January 26, 2009: Day of Lost Video Games

Well, my short, one day weekend is over.  Time to get back to work.

My day started incredibly early this morning when I was paged out at five thirty.  To make things worse I had decided to stay up until one in the morning last night playing Fable: The Lost Chapters after Dominica had gone to be.  I only play Fable when she isn’t around because she wants to play it as well and does not want me to ruin the story for her.  Then, at three thirty, Oreo got me up to take him out for a walk.  So I had very little sleep when I got paged this morning.

The call that I got at five thirty ended up going until almost eleven.  Five hours on a single phone call.  What a morning.  The upside is that I got in a lot of hours even before lunch time.

I was really tired all day after having gotten up so early and having gotten so little sleep in general.  I tried again to complete Final Fantasy III today and beat the “final” boss with ease just to discover that there is an entire section of the game that exists after the “final” bit and that there is no way of going back to save or of knowing what you are supposed to do.  The storyline just drops away and all quality gameplay is replaced by obtusion.  The game went from mildly interesting to completely frustrating – so much so that I deemed it, after forty hours of play, not worth the trouble of even finishing.  If the game designer gave up at this point I sure am not going to invest any more of my time into it.  It is no wonder that FF3 was kept from North America for so long.  Now we can write it off as having been a product of the “novelty” gaming era.

I tried playing Fable as well today.  But I only got to play for about half an hour before I had to pause the system which ended up lasting for most of the day until the XBOX 360 shut itself off thereby losing the game that I was in progress within.

This evening, before going to bed, I decided to take out Final Fantasy III from my Nintendo DS and popped in Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen which I received for Christmas from the Grices and set it up as my current DS game.  I played about twenty minutes before turning in for the night.

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