Battle Beyond the Stars

We had a session of the GURPS campaign last night. At one point, as the party was wandering aimlessly, I picked up one of the jillion GURPS supplements lying around the room, and said, "Okay, I'm going to flip to a random page of this book, and whatever's on it will happen."

"Um, that's Compendium II..."

"So?" Flip flip flip. "Space combat is resolved as a series of contests between individual craft..."

So most of the rest of the session was spent in space. Or at least, in a space ship.

( game summary )

I wasn't especially sleepy during the game, but I'm sort of tired now... *yawn*

Other stuff.

I didn't get any work done at work yesterday... but that's okay, because we were having a morale event, at Jillians, in Seattle. Since it was in Seattle, I had to get a ride, this time with Rick, who's into old cars, old computers, and old music and who smokes a lot. Typical joke: "I had this friend once, who got a custom plate '0XFE06'. Get it?"

Jillians has a variety of things to do... video games, billiards, ping pong, or of course just eating food and drinking alcohol. I spent the whole time playing Puerto Rico. I lost the first game badly, but in the second game we were playing with the expansion, and Doug (who won the first game) remarked, as I bought the aquaduct, "You know, there's a neat thing you can do with the aquaduct and the specialty factory..." So I basically followed his suggestion, added a few strokes of luck, and wound up winning the game by a ridiculous margin.

That ate up all the time we had there, which was kind of a shame, but I don't play board games all that often... I had to leave in a hurry, though (so as not to be left behind by the person who'd given me a ride), and forgot the copy of Munchkin I'd brought. Oops. Had to page my boss's boss and ask him to pick it up for me on the way out, eheh.

In other news, I'm getting sick of Shin Megami Tensei. It just goes on forever! And evolving monsters is so slow and tedious... >.< There are lots of good RPGs coming out soon (Jade Empire, Xenosaga 2), maybe I should set it aside.

I did get 'Viewtiful Joe' to try to take a break from it, but... god, it's a sucky game. Your guy staggers around the screen like a drunken slug, your attacks have a range of 1.5 pixels, and the weakest enemy takes ten hits. And it's so *ugly*! In other words, it's too hard, and I can't get past the first real boss -- some sort of helicopter that riddles you with bullets and takes, by my estimate, 500 punches to take down. Not that I ever got its health bar even halfway down before it killed me, in the six attempts I made.

EDIT: I checked gamefaqs to see if there was some secret strategy to beat the helicopter... only to find in the 'boss faq' that it wasn't even a boss. Gaah. Fuck this game.

*sigh*

Well, I decided to try again to take a break from Shin Megami Tensei, and went out and got Xenosaga 2. I really liked the first game, and the reviews of the sequel were generally positive, so I figured I couldn't go wrong...

Well, I was wrong. I mean, I'm not ready to completely write it off after only two hours, but the load times are crazy, and the skill system is, bizarrely, the same for every character. WTF? The voice acting is awful and very, very badly paced, which makes the numerous and unrelenting cut scenes twice as long (boy, I wish I was joking). And, of course, it drove me to scream and turn off the console after the second boss fight between save points that started you off pinned between three enemies with at least 2000 hp each (where your attacks do about 100) that do 180 damage with a rear attack (where your total hp are about 300). Not only did I not win that fight, but I don't really see how that fight could possibly be winnable... and I'll have to refight the previous boss to even try.

Plus, other than the character names and models (not abilities), the only carry-over from the previous game is the 'boost' system, which has been changed so that it's no longer predictable when you will or won't be able to boost.

Look, difficuly can be good, but some things, like multiple bosses and long, tedious cut scenes with no save points, make me want to hunt down the game designers and kill them. DIE YOU ASSHOLES!