Titans go!

I did several missions today and figured that I would give another shot at killing that giant quadruped, and after a long fight I finally was able to beat it. Which was handy since the very next mission turned out to be to fight one of those things. Also I fought a Tonberry and surpisingly killed it with a perfect score the first try.

This lead to a new section where the mountain sized humanoid, called Titan, challenges the party and they have to go through a endurance run of mission monsters. which I'll leave till tomorrow.

End of the road

After all the fighting and leveling I've been doing I figured I should try my had at that giant cactaur again.

It still kills in 1 shot....

So with that out of the way I continue on past Vanille and Fang's home, and in the middle of a broken high way Serah shows up talking about how it would be best if the party did just destroy the world. It dosen't take long for even Snow to figure out that it's not the real Serah and she's revealed to be the creepy guy who runs the government. He then explains that he put a zombie Cid in charge of the government and that soon things will fall apart into civil war, unless the party wants to transform into giant monsters and destroy the world quickly to end suffering.

After another easy boss battle against him he disappears and leaves his air ship as an open invitation. The party then comes across a message that basically says "Vanille and Fang tried to destory the world but they screwed up and now were all dead", so Hope decides when life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with lemons! So the party decides that even if they can't save themselves, they will take down the being that are manipulating humans and start a revolution.

But first more side quests.

Since it's clear that as soon as I get on the airship I'll lose access to the side mission, I'll have to get them all done before advancing the plot along any more. So I started hoping around all over the world maps finding missions and going to the monster needed to be killed, and of course they are never both in the same place. While returning back to the large open area there was a new feature on the horizon, a gigantic humanoid that's bigger than the mountains and eats the 100 foot tall quadrupeds whole. I sure hope I don't have to fight that thing...

Tin dog

After about a half dozen mid-boss fight I manged to get to the top of the broken tower and fight the super powerful being that resided there. Then I beat it in under 2 minutes with a standard relentless attack...

What really contrasts the boss battle was the optional mission the was unlocked after it. First I had to find a secret room and unlock the final section of elevator, then ride it from the top to the bottom in one go just to get the monster to show up. Then the monster would weaken the whole party on the first attack and kill them all with it's second attack. So I had to figure out a strategy to not only avoid getting weakend but to also stregthen the party while making the monster weaker, and then after that having to gradually chip away it's health points. Plus having to do it all fast enough to get a perfect score.

With that battle finished the party reaches it's destination of the village that Vanille and Fang came from, only to find it empty and slowly being over come with white crystal sand. While scouting around I came across Vanille's old robot dog/rabbit thing just as it stopped working after over 100 years of waiting (must be energizers). With a quick side mission to find parts Sazh manages to get it runnign again, and it gave a bunch of rare items and an achievement.

The 1.5 towers

Continued through the mine tunnels and along the Vanille finally had her summon battle (forgot she hadn't had one yet), it was relatively easy and her summons is a humanoid with a dozen arms that turns into a 4 legged tank (weird). With that all the party members have summons, but since only the leader can summon and I have Lightning as the leader by default, I'll probably only ever see Odin.

There still are mission markers, but they are normally easy and act mostly as teleporters linking all the areas together. Along the way there are also short cut scenes where the party resolve their differences, just to remind you that this is still a Square game.

Currently the party are in a huge tower where a huge flying being resides at the top, so I'm guessing a boss battle is not too far away.

All mine!

I finished all the missions that I could in the main open world area and now I'm continuing forwards along the map to new areas. The next area is some sort of mining operation, filled with clunky iron robots. At one point there was this ridiculously over powered mech that took several tries to figure out how to beat it, the odd thing is that it wasn't a mid boss or anything, it was just hanging out off to the side of the map.

Also along the way I finally maxed out all the main abilities of all the party and now I'm putting all the experience points into secondary abilities. Also I got the weapons of my 3 main party members up to the second level, it took almost every item since the start of the game to do those 3, and there are 45 more weapons to level! And there is a 3rd level for 6 of those!

Gitty up!

Well I didn't have to wait too long to be able to ride a chocobo, the next mission I took unlocked that feature. Not only does this make traveling around much faster, but the chocobos can access speical places and also dig up valuable items. I did a couple other mission and found a huge plant thign that systematically killed me, so I'll come back to it later.

I managed to get my new PS3 hard drive today, and installed it without much trouble. Only tricky bit was the famously soft screws, but I managed to get the last one out with some pliers. Unfortunately my PC hard dive is having some problems of it's on and keeps freezing, so I sent alot of time sorting that out.

Wark!

Took out a bunch more missions today, including one that was aginst a unique monster (most missions are just re-skinned versions of other monsters). The monster was a crystal golem like thing and it hit ridiculously hard, fortunately it was weak to all magic so I didn't get much chance to attack. After defeating it a new area opened up revealing a Chocobo watering hole, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to ride them yet.

I went out shopping today to get a new hard drive for my PS3 (2ogb fills up really fast), but instead I ended up buying 3 more PS3 games. I bought Valkyria Chronicles (only PS3 game I have that's not Atlus or NIS), Disgaea 3 (has a demon girl voiced by Laura Bailey in full Sana Kurata mode), and Cross Edge (another cross over game from NIS). Cross Edge has the dubious distinction of being the lowest rated game on this blog (only one under 60%), but it has Etna in a Prinny suit so how could I pass it up?

Since my title image was getting too big with this addition, I cut off another 20 games from the ones I have finished. This should be the last edit I have to make for a while since there are no other PS3 games that I'm planing to get for a while (unless I find Ratchet and Clank for cheap).

Beam me up

Finished a few more missions today, including finally beating the 2nd mission with a perfect score. I figured out that not filling all 5 action spaces causes the actions to be executed sooner and the left over space rolls over to the next round, so even though you attack less there is much less wait between attacks. I also cam across some speical mission statues that act as teleporters to different areas of the world map, which cuts down on traveling a little.

I was doing well getting perfects on the missions until I took one mission to take out a giant Cactuar, the thing killed everyone in the party with one shot of 1000 needles each. Turns out that it's a B class mission (I have just started on C) and 56th in the mission list (i just finished 11) so it's a bit out of my league for now.

The game feels like they took 2 different games and smashed them together. One is a very linear story driven JRPG and the other is a open world monster hunter game. So 27 hours into the JRPG I'm now in the monster hunter game and most likely going to spend 20 hours just in that before finishing off the JRPG.

Wide Wild Wolrd

Did a couple more of the side missions and got a better idea of just how huge the open world area is.

I figured I would go on to try other missions, even though I haven't got 100% on the 2nd, figuring that I would get me more interesting experience than just grinding. The first mission I took was to kill a monster way off of the map, in an area that I first dismissed as just where I started from. Then when I got there I found that the marker was just for the gate way to the next area, a long series of caverns and ridges, and after that was yet another larger area. 10 minuets of running later I finally found the beastie and was able to get a perfect kill the first shot, which was really lucky since I did not want to have to run all the way back to the first area.

After exploring around a little, taking on triffids and dragons with faces on both ends, I did another mission in the remote area, and thankfully it did not require me to go all the way back. I managed to get perfect on that one two, so I might go back and try my luck again on the 2nd mission later. I'm seeing a clear improvement in my characters too, one monster that use to kill me in 1 shot now rakes 3 shots to kill me!

4.50$

Mostly just did grinding today as I explored the huge open map. Scattered in the map are stone statues that give you quests to kill monsters, and while the first one was easy, I consistently had trouble with the second. Cosidering that there are I think 38 more levels of quests, I need to really level up in order to do this.

Also today I finally bought a PS3, for several reasons:
-Found a original 20GB with hardware backwards compatibility
-Several games I wanted were available at the same store
-The 2 free games offered by Sony for the outages
-Got it for a great price

Along with it I bought 5 new games which are PS3 exclusive, 2 Atlus and 3 NIS. I got Demon's Souls (which is as fun and unforgiving as they say), 3D Dot Heroes (which is VERY Zelda), Atelier Rorona (because I loved Atelier Annie for the DS), Ar tonelico Qoga (since it's an NIS JRPG), and Trinity Universe (Etna and Prinnys). Also since I'm a sucker for a box set I got the collectors editions of Tonelico and Atelier, which came with Art books and a sound track CD.

Now the tricky dession is if I now include PS2 games in this blog. I included the last get titles that played on the two other systems, but then the number of PS2 games that I'd want to play would easily double the list...

It's about time!

Inspired by Cid's stand for what he believes in, the rest of the party decide to fight to save the world regardless of if it's not their mission, except for fang. She is worried that if Vanille dosen't fulfill he mission she would turn into a monster, and Fang would rather destroy the world (it's not her's) to prevent that. Her doubt doubt about this course of action then triggers her summons battle, a robot that turns into Bahamut, which was rather easy since all Fang can do is use guard spells.

After that the party find a airship and a gateway off world. Turns out that the other world is filled with monster of all possible sizes, and a giant flying one attacks their ship as soon as they arrive. The party manages to escape riding Bahamut and make it to the ground and set up camp by the crashed ship. After being stranded a few days Hope passes out and the others fear that he might turn into a monster. He tells them to go on with out him and his conflicting feelings trigger his summons battle, a mech that turns into Alexander. The fight was rather tricky since I had to constantly switch between Hope's healing and buffing skills in order to just keep the other party members alive.

After all that the game map finally opens up into a giant free roam area, and it only took 27 hours to get there...

Paging god

After a long series of fights, ranging from average robots to giant centaur mechs, the party comes across Cid in the middle of the ark and he explains why he was really helping them. Turns out that he has the brand of the beings that control the government and his mission was to ensure the group managed to fulfill their mission of destroying the world.

The plan of the beings is that in order to get the attention of the creator of humans and the beings, they planed to kill a huge number of humans. So the world that everyone was living on is basically a container to breed and contain as many humans as possible, then at the right time kill them all as a tribute to the creator. Since the being running the place can't destroy it themselves, the brand humans and give them magical powers to do their dirty work.

Cid finally comes to the decision that this plan is insane and he wasn't to stop it, and the best way to do that is to kill the party. After a rather hard battle he's finally defeated and then he turns into crystal, which is odd since he was going against his mission, then evaporates.

After that it's much more robot fighting, now with some beasts thrown in the mix.

Right... What's an ark?

After navigating my party of Lightning, Hope, and Vanille (3x healing and 3x magic with attack, status ailments, and buffs) across a huge room with extending catwalks and tons of tricky enemies, I came to the person who runs the government. He then reveals, by way of killing every solider in the room, that he is in fact one of the ancient beings that run the place and that humans are nothing more than tools they mass produce. Next he tells the group that their mission is actually not to save the world but that one of them will become a giant monster to destroy it. Understandably the party dosen't take this too well and attack, he then turns into a giant metallic beast with a huge face and floating shields that cast magic.

The battle was rather tricky since every few minuets he would charge up and the magic attacks from his shields would double, so unless I took out all his shields quickly he would eventually put out more damage than I could heal from. Finally I managed to take out all his shields with a constant switching between hard attacks and triple magic attacks, then it was only a matter of wearing down the face. After the battle he reappeared perfectly fine in his human form and then vanished as the giant airship they were all on start to crash.

There is then another cut scene of the group trying to escape the crashing ship in their jet (which starts to fight on it's own) while being shot at by the military. Just before they nearly crash into a building they are teleported to what looks like an underground train station. Before moving on the group talk over what they have learned, and they are split between beveling that they need to destroy the world, thinking it was all a lie, and being indifferent to it. They then start to explore the odd place they find themselves it (with off world architecture) and soon discover that it's an "ark" built by the beings long ago to store an army of robot weapons in case they are ever attacked. It also doubles as a training ground for people who are given the brand, so it looks like I'll be grinding here a bit tomorrow.

22 hours later...

Not much story progression today, just lots and lots of fighting.

After both parties went though a ton of battles, they finally met up with each other, and for the first time since the crystal sea all 6 party members are together! Also for the very first time the option to customize your party is finally available, just 22 hours into the game. Though since the team of Lightning/Fang/Hope is working so well I may just keep that. Alternatively I could swap Fang for Sazh, giving me 2 commanders, 3 ravagers, 2 healers, 1 saboteur, and one assist.

So now that they are all together it's off to topple the government!

There's a diffrence.

Lightning and the rest of the gang see on a new report that there is going to be a trail and then excution of Sazh and Vanille, and the leader of the the government will preside over it in person. Despite knowing it's an obvious trap, they all decide to crash the party as not only a rescue but a way to take down the controlling government a bit. The party is still Lightning, Fang, and Hope, so it's pretty solid, and Snow is floating somewhere off screen between cut scenes. I would think that a curent gen console could handle a party of 4...

Meanwhile Sazh and Vanille are locked up, with Sazh being quite alive. Turns out that he couldn't bring himself to shoot himself and shot the wall behind him, then the head of the military group made fun of him for a while and knocked him out. They make their escape when guards come to move them due to the chaos Lightning's group is causing, and Sazh's bably chocobo flies at their eyes. So now both groups are trying to catch up with each other as the situation goes to "CODE PURPLE!"

Eidoloned!

The chapter I played today was short but a lot happened.

Sazh and Vanille are currently at their world's equivalent of Disney world and are spending their time running around to avoid being caught and Sazh is trying to not think of his problems. This is even harder for Vanille since she knows she is the cause of most of those problems. After running around among some Chocobos (to a great rendition of the chocobo song with lyrics!) Sazh says that he's going to give himself in and this was all just so he could tell his son about the chocobos before he's executed. Vanille tries to distract him from this idea buy trying to reveal that she was the one to blame for everything, but the military show up and start shooting at them.

After taking out a bunch of soldiers and a relatively easy boss, Sazh's son finally shows up out of nowhere, then he turns into crystal. The odd thing is that when Sarah turned to crystal she turned into a solid crystal sculpture of herself, yet Sazh's kid just gets surrounded by crystal like an ice-cube. Either this means that he's not really turned to crystal or Square just didn't want to bother making a crystal model of him for 1 scene.

Right after this the head of the military group that was running tests on Sazh's son shows up and shows a video of how Vanille and Fang were planning to attack a power station when his son happened to come by and got the power station's brand to stop them. Vanille cries and runs off and the guards let Sazh go off to kill her. When he confronts her he's over come with emotion and triggers another summons battle, this time against the game's equivalent of Ifrit.

After a rather close battle (won with abut 10 seconds left), Sazh admits that he can't kill Vanille and that it would be pointless any ways, then turns the gun to his own head. There is a shot heard off screen and in the next scene the military are taking him away in a floating stretcher and Vanille is in handcuffs. I seriously doubt that he is dead since the game just went through the trouble of having him learn a new summons, I'll probally find out tomorrow.

Fighting fit

After running around town all stealth like, Lightning and Hope are ambushed by the military and surrounded, but Just then Snow shows up and takes on the whole army with several layers of awesome. During their escape Hope winds up with Snow and Lightning winds up with Fang, the woman that picked up Snow and crystal Serah. Hope finally confronts Snow about the death of his mother and Snow shows that under his action hero attitude he's just as confused and full of regret and self doubt as any one. Hope comes to terms with the fact that getting revenge on Snow is pointless and that Snow is suffering offer the death of Nora as it is.

Fang explains to Lightning that she teamed up with a branch of the military that was against the whole "purge a whole city" plan, the group is a massive fleet of airships with no solid jurisdiction so they don't have the strong government ties as other groups. Of course Cid is the head of all the airships. She also explains that her and Vanille were originally from the lower planet and that they too were turned to crystal but woke up a few days ago. The battles with Fang and Lightning were awkward since they both have the same basic skills, so it's like using 2 hammers, great on nails but both useless with screws.

Eventually they all met up again at the home of Hope's father and in a surprising turn he is one of the rare understanding and supportive fathers in video games. The visit is cut short though when the military finally catches up with them, but after a bit of a stand off confusion erupts when some of the soldiers start lobbing gas bombs and shooting at each other. Then there is an incredibly tedious boss fight against a warship, doing about 1% damage er round. Fortunately the Party is Fang, Lightning, and Hope, so there as aenough of a mix of attack and support to make it through the battle.

I don't even know if i was suppose to win that fight since right after destroying the ship another takes it's place only to be shot down by Cid's own airship, and it turns out his soldiers were disguised among the other army to cause chaos. So all of the party leaves on the Airship and Hope's father stays behind tied up so he would not get in trouble for helping fugitives.

Tomorrow it's back to Sazh and Vanille!

Got a camera?

After the scrapyard and the metal forest, this next area was a welcome change of pace.

Sazh and Vanille make it to forest area in the mountains filled with waterfalls and lakes, along the way Sazh explains a bit about his past. It turns out hat he has a son, and on the son's birthday he got branded by one of the being that run the planet. The government then took the son away for testing to see what his mission was, but all the was explained was that he had the ability to track other beings, which lead to the mess that started the game. Also, unknown to Sazh, Vanille had something to do with what happened to his son.

Eventually the two of them run into a boss battle against 2 beasts, one being electric based and the other water. The fight was not as tedious as the last one, but Sazh kept on getting killed and used up the last of the phoenix down.

The parties seem to be split along D&D lines, with Lightning and Hope being chaotic good (taking down the government), Snow and that woman who found him being lawful good (workign for the government), and Sazh and Vanill being neutral good (running from both sides).

Bit of weeding

The story switches back to Sazh and Vanille as they make their way out of the junkyard wasteland, and aside for some fights with Bombs it's uneventful.

Then it goes to Lightning and Hope as they make their way though an odd bio-mechanical forest filled with nasty beasties. Along the way Hope gets more confidant with fighting and tells Lightning of his plan to take revenge on Snow for the death of his mother (who oddly had the same name as Snow's gang). Lightning convinces him that his mother died because of the government's actions, not Snow's, and he agrees to focus on her quest to kill the being running the government.

After much climbing of metal glowing trees they come to the boss battle against a giant animal plant. The fight took for ever and even using the full force of Odin while it was weak didn't even take off a third of it's health. Finally after much attacking and healing I wore it down enough to kill it.

Check out my horse!

As Lightning ad Hope make it out of the scrap yard wasteland they come across a giant bipedal vehicle like they fought before. Now they can pilot it and it starts an odd mini game where you have to stomp and smash as many soldiers as possible.

After that there is a cut scene of Lightning and Hope having an argument about Hope not being able to keep up. During the argument Lightning's brand starts glowing and her summon battle for Odin starts.

This battle was ridiculously frustrating at the start, Odin would kill both Hope and Lightning within seconds of the fight starting. Fortunately when you die in a fight the game restores you to just before the fight, not the last checkpoint. After many, many, tries I figured out a strategy of having both of them healing right off the bat, then both using magic when Odin starts blocking, then repeating that when he starts attacking again. First time I used this strategy though I forgot that I had to hit X to end the fight when Odin's meter was full and he eventually wore lighting down.

In the end I finally beat Odin and he then transformed into a horse for Lightning. The summon system for this game in sort of like in FFX, where the caster remains on the field and fights together with the summon. There is also a meter that fills up that lets the summon transform into ride mode and new massive attacks are unlocked.

Let's party!

Back to FF13 today and the party swapping is getting a little ridiculous.

First I start off with a party of Lightning and Hope, which is a little balanced since at least Lightning is good in a fight.

Then Lightning ditches Hope since he's a useless sad-sack and the game switches to Sazh and Vanille, which is a bit awkward since they are both more suited for support, so fights got a little dicey.

Then they meet back up with Hope and the party is balanced again sine between the 3 of them they have enough magic attack to put up a fight.

Then the party changes again when they all catch up with Lightning and Hope disappears into the 4th slot of the 3 person party. At least now the party is really balanced with Lighting attacking , Vanille doing support, and Sazh switching between the two, which is handy since I ran into the next boss battle.

At the end of the chapter the party splits right back to where it was at the start when Lightning decides the screw the whole "save the world" mission and just attack the being running the government and all the resources. Hope goes along with her since the "screw everything" plan will most likely give him a chance to kill Snow.

The game seems to be spoon feeding controls very slowly, only just today I unlocked the ability to upgrade weapons. I have no idea when I'll be able to pick my own party and the free roam section dosen't start for another 7 chapters.

Orange

Bit of an odd encore here today, I borrowed a second 360 controller and went back and played all the multi-player Portal 2 missions in split screen.

The puzzles are much more changeling than in the main game and at some points just plain mind bending what you have to do simultaneously. This is made even more tricky since I was controlling both characters, but then I can't imagine how I could have solved these puzzles online with a stranger.

The ending was interesting and expands on the story of Glados after Chel leaves, and the constant jibes of her tying to get Orange and Blue to fight are hilarious.

How are you getting that home?

The party continued to walk along the crystallized sea until they found Serah's crystal stuck in place. After digging a bit everyone but snow decides that it's too dangerous to stay there and that they have to keep moving, but Snow leaves the arty to stay behind and dig. The rest of the group eventually find a jet after a boss battle, but after a dog fight cut scene they crash land in a deserted area. Hope and Lightning get separated from Sazh and Vanille and they from 2 separate parties.

Meanwhile the military has caught u with snow (who made no progress digging his fiancee out), and attack him. After the battle the brand on his arm glows and the game's version of a summon show up, as twin sisters of Shiva, and Snow has to battle them to earn the right to summon them. After the battle they transform into a motorcycle and disappear (weird), then some woman with a different brand on her arm show up with solders and takes Snow and Serah away.

The way the fights work in this game is odd and unlike other JRPGs. For the most part it's set that the actions are automatic and you mostly just control on the fly the strategy of the fighters to match the situation. So it's not so much picking the right moves like in most JRPGs but picking the right fighting style at the right times. While you can still pick the moves all manually you are scored by how fast you fight, so taking the time to select actions seems to be discouraged.

Every one got that?

Well the story so far is rather convoluted even by JRPG standards. The game doesn’t seem to even have a single protagonist since it jumps around from person to person so much.

The gist of it is that an artificial hollow world was created by a race of beings and is now populated by humans. If one of these being come in contact with a human they put a brand on them that makes them their slave and they are given 1 command. If they don't fulfill the command they turn into a twisted zombie monster, if they do fulfill the command they turn into a crystal version of themselves, so it's lose lose either way. To make things worse, the person is not told what the command is, they are just given a vague vision and have to figure it out before the time runs out.

Aside from this, the local authorities have labeled these being as total enemies to humanity, and any one who comes in contact with one of them is labeled a traitor. So a short time before the story starts one of these beings is found sleeping near a small town, and when the government hears about this they round up the whole population and plan to ship them off world. Meanwhile one girl named Serah some how came in contact with the being and was branded, and she tells her sister Lightning and fiance Snow.

So when the game starts everything is going to hell when the population of the town decide they don't want to be shipped off world and rebel mid-transport. Lightning takes down one ship from the inside and escapes with Sazh, some guy with two guns and a chocobo chick in his afro. Meanwhile Snow leads a bunch of people on a ground assault against the military, but many under his lead die, including a mother who was fighting to save her son Hope. Then the massive structure that the being was sleeping in shows up and apparently Serah is inside of it.

Lightning and Sazh flies a construction craft to the thing and Snow steals a flying bike to get to it. Hope wants to confront Snow on the death of his mother and with the encouragement of his insanely cheerful friend Vanille they take another bike and follow him. They all manage to meet up at the same time as finding Serah, who tells them that saving their world was her command and asks them to carry it out. When they agree she then turns into a big crystal. The whole group then go and confront the being to get it to change her back to normal, while the military is blasting the place to bits. They win the fight against it but are then sucked into a weird void where they are branded and see a vision of a giant monster destroying everything.

The being explodes in a huge energy blast as the structure falls into a sea, turning all the water into crystal instantly. The party wakes up in this strange landscape and find they can now do magic, which means I can also level them up in an odd circular grid system. So they set off to figure out what to do next.

Well that's forty-seven down...

I finished off the almost all the single layer achievements, and for the most part they are related to neat Easter eggs that I missed the first time through. Things like what happens if you walk into GlaDos and Wheatly's obvious death traps, a painting of the CEO's assistant that made up part of GlaDos' AI, and the last location of a ship that was reported missing in Half-Life 2.

The co-op was interesting, but it's awkward running at the pace of some stranger, so I didn't play it much. If I get a second controller I might run it split screen myself just to see what the rest of the levels are like.

Then I ran through the whole single player game again with the cometary track bubble on, and since I already knew how to solve the puzzles it took MUCH less time.

Tomorrow it's on to Final Fantasy XIII, with nicer visual, weaker writing, and much less game play.

Space

Well I finished the single player part of the game

After going through several more levels of Wheatly's test chamber, GlaDos came up with a another plan to stop him, but he then sprang his death trap early and Chel barely escapes. Running along the space between test chambers, Chel and GlaDos come to the main control center and confront Wheatley. Wheatly has a good plan for killing Chel, he removed all portal supporting surfaces from the room, started filling it with neural-toxin right away, built shields around himself, and equipped a bomb launcher. Fortunately he's still an idiot and failed to notice that removing the surfaces of the walls exposed the pipes filled with the white, orange, and blue gels, so quickly the room becomes covered in the white portal material when the bombs are flying.

After portaling bombs into him, GlaDos calls up a corrupted orb to attach to him, and after repeating this a couple times he becomes corrupt enough swap him out for GlaDos. But then the last stage of Wheatly's plan is exposed when the switch to swap AI's explodes and takes out half the room, exposing the night sky. Chel then fires a portal at the moon (the white liquid is made of moon rocks) and the other end under Wheatly, sucking both of them out to the surface of the moon. Glados manages to pull Chel back through the portal with a robotic arm and Wheatly floats off into space with the rest of the corrupted orbs. In the end GlaDos lets Chel go free, with the tsundere claim that it would be too predictable to kill her and she would just cause more chaos staying here. So Chel takes an elevator up, passing choirs of sinning turrets, and emerges from a small shack in the middle of a field.

Tomorrow I’ll finish up with some of the single player achievements and try the multi player.

Lemon

As Chel makes her way up through the old test chambers the rooms get newer. By the 70's Apature has gone from an elite testing ground with the very best of subjects to a company on the verge of bankruptcy having to pay people off the street 60$ to take the tests. Then in the 80's they couldn't get any volunteers and had to start using company staff. The head of the company’s health is failing due to the toxic nature of some of the stuff they are testing, and he mentions a plan to copy his mind into an AI, and failing that the mind of his second in command.

The later levels introduce 2 more liquids, an orange one that shoots things forwards and a white one that makes any flat surface able to hold a portal. I knew from the ads a while back about the blue and orange, but was surprised by the white when I came across it.

In the 80's levels Chel finds Potato GlaDos and pokes her onto the spike at the end of the portal gun to carry her around. They then make their way up to the modern levels where Wheatly (the orb) is trying to run his own experiments with turrets welded onto boxes as subjects. GlaDos tries the old Star Trek ploy to take down an AI with a logical paradox, but Wheatly is too stupid to understand it and the plan fails. Now They are stuck having to run through the old experiments that GlaDos came up with that Wheatly found until an opportunity presents itself.

Potato

Well the game took a very unexpected turn.

After running through several more experiments, the orb show up again with a plan to take down GlaDos. So they escape into the innards of the facility and first sabotage all the turrets then cut off the supply of deadly neural-toxin. They then manage to swap GlaDos' AI out for the orb, connecting her AI to a potato battery, but just as Chel is about to escape the orb goes mad with power and holds her back. Potato GlaDos then remembers that the orb was designed as a way to restrict her intelligence, by programing it to be the stupidest AI possible, and now he's running everything.

While throwing a tantrum for being called stupid, the orb tosses Potato GlaDOs and Chel down to the bottom of the facility. A bird flies off with the potato GlaDos and Chel is left to make her way up the very first test chambers of Aperture Science, guided by the prerecorded voice of the company's first president. The layout of this area is huge geodesic sphere with 50-60's style tech, and the experiments so far revolve around manipulating this blue liquid that makes things super bouncy.

The change to this retro lab and the turn of the orb is as big a twist and surprise as when GlaDos tried to kill Chel in the first game and then she had to make her way through the back areas.

Apple

Well Final Fantasy XIII will have to wait a little longer since today I bought Portal 2 and it shoots to the top of my list for obvious reason (such as it's portal 2!).

The game starts off right away with the same sharp and perfect writing as the first game. Chel wakes up 15 days after the first game in an Aperture deep sleep room (looking like a cheep hotel), then after an hilarious movement tutorial she is waken up again a long time later when the lab's power plant begins failing. She's first guided by an not too bright orb and they try to make their escape before the place falls apart, picking up the 1 way portal gun as they go. Each area they go through has a temp voice explaining how even in the event of the end of civilization the test can still proceed, and how they are prepared for various doomsday scenarios (like a giant animal king enslaving humanity).

Eventually the orb accidentally wakes up GlaDos, and while fixing up the experiment chambers she explains how she will force Chel to run experiments for the rest of her life as revenge for killing her. Now with each new area GlaDos insults and ridicules Chel every way she can, from teasing her about being abandoned at birth to putting on weight during deep sleep (both are probably false).

The game is just as insanely fun as the first and I had to force myself to stop playing to get to sleep.

Well that's forty-six down...

Finished the DLC today and it didn't clear up anything.

Turns out the DLC is just filler to bridge the gap from this game to the sequel that will probably not get made. To make things worse is that the DLC is more just one episode, sold in 2 parts for double the money (fortunately I got one part free and the other half off).

The basic lot of the first half is that Alan is going insane in the darkness, so the write in the hard dive suit leads Alan's rational side back into control by means of a huge Verizon plug. The main game had product placement for Verizon and Energizer, even an achievement for watching a Verizon commercial, but this DLC revolvs around a Verizon phone with a GPS feature and the hard suit riter even says “can you hear me now?”.

The second half is Alan struggling to wake up from his insanity by going through tons of surreal environments and puzzles. In the end he finally wakes up and starts to write the sequel.

There are several achievements left to get in the game and DLC, but they are all super hard like finish the whole game without ever dying, and not worth the hassle.

Alan Break

Finished the main story line today, and it's a little vague.

After a long last level, fighting every kind of shadow person and possessed object, Alan finally gets back to the lake that the cabin he stayed in was. He dives into the water and emerges in a dream like world where shining light on words causes them to turn into that object. After following these words he gets to the cabin and confronts the old woman by putting his hand with the light switch into the hole where her heart was and turning it on, causing her to explode with light. He then goes up stairs and types on the typewriter, then his wife pops out of the lake and everyone in town is fine and lives happily ever after.

That's it.

No explanation of how Alan solved the problem or what he wrote, only that his wife is safe and he's now trapped. It's like if a book hyped up a battle with a monster for 5 chapters and then on the last page just said “then the hero killed the monster” with no explanation how.

Maybe the DLC that I have will clear it up...