Now-a-days I usually find myself cycling between a few games that I’m currently playing.  Lately, I’ve also found myself gaming somewhat fervently like I used to when I was a teenager.  It makes me still feel like one, that’s for sure.  On my plate I’ve got Dragon Spirit, Gradius I, Persona 4, Phantasy Star IV and Metal Gear Solid 3.  Gonna break down my thoughts on these games, go!

Dragon Spirit (arc): This game has such a classic feel to it.  The fact that there’s 9 stages is kind of cooky, but it seems to go by fast.  Love the sound effects and fantasy theme.  I like its gameplay, it’s kind of a memorizer.  Specific positioning and knowing enemy placement to make ambushes and knowing enemy patterns come into play.  It has the feel like, oh, if I wouldn’t have died from that one thing, or that other thing, then this stage is kind of easy!  Kind of like Gradius… it’s fun to play with ground targets in a vert, anyway.  I can get to St. 5 on one credit, so far, but with a bit of luck to 6.  Haven’t seen St. 7 or above, I won’t spoil myself (you can’t credit feed this game, but in the new version you can select a stage to start from, a nice feature.)

Gradius (arc): The last stage is the hardest of the stages in this game, for sure.  I’ve been trying to devise an approach for scoring, as far as how many options I should get and when.  The higher the rank, the more cheerios the maoi heads will spit out.  Moai doesn’t scare me anymore after dealing with Gradius IV’s Moai. Also how to milk the blue cell stage’s boss effeciently, that is pretty fun.  2-3 is a pretty big hurdle of the second loop, I can’t pass it.  Bullets quickly overwhelm you if you’re not ontop of ambushing enemies.  An amazing game, honestly don’t see why people on shmups think R-Type is the better game.  The gameplay trumps R-Type up its anus.

Persona 4: I’ve put about 50 hours into this game, it’s not a bad game.  I didn’t play P3 and decided to jump to this one for a somewhat ignorant reason.  That being that you can’t select your allies actions in P3, but that doesn’t even make much of a difference in P4, sans the bosses.  So I was kind of stubborn about that.  The thing is, I played Nocturne before P3,4, so  I was grouping Nocturne with the new Persona games.  While they are similar games, Persona doesn’t share the tactical strategy and difficulty of Nocturne, which I loved.  The interaction with your friends and stuff that isn’t dungeon crawling is just as fun as dungeon crawling.  Overall though, I prefer a more traditional RPG with you know, an Overworld, and different towns to visit, etc.  Suffice to say, Persona 4′s dialogue and voice acting made me laugh sincerely many times, Atlus is keen on their humuor.  I haven’t picked this up for a couple weeks or so, though.

Phantasy Star IV: This game is jrpg CRACK!  Having a blast with it.

MGS:3: Playing it a third time through or so, don’t have the patience to watch the cutscenes much this time around.  I just wanted to take the time to explore the game more, because in my previous playthroughs I was always panicking and rushing to the next area.  Taking the time to attempt the stealth approach is rewarding, but most of the time I get spotted and end up wasting 15 guys.  Oops.  I’m at the Fear now, and I don’t have the Thermal Goggles, so essentially I’m fighting him under his terms because of his stealth, it has made the battle a lot more interesting, however.  Beautiful game.

Well, see you guys around!