Recent Blog Entries

This Anima nerf has gotten me to do the Crystal Tower series of raids again, and reminded me of just what an amazing soundtrack they have.
Shattered plays during regular encounters in the Crystal Tower raid, the second in the set of "casual" 24-man raid during Final Fantasy XIV's 2.0 series.The music is all calm and pretty - arrangements of Final Fantasy III's music - and when the encounters start it picks up to this theme.

Perhaps the biggest impact this theme has is that it is a remix o…

Last night I finally got my 210 Anima weapon in Final Fantasy XIV! YES, I am months late. With all other stuff I have been playing I just didn't grind for the 'unidentifiable' set of items, just purchasing them every now and then.

With yesterday's patch, which heavily nerfed the costs of these items, I managed to get all of them with a combination of tomes and beast tribe tokens. Used all my Grand Company seals to get half of the craftable items and bought the other straight from the market …

I started Lightning Returns the other day and... Hm? Yes, I just did. Yeah, I know.
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, also known as FFXIII-3, came out at a terrible time. Back then our wonderful government imposed a $42 tax on courier deliveries. What was previously a $12 delivery jumped to $54 - almost the price of a full game! And thus, it was the first Final Fantasy game that I had to hold off on purchasing. Last year, during my trip to Miami I found it (used, but in excellent stat…

Yo! Yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo guys. This is real:
What's the first thing you do with a franchise like Metal Gear Solid after doing away with its creator and part of its team? Why, do a... survival... game... thingy.

And no, I am not counting the pachinko machine thing because... pachinko.

Konami today announced Metal Gear Survive (which ironically enough also acronyms to 'MGS') and it's... we don't really know what it is but it sure as hell is not a regular, traditional Metal Gear ga…

It's a holiday here and I just spent about 4 hours in the local boardwalk catching pokémon. Water pokémon. Also, since it's a holiday I don't have access to my office PC where my Wordpress credentials are, and since I am too tired and lazy to go changing the password... forget the simple formatting. Amazing PR spin: BlueGartr exclusive!
Pokémon GO is a week old here so the magic hasn't gone away yet, and it's still a lot of fun going around looking for pokémons I am missing and visiting poké…

While more developed countries were catching pokémon and cursing Niantic for removing some steps from some screen, we the people of South America we just crossing our fingers waiting for Pokémon GO to come to us (unless, of course, you somehow managed to install it earlier). Last week we finally got our chance as the game was released in our countries and I can finally leave home and work behind to go explore the world and finally fulfill my dream of becoming a Pokémon master.

I wish.

By no…

Want another piece from Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! 2? Of course you do!
Last week I told you how much I like the OST (or rather 'track list') from the Ouendan games, which came out for the Nintendo DS. Today I share with you another track from it and it is one of my favorites, if not the favorite: Music Hour by Porno Graffiti (yeah, weird name).

Sadly, just like last week, the original video for Music Hour is not on Youtube but can be found elsewhere. A video of a live performance can be found,…

FFXIV

1. FFXIV Random Complaint Thread II: DPS can't count to potato
2. Patch 3.35 Notes
3. The Official Forum fail thread: This game wasn't meant for alts.
4. Random Fail: your words are false
5. Level Boost in FFXIV?

After 3 years Miqo'tes can now sleep.





FFXI

1. Announcing the FFXI Development Team Reddit AMA (07/18/2016)
2. Dev Tracker: Discussion
3. July 2016 Version Update - Discussion & Findings
4. MICROTRANSACTIONS AHOY! Optional Fee-based Storage Expansion (30/06/2016)
5. Windower 4 - Discussion and Support

…

One lay fallen beneath the colossus, which was suspended a few feet in the air. In the corner of the arena, the five surviving challengers gathered, hunched over in fear and apprehension. They were weak, and after countless hours they were exhausted. Still, they knew this was their best chance. They had to try. The group charged forward, battling not just their mammoth opponent, but against a clock which ticked down its final minutes, unrelenting and unstopping. Their efforts were for nau…

Have you played Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan? Or its sequel Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii: Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2? No? I wouldn't be surprised.

Warning: The audio on this one is a bit odd. Treble might be too strong for some. Lower the volume before surrendering yourself to the music.
A couple of Nintendo DS rhythm games from Japan focusing on a trio of male "cheerleaders" who encourage everyday people to reach their goals to the beat of catchy tunes. The concept is as odd as it sounds, but the…

Did I tell you about the times I, as a young kid, stayed up until very late in an almost deserted office building playing DOOM?
My dad worked in the systems department in a local bank. Due to his position, he often had meetings until very late, sometimes without much notice, and when my mom and I would go pick him up we were sometimes faced with waiting for him for potentially hours, or just wait and return when he called. I sometimes chose to say there. You see, some of the workers had ga…

Energy replenished! How about another round of Exvius?
Last week this segment featured a theme from the mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, which I find entertaining in short bursts - namely, my lunch break. Music's pretty good and this week I decided on the other theme I mentioned was pretty great: Duel, also knows as the "battle theme".

Exvius has turn-based battles and even random encounters (when you explore dungeons) so obviously it has a new battle theme to go with it. I love ho…

UPDATE: Square Enix has clarified some points on the promo. Details at the end.

I love Final Fantasy XIV. You all know that. But that's not to say Square Enix (the developers) are often capable of acts of randomness so marvelous that it sometimes... it makes you ask a familiar Angry Video Game Nerd phrase:
A while back they had a Japan-only promo which involved buying stuff from 7-11 stores in exchange for codes that could be redeemed for certain in-game items like the much-sought-after But…

Finally! I have enough energy to make this post! Hopefully I won't have to wait long for the next one! And no, I am not spending my Lapis!
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is, like Final Fantasy Record Keeper before it, a good addition to the mobile landscape. It follows the same formula of most free to play mobile games: you have "energy" which allows you to do dungeons/challenges which are points in a map that turn into battles, and while you can farm a lot of items there's always the option o…

Yeah, in a move that I foresaw I would regret I ended up getting Overwatch during my trip and have been playing quite a bit of it. I regret it in the sense that it has become another game to juggle in my regular play time, together with Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV.

Nevertheless, Overwatch is pretty fun to play, thanks to the Blizzard pedigree behind it. It's fast, matches are quick, and if you are with a group of friends it can be a lot - a lot - of…

This month saw the series finale of Person of Interest, the criminally underappreciated television series which combined a science-fiction spin with a typical police procedural, but remained rooted enough in reality to keep itself believable. Person of Interest ran for one-hundred-three episodes over five seasons, and was cerebral and intelligent, but also knew how to tell a personal story which often elicited powerful emotions. Seeing as the show recently concluded with one of the most perfe…

If you've been to DeviantArt recently this is what the site looks like to most people recently.

As an admin of a site that eats up to 60 TB of bandwidth per month I go out of my way to support the sites I check frequently. I don't use any ad blockers and only use StevenBlack hosts file to make sure to get the most dangerous malware out of the way. I even whitelist safe ads like Google Adsense and Project Wonderful because most of their ads are funny.

Sonomaa and I worked many years to lower …

Hello! I am back from vacations and I had a blast visiting Miami! Technically I returned last Friday night but I have had to prep stuff at home and finish a bunch of work and am now finally ready to enjoy some normal time. Today's theme is from Final Fantasy XIV - spoilers for 3.3 ahead!
This is actually three songs in one! The music for The Final Steps of Faith - the final trial battle in Heavensward's central Dragonsong War - plays during the final battle against the dragon Nidhogg. The …

E3 is always a special time of year for gamers. Over the course of the week, gamers intently follow the press conferences and demos to get a better picture of the games they’ll be playing over the next year and beyond. This E3 was somewhat different though. In addition to the fact that many of the games revealed last year have still not come out, this year’s E3 was plagued by a seemingly larger-than-normal number of leaks and announcements which unveiled many of the surprises before the week…