I beat* Fable. This is amazing for several reasons:
1) I seldom “beat” video games. I lose interest about the time they get difficult enough to actually challenge someone who plays them well.
2) I didn’t use any cheats or walkthroughs past the first half of the game. Granted, the cheats I DID use landed me a superweapon early in the game, and shloads of extra experience points via the “Hero Save” trick (Take the Arena quest, fight all the way to the stone trollls, then DON’T continue fighting. Save your game. Exit. Load your game. You have all the XP from the Arena, and you get to start it over)
3) I killed both Maze (the penultimate Boss) and Jack of Blades (the final Boss) with no Will potions left. My tactic of “slow time, enflame, and then pound the crap out of anything still standing” got replaced with actual PARRYING. Oh, and my ranged weapon skill was pretty much maxed out, so when Jack levitated (“clue to player: use your bow now”) I pretty much murdered him. Had I figured out the bow thing BEFORE he levitated (or read a cheat telling me what to do) the fight would have been over MUCH more quickly.
4) My XBox didn’t crash until the credits. Granted, this means I’ll have to beat the game *again* if I want to run around getting experience and buying property and whatever else you get to do if you sit through the credits, but that’s okay. In the last week my XBox has acted up horribly, but this evening I got a few hours of constant game-play out of it.
With Fable put to bed, I can get back to work. I had a nice, relaxing weekend, so I should be all fired up to crank out the comics first thing tomorrow.
–Howard
*Note: My definition of “beat” is “played all the way through the story one time”. Not “unlocked every secret, played in the hardest-of-the-hard mode, then hacked into the game and made it my prison bizzatch.” True gamers will sneer at me, but I ignore their tauntings. In my world, video game difficulty settings run as follows: Way Too Hard, Too Hard, Still Too Hard, This Is Supposed To Be EASY?, How Can A Beginner POSSIBLY Beat This?, and Middle-Aged Dad In Comfy Chair. That’s me, right there at the bottom. Taunt away. The chair is made of real leather, and I’m comfy.
Very good, very good. I certainly don’t intend to distract you from drawing Schlock, but I believe you may find it…interesting to try and get your hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger, an extremely well-done game which is actually quite easy to beat (if you have the patience), and where you can actually choose where in the game to beat it, after a certain point. Admittedly, the second time around you may even have a lot more to do on it. I know I did.
Of course, you may just need an FAQ/walkthrough to figure out how to beat the last stage of the final boss, much like myself.
Well, It’s only been released for Playstation and Super NES as far as I know. It may be a bit hard to find a copy that would work on one of Howard’s systems. It is a good game though. I need to go finish it.
… apparently I really missed something because I’ve played Chrono Trigger right up to the very end like six times, and every time I start to fight Lavos and I get /slaughtered./ Totally splattered all over. I’ve even done it with the save cheat where you start out with everything from a game that somebody’s beaten, and I /still/ get splatted all over the scenery. Admittedly, most of the game is easy, but that last battle! Aieeeeeeeeeee! *hides*
Real hardcore gamers don’t /have/ to taunt casual gamers. We taunt those who taunt casual gamers.
Hell, you managed to get farther than me in Fable (though with me it was because Burnout 3 distracted me).
There is a setting below Middle-Aged Dad In Comfy Chair…
it’s called So Lame He Doesn’t Game. That’s me, usually.
But put me in front of either Firefox-LD or the original arcade X-Wing [you know, the one with the really naff vectorline drawings] Then you’ll see game-play action that’ll make hardcore gamers weep…
yeah, all my experiance with games is obsolete. But back in the day I was damn good.
[but then I found that ultimatly addictive game called programming.]
Congrats. You’re allowed to stencil the game as a kill on the side of your armchair (or XBox if you prefer welding). There’s only one thing you need to know as a true gamer though: Play until the fun runs out. On a good game that should be until it’s “beaten”. On a really good game, it might be farther (trying to unlock secrets, buy property or whatever other excuse the game offers you to keep you there) or deserve a replay. The bulk of the games (some form of Sturgeon’s Law) however don’t reach this status: either losing interest half way through or simply finding it’s not worth the time investment.
My own collection of un-beaten games measures in the hundreds, but then I have those nasty “gamer interests”, that (for me) include verifying information on them for a database.
::steals one of your thousand secret sources in space and time::
Vorn
yay howard!
What other games are on your beaten list? I seem to remember you mentioning Metroid Prime, which rather surprised me – MP is rather hard.
Vorn
Middle aged?
You’re not allowed to be middle aged. You have to stay young.
Fable was the fastest game evah. I finished it in, like, 13 hours total over about a week of time. And I didn’t even use the save trick. I didn’t have a penultimate weapon, but I did have a good bow. And I had a lot of my skills aimed at the bow. (I was like, 62 or something. Yipes.)
The last battle was so anticlimatic I almost cried. I went in there, chopped him with a sword a couple of times and he started floating around doing massive area of effect damage, so I ran behind a rock, powered up my bow, popped out and let him have it. It took 3 more bow shots and he was down.
Seriously.
It was a great concept, but pretty poorly executed as far as content goes. Final Fantasy X kept me occupied for months. MONTHS!
But at least I got to punt chickens.
FFXI has kept me occupied for over a year now. I’m trying to break myself loose of it and just play a couple nights per week though. There’s just so much content to it. The big problem to me is the amount of leveling you have to do just to get to the next bit of storyline. Lots of wasted time in that game.
FFX, I plowed through that in a couple weeks, then stopped on the final boss. I picked it up a year later, built my characters up a bit more, then beat it.
Well… FFX took me about 120-130 hours to finish. Fable took 13. I haven’t tried FFXI. Probably won’t, as I’m currently addicted to CoH, and by the time I’m done with that I’m sure they’ll have a different FF out. 😀
I guess I’m a lesser gamer myself then. A game is finished when I beat the final boss the first time, all the bonuses etc are just gravy. Some games I go back in and get EVERYTHING, like Spyro 1, 2, and Ratchet and Clank 1. Some I decide I’m tired of after that first finish like FF8-FF10. Some I just keep playing over and over again like Breath of Fire 5, FF1 and FF7.
I now consider FF11 “Finished” because I’ve finished the storyline for the original game. I haven’t finished the Zilart or Promathia expansions storyline yet, so the game continues. I don’t think I’m ever going to finish it to the point where I have all the items and all classes at lvl 75.
Dragon Warrior 7 is finished because I beat the main final boss. There’s more bosses past him that you unlock in the final sequence and I may work on those in the future. For now though, I’m tired of it.
I guess I need to stop buying games faster than I can finish them.
Sound just like my Dad. I won’t get to see him for most of the year though because I’m studying in Indonesia this year. Well, have fun with your games!