Today...*sigh*

Today was the most bullshit day I've had in quite a while now. Its not just me being an emo bitch either, a lot of the class were in foul, depressed moods as well. We were in uni 9-5 with 1 hour free..thats not the worst part though. We had 2 seperate 2 hour labs, one for Applied Optics, and one for Visual Optics. We also had an Anatomy Class test which I had only started revising for the night before (thats my fault, I know). The exam questions were fucking hard, and I was backed up on that by people who had studied a lot. Apparentely it didn't matter how much you studied, because some of the questions were worded in ways which made them trick you, or even fail to understand what is meant.

I got home at like 7ish and worked until midnight as well, in an effort to make up for my lack of work at the weekend, and guilt at not doing enough of my uni stuff. See the last post for some of the shit I've been putting off for a while.

A whole bunch of other stuff wasn't going for me either today. Hopefully tomorrow is better. Urgh...I really don't want this blog to turn into something I use solely to bitch...I just needed somewhere to vent the recent pressure. I seriously think something is wrong with me, both physically (I've got some illness, probably stress induced) and mentally.

Way too much stuff to do....

Just to say I won't be posting anything about what I've been playing during the last week. I had some time for games, but from Thursday-Sunday I ended up staying at a friend from uni's house and drinking, playing a few multiplayer games, pool and other stuff. So while it was pretty awesome and seemed like a good idea, it left me with a big backlog of uni work to do. I've only had a couple hours to study for my Anatomy class test tomorrow, finish the Visual Optics lab report, catch up on the lectures I missed, the tutorial I left early from today, the Applied Optics lab writeup I still haven't finished from last week, write and email the minutes for the last Cali-Otaku commitee meeting, phone the uni eye clinic to book a second appointment and a whole load of other stuff.

Bleh...all that added to the depressing day that is Valentine's day (if you are single) plus the rain made today pretty shit. At least I had fun slacking off during the weekend with some friends.

Hopefully I'll get back into my normal rythm soon.

Time eater..

Seriously, there aren't ever enough hours in the day when you are working or at university. I try to have a list of main things somewhere loosely in my mind each week or day, and I usually get the main priorities done in time, but I never seem to have enough time to put in time to smaller things like a bit of studying each day, reading my notes, watching tv, playing games or writing here. Those things seem to get kicked down a couple notches when I have other stuff like lab reports to do.

I'm in uni 9 to fuckin 6 tomorrow...wtf...I'll need to study throughout the day at uni and some tomorrow night as I've got a Test on Tuesday which I've not started revising for... T_T

I need a hyperbolic time chamber. Cookie to whoever knows what thats from.

Now Playing - "Are you hurt anywhere? Face, chest, ovaries?"

I've been trying to bring back my hardcore RPG self from the perilous casualness that comes with owning an IOS device, and I played some rather awesome games this week.

First person dungeon crawler RPGs have a really nice appeal to me actually. I don't know why that is, as I never really played many of them when I was young. So its not really true nostalgia for them, its probably just as they feel fresh, yet nice, oldschool and hardcore to me. So I'm trying to pick up a few of these type of games and break into the genre. Dark Spire might be next on my to buy list in terms of FPS RPGs, its been sitting in one of the game stores in town for a while now, reduced way down. Pretty good for an imported game. I'll check if its still there some time this week. Anyway, I put some more time into Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (DS) mainly over the weekend. I'm still in the fourth sector, Delphinus...so progress is slow, but at least there is some now that I've finished Golden Sun 1 and 2. Anyway, I made sure to try and improve my demons in the 5 or so hours I played of this over the weekend. I managed to get all the necessary demons for the Special Fusion of Black Frost! =D Awesome! I added a few more to my party that were of decent levels and stats, which helped a fair bit. The story is one of the main aspects I am enjoying the game actually, as well as the characters and the choices you take(even if they have been rare so far). I like a good bit of sci-fi, and this game has a pretty dark, tense and thrilling feel to it. There are some generally creepy moments (The first similar piece of media that comes to mind is the movie called the Thing), which is impressive for a text-driven story and one with static character portraits and arguably fairly limited graphics. I'm getting near the end of Delphinus I think, based on the mission log at least, there are some really overpowered abilities that some of the enemy demons have. One such ability that made me stay away from Strange Journey on Monday(in addition to having uni) is 'Bite the Dust.' I think it works as a status effect designated by a bomb it looks like. It seems like if the demon with the status dies, it takes out the entire rest of the team near enough. It might as well if it doesn't, as the hurt it puts on the rest of the team is brutal. Well...I got 2 game overs in less than an hour to these bastards using this ability, so I put it down for now. I'll try and forget about it and go back to this game in a few days. I also dabbled in a bit of grinding in Etrian Odyssey (DS) while waiting for the Superbowl to start up on Sunday. Its painfully slow, even if it can be pretty simple fun. Its also bloody hard..Anyway I've got a mini-aim for myself before I can progress. I've got to get my team up to lv20 before I attempt the first sanctum boss again. I'm currently at around 17 across the board at the moment.

Earlier in the week I finally finished up Golden Sun: The Lost Age (GBA) as I said above. I had been wanting to finish it 100%, getting all the Djinn, Summon Tablets etc and I made good progress towards that goal. It took me a fair bit of time to get through the last couple dungeons, but I managed them without too much difficulty. So at the moment I've got all the Djinn, thats 72 Djinn that you can get if you import your data from the first game. I also got all but one of the Summon tablets, as I need to beat Dullahan, who is pretty fuckin gay. He is a lot stronger than the final boss(who I gotta say, I was expecting a 2nd battle against in some different form) like Deadbeard in GS1. I can get him pretty close to death by summon rushing(cheap I know..) but when he does Djinn storm and drains all my Djinn, I lose my main Psynergy such as Cool Aura(for a lot of healing across the party). There is probably a way to do it by abusing the Djinn that protect you with shields, but the damage he fires out after Djinn storming is brutal. Nasty boss. I reckon I can beat it if I get a bit of luck or really take my time to plan and calculate though.

I played some more of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (PSP) after playing a little bit of multiplayer at uni. I got my full Hypnocatrice set of armour actually. I wanna go to sleep now, so thats all I can be bothered saying right now...I was supposed to have this posted on Sunday, its now nearly Tuesday T_T

Roguelikes are another subgenre of RPGs that I've been trying to get into. I admit I've never really played much of the games in the genre but I've heard a few things about them, and the genre always interested me. They have their roots in games such as Rogue(where the name comes from) and Nethack. Nethack is one of the games which a lot of current roguelikes take inspiration from. It turns out there are a couple roguelike style games on the Apple App store, so I downloaded iNethack (Ipod) for free and played a little bit of it. Its hard to get used to at first, as I ascended the first set of stairs and ended up escaping the dungeon. Thats doing it wrong however, its more like Diablo in that you have to just keep descending further into the dungeon to progress. Less forgiving however, so if you die, its all over and you have to start again. I've played a handful of times and the furthest I got to was the 4th floor of the dungeon. I'm definitely interested to try more of these games, so I'm open to recommendations/suggestions. I'm thinking ZHP could be a good interesting entry title, as I like NIS's quirky sense of humour.