I got hired to write reviews!

As of right now, no. Maybe that will change as the site grows in popularity.

Cool. Great job at getting a nice job :slight_smile:

Wow, congrats!

Nice. Congrats!

I always enjoyed reading your reviews. Looking forward for more of your creations.

conflict of interest

you’re fired

also RPGamer more like RPLame…oh

To your first paycheck!

I remember I offered him my condolences instead of my congratulations. This is not a fun job to have. Its like when you’re a teen growing up and you think that the best job ever is testing and making video games. Writing reviews is even worse because you constantly eat shit from people who disagree (or much worse, fanboys) or even unhappy PR representatives that will overtly threaten you (like Ubisoft and Eidos) and thus taint your integrity. For every gem you get for free, you have to spend hour after hour chugging away at other half finished, rotten pieces of garbage. You couldn’t pay me to do this job.

I know what I’m getting into, and I’m not worried. Haha, I already had a minor scuffle this morning for giving Skies of Arcadia Legends a 7.5/10 (it’s important to note that by GamerLimit’s scoring definition, 5/10 is ‘average’, so a 7.5 is a pretty damn good score). Although, they were cool about it after I explained why I gave it the score I did.

I think most people here know that I’m outrageously hard-headed about changing my mind or opinion about anything if I don’t feel it’s right. If it ever comes down to my job versus my integrity…well, I’m a talented musician! I won’t starve, that’s for sure. This world is not tough enough to keep me down. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve never played Skies of Arcadia. How is it?

If you want to play a deep-rooted traditional JRPG, Skies of Arcadia is pretty much the alpha and the omega, in my opinion. The only huge gripe I have is how slow and frequent the combat is. There are enough neat little innovations to keep it interesting enough. The gameplay is otherwise pretty cool, and there’s even a Suikoden-esque mechanic where you recruit crew members for your ship, which was fun.

Although the plot is cliche, it’s done in an exciting way, and the character interaction and development is good. What I enjoy about the character development is that characters are dynamic because they mature, not because they deal with one random event and their personality does a complete 180, like in most RPGs with ‘character development.’ Because of this, the characters feel more real, even though they fall into all your typical JRPG character archetypes.

So yeah, if you can stomach the slowness of the combat, it’s worth checking out. DEF get the Gamecube version, though; the Dreamcast had even more frequent random battles, which is fucking IN_SANE.

GameCube version suffers from worse music quality. I think I’ve heard the graphics are slightly worse too in the texture department. Dunno about that.

And the ONLY time I really complained about battle frequency was traveling through the South Ocean the first time to Ixa’Taka.

I’ve triggered random battles by changing the camera angle. That’s fucked up.

Not sure about the music, but the textures are identical between versions. a Gamecube disc holds as much as 2 cds, plus the game didn’t have to carry over redundant data (like common music, characters, levels, models) to a second disc.

The music is definitely of lesser quality.

And SG, are you sure you weren’t moving at the time? I’ve never triggered a random battle by just changing camera angles.

Makes me wish they’d make another SoA…damn Sega. Never have triggered a battle by rotating the camera though. That’s a new one on me.

As for random battles, annoying as they were, Aika’s S-Moves usually weaken or mass kill lots of enemies at once. Of course, later on you can replace that with Rain of Swords or high-level Silver magic (guarantee kill on stuff not immune).

Also loved the ship battles. Especially vs. the giant monsters. Loads of fun right there.

Aika was a godsend for simply wiping weak groups of monsters early on, with her cheap S-move AOE.

I found the game enjoyable overall, although I’m not sure I’d find the patience to replay it all. Ship fights were fun, once you had a REAL MANLY SHIP with a BIG POSSIBLY PHALLIC GUN.

Woot, congrats to you, SG!

I’ll say that I’ve never been able to make it happen when I deliberately try. My theory is that sometimes, a random battle can be triggered before it actually prevents you from moving.

This happens in the game Xenogears, on the PSX: In XG, you know you’re about to get into a random battle cos the music fades out, but you can still move for like a whole second before the battle starts. And, even if you decide to stand still, the random battle will still occur. (Incidentally, you COULD trigger a random battle in XG by fiddling with the camera, heh). Anyways, my theory is that something like that happens at least some of the time in SoAL.

I have been able to tell when I was about to get into a fight in the DC version of SoA. You can hear the disc speed up or whatever and start loading the fight about half a second before the fight. So yeah, it was probably something like that instead of actually just sitting still fiddling with the camera.