Defeating Giygas at Level 99

While I was away on vacation to Illinois, I had time in the car to level up to the maximum with my two star characters Ness and Poo. If you had seen my earlier post, you'll know I was aiming to power level, basically meaning my characters would be far stronger than they should be according to how they progress through the game. Well, I spent sometime fighting Fobbies before taking on Belch, and I raised my levels significantly. When I nearly reached Ness's top level, I received a spectacular surprise. Around level 85, he gains 150 HP and tons of attack power. This is what makes him the superweapon for the rest of the game.

When I finally took on Giygas, it was a fairly straight-forward fight to the death. Giygas's death of course. As you should know if you've ever played and beaten EarthBound, there are a few parts to the battle against Giygas. The first has you focusing entirely on his cohort and your former neighbor, Pokey. Attempting to hit Giygas results in a rather quick death. Giygas hits back with Ness's PSI Gaming attack regularly, which necessitates PSI Shield Beta. You don't want to reflect his magic attacks back at him since he'll just reflect them back at you again. I hit Pokey with everything in my conventional attack repetoire. Multi-bottle rockets, Ness's bat, Paula's frying-pan and Poo's... hands. Unfortunately I forgot to get the Sword of Kings for him. Even without it, his power was quite formidable.

After Pokey fell, it was time to turn my focus on Giygas. PSI Gaming Omega, Ice Omega, and Starstorm Omega as well as Jeff's bazooka brought him down quickly enough. That's when Giygas goes insane... The only way to beat him at this point is to hunker down, defend Paula and let her pray for help. Eventually she'll call on everyone you helped throughout the game, and for the knockout blow, she'll even call on the player to help pray for their safety. This is what finally destroys Giygas.

The end is amazing, and one of the best an RPG could ever aspire to have. Since I've played through the ending of EarthBound, I've hoped for other games with an ending as comprehensive and fun. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who has yet to beat the game, but seriously, if you haven't you need to get to work... the game has been out for a decade!

I promised screenshots, and those will be in a seperate article chronicling a bit of my tour through Eagleland. Stay tuned!

Power Leveling in EarthBound

I've been playing quite a bit of EarthBound as of late. I've been enjoying it too, as I've never played it this way before. What am I doing differently you ask? Well, I'm continually fighting weaker enemies in order to level up higher than I need to be at that point in the gsme. Right now my main party member, "Matt" who is normally Ness, is above level 50 and I just defeated the boss at the top of the department store in Fourside. Under normal circumstances, "Matt" should only be around level 30.

This has changed the way I can play the game quite a bit. Most of the enemies are considerably easier at this higher level, plus I have so much money from defeating enemies that I can easily afford all of the best equipment for each of my party members. I'm about halfway through the game (it's been so long since I've played it that I can't remember exactly how much more there is, besides the fact that it's several hours worth). My objective is to reach level 99 before I go and fight Giygas back in the past. So far it's going well.

I'll definitely have to take some shots of my party's stats once I reach that level. Should be fun taking on Giygas then. I've never done it with a party that strong. Usually I've fought him when I was around level 70, which makes for quite a difficult battle. Anyways, the final battle is going to be fun, I know that much! :-)

Oh yeah, and here are a couple places where you can level up rather quickly: the factory where Belch is located... just fight the Fobbies. You may have to fight up to six at a time, but they aren't very difficult to deal with. Then later you can power level in the desert. Watch for a green caterpillar looking thing, it moves pretty fast but it gives around 30,000 experience points when it is defeated. It's worth looking for! Just make sure you can heal your party members if they get poisoned or have sunstroke! You can always stop off at the miner's cabin if you need a rest to recharge after fighting in the desert. Afterall, it's free!!

I'll post an update when I've gotten further down the road in the game! Stay tuned!

Just 2 More Reasons why Halo Sucks

Not directly focused at Halo, but being a former programmer... call it inheritance. :)

1) Bungie's website is a horror to visit with Firefox. You guys make a "hit game" but can't write the HTML for your website so it works with more than just IE?
2) Bungie's website makes use of .NET to login. The same used for Hotmail and other Microsoft stuff. It was supposed to be the next greatest thing for the Internet... but so far, I know of only a handful of websites that use it. Now I know of one more.

Robotrekking...

I managed to get my hands on an SNES RPG by the name of Robotrek. I've progressed somewhat through the game, and I have to say it's pretty enjoyable, although it seems a bit difficult. I still haven't figured out how to do everything yet... although I do seem to have a pretty good winning combination for my robot.

Basically, you're an inventor's son and you've taken up the profession yourself. You fight evil "hackers" attempting to take over the world, and generally help out your hometown by building inventions for them and rescuing their children. This is as far as I've progressed, so I know there's quite a bit more to it. The overworld map is a bit unique, unlike some RPG's where you can walk anywhere and initiate in random combat, the overworld map in Robotrek seems more like the map used in Super Mario World.

I've played it for several hours now, and I'd suggest that if you like old-skool RPG's you give it a shot, you might like it. I tend to be a bit picky with my RPG's, but this one has me coming back for more. :-)

Remember Uniracers?

I was going through my collection (which will be growing quite soon when my friend finds his box of "old" games for me to try out), and I remembered Uniracers. It wasn't a real big hit for the Super Nintendo, in fact I believe I picked it up from the bargain bin at Wal-Mart several years ago for a really cheap price. It's a quirky race game where you race unicycles against each other and do stunts along the way to increase your overall top speed. The game uses the same 3D-rendering that Donkey Kong Country pioneered when it was released. All of the objects in the game have a nice clean 3D feel to them, even though it's only an SNES running the game.

Uniracers is a very long game, with plenty of races to accomplish, lots of options and the ability to do multiplayer. I've never actually beaten the game, but I have gone through many of the courses. Once you get up into the higher levels, it gets very difficult.

You may want to pull your SNES out for this game sometime. You really missed out if you never got to play it before. As I said before, the graphics are wonderful and you'll be able to pick the controls up in no time. I'll post some screenshots of it in action sometime and let you see what it's all about. On that note, what do you think of adding more screenshots to each post so that way you can see the game I'm playing as I describe it? It would be a bit of work, but I imagine it would make it more interesting for people to reminisce and think about these older games. I may do that in the future like I've done in a couple previous posts. It seems to add a bit more life to them...

Stay tuned for more gaming updates!