The NEW Game Journal

[John]

The colour of the shapes matter. On one peice of paper the first two shapes are blue, giving you the first 2 numbers for the combination. The second peice of paper has the last two shapes as blue, giving you the last two numbers. The same, but in reverse for the red key. The fist two shapes on the second peice of paper are red, giving you the first two numbers, and the last two shapes on the first peice of paper are red, giving you the last two numbers.

EDIT: I just realised you said you only had one peice of paper. You don't have all the clues yet. That'll be your problem. Haha.

I've looked everywhere and touched everything! How could I be missing a clue? Oh, what the hell. I have the picture of the boat, and the one ticket like I explained. I guess I'll have to do some more searching.
I can see this game is going to drive me crazy.
Thanks for the help.

That first room has a little cabinet thing that doesn't initially look like it would be a clickable object.  That and check under all the pillows.

[Mickeymac92]

Is the New Vegas DLC really not good? I've been waiting for years to get that game, but I wanted the DLC because FO3 had really good DLC. Man...I can get for, like, under $10 without the DLC now...And I got the Ultimate Edition sitting in my Amazon cart, waiting for me to finally have the opportunity to get it...

Anyways...I just got Ni no Kuni, and all of a sudden I have a powerful urge to play a grid-based RPG with explorable levels...which Ni no Kuni most definitely is not. Why do I always have these stupid urges at the worst times? Might just grab a demo and get it out of me. Anybody know if any of the Heroes of Magic games, Rainbow Moon, or, Wakfu play like RPG adventures with grid-based movement and gameplay? I suppose there's also Fallout, which I already bought...but that game raped the hell outta me when I last attempted it...

Old World Blues is amazing.  Worth the price alone.

Since I have more time to flesh out this opinion... New Vegas has a really mixed bag of DLC.  Dead Money is pretty bad.  Honest Hearts is pretty easy, but is a good, fun romp if you just want to destroy something.  Plus it gives you some pretty good weaponry for... Old World Blues, which is pretty much the best piece of DLC I've ever played in an RPG. It's got the great 50s sci fi aesthetic, totally crazy and lovable characters, but it is TOUGH.  Lots of mechanical enemies with high armor and you will die a lot.  It's worth it, though.  I didn't play Lonesome Road, but I've heard good things about it.

Thanks, John. Sounds like I'll hold out for the Ultimate Edition after all, though I'll probably avoid the Dead Money DLC.

[Annubis]

I'm not making this up. There's a mini-game in SR3 where you drive a convertible with a tiger next to you and you have to drive fast to help the tiger build up courage. If you smash stuff, he claws you. The whole thing is also voiced by your character going "oh shit it's a tiger next to me aaaaaaah this is the worst idea evaaaaaaar."

How much drug do you need for your devs to create a mini-game like THAT?

[Seultoria]

I'm on Day 6 in SMT Devil Survivor 2. I had a character end up dying. I'm not a perfectionist when it comes to games, so I'm not too worried about it. I did try to beat the boss and was just about there, but I got raped at the end because I was underleveled/didn't have strong enough demons.

Been playing Ni no Kuni. I'm at the place where you have to do those sage trials. The test of friendship is hard for me since I'm not used to using the right analog stick at all, so Esther keeps falling off the ledge. It'll just take some practice to get used to controlling her in that part.

Ahhhhhh! That friendship test didn't take me long but it sure did piss me off..... Just take your time and move them one at a time and it is much easier.... I was (at first) trying to move them both simultaneously and Esther kept falling on me too.... I believe there is only one brief instance you actually NEED to manipulate them both at once (at the start of the 3rd set of paths if I am not mistaken)

I tried it again the next day and got it on the first try. I did what you said: just focus on moving one character at a time as long as the game permitted me to do so. Once I figured out moving both of them at the same time was just about impossible for me, I just tried moving one character at a time.

[Akanbe-]

This Vyce battle in Tactics Ogre is fucking annoying... he is unstoppable because they give him a finisher. I need to grind to be able to beat him, but I'm not in the mood whatsoever. I might end up shelving this for awhile now.

When in doubt, more archers.

I bought a 3DS yesterday so that I can get Fire Emblem next week and decided my first 3DS game would be New Super Mario Bros.2 since I loved the first one... well that was a mistake. It's simply kind of boring compared to the plumbers other games. Incredibly short (beat it in probably 4-5 hours) and the level design is just not up to par. Really disappointed honestly.

I read around a bit and decided to get Super Mario 3D land instead.  It's a bit short as well, especially if you don't do the post game levels (which adds alot), but I had a fun time with it.

I'm not making this up. There's a mini-game in SR3 where you drive a convertible with a tiger next to you and you have to drive fast to help the tiger build up courage. If you smash stuff, he claws you. The whole thing is also voiced by your character going "oh shit it's a tiger next to me aaaaaaah this is the worst idea evaaaaaaar."

How much drug do you need for your devs to create a mini-game like THAT?

Saints Row 3 is fucking amazing.  I really need to get around playing SR2 someday.

[Mickeymac92]

So today I played Ni no Kuni and Fallout 3: GOTY on the PS3, each about 2 hours at a time. Ni no Kuni was kinda difficult to get through because it starts out almost exactly like DS version, whose beginning I'd gone through about 5 times now...at least this time I got to understand Drippy's witty dialogue. Once it got to the gameplay though, it's pretty fun.

Fallout 3 is also pretty slow to start, and I'd played through it before on the PC, though I barely remembered any of it. After Ni no Kuni, this game feels kinda bland and unfriendly. Not the best combination of games I could've picked. I did really want to shoot stuff, though, so I at least got that out of my system. BB Gun sucks, though. Thanks dad...

[Blace]

This Vyce battle in Tactics Ogre is fucking annoying... he is unstoppable because they give him a finisher. I need to grind to be able to beat him, but I'm not in the mood whatsoever. I might end up shelving this for awhile now.

When in doubt, more archers.

I bought a 3DS yesterday so that I can get Fire Emblem next week and decided my first 3DS game would be New Super Mario Bros.2 since I loved the first one... well that was a mistake. It's simply kind of boring compared to the plumbers other games. Incredibly short (beat it in probably 4-5 hours) and the level design is just not up to par. Really disappointed honestly.

I read around a bit and decided to get Super Mario 3D land instead.  It's a bit short as well, especially if you don't do the post game levels (which adds alot), but I had a fun time with it.

I'm not making this up. There's a mini-game in SR3 where you drive a convertible with a tiger next to you and you have to drive fast to help the tiger build up courage. If you smash stuff, he claws you. The whole thing is also voiced by your character going "oh shit it's a tiger next to me aaaaaaah this is the worst idea evaaaaaaar."

How much drug do you need for your devs to create a mini-game like THAT?

Saints Row 3 is fucking amazing.  I really need to get around playing SR2 someday.

The Vyce battle is a 1 vs 1 battle lol. I need to get Super Mario 3D Land at some point.

[Aeolus]

I'm jealous.... I always wanted to make my way through WK to get WK2.... looked very appealing to me... but alas, it still sits on my shelf untouched... I made the mistake of buying that the same time I bought Xenoblade.... popped in Xeno first... you can imagine what happened...

Honestly you aren't missing much. >.> I was anticipating White KNight Chronicles from the moment I saw the first trailer.....and the series really has been a diappointment the entire time. The original trailers and such implied a world with giant scope and fast paced action. The world you get is still giant in scope, but the game play is so miserable. And considering the scope of the world, the actual storyline feels....small. I don't know how it feels small considering it is about a war engulfing the entire world, but somehow it does. For 2 this is probably because the entire game is basically just repeating the areas from 1, but I don't remember why things seemed small in 1. There really was only one time in both games where I really felt the scope that the trailers gave me was in one of the final battles of 2 where you have all five knights fighting and somehow it actually felt dynamic and epic to me despite it just being another fight.

Am I to take it then, that I should  jump right into 2 should I choose to indulge the series in the future...? 2 other individuals were trying to tell me to skip part 1 but I'm a big "start at the beginning" type of guy.... Learned my lesson though... when you guys here tell me to skip something its worth skipping....

NOTE: Yes, I am once again referencing my delinquent decision to not heed the wisdom offered to me here about Atelier Rorona... And now with Ayesha around the bend, the chances of my ever desiring to return to Arland is becoming slimmer and slimmer.....

Actually we're trying to tell you to skip WKC completely. WKC1 was awful, WKC2 was only marginally better at best, and playing them means not playing something better.

[Dice]

Ni no Kuni

*sniff sniff*.  Smell that?  I smell Dragon Quest all over it!  BLEGH. 
It's a good game (betterthandragonquests), but some parts feel really stiff and compromised of a few poor game design decisions. 

For one, the monsters are a bit of a pain, micromanaging (and slow eating animations for very minor stats boosts), equipping them, and then evolving metamorphisizing them back to level 1 makes the grind of the game worse (made worse when trying to "power up" before a boss still stuck with underleveled yet freshly evolved monsters or toughing it out with a high leveled but weaker monster).  The micromanaging can make it a pain whether to gauge getting a new monster or keeping with the ones you have.  The low capture rate is irritating as well, making a few quests a lot of trouble (or at least time consuming) than it should.

The episodic nature of the storyline is just downright silly and the result of uninspired writers or something.  I'm not finding much drive in a plot that has me doing fetch quests so, literally, story-relevant NPCs can "feel good" again because they lost whatever virtue.  The inconsistent voice acting to cutscene ratio really breaks the flow of the dramatic parts as well.  Made worse because there aren't too many of the cutscenes that are really entertaining either.

The saving grace has to be the overall addictive quality of the gameplay, even in spite of its flaws.

This is probably something I'll enjoy but trade in if the value is good enough.  That and given the time I have free these days, it's not really the type of game I can see myself pouring into the bonus content with.

[Kevadu]

Finally finished the future arc in Tales of Graces f over the weekend.  Had been playing this game on and off for months.  I really do like this game, though (despite some horribly sappy dialogue), just haven't had much time for gaming in general.

I find it kind of odd how much better the writing feels in the skits than in the in-game cutscenes.  Like, there are some genuinely funny and cute moments in the skits, but even when they're trying to be funny and cute in cutscenes they fail miserably.  Of course there are some timing issues, too.  The awkward pauses certainly don't help; the skit dialogue flows much more naturally.


Since finishing that I've decided to return to Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time.  There are a lot of things I genuinely like about the game, but it continues to drive me nuts with its lack of save points.  I just had to play through three big set-piece battles in a row (with a few regular battles in between) without getting a chance to rest or save between them.  But the worst part was that I had no idea I was going to be fighting so many large battles like that so I wasn't conserving my MP and knacks appropriately.  By the third battle I had Frayne (in case you don't know the game she's pretty much a standard mage type character) duking it out in melee because she was out of MP, but I managed to barely scrape through somehow.

Barely scraping through was sort of satisfying in a way.  Few modern games give me that sense of satisfaction.  But on the other hand this took so long if I had died I would literally have been set back hours.  That's too much...

[Klyde Chroma]

I'm jealous.... I always wanted to make my way through WK to get WK2.... looked very appealing to me... but alas, it still sits on my shelf untouched... I made the mistake of buying that the same time I bought Xenoblade.... popped in Xeno first... you can imagine what happened...

Honestly you aren't missing much. >.> I was anticipating White KNight Chronicles from the moment I saw the first trailer.....and the series really has been a diappointment the entire time. The original trailers and such implied a world with giant scope and fast paced action. The world you get is still giant in scope, but the game play is so miserable. And considering the scope of the world, the actual storyline feels....small. I don't know how it feels small considering it is about a war engulfing the entire world, but somehow it does. For 2 this is probably because the entire game is basically just repeating the areas from 1, but I don't remember why things seemed small in 1. There really was only one time in both games where I really felt the scope that the trailers gave me was in one of the final battles of 2 where you have all five knights fighting and somehow it actually felt dynamic and epic to me despite it just being another fight.

Am I to take it then, that I should  jump right into 2 should I choose to indulge the series in the future...? 2 other individuals were trying to tell me to skip part 1 but I'm a big "start at the beginning" type of guy.... Learned my lesson though... when you guys here tell me to skip something its worth skipping....

NOTE: Yes, I am once again referencing my delinquent decision to not heed the wisdom offered to me here about Atelier Rorona... And now with Ayesha around the bend, the chances of my ever desiring to return to Arland is becoming slimmer and slimmer.....

Actually we're trying to tell you to skip WKC completely. WKC1 was awful, WKC2 was only marginally better at best, and playing them means not playing something better.

Noted and appreciated.... after just filling up on XBox Rpgs I missed out on, this was actually gonna be a fork in the road I encountered as soon as I finished up Ni No Kuni... I'm thinking tales of vesperia is on deck.... tales is one of my favorite series period, vesperia and legendia are the only 2 I have yet to play through.

[Mickeymac92]

Played some more Fallout 3 and had a very frustrating time. First, the dude's hat was floating on the side of his head...okay, that was funny, actually. What wasn't funny was taking on a quest to get critically erradiated, promised to get fixed up as soon as I returned, only for her to close shop literally as soon as I got back there. Then I had to wait for it to be dawn, since I didn't have any money for a room. Then she sends me on a quest to disarm landmines, which I thought would be great to practice disarming the Nuke, but then the game got stuck on the loading screen for a half an hour, where I then had to shut the game off. I'm not sure if it corrupted my autosave, but either way, I'm done with this game for quite some time...

[John]

Are you playing the PS3 version of that game? Bethesda is notably bad on PS3 development, unfortunately.

[Mickeymac92]

Are you playing the PS3 version of that game? Bethesda is notably bad on PS3 development, unfortunately.

Yeah. I have the PC version, but I liked the game enough that I decided I wanted a console version. Big mistake...I honestly thought the problems were patched out, but I haven't gotten a single patch since I bought the game.

[MeshGearFox]

Are you playing the PS3 version of that game? Bethesda is notably bad on PS3 development, unfortunately.

Yeah. I have the PC version, but I liked the game enough that I decided I wanted a console version. Big mistake...I honestly thought the problems were patched out, but I haven't gotten a single patch since I bought the game.

Wait why? They're the same game, but the console version lacks mod support and apparently has more bugs.