Uncensored Review of Lunar: Dragon Song

I will not be mincing words or hiding my frustration. I'll admit this review is purely a bashing of the game, that I am biased in my opinion, whatever makes you happy. But hey, this is my blog and I can do whatever I want with it. Including vent my frustrations about a crappy game.

So I waltzed in my local EB Games looking for a bargain, and I though I found one. Lunar: Dragon Song, a game translated and distributed by Ubisoft, for a meagre $15 (used with box, manuals, the works). If I could turn back time, I'd have kept my cash and bought a ticket to see a drunken homeless sleep - it would probably have been more entertaining.

Now comes the bashing. Lunar DS (notice the initials - L.A.M.E.) is a piece of shit game that has to be the worse RPG ever created. It's about as fun to play as eating a llama's vomit, and probably looks even worse (no offence intended to all llama's out there). Within the first 15 minutes of playing, I was already starting to bitch at the game and thinking I had just wasted time and money I could have spent reading a book.

There are a number of things to bitch about this game, including but not limited to:

Gameplay:

1. Running (or dashing as the call it) drains your fucking HP. What kind of a fucking idiot thought with his half-assed logic that running hurts anyone? What did he think, "oh, we'll make the characters asthmatic, but they're actually couriers! How funny" ? WTF!
2. You cannot gain Items and Experience at the same time. Yes, you've heard me right. When running around (ouch, my feet hurt!) in monster area, you can select between "Combat Mode" where monsters give you items and reappear infinitely, or "Virtue Mode" where you are kind of sacrificing the monsters you fight to the Goddess Althena. The monsters do not reappear, and you obtain "Althena Conduct" points. So you're never actually gaining experience - you're just sacrificing living things (birds and bees and blobs and the likes) to your goddess so she makes you stronger.
3. Besides that, items you get from monsters are totally useless - you're actually getting whiskers, feathers, tails, clay, rusty kettles (WTF?), etc. Ok, I'll admit that gaining money (Silver in this game, they just didn't want to do like everyone and call it gold) from monsters directly is kind of idiotic - but having to fight for hours to get enough crappy items to sell (less than 10 silvers per items at first) and buy heavily overpriced items and equipment is even more stupid - especially considering the fact that getting money from monsters has come to be expected from RPG games.
4. And as I just said, items are fucking expensive. For example, a basic armour in the second city is around 2400 silvers, which is way over any sort of budget from a beginner. Considering you get your ass kicked in battles, it's an understatement to say the game is unbalanced.
5. Speaking of battles, I could probably go on for hours about how fucking stupid the battle system is. Not only can you not gain items and XP at the same time, the manual states: "Note that you cannot select the monster to attack. Whatever monster is most appropriate will be attacked automatically". Who's the idiot that thought of this, so I can bash his head in with a clue-by-four? "Most appropriate"??? You mean the fact that I'm getting bashed on by monsters that do 15 dmg per hit and my character decides that he's going to attack the fly beside it that only does 1 dmg per hit is somehow logical behaviour? That any sort of battle strategy is missing from this game is supposed to be ok? Oh of course you can select which of your allies to heal with magic or on whom you're using an item... But you can't say which enemy to attack. Bravo, captain idiot!
6. You'll have plenty of time to constantly repeat to yourself how idiotic it is to have no control over the fighting, because the largest percentage of battles are done by selecting Auto Fight and holding the right shoulder button - which speeds up the battle by 3X. That is one of the only smart features of this game, and that's saying a lot.
7. Status effects are extremely idiotic. For example, being "poisoned" means that your HP will drain whenever you attack and enemy... But wait, if it was only that, it would be normal, logical, and predictable - nooooo. Some asshole decided that a) poison also drains MP, removing your ability to heal and cure yourself when you don't have any items left. b) poison does not affect you when outside of battle, so walking around doesn't draining HP or MP - that is unless you're dashing (ouch, a dust particle hit my hand!). c) poison (and possibly other status) is not cured when using an Althena Statue to heal yourself. So you need to use the statue, cure the poison, and then use the statue again. Thanks for wasting my time.
8. Every single use of the DS's capabilities by this game is token and can be done without. The mic is used only for running away from battles by blowing on it like an idiot. The dual-screen in battle doesn't show much except enemies in the air, which could have been on the lower screen. Outside of battle, it just displays your hp and mp, which is pretty useless - oh wait, I forgot you loose HP while running (ouch, a fly just hit my ear!), so maybe that's a good thing. The touch-screen gives you access to the menus which can all be brought up by pressing the appropriate button on the DS. You can also walk around using the arrows on the touch screen, instead of using the much more efficient D-pad. The wireless multiplayer game consists of scratching cards and hoping you can find a pair that's stronger than your opponent's.
9. From all that is said so far, one thing can be deduced: there is no balance in this game. To further this, the secondary "support" character, Lucia, cannot kill a single fucking monster in one shot until she is at least level 11 or 12, and even then it's by luck. She has a limited amount of MP and her spells take huge amounts of it - for example, having 46 MP when a "heal one" spell costs 10, and "heal all" costs 40 seriously sucks. And then you get poisoned, and by the end of the excruciatingly long battle, you're out of MP completely and can't heal yourself. Fucking shit.

Story:

1. After 4 hours of gameplay, I still haven't been told that I was expected to either save the world, save a damsel in distress, that a legend had to be fulfilled and it could only be me. That's a first in any RPG I've even played. Get with it, goddamnit!
2. The dialogues are boring and bland, and from what I've heard in reviews, this is Ubisoft's fault - they just botched the job, didn't create any new puns or witty comments that were lost in translation, and even made a bunch of typos that plague the game as well as the manual.
3. There are "side-missions" to do, given by the local Gad's Express. But they are based on obtaining an item (either a package, or sundries left by monsters) and delivering them to another city. But the higher paying ones will require dozens of a few types of items (some I haven't even seen yet, and that was a job from the first city) and it costs money to drop a job if you realize it's too hard. Making money from these jobs will require you to spend hours running around (ouch, my spleen!) like a headless turkey.

Graphics:

1. I'll concede that the character design in itself is nice. Within dialogues in the city, the faces of main characters as well as city dwellers are nicely rendered - or rather, they are nicely drawn, scanned and coloured. The cities are also cute, very old-school and rpg-like. Here ends the positive side of things.
2. Since the menus can be accessed by touch-screen, some idiot thought that everyone that would play this game is retarded, so they had to make every "hotspot" on the screen veeery obvious. So, they made icons that grow and shrink to a rhythm - but they didn't notice that the algorithm they're using sucks ass, and it looks as ugly as a baboon's shithole. So half of what you see on the screen makes you want to puke.
3. Those city dwellers you see in the game all look the same, since they took half a dozen artwork, changed the colour of the clothe and hair, and called that variety.

Sound:

1. Ok so the sound isn't actually bad, the sound effects are good, the music is entertaining - it's old-school, so the fact that it's not using the whole power of the DS is acceptable, in my opinion. You have a "sound test" option in the menu from the start so you can listen to the music and sound effect loops all you want. Pretty sweet.
2. They didn't try putting voices, which is thankful because they probably would have sucked like everything else.

Miscellaneous crap:

1. Out of 3 people I know that bought the game, none have played more than an hour of the game. They all, without exception, got pissed at it and stopped playing.
2. The game was repeatedly nominated as "worst game of" something (year, all time, etc) by magazines and websites all over the place. User ratings range from an atrocious 2.1 (which is still generous) to an idiotic 9.1 on gamespot, and that stupid asshole just sais "Hey, just forget about what everyone sais, buy the game anyway!". You know, like he was bought off body and soul by the makes or the game. Get a life, idiot.
3. Remember, this is bargain bin $15 (Canadian!).
4. If you're a Lunar series fan - run away as fast as you can. You will hate this game with a passion. The more you're a Lunar fanboy, the more you'll want to travel to Japan just to assassinate the idiots who made this game.
5. If you really want to waste your money, go buy a Sega Genesis and get Rolo to the rescue.

Well now. I guess I feel better. Now, to send an email to the makers of the game.....

More time for posting now...

So I haven't posted in almost 3 months, the reason being I didn't have much personal time at home, and no Internet access from work.

This is now all changing for the better. First of all, I left my fiancé a month ago so personal time is now at it's maximum, and since I left Second Cup and started working again at VIF Internet, I have open access to update my stuff.

For those of you who regularly took a look at my website and noticed it's now offline, you might be interested in knowing that I'm going to have that back up within a week, and I will start working on redesigning it completely using Django.

I've also started writing again in my Livejournal account in french, mostly about personal stuff (whereas this blog is supposed to be more technology-related). Take a look at it if you understand the language.

Open or Closed... The Great Divide

So I picked up a copy of Wired Magazine today, because after work I needed to go to the doctor's and with 2 hours to kill, no books left to read and the library closed, I needed something to keep me entertained.

As I'm reading this mag, not realizing that I'm wasting my time (my doctor appointment is in two weeks, someone got the date wrong), I start reading on websites that are taking advantage of the internet to "crowdsource", a fancy term to say that companies now prefer to pay any average Joe to do the job of a professionnal for a lot less. A stock photo for $1 instead of $150? $10,000 for the solution to a problem that a corporation's R&D department has been strugling to find for months? That's tommorow's news.

There's all sorts of collaborative services on the Internet now, and more are popping up every day. It leads me to think about the everlasting battle between the "open-source" phylosophy and the "closed" one. Take the battle between Internet Explorer and Firefox (see my previous post for an example), where a free software is becoming more secure, fast and user-friendly than something developed by a team of so-called experts cloistered in their little programming bubble at Microsoft.

Personnally, I think that this battle will at one point be a major determinant in humanity's battle for survival, and how the future generations will live and do business. An exageration, you think? Listen to the idea and make your own opinion.

The Open market thrives on user input and collaboration, and mostly everything in this world is free - operating systems, software, even bandwith is now being exchanged and shared by everyone. Google is - in my humble opinion - a big player in this venture, by creating and distributing software as free as it gets (a little advertisement here and there, if any, and Voilà! Free software for the masses). Of course, one cannot mention free and open without thinking of Linux, GNU, sourceforge, and other such major players of the game.

The Closed market on the other hand will push for innovation through internal research, secretive R&D, industrial espionnage and sabotage, etc. The Closed market wants everything to be protected, secured, encrypted... And most important of all, lucrative. Money is the main operative, the ultimate goal, the hand that moves all.

The battle itself in relation to the future is this. On one hand, I see a future where the Closed market reigns, inflation continues, and running software on a budget will become harder every day. With companies like Microsoft creating online licensing, software that runs from the web and payed monthly instead of being purchased, it will eventually become impossible to, say, download Office and run it without paying the ridiculous amount of money MS actually wants you to throw at them. I myself admittingly never payed Microsoft a single penny, and I refuse to pay $300 for Windows, $200 for Office (or whatever the charge for that bloated piece of crap), when there are free solutions available to anyone. When your Operating System becomes costlier than your computer, you've got a problem.

On the other hand, Open systems are cheap, fast, update almost daily, and are almost impervious to hacking and security holes. Again, see my previous post about IE vs. FFox. In the future, if Open takes the larger part of the market, we might start seeing the cost of life actually *drop*, to eventually become null. How? If the model works on the Internet, what's to stop people from applying it to real life? People coming together as a community to build houses on a budget, a return to historical methods of trading goods instead of money, all that might one day become reality again.

That dream is depicted somewhat in worlds like Star Trek, where your valor is based on merit and acheivements, not on money. Ok, so today's weaknesses are also present, such as corruption (without money, that's a weird concept though) and power-hungry megalomaniacs, but at least everyone on the planet gets to live pretty much how they want and do what they love.

I may be seeing too much into this, but maybe in my lifetime we will see the balance tip on the better side of this balance, this world would become a better place. And if someone doesn't actually *need* to work to survive, than maybe - just maybe - humanity could concentrate on the betterment of itself, rather than surviving their own meager individual lives.

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And now on a personal note, I need some sleep. I haven't posted in the last month because I've been busy working. I got hired for the night shift at a Second Cup (for your information, the one on the corner of Milton and DuParc, in Montreal), and I'm gradually becoming the favorite employee there. I've realized that Tech Support might not be my true calling, when I see just how satisfying it is to get a smile and a thanks, not because I spent 30 minutes guiding an old hag through double-clicking on an icon on her desktop (for crying out loud lady, it's right fucking there!), but simply because I've just given them their lifeblood: A cup of coffee. As of this moment, I'm never going back to tech support.

Working the nightshift means my social life took a plunge, I'm spending less time with Tiff, but we think it's well worth it because of the higher salary (if I calculate more hours, and the tips), and the possibility to have an amazing reference and possibly a management position before the end of the year - who knows! More on this in my next post.

When will Firefox be the next target?

So today, Google started advertising Firefox and their toolbar to any US resident using Internet Explorer. This led me to some thinking about why Firefox is currently considered the safest browser and why it's prefered by a lot of sources when recommending browsing software.

People use Ffox for different reasons, for example compatibility, ease of use, tabbed browsing and nowadays for security. Analysts argue that Ffox is less of a target for hackers and virus programmers because it's less popular than Internet Explorer. This is true right now and will probably still be true for another year or so - IE's 60% market share is slowly diminishing, while Ffox's percentage is growing up to 25% and more now - but when the balance tips over in favor of the alternative and it's not the alternative anymore... What browsers will hackers and virus writers target?

True, hackers are mostly biased against Microsoft in general and target their products out of some blind hate targeted at Bill. In my opinion that's justified by the fact that MS is largely basing their "R&D" on copying other existing products, something they've been doing from day 1.

But there's always a part of that dark community that completely disregards the background of the product they target, wishing only their 15 minutes of fame when they discover any random vulerability in a product and creating an exploit out of it. It happens sooner or later with all software even when we least expected - OSX.Leap recently showed that even Mac users are at risk - and so it will happen with Ffox at one point.

And the more it becomes popular, the more it will become a target. The more it's percentage of market rises, the larger the target becomes and the easiest it is to hit.

One can only hope that the open community on which Firefox is built will be enough of a solid foundation to protect it from this dreaded possible future. By having inputs from a larger base of programmers, it's possible that vulnerabilities will be quickly targeted and eliminated before they are exploited by the community. Being protected will then mean being sure you have the latest version of the browser, something the majority of home users need to learn to keep up with.

Update:
I modified my blog's template to include a rather large warning banner on the top of the screen if you're using Internet Explorer, prompting you to download FireFox. You might think this goes against this very post, however I beleive it it best to think positive and think that the community will always be quick enough to protect everyone from massive and dangerous vulnerabilities in FireFox. It's up to you to choose.

Should I jinx it?

I don't know if I should really be talking about this... You all know that I love Google. It's not only my primary search engine, but also hosts my blog, my email and probably my website in the future. I do 3D with Google, I use the maps for driving directions...

So what's this about then? Well, I saw a post on the Official Google blog about the Page Creator written by the project manager Justin Rosenstein, and I thought that it would be pretty cool just to email the guy with the ideas I had to make Page Creator a bit better. It was basically things that I had thought about for NetBench when it was actually a project I was aiming to do at one point.

The whole thing turned into an email exchange that, if I'm really lucky, will become a huge turning point in my life. How so? Because I might actually get a job at Google. I mean, getting support from someone on the Inside could just be what I need. You can read the email exchange on my blog.

It's just amazing what can happen when you simply step up to comment. I could have not only a job but an opportunity to get behind the walls of the most amazing company in the US, get contacts and make tons of friends. I'm just mostly speechless.