Atlantica: The budget gamer’s perspective

A couple notes before I get started. One, because of my present working situation I’m only around my actual computer during the weekends. Since I’m writing/posting this in the middle of the week, I will not be able to put up screens. I’ll try to take some and edit this post with them when I’m able. Until then, you can see some of the default stuff over here – http://www.playatlantica.com

Second, this is the setup for my computer: P4 2.2 ghz processor, 1gb DDR 333, 256mb AGPx8 video. Yeah, budget. My rig is an e-machine that’s a few years old. I added 512mb of the ram and the video card myself, everything else is factory spec.

Alright, lets get this review started! The first thing to note is that the patcher and loading screens are pretty suave. Gives a good initial first impression, at least. The glitter doesn’t last for long though – while there are loads of classes to choose from, the ability to customize your character is sorely missing. Just a few factial, hair and hair color options (and of course gender) and you’re on your way.

The graphics are just plain sexy even on performance settings (since, as I’ve said, my rig is strictly budget). Even when zoomed in for quest conversations and passing folliage, the graphics are dang nice. A nice change of pace is the folliage – when the camera encounters a tree, it shows nice detail on the leaves and cones. Not the usual green-and-brown blotches and splotches that are only designed to look like trees from a distance. Of course, having that much detail while moving slows the framerate to a crawl, but it’s almost worth it.

Atlantica uses mercenaries in battle. Moving around the world, you only see yourself, other people, and monsters on the screen. But once you engage a monster in combat, you and your mercenaries appear on a battle grid (3×3 on both sides) and combat begins. You’re given between 15 and 30 seconds to act and if battle camera is turned off you don’t really need that much time. Battle camera is nice, because you get nice dramatic camera angles as units act but giving orders to other waiting units becomes troublesome – so I keep the dramatics low and keep to the bird’s-eye view. Speaking of which, the camera is pertty much completely customizable so you can easily achieve a point of view on the battlefield that will easily allow you to see all the enemy units as well as your own.

Battle itself is done on an ability point system. At the beginning of your ‘phase’, each unit is given ability points. If any units then have over 100 ability points, they are able to act on that turn. Actions can be taken virtually simultaniously. As soon as you give orders to one unit, it begins to act and control is passed to the next. Therefore, you can have all your units acting within a few seconds of eachother and finish your phase well before the time is up. 

There are a couple downsides to battle. One, any scrolls and potions you take into battle (you only have two slots per unit for battle items) actually take a while to take effect. If you find yourself in need of healing and you don’t have a shaman (or she’s not able to act that turn, or she’s dead), don’t expect that healing potion to take effect for a while. If you really need it, use it and move to the back-line behind another unit until the timer runs out. Oh, and hope that the unit you’re fighting aren’t gunners/spearmen(who are able to target a column) or archers (who can shoot over the front line).

Crafting is a little wierd. Once you have the skill, you can start crafting anywhere. All you need are the materials. Once you designate what you want to make and set aside the mats, a small purple square appears at the top of the screen that indicates progress. How do you advance progress? By battling! Well, while it isn’t exactly intuitive or logical, it’s nice to be able to make progress on your quests and craft at the same time.

Cities (real world counterparts! Hong Kong, Beijing, Sapporo, New York, Berlin, Rome, etc etc) are able to be owned by guilds. The guilds can then develop the city and get wandering NPCs to join the city. While in the limited time of a closed beta I don’t think this will be explored much (the minimum bid is pretty high), I’m excited to see what the various guilds will be able to do.

All-in-all I’d say this is worthwhile a worthwhile. The turn-based system throws me back to the “golden times” of the rpg, and the time limit with simultanious actions keeps the action fast-paced. The graphics are beauitful even on a slow system, and the crafting system ensures that even making things doesn’t get boring.

Graphics: 9/10 – Beautiful on a budget. I’m sure it’s even greater if you have a performance machine.

Sound: 8/10 – Good music and each unit has a voice as well as some NPCs. It gets a little stale, though, listening to the units give their ‘ready’ and ‘attack’ lines over and over.

Control: 7/10 – Auto-move guides you into the area you need to be to work on the highlighted quest. With the battle camera, there’s some issues with trying to target an enemy that is ‘behind’ a unit already attacking, causing you to select the attacking unit instead of the enemy. With looting, you have to click the body and not the circle that represents the hypotheical location of the unit. Some units fly back when killed, causing them to leave the camera range and forcing you to pan around until you get the auto-loot skill around level 12-14.

Playability: 9/10  As you progress through the levels, you gain the ability to add new types of units to your ‘party’ as well as having the party size itself expand. There is storage provided, if you have the ‘licence’, so you can shuffle around with your party makeup. That being said, when you first recruit, the recruit starts at level 1. So, it takes a while for the unit to become useful, but on the otherhand, it softens the grind because if feels like there’s always advancement.

Overall score: 8.5/10 – Definately worth a look

The last two weeks

So.. uh. Yeah. The last two weeks there hasn’t been a lot going on. At work, I did end-of-month paperwork and started the end-of-year paperwork. As we speak, the university’s business office is preparing our budgets so there’ll be more paperwork to be done. This last week was my manager’s vacation so I just.. did what I usually did. O.o; Was a little irritated at the assitant manager, because she’s almost never on time to work, and when she is she doesn’t help much anyway. She’s too busy with her son, if he tags along (he’s in some of the university’s summer camps for local kids) or taking personal phone calls or some such. Sometimes I’m halway done sorting the packages and mail from the post office before she gets off her butt to help. D:

Finished watching Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun, watched the few episodes of Kami-chama Karin I had before it got licenced, and started in Minami-ke. Also finished watching FMP: Fumoffu. GSNK was just… fan-servicable. There was a story there at the end but I’d say it was just justification for boobs boobs and more boobs that the other episodes had. For KcK.. I dunno since I only saw a few episodes, but the really airy voice of the male lead’s female support (yeah, I suck at names) was way to.. airy/whispy and got on my nerves. o.o Didn’t see enough to see what story there was to deveop. Minami-ke.. is funny though I only saw episode 2 (episode 1, for some reason, wasn’t subbed) but it was hilarious. o.o I’m looking forward to finishing it~. And Fumoffu was really funny too. I gave it five stars and reviewed it on netflix. <3

Week 3: June 23-27

Hello! Thank you for coming here once again. I really appricate you coming to look as I head into my third week-in-review-style blog entry. <3

This week in work was pretty plain. The only thing worth mentioning was when I got to go preview our new food service provider as part of a departmental meeting I got to sit in on. It was just kids’ food though – since the university is in the middle of providing summer programs for kids. I was all excited, too, because I heard they were serving things like smothered steak with garlic mashed potatoes last week. What did we get? Corn dogs! Horray! XD The meeting itself was pretty lackluster. Lee, my boss’s boss, said he had some things to go over, but he coudln’t find the notes. >_> So we more or less sat around and talked. The university’s Print Shop is moving to the Engine Test Facility because the building the Print Shop is in is going to be the new cafeteria come this next Spring semester. The end of the fiscal year is upon us and we had to make sure all the preperatory paperwork was coming along. Uneventful and boring. The corn dogs were pretty good.. for corn dogs.

No new manga to report on. XD Never did get around to cracking the next volume of Negima, and I forgot to bring it home with me so I could read it in my spare time this weekend. Oh, well.

Anime.. lets see. In Netflix, I started to watch Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid and Full Metal Panic! Fumoffu. TSR is a lot more edgy than the first one is. Bare breasts, brains being shot out of skulls and necks being slit wide open all on the first disc. And Fumoffu.. well.. hilarious. XD Considering it’s supposed to be, more-or-less, a pure comedy based off FMP, I’m satisfied with it.

I finished watching Dragonaught: The Resonance this week and started watching Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun. Dragonaught was a decent story, IMO, but the character design was just bonkers. I’ve never seen so many ten-gallon breasts in an anime that wasn’t devoted to being a perverted fan-service showdown. Kazuki was pretty pathetic, and the ‘Love with prevail~!’ sort of theme was sickeningly sweet at times. But, overall, it was okay.  After that, I only got to watch a few Goshuushou episodes before I came home this afternoon. Funny stuff, very comedic in the accidental prevertedness as well as other comedic mishaps so far. I just hope they can actually hold my attention after the pervert comedy wears thin.

Week in Review: June 16-20, 2008

Alright! Time for my second week in review! Again, thanks for reading this. <3 It encourages me when I get visitors, of course, so just someone looking makes me happy.

Work was, mostly, the same old schtik. Because the university signed a contract with a new food service provider, we’ve been busy. At the end of the semester, way back in May, our old provider was moving stuff out but they did most of it by themselves. Our new provider, however, is using normal UPS/FedEx shipments to get their stuff in – that means I’m responsable for them, since all normal UPS/FedEx packages pass through my hands. It’s kind of a pain, but hey, it’s to be expected. On top of the new food service provider getting stuff in to get ready to operate, IT has been blowing their leftover budget before the end of the fiscal year happens at the end of this month. So we’ve been getting a lot of new hardware for them, too.

The biggest event happened between Thursday and today (Friday). Since the postal rates changed back in May, we’ve been having trouble processing international mail. It’s not so much a problem, IMO, but just a few extra steps. Pitney Bowes (yes, the people I railed against in an earlier post) finally released an update to us that was supposed to let us process international mail normally again yesterday morning. Guess what happened? The update completely FUBAR-ed the mail meter. It erased all the rates, it erased all our preset modes, it even stopped the meter from communicating with the computer. So our mail processing ability was absolutely nil until they finally got it fixed around noon today, and by then we had a whole day and a half worth of mail stacked up waiting to get meter stamped. I love Pitney Bowes. <3 In case you didn’t know, the meter stamp is the stamp a machine gives an envelope. When you get your junk mail and the postage is in red ink up in the upper right corner? That’s the meter stamp.

Lets see here. I’m still reading Negima, I finished two volumes over the week. The Mahora Festival is just crazy, and some of the stuff that happened made me laugh like crazy. Especailly the costume contest. Fanservice FTW. The fight between Mana and Fu was full of win. The fight between Negi and Takamichi was good, but to me it wasn’t as good as the fight between Mana and Fu. I’m looking forward to the fight between Asuna and Setsuna, it’s always intersting to watch two friends ending up having to fight eachother. You know they’re going to have to go all-out and find a way to remain friends while they’re at it. I know they will, but I’m sure it’ll be fun (and hopefuly with a lot of fanservice too. keh, keh, keh).

I finished watching Full Metal Panic! this week. Stupid Netflix was missing Disc 6, so the major events happening during that disk was pretty lost to me and the people I’m spending my weeknights with. Oh, well, it was still a nice ending. I’m pretty darn tolerant of swearing, but I believe in moderation. Swearing is meant to give oomph and emphisis to a situation, I think, so overuse ends up completely ruining that. Why this tangent? At the last episode, when Sousuke said ‘YOU SHITHEAD!”, it was a lot more of a ‘woah..’ moment than if Sousuke was tossing those words left and right. And when the villian said ‘I love you~!’ right before he exploded, it made me laugh. A lot. He was the most villianous, mess-with-your-head and rub-your-spirit-in-the-ground sort of guy, he was almost awesome. The older son of the family I stay with is kinda wierd, and has chosen him as his role-model.

I watched the first few episodes of Cardcaptors. I was dissapointed because apparently Netflix just has the Americanized version, or the family just had the American version in their queue, or something. I’m kinda ashamed of what American dubbers have done to anime, especailly in earlier animes such as Sailor Moon and CCS.

I’ve also watched around 20 episodes of Slayers. Lina is pretty cool, heh heh. Gourry is just comic relief as far as I’m concerned, because he’s so thick-headed. Amelia is just.. ugh.. she was funny and cute when you first meet her, then it just gets annoying pretty quick. I was somewhat surprised that Zelgadis was actually an ally, just misinformation – as well as Zelgadis’s pride not sharing information – kept Lina/Gourry and Zelgadis battling. After the first major fight, after Zelgadis and Lina/Gourry finally get on the same page, I started to get annoyed. Villains don’t seem to be going away. They seem to die several times, or might as well be dead, but they keep popping up. It stops being a decent plot twist pretty darn quick. When it’s finally explained, it was almost a let-down. I thought it was pretty lame.

A few funny things that happened. Me and the family I stay with were eating at Cheddar’s. For simplicity’s sake, the mother is Kim, the younger son is Kyle, the older son is Caleb. They were talking about Caleb and another friend’s tendancy to get in trouble and Caleb’s ability to talk his way out of things. We were supposing that some day they’ll wind up in jail.

Kim: With your luck, Caleb, you’ll wind up getting off the hook.

Kyle: Yeah, and you’ll get her off too.

Me: *snerk*

And we all had a good laugh. Kyle’s a pretty pure guy, so he was a little slow in the pervert uptake, but he eventually figured it out. And another thing, me and my boss were out delivering our loads of packages to the new food service provider. Usually they’ll keep a front door unlocked so we can easily get in without having to disturb the kitchen crew. However, we found out too late that they didn’t have one unlocked. So here we were, getting back in our cart with an armload of packages. I was keeping the packages steady with one arm, while my other hand was steering the cart – trying to pull it around to the kitchen enterance. Needless to say, it was tough..

Me: Ugh! I can’t do this with one hand!

Boss: … That’s what she said.

Heheheh.  I almost crashed the cart because I was laughing so hard. Good times, good times.

Work stuff – Some things I forgot

Thank you for looking at this latest entry! It’s very much so appricated. <3

 Something I forgot about last week, as far as my internship goes, is that I was able to sit in on.. more or less.. a sales pitch. XD More or less, us here at the university mailcenter strongly dislike Pitney Bowes (one of the largest, if not the largest, seller of mail/package processing equipment and software). Their service is nice – whenever we have technical problems, we can get someone out here pretty quick to fix it. However, dealing with coroprate is a pain in the rear end. So we’ve started the process of having other processing firms court us for our business. We had someone show up at the mail center last week and pitch their system. It was nice, looked a lot better than PB’s systems, had more capabilities and all that good stuff. It would be nice for someone to submit a pickup request or track a package on-site through a program instead of having them call us and bug us. It would be nice to have a package to-do list so that I can have a list of what is going where when I go out to deliver packages to faculty. We’ll see how it goes. The contract with PB doesn’t expire for another two years or so unless we terminate it (and probably pay out the ear).  

Okay, I’m ranting and raving here some more, but I forgot something else last week. Yeah, I’m whining. So what? This is my blog, I’ll do what I want. Huff! Well, it’s a little unfair, in my opinion, about the new ‘summer schedule’ that the president of the university has come up with. All the faculty and staff are given a flex day off and have an hour added to the rest of their days – so a four day workweek with nine hour shifts. So my two managers get a day off (Monday and Friday) and I get.. absolutely nothing. Well, two days of picking up slack, no day off of my own, and no raise to cover my added responsabilties and work. Welcome to Corporate America, Suka!

Week in Review: June 9 – 13, 2008

Okay! This is my first regular content post. Wootness and whatnot. >_>; So this is probably what to expect in terms of regular updates go. I’ll talk a little about work and my internship process, and I’ll talk about the anime I’m watching and the manga I’m reading. If something big happens or I just feel the need to rant, I’ll just post them as needed instead of saving them for my week in review.

My internship can pretty much be described as ‘more of the same’. Of course, you don’t know what ‘the same’ is so I’ll explain it a little bit… accounting and paperwork. >_> That sums it up. In the morning, after the mail and packages from the post office gets dealt with, I start my paperwork. I file the previous day’s work – the register/stamp/deposit sheet, FedEx and UPs reports, and department postage charges – and also enter them into various Excel spreadsheets. At the end of the month, we get a charge report for general charges from the business office (that we work to make sure our accounts balance) and we issue charge reports to all the departments that sent mailings through us so they know how much they spent for their own bookkeeping. Sound boring? It is. >_>;

I’m a little dissapointed that I don’t really feel like I’m training to be a manager for this job. I know I am, a lot of managment IS paperwork. I was hoping to be in a little more on the decision-making process. Sometime this summer I’m supposed to be creating (or at least helping to create) a guide to the mailcenter services that’ll be disbursed to all the faculty offices, but we’ll see if that actually gets done.

Okay, on to the anime! I finished watching Outlaw Star in between the Netflix I was getting. Aisha naked, hah! Too bad it was in the middle of an episode that was more or less a joke – aside from the Caster shells, but even the aquisition of them was a big joke. The end was a little trippy, and I was hoping for a more romantic final scene. Gene just needed to cup Melfina’s cheek, mutter something romantic, and lay a long kiss on her lips. But no, he had to pull on her cheek and turn it into a joke. Bah. >_>

For Netflix, I’ve been watching Full Metal Panic, and and I got through disc 4. I’ll be having disc 5 waiting for me on monday and maybe even disk 7. That’s right, you read it correctly. For some stupid-ass reason, Netflix isn’t carrying disk 6. So I’ll be missing three or four episodes. Hopefully it won’t be too overly important, but it probably will. The season is starting to approach its close, afterall. Anyway, the whole mecha competition between the ditzy Captian and Melissa was a riot. I knew it was too much to ask to see one of them carry through with the punishment. I would have been right there with Kurz when he got his face stomped on because he requested the punishment to actually happen when it was all over. Come on, they’re both hot, though the Captian has a huge cute advantage and I don’t like smokers/drunks so much.

The big up-side to my internship is that I’m staying with friends during the work-week. Friends that love their anime and manga. So I’ve been going through their manga collection whenever there isn’t anything else going on. I read the seven volumes they had of Chibi Vampire already. Cute story, some good inter-personal drama toward volumes 6 and 7. Its a little predictable though, because it was easy to tell that the two main characters would hook up at least for a while.

I’ve also made it into volume 10 of Negima. I’ll tell you something! The manga is soo~oo~ooo much better than the anime (at least what I’ve seen of it). The anime was kinda stupid and silly. Sure, the manga is like that too at times, but the story is a lot better than the anime. In the anime, Negi was like ‘Oh, noes! You know my secret! Now I have to kiss you before this retarted frog and this stupid cat fluffball find out that you know it and turn me into a chupacabra.’ It was cute for a while, but after the whole class started to find out, I just faceplamed and turned it off. I love how the manga keeps you in touch with Negi’s mentality through the process. He’s a little kid, but he’s carrying a huge load in his shoulders. Sure, he and the classmates get into some comic mischief from time to time, but that weight is always looming over the horizon.

Well, I think that about does it for this week. Thank you for making it this far (if you actually read what I had to say. Lord knows I would have skipped half of it if I was an outside reader. >_>;). If you didn’t actually read it.. well.. at least you gave me a pageview or something. Thanks for that, then. *thumbs up* Well, see you next week!

Suka’s first post!

So! This is my first post as a blogger. Kinda neat, kinda not. >_>; It’s not like I’m expecting a lot of traffic or anything like that. Anyways~.

First, a little about myself. I’m a 27 year old male university student. I’m majoring in Managment (general concentration) and am an employee at my university’s mail center. Basicly, I sort mail, get them into their respective boxes, and deliver faculty/staff mail and packages around campus. I’m also the managment intern for the same mail center, so on top of my normal duties I get to do managment stuff until the end of the summer.

One of the main purposes of this journal is to keep track of my internship progress. If something interesting happens, I’ll talk about it here! Besides, one of my tasks as an intern is to keep a log, so I’ll let you guys in on the process. Aren’t I great? <3 I also plan on talking about other things going on in my life, my opinions, anime I’m watching, manga I’m reading, crazy things I do with my friends. I’ll try to make this interesting, just be patient with me as I get my blog-legs (as opposed to sea-legs. Har, har. I so funneh. *dur dur*) under me. I also look forward to interacting with you under the comments, so don’t be afraid to leave me some!