Sno

Another fun oldie.

Evo finals are easily one of my favorite things to watch each year, always incredible stuff happening.

No thread about incredible feats of Video game nonsense is complete without at least one video of a Cave shmup. For things you can actually buy in North America, i strongly endorse Akai Katana. Holy shit, what a great game.

The three localized Guild 01 games are apparently going on sale for a while after April 18th for both North America and Europe. So that's Liberation Maiden, Crimson Shroud, and Aeroporter. If you haven't checked out Crimson Shroud yet, you should absolutely take advantage of the sale when it starts.

I usually end up with one or two a month, which is just enough to convince me that it's worthwhile continuing to carry the thing around with me. It's always a pleasant surprise when i actually get a streetpass hit for a game and not just for Mii Plaza.

What about the sequence with the two white Columbians offering medical assistance to the black population? I wish i could remember where or what exactly was said, but there's another bit of dialogue where a husband starts talking about how he thinks they should treat the non-whites of Columbia more fairly, only to have his wife hurriedly hush that line of talk out of fear other people might hear it.

Me too, i was really taken with them, they're fantastically snappy action RPGs. A few of the Ys games are on Steam too now, I'd recommend Oath in Felghana to just about anybody. (Particularly to people with a fondness for the post-SotN Castlevanias.)

Ys: Memories of Celceta comes out in September. The only Vita game i want to play.

None of it's particularly complicated or nefarious, but it is definitely all presented in the least accessible fashion possible. (It's really incredible how user unfriendly it all quickly became.) Starting with the basics, there's two things that happen automatically when your 3DS is on/sleeping with the wireless active. Streetpass is when it searches for other local 3DS's to talk with and trade information with. Trading Miis in Mii Plaza, for example. (Or perhaps a party of your Fire Emblem: Awakening characters for other people to battle with.) Spotpass is your 3DS looking for open or authorized wi-fi connections to start pulling down content. Nintendo Video does this as a way to push out its content, but at a system level the 3DS actually also pulls down firmware updates in this fashion. (I don't think you can disable this, and it might be the only case where that is true. So if you're neglecting firmware updates, it will eventually force the issue.) Individual uses of Streetpass can be disabled from a central location in the system settings if you want to just shut something down, but managing Spotpass instances is made to be a total pain in the ass, you just have to go hunt down the settings in each game/app that uses it. The things you're talking about with regards to the Mii Plaza are mainly relevant to Streetpass. Mii Plaza's main purpose is to streetpass your Mii out while you're roaming around with your 3DS sleeping in your pocket, while the Miis you yourself collect can be utilized in a couple of minigames. In addition to a couple of things in the Mii Maker, most of the Mii Plaza settings are primarily relevant to how your Mii is represented in Street Pass connections, if at all. (While a few other settings relate to trading Miis online while you play certain games over the internet, most notably Mario Kart 7, which can quickly cause your Mii Plaza population to swell. Online-traded Miis can't be used in the mini-games, however.) If you're worried about privacy, it takes some real intent to trade something you don't want to trade, so don't stick personal information into the text fields and you're good. I'd also recommend downloading Swapnote, it is free and it is essentially the 3DS's messaging system. It's impractical for a conversation, but it's a quaint and fun approach to the 3DS's initial problem of lacking any means to communicate with individuals on your friends list. There's a few other free things on the eShop that are worth looking at. One last little thing: The 3DS is really, really bad about reporting to you if something has an update waiting in eShop. Theoretically, you're supposed to load up eShop and get a notice that something has been updated, and then you go press a button that lists off all the stuff that's been updated. It almost never works. (It may actually just be an issue with the ambassador games from the "WE'RE SORRY" promotion, however.) So you have to go a few layers deeper and find the "Your Downloads" option under settings, and just occasionally check to see if anything has been updated, because it properly identifies updates there. Mario Kart 7 also has a weird patch that the system treats like DLC, you have to download it separately in the eShop. (To say nothing of actual DLC on the system, which are all only purchasable through in-game stores. In the case of FE:A, the store unlocks as part of the narrative progression. God dammit Nintendo, that shit's weird.) Also - Check out the demos, there definitely seems to be some pretty aggressive efforts to get a lot of good demos up on the store, EO4 in particular has an enormous demo. (Some of the oldest ones are no longer present in the eShop sub-subsection that lists them off in order of new additions, but i'm fairly certain they're still on the eShop. RE:Revelations is worth checking out.) Not complicated at all!

Not sure what they are? Or not sure where they are?

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. Somebody just fired this at me, and i'm having difficulty believing that this is real. It seems like the most elaborate, amazing April Fool's joke ever. Every line of dialogue in that piece is hilarious. Look at those videos though, they gave MegaMan a gruff voice, a machine gun, off-handed grenades, executions, and put him in an FPS. (Complete with an ugly, over-designed new look.) It's like a parody of every terrible, gritty, unnecessary reboot. It's this perfect encapsulation of how creatively bankrupt video games can be. Obviously it never happened, obviously somebody realized how hilariously misguided this was, but i almost wish they didn't. Can you imagine the outcry there would have been if this got the go ahead instead of MML3? (Which, speaking personally, is a game i really, desperately wanted to play.)

I will add you at the next opportunity.

Finished the game. That's a fine game, overall. I don't like the level breaks. The MP is more fun than i would have expected, i might go back to that.

MH4 is quite a ways off, at least a year and probably more. Still, you should not play the 3DS version of MH3U. Multiplayer is so integral to the Monster Hunter experience that unless you are in the incredibly rare situation of personally knowing a bunch of people who both have 3DS's and are excited about Monster Hunter, you should not play the 3DS version. You know, Capcom even actually released a weird tunneling app to take the 3DS version online... Except you run the app on a Wii U, and if you have a Wii U, you're probably already playing online with MH3U's Wii U version. Just all so bizarre, such a mess. Monster Hunter is gradually finding an audience in the west in spite of every effort Capcom has made to ensure that it will not. I had a couple run-ins with Monster Hunter before it finally clicking into place with Tri, and it only finally clicked because Tri was the first game in the series released to the west with the absolutely essential online-play intact. In a series that should never be played without people, it was the first time I actually got to play it with people. I had friends mentor me through the painful first few hours of learning the game, i finally had a clear picture of what the game was about, and it ended up being this totally amazing thing that i'm excited to have more of. But not MH3U, i don't have a Wii U.

That's Capcom's continuing self-sabotage of that series in the west, they just don't understand how important online play is outside of Japan. They're stuck on this idea that to justify the home versions, the portable ones can't have online play. You have every right to be pissed off about it. MH4 will finally, finally put an end to that ridiculousness, it's promised to have online play. (Though there will only be one version of it, it's planned as a 3DS exclusive.)

If you count the Elite as distinct from the original models, and there's a reasonable argument for that, there will have been four 360's.

DS games are not region locked, so there should be no problem.

If the Durango reveal is a disappointment, i'm probably going all-in on Steam for my cross-platform fun times.

Apparently it's a remake of the first game with a class-changing system in place of a customizable party, since the party is a set group of characters who all have roles in the story.

Sony's been quite silent on the always-online front, but all signs point to yes. People are going to be so, so bummed about the next-gen consoles, the way things are shaping up.

The armored, explosives-carrying enemies should not need to be bullet sponges when fighting against them, because there are immediate and effective ways to deal with them. What their armor should be doing is forcing you into closer ranges where you can apply a vigor ability that will immediately remove them as a threat. (Possession, turn them on their allies. Bucking Bronco, push them off a ledge.)

... Which weapons? Which vigors? How did you plan your build? Which upgrades did you take? Did you utilize your strengths, did you take advantage of your environment, did you properly exploit enemy weaknesses? Were you aggressive about calculated risks to maximize your possible damage output in a fight? I feel like there's some off-handed dismissal of Infinite's gameplay merits happening here without even really attempting to first discuss it.

Those of you that are unhappy about the "bullet sponginess" of the enemies on hard, what were your tactics in a fight?

Man, that boss fight in the frozen mine, that is a pretty terrible boss fight. Love how the shitty motion detection kept making my aim drift. Euugh.