The kingdom of Renais has just suffered a surprise attack by their longtime allies, the kingdom of Grado. Under orders from the king of Renais, Seth, the captain of the army, takes Princess Eirika out of Renais and away from the attack. Seth and Eirika then depart to the other lands to warn them of Grado's treachery and try to find answers as to why, after hundreds of years of peace, Grado attacked without provocation. Along the way, many other brave men and women would join their cause, and as darkness spreads across the land, the answers Eirika finds would prove far more terrifying than they could have ever imagined.
<b>GRAPHICS</b>
If you played the original, you'll feel very familiar with the units, interface, landscapes, battle animations, and even backgrounds of Sacred Stones. That's because very little was changed graphically in the sequel, the game uses the same engine as it's predecessor. Some may find this lack of graphical improvement detrimental to the game, but I rather like the familiarity. Still, if you're expecting a flashier show out of the sequel, sadly, you won't get it.
If you're new to Emblem, you'll find the graphics pleasing yet practical. Every unit on the map is distinctive and easy to discern (unless you have two or more of the same class of unit on the map at once, in which case you must move your cursor over him/her to tell the difference), landscapes and backgrounds look detailed and realistic, battle animations are smooth and in some cases, a sight to behold; many units critical attacks will leave you laughing at your enemies painful demise.
<b>SOUND</b>
Sound effects and music far from disappoint, they add a great atmosphere to the game. While much of the visuals of the previous game were recycled, music is almost all new, and the few remaining familiar songs are redone and made better. As for sound effects, all are well done and clear, adding much to battles. Attacks that do no damage give a pitiful *chink*, while critical attacks make an extremely satisfying BOOM when they land.
<b>GAMEPLAY</b>
The original Fire Emblem set a new standard in the genre of turn-based strategy/RPG for the Game Boy Advance. The entire concept revolves around easy-to-learn but hard-to-master gameplay, epic storylines, and incredibly deep character development. The formula that Fire Emblem created, Sacred Stones wonderfully perfected. All the shortcomings of the original were rectified and great new options added, Sacred Stones is everything a Fire Emblem fan could want out of a sequel and more. Much like the Final Fantasy series, each Fire Emblems storylines and characters are new and seperate.
One welcome addition was the Supply option. In Fire Emblem, about halfway through the game, you would acquire the services of a merchant to carry your excess equipment, and to access it, you had to visit the extremely vulnerable supply tent that was set up on the battlefield. As all weapons and most equipment degrades with each use, eventually they will break and you'll need to replace them. Before, this involved leaving your allies in the battle behind, exhausting possibly several turns trekking unarmed back to where the tent was set up while avoiding enemies, getting the weapon you needed, and rushing back to the battle, if it's still even going on. Well, this inconvenience has been thankfully removed. From the beginning of the game, Eirika serves as your supply and can hold up to 100 weapons and items not currently equipped by any of your units. Therefore, since Eirika is not only on the field, but also in combat, your units probably won't be far from a new weapon if the one they have breaks.
As with it's predecessor, Sacred Stones focuses heavily on the interaction between the men and women in your army. Every unit has compatability levels with certain other units, and if they spend enough time near one another, they may recieve the opportunity to have a support conversation. These conversations can range anywhere from hilarious to heartwrenching, can lead to rivalries, close friendships, and even love, but they all have the same benefit: The more conversations those two units share (up to three), the better they fight when they are near one another. Putting units near each other with full support level can raise both units speed, defense, evasion, critical hit ratio, and other factors. Thus, supporting one another on your team can lead to great dividends. Choose your relationships wisely, though, as every unit is only capable of 5 conversations apiece. Supporting units is also much easier in Sacred Stones. In the original Fire Emblem, some units would have to spend literally hundreds of turns next to each other to prompt a conversation, but it's been reduced for the sequel, so conversations are much more frequent and, sometimes, even unexpected.
Another welcome addition is the ability to enter certain areas without missions simply to train your fighters. Two such areas exist, each containing 8 progressively more difficult enemies, and are mostly populated by monsters. Training here every so often will help your characters level up, and is especially useful for catching up some of your lesser-used fighters. One aspect that is prominent in the game is that units that do good will continue to do good, while weaker ones get used less and less, if even at all. Your strongest fighters are usually the ones you want in important battles, and since taking your weak units into a chapter battle can be risky, you can bring them here to level up. Also, if they've bit off more than they can chew, the option to retreat is always available if things get nasty.
The basic principle of the game is easy. Your army starts on a predetermined area of a battle map, and you must complete certain objectives to pass the chapter. Usually, this goal is to either clear the area of enemies, or to defeat a powerful boss enemy, though some missions require you to simply survive a certain number of turns or to protect a neutral unit. Battles follow a weapon heirarchy of axes, swords, and lances. Swords best axes, axes best lances, and lances best swords. Magic follows a similar pattern between light, dark, and anima (elemental) magic. Simple enough, and crucial to learn, but this is just the basics of the basics when it comes to battle. For instance, some axes are specially equipped to best swords, certain lances and axes can be thrown, hammers deal extra damage to armored foes, light magic does well against monsters, and arrows deal critical damage to flying units. Such are a few examples of many tactics that must be taken into account when entering a battle. You'd also be smart to check enemy equipment as well. Sending your mounted units against enemies weilding Halberd axes, Horseslayer lances, and Zanbato swords will likely end badly for you, and enemies armed with Killing Edge swords should be dealt with swiftly, as the odds are against you. Likewise, a group of enemies weilding swords can be handled easily and fairly painlessly with one or two units skilled with a lance.
Overall, Sacred Stones is a great follow-up to an already solid game. The lack of innovation may be a turn-off for some, but if that doesn't bother you, and you enjoyed the original Emblem, you'll love Sacred Stones just as much, if not more than the first. I rate this game 9.0 out of 10.
Quote:June 9, 2005
For Them, Just Saying No Is Easy
By MARY DUENWALD
BIRDS do it, bees do it. But not necessarily all of them. Among bees the sisters of queens do not engage in sex. And in certain species of birds - Florida scrub jays, for one - some individuals, known as helpers, do not breed but only help the breeders raise their offspring.
But could indifference to sex extend to humans, too? An increasing number of people say yes and offer themselves as proof. They describe themselves as asexual, and they call their condition normal, not the result of confused sexual orientation, a fear of intimacy or a temporary lapse of desire. They would like the world to understand that they can live their entire lives happily without ever having sex.
"People think they need to convert you," said Cijay Morgan, 42, a telephone saleswoman in Edmonton, Alberta, and a self-professed asexual. "They can understand if you don't like country music or onion rings or if you aren't interested in learning how to whistle, but they can't accept someone not wanting sex. What they don't understand is that a lot of asexuals don't wish to be quote-unquote fixed."
Considering the pervasive advertising for drugs to enhance sexual performance, the efforts to market a testosterone patch to boost sexual desire in women and the ubiquity of sexual references in pop culture, it is not surprising that those professing no sex drive whatever have been misunderstood, or at least overlooked. Only one scientific survey seems to have been done. And many experts in human sexuality, when told there is a growing Internet community of people calling themselves asexual, say they have not heard of it. Yet most of those experts find the concept unsurprising.
Three-fourths of the patients who go to the Center for Sexual Medicine at Boston University lack any sex drive, said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, its director, who is also the editor of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. "We call that H.S.D.D., hypoactive sexual desire disorder," he said.
Lack of interest in sex is not necessarily a disorder nor even a problem, however, Dr. Goldstein quickly added, unless it causes distress, if it leads, for instance, to conflict within a marriage or romantic relationship.
Dr. John Bancroft, the recently retired director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, said, "I think it would be very surprising if there weren't asexuals, if you look at it from a Kinseyan perspective, that there's this huge variation in human sexuality."
Not all clinicians agree that lack of interest in sex can be considered normal. "It's a bit like people saying they never have an appetite for food," said Dr. Leonard R. Derogatis, a psychologist and the director of the Center for Sexual Health and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Sex is a natural drive, as natural as the drive for sustenance and water to survive. It's a little difficult to judge these folks as normal."
Asexual people often say they have been aware of their lack of interest in sex since adolescence and that while it may have troubled them, they never knew anything different. "I realized I was asexual about the same time I realized I was short, when I was about 15," said Miss Morgan of Edmonton, who is 5-foot-1. "I realized I was short when everyone grew taller than me, and I realized I didn't have sexual feelings when everyone else started expressing and experimenting with theirs."
The Internet has provided a platform for people calling themselves asexual to announce their collective existence. The anonymity of the Web makes it easier to converse about the topic, said Todd Niquette, 36, a systems analyst in St. Paul and a member of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an Internet group. With more than 4,000 registered participants, it is the largest such community of asexuals. "What we're really trying to find out is: how can I feel less alone in this?" Mr. Niquette said.
His network defines an asexual as someone who "does not experience sexual attraction." This definition is, of course, distinct from the much older concept of asexual reproduction, practiced by amoebas, jellyfish and whiptail lizards, for example, as well as by many species of plants.
Asexuals might have sexual urges and even masturbate, but they do not want to have sex with other people, said David Jay, 23, who founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (called AVEN by its members) four years ago, when he was in college. Asexuals often feel romantic attraction for other people, Mr. Jay said. It just doesn't involve sex.
Mr. Jay, who works for an educational nonprofit organization in San Francisco, is a talkative, outgoing man with a ready smile and plenty of friends. He is, he said, interested in "deep emotional involvement" and in raising children (though "not necessarily having my own"). But he has never had sex, he said, adding there is a good chance he never will.
If asexual people are commonplace, why have they not been mentioned in history books or anywhere else before the advent of the Internet? Elizabeth Abbott, a research associate at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, is the author of "A History of Celibacy." She speculates that it may be because such people have stayed under the radar. They never married perhaps, or they entered into sexless marriages, or they had sex without wanting to. Unlike homosexuality, she noted, asexuality has never been illegal.
Society has not always accepted it, however. As early as the Middle Ages, Dr. Abbott said, "nonconsummation of marriage" was considered "an insult to the sacrament of marriage" and a ground for divorce.
Asexuality, she noted, is distinct from celibacy, which implies a conscious decision to stifle a desire for sex. What appears to be the only published study of asexuality - which defined it as a lifelong lack of sexual attraction to either men or women - found that 1.1 percent of adults may be asexual. The figure was drawn from a survey of 18,000 Britons who were interviewed in 1994 about sexually transmitted diseases. The data were reanalyzed by Dr. Anthony F. Bogaert, a psychologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, who published his findings last August in The Journal of Sex Research.
Dr. Bogaert found that 44 percent of those expressing no interest in sex were either married or living with partners or had been in the past.
One might assume that by avoiding sex and all the emotions and responsibilities that go with it, let alone the health risks, asexuals might have a comparatively easy life.
"But I think we exchange all that for a different set of trouble," Mr. Jay said. "Sex is very central to life in a lot of ways, and one of the real challenges of being asexual is trying to figure out where you fit."
That problem typically arises during the teenage years. "I knew when I was 16 or 17 that sex was just something that seemed tremendously important to everybody else but that I just didn't get," said David Warner, 55, a technical writer and editor in a Virginia suburb of Washington.
Like many other asexuals, Kate Goldfield, 21, a student at Goucher College in Baltimore, once thought she might be a lesbian. "I decided I must be gay because I knew I wasn't straight," she said. But she said she has since realized that she is not sexually attracted to women either.
Asexuals say they are often told that they will change when they meet the right person or when circumstances change, but those predictions do not ring true to them.
"Why do I need sexuality in my life so much that I should divert my time and energy to finding out what it is that will turn me on?" Mr. Jay asked.
Physicians have found that they can prompt sexual desire in both women and men by giving them supplemental hormones. And some scientists suspect that hormones might be involved in some cases of asexuality. Or, Dr. Bogaert suggested, it could be that certain brain structures may have developed differently in asexual people.
Dr. Derogatis agreed that low hormone levels usually underlie low libido but said sometimes psychological mechanisms come into play. "Some of these people may have a very powerful phobia about sex," he said.
Yet a small and still unpublished survey of 1,146 people - including 41 who described themselves as asexual - conducted in online interviews by Nicole Prause, a graduate student in psychology at Indiana, found that asexuals do not resist having sex because of fear. Rather asexuals "only lack the excitatory drive," Ms. Prause said in an e-mail message.
Barry W. McCarthy, a professor of psychology at American University and an author of "Rekindling Desire," a self-help book for married couples, said many people who experience inhibited desire would be well advised to examine that inhibition because it may turn out to be the result of fear, rather than a natural desire to forgo sex. "You have to respect people's individual differences," he said. "But for the great majority of people with inhibited desire the answer is not asexuality."
People often experience periods of asexuality. Many married couples give up sex after a number of years, said Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of "Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong." "Some people are relieved to not only back-burner sex, but to no-burner it," she said.
Mr. Jay acknowledged that some asexuals have spent - or will spend - some time being sexual. "We'll have people in AVEN who get into a relationship where suddenly they enjoy sex, and we have many people who say they used to enjoy sex but really not anymore," he said. "But the majority of the community is pretty stable."
A 32-year-old man in Dallas named Keith (he declined to give his last name) said he had tried to cope with his asexuality by marrying. "I thought that getting married would fix me and suddenly I would become interested in sex." After six years he and his wife were divorced, and now he is living with a younger man in a relationship that he described as loving and romantic but free of sex.
Mr. Jay said he believes asexual people can learn to negotiate relationships with sexual people.
"In high school and early college, when I would sense that someone was hitting on me, I would go into defensive mode and be like, 'O.K., this can't work,' " he said. "But since then I've realized that if someone is going to approach me sexually, it means they like my personality."
In recent months many people have logged on to the asexuals' network Web site to learn to understand better partners or spouses who are asexual, Mr. Jay said.
"There's a real desire out there to figure out how do you manage relationships without sexuality?" he said. "We don't have anything like a self-help book we could write on this yet."
Saw this over at The OT and thought somebody here might find it interesting.
I'm so the opposite of this. I think I might have too much sexual desire.
Quote: Killer 7; experimental college project or game...you decide #1<!-- 2 1--> <hr style="color: rgb(209, 209, 225);" size="1"> <!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message --> Some initial impressions of the GC version of Killer 7. I put about 4 hours in and did the first 2 "episodes".
--There is very little gameplay in the title. The action bits consist of simple shooting a couple of enemies in each section and the rest of the time is running around RE style and collecting items to use in fireplaces which give you new items to use on the empty picture on the wall which opens the secret passage. Though this is not bad, it's actually pretty fun.
--The shooting bits are a joke. You can either aim on your own, or just tap L and it locks on to the enemy's weakpoint and you hit fire and kill them in 1 hit. Basically this is the big "hit win" button game.
--You can change between 6 of the 7 characters at any time, the 7th one is the medical man and can't be changed to during play. But at checkpoint rooms you can use a TV and change to him. If one of the 6 characters dies in battle, you are warped back to the last checkpoint room. If you use the medical man and go to where the previous guy died, you can take their head back and resurrect them for what seems like free of cost. So again "win button"
--Each character has their own unique attacks, special attacks, and personal abilities. Certain enemies are best dealt with by certain members but since you can morph instantely it's no problem. For the personal abilities the map actually marks all points that can be accessed with a specific character and shows a picture of their face. For instance one of the guys can unlock any lock, so if his portrait is on the map screen you know there will be a lock there and you should switch to him. Some characters can jump to rooftops, some can read secret messages, some can destroy walls, etc... but since the map tells you who to use at each area again "win button" :P
--When you kill enemies you get blood. You can store the blood at your checkpoints and use it to upgrade your stats of your characters. There is a limit to how much you can store per episode and since enemies respawn you reach the max pretty fast. From that point you can just use the blood to heal yourself at enemy time or use it for the character specials which cost blood.
--Level and art design is pretty cool. Each section looks great and the game just has a really nice look that makes it stick out. The game is very gorey (screaming girls exploding and only their top half of torso remains; rolling heads of high school girls, etc...) but since the graphics are kinda like PS1.5 looking they can get away with it. It kinda reminds me of Fear Effect where it's really gorey but the graphics suck so much it's not that offensive. Graphics are decent on the main characters and the levels look alright but yea it's the art that makes it look good; technically it's pretty weak.
--Music ROCKS. Really good music filled with bizarre ambient sound effects. Unique music for almost every few rooms, tons of variety so far and everything fits. Sound effects are pretty good although since the game is about hearing where the enemies are located it's kinda weak that you're limited to Stereo sound.
--Considering the levels are complete insanity, the plot is kinda a normal alternate universe sci-fi political story. Seems interesting so far, but Capcom scripts always have a disjumbled feel to them.
--Voices range. Some like the villian are horrible, while the main old guy and the black guy are awesome. As usual with English voiced capcom games, the dialogue is odd and stilted because I'm guessing that the Japanese team has a ton of control over the english voice recording and use...and yea most Japanese people don't know the difference between good english voicework and bad work.
--I gotta wonder if this game will be uncensored in the US. Not only is it pretty gory, but each character has a tag line they yell when you kill an enemy and one guys is "YOUR FUCKED" and anothers is "FUCK YOU". So when you're shooting a room full of enemies all you hear is "FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU" :P For a GC game I dunno how that'll go over in the states. Maybe they'll change the lines.
--Another thing that will be interesting with the localization. 90% of the voice acting in Killer7 is by ghost like people who are supposed to be wierd. So in order to up the wierdness Capcom decided to do this:
1. Take the Japanese script for each line (ex: You'll never make it through here alive!)
2. Run it through babblefish (result: Alive you chop wood tree)
3. Use a text-to-voice pc program and record the voicing (robotic voice: Alive you chop wood tree)
4. Insert this as the voice of all the ghost characters
Now in the Japanese version you can at least read the Japanese subs and it'll make sense, since the subs are saying "You'll never make it through here alive" while the voice is talking about trees. But in the US version normally the subtitles would just be a transcript of the voice work which in this case would make 90% of the dialogue sections complete giberish. Hopefully Capcom USA is not that dumb and will have readable normal english subs while the ghost is speaking gibberish.
--Loading times suck. I'm playing a GC game...WHY ARE THERE LOAD TIMES!? In reality they really don't suck and are only about 2-3 secs between rooms. But compared to your average GC game that's like a 300% upgrade in load times. Bah. I bet the PS2 version is kinda bad if they're twice as long.
--Boss battles are kinda bad gameplay-wise. I mean when you can't even move on your own, there's not much you can do with a boss battle so.....yea.
So umm, yea so far it's hard to really describe it as a game. I'm having a good time playing it and certain things have made me smile and laugh a bit. It's really addictive and if I didn't have work tomorrow I'd probably play the entire thing straight through. But for those looking for a RE4 experience or DMC3 or anything gameplay related are gonna be let down. It's a walk around and solve simple RE-style puzzles while going through cool levels game with a little bit of easy shooting to keep things interesting. I don't expect a great plot as it's a Capcom game, nor do I expect great dialogue sequences as it's a Capcom Jpn game with English voices. Yet take it for what it is and it's good stuff; the Famitsu guy who gave it a 10/10 was crazy, but since I enjoy oddball attempts at unique art pieces it's easily a strong 8-9/10 so far.
![[Image: smile.gif]](http://www.ga-forum.com/images/smilies/smile.gif)