Yet Another War In Kryta Rant

Yeah, I've been playing GW1 lately.  GW2 just doesn't feel the way I wanted it to.  It should have been a Guild Wars MMO, but it ended up being an MMO in the Guild Wars universe.  Crafting professions were unnecessary, and the auto-debuff system basically means you'll never actually feel like your character has gained any strength at all.

Anyway.

So I finally decided to take another shot at doing the very last part of the second-to-last War in Kryta quest, Mustering A Response, where you escort Livia, Zinn, Blimm, and a bunch of Ascalonian settlers from the Ascalonian settlement to Lion's Arch.  Being a War in Kryta quest, it throws ridiculous numbers of overpowered enemies at you and calls it challenge.  All you can really do is run.  If you stop to fight, you're dead.  In fact, even the wiki article for the quest recommends flagging a sacrificial hero or two behind the party to divert the horde's attention ever so briefly.

After failing it because Blimm died when I was almost there, I got an idea.  All we're doing is running, right?  Let's go with that.  Warriors have an elite skill called "Charge!" that makes all allies within earshot move 33% faster for a while.  It lasts around half its recharge time, but I have a party of six available, all of whom could be configured to have "Charge!" on their skill bar with enough attribute points in Tactics to matter.

Entered the quest with a party of six, all with 12 Tactics and only "Charge!" on their bar.

Blimm died when I was almost there.  Ugh.

A second try would be much more successful, and I was finally, after all these years, able to move on to the final quest in the most horribly designed quest line ever: The Battle For Lion's Arch.

On the tin it looks like a standard "defend the area from waves of enemies" quest.  Which is exactly what it is.  Except for one thing: it's a War in Kryta quest.  Which means every wave is 20-30 enemies.  As it goes further, more and more of the Mursaat's Jade constructs get mixed in, with their frustratingly high armor levels.

I lost count of how many attempts I made.  The furthest I ever got was the wave just after the one with Oizys the Miserable.  When Zinn activates the Spectral Infusion buff way too fucking late to be of any use whatsoever because all the NPCs it's supposed to protect are dead by this point, and the enemies rushing the town are so far out of the remaining NPCs' league that they don't last very long anyway.

I've ranted about War in Kryta before, so I'll summarize what I've previously said:

Up until this point, two enemies with the same name had the same build, guaranteed.  Not so here.  The primary profession is usually the same, but the secondary can and will differ, and the skills they bring will of course vary.

Up until this point, if enemies carried resurrection skills at all, they were rarely used or semi-easy to deal with.  Sole exception going to post-skill-rework "We Shall Return!" in Nightfall.  They never did rebalance Awakened Cavaliers after making that change.  Even then, you can deal with their newfound spammable insta-res, because you're riding giant undead wurms that can siege the fuck out of them.  The War in Kryta pretty much requires your party to contain a Ranger with Frozen Soil to prevent the enemies from using their resurrect skills.

So, what have we learned from this?

1. First, whoever designed the difficulty brick wall for the War in Kryta content needs to be shot.  Repeatedly.  Until they die.  I would say this to that person's face.
2. Second, the Winds of Change content in Factions is probably much of the same.  Probably even the same person in charge.  I haven't yet started it because of the foul smell, taste, and experience of War in Kryta.  Plus I hate Factions PvE anyway.  It was thrown in as an afterthought.
3. Third, this whole quest line showcases horrible design decision after horrible design decision.  It's not just a little bit different, it's completely different from the entire rest of Guild Wars 1.
4. Fourth, I don't know if this is ArenaNet's definition of "fun and challenging", but I assure you it's neither.  It's tedious and frustrating.

Now, let's try to be constructive.  How would I take this War in Kryta mess and produce a balanced quest line out of it?

1. Make sure that entry into the content was willing on the part of the player, and provide a means to pause or disable it without having to complete it, while remembering where the player was if they decide to pick it back up.
2. Tone down the enemy group size.  It reeks of Factions PvE.
3. All enemies with the same name would have the same exact build.
4. No more than two enemies with a resurrect skill per group.
5. Tone down the armor on the Jade constructs.  It takes several minutes to kill one of them, and you get four or five thrown at you at once...
6. Longer pauses between waves.  Give the player a bit longer to recover, and maybe actually let them go pick up some of the items that dropped.
7. Allow the player to put together an 8-person party for the entire quest line, regardless of where they start from, since all War in Kryta content appears to be designed for parties of at least 8 players, which is a bit of a punch in the babymaker since the maximum party size for anywhere other than elite missions is 8.
8. When taking henchmen into War in Kryta, automatically buff them up to level 20 with appropriate armor and skills.
9. Have the auto-resurrection timer be shorter than 10 seconds on The Battle For Lion's Arch when the player has been pushed back to Lion's Arch Keep itself and is resurrecting while still under fire from the spells that killed them in the first place.
10. Make the NPCs who are defending Lion's Arch with you actually have decent armor and skill sets.
11. Do the auto-res thing for all the defending NPCs, not just only certain named ones.
12. A mission effect similar to the bounties received from people at res shrines in Eye of the North, so that death penalty can be gotten rid of without using consumables.  Basically, a bonus every 25 kills.

Azure Tusk

...or, you know, Bluetooth.

With my new phone's ability to use Bluetooth, I naturally wanted to be able to use that.  Especially considering how the network completely mangles the images and audio I send to it via MMS.  I began my quest by poking around various TracFone-related resources for the phone, since TracFone likes to be a little bitch and disable or overly restrict all the useful features on their phones.  There I found conflicting information, both suggesting that TracFone had disabled the ability to transfer files via Bluetooth, and that a good number of people had been using it on a regular basis.

I found way more of the "file transfer via Bluetooth works" sentiment than the "no, it doesn't work" sentiment.  So, I hopped over to Newegg and ordered myself a USB Bluetooth adapter.  Specifically, the IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter.  $8 shipped, with promo code that despite being openly advertised on their website I had to subscribe to and then later unsubscribe from their email newsletter to actually use it.  It arrived yesterday, and so my adventure in getting it installed and set up began.

The instructions that came with it gave conflicting directions for Windows XP.  First, they said "oh, the driver disc has a driver for Windows XP on it".  Next, they said "If you're using Windows XP, go to our website to get the latest driver".  Lastly, they said "or you can just plug it in if you're using Windows XP SP2 or later and use Microsoft's Bluetooth stack, limited though it may be".  Care to take a guess as to which one was the correct thing to do?

Well, I tried the driver they told me to download.  Even though it's for the GBU421 and their site makes no mention of the GBU521.  After installing that and plugging in the device, I got greeted with a Windows Found New Hardware wizard that never produced any results.  So, that wouldn't work.  I tried rebooting, just on the off-chance that it was actually required, and nope, still the same thing.  So, I popped in the disc and installed from that.  Wham, it worked.

So anyway.  Pairing my phone with my computer was rather simple, and I got the non-ass-quality PNG version of my wallpaper transferred.  I then tried to transfer the text message noise I'd made in FamiTracker, basically recreating my old text message noise (the Power Rangers communicator beep) in NES.  It transferred, but didn't go into the ringtones folder because the phone doesn't recognize WAV files for some stupid reason.  So I encoded it to MP3 and it took that.

Then it started acting up and not letting me transfer anything from the phone at all, saying I'd need to reboot, so I did.  Then it worked properly.

Anyway.  The things you should get from this are:

• Install the IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth adapter's driver from the disc on Windows XP, not from the internet, and don't just plug it in and try to use it with Microsoft's shit, because it's, well, shit.
• TracFone-branded  LG 420G phones can indeed transfer files via Bluetooth, and therefore not have to suffer through faggoty automatic-by-cell-network transcoding/lossy compression, and for free.  If any later software version happens to change this, my phone's software version is LG420GHL_V10f.
• People always think that the Power Rangers communicator beep is something from Kim Possible.

Main Screen Turn Off, The Sequel

So, over two years ago, I bought a Tracfone.  I didn't really expect much from a prepaid carrier, but I never anticipated it being as shitty as it was.  Still, the phone worked, so I stuck with it and kept buying airtime to extend my service date.

After a while I realized "hey, Twitter has the ability to post and get tweets via text message" and set my shit up for that.  This would become the primary use of the phone, to check and update Twitter while I was out of the house.  Occasionally I would make calls, but it was mostly text messaging.

At some point during MAGFest, the phone's plastic became cracked.  It had been starting to crack for a while, but it was relatively minor, so I didn't really care.  This crack, though, was a lot bigger and I could see the circuit board inside the phone if I looked at the right angle.  The phone was aging anyway, and I'd seen a newer one at Giant with a $30 price tag and a camera for a while.

I got that phone last Thursday.  Despite not being labelled as such, it was actually $15 with the bonuscard.  For anyone who cares, it's an LG420G.  Took it home and went through Tracfone's process to transfer the number and service from my old phone to the new one, which was actually really easy.  Just fill out a form with some uber-secret values from the old phone and the one identifying value from the new phone, and shit happens.

Things I've noticed:

• It has an external screen for Caller ID and displaying the time/date/signal/battery life.  I still set it to only answer a call if I open it and press Send, though.
• It will actually charge off of a USB connection from my computer, unlike my previous phone.
• Getting used to a slightly different button layout will be annoying.  Both for general use, and text messaging.
• It has bluetooth.
• It has a "web browser".  Tracfone charges 0.5 for each minute of using this, rounded up to the next whole minute.
• It can do wallpapers and MP3 ringtones.
• It can also apparently send email.  Regular emails cost the same as a text message, but I sent a picture via email and it deducted a whole minute and then half a minute.  I assume that the extra half minute was for the time it took to upload the photo.
• The camera maxes out at 640x480, and won't let me zoom it in despite having the option to do so.
• It also came with a TF64SIMC4 SIM card, meaning still on AT&T, meaning still shitty signal in my house.
• It came with double minutes for life, so I don't need to buy that card again.
• Being a new phone, the spring in the hinge isn't broken, so I can't just flip it open with the flick of a wrist like with my old phone.

Regardless, it's a much better phone that isn't falling apart, so I'll take it.  I'm going to save up my money and get the 1 year/400 minute card so I won't have to buy minute cards as often.  Those 400 minutes will double to 800, which should theoretically be more than I need in a year.

Games Where You Launch Something Just To See How Far It Goes

I've mentioned all three of these before, but not really in-depth.  I'm not going to go too in-depth here either, this post is merely to sum up each game and compare them to each other.

Nanaca Crash

As far as I'm aware, this is the one that started it all.  It has specials that activate depending on differing conditions.  Two of these need two of the characters to appear adjacent to each other in a certain order.  The person who makes you miss a target has a special of her own that can change depending on certain conditions, but is fairly difficult to get.  I've only ever seen two variations of it.  You also have two aerial specials, one that launches the character upwards that you can use up to three times, and one that launches them downwards you can use infinitely, but has to charge between uses.

Pros

• Will always have that nostalgia value, for me at least.

Cons

• Fairly difficult.  I tend to prefer "tough but fair" to "unforgiving".  It's far from "unforgiving", but it's not exactly close to "tough but fair".
• Very few people to hit, so you'll be seeing a lot of the same things happen in each run.
• You have to click to activate people's specials.

Katawa Crash

As mentioned before, this game takes Nanaca Crash's formula of people to hit that do different things, some of whom have specials, and one person who can prevent you from hitting people that has a tricky to activate special of their own, and runs with it.  Using characters from the visual novel Katawa Shoujo, plus a whole host of guest characters, this game is pretty crazy.  It keeps the same aerial special formula as Nanaca Crash, but adds the ability to get more "launch the character upwards" uses.  It also adds achievements, because we all need achievements.

Pros

• Crazy.
• Srsly.
• So many things you'll never expect the first time you see them that just make you go "wat" then "lolol".
• You don't have to click to activate people's specials.
• The music is quirky and some on-hit effects depend on your timing relative to it.

Cons

• um.  uh...  hmm.  Can't really think of any, to be honest. (the rest of these were added as I wrote the section for Toss The Turtle)
• Oh, wait.  It's so fun you'll wonder where all your free time went.
• Also, after a run ends, it goes back to the main menu, rather than either going straight to another launch or asking you if you want to go again.
• "RUMBA RUMBA RUMBA RUMBA RUMBA" will get stuck in your head.  Guaranteed. (the song I linked to isn't the exact version of the song used in the game, but I can't find that one)

Toss The Turtle

This game technically came before Katawa Crash, but whatever.  It's similar enough to the other two to be compared to them, but it doesn't follow the same formula.  Most notably, it has a shop where you can buy upgrades that enable you to get more distance.  Most of the stuff you can hit is actually in the air.  There are also quite many ways for your run to end prematurely: vertical ground spikes, horizontal ground spikes, aerial spikes, and UFOs.  The first three can be guarded against once by purchasing the Chest Bomb from the shop, but if the UFO gets you, it's all over.  After each run you're awarded money based on your distance, with bonuses for things you hit during the run, and you can use that money to upgrade the cannon and your aerial specials so you can get more distance and therefore more money.  This game also has achievements, some of which give you in-game bonuses.

The specials work a bit differently.  You have three of them: a weapon that launches the turtle upwards when you hit him, and is aimed with the mouse; a jetpack you can buy and upgrade in the shop that gives you a bunch of horizontal distance at your current altitude once per run; and nuclear bombs that launch you high into the air, that you can buy a lot of and use multiple times per run.  The latter two are activated by clicking their respective icons in the HUD.

In addition, you can control the turtle somewhat using WASD, and the camera follows the turtle rather than being fixed on the ground.

Pros

• A bit of a different formula.  Different is good, after all.
• The music, the first time you hear it every time you fire up the game.  Silence, you fire the cannon, then epic music.  It works quite well.

Cons

• Too much shit that ends your run.  You should be able to buy an upgrade that removes UFOs, and another upgrade that removes aerial spikes.  The ground spikes, in both varieties, are fine.
• The reason these upgrades are necessary: both UFOs and aerial spikes can appear above the highest point that the camera will go up to, ending your run without you being able to see them coming, literally.
• Too much distance between objects on the ground.  There are achievements that add "more stuff", but they take a while to unlock.
• The music, after it loops for the 9001st time.  Basically, once you start it on your first shot after firing up the game, it never stops.  There's no run-end fanfare and then period of relative silence like with Katawa Crash.
• The best weapon to use is actually in the mid-tier: the AK-47.  Sure, the bullets of "The Ultimate Gun" have insane power, but you get so few of them and ammo pickups are rare and difficult to hit.  You can get much longer runs by taking the AK-47 and then feather-touching your mouse button to fire one bullet at a time.  Basically, bigger magazine > individual bullet's power, and the AK-47 has the biggest magazine of all the available weapons.

There you have it, a synopsis of each with pros and cons.  I will leave it up to the reader to make their own decisions, because when comparing things I don't like to go "this is how it is, always, if your opinion is different it's wrong, deal with it, *sunglasses*, YEEAAAAHHHHHH".  If you want my opinion, I'll still give it, and it would be that you should play Nanaca Crash a few times to get the gist of the formula, and then progress to Katawa Crash.

Katawa Crash

Hey, a post that's not about Rogue Galaxy.  A post that explains why I haven't really been playing any Rogue Galaxy at all, and have had trouble doing my post-MAGFest YouTube catch-up.

It's because of the game Katawa Crash.

Katawa Crash is a Flash game based on an old classic called Nanaca Crash, but using characters from the 4chan-made visual novel Katawa Shoujo.  It basically extends on the format of Nanaca Crash, adding a bunch more characters and a wide variety of things that can happen.  For instance, you can score a touchdown, or trigger multiball.  Those are just two of the crazy things that can happen.

Gameplay is fairly simple.  When you start, you have to launch the Katawa Shoujo main character, Hisao.  Click and hold to set the angle, then release to set the velocity, then your round of time-wasting craziness begins.  While it's going, there are two things you can do to alter Hisao's trajectory, to either avoid people whose effects you don't want or to attempt to hit someone with a good effect.  These two abilities were also present in Nanaca Crash, with pretty much identical functionality.

The game has a variety of achievements, tiered into three tiers and labelled with different colored hearts.  The three teirs' colors are grey, yellow, and blue, with blue being secret achievements.  For the most part, you can figure out what to do to get the secret achievements based on their name, but some are intended as surprises and are of the type that will just happen to you eventually, given enough playtime.

There's not really much more I can say about the game without turning this review into a tutorial.  It's fun, and you'll lose a lot of hours to it seeing how far you can make Hisao go before he comes to a stop.

Rogue Galaxy Post-Game Session 10

After getting to the 60th floor last night, I decided to start in on the final 40 floors.  It went fairly smoothly up to and including the 70th floor boss, who had to be hit with a charge attack before he could take damage, but then one use of Drunken Burst and a couple uses of Illusion Sword later, among some other things, he bit the dust.

Then I decided to go out and grab a frozen pizza for lunch, as well as spending leftover money after that on alcohol.  This was a solid decision.  Note that I didn't actually consume the alcohol while eating the pizza.  I'm not about to waste an entire $13 bottle of Kahlua on one meal.

The last 40 floors were pretty much as uneventful as the first 60.  The only real noteworthy thing is that Jaster reached level 99 on the 98th floor.  However, I did have to run in circles to force the random encounters to give me what I needed on the 99th floor so I could complete Hunter Record.

The last boss is named "Doppelganger" and he wasn't really all that difficult.  He has a stance where he spins his sword around and doesn't take any damage, but the AI is actually smart enough to know not to attack during this, so it just becomes "okay, heal up and wait for him to be vulnerable again".  My strategy consisted of having Jaster use Illusion Sword, Kisala use Dagger Slash, and Zegram use Twin Sword, and just keep refreshing them until he died.  I chose Illusion Sword over Flash Sword so I could keep my distance with Jaster in case anything stupid happened and everyone up close and personal died.

The reward for completing Ghost Ship Extreme is Kisala's Swimsuit (her best costume stat-wise, since they do have minor defense value differences), the Beach Sandals (basically, matching max power footwear), and the Royal Fruit, which is used to catch the best insector in the game.

Then, I had Kisala put on her swimsuit (and sandals), and jetted to Zerard where I turned in the complete Hunter Record and got another costume for Kisala, Arina's Sleeve.  It comes with matching boots that are crap stat-wise (Aura Shoes).

Next up, the important thing: getting the Beach Sandals to MASTERED so I can actually make full use of them.  Unfortunately, the game prevents us from doing it the easy way, by feeding them to Toady along with Excelion Shards to raise all their elemental stats by 5 per shard.  The only other way is to fight battles with them equipped and get one point in a random stat per battle.  Which would take several hundred battles.  Which, technically, I could do by clearing my inventory of certain items, rubber banding the analog sticks together, and letting it go on Rosa while I do something else for a few hours.  I guess I could do that.  We'll see.

Regardless, just for the lulz, I got the Aura Shoes that came with the Arina's Sleeve costume up to MASTERED.  Not that I'll ever use them.

One final bit of business: catching the insector that I got the bait for.  Luckily that's not too difficult, I think it's even a guaranteed catch since you have to go through such effort to get the bait.  Still, I used Insector Trap 2 because it said it had a better chance of catching ground-crawling Insectors.  Toss the Royal Fruit in there, go to Mariglenn, teleport to the Gulza Sanctuary Plaza, and plunk that sucker down.  Then you wait.  Wait until you hear a noise and the trap starts flashing.  Open it up and it should be a Dark Emperor, guaranteed.

After that, I went to Juraika and caught a couple random insectors just for the express purpose of playing around with breeding them.  Since information on Insectron is so spotty on the internet, I'm just going to have to figure out most of it myself.  I want to put together a balanced team to properly support my Dark Emperor, and for that I need healers...

Anyway, ending this post here.

Rogue Galaxy Post-Game Session 9

I'm trying to see if I can finish Ghost Ship Extreme in three sessions of roughly 30 levels each.  Since last session was a bit short because I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open, this session will hopefully make up for that and get me to the floor 60 range.

I've read from guides that there are shops every 30 floors, so at last I know I'll come upon one in six floors.

So far it doesn't seem particularly difficult, just long and drawn out.  The boss battles I've faced on every tenth floor so far have been harder than the random encounters.  According to guides I find though, I'm a bit overlevelled, which is Just The Way I Like It™.  Depending on how much levelling I have left as I get towards the end, I might stop progressing upwards and just farm XP for a while so I can max everyone out.

--- session happened here ---

Okay, well, what did I learn from this session?  First, it's completely possible to fill in the Hunter Record for Ghost Ship Extreme on your first playthrough without even specifically trying for it.  Second, heavily armored, hard-hitting, fast-attacking enemies who must be hit with a charge attack before they can be hit with anything else are annoying as fuck.  Third, the bosses in GSE can be spam-killed just like the bosses anywhere else.  The boss on floor 60 is a fuckton of bugs.  No joke.  Rather than hunt down and kill each one individually, I used Jaster, Kisala, and Zegram's Supernova three times.

And that's where I'm leaving it for this session, having saved in the first room of the 61st floor.