"Gearing up for the holidays" Monday - December 18th, 2006

It sure seems that despite her control over her emotions that Izumi is pretty pissed off doesn't it? It still didn't stop her from having a plan in place before she decided to try and take on Miss Albrecht. I liked a couple of the panels in this comic such as P3 and P8. I don't know why, but I do like them. Sometimes when you have a scene pictured in your mind you sit and try to figure out how the hell you're going to try and put it down on paper. This was one of those cases. I knew it was going to be a chase scene with the trap coming in mid comic. I saw how it played in mind, and despite one or two transition cuts I didn't think it came out pretty close to the original vision. Hope you enjoyed it.

Oh and I wanted to offer my thoughts on FF XII, even though the game has already been out for forever. I played it all Saturday after only planning to spend an afternoon on it. We're talking about 10 hours of game play and I have to say I love it. The story is very nice and I like the whole MMORPG feel to it. The characters so far have been great and the voice acting has been top notch. I knew the graphics would be good, but I had heard the music wasn't as good as previous FF's. I kinda enjoyed the music. During an escape scene you had the appropriate panic high tension music and I enjoyed that tons. However I did have a few problems. The control of the camera angle is mapped to the right analog stick, but it's mapped backwards to how I would think it should go. Annoying. The other complaint was that you can turn Gambits on and off and a character mentions them, but you can't actually set them until way after that. So I sat there for a couple of minutes pouring through the menu's being like "okay this menu has got to be here somewhere." All in all I would say I'm enjoying the experience of XII more than I did X. My closing statement is that while Vaan is okay, Balthier and Fran are bad ass. I love the weird accent they gave Fran.

Oh and I have to give props here to Tora for giving me a goods run for my money in a friendly debate on the NS Forum. I won't get in the specifics, but you know it's a good debate anytime someone counter argues and you have to pause for a moment to ask yourself if you're really right. Props to the Mabushii.

I think that's about it. As is the holiday tradition for NS, I won't have a comic for Christmas or News Years. I will have filler so don't you fret. Chances are you will still get a comic next Thursday and the one after that. Doing the whole skipping Mondays for the holidays thing. There will however be a comic this Thursday so sit back and enjoy this one till then!