Star Ocean 4 Mini-Reiview

And I mean mini. From a 10-hour playtime. I've procrastinated for my exam way too much :-\

Graphics: 8/10. Interesting and super-well detailed environments, ranging from sterile, but colorful spaceship interiors to large planetary expanses, to dark, dank dungeons. It's a far cry from the spaceship EXTERIOR graphics. They look rushed and the textures are horrible for a game that is this massive, coming from a company known for really immersive settings. Characters look like anime porcelain dolls, which isn't a bad thing. They should have kept the conversation portraits and the menu style from the Japanese version, but it's tolerable.

Sound: 7/10. Your home spaceship and planet selection screen give that whole space opera, adventure feel and is thoroughly appropriate. Battle music is the classic Motoi Sakuraba upbeat type, a bit of rock and orchestra, and is also appropriate. Dungeons are a hit and miss and it's kind of off-setting when you hear a rock organ playing in a dungeon set in a 12-Century tech level planet. Voice acting is NOT as horrible as it might have been for an English cast; I blame it on the less than stellar writing, which can come off as cheesy and some of the Japan-isms don't translate well into English. It seemed like they were writing for the Japanese audio with English subtitles, but used the subtitle script for the dub. Still, the voice acting was not a game-breaker.

Gameplay: 9/10. Battle system is a modified version from SO3, and that's a good thing. Because of that, battles are faster-paced and the Blindside techniques, essentially timing a button-hold and moving the control stick at the right moment, really add depth. Add to that the Bonus Board for doing things (ie. Killing an enemy with a critical hit), and levelling grind-haters may actually find themselves grinding. I once had a 90% experience point bonus going on for several battles and my characters jumped six levels really fast. Where the game is lackluster is the dungeon design. Even 10 hours into the game, there's a dungeon where you probably can spend three hours slogging through and barely reach the end boss. Most of the dungeon was empty space, except for the visible enemies and environmental hazards. You can avoid them with a dash technique, which looks a little weird, but it speeds up the jog through Long Corridor. Other than the expected enemies and a few puzzles, the main challenge in the dungeons so far is getting from A to B on a sprawling map.

Story: N/A. I haven't played through the end or even the bulk of the game, so I can't say much about the story. I can say that it's good enough for me to wish my exams were over so I can see more stuff. Being a JRPG, there's going to be lots to do and I believe there are multiple endings and a love story/stories depending on your actions.

Overall: 8/10. Good, but not the greatest. Sorta wished the localization team from Tales of Vesperia worked on this game.

Foleys, Care Plans, and a New RPG!

So, it's the start of a new week after spending a weekend celebrating my mom's birthday. What do I have to look forward to this time? Why finishing up a care plan of course! But not just any care plan... a Gastro-intestinal related care plan! As an added bonus, I'm going to be assessed on how well I install a foley catheter, collect a specimen, and how to D/C it.

For the care plan, this whole new rule about focusing on our current area of study is really frustrating, and the other folks in my clinical group were having trouble coming up with nursing diagnoses, mainly because some of their patients' main medical diagnoses aren't GI-related at all. Granted a good portion of them have Diabetes Mellitus, but arguably that's mainly an endocrine disease.

And since we're doing GI, our care plans are limited to fluid, food, or elimination.

I kind of lucked out since my patient was found to have some GI erosion and a hiatal hernia during an EGD that I watched. Awesome. Taking care of it is basically some Maalox, Pepcid, sitting up straight, eating boring food, and watching what pills you pop. My patient also had a decreasing H and H on her blood work, so I threw in some packed blood in my care plan, which I'm still a little iffy about.

I shouldn't forget to throw in a low sodium diet. She has massive hypertension, but her [Na+] is normal. It could come down a ways and stay normal, but I'm not so sure how much of an impact lowering already normal sodium would affect her high blood pressure.

Still, I'm pretty confident that it's going to be a decent care plan.

Oh and this new RPG is called Ar Tonelico II, but you wouldn't care about that, would you? I don't know how I'm going to play it when Star Ocean 4 is coming out in two weeks. I still haven't finished Ar Tonelico I, and other games in my huge backlog of JRPGs...

I also have an exam for my Saturday physiology class and the second exam (I know, and classes only started 3 weeks ago) for Nursing coming up next Monday... It never ends :-\

A New MO

Well, I don't think a gaming blog is too viable at this point, with me being in nursing school and all, but I still have my passion for games (or at least the games I like).

With that in mind, I think I'll make this blog a combination of my nursing school adventures as well as my excursions in gaming and whatnot. After all, these things are significant in my life, but they are not everything. There's also food. And family. Friends and such.

But okay, let's make a focused blog on nursing and gaming. All my mistrials and misadventures, failures and flops, and, of course, whenever I succeed.

So, here's to a fresh start. Cheers, everyone.

I'm Still Alive... But this blog is in a coma

But I'm still gaming strong. Well, not as much as before, but at least it's not on life support.

Chaos Wars Acquired! And Call of Duty 4 Maps Impressions

Purchased a copy of Chaos Wars. Honestly, I don't know what to expect from this game. All I heard was that it was going to be one of those releases that will probably never be printed after its initial run... kinda like the original Valkyrie Profile for the PS1. The store associate who handled my Mana Khemia order recommended it to me... or forced me to buy it. Just kidding ;)

Will post some impressions of it, but will not play it until I'm done with Mana Khemia... which may take a while ^^;;

Oh, and for those people who play the PC version of Call of Duty 4, the Map Pack that was available to PS3 and Xbox 360 owners for about 10 USD is available in the newest patch, version 1.6.

The maps are a welcome addition, in my opinion, but I've only played Killhouse and Creek.

I like Killhouse. It's almost a more strategic Shipment, but with elements of Downpour. Like those two maps, though, I highly do not recommend playing Killhouse with more than 12 people during a team game. I got turned around so often that it gets annoying. Unlike Shipment, where I guess spawn kills are the bread and butter, Killhouse is practically, well, a killhouse. Expect to die. Often.

Creek is a Sniper's paradise and I got killed so often that I didn't know my buttstock from my muzzle, but I think the map has potential. I have to find the right game mode and keep away from my CQB-stealth custom class.

Chinatown, which is apparently based on the Carentan map of CoD 2, is a nice sight for sore eyes. I haven't played a game on it, but I did run around it by myself, sadly. A super-minor criticism of many of the maps in multiplayer CoD 4 is that they are one basic color scheme: the Marine-OpFor maps are your basic brown and tan colored scheme, and the SAS-Spetsnaz maps are a mixed bag of washed out green and grey. But, Chinatown comes at you with its nighttime environment and complementary neon-lit streets and painfully bright fluorescent interiors. It looks like it would be a great level for CQB and long range fighters, although I wouldn't recommend going Sniper, but, hey, to each his/her own.

Finally, Broadcast looks like an interesting fight. It feels like the focus will be the interior office corridors, and, like many office buildings, there are multiple entryways and exits to go into and out of the building. This map was made for objective-based games, I think. Still haven't played a real game on it, but crossing my fingers for a good HQ game.

By the way, my name on the CoD 4 PC servers is [DNA] Helicase, so if you ever find me, give me a hoot. I don't really play on any one server, so it might be hard to find me ^^;

In any case, happy playing!

Mana Khemia First Impressions

Hmm... The game is slightly different from what I thought it would be, but it looks like a keeper from the two hours I spent on it. So far, I'm attending classes, going out on assignments, which are basically dungeon runs, and sitting through cutscenes. Standard fair and choosing classes reminds me of times I would check my major degree requirements and the online catalog for available classes. Bad memories? Perhaps...

First off, the graphics, like a lot of the NIS America games that came out, are 2D sprites in a 3D world. That is not something I am used to, and I think I'm a bit spoiled from Valkyrie Profile 2's graphics, not that the game has the best graphics of the PS2... You get the point. Still, the major dialogue scenes have some good looking images of the characters, if you're into the anime/manga art style.

Speaking of which, the game does give you a choice of English or the original Japanese dialogue. I'm still a little undecided to which one I prefer to hear for the rest of game. Oddly enough, the NPCs that probably wouldn't need any voice acting, like shopkeepers and the nurse in the infirmary, have voices when you choose the Japanese voices, and aren't there when you choose the English voices... In any case, the voice acting in both versions, so far, seems fairly solid, but they sound pretty typical for anime.

A note about voice acting in general on another post...

Continuing on about sound, the game has some typical RPG-ish music to it, but it's definitely not going for any theme or epic-sounding orchestra, a la Final Fantasy. Dungeon music is fairly fast-paced, but nothing too catchy. Town music -- well, campus music -- is an instrumentation on the school march song that you hear in one of the opening cutscenes, which I think is pretty nice and is actually quite catchy. I'm actually kinda humming it now, haha...

Battling seems pretty straightforward. Considering I'm still two hours into the game, I keep whoring the attack and heal commands. I did die a few times, but that was because I suck didn't plan ahead. I'm still looking forward to something deeper, especially since the alchemy system is pretty complex and it looks like there are a bajillion materials to collect to upgrade weapons, armor, items, etc.

For now, at least, I'll be keeping writing about what happens in the game, but I probably won't be playing too often. After all, there's life to live...

Mana Khemia Acquired!

My limited funds and selling off of my beloved PS2 games (I know, I'm behind. Don't have no Wii/360/PSTriple :p) have gotten my dirty mitts on an RPG made by the same folks who made the Atelier Iris series and released by NIS America.

If you know anything about me, I am a big fan of JRPGs, though that does not mean I own loads and loads of them. I am, either sadly or fortunately, rather busy most of the time and unlike my old middle and high school days, I can't commit so much time to playing as I used to.

In any case, I hope to put up some of my first impressions of the game in the coming hours/days/weeks.

I also pat myself on the back for writing the first ever post for Banal Ganglia. Go me!