Final Fantasy XIII

I was in Best Buy doing some shopping. Stopped by the XBox 360 aisles to see if there were any deals. A friend picked up a game for Kinect that was $40. I saw Final Fantasy XIII and had to get it. The thing only cost me $20.

I informed a friend that I got a great deal. Nope. Apparently you get get the game for $10 elsewhere. Oh well. I got through a few save points in the game. Still on Chapter 1. I actually died once. Your party dies if the leader dies.

I agree that so far the game seems very contrained. You must follow the path and punch through the enemies there. I am still too early in the game to tell. The graphics are hot. The game feels true to the Final Fantasy brand.

Every time I attack and hit, I see the numbers representing the amount of damage I did. Perhaps I should implement something like this in my roguelike game engine.

Skyrimmed

I have only heard about this Skyrim game second hand. My buddy says he sees the commercials on TV all the time. Another friend paid an extra $7 in priority shipping to get the game right away. The real surprise was when I heard people complaining about the game's performance.

Skyrim was written orignally for a console such as the Xbox 360. It was then ported the PC. Apparently some dude did a mod on the PC release to make it upwards of 40% faster. This mod took about a day to create. Customers think this shows either incompetance or negligence from software manufacturer Bethesda Games.

My game-crazy friend is a big fan of Bethesda. If anybody should know who is good, it would be him. I trust his opinion. Sure some hacker might have come out with a speedup. But did he break anything with the hack? And you got to realize that the PC market is just an afterthought. If you want the best performance from the manufacturer, get the console version. I have given up on high performance PC games a long time ago. You should too.