This game wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. It had such promise, but it was marred by bugs all over the place.
The game clearly tried to borrow the party play system from Final Fantasy XII, only it wasn’t as useful. The ability to raise fallen party members was limited and couldn’t be effectively automated. Spellcasting was often made impossible by the game’s sometimes insistence on having my mage run to the center of my fireball before casting it, which not only was terribly damaging, but took time as I ran instead of just casting and then casting another spell. Well, that’s what reloads were for.
There’s extra paid content in the game, but at least part of it (Soldier’s Keep) by all rights should have been in the core game. The inability to have a home base was just stupid and a glaring omission. An honest company would have just charged the extra $10 outright instead of draining you after you already committed most of the money in advance.
So buggy for the amount of money I put into it. I’m disappointed. If the game had worked well I would have been satisfied. As it stands, I’m not. I’m highly unlikely ever again to buy a Bioware game.
Just too much frustration, because on top of the bugs there are the gimmicks. Pre-set battles where I can’t place and prepare my people, monsters that appear out of nowhere when you step on a certain place, and such just add difficulty in a cheap and unfair way that makes it just much less fun and interesting for me.
Oh and saving and loading took way, way, way too long, which is made worse by the autosaves. Next time guys: ASK if I want to save instead of just autosaving. Especially since I can’t convert an autosave to a regular save.
Much like Super Paper Mario, it’s really only the plot and characters that led me even to finish, which I guess puts it one step above KOTOR, but games I put away forever in disgust aren’t a high bar to clear.
Update: I almost forgot one of the worst bugs of all. The Orzammar main plot got into a frozen state with me: unadvanceable by any means, in a way that you don’t know is coming until it’s too late. Had I not had a save just prior to triggering the bug, I could have lost dozens of hours of gameplay by having to start over entirely. I would have burned the game with fire before I did that, but I was lucky and had a save suitable.
Yeah, it really doesn’t speak well of the game when you have to warn people to save frequently and keep many saves.
This bug is also on top of another one related to Leliana, which I was warned about by Moe Lane before triggerng, fortunately.
Every time I mention at Red State that freeloaders are the driving force behind the Obama-Google Net Neutrality plan, the freeloaders flip out. Those leeches contribute nothing but demand everything from others: Free downloads of music, free downloads of movies, and free downloads of games are what they already take from the Internet and of course the idea of Net Neutrality is to create a government mandate for free use of all that download capacity itself.
Freeloaders benefit because, hey, free stuff! Google benefits because the freeloaders drive up ad rates at Gmail, Youtube, Blogger, Google Maps, and of course the constantly rumored GDrive storage service. Obama benefits because he finally gets to throw his base a bone, he gets power over the Internet, and he gets a step closer to Single Payer Internet in fact.
The problem with this is that the rest of us lose. That fact is becoming ever more apparent to even the left as it studies phase two of the Obama Internet agenda, the National Broadband Plan. Proponents of such a plan are increasingly opposing Net Neutrality, creating a broad left-right alliance against the Obama-Google agenda, and in favor of liberty, choice, and markets.
Says Brent Wilkes, national Executive Director for the League of United Latin American Citizens, no arch-conservative by any stretch, in the San Jose Mercury-News:
Some net neutrality advocates argue that the FCC should adopt rules that would insulate Internet applications companies such as Google, Yahoo and Skype from bearing any of the burden of these costs. The result would mean a de facto regressive “broadband tax” on consumers. That would hit non-adopters in the Latino community and elsewhere particularly hard, as considerable data show that such cost-shifting onto consumers would deter adoption.
Net neutrality rules should prevent broadband providers from engaging in anti-competitive behavior, but they should not be commandeered to insulate wealthy Internet applications companies from paying their fair share of the broadband bill.
Translation: Net Neutrality is a transfer from poor people of color to rich people of pallor. And this is no Republican, no conservative saying it. Wilkes went to bat against Senator Cornyn for Justice Sotomayor, yet now he goes to bat against Google against Net Neutrality.
That’s how far out of the mainstream Net Neutrality is. Even left Democrats can’t endorse it. Net Neutrality is a pure payoff to wealthy Internet companies that back Obama, nothing more, nothing less. We must keep the pressure on to defeat it at the FCC.
Government must not be used to enrich Google fatcats at the expense of kids in cities trying to work hard and get ahead. Net Neutrality is un-American.
As I’ve discussed in this space before, the opponents of a government-controlled Internet need to get out of Net Neturality coalitions like Save the Internet. It appears that this is beginning to happen, as Glenn Reynolds is coming out against the Google-Obama Net Neutrality. Says Reason.com:
Instapundit’s main message: “The Internet has done very well as a largely unregulated space, and in light of that success, those advocating a shift to regulation should have a heavy burden of proof.”
The comments below that article are a fun read. Libertarians vs Progressives fighting it out. They’re as nasty to each other as they are to us (before they get banned at RedState), only now we can grab the popcorn and enjoy it.
Just more evidence that the mainstream, consensus position is against Net Neutrality. People don’t want an Internet that works with the efficiency of the DMV, the fairness of the White House communications office, and the freedom provided by the IRS.
Have you heard the latest from Barbara Boxer?
The men who have brought us this don’t single out a procedure that’s used by a man, or a drug that is used by a man, that involves his reproductive health care and say they have to get a special rider.
There’s nothing in this amendment that says if a man some days wants to buy Viagra, for example, that his pharmaceutical coverage cannot cover it, that he has to buy a rider. I wouldn’t support that.
Of course, this isn’t the first time she’s compared “reproductive health care,” code for prevention of reproduction, with Viagra, something that has nothing to do with abortion or birth control. Take a look at this:
A real, live example, which I’ve been hearing a lot about from women: There are many health insurance plans that will cover Viagra but won’t cover birth-control medication. Those women would like a choice.
Oh wait, my mistake. That last quote wasn’t from Barbara Boxer. It was from Carly Fiorina. Oops. Who can tell these “choice” advocates apart, though? Of course, Fiorina later backtracked and claimed that she was not taking a position at all on “pro-life” matters, I find it interesting that even then, she refused to come out and say that as a matter of public policy, she opposed abortion. She only claimed to be “personally” against abortion, which is the same formulation used by notable pro-publicly-financed-abortion candidates John Kerry and Rudy Giuliani.
Further, let us not forget that the two issues – abortion and birth control – are legally intertwined. A key precedent of Roe v. Wade was Eisenstadt v. Baird, in which Justice Brennan invoked “privacy” in declaring the right to make a “decision whether or not to bear or beget a child.”
The bottom line is this: time and again, Carly Fiorina has had the opportunity to take a stand for life and sane social values. However she has not, and only falls back on “I am personally pro-life” when questioned, instead of being an outspoken champion for life. This is why we have reason to question her commitment to life as a matter of law, and why pro-life California Republicans should think twice before supporting her in June.
Up until now, Google has been able to avoid being hoisted by its own Net Neutrality due to the fact that the firm has not been directly involved as an ISP, but rather has been a partner of ISPs such as T-Mobile. We can point out all we want how they have more money and more market power than any ISP, but until they started providing the services that ISPs provide, we could only get so far.
But now, the day comes that Google gets further into the ISP business. Google is launching its own public DNS server. Ignore the misleading Register header, but read the content. The Google Public DNS is a direct launch of a service that ISPs provide, and that puts Google even further into the role of a gatekeeper. They can already make a site disappear from the Internet from the perspective of their searchers, with no transparency in the process whatsoever. Now they can make a site entirely inaccessible to its users because without a DNS lookup, your webpage, your email, your everything will create error messages instead of connectivity.
So here’s the question: Will Google obey its own Google/Obama/Genachowski Net Neutrality principles, or will Google Public DNS be as non-neutral and non-transparent as every single other service Google provides? Will Google deny DNS forwarding for any domain they deem a ‘spammer’ and deny ‘Pagerank’ to?
The world awaits an answer.
This may come as a shock, but I don’t use the Google search service. So it took an anonymous tipster to set me off on a brewing bit of fraud going in in the Google search service: They are ham-handedly altering the suggested search terms in order to promote a coverup of “Climategate.”
Google’s suggested terms feature has been the source of much humor as people have gamed it to produce odd results. Type Why, for example, and you get results like these:
But Google wants us to believe nobody is searching for Climategate despite it being such a big story, but I have evidence that it’s merely a coverup for political purposes.
My evidence is in the behavior of the feature itself. Watch what happens if you type in Climatega, nearly typing in the entire word Climategate:
Well that’s odd. Nobody’s searching for climategate at all. But wait: It’s not showing me words that start with Climatega. Rather, it’s showing me words that start with Climategua. Seems like a bug, right? Like those letters got pointed to the wrong place, almost.
Let’s back it up a letter and type in Climateg:
At least now it’s working correctly again and showing me searches that use the letters I typed in order. But still no climategate. Let’s back up another letter:
Well what do we have here? Climate gate scandal. Oops. They erased climategate but didn’t erase climate gate. Somebody did an incomplete job of sending the story down the memory hole. Too bad, so sad. You are exposed, Google. People are trying to get to the truth, but Google is actively trying to hide that fact.
Talk about an inconvenient truth.
Oops. I never did get around to posting my final assessment of this game, despite defeating Yoshitsuna about a week ago.
Though ultimately there’s only so much to say about it. It’s yet another evolution in the La Pucelle – Disgaea – Phantom Brave chain, and was worth a solid 200+ hours of play as I went through the game once, assembled a final party of Castile, Laharl, Etna, Flonne, Prinny God x 2, Zetta, Valvolga, and Babylon.
The Vehicles were an interesting addition and created all sorts of tradeoffs in combat when combined with the limit of 8 characters + vehicles on the map. The buildings were nice, too. I think the combos worked well; I like how they did things like increase the points to end the level. What I didn’t like was the Mana system; it was way too tedious later on accumulating mana to keep creating the free dungeons I needed to level up properly. Same problem as Disgaea had with Mana. Also the usual problem of supporting characters not getting kills, and thus having a hard time getting mana, was still there. They fixed that with experience (support spells gave it now); fix it with mana or get rid of mana!
The complexity went back up all around: On top of vehicles and buildings we saw a return of item slots, the heavy use of items on-map, another huge job list, and a huge weapon type list, including balloons, boxes, magic batons, light sabers swords, and more. That was good stuff.
The only way complexity really went down was in the disappearance of the speed system. Team-based turns came back, which definitely made the game harder later on than Phantom Brave was.
One serious failing was the use of money in the game. I very, very quickly ran out of any use for it. It was even too tedious to level up my shopkeeper with it all. The game could have used the La Pucelle-style “Buy out the shop and get rare, super-expensive stuff,” especially since getting the ultimate equipment was so slow and tiresome from the free dungeons. This was a major shortcoming I think.
Plotwise I think this was the worst of the first four. Zetta is an incredibly uninteresting character, and seems to exist only to let the rest of the cast reflect off of him. This contrasts sharply with Priere, Marone, and even Laharl.
Sadly I know that despite the teaser in the “Defeat the next game’s main character” event dungeon, the next game does not deliver a plot and story-driven overworld adventure as the previous pattern would indicate, but rather goes into full cashing in mode by being Disgaea 2. I hope it delivers better than Makai Kingdom did in terms of plot and character.
At least the game itself and the music were fine. I especially appreciated the return of the La Pucelle dark world music when fighting Baal. That made me smile.
All in all the game was a step down in plot and character, a major polishing and evolutionary improvement over Phantom Brave, and over all worth my time. A-.
Now on to playing Dragon Age: Origins before tackling Disgaea 2. DA:O is playing like a cross between Knights of the Old Republic and Final Fantasy XII, which to me suggests the reports are exaggerated that American and Japanese games are fundamentally different.
In another triumph of openness for the Hopenchange™ administration, the secret negotations of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement (ACTA) continue. And according to Wired, they’re not going well for the President. A note from the EU to the US was leaked and published to a European website, and it exposes two facts. First, Hollywood isn’t content to have gotten two expansions of copyright in the 1976 Copyright Act, which extended copyright about thirty years, and the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which extended it about another twenty years on top of that. It wants to gain, through treaty, even more tilting of the scales of copyright, and according to the EU, the Obama adminstration is negotiating purely with Hollywood’s interests in mind.
Most shocking, according to this document, is that the US wants to expand the enforcement of copyright beyond infringers themselves, but to those people who merely receive infringing broadcasts; that is, Obama wants to punish the downloaders of files. In fact, he wishes to mandate that ISPs worldwide, without any recourse or appeal by the users, be disconnected from the Internet service they’ve paid for according to the whims of the Motion Picture Association of America and other trade groups. Other trade groups including the Recording Industry Association of America, which Wired says has sent five lawyers to join the Obama administration.
The President is clearly embarassed by this gross shilling for a particular industry which treated him so well in the election, because he has declared the negotations of this treaty to be a secret on the grounds that divulging the information would harm the security of the nation.
Yeah, Obama thinks his polling numbers are a matter of national security. And he’ll use the entire power of the Presidency to protect them. That’s the Chicago way.
Regardless of whether “information wants to be free,” Obama wants to lock it up as tightly as possible for the benefit of his donors, for as long as possible. Elections have consequences. How’s that working out for you, Libertarians?
I’ve said before that Google was treading dangerously near to hypocrisy in the contrast between its promoted public policy and its own internal policy, but now the large, wealthy firm has gone well over the line.
Google is a widely outspoken proponent of the Obama administration’s Net Neutrality plan. At the core of this plan are two “principles” outlined by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. First is the principle of neutrality that “would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management,” as Genachowski has said. The second is the principle of transparency that “would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.”
Conveniently, the same two principles Google wants private ISPs to meet, Google itself flagrantly ignores, even though Google’s market power gives their actions more effect than the actions of any ISP. Take the case of Studio Briefing to see Google ignoring both principles of the Net Neutrality push.
Firstly we have the principle of neutrality itself. If Google has its way, carriers like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, and the rest will not have a say at all in what its users find through their Internet connections. They will not be allowed to set network policies that favor some websites or services over others, no matter how detrimental to the company’s ability to service all its customers.
However, we can see in the case of Studio Briefing that Google is anything but neutral. Studio Briefing has been shut out of all of Google’s services, and has been forcibly removed even from the search, so searching for Studio Briefing would never turn up the company’s webpage. Rather than letting algorithms pick and choose what sites come up, as Google usually claims, somebody human took a step by removing a particular company’s site from the system and sending an email notifying the company of the situation. Imagine Google’s hysterical shrieking had AT&T wiped a Google site off of the map for all users of its services.
Secondly we have the principle of transparency. Under the Obama plan, the policies of every ISP’s data handling must be made visible to outsiders. Proponents claim this is necessary for the neutrality to be enforced. However Google won’t even tell Studio Briefing, let alone the public, the policies and process that led to them blockading the company from its servers.
Fortunately for Google they’ve exempted big, rich companies like themselves from the Net Neutrality plan, only targetting smaller, more vulnerable companies like Verizon and AT&T (who of course has no connection to the monopolist of old, actually being the former Cingular with a new name). Fortunate and completely hypocritical.
But you can get away with that when you have high executives in good with the President, I guess.