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Keep in mind the alien level scales up with your technology, not with time. So you should "coast" by leveling up your soldiers and engineers and go easy on the research (don't build many laboratories). I'm not sure what the precise technology breakpoints for alien level-up are, unfortunately. (BTW I just hate this kind of scaling, it's the exact opposite of fair and balanced.)

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I don't remember much touch-screen usage in Chinatown Wars except for some minigames. Rather, it made heavier use of all six face buttons and shoulder buttons than any other DS game I've ever played. I think the PSP's larger screen would also benefit the game, so I'd go with the PSP.

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FFX's turn list is fantastic and I wish I had it whenever I play any other JRPG (I find it especially irritating that Etrian Odyssey doesn't have it despite coming out afterwards). I'm not so fond of the character swap, because it's overpowered: new characters come in in 0 turns at full health, providing a instant escape hatch for anybody about to die, and they get XP without diluting the pool given to the other characters.

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I've played a bunch of La Mulana Steam remake this weekend. On the original I had quit playing after discovering most of the frontside fields and thinking I had seen most of the content (ha), this time I made it up to the Tower of Ruin savepoint and beat 3 bosses so far. Thoughts:

- The artwork and music are fantastic and there is just so much of it. I think it has at least as much landscape artwork as a DS castlevania (albeit much less enemy animation frames).

- This game could stand to mix up its pacing a bit more. The whole game is cruel traps and obscure puzzles and your reward for solving them is even crueler and more obscure stuff. It gets a little depressing after a while and I remember why I quit playing last time. At least the bosses provide respite and there are a good number of sub-bosses.

- The Birth Seal and Life Seal are just total bullshit to obtain. Somehow it felt like it would be something optional like a HP orb in the chest where the Birth Seal is, so I initially gave up on it after a couple of failed jump attempts. I only went back there after I got stuck and looked up where the seal is on the wiki. And did they really on purpose position that eagle so you have to knife it in mid-air!?

- Steam achievement stats: 70% enter the dungeon at all, roughly 30-40% beat at least one boss, 13% reveal Eden and 4.7% win (4.6% of those in under 40 hours). So I'm not the only one who quit on it (as a "normal" point of comparison, HL2:E2 has 75% of buyers entering the initial mines, and 48% winning the game). I also interpret the high rate of under-40-hour completion to mean that almost all winning players cribbed from FAQs, as I don't think you could solve all the puzzles naturally without messing around for longer than that. So I don't have to feel too bad that I started spoilering myself heavily when I ran out of low-hanging early-game exploration.

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How to rod break: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/930369-final-fantasy-v-advance/43894220

The 750-GP rods you can buy in Fire Crystal town cast Fire3/Ice3/Thunder3 when you break them.

I didn't know about it either until I looked it up just now. Apparently FFV and FFVI let you do it, I'm not sure about any of the other FFs (almost all online references to it are about FFV).

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Inspired by parkbench's exploits I started my first FFV Fiesta. Wind job: thief. I think that might be the worst wind job -- dashing, stealing and escaping are sort of nice but none of that helps kill bosses. Playing with four thieves sure leads to some curious challenges, for example there are no knives for sale in the first town so I had to fight the first three bosses with two characters bare-fisted. Also I have gone through at least 100 healing potions so far (good thing they're cheap) and against hard-hitting physical enemies put my entire party in the back row to increase the relative effectiveness of potions' fixed 50 points of healing.

I'm currently resorting to some grinding to be able to beat the Water Crystal boss.

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Yeeaaahh my Earth Job is Chemist. And I have 78 DarkMatters from grinding against Prototype for so long. So I'm in business in this Fiesta.

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Wing Commander III has an interesting story? The wikipedia summary makes it sound awful. I only ever played II and IV myself though (IV's story is awful in retrospect too).

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FFV Fiesta update: I beat world 2 today. Overall I have a very lucky fiesta going. I'm not at all having to work with garbage classes and my only problem is that my sustainable offensive power is a little on the weak side (but this doesn't seem to matter at all in practice).

- As assumed, Chemist is incredibly overpowered when you use it alongside a FAQ telling you what all the Mix combinations are. I was also very fortunate in that I grinded for a long time against Prototype in World 1 which gave me huge amounts of Ether and DarkMatter, both important mix ingredients. I've been using PhoenixDown+Ether a lot for full-HP revive, and I used PhoenixDown+DarkMatter to insta-kill the tree crystal boss (who surprisingly enough is not immune to instant death). And I haven't even mastered its revive-all-party-members skill yet.

- Beastmaster is the most special-purpose class I have and I hardly used its powers in World 2 at all. But it was necessary to grind Prototype earlier so there is a nice synergy with Chemist in that sense. There is also a synergy with Time Mage in that Demi/Quarter spell is very useful for catching.

- Thief's Escape ability proves to be its most useful one. Because Thief also almost always acts first, it basically acts like Moogle Charm in FFVI and I've hardly been completing a single random battle unless I specifically decide to grind a particular enemy type. I haven't been able to use its get-thief-agility passive ability much because there's usually a more important active ability I want in the one slot available.

- Time Mage proves to be a more than adequate offensive class even though much of its spells are utility oriented. In World 1, I rod broke with it, and in World 2, I heavily used Comet (using it as my only offense on 3 of 4 characters against Atomos and Exdeath). Any enemy without immunity to Demi/Quarter also gets creamed by that spell no matter how otherwise powerful it is. For example, I used Quarter to grind Yellow Dragons in Exdeath castle and acquired 4 Coral Rings there. (I have a vague memory of reading about that drop in a FAQ after Yellow Dragon is no longer encounterable the last time I played FFV. I was luckily reminded of it by a fortunate Coral Ring drop and then grinded them for the other 3.)

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FFV Fiesta complete, the final boss was a pushover. I put a haste ring on everybody, my chemist powers doubled everyone's HP and I repeatedly used Quick to do double-Meteo/Mix. Also after unlocking the supreme weapon, Chicken Knife, my Thief dealt 3000 damage.

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NES TMNT did some interesting stuff with combining a top-down overworld with side-scrolling levels. There's something compelling about how you traverse the city -- entering sewers to bypass obstacles and challenging the optional buildings/sewers for health and items like grappling hooks and missiles for your overworld vehicle -- particularly in the third level. It's a bit of a Metrovania-like but short, brutally difficult and lacking save points.

That said I wouldn't blame anybody for writing off the game because of the clunky physics and unforgiving difficulty. Many players won't even get to the cool stuff in the third level due to dying all the time. I think the last time I played I had an emulator save state at the beginning of the third level and that's when I started appreciating the game.

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There isn't enough variation in fights in D3. How it goes with typical enemy groups is that I near-freeze them with Caltrops, then slo-o-o-wly knock their health down by alternating between my primary and secondary attacks depending on my red-bar energy balance. Then when the Caltrops Slow runs out or some other enemies run around it, I back up half a screen, lay more traps and do that some more -- and be careful to dodge any projectiles. Rince repeat for hours on end.

It's actually not a trivial fighting style and it was interesting to master for the first couple of hours. But the problem is that it works against any and every enemy group. Nothing is immune to Caltrops, not even flying enemies. They designed a bunch of very interesting player abilities but then didn't design the enemies to have any counters whatsoever to them, so there's no real dynamism to the battles. There are melee enemies and projectile enemies, both with the same elementary AI, and no other relevant differences it seems.

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With four players in offline co-op I can see it getting really tedious waiting for everyone else to manage their loot in the fullscreen menu. It's already pretty annoying in 2 players given the ~12 equipment types and the constant stream of new loot that needs to be examined to decide whether to equip or break into crafting materials. It doesn't help that there's no option to have a shared pool of loot between players even if you intend to co-op with the same team for the entire game.

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Maybe your problem is Legendary, I didn't enjoy that much because enemies are bullet sponges and you're weak enough you have to play very cautiously instead of in a fun run-out-shoot-then-run-back way. I suggest Heroic and then turn on some skulls if it's not hard enough for you.

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TXTSWORD was complaining a lot about Reach on Legendary as well, I think there's a balance problem there. I really enjoyed the enemy mixes on Heroic myself. As I said, you can turn on the skull that makes enemies deal double damage to you on Heroic and it sounds like that'll be closer to what you like.

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Trying Ys: Oath at Felghana. I really like the stage design in this game, every polygon is there for a reason, like a well-made N64 game.

I started on Hard difficulty which was probably a mistake, the first two bosses are really unforgiving: with a level 10 character (which is the most I can reasonably grind to), I have to deal about 100 hits against the second boss, and die myself in 5 hits of the giant projectile that it's flinging at me literally every 2 seconds like clockwork, with a very finicky timing window for dodging it. I could beat the second boss with enough retries, but I suppose it'll only get worse from here, so I should probably restart on Normal and suffer through the intro JRPG dialogue again. The steamchievement for dying lots against a boss is called "Read a FAQ already" which... I don't see how that would help.

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Yeah Ico is not really fun to play for me either. There's a feeling of tedium that creeps over me over time. There's a lot of walking around admiring the scenery, and the puzzles and battles are rather basic. I don't hate it though, it's good for what it is. It's an experience similar to visiting a museum (which would get tedious 10 hours in as well).

I think Jonathan Blow is onto something mixing a beautiful quiet exploration environment with a dense micro-puzzle system in The Witness. The problem is that there's a limit to how engaging you can make crate-pushing, gate-opening puzzles.