Crossword: 13:17

You don't see a rebus puzzle on a Wednesday very often, but this one was easy enough to push the envelope. PO was put into one box in many answers with POBOX in the middle as a revealer. Some clues made the rebus obvious, like "Salk vaccine target" with only 4 boxes. GS(PO)T was another, somewhat risque for the Times. The first one I got was earlier, but harder. I was pretty sure "Hop On Pop" was the Dr. Seuss book I was looking for, but I only had six squares. (In fact, I don't think any Dr. Seuss books would fit into six squares.) But the third square crossed a 4-letter Marx Brother (Harpo), which I wanted earlier, but couldn't fit, and I wasn't sure there wasn't some other brother I hadn't heard of. Solving two clues simultaneously like that is not the fastest way to do things, but when it breaks the theme open, the rest falls like butter. Rebus puzzles are usually easier in general, and have a higher word count, because the rebus buffs the difficulty.

I'm maybe at the 70% mark in Final Fantasy 4. I got stuck on a boss and turned to a walkthrough. While reading it, I discovered that I've been doing the augments all wrong. You're supposed to give them to temporary characters like Palom and Porom. If you give them 3, you get a Dualcast augment when they leave! Give some to Yang and it gets you a Long Range augment, which is very useful for Edge, since he doesn't use a shield. The thing is, you can't get them all on one playthrough because you don't have enough to give Edward and Palom and Porom and Tellah before they leave. You get to start over with a New Game+, like Chrono Trigger has, where you keep all your levels and gear and abilities so you can give the augments to the guy you missed if you want to be totally completionist about it. I kinda do. It would mean starting all over again, but if I want to get all the augments, it will still take playing through twice more, so why not start over right now? I mean, I feel good about my game. I'm possibly a little over-leveled, since I did a little more wandering (there are bonuses for completing a map). There is an excellent walkthrough at gamefaqs which spells out which augments to whom when, so I guess that's what I'll do. It's kinda cheaty, but it's my game. I've certainly won the fair way without all the augment nonsense plenty of times. There are extra bonus dungeons in this game too, and I'd sure like Dualcast and whatever else for that.