And of course I watched the Lions on Thanksgiving. They were more competitive this year than the last few, but they still managed to find three or four ways to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory. Ah well, this is in fact one of the ornaments up on our tree:
I had planned on getting tons of gaming in, and while I got some Elminage (seriously - a new PSP RPG game? Sign me up - I was more than happy to dust the handheld off for that)...
... and Madden and Dragon Ball Z...
... the majority of the weekend was spent doing things with the family. A good chunk of that time was spent on board games of the Uno, Monopoly, Sorry!, Sorry! Sliders and Monopoly: Christmas Story edition.
All in all, we had a really good time. It got cold, there was some standing (albeit light) snow, a lost football game - but also good food, plenty of games and pretty holiday decorations and the completion of most of our Christmas shopping as well. I hope my readers all had a great weekend, holiday or not! Take care!
Glad to hear you had a nice holiday weekend, too! And, yes, it's too bad that it's already over. Oh, well, another four-day weekend will be here before you know it (hopefully!).
ReplyDeleteBTW, what do you think of Elminage so far? I was planning to pick it up day one ... until I read some rather negative impressions on line. Have you been able to enjoy it despite the possible localization issues, etc., or would you recommend against buying it at this point?
Good morning - thanks for dropping by! And I do have a lengthy weekend coming up in my near future. I get Christmas Day off, but work the rest of that week. However, I am off on the 1st and do not go back until the following Monday, so I get a niiiice stretch of working 1 day out of 9. I'm going to enjoy that. A lot. :)
ReplyDeleteI like Elminage quite a bit actually. It's a dungeon crawl, not unlike the older Wizardry games or Shining in the Darkness. There are some concerns so far. I can't make the Face Load option work, and I tried contacting their Customer Service about that almost a week ago now, and I see a lot of people struggling with that feature on various forums. Also, the localization is rough in places, there is no doubt about it.
I have a good deal of sympathy for text-heavy titles like this because there is so much that has to be translated, but there were definitely some odd whiffs (like some of the races being wrong. Humans and Elves work out fine, but if you choose a dwarf, you wind up with something different, like gnome). I have a pretty high degree of patience for those smaller issues.
I will wind up putting up a full pair of reviews here and on Digitally Downloaded *hopefully* by this weekend. All in all, I like it, but there are some flaws to be certain. I think a lot of it depends on how much you enjoy that sort of first-person RPG crawl, but I happen to enjoy the genre quite a bit.
Thanks for the impressions/opinions--I really appreciate them. I'm a pretty big fan of this type of game (first-person dungeon crawl, esp. 'old skool' ones), so I'm guess you'd recommend this even though the localization is a bit busted? If so, I'll probably pick it up sometime between now and the start of 2013. Regardless, I look forward to reading your review of this game at some future point in time :)
ReplyDeleteAs long as the localization issues don't particularly bother you, I'd say to go for it. There are some nice little touches, like the fairly solid automap and the pressing of square button to 'auto attack' instead of having to input specific commands. There are definitely some details that the title could do a better job of explaining to you along the way, and like the old D&D games, you characters can DIE and be gone for good if they don't resurrect properly. I know that sort of thing can really get under a person's skin, but personally I've been enjoying it so far.
ReplyDeleteThanks again, Chalgyr. I guess my biggest worry is that the translation/localization is so bad that it will annoy me due to making it hard to tell what to do next, or make it hard to know what spell does what, etc. It sounds like that hasn't been a problem for you, though?
ReplyDeleteNot as of yet. I'm only around level 10 or 11 at the moment, so I don't have *too* many spells, but they have been pretty clear cut so far. The names of the spells can be odd, but as soon as I put the cursor on them, I see that it heals a small amount of hitpoints or has a high chance of putting an enemy to sleep.
ReplyDeleteMost of what I've seen are odd alignment or pieces of punctuation. One sentence was set up like:
So this is a. sentence and it is badly formed
That wasn't the text or anything, but just an unfortunate bit of punctuation midway. Things like that. Now, some people are far less forgiving on that front than I am, like a couple of the people in here:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=44793547
As an example.
Ah, well, that makes me feel somewhat better, too. I understand why some people aren't happy with that kind of sloppiness, but I'm actually OK with it in certain situations--such as in an RPG that would never make it over here otherwise. Anyway, all of this means I'll likely pick it up soon. Thanks for your help!
ReplyDelete