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Unless new information came to light and i was unawares, it's been stated that Pikmin 3 will not have any online play. I'm sorry.

Besides just learning how to play fighting games, i find i now frequently search faqs and fan forums to essentially innoculate my RPG playthroughs against some of the annoying, evil things i've always hated about RPG's. (Basically, i want to know if there are any significant missables or points of no return. JRPG's, especially, are always real assholes about stuff like that.) I'm usually pretty selective in my searches, to try and avoid spoiling things by having it all just laid out in front of me, though sometimes having it all just laid out in front of you doesn't actually detract from the game at all, but only adds to it. Fire Emblem Awakening ended up being like that for me. It's a game that doesn't really surface enough information for you to formulate any substantial plans for your character builds, but access to a detailed fansite really revealed a wealth of interesting and layered complexity in its systems and i ended up getting way deeper into that game than i probably would have otherwise.

I also know that this will be the first main-series SMT game in a decade. (Though the DS's SMT: Strange Journey is apparently held to be an ancillary part of the main series.) When i've heard people talk about SMT as a series, it's given the impression that the main-series games are significantly darker and more adult in tone than everything else, though the Persona games are by far the most popular. (With their emphasis on apparently well-written characters and relationship building.) Having really only been a distant observer of the series for a long time, i'm curious about finally giving it a chance via the 3DS games. (Soul Hackers also sounds pretty cool to me, though as part of the Devil Summoner series, i guess it's much more of a dungeon crawler. It's also a remake of an old game that was originally never released outside of Japan. As a result, it's been criticzed somewhat for both being a bit dated and feeling like a bit of a slog.) There's also those Devil Survivor games, the other currently relevant branch of SMT, which are just straight up strategy RPG's.

You're probably still quite early in the game, i imagine.

With the enemy respawn, a lengthy trek back and forth across the levels to try and minmax your resources like that might end up being fruitless. Perhaps more viable on the lower difficulties, i guess. I mean, and if you get maintenance to a reasonable point, you're just using tools you find to fix things up, you aren't spending any nanites on buying more. (The actual maintenance process doesn't cost nanites, don't confuse it with repair, which does.)

Oh, hey. Starship Damrey is apparently out today.

Apparently EA is abandoning online passes?

I'm not an SMT guy, but i understand there to be a ton of different continuities in a ton of different sub-series.

Fair enough, i should have specified. In general though, my feeling is that these character designs are probably going to end up being a very small part of a very big game, if you look at Vanillaware's history. Whether you're offended by it or not, or even into it, it's probably not worth being riled up about.

The Castlevania game, i thought the demo was totally fine for what it was, but it has inspired quite a lot of vitriolic backlash for being so unlike the Igarashi games.

I don't like this immediate assumption that since i'm taking up an opposing position, that i'm ridiculing you specifically. I was speaking generally, but i was talking mostly about the Kotaku pieces that were trying to drum up controversy around this, they were juvenile and stupid and devolved into insults being traded back and forth. I do not think the things that this game is doing are worth being offended by.

The next couple months are looking pretty crazy for the 3DS. Shin Megami Tensei IV, Mario & Luigi 4, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Rune Factory 4, and Project X Zone. Four of these upcoming things being RPG's in a year when the 3DS has already had Fire Emblem: Awakening, Etrian Odyssey IV, and Soul Hackers. Hell, and Bravely Default will probably end up being a 2013 3DS RPG for us too. So many RPGs. Even more: Ace Attorney 5 was just confirmed for the west. (Only as a digital release, unfortunately, but at least it's happening. Now what about Ace Attorney vs Layton? Are we ever getting that?) I don't think i could be more thrilled with how things are going on the 3DS. Yeah, and Starship Damrey is out real soon, i think that looks like a pretty neat adventure game, and that Mario vs DK-themed Pipe Dream clone just came out too.

I have been motivated to load up my copy of Wild World and poke around. I see a bunch of custom pixel art everywhere, a pretty swank, classy house filled with some of the limited goodies that were trickled out over time, and a friends list full of people i haven't spoken to in years. I must have put a ton of time into this game. I forgot how ambitiously online-focused Wild World was, relatively speaking of course, considering what little else Nintendo was doing at the time.

The hacking mini-game is just a match-three thing, extremely basic rules, there's no real tactic to it. The only consideration is that yellow squares can either be safe or break the whole thing as a roll based on your stats, while your stats also determine their frequency on the board. If you see a lot of yellow squares on a grid, it's often safer to just back out and eat the cost of starting the hack/repair over, seeing if you get a better field to work with. The trade-off ends up being whether or not you're willing to keep spending nanites until you get a board that gives you room to match three, or if you'll take the chance on a yellow square to just try and force it. As for the guns, it pays off big to put some points into maintenance, it's one of the most important skills in the game. (As noted in some of my previous posts which i encourage looking over. Hacking and maintenance should be the cornerstones of a first playthrough.) Constant panic and never having enough of what you need are pretty much the point of the game though.

I've toyed around with the idea of checking in with my Wild World town, but i don't think i could bear the guilt of seeing what a catastrophe my town has turned into without me. I'm really excited to start new with New Leaf, though.

It's hard to say, there seems to be very little standardization from product to product, the "class" rating ended up seeming almost completely worthless. It appears to have been established around a very narrow use case of recording HD video, and so performance varies wildly in other applications. I was looking for a clear answer and couldn't find one. I saw reports of class 2 cards inexplicably being faster for software applications than class 10 cards, since the latter are so specialized. Talk about a confusing, counter-productive set of standards. I mean, and anything over 2GB's is apparently not even officially supported by Nintendo, it seems like the 3DS was only designed with the original SD standard in mind. (So FAT16 and a 2 gig limit, which is exactly the card the 3DS ships with.) I honestly went with this particular class 6 card since it was relatively cheap, apparently reliable, and because it seemed like an appropriate performance median. (I paid thirty bucks canadian.) So yeah, even after looking into it a bunch, i still ended up just kind of winging it.

I just transferred the contents of my fully-loaded 3DS over to a new 32GB (class 6) card and it seems to be working fine. Swapnote loads like five times as fast, it's kind of nuts, and I have over 220 thousand memory blocks to play around with. (I had been using the pack-in SD card until now.) I did a lot of research to figure out what an ideal SD card would be, and the only conclusion i came to was that SD cards are totally fucked. I saw some of you guys asking about SD cards a while ago, so let me share my findings: Speed classes are virtually meaningless and sometimes even contrary to smooth operation in software applications, and the 3DS has a ton of fidgety, weird behaviors with newer, larger cards. As a general rule of thumb, based on my findings, you want to avoid anything over 32 GB's, and anything above a Class 10 card. (So SD and SDHC and no UHS cards.) A class 10 card is not necessarily better than a lower class, since the faster ones are optimized for writing HD video in a linear fashion. Because of those specific optimizations, they may actually be slower for the kind of random access that goes on in normal software applications. Depending on how you format it, you can apparently cause other problems too. (FAT32 and 32KB clusters seems to be the accepted settings. Nintendo's site advises using the SD association's custom formating tool.)

I don't think i've ever felt as conflicted about a game as i was with Nier. There's a lot of really tremendous stuff about that game, things both innovative and daring. I'm definitely on the side of the argument that says it's well worth playing. (Twice, in fact, so you can see the things that change in NG+.) Still, a lot of it also just doesn't work at all. For me, it was mostly mechanical, just the way it handles its overworld and its towns and quests, it feels like it's all just there out of obligation for being an RPG. (On the other hand, I think the combat and odd bullet hell-inspired bosses are actually both pretty fantastic, and i nearly lost it when i saw one of the dungeons shift to a true isometric perspective.) One of my favorite Video game soundtracks too. Apparently some of the Cavia guys are reuniting to make Drakengard 3. As for Dragon's Crown, i don't know. Exaggerated and gross, maybe, but it does not seem to me like the kind of crass, pandering sexism that is prevalent in many other japanese games. I think the outcry around it has had a pretty juvenile and embarrassing tone.

It was a timed exclusive, there wasn't any subterfuge about it, it's been known since it came out on GoG that it would also be coming to Steam.

I thought it was totally crazy! I think it's so dumb and amazing. So easy to navigate.

It's basically impossible to play a fighting game at any level of competency if you aren't willing to dig through forum guides and match/combo videos.

My previous computer, a machine i had been operating for a pretty ridiculous eight years, finally gave up the ghost about a week ago. So i did a ton of research and built a new system. FX 6300, GTX 660 Ti, and 12GB of DDR3 1600 on a 990FX motherboard, all in a big fancy case with lots of fans. I'm feeling pretty proud of myself, every issue i ran into i was able to troubleshoot and figure out on my own. I mean, I used to be way into this stuff, but have obviously been out of the loop for a long time. My BIOS has graphics and mouse support, holy shit.

Would anybody be interested in getting together at some point for Mario Kart 7 multiplayer?

There are some things in the first few levels of the first mansion that you have to go back to, but i think mostly everything else can be done in one run.

*Deleted* Edit: I'm dumb and I forget things. Also, I don't see that anybody is setting up another game, so i guess we're done. That was fun, guys.