A Green Mushroom

Wow, that post title looks weird with multiple colons in it. Anyway.... HELLO! This is my first Final Fantasy Sidequest post.  I've been playing Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call a little bit here and there ever since it released on 3DS last September.  I thought it was finally time to write about it. It's really good! I rarely play it for more than 15 minutes in one sitting, but it keeps drawing me back for more.  It's been out for over four months and I'm still playing it.  That should say a lot about it. It does have a huge pedigree of amazing music to pull from.  That's easily the best part of the game.  The music selection from the Final Fantasy series is just fantastic.  They have it sorted by game and music type which makes it simple to find the track you're hunting for. The main thing that makes this so much better than the original Theatrhythm Final Fantasy game are the control options.  I tried the original ga...

The title of this post could be taken a number of ways, but I didn't mean it in a good way.  I'm less than a month into Final Fantasy XIV after more than four years away from MMOs... and I'm already getting sick of the grind. After playing so many single player games I can easily see where they are artificially inflated grind between meaningful events.  I know it's because it's an MMO and they need to extend their content.  They need to keep people subscribed.  But, this amount of extra time and grind would never hold up in a single player game. I'm already sick of it less than one month in.  I'm pretty sure that doesn't bode well for my future with MMOs. I knew this was liable to happen if I tried out a MMO again.  I just didn't anticipate it happening so fast. It makes me realize how much I wish I could check out other MMOs for the core content without all the MMO trappings.  I would love to experience all the storyline quests in S...

The rumor of the last couple days, backed up by tweets from employees of the company, is that Joystiq is being shut down by it's parent company AOL. That sucks. Joystiq is one of the best places for gaming news online.  I've had them in my RSS feed for as long as I can remember. From time to time, as I've played various MMOs, I've also followed the work of their subsites like WoW Insider and Massively . Joystiq does such great work and they're one of only three gaming news sites that I actually look at every article they post.  If they're gone their is going to be a hole in my gaming news and I don't know where I'm going to turn to fill it. The other two sites that I look at every article from are Polygon and Rock, Paper, Shotgun .  But I need to get news from multiple sources.  If Joystiq really goes under I'll be in search of a new general gaming news site.  I would rather not turn toward the Kotakus of the world.  They don't ...

I hit level 30  in Final Fantasy XIV earlier this week and the pacing came to a grinding halt.  And I do mean grinding. I was jarred out of the main story because suddenly I needed to go start a secondary Class from level 1 and get them up to level 15.  I've been playing an Archer, so in this case the secondary Class I needed was Pugilist.  I needed to get my secondary Class to 15 so that I could pick up an advanced "Job" that goes on top of my main Archer class. The Class and Job system isn't really explained well in the game.  I needed to ask some guildmates about it and do some research online to actually figure it out. In the end, I got Pugilist to 15 which let me pick up the Bard Job for my Archer Class.  It took multiple days and it totally broke me out of my groove. I finally got back to my level 30 main Class/Job which is now Archer/Bard and found that after level 30 the leveling slows down a lot.  No longer could I fly through the...

I'm not a comic book guy.  I never really have been.  And while I love webcomics like Penny-Arcade I don't think I've ever bought a physical comic book in my life. There have been two times when I waded into the shallow end of the comic book pool. The first time was when one of my roommates in college gave my PDFs of comic series he thought I would like.  It basically ended up being the entire run of Walking Dead and Y The Last Man.  Neither series had been finished at that point but I read everything that had been released at the time.  While it didn't get me to run out and buy the next entry in each series, it did show me that modern comic books aren't all boring superheroes rehashing the same events and situations. My second exposure was a year or two ago on free comic book day when I learned about Comixology .  It's an app , web interface, and online store where you can buy comics digitally.  They were offering something like the first issue...

I finally got around to trying out NES Remix 2 on my Wii U yesterday and I found it surprisingly fun. I bought and played NES Remix 1 when it released but was underwhelmed by the game.  This series takes small portions of various Nintendo Entertainment System games and samples them.  It gives a taste of each game while giving you minor challenges and teaching you the basic mechanics.  Then it gives bonus stages that remix everything you know about the games. While NES Remix 1 wasn't fantastic, it was an interesting format.  It's major failing was the games that it sampled from.  They were all very early NES games and the majority weren't great. NES Remix 2 solves this problem by pulling from later NES games.  I'm having so much more fun with this second entry in the series than I did with the first.  It's giving me a feel for a bunch of games that I never tried, which is really fun.  It's also a blast from the past since it gives me a cha...

I should really write about all the health/fitness apps I use, but for right now I want to talk about MyFitnessPal.  The others might come up in the course of writing this anyway. One of the things to do when you're trying to get healthier or change your diet is to start counting calories.  Since I'm doing that right now I wanted to write about this app because it's the best calorie counter that I've found. It's an app and also a website.  All the information syncs between the two. It has a huge library of food that is easily searchable.  Any user can submit new food to it.  Other users can then confirm nutritional info as correct and it will end up in their general library for everyone to use. The last time I used it was over 6 months ago and since then they've added a new feature.  Scanning barcodes!  I can't believe how easy this makes it to track calories.  Just point your phone at the barcodes of food or ingredients as you pull t...