After the debacle of the Playstation Network getting hacked back in 2011 I never saw it fit to give Sony my card details. So when I wanted to buy Resident Evil 2 a couple of years back I did so using a PSN card. However this gave me extra funds in my account that I didn't really know how to spend. It was quite a while ago, May 2013 in fact, that I decided to use up the funds by grabbing Final Fantasy 6 and Final Fantasy 9, as I'd never played 6, and had never owned 9.

I've never owned any Nintendo console, so my first Final Fantasy was 7 on the PS1, which I really loved at the time. However, it's number 6 that's widely regarded to be the best Final Fantasy game ever made, and back in March I finally began my journey through its madness. I know. I don't work very fast.

Before playing this I was well aware my tastes have changed since 1998. I haven't played FF7 in well over a decade, and though I consider it my fave game of all time for its story, I have long believed I would struggle to play it again due to its mechanics and random encounters. That belief has certainly been reinforced while playing through FF6.

Very much a game of two halves, it started out very much reminding me of number 7, being fairly linear and story driven. However, unlike 7, you very quickly get to explore the places of the world, and fairly quickly gain an airship to travel around. Still, during this time, the game makes it clear where you've got to go and what you've got to do, but allows you to fly around and do your own thing if you wish.
In contrast, the second half of the game is weird. You get absolutely no story or instructions to guide you, other than it's your task to kill the final boss, Kefka. At that point in the game though, the low levels of your characters dictate that such an attempt would be pointless. It's up to you where to go, what to explore and how much to level up before going into Kefka's tower.

Instead, the game is laden with secret little things to find and do. Number 7 had a few hidden cut scenes, like when visiting the Shinra Mansion basement or Lucrecia's cave, but in this game there were loads of little scenes that flashed up out of nowhere, and entire side missions that would become available, depending on what I was doing or which characters were in my party. I can't even begin to imagine how many things I missed, and it's left me with a feeling that I learned very little about the characters, meaning I don't really care for any of them. Some people probably enjoy that there are so many things to find and do, but for me I'd rather at least all the big back story scenes be mandatory.

The lack of story and focus was not the only problem with the later sections of the game. I certainly did not enjoy the required grind to level up enough of the characters and have them learn enough magic to be useful going into the final confrontations. Number 8 had a lot of grinding in order to draw magics, but I don't remember anything of the sort necessary in 7 or 9, unless you wanted to fight the WEAPONs. Maybe it's an even number thing. It's just not something I care for.

But by far the main issues were down to the downright pathetic attempt at porting this old Nintendo game to the Playstation platform. I've seen footage of the original Nintento version on Youtube, and it has none of the issues this version has. Incredibly slow load speeds in between battles and sections, battle menu freezes, and sluggish controller response times plagued me every step of the way. Also, in the iconic opera scene, there's some very strange video/audio sync issues which made the whole section really hard to get passed as correct timing is necessary.
The other issue which also annoyed me, which was not port-related, was the fact that you can not see your character's MP or max HP when you're in a battle. I'm so glad they made that info available in later games, because there's no excuse for it not to be there.

For all its bad points though, the game was still playable. It says something about how bad 13 was if I've managed to get through this game with all its Playstation issues, when I couldn't face 13 for more than a few hours.

As far as number 9 is concerned, I struggled to get through it the first time when I borrowed it from Scoob. After this experience it's unlikely I'll play it, or any Final Fantasy, ever again.

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After all these months Final Fantasy 6 is not the only game that's been played. Back in January, I joined Scoob and his bro in trying out the free to play game World Of Tanks. Though there were things I liked about the game, we only played it for a for a few weeks before getting a bit bored. The main problem was the disparity between the power of some of the tanks and some of the guns, and after the first few levels the game starts matching you against players who are much higher level, meaning you don't have a chance really. And of course the other main problem was having to rely on a full team of strangers, meaning many games weren't really that close, with whichever side working best as a team completely destroying the other. I think if they made the whole game a bit less realistic and more fast-paced, or a new mode within the game that was like that, then I'd have liked it more overall.

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Scoob and I recently gave a really old game a go in the form of Heroes Of Might & Magic 3, widely regarded to be the best in the series. I bought this one purely for the multiplayer, to try and revive some of the strategy game love we used to have in the past. But after a few attempts we realised this game was not for us. It has a similar problem to that of the Settlers games, but to a far greater degree. With this genre, when the game starts its fun as you scramble to develop your warriors and towns, but then there's a huge delay while you're just waiting for everything to finish and upgrade before you go and destroy the enemy. This could be a long time in something like Settlers 3, but here the wait is insane. We tried a fair few maps, even a 4v4 map of my own design that gave us many resources and towns to start with, but the game still went on for hours. What's even worse with this game over the Settlers is that it's turn-based, meaning you can't even do anything while an opponent is moving. I can see it being a fun game if it was slightly different, but overall I'm not sure why it's so highly regarded.

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We've tried a few other old multiplayer games, such as Red Alert 2 and Dungeon Keeper 2, but could not get both of my computers playing them for more than a few minutes before one of them crashed.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, our main game of choice recently has been League Of Legends once again. Damn thing is too addictive. Still haven't done any real PvP yet, other than a few skirmishes against each other, and some ARAMs, one of which was a One For All battle between 10 Rengars, which was interesting. I had a good start going 4 and 1, but got pegged back to 5 and 5. Buggers.
We're mainly doing Co-op Vs. AI matches, just to get a bit of IP, but even in those games we get idiots who argue amongst themselves and rage quit. It really doesn't fill me with any great desire to dive into full PvP.

Wow, kind of a crazy wargaming entry for this blog after some years of inactivity. It seems finally that some motivation and desire to work on this hobby is again starting to flow through my veins.

The first thing I got around to was more terrain. After finishing the oil plant I felt determined to finish all the other terrain I had started in the past. In addition, I made some steps up in the style of the hilly rock things, and some bridges to also get an interesting two-level effect.

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I've spent many hours going through all my old and never used models that have been collecting dust in the loft, preparing them all for a spraying marathon. It's been very strange tidying up my old Space Crusade stuff, which me and my friends utterly destroyed with our crappy painting efforts back in the early 90s. I've also finally glued together my Orks and Gretchin which I've owned since the 2nd edition box set, so my warboss has got some Boyz to hang around with.
With all my terrain done and (hopefully) soon all my spraying done, all I'll have left is many hundreds of models to paint. I highly doubt I'll be as motivated to get stuck into all those though...

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I lucked out recently when I had some models given to me, including some 6mm scale stuff and an original Varag Ghoul-Chewer and Horkon Heartripper. I used to have Varag back when I started playing Blood Bowl in 94, but for some reason I cut his hands off and glued them to a Black Orc to make my own version of the model in an attempt to make him more imposing. More recently I was actually planning on using a Black Scorpion model and an elf I got free with White Dwarf as these characters, but obviously these two new additions will take their rightful places on the pitch.

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Here's quite an interesing little update concerning actual wargames gameplay. Last year sometime me and Scoob started bashing out some ideas for our own ruleset based on 5th edition 40K. This was mainly because nobody wanted to play either 6th or the WARGAME rules I was originally making, and 5th had gotten a bit stale. So we've done a fair bit of playtesting and even more sitting down and discussing rule ideas over the last 6 months or so, and we're nearly at a point where the rules are sorted. We're not quite sure how we're going to decide on points values, but in order to playtest the rules a bit more, and get an idea of points, we're hoping to do a small narrative campaign sometime soon. Should be interesting.

It's been a long long time since I paid wargaming any attention, but for some reason, over the last couple of weeks I've been motivated to complete the oil plant that I started about five years ago. That only leaves a couple of craters and the Aegis defence line to paint and all the terrain I've started will be done. I could probably do with making a brand new river, and I have some ideas for new hilly rock things to make the ones I've already made a bit more usable, but neither of those things are really that necessary. It's not like we're actually playing many games at the moment...

Just recently got the chance to play through a game I've really wanted to play since its release about a year ago, in the form of strange puzzle game Antichamber. Up until now, it had only been available on Steam, which I still don't have an account for. But the recent release of Humble Indie Bundle 11 gave me the opportunity to finally give it a DRM-free bash.

It's a first person exploration and puzzle game, with one of the most bizarre visual styles you're likely to see. Puzzles mostly focus around manipulating coloured blocks with several different gun-type tools that you find as you wander through the maze of brain-frelling madness. But you'll also come across things like invisible obstacles, walls and floors you can freely pass through, things that don't exist one minute but then do the next, and all kinds of other craziness.

I enjoyed the game for the most part, especially the first half, but the puzzles seemed to get less imaginative the more guns I got. The two main gameplay problems were the tiny reticule, which I very often couldn't even see in order to aim properly, and the fact that every now and then the frame rate would severely drop. I don't know why in a game with such a minimalist graphic style. Maybe the game was loading something in the background. Whatever.

I have to shamefully admit that I had to go looking for help for a couple of the puzzles. It wasn't necessarily that I couldn't figure them out, but rather there were mechanics in the game that I didn't realise existed. Most of the time the game would give you subtle hints about what to do when encountering something new for the first time, but sometimes it wouldn't. I guess I shoulda played around more.
But it's all good, as it's another one down.