Summer was Ending when I started this, alright?

Summer's ending, and you know what that means; The Earth is moving away from its orbital aphelion and towards its perihelion, where the Northern Hemisphere is pointed away from the Sun. But, more importantly, I have to personally go to some collection of buildings to listen to people talk and write things on papers for several hours almost every day, learning confusing new words like "aphelion" and "perihelion". So, in a feeble attempt to avoid the fact that I'm taking way more math and physics than I can handle, I'm going to reminisce about summer. The good days. Not the ones I spent crying in the corner about quantum mechanics.

So, what did I do over the summer? Well, besides probably disappointing the physics lab professor and making jokes about my brother being in space, Persona 3, mostly. So how did I like it? Enough that I'm considering buying all 4 Persona games being released over the next few months, as well as a Vita pretty much just for the ability to play the enhanced version of Persona 4.

If only there were another way...

Persona 3 is the kind of game that makes me almost wish I had friends. In contrast to the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games, which teach lessons like “If your friends have different beliefs from you, you should kill them”, Persona is all about friendship. Part high school sim, and part dungeon-crawler RPG, you spend your days hanging out with friends and developing social links, and you spend your nights fighting monsters called Shadows. So kind of like Batman, but with prettier hair. I actually first made that comparison in jest, but when you take into account the dead parents, the fact that persona are often likened to masks, and how he can gain his power from Lucifer, (I, uh, don't actually read that much Batman) the similarities are more striking than Kenpachi Ramasama's piercing grey eyes.

Huh? Was I saying something? I lost my train of thought

More than just being fun, Persona 3 is the kind of game that can change the way you see your friends, yourself, the full moon, robots with feelings, and the inevitability of Death. And at just $4 at the time that I got it, it's probably the best value of anything I have ever purchased in my life. And I bought Skullgirls for $10.

I REMAIN making dumb references no one will get.

Despite my insistence at the beginning that I would be speaking of good days, I guess I'll make the natural progression to talking about Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (SMT 3). But maybe I'm being too harsh on it. I certainly wouldn't say that Nocturne is a bad game. In fact, I'd say that it's a great game, if it weren't for all the times while playing it that I found myself thinking “Wow, this is literally bad game design.”

Someone call my name?

See that asshole up there? That's the Matador. But he should be called the mad-ador, because that's exactly what you'll be when you're fighting him for the third time after two hours of grinding. He just shows up out of nowhere early on the game, maximizes his evasion, sharply lowers your party's defense, and just goes to town on your party. The town is Painville, Hell; population: 4, and rapidly declining. And the worst part is that he totally hustles you, and he's far from the only boss in the game to do it. For the first half, they toy with you, using attacks that you can resist so you think that you have a chance, but once it's game time for real, all your people get stabbed over and over and over until none of the remain to be stabbed. I had more trouble with the Matador, the first fiend in the game, (of 10 that you have to fight to get the coolguy demon ending) than I had with Lucifer, actual King of the Demons, who takes 25% from all kinds of attacks, (including almighty attacks, the element whose entire point is that no one resists it) and has as much HP as they could fit into 2 bytes.

Besides the frustrating bosses, the game had dungeons that I'll admit were cleverly designed, but only begrudgingly. Because, as cool as some of the things were, spending 2 hours wandering a dungeon because you have no idea where to go next is very much uncool. Just ask those (totally hypothetical) kids that I totally implied that I chained to chairs in my basement a few posts back.

The one that got away NOTE: DON'T PUBLISH THIS

But that's all in the past, now. What really matters is the future. And there's only one thing in the future that matters right now: Super Smash Brothers. And while the demo might be available to the public by the time I actually finish this, (hell, the game might be out for the Wii U by the time I finish this) I would like the record to show that I got a totally legitimate early demo for being a platinum member of Club Nintendo. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm kind of a big deal.

inb4 "You're a real pizza. Pizza SHIT"

Of course, as I said, by the time this reaches the presses, most of you will probably have had an opportunity to play the demo for yourself. Not to mention the fact that the game's out in Japan already, and there are plenty of people sharing details about that. Regardless, this Smash demo is just about the only thing I've got going for me, and I intend to milk it for all it's worth, and then some. And of course, by the time I get around to writing this very next sentence, the demo's already upon us. So, now that you have the opportunity, do yourself a favor and find a friend to play Smash Potato with right now. What's Smash Potato? Well, Smash Potato is when two people face off, both playing as the Murdere- er, Villager. They are only allowed to use two moves: His down B, where he plants a tree, waters it, and chops it down, and his regular B, which allows him to pocket just about anything, including trees. What follows is an intense game of timing, strategy, and throwing trees at your friends, where even a single slip-up can result in a spectacular black lightning death. What's black lightning, you ask? Well, I feel like this post is disjointed enough as it is, so I think I'll leave this as a cliffhanger for my next post, if for no other reason than to motivate me to finish it sooner.. So, as my physics professor would say, you'll have to wait until the next exciting episode to find out. Or you could just play the demo.