If you are like me and never pull out the directions to the game you might get confused by the fact that there is no “run” option in the combat menu.  This lead me to believe that I had to fight the dragon.  I looked online and no one else is mentioning not knowing how to run away so I figured that I needed to post for those who are stuck and lost at this point.

In order to run from the dragon Bahamut you must hit the Right and Left shoulder buttons of the DS together instead of choosing to attack or use magic.  This will silently trigger the run option.  It is a very confusing bit of the combat interface and unnecessarily so.

Don’t worry that Bahamut will likely kill one or more of your party before you manage to escape.  Anyone who dies is magically alive again immediately after the battle.

• Shenmue 2

• Blue Dragon
• Enchanted Arms
• Fable II (Fable 2)
• Grand Theft Auto 4
• Lego Indiana Jones
• Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
• Lost Odyssey
• Kung Fu Panda

Additional Downloadable Content:

• Fable II: Knothole Island
• Fable II: See the Future

XBOX Live Arcade Titles:

• Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

• Assassin’s Creed
• Call of Duty 4
• Dragon Age: Origins
• Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition
• Final Fantasy XIII
• Folklore
• GT 5: Prologue

10 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 3 days.

It is Saturday.  The alarm went off at eight.  I was pretty tired but there is work to be done.

I logged into the office and discovered that I had received 15,600 email messages since having left the office last night.  Argh.  There has to be a better way to handle non-essential mail communications.  I never, ever receive external spam but there is so much internal junk mail that it barely makes a difference.

I did some reading on announced game releases for the Wii Virtual Console and noticed that one of my all time favourite games, Earthbound (a.k.a. Mother 2) from the Super Nintendo, has been announced.  This is one of the rare SNES games that I actually played all of the way through.  I completed in about one week of constant play.

When Earthbound first released, I bought it at Walmart in Geneseo, I played it for a few hours and then called Josh to let him know that he had to play it too.  He bought it the next day and we ended up playing a lot of the game over the phone with each other.  We both finished it in no time.  We had a ton of fun talking about the game as we played it and constantly trying to get ahead of each other in the story line.  Playing an RPG like that with someone to discuss the story with the entire way through is really cool.

There are many, old SNES RPG games that I look forward to having an opportunity to play now on the Wii Virtual Console both North American games and Japanese games that never got released to the U.S.  Games like Secret of Evermore, Chrono Trigger (which I own and completed on the SNES but would like to play again,) Breath of Fire 1 & 2 and Seiken Densetsu 3.  I’ve heard that the Mario RPG was really good and that did release for the Virtual Console recently although I am never a fan of the Mario crossover games so I will be avoiding it but Dominica might be interested.  She likes Paper Mario and other Mario-themed non-platform games.

I learned today that Square Enix is planning to release an updated version of Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS next month.  The new release will feature some new game area and some cut scenes from the later Sony Platstation remake.  I am looking forward to a chance to play Chrono Trigger again and hope that Squre Enix decides to make the sequel, Chrono Cross, available for the DS as well.

Dominica got up at nine this morning which was far earlier than I would have expected.  She got up and started the laundry right away and then, as soon as that was kicked off, she started assembling packing boxes so that I could begin the process of packing up everything that we have in the house.  That is our big job for this weekend.  Not our favourite thing to do.  We are so glad that we have almost nothing in this tiny apartment.

While she was making boxes I was also working on keeping Handbrake jobs running.  I have a lot that I want to get completed before we move.  I am on track for that but need to stay at it in order to be completed in time.  There is still a bit to be done.

At eleven thirty we hopped into the car and drove over to Kearny to go to the dentist.  Dominica has been to the dentist quite a bit recently – at least three or four times since we have moved to Newark and probably much more.  I, however, have not been to the dentist for six or seven years so Dominica was adamant about getting me to go now before we no longer have dental insurance.

The appointment ended up taking well over three hours!  What a long day.  The dentist was very impressed with the incredible condition of my teeth. I did get a chance to do some reading while I was stuck waiting at the dentist’s office, and I read about eighty pages in “Programming Ruby“, also known as the Pickaxe Book.

After the dentist we had to run to Walmart to pick up a packing tape dispenser.  One of the worst things about Newark is that it takes literally thirty to forty minutes just to run into the store, grap a simple item and get back out again.  That place is a mad house.  Living in this area means that even the simplest, most trivial task is stressful, expensive and time consuming.

We were starving by the time that all of this was over so we drove to the IHOP by UMDNJ and had dinner (or breakfast, who can tell.)  It was after four in the afternoon by the time that we were able to have our first meal of the day.

We got home around five thirty and I set about doing some more work for the office.  It wasn’t long before Dominica decided that she was really tired and went to bed to take a long, serious nap.  Oreo, of course, joined her and the two slept the evening away.  This worked out well because it gave me an opportunity to focus on my RIT homework which is due tomorrow.  I managed to get all of my work done for class so that all that I have to do tomorrow is to continue to participate in the class discussions.

I also managed to do some packing as well as some dishes.  The kitchen is really a mess.  It is impossible to keep up with it at all.

Today, Dominica and I read a really good article in Family Circle magazine in which they interviewed two researchers from Harvard who were looking into the social ramifications of video games on children today.  They had some numbers that were, of course, completely obvious to people who actually play video games but that people who don’t always seem to be surprised by.  The first, of course, is that as violence in video games has increased the rate of violent crimes from children has decreased.  While there is some loose evidence to show that violence in movies may contribute to violent behaviour the same has not been estabished with video games and would contradict the established data.

The article also discussed what video game “triggers” should be watched for that may indicate children with social issues.  The most important one is that children who play excessive amount of video games is fine.  There is no direct corellation between extreme video game usage and social issues.  What should be watched for are children who are neglecting other areas.  If video games are a substitute for homework, social interaction, etc. then the issue might be avoidance but interest in and use of video games on their own is not known to be a sign of a problem.

The two warning signs for which parents should be on the look out are either: girls who play more than fifteen hours per week of extremely violent games and boys who play little to no video games at all.  Either of these two warning signs may indicate that a child is likely to be experiencing some level of social issue.  Of course, a girl enjoying GTA4 or a boy who just loves to read does not necessarily mean that there is a problem, but it is a simply an indicator used to determine that a subject may need more careful observation.  Boys who do not play any games, for example, are often missing key social interaction elements which are important to development.

In the article, there was one set of parents discussing how they use video games as a “treat” for good behaviour but, quite obviously, did not see video games as a legitimate form of entertainment and limited the use of all video games to just one hour for each weekend day and none at all during the week.  This might seem great but there are several underlying problems here that I would like to address.

The first is that it seems very unlikely that the time away from video games is used for anything other than television.  This is not necessarily so but in most households this is the norm.  The message being sent to the children (and to me the reader) here is that the parents would prefer the children to be mindless zombies watching passively provided “entertainment” that requires no thinking or interaction over engaging, interactive content from a video game that involves thinking, planning and involvement.

The second problem that I have has to do with the time limits set on the game play.  The parents in the article didn’t allow game play of over one hour and almost always limited a single game to just thirty minutes.  This is crazy.  Anyone who has ever worked in an intensive intellectual profession such as engineering, IT, writing, science, etc., etc. knows that to get “in the zone” or really deeply into the problem that it requires 20 – 30 minutes just for your brain to engage in this manner.  This applies to students doing homework as well or writing a serious paper.  The first hour is often lost as the worker or student simply strives to get their brain deeply into the problem at hand.

By limited video game play to time frames too short to allow the brain to engage deeply one necessarily limits the value of gameplay to shallow thinking, reflex oriented games.  At best puzzle games can be played but, more likely, mindless, reflex driven first person shooters, heavily on violence and short on literary value, become the norm.  The value that other children glean from the mental intensity of many video games is sacrificed to make them of little greater value than just watching television.

The shorter time frames imposed by such time limits also rule out the use, at all, of truly engaging and mind strengthening games such as Age of Empires or chess because these games often last hours requiring every ounce of mental capacity be expended.  Children who are never allowed to let their brain engage in this way will see video games as a time killing enterprise or an attempt to be able to “seem normal” but will not take advantage of the mental training that other children receive.  Most often, though, they will never even attempt hard and challenging games because they will never be allowed to complete a serious game.  The very value that normal parents would want their children to get from gaming is exactly what is being denied.

Beyond forbidding a lack of game depth and challenge, such extreme game play limits also turn classic literary games such as Final Fantasy VII (the game that taught gamers how to cry) or Dragon Quest VIII (possibly my favourite game of all time) into two to four years challenges.  This means that the necessarily investment into a game of any seriousness may be so great that the children would never seek to attempt it since the investment in a single game is so high.  They might lost six months just determining that the game is too hard, too easy or not interesting.

Such extreme limits cause children to see the gaming time as very different from the valuable experiences of which gamers usually speak.  It is almost exactly like taking away all strategy and literary games and only allowing children to have four quarters at the neighbourhood arcade.  The only games that can be played are mindles, violent drivel.

The Coleco Vision would have a major impact on my life as it was my first introduction to video games at home. When we got it we knew a few people who had the Atari 2600 system and the Coleco was supposed to be much more powerful than the 2600. The Coleco was also very expensive and did not sell nearly as well as Coleco had hoped as people found that they just were not able to afford the system. In total, only 170 games were ever made for the Coleco (in contrast, the Atari 2600 had over 900 games made for it.)

For the first Christmas all we had was the console itself which came bundles with Donkey Kong and one additional game, Zaxxon, which was the really hot “3D” game of the day that was used as the shining example of the Coleco Vision’s power.

By the time that our Coleco Vision was retired in the late 1980s we had amassed several game cartridges for the system:

Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong Jr.
LadyBug
Mousetrap
Zaxxon
Cosmic Avenger
Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle
Q-Bert
Wargames
Centipede
Defender
Carnival
Space Fury
Turbo
Destructor
Sir Lancelot
Ventur

Turbo by Sega was one of the really amazing games of its time in that it used a real steering wheel, shifter and accelerator that you put under your foot in order to play. This was a very expensive game for its time costing, if I remember correctly, almost $100! This is more than many game consoles have cost over the years. It was a truly ground breaking driving game though. No other platform had anything to compete with it.

Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle was recently (circa 2006) rated by Microsoft’s MSN as one of the ten worst video games ever made and they might be right. Smurfs was a horrible game even for its time. But it was special in that it didn’t use a black background like so many games of its time did.

Wargames and Mousetrap were special in that they used plastic overlays to put on the twelve button Coleco keypad giving you a keyboard with which to command the game. Both games widely used the extensive keyboard for gameplay and, for the most part, used it well.

Donkey Kong was a port of the all ready classic arcade game and had weaker ports on other consoles but the Coleco version was almost identical to the arcade system. Donkey Kong was made by Nintendo and bundled with the Coleco Vision and served to make both companies famous. The Coleco Vision would go on to be THE console for Nintendo’s early games include Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong III and Mario Bros. These games were so popular at the time that in 1983 a cartoon on the Saturday Morning Supercade called “Donkey Kong” was made. I used to watch it and the Pac Man cartoon as well when I was young. These four early titles went on, of course, to spawn many Nintendo titles including the Super Mario Bros. series of games, Donkey Kong Country and other series that would exist on many consoles over the years.

LadyBug was my parents’ favourite game and dad played it quite a bit. LadyBug was more or less a Pac Man clone although the sound and graphics were a bit better and the swinging doors made for more interesting game play. MouseTrap was yet another Pac Man clone but making use of the Coleco’s unique gamepad to do some things that Pac Man could never have done.

Wargames was one of the most innovative games on the Coleco Vision console. Wargames was a strategy game before its time that truly took advantage of the Coleco’s game pad and made it really make sense. The game was not an arcade style game but was a new breed of games designed for home based play instead of arcade type play. This was definitely one of the best Coleco titles.

[This post was originally a “page” but that was not a good way to manage it so I changed it into a post instead.]

• Dance Dance Revolution Supernova
• Dark Cloud
• Dark Cloud 2
• Dawn of Mana
• Dragon Quest VIII
• Escape from Monkey Island (Monkey Island 4)
• Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus
• Final Fantasy X
• Final Fantasy X-2
• Final Fantasy XII
• Guitar Hero
• Guitar Hero II
• Karaoke Revolution Country
• Kingdom Hearts II
• Rogue Galaxy
• Singstar Pop
• Singstar Rocks
• Suikoden III
• Suikoden IV
• Suikoden V
• Tales of Legendia
• True Crime: Streets of LA

• Bust-A-Move 4
• ChuChu Rocket
• Grandia II
• Resident Evil Code: Veronica
• Sega GT
• Sega Rally 2: Sega Rally Championship
• Shenmue
• Skies of Arcadia
• Test Drive Le Mans

Previously we also owned:

• Seaman (thrown out)

• Age of Empires: The Age of Kings (2 copies)
• Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery
• Blue Dragon Plus
• Children of Mana
• ChronoTrigger
• Cooking Mama
• Dragon Quest IV
• Final Fantasy III
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fate
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time
• Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon
• Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
• Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• Lunar: Dragon Song
• Mahjong Quest Expeditions
• MarioKart DS
• My French Coach
• Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Clue Bender Society
• Nancy Drew: Deadly Secret of Olde World Park
• Suikoden Tierkreis
• Trace Memory
• Trauma Center: Under the Knife
• Lost Magic
• Mario Hoops 3on3
• Nicktoons Unite
• Sims 2
• Urbz: Sims in the City
• Zoo Tycoon DS

• Advance Wars
• Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand
• Breath of Fire
• Breath of Fire II
• Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
• Final Fantasy I & II
• Final Fantasy IV
• Final Fantasy V
• Final Fantasy VI
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
• Golden Sun
• Golden Sun II
• Harry Potter
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
• Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
• Lord of the RIngs: The Two Towers
• Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga
• Metroid Fusion
• Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion
• Rayman Advance
• Riviera: The Promised Land
• Sims: Bustin’ Out
• Sword of Mana
• Yoshi’s Island (Super Mario Advance 3)
• Zelda I: The Legend of Zelda
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
• Zelda III: A Link to the Past and Four Swords
• Zelda: The Minish Cap

Games that are crossed out were given away.