Despite the Lateness of the Hour...

So I've just finished my first painting assignment, and am nearly through with cleaning up all of my materials, (thank god soap gets oil paint off hands and sinks) and I was checking my various internets. All I can say is that I wish I had found these before I found those yearbook things from that other post I made. You know the one.







I'm sorry, I just thought these were funny. It's really pretty late, so I don't feel like watching something, but I feel like doing SOMETHING before sleep, so I've decided to play through one fight in Shining Force before I throw on my audio book and sleep. Might as well be productive if I'm awake, right?

Right.

Some Progress!

So I was playing Shining Force a bit today while hanging out with my new roommates at school, and I made a bit of good progress. I'm not a ton further, but I'm roughly where I was before my unfortunate restart. I've found a fight which seems to be productive enough that I'm grinding it for a while. I'm thinking that I want to do this fight until I can just about get everyone promoted who I want to promote. Then maybe keep going a little bit to re-level those characters a little before I move on.

I'm still debating my plan a little, but level 10 is only a few away, so I'll be doing promotions pretty soon either way. My two knights and all of my casters are the ones I should focus on a little bit right now, which, thanks to the first useful weapon salesman I've met yet, should be a lot easier than before. Normal attacks managed to yield as much of a punch as some of my weaker fighting characters, which means that they should be able to do some damage of their own, as long as I'm careful.

Just thought I should do an update. My first one from school! Game on, people.

The oh so famous opera

Sean here. It's been forever since my last post, so I figured I'd post a quick update. I just completed the famous "opera house scene" in FF6 in the world of balance. SO GOOD. It just reminds me of how much this game rocks.

However, I have been fairly busy and have been procrastinating on playing the game. This is one such reason that we created the Zuul arcade, to help curb these issues and FINISH these damn games! The good part about this blog is now it feels like an obligation to complete ff6 rather than a casual "do what I want" playthrough.

Not much more than that to update. I'm sure we'll post more silly video's and zany blogs soon.

GAH!

So every time I feel that i like Eternal Sonata again, the game does something to irratate me. I got to use a character that I REALLY liked for one section of the game...and now she's disappeared. grrrr....

Things I Promise People

So the other day I said something about posting things, and then instead, I posted a video. So... I think we can all agree that this shows that I'm okay with lying to you. Basically I've been really busy lately, especially the last week or so, getting things together for going off to college. As a result, I've been ignoring this page a bit, and worse, ignoring my game. I feel somewhat justified in that, being as busy as I have been, but it still sucks.

Now. We must discuss what my going away will mean for this blog. Of course, I will have the internet still while I'm at school, but it is very possible that much of the time, I'll be all busy and whatnot, and school will have to come first for me. However, I know I'll go mad if I'm not gaming at all down there, and so I will still be active around here. Of course, since the webcam does not belong to me, I won't be in the videos very much, but I will be willing to edit them anyway, and I hope they keep getting made.

Of course, I'm going off to school, so you know what that means, yeah?


Or maybe...


Or maybe even this!


OR EVEN THIS!



...I'm sorry, that was stupid. I had to make this video game related somehow, though.

The other thing I wanted to talk about though, was something from our video the other day.

Jeff Benson.

Okay, so, I know this was just a stupid joke, but we can't seem to stop talking about this kid. We just have to know what the hell happened to Jeff. Yesterday I was thinking about Jeff Benson, and I started digging around a little. I think I may have found something.

Punching in "Jeff Benson Nintendo" to a search engine comes up with a number of results. That number is about 12,800, by the way. The one that stuck out to me brought me to a list of some letters sent in to Nintendo Power back in the day. I found this following letter.

"Looking for a Power Player? Search no more. With seventeen games conquered and more on the way, I'm a sure fire winner. Nintendo is the best hobby I've ever had. I was the second one of my friends to get a Nintendo and three others got them soon after. In the afternoons, my friends and I always go to one of our houses to play Nintendo. I've even been known to play al night without stopping (although only on rare occasions). The games I've conquered include many of the best: Super Mario Bros. 2, Metal Gear, Rygar and Metroid. BreakThru and Life Force were each beaten on the day I first played them and a friend and I finished Contra after four hours of playing it!

I'm president of a Nintendo club called the Video Warlords. We save up for club games. I'm 14, I have a dog names Benji and I'm Nintendo's number one fan! (Another note: most of the games above were finished with Nintendo's standard controller, and none were finished in slow motion.) Thank you for providing over 15 million citizens with an ever-cool hobby!!

Jeff Benson
New Paris, TX"

New Paris TX, you say! Interesting. The young President of the Video Warlords mentions Mario Bros. 2, which seems to me an important detail. Very interesting indeed!

Now, another thing I found is that the short lived and then scrapped TV show that was to be made about Earthbound, the Earthbound Saga, was in part created by a Jeff Benson. Likely not the same one, obviously, but still, an odd coincidence.

The search continues, but I wanted to report that little bit. He may be a real person yet!

Is the NES a Bad Enough Dude?

So we didn't make this video, obviously, but I felt it went nicely with our values at this blog. Enjoy!



I'll get to that other stuff I was gonna talk about later. Right now I'm going to play something.

Zuul Arcade First!

So. It is late, and I am tired, and I have to get up in the morning. However, I'm not asleep yet because I would like to put this up here now that it's finally properly rendered and all that. Please enjoy our first video, by way of apology for the lack of updates.



More to come later, and as we make them, the videos will have more of a point to them. Tomorrow I will be posting about life, school, Shining Force, and the search for Jeff Benson.

Time to Give In!

Well, the votes came in here and there (from where, I still don't know), and people talked me into it in person. I have restarted Shining Force. My having waited angrily for this long has actually made it less annoying to jump back in. I'm nearly at the end of Chapter One, after playing a little bit this morning. I got the Monk a little earlier this time around, which has been handy. Sadly, on my way out of my starting town, I lost towards the end of a big fight that had been going quite well until a bunch of the baddies got their turns all in a row and managed to gang up on my main character.

So, being annoyed about that, I took a break for a while, because frankly, Shining Force and I need to take a little time to rebuild our relationship.

Random point of interest; I spent several minutes this morning staring at my old Turbo GraphX 16 and thinking, "I could just take you downstairs, hook you up, and rock some Blazing Lazers...

That's really it, for now, just wanted to mention that in fact I have restarted my game.

The plunge!

Last week I began Chrono Trigger again. At this point I'm probably about 15 hours in. I've already completed the Masamune and have met all the main characters. I forgot how much I love this game. The music, the forced grinding, the forgetting where I left off and wandering through the different time periods until I find the right story line. The beginning took forever as I was determined to complete each of the three games at the fair. Each game took points and points had to be obtained at the fair. This meant I spent at least an hour fighting a robot and effectively becoming super powered in the beginning of the game in order to successfully finish the games. @_@;; Over...kill... Also gained enough points that I could trade in for gold to get the best sword available at the time. The 4000 gold silver sword. Woo!

And now a haiku for all those poetry loving folks out there.

The real time hero
Chrono wanders the deep past
With friends close at hand

Take that, newbs.

New year, new post

Sean here. Happy 2010 everyone!

So, the 1st part of my blog I will regale everyone with my most recent trials and tribulations on ff6. In the 2nd part, I will offer words of encouragement to my fellow bloggers who ARE ALL EXPERIENCING PROBLEMS. This is the exact reason we created Zuul arcade, to help us get through the minutia of different issues that are going to arise.

So, ff6 has been well and good. I'm remembering much more of the game than I realize and I'm playing it in what I refer to as "episodic content". I'll get to a part of the game (I.E. the phantom train) and I'll go "OOOH YEAH...this part. crap. I really don't want to do this right now." So what I do is I'm playing in 15-20 minute stretches and putting the game down when I'm sensing I'm getting bored with it. I'm also switching up and using party members I almost never used on my previous playthroughs just to make it a different experience this time. It's actually helping quite a bit. For example, in previous playthroughs I almost never used Celes...now as I'm older and wiser, I'm realizing that many characters abilites become useless later on in the game, that earlier on are really powerful (such as sabin's blitz moves.) Celes's "Runic" ability is ALWAYS HELPFUL. she essentially neutralizes all enemy magical attacks. So I'm learning to be a bit more crafty with my party selections. I've currently just found terra in Zozo and recieved the chainsaw for Edgar. (quite nifty!) and now I must infiltrate the empire.

Good times.

Now for my friends in need.

Teague, that issue with Shining Force SUCKS. Life has decided it is testing you, and your patience and your ability to not smash your computer to bits. Frankly, as people voted, it looks like a restart is in order. I would offer you an actual genesis with the game, but I can't guarantee a save battery circa 1993 is still going to work. the damn thing is nearly 20 years old, and the batteries are supposed to have a life span of about 5 years...I'm actually wondering if there are companies that offer replacement services. something to look into. What we need is to find a Rom that isn't going to fuck you over. So, I would give it one more try, and if you find a similar issue with another rom, I don't think anyone will blame you for passing this one over. But it will attack your well being because you'll be feeling like you "gave up". So we'll figure something out.

Brendan. Your issue is a little harder, and is more like a mental block. My best suggestion is to run the game in the backround while your doing something else, or multiple things. Maybe watch a movie you like and while your watching just kind of pay a half sort of attention to the current part of the game your at. If it's an issue were you don't know where to go, Mike is essentially a goddamn ff6 expert and can pretty much point you in the correct direction at any time, but I'm not thinking that's the case. Since your in the WOR, there is a ton of content that needs to be addressed before you go about trying to fight God Kefka. But yeah, my suggestion would be just turn the game on even if you don't feel like playing it so that it's right there in front of you so you'll kind of feel obligated to dick around with it.

Mike, I like the critique of eternal sonata. But I agree that having LESS time the more POWERFUL you get is rather gay. I can see the thinking behind this, some developer was sitting at his cubicle going "Well, since there more skilled at this point, they don't need as much time". And to this I say "Where the hell was the rest of the development team that has any SENSE? Why didn't they kick this guy in the teeth?" Because whoever thought of this, that's what they need, a goddamn kick in the teeth. Or a good curbstomp. Where's Teague?

Oh, for all you Zuul arcade readers/posters. Poetry is free form and I'm a goddamn haiku PIONEER. Years from now millions of failed haiku's will be attributed to my name, because I was brave enough to break boundries, and I will dub these "Seanku's"

"Kefka is evil"
"His laughter scares small children"
"He needs a curbstomp"

All right I'm out. We are still working on the challenge bat, and have many good things in store this year! - Sean