10 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 4 days.

“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among men the greatest asset I possess. The way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement.” – Charles Schwab

Only two weeks to go until we are into the “baby could come any day” zone.  Sure the baby could arrive any day already but the “official baby window” starts in about two to three weeks.  Once we are in that window the baby has a pretty good likelihood of arriving at any moment.  We should just be done moving when we enter “the window.”

The weather is much nicer today.  An actual autumn day.  I got up as Dominica was leaving to go to work so that I could get ready and head into the office.  I spent a little bit of time before leaving just checking my emails and getting Handbrake set up to run throughout the day.

On the ride in this morning I began reading the classic 1936 “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.  It is quite the classic.

I had a busy morning and was very excited when one o’clock rolled around and it was time to head to the gym.  I am feeling really good today.  I am really loving this whole gym thing.  I needed a locker lock and Dan needed to buy some goggles so we took a “quick” one and a half mile detour on foot up to Modell’s to pick up our supplies before heading south to the gym at Battery Park.

I got a really good workout today.  The gym was a little busier than I have seen it other days so I was “stuck” in the fast lane with multiple people swimming so that we had to do traditional circular swimming which makes it far less easy to take a break between laps.  That pushed me to do more than I might have done had I been there on my own.  It was a good workout and I am looking forward to Monday.  On Monday I am intending to officially join the gym.  This week was a free trial.

I spoke to Katie today.  She has open enrollment at the gym starting November 1st so she is planning to get a membership as well and will be swimming with me from time to time.  I am not sure if Dan is going to be able to join the club or not but he really likes it there and wants to use that has his health club.  Overall we were really impressed with the club all week.  The people there are great.

Lunch was a gigantic salad from a shop down near the gym.  Yummy.

No sooner was I back to the office and only halfway through my giant salad than I was grabbed to head down to the chocolate shop for hot chocolates to celebrate the chaning of the seasons.  I got quite the extensive walking done today.  This has to be a record day for me of late.

I worked at the office until seven thirty.  I had originally thought that I was going to be done rather early but one deployment took a really long time and I needed to stay to take care of it.  So it was pretty late when I started walking to the PATH station.

There are not too many more times that I need to make this walk to the PATH station.  There are only two more weeks of me living in New Jersey and in those two weeks I will only be taking the PATH about five more time.  That is weird to think about.

I got home around nine. Dominica is doing a ton of cooking tonight.  She made peanut butter and chocolate brownies, BBQ Tofu over chinese noodles and harvest apple salads with apple cider dressing.  Quite a delicious dinner.  (Don’t worry, the Chinese noodles were not actually made in China.)

We finished watching the second season of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air while we ate.  Then we turned on the Wii.  I wanted to race Dominica in Mario Kart Wii, but she did not have the energy.  So we played around with the Wii shopping system and bought the first episode of the new Strong Bad game (of Homestar Runner fame.)  We also found that one of my all time favourite Super Nintendo games, Secret of Mana, is now available for the Wii Virtual Console.  I am very excited about this.

The Mana game series is a gaiden, or side story, of Final Fantasy that originally appeared for the Game Boy under the name Final Fantasy Adventure (a.k.a. Seiken Densetsu) in 1991. I bought this original Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy when it first released and was one of my favourite Game Boy titles and one of the rare games that I actually played all of the way through.

I bought Secret of Mana in 1994 shortly after its release in North America.  It was one of the games that I took to college with me.  I did not have a television or computer at college that first year and all that I had was my Super Nintendo and a 13″ monitor on which to play it.  Secret of Mana was my favourite game at the time.  It was a really great game and I am very excited to be able to play it on the Virtual Console.

I am encouraged that Secret of Mana is now out for the VC.  This is the first, serious RPG to be released for the Virtual Console and I am hopeful that with enough interest from the gaming community that more will follow.  So far the only games available on the VC have been silly action games and puzzle games in which I am not interested.  There have been a few Nintendo 64 games that were interesting but very, very few.  The Super Nintendo, being one of the great classic RPG platforms along with the original Playstation, has an amazing catalogue of awesome titles that have the potential to be released but thus far have all but been ignored.  I am excited to potentially see games that were previously Japan-only releases such as Seiken Densetsu 3 or Mother 3 (a.k.a. EarthBound 2.)

I have to work early tomorrow morning.  Eight o’clock as usual.  Then, at noon, I have a dentist appointment and Dominica has one at one thirty.  Other than that, it is a packing day for us.

Children of Mana is saddled with a tradition of being an action RPG which is always a difficult role to live up to. Action RPGs are, by their very definition, not very “RPGish” and have two distinct conflicting personalities that are nearly impossible to integrate well. CoM does far worse than that though by using an archaic “Legend of Zelda” style of action interface which is cludgy and extremely unrefined. It feels like a cheap afterthought or, more likely, just old code borrowed from some late NES-era game.

The graphics of the non-action portions of the game are amazing but few and far between. The backgrounds are the best I have ever seen on the Nintendo DS and top anything I ever saw on the SNES. But a few amazing backgrounds only go so far. The sprites are okay but don’t mesh fluidly with the background being of a distinctively different quality and style. And the moment that you step foot into a “dungeon” you will get the impression that you have gone into a different game altogether.

RPG and Console RPG fans will be significantly disappointed in this game. The RPG elements are weak approaching non-existant. In fact, calling this game an RPG at all is truly misleading. If anything this is an action game with a strong storyline. The really unfortunate thing is that the action is so poorly executed. There is nothing wrong with an action game with a strong storyline but CoM’s action elements are by far the weakest portion of the game. The action is boring and juvenile.

Overall, unless you are a serious Mana aficionado I would suggest avoiding this title. Children of Mana is not going to live up to your Secret of Mana expectations. One would think that the series would have covered some ground since the early 1990s but apparently it hasn’t.

In the end I gave up on attempting to play CoM.  I found that just by attempting to force myself to work through this game it made me no longer have any driving desire to play the Nintendo DS and it was keeping me from playing games that are much better.