tegan

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Posts posted by tegan

  1. Posted

    You guys of course realize that the collector's edition of this game is called the Wizard's Edition.

    I enjoyed the demo, but I just know that I have no chance of finishing this game. I just can't do the 100-hour JRPG thing anymore. Maybe if I finally finish Xenoblade and get the craving again somewhere down the line.

  2. Posted

    They're definitely very similar in terms of subject matter, but pretty different in terms of how they communicate it, I think. Dys4ia is more stylish but I kind of appreciated the way Mainichi made its point more. They're both worthwhile game experiences though.

    Having actually gone and played Mainichi now... yeah, I can see how this is probably more relatable for more people than the very specific situations of Dys4ia.

  4. Posted

    It might only be superficially similar, but Mainichi reminds me of Auntie Pixelante's Dys4ia. It's and almost Warioware-esque take on the memoirs of a transwoman undergoing hormone replacement therapy.

    Also, just since Queen of Pain and Sean's girlfriend came up in this episode again, I've been meaning to ask: Why doesn't Sean just play with headphones?

  7. Posted

    Is the mii thing called mii wara wara yet? Iwata implied that would be the name across all regions but I don't see it on the US promos and quicklooks.

    p.s. hd wind waker yissss

    (Maybe they could add back in those dungeons they scrapped during the original dev, so the endgame isn't so sparse? Please?)

    It's been called Warawara Plaza since day one, it just doesn't come up much. And although they haven't specified what they mean, they've stated that they want to "tune up the overall game experience." I'm thinking the best-case scenario is finishing a scrapped dungeon; worst-case is making the Triforce hunt less stupid.

  9. Posted

    I've been sick since Saturday. This is the fourth day of work in a row that I've missed, and I'm bored out of my skull to boot. I know that I made bonus in December, so my paycheque on Friday will be far bigger than normal, and now I can't even enjoy it since I know that my next one's going to be a disaster.

  10. Posted

    So there was a surprise Nintendo Direct this morning.

    Highlights:

    • Virtual Console coming in spring. Everything playable on the gamepad. You don't have to rebuy the games you already own from Wii VC, but you do have to pay $1.00-$1.50 to upgrade them. GBA games coming eventually. Famicom 30th Anniversary sale on Wii U VC: certain games will be available for a rental of 30 days for 30 cents, starting with Balloon Fight, available RIGHT NOW.
    • Finally fixing the awful load times between menus
    • New features being added to Miiverse.
    • New Iwata Asks where he speaks with some of the heads of Platinum Games
    • New 3D Mario game from the Galaxy team, playable at E3.
    • New Mario Kart, also playable at E3.
    • New party game actually looks pretty neat
    • New Yoshi game with the same visual style as Kirby Epic Yarn from the director of Yoshi's Island
    • There will be new information about the new Smash Bros. games at E3 this year.
    • Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem whaaaaat
    • New Zelda with an emphasis on nonlinear exploration and some kind of multiplayer
    • Wind Waker HD holy shit
    • Monolift Soft has a new game that plays very similarly to Xenoblade, but with vehicles (including mecha).

    So yeah. Wii U has been justified.

  11. Posted

    Making people feel old is what makes me feel young. I feed on it, like a vampire.

    Metroid Prime came out nearly half my lifetime ago!

    Jurassic Park was the first film I ever saw in a theater!

    I have never seen a Sega console older than the Dreamcast in person!

    I take the internet for granted!

    When the last Harry Potter book came out, I was still younger than Harry was in the novel!

    The Simpsons is older than I am!

  12. Posted

    You never 100%ed Super Mario World? That game was amazing!

    At the risk of being shunned; my first console was the N64 and my first handheld was the Gameboy Advance, both in Christmas of 2001. I'm fairly young by most standards of the good part of the internet, and wasn't allowed to play most video games as a kid, so most of the classics are new to me. I only played Super Mario World for the first time in summer of 2009. I have two copies of it now (an original SNES copy and a GBA cart), but since I have no 2D platforming chops whatsoever, having done most of my platforming in a post-2D world, it's way too hard for me. I hope to finish it one day, though.

    In a weird bit of anachronistic fortune, I did have a hand-me-down 486 computer as a kid, along with a hand-me-down copy of The Secret of Monkey Island, which came out before I was born. So I did play that! I didn't beat it until I was in high school playing it on ScummVM though.

  13. Posted

    I've seen that picture a bunch of times, and I wonder if it's a functioning and genuinely useful stack of adapters or whatever they are. Does each element fulfil a purpose, or is it just a console version of plugging together a million power converters?

    One of those attachments is the Sega Cleaning System, which is just a double-ended cartridge with two sets of cleaning pads rather than electrical contacts, so no. Even without that component I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't work, though.

    I'm still waiting for someone to make the everygame. ie: You start with an old Gameboy cartridge with a minigame on it. When you beat the game it prompts you to plug in the Gameboy Printer, which prints out a QR code. Viewing the code with a 3DS gets you a download code for another minigame, which you can share via DS download play to an original DS, which then unlocks something on a GBA cartridge. This goes through several stages like a Kinect picking up your motions while you play a Playstation Move game, using a Blockbuster Pokémon Snap sticker printing station to make e-reader cards, and using a Wiimote to track the light emitted by a Virtual Boy headset. At the end you get a postcard from J Allard or something. It would be glorious.

    I'm also waiting for the music peripheral game that uses everything, from the DJ Hero turntable to the Samba De Amigo maracas. The only song you can play is "Wildcat" by Ratatat and it's pretty boring for everyone involved.

  14. Posted

    The secret to beating the levels with the purple anti-Mario is to not run. It's significantly easier to avoid him if you just go at a relaxed pace rather than actually trying to outrun him.

    Super Mario 3D Land is the only Mario game I've ever 100%ed apart from Super Mario 64 DS. That is to say, it's pretty damned good.

  16. Posted

    This is a long one but a fun one. I've been listening to podcasty stuff as I draw. David Graeber starts with a ridiculous premise of Where are all the awesome things that 1960s science fiction promised we'd have by now? …and manages to be show that it is not at all an unreasonable question for us to ask. Along the way he drive-bys some fun interpretations of pop culture he touches upon.

    I listened to most of this last night, and now that I've had some time to digest it... while his resulting argument about how we've bureaucratization has slowed technological advancement to a crawl is interesting, his initial premise of "kids in 1900 got everything from science fiction by 1950, but kids in 1960 didn't get anything from science fiction" is full of crap.

    For one thing, they didn't. Although it's quaint to think that the only things they envisioned were submarines and television, they wanted all of the same insane shit that we wanted in the 1960s, just with a certain Victorian sensibility to them. Second: his examples of saying that we got submarines but not flying cars is very odd. We got both. It's true that flying cars aren't available for the public sector, but they certainly exist. But apart from sheer quantities, that situation is absolutely no different from submarines. In fact, most of the things he touches on are either existing technologies or in development. NASA began development of a faster-than-light warp drive last year. A Japanese robotics firm started mass-producing

    , as well. Although I'm not aware of a robot that does laundry, we most definitely have robots that do chores. I'm not familiar with the tech behind Siri, but by all accounts it's a pretty damned advanced AI for something intended for the average consumer, and I'd say it (only just) fits the description of an AI that you can talk with.

    Yeah, it's disappointing that I'll probably never get my Wipeout car or Iron Man suit, but the idea that we don't get any of the things that science fiction has promised us is bullshit. Saying that the internet is simultaneously the most important invention of the last few decades and also unimpressive as shit is true, but no less so than television or the automobile. The important, world-changing inventions have always been defined by being utilitarian and accessible to the masses. They will always be, by necessity, boring.

    (I'll cut him some slack, though, since that talk seems to be from around 2011 and would have just barely predated most of those counterexamples I just posted)

  17. Posted

    (It is my understanding that the costs associated with the ESRB rating process are actually a big part of why those Virtual Console games cost so damn much. Seriously.)

    This was the case, but the ESRB changed their process for digital releases a few months ago. Now it's much easier, it's free, and if your game was previously released for another platform and has already been rated, you don't have to resubmit it as long as the content hasn't changed (ie: most Virtual Console games can now skip the rating altogether).

  18. Posted

    If we're thanking people for stuff, I'd like to thank Chris for his exemplary work in keeping up the recording quality of Idle Thumbs. I don't know how much it gets touched upon here, but I'm a bit of an audiophile and it's easily the most professional-sounding podcast I've ever listened to.

  20. Posted

    A large part of America is ready for it, but America itself isn't ready for it. That's been the really weird thing about living in the States this past decade, with healthcare and gay marriage and now gun control.

    This is kind of a weird fascinating thing, for me. Apart from the "America go democracy too early" explanation posted earlier, can anyone provide an explanation of this phenomenon to me?

    It's something that seems to basically be unique to America. For example, when I someday meet the Lara to my Skipper Croft, I'll be able to get married because the major gay marriage debate in my province lasted for four months (with one month of that being a waiting period for paperwork and such), even with a conservative premier who opposed the idea.

  21. Posted

    We might be getting way ahead of ourselves with this line of conversation, but...

    Are you sure about the colossi coming about after people had left the forbidden lands? The game itself strongly implies that many locations were built specifically for the colossi, and some of the outside details i've heard support that.

    General game spoilers:

    If I remember correctly, the colossi are stated to be pieces of Dormin's soul and Dormin's punishment marked the time when people left the forbidden lands. On the other hand, I suppose there's nothing to indicate if his soul was scattered placed into existing entities or not, but I always figured they just pulled themselves together from the earth. They do turn to stone when Dormin's soul leaves them, after all. It could even be that some of them assembled themselves from pieces of the earth that happened to have cities standing on it. They could even be physical manifestations of the gods that the people of the Forbidden Land worshipped, given that they're first encountered in the form of idols (that you can even pray to, eventually).

    Massive game ending spoiler:

    Also, when Wander is possessed by Dormin, he turns into something that clearly has the form of a colossus. I think that's just the shape that Dormin takes now.

    I am amused by this, would it be okay if i stuck this in the original post as a logo for this whole thing?

    Do it.

    I wanted to do an alternate version that replaced Mono lying on the altar with Jeff Goldblum being found after the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park, but I couldn't get a good enough Goldblum screencap.

  22. Posted

    I got dragged into seeing Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and wasn't looking forward to it until I learned it was made by the Clone High guys. I ended up loving it, even though I never would have thought that they could make a kids' movie using the exact same style of humour.

  23. Posted

    I don't know that anime, what's she from? I might go and watch it. I just saw the picture and thought it was relevant.

    Unless I'm mistaken, it's Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It's a pretty good deconstruction of the Sailor Moon magical girl archetype and it's only twelve episodes long. That particular character gets a backstory episode near the end of the series that reveals -among other things- why she uses actual modern firearms and incendiaries when everyone else uses nebulously magical weapons and why she seems to be weighed down by an overwhelming sense of nihilism.

    Her only actual power is time manipulation. She's been using it to live the same few months over and over again to try to keep the girl she loves from either dying or becoming corrupted and killing everyone, but failing every time, leaving her jaded and bitter. She initially was reluctant to even use a golf club as a weapon, but gradually takes to stealing handguns and explosives. By the current timeline, she's bordering on emotionally dead and has built up a massive arsenal.

  24. Posted

    If I recognize it correctly, the character depicted on that handle uses her proficiency with firearms as a metaphor for her ongoing mental breakdown that resulted from a relentless need to protect her loved ones, which failed until it was replaced with a non-violent solution. Nice choice.

    (I watch like one anime a year and it happened to be that one in 2011. Cut me some slack)

  25. Posted

    I'm all caught up now!

    First colossus (Valus) thoughts:

    I've always wondered; I know that the colossi only came about after people were exiled from the forbidden lands, so why do they look like they were harnessed by humans in some way? Are the clearly architectural details just there for aesthetic reasons, or did they deliberately armour themselves with pieces of human buildings, or what? It's especially noticeable with the first colossus for me, which straight-up has a balcony on its ass. Playing this through for the fourth or so time now I realize that the colossi are supposed to be modelled after the idols and not the other way around, but the idols all resemble animals or real-world ancient carved statues without that level of embellishment.

    True story: the first time I ever played this game, I spent twenty goddamned minutes on this thing's calf before getting killed. It wasn't until I did the sensible thing and reversed all of the controls months later that I actually took Valus down.

    Second colossus (Quadratus) thoughts:

    I decided to take this one down the hard way, but just in case someone's new to the game: You can totally shoot the bottoms of Quadratus' hooves while it's walking if you aim just right, so you can skip the section where it rears up altogether. I have no idea if that's an intentional design choice or just a happy accident.

    I'm not a huge fan of the quadruped colossi, but Quadratus is alright. I think it might have been the first one designed, since it strongly resembles (and clearly has the same animations as) the colossus in the Nico trailer from way back when SOTC was just a glimmer in Ueda's eye.

    I hope that, if they do end up producing the movie, that they keep Dormin's voice as being both a male and female voice together. It really adds a lot to the character for me.

    Next week: BEST COLOSSUS

    EDIT: Had to.

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