I finally finished Final Fantasy IX.  Took me a little over 30 hours.  I didn’t do all the side quests, but that’s more of Dan’s thing.  The characters I played with the most ended up at about level 52 - if that tells you anything.  Except for a little bit when I was trying to learn some skills, I didn’t do any grinding.  That’s the big difference from when I played Final Fantasy VI as a kid.  I don’t have quite as much time.  Whenever I got to a complicated dungeon, I consulted an FAQ.  So what are my final thoughts?  Here’s a rambling, stream-of-conciousness review of the game after finishing it up.

Just like Dina, Daniel has a great smile.  This is pretty easy to capture because he’s almost always laughing.  He has a great attitude towards life and you can’t help but smile when you’re around Daniel.

While finishing up my photographic bio, I was copying and adapting my introduction from my flickr Top 40 book.  So I decided to see how the top ten photos in my flickr Top 40 have changed in the past three years.

2006

Original Rank: 1 Current Rank: 5 Original Views:  455 Current Views:  1881 Camera: Kodak DX3600

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“These eyes, specifically”] [/caption]

I think it’s pretty interesting that my eyes can see without seeing.  For example, when I’m walking through the hallways at work, my eyes often end up in collision-avoidance mode.  That is, I don’t see through my eyes because I’m busy seeing something else in my mind’s eye.  So my eyes become visible-spectrum sonar and keep me from bumping into people and things.  It’s often while in this mode that friends and coworkers will go out of their way to snap me out of my trance to bring to my attention the fact that I didn’t acknowledge their presence in the hallway.  They never believe me that I didn’t see them because they were the only person in the hallway.  In extreme cases I have literally manoeuvred around a person to get into a door or otherwise not crash, and still did not see the person.  I mean, my brain knows I went around a human, but it doesn’t bother to decode the face so I have no idea who I narrowly missed.  This makes them even more incredulous when I deny having seen them.  Sorry, but it’s true.  My brain decided that whatever it was picturing was more important than dedicating some neurons for facial recognition.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“372” caption=“Perhaps taking the introspection a bit too literally”] [/caption]

My blog has always contained some degree of introspection.  It has varied based on my interests at the time.  While it’s not impossible to include some self-examination in a Linux review, it’s certainly not par for the course.  But, recently, reading Min and Kailyn’s blogs recently has inspired me to try and include some more of my thought process when blogging.  I think I’ll definitely try to give it a shot on my next photo essay, but also on other posts, such as those dealing with my photography or politics.

After playing Final Fantasy 9 for a few days, here are my first impressions.

• the graphics are a little distracting - it’s kinda like an uncanny valley thing.  It’s not quite as nice as the new stuff, but better than the SNES graphics.  But there are a lot of closeups because it was state of the art when it first came out.
• There appears to be a lot of slapstick with Steiner.  But then again, there’s always some slapstick in Final Fantasy games.
• Like pretty much any Final Fantasy game, after the first disc, I’m still not sure what the plot is.  Just like anime/manga, the plot is usually not evident in the first few hours.  After playing for just about eight hours I still didn’t know what was going on.
• At first I thought I had acquired an airship VERY early for a Final Fantasy game, but then quickly lost it.

My most used tag on flickr - portrait.

And my most interesting photos continue to shuffle around!  Here’s the latest top 10.  You’ll see that this photo, which had become my 2nd most interesting photo at one time, is now off the top 10.

I have a lot of love for Squaresoft (well, now they’re SquareEnix), despite the fact that I’ve played relatively few of their games.  I think Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as Final Fantasy 3 in the US) are the pinnacle of their jRPG work.  I’ve also played Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Chrono Cross.  I didn’t really enjoy Final Fantasy 7 nearly as much as everyone else.  I think it’s partly out of spite.  All these new jRPG fans think that Final Fantasy 7 is the greatest Final Fantasy game ever.  But they’re never played the SNES Final Fantasies.  Nothing is better than Final Fantasy 6 story-wise.  And Chrono Trigger is unmatched for the amount of differences your actions could make to the game.  When I finally got a Playstation in college, I was lucky enough that all the Final Fantasies released up to that time had become “greatest hits” and were available for $20.  I bought them all.  I finally got to play Final Fantasy 7.  I had tried before on our computer, but it just wasn’t up to snuff.  Even owning it on Playstation, it took me two attempts to get through it thanks to real life getting in the way.  When I finally finished it, I just didn’t see why everyone thought it was so awesome.  It might partially have to do with the fact that I had a 2 month gap in the middle of my playing the game, but I just didn’t get what made it so amazing.

All good things come to an end.  In this specific case I’ve decided to end my tenure reviewing Linux distros.  Being a home owner consumes a lot more of my time than being a renter.  Doing a quality distro review takes a lot of time - usually at least 2 - 4 hours.  And so it was that I came to decide I’d rather spend my time on the hobby I enjoy most - photography.  Also, I’ve grown bored with Linux.  Not that I’m giving up on running Linux on my computers.  But it just doesn’t excite me as it once did.  I’m strongly considering letting my Linux Format Magazine subscription lapse.  It was a tough decision because 90% of my blog’s traffic comes from Linux reviews.  But, with only so much time in the day, I’d rather just work on my photography.  So, very likely, this will be my last Linux review unless I get into it again.  I will still probably be blogging about Linux and technology, I just won’t be doing any full-blown reviews.  The big exception would be if I installed a new distro on one of my machines.

note:  I started writing this months ago when I did the installation and now I am finishing up by looking at the installed distro. PCLinuxOS started as an extra set of packages for Mandriva.  Interesting because Mandriva originally started as a KDE version of Red Hat.  Eventually, it became its own distro.  It became very, very popular around the same time as Ubuntu - give or take a few months.  There was a time where you couldn’t read a Linux review without someone in the comments suggesting you should check out PC Linux OS.  (Kinda like what I see happening with ArchLinux nowadays)  The distro built up lots of steam and in 2007 seemed as though it could potentially steal Ubuntu’s thunder.  Then it suddenly dissapeared from mention.  There wasn’t a full-fledged 2008 release.  According to its wikipedia page, PCLinuxOS has twice forked from Mandriva.  So, while it was based on Mandriva at that point in time, it has since diverged into its own distinct distro.  This is a very interesting distinction because this month I am also reviewing Mandriva 2009.1 and I had to postpone that review because it wouldn’t load up.  PCLinuxOS, on the other hand, did load up.  First up I had to choose my keyboard type.