Sadly (for me) I’m back from the holidays. For those of you who wondered why the updates on Japan stopped: when I got back to Tokyo I didn’t have an Internet connection, so I had no means to update. The whole holiday was a blast, though, and we’re considering getting back in two years.
Aside from that, work has picked up a really fast pace immediately (why on Earth journals don’t accept LaTeX-produced PDFs?) and I expect a round of meetings and planning to start soon to plan the next three months. I had a poster accepted at the ECCB 2008 conference, but the steep fees (1200 euro for flight, registration and lodging) made me reconsider. Better luck next time, I guess.
On other fronts, I read that FFXI can run on WINE now. I’ll be sure to try it once I finish preparing my new PC (I’ll write about it soon).
That’s all for now.
(Note: I should really start posting more often nowadays)
Last monday, for one of my group, I re-did one of the hardest missions of the whole Chains of Promathia expansion: PM6-4, better known as “One to be Feared”. I was looking forward to redoing it, mainly because I wanted to see if the adjustments that came after I finished the expansion (Sentinel modification, shield blocks modification, etc.) made the job easier.
The first attempt was embarassing, because we all died in the supposedly “easy” stage, fighting the five mammets. We redid it using the so-called “super tank” method (extremely boring on my part, sadly) and we moved on to do a dry run (no items, no two-hour abilities) on Omega and Ultima. We got Omega down to around 40% before it killed us. I noticed that the new abilities helped a lot, but it was still hard, and worse, I had become very rusty on such difficult fights.
The third time was our winning run, and went well. Both the party and I got into the right mindset and with two more or less controlled wipes, and the use of CCB Polymer pumps, we were able to achieve victory. It was even fun… more fun than the watered-down Wings of the Goddess missions offered so far. I hope that the new update (scheduled for mid-June) will bring at least half as that fun.
I haven’t posted anything in a month or so. Quite a long time, considering I used to write at least once per week. The reasons are mainly two: first of all, my work schedule has taken a turn for the worse, which means I have to do my job a lot harder than before; secondly, there wasn’t much interesting stuff to report.
Let’s resume from the hiatus by writing about my latest Final Fantasy XI session. Given that Square Enix didn’t release a lot of content for the recent Wings of the Goddess update, I did the few (four) quests in total in one day. Although the story was quite interesting, they were far too easy. I could have done them alone, probably. I wonder, what was the point of waiting four months for that? At least some form of challenge would be appreciated.
I’m not going to write much about the quests themselves, because my brother has done a good job at putting everything together in a single movie. You’ll find the streaming version below (direct link once I manage to get it):
For a change, my brother has found a place (DLsite.com) that sells dojinshi even to non-Japanese people, and also found three non-hentai Final Fantasy XI dojins, which I’m going to cover in this post. For reference, they are available with these prices:
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