One of my favorite Ayumi Hamasaki songs is one of her early ones and also early music videos (I would share her music video, but it’s very difficult to find Ayu videos that can be embedded these days). The song has a very anime like feel too it, like it should be the ending them for an anime like Sailor Moon or some kind of simple and fun anime. For some reason the song also makes me think of maybe being out at a carnival or fair. This is without factoring in the meaning of the song, because for me, sometimes its better just to not know what the meaning behind a song is.

Goong is one of my favorite Asian Dramas. It was also my first. I started off strong, the show was so addicting and back then it could be watched pretty much everywhere. Nowadays, it’s hard to find any good dramas without digging hard. One thing that I liked about Goong besides the actual story/acting elements was the soundtrack. It seemed perfectly fit for what happened on the show. Perhaps Love is pretty the main theme. Whenever I hear it, I think about just crazy times, the way high school can be so crazy and there’s all these things going on, and sometimes there are people all lost trying to find they’re way, and sometimes we are lucky to have a certain set of people that help us get through it all, and I think that’s what I get from this song without looking at the lyrics.

It’s been rather ugly lately with all the summer rain in Florida, creating more time for playing video games. Today I beat Space Harrier II for the Sega Genesis. I must say that game has a really high difficulty. I only made it with the helping hands of a fellow blue creature. I capped some of the ending. Here are my caps (click for larger versions):

Why do I feel like I’m going through hell? Maybe because I am.

I just spent many hours in a dumb haunted house. Though I appreciate the developers attempts to make the magic seem more important by forcing players to use specific characters magic in battle to disable enemies before attack, the increase into battle time this added was very, very painful. I wanted to just walk away while I waited for Hiro’s Wind magic to take place or Jean’s dancing magic to take effect.

Welcome to your worst nightmare. If only there weren’t so many rooms…

I get annoyed with Lucia. She reminds me of Princess Garnet from Final Fantasy IX. Completely out of your control and at times useless. I hate not being able to control my characters, especially in RPG’s where it is so essential. It tends to be the powerful ones as well, Garnet with her summons and Lucia with her magic.

And hours pass…

I think of it as bad game design for the developers to throw you into a difficult boss battle without warning you that it’s coming, not even providing a healing point ahead of the battle. Not to mention, your party members lose HP/MP traveling up the cave to fight this boss, then have to fight this boss, AND travel back down without any real healing, with eventually crashing MP levels.

Once I beat the boss, I thought I was quite lucky to make it out of the whole section alive, but then I come out to the overworld utterly confused on where to go. I like to explore…as long as I don’t feel lost. I felt so lost while wandering around here, not to mention with low MP levels, I think almost all my characters had 1 MP by the time I finally reached Nota. Maybe this is why Lunar doesn’t have so much attention brought to it, the game is torture.

Yay it wasn’t all for nothing.

This game looks awesome! I need to really improve my Japanese so I can read these websites better.

Ryu’s Hadouken looks amazing!

Megaman Legends stages!

Ryu kicking Chun-Li’s ass=priceless

I’m very worried about the future of my favorite game companies.

SEGA reported $501 million dollars of losses in the 2007 fiscal year. The company has been on a slump for quite awhile, and as a long-time fan of the games that have produced by the company, I really am wondering whether the company will ever make a real turn around. When is a new hit Sonic the Hedgehog that is worthwhile going to appear? Nights 2 didn’t make any buzz at all from what I saw. I’m still waiting to play it.

I just hope they make a comeback at some point, get it together, realize how to correctly use their franchises and stop puking out these horrible new versions of games. The other day I was watching some YouTube videos of Sonic Adventure and I remember how awesome it was when I first got my hands on that game when I got my SEGA Dreamcast way back in ’99. I haven’t liked a Sonic title since that version.

With losses like this, I better never even hope to see the light of day of some my still uncompleted game series.

In other news, Square-Enix has reported losses in the United States of America in the last fiscal year, down 51% from last year. That’s quite a big number, but let’s not forget that all Square-Enix has really been doing lately is re-releasing games that are old news. I’ve already played Final Fantasy I on my NES, Playstation, Neo Geo Pocket Color, PSP, seriously I don’t care to play the game again, especially at $30 retail price. Gamers in the USA will shell out the money for a new Final Fantasy, but the whole remake/rehash tactic of theirs is getting so old, and though I’m not an expert and I can’t say that this is really why they are experiencing such losses, maybe it’s time for them to take some looks at the development and start making NEW games.

I’ve never played Lunar before until today. It seems like every other RPG I have played so far. I do like the theme that plays at the end of battles so far. I don’t know if it is my character’s levels or the battle system that is making it difficult for me to run away from battles; I usually like to have the option open to me in RPG games.

Right now I am still in the first castle, I don’t know what it’s called yet. =/ I have much to learn about the Lunar universe. My RPG adventures have been mostly limited to Square-Enix series.