Dominica and my weekend of total relaxation continues today. We slept in a little this morning and then I decided to start playing Suikoden III on the PS2 which I just got a week or so ago. I originally played Suikoden on the Playstation back in the late 1990s and it was very good – one of my favourite traditional 2D jRPGs so I have high hopes for Suikoden III.
Here is a really cool idea: wind turbines that float in the ocean!
I put in about three hours or so on Suikoden III. I got to a point where I attempted to save and instead of saving the game at the save point it instead put me directly into a battle and killed me. It was the save point itself that triggered the battle! I call that “bad interface design.” That wasn’t fun and I lost a bit of time that I had put into the game. So I packed it up and called it a day.
Dominica had a similar video game adventure today although hers was much worse. She was playing King’s Quest 7 all morning and when she got part way through the fifth chapter (out of six) the game no longer works. Your character picks up a lit firecracker, then the game automatically saves and then you blow up. Any attempt to return to the game simply causes you to blow up immediately again! We did some research and it turns out that this is a known bug in the game that Vivendi just decided to ignore in the hopes that no one would ever actually play the game that far! The bug has been known about for years – years before they even released this particular package of the game. So there is no excuse for not fixing it at all.
We did some searching online and, of course, found tons of people having the same issues with the game. There were some online fixes but they ended up killing the entire installation of King’s Quest rather than fixing anything. So Dominica gave up on that game when she had almost managed to complete it! What a pain. Vivendi, a large French media conglomerate, is the worst video game company ever. Everything that they make is really cheap and shoddy. Vivendi is also the parent organization of Blizzard who is known for using their financial muscle to threaten their largest fan base. They have their lawyers threaten lawsuits that are clearly made up simply because the defendants don’t have the financial resources to fight the cases in court. I have been involved in the Blizzard boycott for a very long time and because of this have never even seen the game “World of Warcraft” being played let alone played it myself even though it has become something of a cultural phenomenon. Apparently I need to start making sure that Vivendi is not involved in any way in the products that I buy as they don’t stand by their products at all.
(Vivendi didn’t even bother to make an installation guide for Space Quest – instead they packaged a single piece of paper with the Space Quest CD that said how to install…. the King’s Quest Collection that had released several months before! The directions were even wrong as they were for a multi-disc installation and not a single disc installation like Space Quest! Talk about cheap. It was a single piece of paper printed on an office laserjet!)
So we decided to give up on our existing video game collection for the time being. We couldn’t decide what we wanted to do for the day so we decided to run out to Walmart and do some shopping. We are running low on bottled water as Oreo has to be on bottled water now too as the water in 1180 has kept having sediment in it from time to time and we just don’t trust it (we ran the laundry empty several times today to get the brown water out of it!)
At Walmart we picked up six gallons of water and a copy of Tales of Legendia for the PS2. Dominica wanted a jRPG of her own to play after having watched me play DQ8 all week. There wasn’t much of a selection at Walmart but I thought that I had heard that Tales of Legendia was pretty good and I have been interested in checking out the Tales series which is one of the five biggest Console RPG series in Japan.
We came home and decided to just order in some Chinese (cheese wontons and General Tso’s Bean Curd) and watch a little <em>Good Eats</em> with Alton Brown. After a few episodes involving a lot of cheese 🙂 we decided to really take it easy. So we loaded up Tales of Legendia and settled onto the loveseat. Dominica played the game while I just relaxed and followed along like a movie. Occasionally she would have me fill in in the “driver’s seat” while she made some sugar-free pudding or something. Oreo came over and joined us making the loveseat very, very full. We played for almost three hours before going to bed.
I think we need to break you of your Walmart habit…:)