Well… it’s been entirely too long since I’ve written. I love how two posts ago also started with this observation. Well, the half-written post count is up to 19 and the video game reviews I want to write are up to 4 
We’re also still alive. I probably should have mentioned that when we came home from Troy’s. The fire didn’t directly affect anyone I know. It got within yards of one of my coworkers’ place and burnt other buildings in his complex, but his was fine. Where I am was fine, fire didn’t get much closer than 2.5-3 miles to our place. We got a thin dusting of ash, but barely enough to notice. The air was horrendous for a few days after we got back though.
Work… is awesome and mentally draining and terribly rewarding. Even though I can talk about the platform now, most of the things I would want to say (and haven’t already just said on the forums) are about games and features that have yet to be unveiled, so shrug. A few of my partially written blog posts are on some of the problems I’ve solved at work, so those might wind up giving me an outlet to talk about Metaplace w/o actually talking about Metaplaces.
I’ve all but given up on doing any real anime reviews this season – I’ve not actually had time to watch anything new, even though I’ve been looking forward to 2 or 3 of the shows currently on. We’ll see if I can watch some of the spring 2008 season in stead. Looks like Haruhi is coming back next year, so that’ll be fun… yeah. I’m gonna be prepared this time next around 
I’ve beaten Folklore, Jeanne d’Arc, and Portal since October. I am currently really enjoying Lego Star Wars on the Wii (yay for silly games) and the new EQ2 expansion. My WoW chars are sitting on ice until the expansion, I think. I keep meaning to get back into Puzzle Quest and the FFT and Disgaea PSP remakes and and am also serving Dracula X and Super Mario Galaxy with a good long look…
While I’m here, I guess a few quick game observations are in order. I’ve got a separate mud-related post that I’ll also try to finish tonight.
Portal (PC)
I offer no review for Portal, plenty of others already have. The game rocks. It’s funny. It’s innovative. I’ve played it through twice now, and am currently torturing myself with challenge maps
Jeanne d’Arc (PSP)
Jeanne d’Arc is the reason I bought a PSP. It is the first tactical strategy RPG I’ve beaten in years. I really can’t say enough good things about it.
The graphics are good, the anime cut sequences are well done. The silly Frenchy accents are a bit meh, but they don’t detract from the story. I stayed up late many a night with the PSP plugged into the wall next to my bed in order to watch “just one more” story sequence.
The combat system is great. It’s refreshing to see an RPG where the “fight” button is actually useful throughout the entire duration of the game – most games obsolete the generic attack option with specials that you can use with abandon. And, while it sometimes irked me as I played, I appreciated the built-in time limits on all battles. They prevented me from pulling a Disgaea or FFT and grinding skills during plot fights and becoming too supremely overpowered.
I guess my only real complaint about the game is that the story became more and more far-fetched as it progressed. That, and the combat quickly became easy and then trivial. I actually beat the game “by accident” while alternating between absentmindedly taking moves and watching news about the fire’s progress on m3mnoch’s couch. I don’t even know which of my party members delivered the killing blow
I give the game a 9.5 out of 10. It is a definite must-have for fans of the genre. Just ignore the fantasy Europe and the talking animals and stuff.
They could have done better by giving me an adaptive difficulty setting where the AI responded intelligently to veteran players as the game progressed. As it is, the same tricks that one discovers before map 10 still work after map 30. None of the boss fights really taxed the neurons, they were all pretty much cases of “smash the boss before he eats you”. Sometimes you had to do something trivial to enable said smashing… but that was usually as little as “get within attack range”
Folklore (PS3)
Folklore is one of the first exclusive PS3 titles worth playing. I loved the demo and waited for the launch like a man possessed because I was dumb enough not to pre-order for some bizarre reason. It took me several days until after the nominal launch to actually find a copy, which I then pretty much devoured.
The story is excellent, and the voice acting adds a lot. The characters are the sort you can get attached to. The humor is even occasionally pretty good. Unfortunately, the pseudo comic book cut sequences outweighed the fully rendered plot points by a large number, and they really take some getting used to so some people might miss the depth of the plot. I enjoyed the comic sequences near the end of the game, but always wished that they’d just taken the effort to do the story sequences right.
The gameplay is good. Not excellent, but it’s enjoyable and intuitive. It does get a bit repetitive after a while, however. The first 3 levels enthralled me. The last few… I blew through the combat, just to get to the story points.
The sixaxis stuff isn’t bad, either. There was some concern that it would take away from the game, but it was well done. However, I don’t really think it added anything meaningful to the game and wouldn’t have missed it if they hadn’t included it. Like all early titles for any system with a new control scheme, Folklore suffers from the same desire to actually use all of the features. Remember how the PS2 controllers featured analog buttons? Early games obsessed with making button pressure matter. I hated that. Thankfully, most later games on the console that I am aware of ditched that idea as a core gameplay element.
All in all, It plays kind of like a cross between Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and Dark Cloud. I give the game an 7.5 out of 10.
It is certainly better than the average stuff to hit the console and is worth considering, despite a few rough spots. But it is essentially a launch title, so I cut them some slack there. They could have scored higher by giving me more content, making the distinction between Ellen and Keats’s puzzles more pronounced (their boss fights really were 90% the same), and ditching the crummy plot sequence mechanics.
But the number one thing they could have done to improve the game was give me a blasted “New Game+” mode or even just let me continue running around in the netherworlds after beating the final boss. They give you this Pokemon system for catching several dozen creatures and then training them up… but when you finish the game, it’s all over. No way to resume building up your guys just for the 100% completion type feeling.