All guide-related information here is for everyone to view FOR FREE. You are free to share them as long as they remain unaltered and that you DO NOT claim ownership over them. Moreover, please DO NOT use or replicate any works (written or images) below, in whole or part, for the purposes of commercial gain. Thank you.


Content on this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

It magically and continuously types out backslashes which totally messes with hotkey shortcuts like Alt-F4. What's amazing is that the system now registers both left and right Control keys as the equivalent of the hotkey combo for closing browser tabs and the browser itself.

I already disconnected the keyboard and plugged it back in but it didn't fix the issue. Getting access to the keyboard was a chore cuz the screws holding the cover just WOULD NOT COME OFF. >_< I ended up causing three of the four heads to become stripped. 9___9 Right now, I only screwed back on the one that wasn't destroyed by me. :P

I'm currently on my Dell Mini which is a fine system except it's slower and the keyboard is tinier. I'm also used to the awkward placement of the left Ctrl key on the Lenovo notebook so every time I try to use it on this, I hit the Function key instead. >_>

Anyway, I'm kind of cursing the notebook for not messing up earlier because a day or so before the symptoms made themselves apparent, I have already placed orders at NCIX and TigerDirect for other things. I COULD HAVE PURCHASED A PS2 TO USB ADAPTER FOR A KEYBOARD TO TEST WITH THE NOTEBOOK! >:O! Heck, I even could have gotten an $100 gift card for Future Shop from redeeming points from the HSBC Premier MasterCard but noooo, all the points went to T&T Supermarket gift cards.

Sigh.

I haven't used any of my PSPs (I own 3 of them -- one of each generation ^^) in a long while but suddenly decided to check out some demos yesterday. After playing a bit of Konami's Frontier Gate and Square Enix's FF Type-0, I thought I'd write down some thoughts about both games. I'll be skipping the synopsis on story and gameplay though:

FRONTIER GATE
I've read that Frontier Gate is supposedly a Monster Hunter clone. I've never played any MH games before and the closest I've ever gotten was the demo of Bamco's God Eater and I really didn't like that one due to the stupid camera being useless in battles. (Or maybe there was just some auto-lock/auto-target option I didn't know about.)

To me, Frontier Gate feels like GE + Last Ranker (with a party) + every bloody KRPG that's on the iOS right now. All I'm doing is running around the same bloody town talking to the same bloody people, nabbing quests from the guild master or whatever (never bothered to try and figure out what he was and it's hard to check now since I'm in the middle of a quest), and then running into set quest areas to complete whatever tasks I need to complete. (I finally triggered the fusion option. It took about 5 quests before I was given the quest that unlocks it. >_>) The gameplay is overly monotonous and boring. I do like the combat system, however.

Being illiterate to Japanese, I'm missing out on whatever underlying story there is. There seems to be something about a Legendary Sword but I dunno if that's still going or if it's exclusive to the NPC Emilio.

The sad thing, however, is that although I complain about monotonous gameplay, these are the kinds of games I usually end up playing and liking to some extent. Or at least, I'll stick with them for an extended period of time. :P I mean, I managed to finish Koei's mind-numbing TRINITY: Souls of Zill O'll -- with a good deal of the trophies obtained too. :3

FF TYPE-0
While Frontier Gate felt very familiar, FF Type-0 was completely the opposite. Aside from it feeling a little like Crisis Core on crack, I felt overwhelmed by the menu and I didn't know what the heck was going on in the game.

I was very annoyed with Guest "NPCs" constantly being swapped in and out in the middle of battles. I sincerely hope the wifi or ad-hoc or whatever option the game has doesn't actually allow this to happen because it's grating. I WANT the party I picked to stay with me, not some random person playing 238472 miles away to suddenly butt in. I mean, I don't believe I could swap between the characters I selected if they joined. (Honestly, I didn't try. ^^;;)

Sometimes, because their levels were a bit higher than my party, their help was welcomed. Otherwise, I don't want them to be a part of my game. I eventually turned off the option in the menu since it was simply too annoying.

I'm still learning though but because I can't read Japanese very well, there were a lot of things that lead to frustration. For example, is there any way to replenish MP beside sucking it out of defeated enemies and those restoration points? I thought there was an item in the menu that would do it but it didn't seem there was any. ^^

I was using Rem and ran out of MP during the fight against the giant multi-legged mechanical enemy. 9__9; I didn't want to switch to anyone else since no one had any ranged magic that didn't require charging.

My right hand hurt after playing the demo for a while since I was gripping onto the R button in battle. Maybe I didn't experiment enough but it seems like you NEED to keep the button pressed to keep a lock on an enemy. Very annoying.

I suppose I should do some searching online to see if anyone's whipped up a tutorial on the gameplay and provided explanation of the menus. For some reason, while I usually love to experiment and explore, I don't feel the urge with this game. :\

Stupid me.  I keep forgetting that the Friends page only shows the past 30 entries or whatever. .___.  I've missed quite a few posts from everyone since I'm hardly here anymore. TT~

Anyway, nothing really new has happened other than becoming even more obsessed with Kairosoft games. XD  I do have some recent posts over at my Tumblr page and my WordPress blog though~! However, they're kind of game-specifc.  I suppose that's nothing really new since this journal's usually just full of babbles about games I'm playing anyway.

Well, that's all for now. :3

I've been using the tablet on and off for the past few days so I just thought I'll throw together some thoughts about them! :D

Not sure if I sorted some of the things correctly since I'm not entirely sure which things were installed by Samsung and which are available as default in Honeycomb.

TABLET

• Beautiful bright and crisp display


• Very lightweight


• Quick! Opening apps and menus is zippy!


• Access to a file manager. Unsure if this is a Galaxy Tab 10.1 or Honeycomb feature or not but being able to see a lot of the files on the system is pretty useful. Unfortunately, all hidden folders like for most of the installed apps is unavailable for perusing.


• Seemingly excellent battery life.I say seemingly since I'm not gaming on the thing like I do with my iPod touch 4G (which seems to drain within 4 hours). Well, the wifi is on too.


• Doesn't have any input ports
  
• The bloody screen capture button is right next to the history button. I suppose this might not be an issue for most people but I treat the history log like a taskbar in Windows and tend to switch between programs that way so I use it a lot.


• Not sure if this is a problem with the tablet but sometimes, upon re-enabling wifi after putting it in Flight mode, the system will lag like hell.


• Not all apps in the Market work with the device. Unsure if it's a developer problem or a problem with the OS or a combination of this.

OS

• Next to no learning curve. Well, this was true for me. ^^;


• Task manager. I use this to close programs that I was too lazy to close myself. XD


• Hitting the back arrow closes apps. This is unlike bloody iOS where apps will remain open until you close them yourself.


• Lots of apps have widget versions of some aspect of themselves. And being on a tablet, I actually have room and WANT to use widgets for once. ^^ I generally avoid them like a plague.


• You can do all your shopping and installing of apps from the Android Market from a Web browser. I simply adore this feature as it's so quick and painless and doesn't require the installation of some bloaty program.


• Cannot put icons into folders. I guess if they included that, it'd give another reason for Apple to sue.

Oh, and another a plus is that there's a handful of really spiffy tweaks for Android that you wouldn't see for the iOS unless you jailbreak and visit the Cydia store. I'm talking about such apps like folder and app managers (where you can arrange a bunch of apps into folders) and skins/themes! Certainly, if you root an Android device, you'll get a lot more freedom but even without doing so, I can see that there seems to be more freedom from Google's mobile OS than Apple's~! ♥

I also gotta complain about eBuddy for Android. Aside from the bloody app not being optimized for the tablet, it FORCES landscape mode on you. I already checked the settings and it really doesn't seem like you can get it into portrait mode. >:( I suppose it's all fine and dandy on a phone where the screen is smaller but on a tablet, the chat window just looks plain silly.

*links to other blog XD*

• Setting wallpapers “without cropping” for Honeycomb tablets


• Android~! Windows~! iOS~!


• Not all apps work on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 :(

See video descriptions at YouTube for more info. Also, the videos can be viewed in 720p resolution too! ^o^

The second video would look kind of cruddy though since I had the game setting on Performance or Graphics. :B

Note: These are video captures of the Japanese version of the game. The text is in English because the game came with English text coded in already.

That is all.

Well, some of the prettiness can be seen here: http://phonering.tumblr.com/post/9894002938/my-current-springboard-layout-it-is-much

... it's the fact that you have to unlock songs in a specific order and you have to do this in every. Single. Difficulty. Oh, and you have to actually pass the tune to unlock it too.

Why not just have people pay a premium amount for the bloody locked tunes? Like, instead of 70 points to gain access to it, you have to pay a one-time fee of 210 points on any difficulty which would unlock the tune in all 3 difficulties. Subsequent plays would still require the 70 point payment.

Yeah, I realize that people will still be paying 70 points three times anyway but my idea is that Neowiz should charge the premium and allow players to unlock any tune they want at any time.

It's sort of a drag that you HAVE to spend money on tracks that you don't want to play but you HAVE to because if you don't, you can't unlock the tunes that follow them. >_>

To make matters worse, there is a good chance that you won't succeed in clearing a tune in the higher difficulties which means that you will never get to play the locked tracks beyond it. >_______________>