Wednesday, July 13, 2005

A Picture Share!

Whale statues like this one are scattered around the Mystic area.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

A Picture Share!

Kendra & I passed this statue honoring Civil war veterans while shopping in Mystic. Grandpa was watching Katy. :)

Monday, July 11, 2005

Let's start blogging!

A Picture Share!

This is the drawbridge as seen from my father-in-law's.

Friday, July 01, 2005

Ancient Relics of Great Worth

This is another little post about video games, specifically older ones. Just a warning for those who might be looking for something more interesting.

A long, long while ago, when I would frequent places like Best Buy or Babbages, more often than not, I would leave with at least one game. What would often happen is that I would enjoy the game(s) for a bit, but then would have many to play without enough time to play them all. Some would, inevitably, get set aside and forgotten rather quickly.

Times have changed; I no longer purchase my toys as frequently, and when I do, they tend to be used and slightly older than brand new. Recently, I have stumbled upon a stash of forgotten games. While not exactly cutting edge, they are, as the saying goes, new to me.

Within the last couple of weeks, I've been playing a game my brother bought for me as a gift, shortly after I bought the PS2. Batman: Vengeance, a game by Ubi-Soft, had a couple of flaws, especially the camera control and unprecise jumping, but was a pretty good time.

Another oldie takes on a slightly different form. Ages ago (around 1994 or so), Davey bought me the RPG, Final Fantasy III for the Super Nintendo. Over the years, I have started this game over a number of times. Typically, I would get pretty far in the game and then would either tire of it or be forced into taking an extended break; when I would try to return to it, often months later, I could not recall what I was doing and would decide that I needed to start again. While I still have the game and SNES sitting in the basement, the practicality of setting it up doesn't really excite me. However, I found that I can play it on my computer now. With an emulator for the SNES and the Final Fantasy III, (or VI, as it was known in Japan) rom, I am able to play through on the computer with some features that were not available on the original. For example, there were only specific locations that you could save at when playing on the SNES, and you could only have up to three saves at a time. With the emulator, I can still use those saves as normal, but it is easier to use one of the ten available "save states" that is, essentially, a snapshot of the moment in the game. Thus, I can save at any point, without any restrictions, as well as reload at any point without long delays. Plus, it has a fast forward button that allows for speeding through movie sections that have already been seen. Very nice. When I finally finish, I'll also take a look at Dragon Warrior 1-4 for the original NES.

For the PS2, I still have "Silent Hill 3" and for the GameCube I have the LOTR:ROTK that I am borrowing from the sibs. So, the need for the new new games is much less.