In the game, you play a boy attending school during the day. At night, there is a period of time called the “Dark Hour”. Only certain people are aware of this time, others become unconscious. Of course, you are one of those that can detect this special time, and your task is to check out this huge tower called Tartarus. During the day, you go to school, and are able to create Social Links with other people, as well as increase your Academic / Charm / Courage stats. And by night, you battle in Tartarus.

It’s fairly interesting thus far, I’ve reached level 20+ in Tartarus. The annoying thing about the game is the tiredness factor, after battling in Tartarus, either myself or my party members will get tired. If you continue battling in this condition, your characters will fall sick, and take even longer to recover. I seem to be getting tired all the time! Oh, and another thing that causes you to get tired is by studying late at night.

Other than my PS2, I’ve also been playing with my DS. I started playing Spore Creatures about two weeks ago, it’s quite a cute game! You are a creature that has the ability to evolve, and you can get new body parts by completing quests / fighting other monsters. You get new arms, legs, tails, mouths, and more! Each body part has a different functionality, for example, new arms will give you higher attack power. There are many creatures on the different continents that you explore, some are enemies, and some can become your friends. You can befriend them by “cuddling” them, which involves moving your stylus back and forth across their bodies, or by dancing with them, which is a mini rhythm game. Once you’ve made friends with them, they may give you a new body part. You can also ask them to join you in battle!

It’s a mission based game, and is fairly straightforward. In fact, I finished the game over one weekend! The one thing I found annoying was one mini-game which had to be completed in order to proceed with the storyline. You had to throw stones at these creatures who were coming to steal your food. I found it really difficult, it felt like a lot of random tapping on the screen to try and guess where the creatures were going to go. I almost quit the game because of that part, but after some perseverance, I finally managed to complete it.

After Spore Creatures, I moved on to Puzzle Quest – Challenge of the Warlords. It’s basically a Bejewelled game, but with a twist! There are elements of RPG-ness in the game, you play the part of a Warlord, trying to complete various interlinked quests. As you play Bejewelled, each coloured tokens collect Mana / Experience Points / Money. With enough Mana, you can cast spells on your opponent. It’s not as simple as it sounds, because your opponent takes turns with you, and also can attack you! It was really attention holding, and one of my colleagues and his wife are now hooked on it as well.

Puzzle Quest didn’t hold my attention for too long, I moved on again shortly after that to Rune Factory – A Fantasy Harvest Moon. I loved Harvest Moon on the PS1, no other Harvest Moon game entertained me as well. I tried a few on the PS2, but it didn’t seem that good. With Rune Factory, all that has changed. It combines Harvest Moon, and RPG! You play a farmer (of course), and you get to do the standard Harvest Moon things, like plant crops, fishing, mining, but you also get to fight! There are monsters that appear in the caves, and you have to defeat them, and the boss, in order to proceed to the next cave.

A few comments, I find the RP a bit annoying. In order to do anything (eg. chop wood, break stones), you need RP. And RP runs out really quickly! In the previous Harvest Moon game, you could regenerate your health really easily, by sitting in the hot springs at any time of day. For this one, you can only do it once the hot springs opens, which is at 3pm. So, I run out of RP in the morning, and need to wait till afternoon before I can do anything else! Also, collecting wood seems to take ages. In order to upgrade your house, you need wood, which can be obtained by chopping the logs / stumps. In the previous game, you could also buy the wood, but here, you can’t. Which means waiting ages for wood to grow, and chop it! I’m still playing it at the moment, but I’m not sure how much longer I will last, unless I find another way to replenish my RP quickly.

Related posts:

1. Fun games!
2. FFX-2 Completed!
3. DS Review – New Super Mario Bros

The first thing I noticed was that my Ctrl+Alt+Delete wasn’t working. It kept saying that the Task Manager had been disabled by an administrator. Hm, well, I’m the administrator, aren’t I? I definitely don’t remember I ran all AVG, Spybot, and Lavasoft Ad-Aware, and they removed some of the problems, but there seem to be more lurking around. All the scans kept saying that my machine was clean, but I know better than that! To fix the Task Manager problem, I downloaded a nifty program from here, and that got it working again.

That was a much needed fix, because another thing I noticed was that my Firefox browser kept hanging. And to close it, I can only Ctrl+Alt+Delete to end the process. ^&*(^%$^&5!! I thought that maybe if I upgraded to Firefox 3, it might solve the problem, so I did that, and…no such luck. It still kept hanging. Also, when I added a post to my blog, it just took the title, and left out all the content, so I had to re-type it all over again. *sigh* There were a few other problems, like dropdowns not working, and my Yahoo Mail content not showing up. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox, but that doesn’t work either.

So now, I’m running all the anti-virus & adware programs, for what seems like the umpteenth time. I’ve tried Googling it, but I haven’t found a proper solution yet. I’m in the middle of downloading Kapersky’s trial anti-virus program, and if that doesn’t work, I have no idea what else to do! Well, if I find something that works, I’ll be sure to post an update, just in case anyone else is experiencing the same problems.

*Edit: Well, I’ve finally managed to get rid of most of the issues plaguing my computer. It was solved by two things. One was downloading Malwarebytes’ Anti Malware and scanning my machine with it. Secondly, was a comment that I found on one of the many forums that I was reading. These were the steps that I used:

   1. Wait for trojan to appear then run task manager by pressing ctrl +alt + delete.
   2. Go to Applictions – right click on problem task and left lick on – go to process, record image name of file and end process.
   3. Go to Start, select Search and type in file name for search.
   4. Left click on result name go to file and open Containing folder.
   5. Move folder/file to desktop.
   6. Run Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware click on More Tools tab and then run File Assassin tool.
   7. Locate problem file on desk top and run tool.
   8. A notification will come up advising that the file will be removed on start up – reboot computer and hey presto the troublesome trojan has gone.

I hope if anyone else is having the same problem, this will help you as it helped me!

No related posts.