I stand atop a hill, nay a mountain of my fallen enemies. Monsters, demons, and corrupt soldiers all fear me. Cute little muchroom-people run in terror at my presence, for I have defeated La Pucelle Tactics. I picked it up a couple weeks ago and have been putting in a couple hours a night ever since. Ok, so I put in over fifty hours. It’s a fun game. Having gone through the plotline, rescued those who needed rescuing, smited those in need of smiting, and brought my wrath and fury down upon those who dared to stand against me, I have the following bits of advice for any who care to listen:

1. Pay no mind to the character descriptions on the official website. They’re wrong. They’re worse than wrong, they’re misleading.
2. Your physical combat abilites are really really really easy to develop. You don’t have to focus on them when improving your characters.
3. Your magical abilities are really not easy to develop. It may seem easier to use a physical attack and do a lot of damage now, but if you want to be able to use AoE elemental magic later in the game, you need to work on it and build up your skills.
4. You will want those AoE elemental magic skills later in the game.
5. Don’t count on having one or two powerful characters. There are plot points that remove some characters from play for several fights at a time. Diversify and be comfortable with your whole squad.
6. If you have purified a monster into joining your team, then spend some quality time levelling it up, don’t get too attached. Eventually that Zombie you recruited on the first map just isn’t going to be able to keep up anymore.
7. Make sure you have two people that can cast healing magic.
8. Learn how to merge equipment at the Rosenqueen shop. It’s a good way to reduce the number of accidentally-recruited monsters on your list and get cool stuff.
9. You don’t need to get more than two or three levels into the Cave of Trials before you’re perfectly capable of defeating the final boss.
10. You also don’t need to go to the Dark World.
11. Eclair is better than Prier.
12. Yes, Prier is in Disgaea too. This story takes place before Disgaea in the same setting.

That’s about all there is to it that doesn’t give anything away. I see a lot of potential in this subgenre of strategy game. Final Fantasy Tactics was one of my all-time favorite games, and this one was greatly enjoyable as well. As soon as I can justify to myself spending more money on another PS2 game I’m going to have to go pick up Disgaea, the sequel to La Pucelle Tactics. Yes, Disgaea was released in the US first, but that’s just the way things go sometimes. Go pick up a copy of yourself. You should get at least 50 hours of fun out of it, which is under a dollar per hour of entertainment. I suspect it’s pretty re-playable too, but the only way to know is to pick it up again. I’ll give it a whack after I’m prepped up for Friday’s D&D game.

Back in August, I finished up .Hack//Mutation and had enjoyed it thoroughly. Since then, I’ve picked up on playing Jak II, FFXI, and La Pucelle Tactics since then. I tend to average 3-5 video games in a year, considering my pendhant for RPGs and strategy games (La Pucelle fits both categories nicely, BTW).

This means that the .Hack//Outbreak has been out for about half a year now, and I haven’t gotten around to it just yet. During the time since its release, one of my previous reports regarding my experiences with .Hack//Mutation has become a suprisingly active message board regarding that particular installment. Fully 1/5th of all comments on this website, dating back to my reinstallation of Movable Type back in August of 2002.

There were also a respectable number of posts on my .Hack//Infection entry, so as the request of one of the frequenters of those two de-facto forums, I am placing an entry here for people to discuss their experiences with Outbreak. Outbreak includes the introduction of the Sigma server. I understand that very early on you find that a number of your most useful party members are not available in the gameworld for a while. If it turns out that Mistral is unavailable, as somebody told me at work, this will force me to rework a lot of my methods ffor dealing with combat, and I’ll be fielding Gardenia a lot more.

As I mentioned, I have yet to pick up this title, so I’ll be of little use in providing tips and tricks for this one, at least not until I’ve finished up La Pucelle Tactics. I’ve found that when I pick up a new game before finishing my current one, I never get back to it…. Like Vice City. I still don’t know how that one ends. Please feel free to put up questions and advice in the Comments field here. I know there are several folks who come here for .Hack info, and I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

At times, working with my gracious employer can seem like a comedy of errors. There are procedural, management, staff, and structural issues that can seem large when you’re on the inside. Every little inconsistency and mistake is magnified by one’s proximity to the source. One such example is the day to day hassles you encounter when you’re in a room with the folks who do the maintenance and deployment work in a relatively large data center. Then in the course of digging through a frequently-viewed website, you decide to follow a “hosted at” link.

Please note that the image on the left is three years old, so it is not only possible but likely that things have been rearranged, rebuilt, moved, upgraded, and otherwise improved. The machines depicted on the left are from terminus.au, an Australian company that does network services and web design. They host the Australian Mensa Society, so I trust that this photo isn’t representative of how those folks do business or the reliablity of their service. I’m just glad I don’t spend fourty hours a week working with the poor guy that has to take care of that system.

The center image above shows that, regardless of the scruffy-looking guy in the hawaiian shirt (no, that’s not me) we have a neatly arranged series of locked cabinets to house our equipment, as well as that of our customers. This means that even if you fill up 48U of rackspace with your own sillystring mess of Cat5 and power cords, it won’t constitute an eyesore for others who may access the data center.

The image on the right is an example of the king of painstaking, possibly anal-retentive, work that our NOC folks put in to keep everything well-managed and pretty. Tidiness is a symptom of diligence, and sometimes in our daily lives we forget to appreciate such things.

In the interest of fairness, I should probably follow up on this post with some shots of my own (poor to nonexistant) cable management at home, where I have a single computer, a DSL bridge, a switch, a wireless router, a couple speakers, and a rat’s nest of associated wiring inadequately hidden behind a desk. Those is glass houses should not thrown stones, as they say.

This weekend I finally broke down and picked up La Pucelle Tactics. It is a “tactics” game in the spirit of Final Fantasy Tactics, one of my all-time favorite video games. In the tradition of tactical RPGs, you effectively are managing an army of heroes and monsters as they track down and do battle with a horrible menace that would otherwise destroy the world. Invariably, this menace is a corrupt church. La Pucelle Tactics is no exception.

The nominal main character is a headstrong, brash, somewhat obnoxious young woman named Priel. If she reminds you of Tomo from Azumanga Daioh, you aren’t alone. As the story progresses, you have the option to forgo attacking a foe in order to try to “purify” it into joining your group. This, along with the ability to replay scenarios that you’re already defeated, allows you to customize your fighting force to a great degree.

So far I have about six hours of gameplay in, and so far it looks great. This isn’t one to buy if you can’t handle super-deformed sprite animation. If you absolutely must have bump-mapping, cell-shading, and crazy particle effects to have a good time, then save your money. If you like games that force you to think, pick it up.

It looks like the folks at Mozilla have done it again. Thunderbird 0.6 has been released with some degree of fanfare in late April. It has improved junkmail filtering and a swizzy new logo. Please note that if you’re using a theme that was created for older versions of this product, you may need to update it. The installer apparently doesn’t know this, so you may lose some functionality unless you switch back to the default theme. Enjoy!

Recently while playing FFXI I decided to put away my axes and spear and spend some quality time as a spellcaster. To see how the other side lives. To give back some of the spell-hurling love to the community that has given me so much. Unfortunately, I did this right as the Playstation2 release hit the streets. Now I know how many of the japanese players must have felt when the north americans showed up last fall. Hint to all players with low-level jobs, new or otherwise: please don’t ever say that something is the case because your strategy guide or some website said so. Such resources are no substitue for experience. When I tell you a “bogy” is going to kick your sorry lvl16 butt, believe me. I’ve seen it happen more often than you might think.

It looks like my loving ISP has added another RBL to our mail servers. Huge chunks of the internet, mostly consisting of active spamhaus establishments and compromised systems (got broadband but no firewall? shame on you!) are having their traffic to mx.sonic.net dropped without comment. Recent stats show that we’re down from roughly 400-500 spams per minute to roughly 200. Thank you, spamhaus.org, your hard work is greatly appreciated.

See the stats for yourself

In the game FFXI, cooperative play with other characters is vital to being a successful adventurer. By successful, of course, I mean efficiently slaying many, many beastmen and such. Cooperative play is mostly accomplished by means of the “party” system, in which up to six characters can participate in hunting the same prey. It is also possible to link up to three full parties (for 18 characters cooperating), but this isn’t done without having a special reason to do so: a six-character party tends to work best for gaining experience points and advancing in your job.

A party needs to be able to do three things: find prey that is worth fighting, bring that prey down, and survive the encounter. The more effectively these tasks can be accomplished, the better. Each of these tasks can be handled with various techniques and degrees of competancy depending on your character’s job. A mix of jobs is vital, making sure all the bases are covered.
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