy Steel Armor and CUR3 and FIR3, while Garland was probably getting tired of waiting for the Warriors of Light to just fucking show up already so he could begin his time cycle of destrucity.

RPG logic is funny like that; your characters are already supposedly the “chosen ones” or “destined soldiers” or at least the most skilled and qualified persons to be going on all these world-saving quests. You’d think that they should kind of _come_ with all the experience and gear they needed to do their job, but instead we as the players have to spend endless hours and countless in-game days to develop our characters as if they were newborn babies. Figure that.

Yes, this was an update to my facebook at one point, but I liked it enough to brog it.  Deal.

Sexism logic fail

Game is perceived to be sexist due to the fact that male protagonist must rescue female from the forces of bad.  In an attempt to nullify the perceived sexism, the game is re-created (plagiarized) with the male and female roles reversed.

…and this is considered NOT sexist how?

Murdering a murderer for committing murder doesn’t solve anything.  In the end, you still have someone who committed murder that is still alive and standing in the end, and is technically probably wanted by the authorities.  It’s a little extreme of an analogy but I think it’s valid; people who hack video games they think are sexist, and make a game where females rescue males aren’t solving anything either; in the end, they’ve produced a sexist game themselves.

Over the last few weeks, there’s been some buzz on the interwebs about sexism in video games, and two particular instances where people have hacked some classic Nintendo games in an attempt to fight an imaginary fight against sexism in video games.  One guy hacked Donkey Kong, and reversed the roles of Mario and Pauline, so that the player plays as Pauline who has to jump barrels, hammer living fireballs, and climb ladders to rescue Mario, who has been kidnapped by Donkey Kong.  A week later, someone hacked The Legend of Zelda, so that you play through the entire game as Princess Zelda, in the quest to gather the pieces of the Triforce and defeat Ganon and rescue Link.

What we have here are people attempting to fight against perceived misogyny by employing misandry.

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Imagine eSports playing sports games

Yeah, I know I take a lot of time and use a lot of words to criticize professional gaming, but really it is very silly to me, and I have a hard time grasping that it’s become so big.  It’s watching people, playing video games; sure it takes talent, but I could watch people playing video games in lots of places.  And based on the frequency in which I see ads for “whatever regional world championship tournament” when I’m playing LoL, it’s hard to imagine that any one particular title has any meaning.

But the funniest thing for me is when I see pictures of the tournaments, and they’ve got these pretty grandiose graphic treatments, and they try to present the matches as if they were like an actual sport.  Out of all of the live graphics that they use, none of them stands out more to me than when a LoL tournament goes to the effort to present a startling lineup card, much like it would be in an NBA or an NCAA game, since it’s five starters.

And then it got me thinking about how LoL positions would compare to basketball positions.  I would use the analogies as such:

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