I guess it’s rather official.  I am way too busy with life during the summer to make even moderate attempts at a blog entry.  With a cottage about an hour’s drive, I’d much rather be on the lake, with a fishing rod in one hand, and a beer in the other.

Still, life does go on, and the squirts have both started school today.  We’ve put them into a few sports programs to keep them as active as possible. Getting all that sorted out is it’s own mess of fun, but will pay off in the end. My own winter hockey starts up next week, so that should be fun to get back out with the guys.  All told, I think we’re in a good enough spot for the fall rush.

Final Fantasy 12 TSA

I picked this up in the summer sometime and put in a few spots here and there. 12 has been a go-to version for me for some time, as I find that both the mechanics and story work.  Zodiac Age is a bit harder since it’s based on the earlier re-release.  You can’t all be super-human, instead you need to pick 2 of 12 jobs per character.  I would guess that it would be hard to mess that up unless you were willingly handicapping yourself (say, everyone white mage) but there are optimum spreads.  The rest of the game (gambits, loots, gear, bazaar) all seem intact.  There are a few minor tweaks and balances, but it seems mostly intact.

There are 2 massive quality of life boosts though.  First is the auto-save feature whenever you zone.  There are some parts of FF12 that are absolute death if you’re not paying attention, and then can string together.  This is compounded by the best feature – double and quad time.  With quad time enabled, everything goes 4x as fast.  Everything.  That makes for some interesting battles where you really should be paying more attention to the minutia rather than just watching it happen.  It works great for most level grinding spots, or farming a specific item.  It is near death on bosses and hunts.

Diablo 3

Fits and spurts.  It didn’t take too long to get my DH up to snuff and clearing T10 with ease, and T13 with effort.  Multishot has a cap it seems, and I need to move into impale to go farther.  So.

Necro is ok geared, clearing T10 but barely stepping foot into T12.  Where a DH is a glass cannon, a Necro is a wet tissue/nuclear bomb.  Either you one-shot everything, or you die.  It’s a weird class compared to others, as at top levels it’s much more about the mechanics than it is about movement and target placement.  Where some classes get by with passive boosts that increase overall damage, the necro needs what seems like every piece to work with another, and a specific skill setting to get the best results.  It reminds me a bit of the EP monk way back, where math was very important.

That said, he looks neat, the skills are interesting, and there’s a nostalgic bit thrown in as well.  I can fit in bits of game here and there, but the concept of eternal grind is not at all appealing.