tegan

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    4990

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by tegan

  3. Posted

    I'm only 22. And I recently shaved off the beard that I had been cultivating through college. ...I guess I just don't belong here.

     

    High-five for being a fellow video game baby!

  5. Posted

    Jeremy Parish elaborated quite elegantly.

     

    I can understand why YouTube folks are upset about this. It seems like horrible corporate horribleness from the outside.

    But I'm surprised and disappointed by all the folks in the press who jumped up on a soapbox to declare Nintendo to be Stupid and Bad. A rudimentary understanding of intellectual property law should be mandatory for journalists! It's important!

    Nintendo is actually obligated to do things like this to protect their ownership rights. American copyright law is vile and weighted heavily in favor of preserving corporate ownership of concepts in perpetuity, but there are ways to break that control. If a property owner doesn't take good-faith measures to protect its ownership of its material, their ownership that material will at some point no longer be legally defensible and the content will pass into the public domain.

    I think they're managing this balancing act really well. They could have been stupid like certain other game publishers and just shut down all YT videos containing their material, but instead they simply forbade people from making money off of Nintendo property. It's essentially saying, "Hey, it's cool to use our stuff for your work, but we're the only ones allowed to profit from it."

    I've seen some people cite Fair Use as a defense, but that means they don't understand the nature of Fair Use. The doctrine of fair use places very exact limitations on content: It can only be for academic or critical purposes, and the material reproduced must be less than a certain percentage of both the original work and comprise less than a certain percentage of the derivative work -- I don't remember the exact percentage, but it's something like 25%.

    Anyway, there was no way Nintendo was getting out of this without a black eye, but I guarantee they infinitely prefer a bit of pissy public relations for a while to seeing Mario pass forever into the public domain.

  6. Posted

    I see Independence Day; Signs; comedy movies featuring Adam Sandler, Dane Cook, and Will Ferrel; Underworld; two copies of 300 (DVD and HD-DVD?)...

     

    On the other hand, I see Shaun of the Dead and both Up and Toy Story 3 on Blu-Ray.

     

     

    ...I used to work in a video store. I can recognize movies by their spines.

  7. Posted

    m4A3in9.png

     

     

     

    So, as you may or may not know, Super Metroid -a game which is now old enough to legally drink in Canada- just came out on the Wii U virtual console for thirty cents this week. Miiverse integration has provided an absolutely fascinating look at two types of players:

    1. Veterans who are breezing through and using screenshots to show off their sequence breaking techniques
    2. Kids playing for the first time and being either astounded at how good the game is, or are completely lost and keep asking why metroid cant crawl

    Personally, I'm a huge Metroid fan. I never played the games at all until a few years ago, when the Metroid Prime trilogy came out for the Wii. I would have been nineteen at the time. Since then, I've played Metroid every time I feel hopeless. My playthrough of Prime 1 was over the period where I came out and my social life went to hell. I didn't finish it until some time after I had left home. A long period of unemployment followed that, where I got through every major game (I skipped the second half of Metroid 1, plus I skipped Prime Hunters and Pinball); with the last game I finished being Super Metroid. Playing it now (in a suitably hopeless time) feels entirely different from playing it that first time. My mental process has changed from "now what's the next part of the map I need to go to" to "look at all of these places I can go to!" The game has become a completely different animal based entirely on skill and experience, and that is rad. I'm excited to see where this goes.

  8. Posted

    For every hilarious joke comment there are just as many serious ones. These dang kids seem to have a really hard time figuring out the morph ball.

     

    So the Nintendo Direct today was sort of butt! We got more Pikmin 3 footage and I guess you can buy New Super Luigi U as a standalone game for thirty dollars if you want to, but that's really all the interesting info there was.

     

    Oh, also, I guess Nintendo has certain exclusivity with Sega now. Somebody's inner child is having their mind blown.

  12. Posted

    Because Pikmin 3 is gradually creeping up on us.

     

    I'm UnitNumberFive. Miiverse profile here. Right now I'm going through Super Metroid in whatever order I feel like.

     

    PROTIP: there are two ways to Friend people. The first way is to go to "Register Friend" on the Friends List itself and type in their name, but they won't be notified that you're trying to add them. The second is to send them a friend request through Miiverse, which you can do by going to "User Menu" > "Search Users" > type their exact name > "Friend Request."

  15. Posted

    1. Go to Miiverse
    2. "User Menu"
    3. "Search Users"
    4. type "UnitNumberFive" (that's me!) exactly as spelled and capitalized
    5. go into my profile, and in the top right you should see a "Friend Request" button.

    If you haven't set up your friends list yet, hit the home button and go into "Friends" first. It asks you like two questions, but otherwise it won't let you add any friends.

     

    We should start a Wii U Friending thread!

  16. Posted

    guys seriously Miiverse is so fucking great now that I have a non-baby game to see its potential. Every once in a while I'll take a quick break from Super Metroid to post updates about how my sequence breaking is progressing, then get sidetracked by finding beginniners who are stuck on one part of the game or another and wind up sharing helpful doodles.

     

    rJyroAX.png

  18. Posted

    If I'm honest, I'm disappointed that barbarian lady isn't more obviously muscular, but you can still tell she is. Also, at the very least, she is not, by any definition from popular culture, "sexy", which undoubtedly contributes to why she's tied for my favorite. (She'd probably be in first place if hammer dude's beard/mane didn't exist.)

    Well, except for the lack of a small dude. Small dudes exist, and they don't have one here.

     

    I don't really feel ready to form a definite opinion on the matter yet, but I feel it's worth noting that Muramasa had Raijin and her romantic partner Fujin.

     

    vOrZN0o.jpg

  21. Posted

    Super Metroid is almost entirely gated with mechanics, isn't it? You need crazy missile type X to bash through this wall, or you need the grappling beam to swing across this otherwise insane gap! I'm sure there are parts of the game which you can complete if you have near-exploit-worthy levels of wall hopping traversal skill, but that's not explicit in the design of the game, right? I'm not anywhere near a skilled Metroid player, so while I know about speed run type scenarios, my understanding of Metroid design is "the player sees an interesting place that they can't go but find intriguing, and then when they gain a new unlock or ability they realize they can backtrack to that interesting place and discover they now have the mechanical means to access it." That's pretty different than core-skill-based gating.

     

     

    Super Metroid is very deliberately filled with things you can bypass with either inherent skill or the first tools you get. Specifically; walljumping, shinesparking, and bomb-jumping. There are some rooms with outcrops or bumps that seem to have been chosen at random for aesthetic purposes, but actually are specifically placed so as to give you a spot you can shinespark to, to keep a corridor from being long enough to let you build up a speed boost, etc. There's an absurd attention to detail in the level design of that game. I'm no speedrunner and I've grabbed items ahead of time through pure skill in that game.

  23. Posted

    Oh man. So Nintendo just Mr. Miyagi'd me into understanding why Miiverse is cool. Just now I was playing Super Metroid, and -despite never really being able to master the bomb jump- managed to grab an energy tank much earlier than you're supposed to be able to.So I was all "Oh man, that was awesome. I wish I could show this off to somebody." And then I was all "Oh wait... I can!" And then I paused to the home menu, took a screenshot, and made a post about it without leaving the game. That's neat!

     

    Lfufgke.jpg

  25. Posted

    The XL ships with a 4GB card.

     

    Is there maybe a list of the best cards to get for the 3DS somewhere? I might upgrade to a higher-capacity card as games that I'll want on my system forever keep coming out (Pokémon, Animal Crossing, etc).