Lately, I’ve been into playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village and Apollo Justice. The former game, I bought because the premise was really cute… at the time. Now that I’m actually playing through it, I have a hard time believing a kid would be able to play through this game without wanting to chuck the damn case at someone. No matter how cute and innocent it looks, the puzzles can really prove to be annoying at times. I will gladly tell people I had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to make FIVE boxes into four. Ugh, it makes my head hurt just thinking about it!

The later game, Apollo Justice is fourth in the series of games known as Ace Attorney or Gyakuten Saiban. I am totally enamored by the series because of the innuendos, the cultural references, and because its kind of like an interactive book. Totally awesome! By far, the best in the series was Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations otherwise known as Gyakuten Saiban 3. How the stories managed to intertwine with each other was amazing, and I was actually wanting to chuck my DS at someone because it kept me entertained and kept hitting me with suspense at times I didn’t necessarily expect to be hit with it. The fourth installment of the series is also pretty decent, but probably because I’m totally liking the prosecuting attorney and like the “scientific investigations” I get to perform once in awhile.

I still have more games to finish, however… and it doesn’t help at all that Super Smash Bros. Brawl is coming out real soon. My brother (Makai) was tormenting me for thirty minutes straight by telling me how he was going to win and why. Then informed me that he would beat me down with Peach since he knows she’s one of my favorite characters to play. Ugh.

FFXI entry will come either tomorrow or on Monday; since there are still things to be done tomorrow when we meet for ENMs and such. I am, however, in the market to look for a end game LS for a friend. I’d join myself, but I barely have time for myself without feeling totally stressed out. If you happen to be on the Ragnarok server and know of a LS, please leave a comment and let me know!

I would like to think that I’m a calm, collected, and patient person. Work with 2.5 – 6-year-olds on a daily basis, and you kind of need to have a ton of the above in order to work peacefully with that age group. So, I guess I should be ashamed of myself when Orophen is trying to explain the battle plan to everyone last Sunday and I’m… huffing, puffing, and getting super antsy because we haven’t started yet. Heck, I even started to zone out mentally and verbalize how badly I just wanted to get going to the point of not reading the wall of text that was attacking my already poor eye sight!

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Having a three day weekend, I thought I’d sleep more, maybe poke around on FFXI more, and maybe get my homework done. Sadly, none of that really happened. I did play FFXI, I am getting my homework done, but the sleep part? Hah! Despite this, I managed to have a lot of fun this weekend. I was mostly in Seattle on Saturday, and then dragged people out to do avatar fights the following day. As we went through the runs, I remembered why I was so gung ho about leveling BRD and why I still love it to this day (despite my complaints from time to time). I still remember watching in fascination how a BRD from another server ran back and forth and really helped his party out win against Garuda. I don’t remember the name of the person anymore, but that image was always in my mind and I remember wanting to do something like that for the longest time. Granted I had already done these fights before, it was still a lot of fun to go through them again. Though not so much fun when Mekare and Makai was hit with an unresisted Shiva 2-HR. I totally panicked when I saw that they went from wihte to 0 in a second, while Orophen and I were trying to duke it out and then run like crazy from that icy demon. Thankfully Reiokyu came to our rescue, and we managed to go through the rest of the fights very easily.

As for today? I had thought of dragging them to go do the rest of the avatar fights, but then I made a last minute call of having everyone do Promyvion-Vahzl. I’m sure some were annoyed at having to be called out all the way there, haul out their level 50 gear, etc… but I’m really glad that we were able to go and I’m sure the others felt the same way in the end. We managed to get to the top most floor very easily, and it was miraculous that we didn’t run into a SINGLE fake MR! We also had one death on the way there, and I’m not even sure how that happened to begin with. I’ll just say its karma on Orophen, since he can’t learn to shut his mouth when he needs to! ;P

When we managed to make it to the top and kill off the last NM, we started to talk about the BCNM fight and the strategies we would be using for it. We had already used two hours for the fun of it, and were planning to go down when I chirped that we could spend the last few minutes trying the bosses out for ourselves! Everyone agreed and we headed out for a test run in the Spire. We managed to get our second mob down to less than 15% (I died at this time), and commented how we could have kept going if I actually had medicines. Mekare mentioned it would be cake if we had items with us, and it pretty much was the case before we wiped. We’ll be doing our official run next week Sunday, so I’m really looking forward to hacking and slashing it out with the rest of them.

Besides having a pretty shitty week last week with JUST health problems, I feel mounting stress from in game stuff and also commuting problems. I’m not even sure if the stress from the game is really stress or me just… not really sure about certain things and feeling really insecure. It drove me to the point of wanting to play WoW, but I just started a new segment on my training and need to focus on getting it done instead of messing around too much. So, instead I just sat around feeling really meh and kinda beating myself up on things I probably shouldn’t have.

Besides attempting to farm spells for BLU, helping my brother get AF, and doing Campaign in attempt to get my WHM to 60 (don’t want to take it up past this… for now), I met two nice people who had actually stayed awhile when trying to get my brother’s AF key. If it weren’t for Mekare telling me to ask them to team up, we wouldn’t have met them or been able to help them get the testimony that they needed. So, yeah! Thanks to Apotaru and congratulations to Libent on getting a MNK testimony! We wish you the best for your Maat fight!

While I was duoing with Orophen, Mekare and I got into a lengthy conversation about some things. Some of it had to do with our frustrations and the other part had to do with our fond memories of when the game was a little harder. It seemed kind of funny that we both missed the trains of mobs in zones, the fun times of old Dunes parties (gotta admit most of mine were entertaining and enjoyable), and just the whole feel of what the game was like before some of the updates S-E has made. Granted those updates were a little necessary to stop MPKs and such, but those memories were actually nice. Its how I met several friends and where I usually remember lots of good stuff. Like… meeting Scoobysnacks or Chakura poking at a former player from long ago.

Part of me feels guilty and a little dirty about this mission. Why? Mostly because I had to make sure people were going to be there by sending out mass text messages to those I could the day before, to ensure people were going to attend and even going so far as to tell them what the schedule will be. Thankfully, I don’t think I have to do that this time around… but I still felt dirty doing it. On the plus side… people were there and my brother managed to make it before we said he had to be there!

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After walking around downtown Seattle in light rain, a blister, then traveling across the Puget Sound on ferry, and coming back home only to take a three hour nap… I’m back and ready to write about the concert I attended only hours ago.

PLAY! A video game symphony, is a live performance of many memorable (and not so) pieces from timeless classics such as the Mario Bros. Medley to modern pieces from games such as Halo, World of Warcraft, and now Guild Wars. Along with the live performances, a few pieces are also accompanied by visuals that also come from these game pieces. For Seattle’s performance, we were blessed with the performances of the Seattle Orchestra, the Northwest BoyChoir, and Vocalpoint! Seattle. What we weren’t blessed with, was the appearance of Maestro Arnie Roth. For those unfamiliar with him, he was also the man who had conducted Voices, Dear Friends, and many other video game concerts around the world. Maybe he was too good for the second performance, but I guess who am I to complain? The first performance (Thursday, Jan. 24) was sold out and the second performance was only made by popular demand for a second showing.

Instead of Maestro Arnie Roth, another conductor from Benaroya Hall was present. In absence of Arnie Roth, however, we were gifted with the appearances of two men from the video game industry. One was one of the men who had composed the Halo music himself! Which, I suppose, would have been great if I had actually played Halo…

The program for the day included:

PLAY! Opening Fanfare
FINAL FANTASY VII – Liberi Fatali
Super Mario Bros.
Shenmue
Battlefield 1942
FINAL FANTASY VII – Aerith’s Theme
Sonic the Hedgehog
Metal Gear Solid
Kingdom Hearts

Intermission

THE ELDER SCROLLS IV- OBLIVION
FINAL FANTASY SERIES – Swing de Chocobo
Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross
World of Warcraft
Silent Hill 2
HALO
the Legend of Zelda
New: Guild Wars
FINAL FANTASY VII – One Winged Angel

The striked song is what was removed from the program in favor of adding more time to play a piece from Guild Wars. Was it worth it? For those who were probably tired of the Final Fantasy fanaticism? Yes. For those who were looking forward to the old Chocobo theme like myself? Then you were probably as bummed out as I was.

One concern going into this concert was that a friend who had attended Thursday’s performance mentioned a noticeable problem with the percussionists. I didn’t notice anything off about the percussionist this time around, but I found that the stage presence of the violinist and overall presentation for the Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross performance to be very lacking. Time Scar had a very strong violin solo segment that went very soft during today’s performance at Benaroya. It was quite noticeable, especially since it was one of my favorite pieces that had me hooked onto Chrono Cross in the beginning! There was also a time when the trumpets seemed off, and when other segments just didn’t seem to be on key with each other.

The choir, while very talented and fresh sounding, did not exactly seemed ‘right’ to me during the vocal portions of the show. Then again, they were a very young group, and so some of the areas which you’d expect an older voice the choir would come off sounding like these children were being placed into slave camps. It was a little ridiculous, and I felt horrible seeing how bored the females were looking in the choir. It actually depressed me when I would occasionally glance at the choir form the screen.

Other than that, the performances were well played. A definite crowd favorite was Super Mario Bros and Halo. Also, despite my complaints about the choir, they did send chills through my arms when they had performed Liberi Fatali. Sure they sounded young, but at least they did a rather impressive job. Although part of me wished they hadn’t performed a piece from WoW, as I was already contemplating going back despite initial problems with my wrist and fingers. They also managed to give me a fresh view of the WoW music, which I had initially dismissed as being downright awful. Now I’ve rated it to be on better terms in my book, but I doubt my opinion of it will be any different with the actual background themes playing while in the game. I suppose, however, that is the beauty of WoW being in windowed mode! At least I can play more desirable music in the background…

Aside from the symphony, many people also brought their DSes with them. For the first time, I actually got to use Pictochat other than with people I am already familiar with. However, due to poor reception, I think I missed out on a lot of fun things that were going on elsewhere in the concert hall. I was also surprised to see that only two people decided to be daring and try to wear something a little different. One was a man wearing a panda hat down in the front row (yes, we could see you on the big screen) and a young lady sitting somewhere behind me wearing a lolita outfit. There were also a surprising number of older attendants, but I am merely assuming they were season ticket holders or people who had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

Overall, I wholeheartedly encourage those who do like video game music to attend any concert that features a live performance. It was an absolutely wonderful experience to be able to not only hear the music, but to hear it performed live and actually see the people perform the music as well.

After an hour and a half (or was it more?) of waiting for my brother to wake up and NOT kill me, we managed to continue where we left off on Saturday with our CoP 4-2 run and Refueling acquisition party. On Saturday, 2/3 of the BLU managed to get our spell while getting a little distracted watching an end game LS attempt to take down one of the popped NMs in Riverne. With limited time on our hands, we decided to wait until Monday, Jan. 21, when everyone would be home on a national holiday. Most of us were there on time or earlier, and the only one who wasn’t? My brother who nearly TKD’ed my face after several attempts of waking him up. Thankfully I have a laptop, and was able to prep him up, log him on, and take him to where we needed to go before he finally woke up and decided to join us.

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Our camp for this level is one of my favorite camps in this level range: Garlaige Citadel. I have partied here both as BRD and WHM, and I’ve found it a nice little area despite some of its annoyances. We’ll probably be here for awhile, since the EXP is still pretty good and we can probably move onto Chamber Beetles now that we’re level 50. From 48-50 our main target focus has been the Funnel Bats since we can actually chain them and not waste 400+ MP on a single mob (the Chamber Beetles). However, there aren’t many spells that can lead to really high damage numbers on these mobs unless you skill chain off of them. Then again, we’re all /nin and I’m sure things would be different if we were in a different party set up.

Sadly, as we were down in the Citadel, I found that we weren’t really on top of all of our spells. It is probably my fault, since I am rusty and haven’t really bothered to check my check list in awhile. However, since we are now at 50, I’ll probably be arranging to get caught up on our spells and then a continuation of CoP runs for the near future. I am very excited, however, as it means we are getting closer to getting to our base goal: getting BLU to 60 and wear BLU AF. At the moment I’m keeping that single goal in mind, because there are so many other things that are stressing the hell out of me at the moment. One step at a time! Once we get to that goal, I’m sure we’ll aim for 75 and Sea access… but getting to 60 is already a lot for me to chew on at the moment.

This is also advance notice to my friends that on Saturday, January 26, my siblings and I will be attending a concert at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall. The concert is known as PLAY! A video game symphony. Arnie Roth will be the conductor and is known to have conducted at the Dear Friends and More Friends concert for S-E. From the video clips I’ve seen of the guy, he seems pretty cool. I really enjoy listening to video game music, so this is going to be a special treat for me and my siblings who also enjoy the same thing.

Speaking of which, my brother (Makai on FFXI) found this clip when searching stuff on marching bands. He’s in the marching band at our local high school and we thought this was really cool:

Can you name ALL the video game themes they play!? :3

One of my favorite game series for the DS is Gyakuten Saiban a.k.a. the Ace Attorney series. I also recently started watching an anime known as Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. The clip I’m going to post below manages to merge the two together for Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei’s opening scene. If you’ve played through the Ace Attorney games, then you’ll probably find this to be pretty amusing if not WTF worthy:

After a three month hiatus, the BLU set has returned! We were actually shooting for starting up again late December, but had little luck since we were playing WoW and then I had health problems (flu, hand and wrist pain). For these levels, we took a return trip to the Eldieme Necropolis; a small trip we had made for the first half of level 46 but had to leave because I had lost RR and we couldn’t get a Raise.

To get to our camp, we had to go through Beaucedine Glacier and then to where most people used to camp for the genkai item. Its a tad annoying, but its a nice secluded area and we hardly have to worry about anyone pestering us. The most annoying mob we fought here are the Hell Hounds. Being hit with a virus really puts us down for awhile, considering we have no one who can cast Viruna on us and the alternative ways of removing that status effect is a tad too pricey for us. To get around this, we eventually started to zone the dogs so that they would depop. This started to work against us after awhile, when the dogs started to pop at a faster repop time. Damn.

Lichs are especially annoying because of their spell casting abilities, but Mummies are great! They aren’t as troublesome and really bring about some nice EXP. We didn’t get many high chains, but after a few good hours we managed to ding up to level 48. We plan to exp for at least an hour sometime this week, and then try to get our CoP set to do a few ENM runs (that means you, Hiro!).

Though I really need to be careful about how much hate I pull. There was one situation when I ended up going damage happy for one fight. I started off with Bludgeon, went wild, and then tossed in a solo renkei for about 569 damage. o.o; Being a BRD and WHM, I’m not really used to doing stuff like that on my own! I couldn’t help but laugh and remember why I’d be the worst BLM alive… I’d end up over nuking things to death because I’d look at the numbers and go “ooooohhhh~”!

During this exp session, I found that FFXI was much easier on my wrists than WoW is when trying to grind away. I think for that reason, I’ll put renewing my WoW account on hold for awhile. My wrist has been acting up lately, and it tends to be bothersome. I have kind of figured out how to go at FFXI so that I’m not hindered too much, but there are times when I still end up in a lot of pain. I don’t like it when I have to be out for a few days because I was WoWing and then try to go onto FFXI but find that I can’t because my wrist is in a messed up state. It also prevents me from doing homework and responding to e-mails, so… yeah. Sorry, WoW! You lost this round.