Still doing FF12

Well, all the Espers are mine now. Did the long walk through the mines to fight Zodiark. And killed it. Just. First 90% of the battle was over in a couple of minutes. It's just that last 10% of killing it that took the most time. See, once you've inflicted a suitable amount of hurt on it, it's suddenly immune to physical attacks. And then starts reflecting your magic back at you. Cunning rearranging of my equipment, and I could slowly attack it with magic with a single character while the other 2 kept him alive.

So now I'm trying to kill Yiazmat (or something like that). A giant thing who's a bit hard. Half an hour, and I'd killed about 5% of him. Gave up at that point. (I wasn't going to keep going for 10 hours!).

Also got another DVD (to add to the shelf with no space left). A Scanner Darkly. Very strange and enjoyable film. The combination of the weird animation style (drawing over the real actors, or whatever they did) and the music makes it a bit uncomfortable to watch. I guess that's the whole point. It just all feels ever so slightly wrong. Worth spending the Nectar points on.

And now I've got another fiver (for pointless ads on my website), bringing me to £111.97. With £35 quid of that sat in my Amazon account. I'll get that new toy sometime this year, I'm sure.

SquareEnix, you're quite, quite evil!

Bloody FF12. I obviously have to finish all the sidequests, and do everything there is to do. A good 2 hours wandering through mines, killing the most evil creatures in the game, find the final Esper I'm missing, fight it, almost kill it, and then die. How annoying is that?

That's after wandering through the big crystal for ages to find the previous almost final Esper. No map, and every single location looks exactly the same. And there's hours of running backwards and forwards to open gates (with the switch for the gate being almost too far to get back before a totally random timer runs out). Still, at least there was a save point just before fighting her. And then a long walk to get out of the place again. And it keeps me off the streets.

And the "free" stuff count keeps going up. £10.99 worth of DVD (with Nectar points from surveys), and £6.49 of book for Phil. £106.97. Half way to beating the 200 quid or so last year. With enough Nectar points left to buy a CD I want, but I'll have to wait 3 weeks to get it half price. And almost a 10 quid voucher for Phil from pigsback. Which explains why he just emailed me an Amazon voucher. Giving me 30 quid there. Not getting far with this "buy a DS" plan. Or I might save up even more and buy a Wii.

And FF12 is still good

A bit too good. By not having anything else to do, I've finished it. Well, the main bits. Some of the extra bosses and the hunts are a bit nasty. Well, time-consuming. The Hell Wyrm took about 90 minutes to take down. And there's still a couple of places where I'm tending to die quite quickly.

But it's a very good game. Best since FF7, definitely. And as it appears there's going to be a FF12 game for the DS, it's time Nintendo had some of my money. Amazon will happily give it to them if I ask them to send me a DS. Just got a 5 quid voucher for some surveys, bringing the total in my Amazon account to 20 quid (once Amazon give me the 2 quid refund because FF12 is now 2 quid cheaper than it was when I ordered it! Ask, and they refund the difference if it's within 30 days. But only if you ask).

So, the total for my free stuff this year is £89.49. Almost enough for a DS, except I've spent a lot of that, and it wasn't all in one place anyway. Oh well. I might save up enough there some day.