27/09/2013 - God of War III Platinum, Ghost of Sparta Platinum and Bamboo Blade

Today has been a day of much swearing... After facerolling my way through the entirety of Titan mode, I got a nasty wake up call at the Three Judges in the infamous flaming cerberus + 3 satyr fight... Oh boy, that one hurt.

The first stage of the fight is pretty easy, considering all you day is spam-fire your Bow of Apollo and kick the dogs the cerberus vomits out back at his face. The latter part is really fun, in a sadistic kind of way.

The second phase is also pretty easy, though some how the cerberus still manages to spit three fireballs from only two heads, go figure. The satyr can be a pain, but the 'Claws of Hades' and there 'Gorgon Soul' ability turn him to stone and make him easy prey. The last phase is when *&@# goes down...

You have to fight the now one-headed cerberus and two satyrs at once. The cerberus doesn't do anything different except spam more fireballs, but the satyrs make the bow+dog kicking strategy redundant and unless you're incredibly lucky or have a godlike aim, you can only hit one satyr with the stone gaze. I died here more times than I can count, until on my successful attempt I went into a Kratos-like rage and went apeshit on the cerberus with Rage of Sparta.

I thought it was smooth sailing after that, but Zeus can kill you in one combo on Titan mode, so that peed on my fireworks a little. Sigh... Anyway, here's the platinum! Oh, and the delayed one from Ghost of Sparta.

God of War III - Platinum Trophy - Probably the second hardest after GoW I

God of War: Ghost of Sparta - Platinum Trophy - One of the easier ones to be honest.

I kind of wish I had God of War: Ascension here as well, but after playing five of them in a row, I think it might be time to take a break! Besides, I have Kingdom Hearts (soon, grrrrr) and Skyrim to play.

I really wish Kingdom Hearts would arrive, the postal service here is bollocks, it almost makes me regret my past insults of Royal Mail... Almost. On the topic of Kingdom Hearts, I believe the following picture summarises my anger, behold the pr0 meme generator skills!

Seriously, y u no?

I managed to watch a few episodes of Bamboo Blade today, seeing Tamaki do a throat strike is epic, they make it look so brutal. Although, I imagine having a shinai jammed in to your throat is probably brutal enough without additional glorification.

Up to episode 19 and the motivation to watch is returning, mainly because I want to start Cowboy Bebop, but shh!

Well, that's all for today. Demon's Souls review is actually finished, but I don't want to spam post so I'll release it early tomorrow.

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26/09/2013 - God of War III, Ghost of Sparta and Far Cry 3

I know, I know, I've been slacking off on these updates recently, but in all honesty I haven't actually done anything worth writing about for the past few days. Now I'm playing God of War III and Far Cry 3 (yay free PlayStation Plus goodies)!

Anyways, God of War: Ghost of Sparta is now platinumed, I remember mentioning that I enjoyed the final boss, but not much else. The combat is the same as every other God of War and there aren't many bosses. Even the bosses that are present are nothing notable, easy to defeat even on Hard mode and the generous checkpoint system wouldn't make them difficult fights even if they were a bit more tactical.

God of War III has been the most enjoyable one so far, the Challenges of Olympus were a bit easy compared to the earlier titles, but I'd rather not have to go through Challenge of the Gods 10 on God of War ever again. I'm currently on my Titan difficulty playthrough and I've just reached the Hermes encounter, so it shouldn't take me long to finish it.

I'm still waiting for my copy of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD, it was due to arrive on the 25th, but my Skyrim copy was 10 days late so I'm not surprised at all. It does kind of suck though, I really want to play it!

I've watched a few movies over the last few days: City Island, It's Kind of a Funny Story and Lars and the real Girl, none of which warrant talking about much. City Island was funny, but kind of predictable. It's Kind of a Funny Story was hard to watch because the main character is a clone of my best friend from high school and I have no idea how Lars and the Real Girl is labelled as a comedy when the entire feature focus is Lars' mental illness... If the whole basis for the genre is the sex doll, then the movie obviously didn't have much else to go on.

I'm trying to work my way through Kara no Kyoukai as well, but the movies are pretty weird so I only watch them like once a week. I'm still on episode 16 of Bamboo Blade, so not much progress unfortunately.

The Demon's Souls platinum review is nearly finished, so I'll be sure to post that tomorrow during the day as well as a daily update.

I hope you enjoyed the update and I'll speak to you again soon!

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20/09/2013 - Demon's Souls Platinum and God of War: Ghost of Sparta

Yeah... I finally did it. After two-and-a-half hours of farming, I got the Pure Bladestone from the Dual-Katana Black Skeleton with Pure Black World Tendency from 4-2. That was such a boring grind it's insane. It's not quite up there with my Insane in the Membrane achievement in WoW or the battle trophies in Star Ocean IV, but it's still stupid.

Pure Bladestone at last... That's right, I got you. #@*%ing thing.

Honestly, the developer that thought it was a good idea to make every ore easily obtainable from Crystal Lizards or looting and then make one ore that's a bitch to get needs slapping. I think if I play Dark Souls, I might wait a while. Whining aside, I enjoyed getting the platinum for Demon's Souls, except that last farm. Here's a pic of the trophy and my character (stupid sunlight, who put that there?)

Demon's Souls Platinum and a mugshot of Nireth. Cheese?

I was planning to watch a lot of Bamboo Blade today, but I felt like gaming a bit more so I only watched one episode. I started playing God of War: Ghost of Sparta, the fourth one I've played from my collection. I enjoyed it more than Chains of Olympus, but less than one and two. The Challenges of the Gods are a lot easier than the other games, but still make you think.

I've nearly got the platinum in Ghost of Sparta as well, I just need to finish the game on Spartan mode and that will be it. Maybe my quickest platinum ever, who knows.

My copy of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD should be here next week, I ordered the limited edition hardback walkthrough as well, but apparently the publication date isn't until October 13th (??). Might have made more sense to release it with the game, but there must be a valid reason.

Well, I'm off to bed. My girlfriend wants to play games tomorrow, so I might not get to finish God of War, but I guess a day off is a good thing every now and then.

18/09/2013 - Demon's Souls and Summer Wars

So there's been a day gap in my daily updates (technically two if you include this late post). Lame excuse time, commence! I ended up watching Summer Wars with my girlfriend until about 1am and then I was so tired that I fell asleep almost instantly, my bad.

But, on to the update!

I've almost completely finished Demon's Souls now. All I have left to do is farm a piece of Pure Bladestone and kill King Allant to craft the Northern Regalia sword. The drop rate on this Pure Bladestone is absolutely ridiculous though. I'm currently using the secret passage in 4-2 to farm the dual-katana skeleton and after 50 or so kills, it still hasn't dropped.

I might have to use my other character to farm the Pure anyway, since I dropped my controller yesterday and took a large chunk of flesh from Stockpile Thomas' head... Oops.

Honestly, I've had my fun time with this game and now it's just becoming tedious, grinding is very rarely fun, but in MMOs I can generally tolerate it. Ah well, I guess I better get back to grinding.

Now, about Summer Wars. I didn't actually plan to watch it for a while, but one of my girlfriends students told her that she should watch it, so we did. What an awesome movie. I haven't actually watched many anime movies outside of series and Ghibli, apart from the obvious ones like Akira, but after Summer Wars I think that will change. The concept for the movie is completely unique and manages to utilise the internet without going down the road of .hack and Sword Art Online. I would write a complete review of it but I might have to watch it again to make it worth reading.

Only a few more days until the penultimate episode of Shingeki no Kyojin, I can't wait! Hopefully [gg] subs will be on time, but that's something I won't hold my breath for.

Back to normal update schedule as of today, with the review of Demon's Souls hopefully arriving at the beginning of next week.

15/09/2013 - Bamboo Blade and Shingeki no Kyojin 23

Another amazing post title! Yep, today I've sat watching Bamboo Blade and the latest episode of Shingeki. Not very productive, but ah well. I decided to give Demon's Souls a break for today and will continue playing tomorrow. It takes a lot of motivation to do the Tower of Latria and Flamelurker from Stonefang Tunnel has pissed me off enough to last a lifetime.

In regards to Bamboo Blade, I actually had to find an alternative subbing group as the ones included on the DVD are god awful. No matter what media player I used the subtitles were horrid. I've decided to go with [Huzzah-Doremi] since they have generally positive reviews. The video files are only 400p, but I can live without HD every now and then.

Bamboo Blade is actually much funnier in Japanese dub than English dub, the voices seem much better cast (as always) and the humour is clearer. I think the series would be much funnier to someone who is actually Japanese due to the cultural differences. Overall the plot is pretty good and entertaining, but Tamaki Kawazoe comes across as a less-intelligent Yuki Nagato clone (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya).

For the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed the new episode of Shingeki. They made the same mistake as Sword Art Online which got much worse in the second part of the story, but it looks like they might redeem themselves before the end of the series. At least, I hope so.

Annie's laugh at the end was really creepy though, considering she spends the entire story up to this point displaying no emotion at all. I'm looking forward to seeing how it pans out and if it is at all different to the manga. My personal preference would be to follow the manga exactly.

On a less interesting note, I watched Olympus Has Fallen this evening. The action was really good and the plot didn't make me fall asleep, but I felt like I was watching a movie of Call of Duty, which is slightly off putting. It's good if you want a good two hours of explosions and gunfire, not much in terms of plot though. Another similarity to Call of Duty, go figure.

Last thing to say is if you fancy watching a funny action movie, give Chinese Zodiac a watch. It's a Jackie Chan movie from 2012 where he plays a famous National Relic thief and is tasked with finding the twelve Chinese zodiac heads. The last movie I watched with Jackie Chan was The Forbidden Kingdom and I enjoyed this just as much.

Two daily updates in a row, such amazing consistency! Let's hope I can keep it up.

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14/09/2013 - Demon's Souls and One Piece 610

I managed to kick back a bit and play some more Demon's Souls now that I have finished my The Last of Us review. You can probably see why it took me so long by the length of it, but I wanted to cover every base.

On the topic of Demon's Souls after reaching the end of my second playthrough, I discovered that I had made a monumental cock up with my character tendency by accidentally one-shotting the Dregling NPC and stopping myself from getting Pure White Character Tendency... Arse.

Oh well, I fancied a change so I started again using a similar build based on the Temple Knight class and I'm really enjoying it. However, since I don't want to end up doing a total of five playthroughs I'm following a 'Platinum Trophy Guide' on the Demon's Souls wiki which will allow me to get the platinum trophy in just over one playthrough, and so far it is incredibly well written with some thought out and well labelled maps of every level. I'll place a link to the guide at the bottom so you guys can check it out.

I'm thinking I'll go with the Blueblood Sword again due to how quickly the damage scales with it equipped, but I'm tempted to try a dexterity-based build and use a Sharp Uchigatana +5, I'll have to do some research I guess.

The next part of my day - I now have a blu-ray copy of Full Metal Jacket so tomorrow I will be reuniting myself with obtuse amounts of comedic swearing in an otherwise quite serious movie. I haven't watched Full Metal Jacket for a few years, but when I'm nerding out I can still quote lines from it... Yeah...

Also, Yibis released their version of One Piece episode 610 today and I was disappointed. The preview in 609 really hyped up the fight between Vergo and Smoker but after watching it they only punched each other a few times, most of the episodes focus was on Caesar and Vegapunks past. It was cool to hear Vegapunks voice, but I'm getting impatient while waiting for Luffy to kick Caesars ass. GOMU GOMU NO.... GET THE HELL ON WITH IT!

My girlfriend just finished watching the Skypiea arc and really enjoyed it, she enjoyed it so much that every now and then I hear GOMU GOMU NO.... OUGEN RIFLE~! It's actually made me jump a few times, but it's pretty awesome that she likes One Piece as much as me!

Anyways, that's all for today. My fingers are now stumps after typing both this and a portion of my The Last of Us review. I'll post an update tomorrow if my Titan powers have regenerated my fingers! Adios!

Demon's Souls Platinum Trophy Guide

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11/09/2013 - General Update, Demon's Souls, Demon's Souls & more Demon's Souls

Good day! Sorry that I haven't been doing as many updates recently, I fell ill after my girlfriend's pizza party and I've been pretty sick since then, so, my bad. I managed to proofread, edit and publish my Future Diary review, but not much else.

Anyways, now that my brain and other organs are back under my control (too much information?), I decided to continue my second play through of Demon's Souls. New Game+ is enjoying handing my arse to me on every possible occasion, but I'm soldiering on through the endless hoards of Dreglings, Black Phantoms and believe it or not, Demon's.

The main problem with Demon's Souls is that it is incredibly repetitive. The environments may be quite pretty and well designed, when you can actually see them (Tower of Latria, ughhh). But otherwise, the enemy diversity leaves much to be desired, especially considering how different and challenging the boss fights are. Don't get me wrong, the game has a lot to offer in regards to side quests and the various World Tendencies, but it follows the typical Japanese game algorithm where 'grinding is winning'. I played World of Warcraft for 6 years, I can't be bothered with grinding any more. I'm enjoying my Blueblood Sword though, but one-shotting everything with Light Weapon and 99 Luck only stays fun for so long.

Tomorrow, I will be out for most of the day, but I'll make sure to save some time for gaming and working on  my The Last of Us review. Unfortunately due to the length of the review, it might not be published for a few days, so bare with me guys.

Another things to look forward to are the One Piece special, Episode of Merry. I just have to wait for Yibis to sub it, which could be a while considering how thorough they are with the fansubbing. The upcoming JRPG tribute game by Ubisoft, Child of Light, also looks incredible. With the interesting art style, turn-based combat and the sheer number of systems it's being released on, I can see it being a huge success.

You can check out the trailer for Child of Light here:

Sadly that's all I have to say for today, but I'm sure I'll have much more to post once I get done with Demon's Souls and start playing Kingdom Hearts HD. That's something I'm really looking forward to.

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08/09/2013 - The Last of Us Platinum and Bamboo Blade

This is a late post since I forgot to change it from a draft (derrrrrp).My bad!

IT'S OVER! IT'S FINALLY OVER! This morning I finally finished the multiplayer on The Last of Us and promptly began playing Demon's Souls. It's kind of sad really, considering I did incredibly well on my last six or so matches. What really sucks is that I finished Week 12 with less than 85 survivors... Which isn't enough to get the skull mask. Lame, but, oh well. Here's a photo!

The Last of Us - Platinum Trophy (It can't be for nothing) - FINALLY!

I'm hoping that when they release the DLC for this game that it is purely singleplayer content - maybe explaining a bit more about when Joel met Tess or some of the past between Bill and Frank, that would be cool right?

But, this is Naughty Dog we're talking about, and considering what the DLC trophies were like for Uncharted 3, we probably know how it will actually pan out. Getting the platinum trophy also means that now I have to write a review on the game, not sure how well I will keep my polite demeanour when it comes to reviewing the multiplayer, but I'll try!

As I said before, I've started Demon's Souls and though the difficulty is incredibly punishing, it's still very much enjoyable. I was actually tempted to do it via the glitching route and duplication which makes the game much easier, but now I'm not so sure about doing it that way. The main thing that is tempting me to do it, is how easy it is to execute the duplicating glitch.

Another thing to look forward to is that I've ordered my copy of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD from the UK and got a deal to save £5 on the Prima Walkthrough. The only reason I decided to buy the walkthrough was because of the exceptional quality of Prima's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Legendary Edition walkthrough.

I'll make sure to upload a picture once the package has arrived! Unfortunately, I still don't have enough funds to build my new PC, which is sort of hindering my plans considering how limited I am with the functionality of this laptop.

Finally, I started watching Bamboo Blade! Unfortunately, I couldn't find a very good version so the subtitles are not spectacular, but it does not take much away from the plot. I would prefer 720p or 1080p, but I can cope with 480p if I have to. My girlfriend is trying to get me to watch Cowboy Bebop next and I think I've given in. I wouldn't normally, but it has been reviewed many times as an 'anime masterpiece' so I don't have much to lose.

Speaking of my girlfriend, it's her birthday tomorrow! I'm not sure I'll get much work done on the reviews, but I'll make sure to post a daily update as always (and not forget to change it from draft status).

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05/09/2013 - The Last of Us and Demon's Souls

Today has been a good day for gaming, particularly for trophies in the case of Demon's Souls. In truth, I was actually hoping to watch some anime today but instead figured I should probably put some effort in to finishing The Last of Us.

If I remember correctly, I am currently on Week 6 Day 2 of my Hunter journey and getting more bored by the minute. I guess the consistent run of bad luck with joining matches when there is only one round left didn't help. But, it helped my clan of 115 people less since most of them are either now starving or sick. It should be easy to remedy though, by killing most of them off when I finish the current population challenge. I chose the gifting challenge this time for the first 100% risk challenge so I could faceroll my way through it without worrying too much. My plan for the 100% risk challenges this time around is Gifting - Gifting - Gifting - Downs and then Marks. That makes it pretty easy to finish up to tier 3 each time.

But enough about tedious and badly designed multiplayers, I went back to Demon's Souls! It's been sitting on my trophy list for several months now and I never got around to finishing it. This wasn't because I was bored or that I wasn't enjoying it. I left the disk in the UK when I moved to the Philippines... Whoops. Thankfully though, I think the fairies at PlayStation Plus must have heard my prayers though, since one month later it was free on the European PlayStation Store. Score!

For all you fans of Demon's Souls out there, this next bit should make perfect sense. Today I finished the following stages: 3-2, 3-3, 4-1, 4-2, 4-3 and 5-1. Not bad eh? I thought I did quite well considering how unforgiving this game is. Ignoring the various parodies on YouTube about the difficulty of the series, it does chew you up, spit you back out, stamp on you, set fire to you, vomit on you and then launch you through another dimension of pain. But it's fun... Right..? Please agree with me...

I think tomorrow will spent either playing more video games or watching One Piece with my girlfriend. I have such a large variety of hobbies in my life. She's playing catchup to me at the moment considering that we're on episode 175 and I'm on episode 608. Not far to go.

Any opinions on what I should play next? I have a fair few choices, one of which is GTA V. The truth is that with the amount of effort I'm putting in to finishing TLOU, it's going to take me until the release date to finish it.

Remember to leave a comment, share and/or subscribe to my blog. Mirai Nikki review is not entirely finished yet as I'm not convinced on the quality. Look forward to it though!

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