The Old School Otaku Lounge

I'll be doing a group buy and getting Torchlight II next week. On my IPad I play Skylanders, COD World at War Zombies and a slot machine game. On my Playbook it's a Starcraft clone game. That's pretty well it. I can play at my friend's store with the stand up with 2,000 ROMs in it. Overkill that machine...

Playing Macross: Ultimate Frontier

black mesa source....free remake of half life 1 ....looks like h/l 2 now...but it's still h/l 1....

Europa Universalis 3. Its kinda like Risk but with a ton of diplomacy and government planning and junk. Really difficult learning curve, but alright once you get the hang of it. Not sure I would recommend it, but I've sunk way too many hours into it already and plan to sink quite a few more. Its not even the year 1500 yet!

Right now I'm playing the two AKB1/48 games on the PSP..lol...

I've been playing Rolling Thunder 2 on the Sega Genesis a lot lately. Man, that game is hard! At least it has continues, unlike the first game.

I am also on the final "week" in Fate/Extra on the PSP. I started playing that game about a year ago when it first came out. I am so slow to play RPGs. I still haven't played Legend of Heroes that I started 2 years ago, nor have I gone back to Final Fantasy 1 or Tales of Phantasia I started 3 years ago. Sheesh... I also lost track of Disgaea on the DS a couple of years ago.

Rolling Thunder 2 is indeed quite hard. I have gotten to the last boss but I haven't beaten him. I heard that to get the best ending, you have to play it through twice (a la Ghouls and Ghosts).

I took up Odin Sphere the other day.

Odin Sphere is so beautiful! I was enraptured with that game, and I was lucky that the Korean version featured English subtitles with Japanese voices (identical to the North American release). I only have a Japanese PS2, so this was a great way to play the game in English. My disappointment with the game is that when you play as other characters, you basically just fight through the same areas all over again, but with different objectives. So to me, it seemed a bit repetitive and I lost interest while playing the second character (Pooka Prince). It has been years since I last played it. From what I understand, Murasame (or whatever it's called) on the Wii is different, and the repetition has been eliminated. If I had a Wii, that would be one game I would definitely get.

Odin Sphere does seem to be structured a little like Saga Frontier. I'm only on the first character, so I don't know how long each character's quest lasts. Saga Frontier's repetitiveness was softened by the fact that it only took you around 5-6 hours to play through each character's quest. I think the longest quest was 9-10 hours.

I do like its Norse fairy tale/faux-Shakespearean feel. I actually wonder why more JRPGs don't go for that feel, as most of them end up basically like anime TV shows rather than "real" European medieval fantasy. Western RPGs tend to have more of a Dungeons and Dragons feel, which is different in tone from European fantasies.

Tell me about it! I think that if more anime today was similar to the plots of Japanese games, I would watch more modern anime. Why don't they make more anime like Odin Sphere, Valkyrie Profile, Tales of Phantasia, Dragon Quest, etc? And why can't they make a Final Fantasy show that is real Final Fantasy? (FF1-6 I mean, before they started sucking. 7 was -okay- mostly for nostalgic purposes, but the materia made all of the characters magic users and boring with only their weapons to make them different. The series got horrible from 8 on, IMHO.) I know there was the Dragon Quest anime from way back when, which was even released as Dragon Warrior for US television, there was a Disgaea series and there have been some OVAs for Tales of Symphonia and whatnot. But Odin Sphere would make a great anime, as would so many RPGs and such.