Category: Fire Emblem

Marth steps out of the shadows and into another remake

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Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (2008)

Hollywood’s gotten itself into a creative funk again, and but for the presence of a hundred thousand Marvel and Disney films, made with the express purpose of giving these two creators more disposable cash than any piddly old first world country, there isn’t much to see in the cinema.

Well, that’s not fully true: there are a bunch of remakes for you to “treat” your eyes to. I even hear rumblings that they want to redo The Breakfast Club. Simply impossible – how do you catch lightning in a bottle twice? The kids would be on their phones all day, secretly capturing videos of each other to post publicly in humiliating fashion for the victims, and that would be that. God, I’m glad the phones weren’t smart when I was in school.

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Nothing as sacred as sisterly love, straight to the stones

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Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (2005)

You know, when a woman walks into the room, I look the other way. When she looks at me, I look at her shoes, trying not to catch her chest on the way down. If she talks to me, I go full clam. I know, I know, you wouldn’t expect a thunderchad like me to let himself down on the big stage like that, but why are you surprised? There were no girls in my schools. No girls in my chess clubs. No girls in the pro Pokémon trading card circuits. And certainly no girls in my house, apart from my mother, but she hardly counts now does she?

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Matchmakers these days may find themselves in for a rude Awakening

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Fire Emblem Awakening (2013)

I saw a chart the other day which suggested that, as of 2018, almost 40% of people met their partners online, up from the 0.1% of high-tech loonies who did so in 1990. Of course this increase has taken a chunk out of the figures of those couples who met through mutual friends, a figure which has declined to 20% and is still plummeting.

This is a bit of a shame for me, as I’ve always seemed to have a knack for matchmaking. There seemed to be a time when I was always the bridesmaid and never the bride, setting up relationships but never getting an old consolation snog myself, a sort of sweetener for the deal. Don’t they say that the art of good business is being a good middleman? That’s where the returns are, or so you’d think.

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Keep your chin up and maintain your radiance, even as the job market Crits you

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Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (2005)

We’re at that time again, fellow lemmings, time that I left my job to get a new one. For a start, I can tell you that I’ve never subscribed to this whole theory of never leaving a job unless you’ve something else lined up. I suppose there’s that mature fear where you’ll turn out to be a wee bit less of a tantalising employment prospect than you had thought, which is always a hefty blow. Not to mention it makes the mortgage payment look about ten times bigger.

But you can’t tell me that you just become immediately unemployable on the Friday afternoon that you finish up. The last job I left, no sooner had I given a fairly rubbish speech than I was out the door and in a car, booting to the airport for a drunken weekend in one of my favourite cities, Liverpool. When I got home on the Sunday, I was able to sleep through the Monday while the other plankton had to go to work. It was great – I felt like Ferris Bueller.

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Winging it with Peter and the pre-promotes

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Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War (1996)

I’m here today to call BS on a piece of conventional wisdom that I keep seeing repeated everywhere, and that’s this idea that everyone around you is winging it to some extent, that nobody really knows what’s going on and we’re all just trying to get by. I’m sorry, but that is one enormous coping mechanism, probably designed to make you feel better, or smarter, about yourself. A couple of jobs ago, this was brought home to me; I’d thought of myself as fairly intelligent, which isn’t too arrogant or self-deluded right? Don’t we all like to think that of ourselves?

But in this job, in an office of about 50 people I was fone of about four imbeciles, and I most certainly wasn’t just “getting by”, nor was everyone else just winging it and pretending to know the score. What I’m getting at here is that if you’re’ not sharp, then in most cases you shall be found out very quickly, and just see what happens if you call the person sacking you a blagger.

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Mystery of the menus, curse of the cursors, the death of design

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Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem (1994)

I don’t know if we’ve just become spoilt by the wealth of apps and online services available nowadays, but is it my imagination or are user interfaces and user experiences getting worse and worse? Strangely, it also seems to me that there’s a growing abundance of money in UX / UI Designer jobs. Perhaps this means they’re throwing more money than in God’s wallet at the problem, but it’s still to no avail.

You take the video streaming services, and we pretty much have them all as we’re awful couch potatoes. Well, you try and search for something on Netflix and you can forget it. The search function is slow, sometimes difficult to find, and the thing you’re searching for is either not there (but here are dreadful knock-offs, a classic Netflix move. Or your desired result is buried beneath a load of child porn-enabling series and other bleeding heart liberal rubbish.

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A war’s brewing, you say? The country’s on fire? I ain’t your guy, then

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Fire Emblem Gaiden (1992)

It’s all going nuts again. Geopolitically, I mean. Of course, even that sentence doesn’t date this piece too badly – a headline like “Tensions mount in Middle East” could be on any online news outlet since the mid 90s and still be relevant. For today’s purposes, let’s just say that the Taliban are at it again. I wonder if they’ll still be at it in 20 years time? Or will there even be a 20 years time, because it gives you a right frightenener down the jacksy when those boys are at it, America and Russia are responding (the UK tries to pop up but deliberately gets ignored) and then suddenly fingers begin hovering over the big red button.

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In an alternate timeline, I’d be Prince Burkey

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Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & The Blade of Light (1990)

I know you never believe me when I come out with things like this, but I am actually descended from nobility. That’s right: I have blue blood, and you may well be wondering, if that’s the case Burkey, then why is it that you’re tight with money? Why were you on the dole? Why do you never exercise any kind of power, and why are you not inbred?

Well, perhaps some people would contest that last one. But I have a perfectly good answer to every one of these rebuttals, and unfortunately it’s that old devil at work again: organized religion.

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I’m the master of strategy, until someone uses en passant

~ Burkey Gaming ~ 2 Comments

fire emblem logo

Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (2004)

It mightn’t much fit my macho image, but I can tell you without any hesitation or modesty that I’m one heckuva chess player. OK, I haven’t played against a human, an AI opponent or even against myself in the last ten years or so. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still kick some ebony or ivory behind if war broke out and the main fighting weaponry turned out to be chess pieces.

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