A Princess' Princess: DARK CLOUD 2

SO...I PICKED UP LEGEND OF ZELDA...
I love RPGs, can we ever say that enough? I mean, really, they're my favorite. I don't always have the patience for them, but I do enjoy them. You can draw a pretty neat little line between RPGs and...whatever Legend of Zelda is...and I'll say "Yes, I enjoy that genre too." I guess it's like an action/adventure dungeon crawler? Or something?

 Even Link isn't sure what game genre he fits into.

Anyway, that's kind of beside the point, the point is, Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle in areas outside of the USA, right?) is a pretty awesome RPG that I played A LOT back in the era of the PS2, and if anyone caught wind of my previous post about what I'm up to as far as video games are concerned, they'd see that I'm uploading a Dark Cloud 2 Let's Play to youtube! Presently there are three episodes up, I have two other episodes I need to put up in the near future, and more to follow (naturally).

Check that out here!

Even more to the point though, is that I noticed some similarities, and some dissimilarities between Dark Cloud 2, and Nintendo's masterpiece, the Legend of Zelda, like they both have princesses!

 Respectively here and here.

What do you mean they have nothing in common? What if I told you that they both used magic? Still nothing special? What if I told you both of them lived in a castle? Okay, so a little sarcasm here and there, and the two games do have nothing to do with each other. It's still pretty cool. The games center on two protagonists who are otherwise normal characters who get caught up in a princess' time line dispersing issues. The two games follow time-travel differently, in Zelda, time travel causes the universe to split into three time lines (one where Link succeeds as a child, one where he succeeds as an adult, and one where he dies? I think?) while in Dark Chronicle, time-travel is used to repair the future and prevent the bad things from happening. I guess that doesn't mean there aren't other time lines, we just don't have examples of them that I'm aware of.

 Respectively here and here.


Look at our heroes, both wear default green costumes (unless you play the Western version), both rely primarily on a melee weapon (never mind the nature of the weapon) that they had to improvise due to destiny (sure one's a wrench and one is a magical sword that was hidden away for such an occasion) and they both have an assortment of tools they rely on. Not to mention they both exist in societies that are sheltered from the outside world until their grand quest begins.

I guess that's really all beside the point though, I just really like this game, and I can draw some similarities to other games that I really like, so yeah...awesome game. I'll talk about the golf and fishing mini games a bit later.

Until then, thanks for reading!

Quick Cash: LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

Make or Break?
I watch a lot of youtube, have I said that?

 Wut?
I play a lot of video games too. I may not necessarily play them well, and I don't complete them all, but I do play a LOT of video games. With that said, League of Legends is the one I probably play the most. Have I said that?

Yes, I realize I'm a bit redundant. Anyway, League of Legends is a completely free game. The game can be played without ever spending a dime on it, and can be enjoyed to its fullest in such a fashion. Real world money can be spent on skins and icons and such to make the a little prettier and to give your account a unique feel, but you don't have to buy any of that. It's not like some other games where it's free to a point, or you can't experience the full game without paying money, everything can be unlocked through gameplay.

That used to be a slightly ridiculous statement, because random free skins were a rarity and in turn you could argue that you can't get the FULL experience. But you really can, skins do nothing for gameplay. Anyway, all of that aside, Riot has introduced a new mechanic to the game called hextech crafting that allows you to get chests for performing extremely well with a champion and then randomly drop keys to those chests after matches.

This essentially means you can unlock anything in the game for free, through random chance. I've seen people get several legendary skins and ultimate skins (these are aesthetic changes to the game that cost around $20.00 by themselves) from these chests. What's the catch? There is none! Well...there's one.

 That's $270.00...

Whatever money Riot loses by giving away free content once or twice a month to players ($40.00 or so worth of stuff each year according to some youtube experts) they more than gained back in the first two or three weeks of the new system's launch. There's an equation out there somewhere that probably can't be fully relied on and probably doesn't actually represent real math, but I suspect it goes like this:

X=Y*Z^3

Where x=number of subscribers, y=amount of money spent on games/merchandise and z=number of videos featuring games/merchandise.

The first video posted appears to be a pretty well established youtube personality, while the latter is a not-so-established one (215 subs at the moment) but you'll notice his video as of 4:23 p.m. has broke 14,000 views. Why? Because he spent $270.00 on a completely free game to take advantage of a free system. Additionally notable is that there are SEVERAL well-established League of Legends based youtubers out there and at least two others have spent $100.00 on hextech crafting.

What am I getting at? Well, in a matter of two or three weeks, Riot Games has made, at the very least, $970.00 on a system that was introduced as sort of a free system for players to get rewarded with items that would otherwise need to be purchased. The guys no how to make money. And so do these youtubers. I realize that $1,000.00 is hardly a drop in the bucket for what it costs to program all of these things, but $1,000.00 is also just a drop in the bucket compared to what has actually been spent, and what will be spent I suspect, on hextech crafting alone. Think about it, if one video can get 14,000 views based solely on spending money on a game, that draws the necessary attention to get a fanbase, which eventually leads into youtube advertisement partnership, which then leads to the youtuber making enough money to waste more on games, which leads to exactly what got them started, more unboxing videos.

This isn't the only instance where random chance and wasted money leads to youtube view spikes either, people do unboxing videos all the time, most of them are pretty popular, even if the youtuber isn't. 

Did I get all of that out? Cool, then I'm about to go spend $1,000.00 on Hextech Chests and make four youtube videos off of that experience and get youtube famous. Roflcoptermao

Thanks for reading!

Been a Minute: GENERAL UPDATE

No Particular Topic
Yeah, just sort of gonna type some things up, generalize some ideas.

GURPS
This last weekend I had intentions of playing a GURPS super hero campaign with some friends, that didn't go as planned. I will however go ahead and note what we were looking at. A school is exposed to an undisclosed type of radiation, causing the entire student body to become hideous mutants, with the exception of our heroes, who all get crazy super powers. A geomancer, an artist who can draw an items and cause them to come into existence, a boxer with incredible power and variable firepower arm transformations, and a gamer who can retrieve the specs of enemies by looking at them and has a sped up sense of time. Anyway, there's that, maybe I'll pop my stats up here later, maybe not.

Pokémon Blue (The Quest for Completion)
I am sitting at 121 Pokémon in my Pokédex, several due to exploitation of the "Mew Glitch" or "Ditto Glitch." This is pretty exciting, it's the closest I've come to completing a Pokédex, and it'll be in the original game...if on a virtual console. Plus, as far as I'm concerned, it's a legitimate completion, some people will say the Pokémon were spawned using a glitch and therefore aren't valid, I would argue that the glitch wasn't removed when rereleased (and the game was very clearly adapted at least slightly to make it playable) so it's intended to be available to players.

Meanwhile I'm on the seventh gym badge, but I'm so caught up with collecting all 151 that I haven't actually cleared Silphco yet. So yeah...

Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (The Quest for Perfection)
Perfection may not be the perfect term for what I'm seeking. I'm working on a doubles team using Rhyperior, Slowbro, and two other, as of yet undecided, Pokémon. So far I've managed to breed a near perfect Rhyhorn (I actually wound up with one max IV greater than I wanted, speed was unnecessary,) and I've figured out what I want out of my Slowbro (Mega Slowbro) but I haven't even caught one yet -_-. So it'll take some work. But I'm one Pokémon up! Yay!

Youtube
You can actually check out my youtube channel and see a bit of what I'm up to, but not much. Unfortunately I'm slow, clunky, and not using the best equipment. I've started a Borderlands play through as a Siren (handguns only, I obviously hate myself) and a nearly discontinued (but not) Dark Cloud 2 (Dark Chronicle?) Play Through. There are several other basically abandoned projects on my youtube channel which probably won't get any more love, but I figure I'll start updating again and hopefully make some progress.

You could follow along with my Less than Pro videos where I play League of Legends poorly, not intentionally, just because I'm not the best gamer in the world!

Resident Evil
Yeah, I got Resident Evil 4 recently, what of it? You want me to play it? No. Not until I can record it. And currently recording it slows my game down way too much.

I think that's a pretty good update of where I stand at as far as games are concerned...cool.