Monday, January 6, 2014

TEXT PLAY: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom (Taito, SNES 1993): Issue #40: Well, Crap...

I guess I shouldn't really be surprised that my plan wound up going to shit on me here.

Considering the amount of otherwise good luck I've had with these Text Plays since I essentially gave up on Breath of Fire a couple years ago, I suppose it's about time I had a little bad luck with one. It's just too bad it had to be this one.

Although, I guess this is more than just “a little” bad luck. I've been saying for quite a while now that I think my Super Nintendo is finally on its way out after twenty-plus years of somewhat less-than-gentle use. What it had been doing this whole time is that it would play fine for awhile and then stop sending a signal out to the TV. At first, it was rare and for only a barely noticeable amount of time, but as time went on, it got more frequent and long enough for me to have more than enough time to read the “weak or no signal input” message my TV gives now.

That's something that I found annoying, but I could still work with it. After all, it didn't seem like it was going to be a permanent or fatal thing. I'd even thought that now that I was past the Glasdar Tower section of the game, maybe I'd be free of it. This is, after all, a twenty year old game being played on a console that's just as old, if not slightly older. So when the thing started acting up on me when I tried to finish this off this morning, I thought I'd just shut it off, take a shower, maybe have a little lunch, and try again.

Of course, it turns out that I was due for another failure of this sort, and that's exactly what's happened here. After the shower, lunch, and a little screwing around on the Web for awhile, I finally got back around to coaxing my SNES back into working again. The good news here is that I did eventually get the thing going again, at least for a little while. The bad news is that when I say “for a little while,” I mean just long enough to find that the whole process of coaxing the thing to work wound up wiping out the game that I'd come so damn near finishing. All those hours of work, gone. And only an hour, maybe two, away from finishing the game. The whole damned thing just had to go splooey now, I suppose. That's the way my luck tends to go.

So I guess this is the end of my Lufia and the Fortress of Doom Text Play. It's certainly not the ending I was hoping to give, and I'd think not the one anybody reading this was hoping for. I may try this again later, just as I may try the first Breath of Fire game again. It's just likely to be a while now, if only because I need to step away from my SNES. I'm not sure if it's actually going to finally break down on me, but I'd rather not ensure that it does out of my own frustration, mostly because I'm not into rage-smashing things, but also because I can't spare the funds to replace it right now even if it does go out on me regardless of my own actions.

I guess this is just one of those games that fate just won't have me finishing, at least not in the foreseeable future. Both times I made it to this specific point in the game, unavoidable circumstances took me away from it. The first time, it was because I finally started taking my higher education more seriously when I should have been giving it that level of attention the whole time. This time, it's because of technical difficulties that I guess had to crop up at some point simply due to the age of the game and system.

This leaves us with the question of what game I might try to do next. To be honest, I'm not really sure. I know it's not going to be Final Fantasy 6, because I need to get away from that particular console for awhile. I might do Crono Trigger next, though, because I did find a copy of Final Fantasy Chronicles available for cheap just before everybody's hours changed at my day job.

That's a decision I'll make later, though. I want to look through my PlayStation collection before I actually settle on something, and I'm going to need a little time for that.

So anyway, thanks for reading along with me for this long. I'm sorry I couldn't actually finish this game in spite of getting so close. I'd fully intended to, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be.

I'll let you know soon as I'm ready to start another one of these. Until then, stay safe, have fun, keep, gaming, and DFTBA!

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