Thursday, July 1, 2010

Restored and Moved

I've restarted my blog and have moved it to wordpress because it's easier on my eyes.

http://rikkuhime.wordpress.com

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Current Damage Boosts @ April 7, 2010

This blog IS useful, too bad that this information was out dated and I need to put effort into updating it.

1.93 * 1.88 * 1.6 * 1.7

I think that's accurate enough...

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Platinum Achieved in FFXIII

Got my Platinum in 66 Hours of playing, which seems to be quicker than most people.

Ego boost for me.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Opinions are like Assholes

Everyone has one, and they're usually smelly.

Recently I've been playing League of Legends less and less due to that massive learning curve that always has me fail every game. Either that or it's my incompetence.

I decided to show my PS3 some love and decided to go out and buy some games for it. I went to my nearby BestBuy and whored up as many cheap $20 games I could find. Those lasted me a few weeks until Final Fantasy 13 came out.

Now the meaning of this title is just like it sounds, and it's related to FF13. I went onto GameFAQs to check the message boards to see if there would be anything major I should look out for, because in FF12 I failed at getting the spear which was impossible to get unless you knew the pre-requisites beforehand. It turns out the is so linear that there was no freaking way I could miss anything, which is always a good thing in certain cases. What I read on the message boards though raised a few eyebrows.

Opinions of FF13 are highly polarized, either you love it or hate it.

What's more entertaining than reading biased reviews though? Watching die hard FF fanboys argue with each other on which FF was the best. Personally, I will whole heartedly believe that FFX was the best unconditionally just because it was the first FF I have played. Nothing is better than your first time right? Well apparently every other FF fanboy thought so too and started to argue how so-and-so FF was better than FF13. Too bad that every one of them was drowning in their own nostalgia for me to make out what they were saying.

I thought I was watching people yelling at brick walls with the way they were arguing.

Well what I got from all of this was that FF fanboys are more stubborn than ... a fat guy with a diet? Oh, and critics like to bash JRPGs while praising WRPGs.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

RikkuHime - Where Did My Name Come From?

I thought I'd actually share this small trivia with you guys as it is mildly interesting (or at least I hope it is or my ego drops even lower).

The first thing I'd like to begin with is that the reason originated from a different game. Soldier Front from Ijji (Renowned as another Counter Strike ripoff). It was the FIRST MMOFPS game I've played and as a result of that I was heavily addicted to it. FPS games were lacking in my life let alone MMO ones. So when I found this game I immediately got addicted to it and spent the next two years with that game, one year longer than Megaten. Anyways, SF is a F2P game meaning they have scams everywhere to make you buy from the Cash Shop. I won't go into too muc hdetail but essentially if you were an average player who iddn't spend money you could only afford one gun per account. This created a lot of smurf accounts so that everyone could try all the different guns. I myself had roughly 20 smurf accounts, and among them was RikkuHime.

The name itself is not what's important about it, it's what I did with that name and why I love it so much. If you are curious, I named it after a character from FFX and added some random japanese honorific. It was a smurf account, I just needed a name.

Now what I did to gain my 15 minutes of fame occurred about a year into my life cycle of SF. The fun of FPS games was starting to dwindle and I was beginning to be bored, much like evey other game I played. What I decided to do for fun then was to see how high I could get my post count on the forums. The method didn't matter, I just needed to do something to kill time. A lot of time. One thing I have to say about the SF forums is that the forums itself is more like a chatbox during peak hours. So you can find yourself replying to one thread and there'll be about 7 new replies when you refreshed the forum. Anyways, I started to get noticed by people when they saw that EVERY thread on the first few pages were all last replied by me. Mind you, there's a 60 second spam-free time inbetween posts so I had to wait between them. Needless to say though, I didn't neccessarily spammed, but responded to every thread with one lined sentence instead of the obnoxious "lulz bad thread gtfo" comments. I made sensible sentences that actually responded to the thread. Maybe this is why people put up with me for the most part as the spam wasn't obnoxious, but there were the few people who clearly didn't like me.

To give you a sense of how much free time I had with this, I got 1,000 posts in about 4-7 days. I can't exactly remember the exact period. However needless to say people noticed me.

Another part contributing to my fame was my gender. People thought I was female for whatever reason why. I found humour in this and neither accepted or denied this statement and everyone followed suit and treated me as female. It raised many sexist comments about me over the forums but nonetheless it was still funny to watch. On a side note, people thought I was female in Megaten too. However, it kind of made sense because I played a female character but still, am I that feminine to be taken as a female? Truth be told, if I ever get around to writing it, I was constantly getting hit on by one of my clan leaders in open beta.

Because of this fame that I've acquired I made new friends with people and started to enjoy SF by playing with them. Their personalities varied, but I don't think you care about that much anyways.

Now to say, my original goal with spamming the forums was just to get 5,000 posts and get the last rank one could achieve on there. Just a small time thing to do to keep me preoccupied with the game and company itself. I did end up getting to 5,000 posts after 6 months and just vanished after that (I'm aware I'm getting the timeline mixed up but it was 2 years ago, I don't remember fine details like this).

But yes, the fame I've gotten from doing something like this wasn't exactly major, but enough for recognition. The older forummers regarded me with dislike, while the others watched me with amusement. People tolerated me, but I could tell I was not liked as well as a celebrity. If I had to rank myself on a scale, I'd say I was a 6. 0 being normal forummer and 10 being celebrity. People knew who I was, but it was rather infamy than fame.

Negative things did happen though. I got flamed. I got mocked. I became a verb. Some people started acting like me for whatever reason.

Finishing up though, while I was playing League of Legends, 2 years after I disappeared from Ijji people called me out and recognized me. I must say I was fairly amused with that.

Because of what happened at Ijji about 2-3 years ago I feel attachment to this name and get slightly angered if someone takes it.

Unrelated Blog Post: League of Legends

As the days go by and I find myself having less and less things to do I find my way back to my blog to talk about things I don't relatively care about.

If anyone remembers I pretty much rage quite Megaten and ran over to League of Legends. Needless to say no matter how addicted you are to a game it does not last forever.

League of Legends was my introduction into the MOBA genre and it was very fulfilling. I played about 500 games with each one averaging about 40 minutes long each. I look back to myself and just get ashamed of what I've been spending my time on (there's worse things I've done but I'll get to that later). As I've played more and more rounds though I can't but feel like I hit a wall in any progression in the game. It feels like I'm having a second job in order to get through with it.

Anyways, the MOBA genre is very hard to explain in words. What it is in a nutshell though is a hybrid of MMO + RPG + RTS all meshed together. You control only one character that starts at level one in the beginning of every game and levels up by killing mobs on the map. The overlying point of LoL is to destroy the other team's base, just like in RTS games. The difference is, is that instead of micromanaging hundreds of minions at once you only control your character, with your other teammates' characters. As you level up you gain better stats and can level up your skills. While all this is happening you are also fighting the enemy team's characters, all from level one too (highly unrecommended though because of how easy it is to die). The game gets very challenging as it is based more around on how well you cooperate with yuor teammate than it does with individual skill. Essentially, one bad teammate = GG.

So although LoLwas a ridiculously fun game in the start, I saw the problems starting to show. First, since the game is heavily based on teamwork there is a lot of quite a bit of (negative) chatting going on. If you so much as die first or do ONE thing wrong you will be flamed and blamed for losing the game throughout the rest of the match. This discourages trying new things as you will be the fault of the team if you do. Second, no casually playing attitudes. Because of the traditional -find a room and join it- system is not here they used something else. They match you against other players who are similar to your skill level and tries to get as close to 50% win/loss chance as possible. This matchmaking makes a lot of trouble within the community for "being faulty" (I don't find it faulty unless you have more losses than wins), but that isn't what irritates me. Since matchmaking puts you against other players around your skill, it means you are going to have to try your hardest in that game. Did I mention that there are roughly 40+ characters in that game and all have different abilities? So you can't be picking someone new after you've been playing a while. You will get stomped with the unfamiliar controls. This is the position I am in currently, pic kthe same character I've played +200 games with or pick someone new and get stomped?, And on a plus get flamed for it too.

So although the MOBA genre and League of Legends has its faults, it does have its merits too. I have had a lot of fun playing the game but the fun is waning and I can't bear myself ot play another round with that same character. Imagine remaking your character in Megaten every hour to retrain him just for Act 4. Not as bland as that since you hit max level in 30-35mins, but it gets boring replaying the same thing over and over again.

Do I see myself playing this game again? Probably, but very, very little of it in moderation.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Life in Megaten: Closed Beta

I got really bored and decided to write about my experiences in Megaten. Not like I have anything else to do right?

My journey into Megaten begain when I was browsing a random game review website to see if any new noticeable games were coming up, and by a stroke of coincidence I found that the website was also giving out Closed Beta keys for Megaten. Since I had just recently quit an MMOFPS game at the time I decided to try it out since having no MMO to play I have too much free time on my hands.

I promptly made made my character and started browsing around the forums for any idea on what to do. Megaten was a very unforgiving game where if you messed up your expertises it was best advised to restart your character. I was fortunate for being in Closed Beta for I could experiment with whatever I wanted with.

I named my character with my trademark name RikkuHime because of the notoriety I've gained from the Ijji game forums. Truth be told, people really didn't like me over there for what I did. Then there are the few who found humour in my antics. Anyways, moving on.

As soon as I started playing Megaten I was enthralled with the different style it had compared to the numerous other Korean-MMOs I've played. The combat and art style was different and was enough for me to get hooked.

I had rolled in the beginning as a Mage Gunner. I did not even know Magic Bullet existed yet, all I knew was that someone said Guns had high Spell stat so I went and leveled up any skill related to Guns and Magic. It was very painful to go through with this and I learned of Demolition Dash later on, much later on.

The Acts in this game were painful as hell. I did everything solo because I got randomly invited to a clan where no one was on and never talked. I was left alone for most of my time online and anyone that happened to log on wouldn't give me the time of day. In all honesty I managed quite fine until I got to the Act 4 and had to fight the Decarabria or however you spell it. I died roughly 4~6 times in a row and had to walk through the entire floor just to die again. On another note Death Penalty was bugged back then so you didn't lose any exp for dying. I made it to Act 5 before I left the clan I was in and started roaming around solo.

I couldn't get my DB license until level 25 so I was running around doing random dungeons (and dying) until I got to level 24. Cell Bronze took me 20 minutes to solo and only gave me 8%, I truly hated the grind back then.

I believe it was around here that I learned about Demolition Dash from the forums. I went through horrible things to get it unlocked, and very painful things too I might add. I was extremely happy when I got it though because the damage was RIDICULOUS compared to Shot Spells. Because of its high skill modifier and enchanting equipments was not even heard of everyone went DD Mage.

As chance would had it I met FoX the leader of SEED during one of the Sugi Silver trips I got invited on. During the trip I realized that people actually TALKED in this game and was envious because I spent my first few weeks of Closed Beta in complete isolation because of the Clan. I asked if I could join SEED and FoX let me.

This was the clan I stayed in for the rest of Closed Beta.

The rest that happened after that was pretty uneventful. I enjoyed me days in Closed Beta and did all my Acts up to Act 13. Closed Beta was ending shortly and I knew grinding further was pointless. I said my farewells and said we'd see each other again in Open Beta and logged off at level 32.

I think I went through withdrawal without playing Megaten for a while as I waited for Open Beta to approach.

On a final note, I saw someone in one of my Sugi trips that had a weird buff (Enhancement, no one knew what this was at the time) and was hitting for ridiculous damage with DD. How much? 600 Electric DD on Black Slimes. This was unheard of back then when my highest damage was probably only 200~300, or something like that. It was a long time ago.

Anyways, this sums up Closed Beta in Megaten. If I get less lazy I might type up about Open Beta.