Super First Impressions

I picked up Super Street Fighter 4 last night and while I didn't have much time to play and have yet to turn it on tonight, I am very pleased with it. The additional characters are cool and while I don't know much about the rebalancing of the characters, from what I have read online, it seems to be pretty good. While I will keep playing Cammy, I think I might give Juri and Ibuki a try as well. I still need to pick a charge character to learn. It's most likely going to be Honda.

One of the new characters, Hakan, is a Turkish oil wrestler. It's kind of upsetting. He pours oil on himself and slides around and squeezes you and all sorts of unpleasant things. He is also red. I don't know why he is red.

I am glad that they made unlocking costume colors and taunts so easy this time. All you need to do is go to versus mode, pick your character, choose the newest color and taunt that you have, start the battle. Then, hit start, go to change your character and a new color or taunt will be unlocked.

On another note, I beat Final Fantasy 13. I enjoyed it. I had about 60 hours logged at the end.

Lost Civilization

As predicted, my civilization is not going to well. I haven't had the money problems like a predicted because I have nothing to spend the money on. Simply, I am not growing. I have three cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novgorod) and they are tiny. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Perhaps I need to accept some short periods of losing money to grow my civilization into areas that I can exploit. If this is the case, I need to do it fast. I'm being boxed in and even though I am building as many military units as I can, I am pretty sure I am completely out ranked.

That doesn't sound too bad though, building up my army, no matter how weak the units are, right? Yeah... not so much. The reason all I am making is army guys is that I have nothing else to make for my cities. My tech is so low, I've made all the buildings that I have access to. And I have no need for more workers because I chose some stupid locations for my cities and there isn't anything for them to do.

If I do end up losing, I will start again, but probably on a lower difficulty.

Pick 'em

Faithful reader(s), I am thinking of starting a new game of Civilization 4 to waste time on randomly and I want you to choose the empire I will play the game as. I have all of the expansions installed, so there are many to choose from. Once you have chosen, I will pick the map to use and dive in.

Expect reports of famine and me to hemorrhage money. I am not very good at this game. I think my problems include spreading out too quickly and letting my cities get too big too fast. Especially in the early game, when the buildings that can be used to keep your citizens happy are not available, it's probably not a good thing to have high growth (which makes citizens unhappy).

So... let me know. You can find the full list of empires and their leaders that I can choose here.

Playing Games Makes Me Worse At Them

It seems that after putting 30+ hours into FF13 and still not being close to being done, my skills in other games have really fallen off. I've been letting the stupidest goals in on NHL10 and the moves I listed in my previous post have only been so-so.

I've found that practice mode might not be the best place for practicing my execution. I have a lot more trouble pulling moves off under pressure from an attacking opponent than one that is standing. Even if I turn on CPU control for the dummy in training mode, the lack of wins/losses and a real outcome makes me unable to feel the same pressure.

What I think I might need to do is use arcade mode on a semi difficult difficulty to practice my moves. If I'm going to practice doing the same move over and over, I won't win, but I can practice it in a game situation. The only main problem is that I will not be able to consistently practice Supers and Ultras because of the need for meter to charge. I will try to figure everything out when I have less interest in the FF.