Burrowowl

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.

The IKCG is at the printers as of this past Thursday, and after a night or two of joyous celebration, the Privateer Press folks have released an official IKCG Preview. This is differentiated from the various “sneak peeks” we’ve been given in the past in that

1. It shows the actual version that is being printed, not a draft subject to changes
2. There is a rather broad cross-section of content, ranging from descriptions of the Midlunder ethnicity, to the beginning of a multiple-page entry regarding Iosan Mage Hunters, to descriptions of Wurmist Cults, to rules regarding the creation of Mechanikal magic items
3. It is in the form of permanent content on the Privateer Press webpage instead of simply an entry in the “From the EIC‘s Desk” section, which I’ve always perceived as temporary.

It looks like their server has fallen over, so I am putting up a temporary mirror of the IKCG Preview PDF file. Download a single copy of it to your hard drive for posterity. It’ll be a few weeks before the finished product actually hits the shelves, so this will have to tide you over.

Here’s a direct link to the IKCG Preview. It looks like their name servers had issues earlier today, so who knows if the link will be working…

A big fat thank-you goes out to Toybox for pointing out something that I really should have known about earlier: OS-tan. Originating from 2chan.net aka Futabachan, this is one of those odd could-only-happen-on-the-internet things that would probably have gotten a lot of press if it had happened in 1999. Basically a bunch of Japanese folks made some charicatures of a variety of operating systems, represented by little cartoon girls. Windows 95 fights a lot with the Macintosh OS girls, Windows ME is unreliable and flakey, et cetera.

I have some catching up to do here, as there appears to be a rather large amount of material out there, including a number of yon-koma comic strips (samples are available on the Toybox page, as are a number of handy links). Looks hilarious. I look forward to putting one of the Windows CE drawings onto the desktop of my PDA.

*Edit on 2005-01-04: There is a rather extensive Wikipedia entry regarding OS-Tan now.

The folks at A List Apart are at it again. Fresh from showing us how to use CSS to make dropshadows, and more recently another means of using CSS to make dropshadows, they have brought us something different: A way to use CSS to make dropshadows that has a catchy name. This leaves us, the web-standards guru-watching public, with a burning question: CSS is great and all, but can I use it to make dropshadows?

In fairness to the find folks at A List Apart, the author is aware to the redundant nature of his article. As with most “how-to” articles available on the web, it is most useful as a demonstration not of how to achieve a particular visual effect, but as a demonstration of how flexible our toolset as web designers really is.

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.