Dragon Quest V for the DS does the thing where you can spend gold at the casino and buy tokens, then use those tokens to play slot machines and win even more tokens, then trade those tokens in for, if not the best weapons in the game, certainly the best weapons you’re going to get in the first half of the game.
So after whupping on enough monsters to start with a decent stake, you play the 1-token per pull games until you win enough to play the 10-tokens per pull games, then repeat until you’re playing the 100-tokens per pull games (and you save after a big win and you restore after a long drought without any big wins).
Which has the odd effect of turning an RPG into a boring slot machine simulator. I just want to make enough money so I can get back to playing the game! THIS IS TOO MUCH LIKE REAL LIFE.
So… what are you playing?
(Photo is “The Game” taken by Mo Riza, used under a creative commons license.)
Playing Game Dev Tycoon (One day I will get an 11). And finishing Dragon Age 2.
Pity the levels/maps annoyed me so much that I put it down years ago and never finished. The combat’s okay, but the story is fun. (I particularly enjoy the framing device using Varrik and the Seeker. That’s an idea that should be reused).Report
The 11 eludes me too. I think you have to have multiple specialists on each part of the game. A World Design specialist on World Design and so on.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0oReport
That soap advertised itself as being beige…..
Now that was also one of the most 70s things I have ever seen. Kind of dirty, yet kind of squeaky clean. All the women had strangely cartoonish voices like they were trying to imitate Betty Boop if she were raised in Brooklyn.Report
They are all affectations, none more so than Garr’s, but that’s Marshall’s real voice – or at least the one she always used as far as I can tell. Then again, she’s the only one actually from NooYawk.Report
This might be more 70s. I can’t tell if Brian Eno is wearing an eyepatch for a costume’s sake or because he needed it.Report
Er make that Bryan FerryReport
I’m playing FTL the expansion. Pretty sweet.Report
Minigames like that are just dull.
I do know someone who wrote a good slotmachine game —
but it had to stand on its own two feet.Report
I’ve found that JRPGs assume a higher level of tolerance for grinding than western RPGs.
(For the record, there’s an entire casino with all kinds of games which include betting on races, betting on fights, and a cute little board game kinda game… it’s just that the rate of return for the slots is a couple orders of magnitude higher than anything else in the casino. If you want the best whip you can possibly get, you need to play the slots.)Report
Whip?Report
Suikoden 2 at least had some dimension of “You can do what you want” and you didn’t need to grind EVERYTHING.Report
Most of the attacks in the game target individual monsters rather than an entire group of monsters. A whip attacks every member in a particular monster group. (Now, if you want to attack every single monster in the fight, you need a boomerang… but, generally, if there’s merely a group of skeletons or whatever, a whip is sufficient to hit each one of them. It’s the difference between attacking each of five skeletons one at a time or attacking a group of five skeletons twice.)Report
They need to port the Suikodens to DS, I tell you what.
(Though Zelda: Majora’s Mask comes out next month!)Report
Oh, a real whip 🙂 I was wondering if it was an acronym for Something Hit Something Points. There’s an “advanced” (i.e. post-1900) baseball statistic called WHIP, which stands for Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched, i.e. how many men does a pitcher put on base each inning.Report
Are they not men?Report