tegan

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Posts posted by tegan

  1. Posted

    Your Journey playtime will vary a bit depending on your companion. The longest session I've ever gotten out of Journey was three hours, and that was mostly alone and on my first run. I had a whitecloak player guide me on my most recent run and we did everything there is to do in about two hours.

  2. Posted

    So there is a new Pokémon generation, in full 3D and with a simultaneous global release this October. A Nintendo handheld's just not a Nintendo handheld until there's a Pokémon game on it.

    The biggest reveal is that Game Freak, as foretold in jokes, did indeed run out of colours.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GUYzzY9BQrk

    I also notice that the male protagonist's design is significantly less stupid than what I've come to expect.

    I didn't really like Black/White much and skipped the sequels altogether, but I'll probably give this a go. Pokémon has always fascinated me. It's really the only game series out there that fits its specific niche; it appeals to little kids who want to play the most casual of casual RPGs, but if you crack it open it secretly contains a Starcraft. Something something onions and Koreans. I'm particularly excited at what looks like a more organic overworld, ad the style proposed by early Pokémon concept art is really what drew me into that world. Interesting times ahead!

  3. Posted

    I hang onto my old consoles, but it's not an elegant solution. I don't like keeping them constantly plugged in, so they're mostly in storage and need to be lugged out and hooked up whenever I want to use them.

    Of course, there's the obvious solution of console manufacturers doing exactly what they've already been doing for ages now: backwards-compatibility with physical copies of last-gen games, with all previous generations being handled via digital library. Of course, there are obvious flaws (having to buy multiple licenses for the same game like the NES games on both Wii and 3DS Virtual Console; lots of games missing from services, especially licensed favourites like Ducktales or Beetle Adventure Racing; the disturbing recent trend of removing games from services without warning or reason; old games that use specialized hardware like the Centipede Trackball or the Steel Batallion Clusterfuck; etc), but it's easily the best solution available right now.

  5. Posted

    Nintendo consoles have traditionally been day-one from me. Specifically because there's much more of a guarantee of exactly what kind of titles you're going to see compared to other consoles. Your home console will always get at least one Zelda (probably two), your handheld will get at least one Pokémon generation, etc. If you like those games (and I generally have in the past), then you might as well pick up a system. ...Though admittedly I've been really disappointed with the way those games have been developing lately, and a lot more interested in the less-certain games like Metroid and Pikmin. Admittedly, I probably shouldn't have bought a Wii U when I did.

    Other consoles for me have always been secondary. My general principle is that any system with at least one good game is worth trying; it's just a matter of waiting for it to hit the right price, and usually that price is not one that the console dips to in its natural lifespan, so I usually pick up consoles by the time they're considered retro and get all of the good stuff at once. The biggest exception to the rule for me was the PS3, which I primarily got as a Blu-Ray player and turned out to arguably be my best all-around console. The Playstation 4 will be a lot more tempting as a day-one purchase this time around knowing what kind of use I got out of it.

    Short answer: shameless brand loyalty.

  6. Posted

    If I played any serious PC games I would seek out an alternative to the Arc Touch, but otherwise it's probably the nicest mouse I've ever used.

    Another nice thing: everything on my desktop is easy to turn off. The Arc Touch folds flat, my monitor (Samsung Syncmaster PX2370) has a touch panel for power, and the blue light on the side of my keyboard is actually a sleep button that needs to be pressed in sideways instead of being pressed down. It's great; it's always there for when I need it but I almost never press it by accident thanks to the way it's designed.

  7. Posted

    I've had a couple of Wacom tablets and yeah, they're incredibly useful. I don't usually use mine for anything other than drawing, though. At any given time I'm rocking only two thirds of the Impractical Desktop Accessories Suite.

    K2aKv.pngB6Gft.jpg

    b7QyH.jpg

    ...I have a very strong sense of style.

    Also, I learned something today: going through the menus on your TV and relabeling all of the inputs to what they are makes life so much simpler. Now I know which component input is for Wii and which one is for PS2 and Xbox!

  9. Posted

    Actually, this brings me to another subject. How does everyone feel about the future of the "HD rerelease" trend?
    This may be some kind of sacrilege, but I'm really interested in seeing more HD rereleases and collections of old games. I'm a sucker for snazzy boxed sets and only got into a lot of games fairly recently. In particular I'm really excited about Nintendo's recent trend of updating their back catalogue through things like Ocarina of Time and Starfox 64 on 3DS and the enhanced Gamecube ports of games like Metroid Prime and Pikmin that the Wii got.

    I feel like a terrible person for wanting a Playstation Vita, because I mostly want it to play the enhanced ports of Muramasa and Persona 4.

  10. Posted

    There are some white-tailed lizards out in the open, too.

    Side note: there are trophies in the PS3 version for eating all of the fruit in the world, killing all of the white-tailed lizards, and saving at every save ruin. This sounds stupid, but it's a great way of knowing when you've seen everything there is to see.

    My favourite thing about this game's world is that not only is it huge; but if you only follow the optimal paths you'll only see maybe 60% of it. I try to set out in a different direction every time I load the game up just to find more save ruins and such, and I've still never seen the whole thing.

    Also, if you climb to the top of a save ruin and let the camera compose itself, it pretty much always shows you a spectacular view that somebody clearly put a lot of work into.

  13. Posted

    I read a couple of Discworld novels a few years ago and enjoyed them, but never decided to seek out the rest of the series for some reason. In the last few weeks I've been trying to read at least one book from the series each week, in no particular order. It's been an interesting experience! Right now I'm on Moving Pictures, which seems like kind of a spiritual predecessor to Soul Music. I just wish that I could find the Sam Vimes books that I'm missing.

    Also, reading these books now and knowing what's been happening to Terry Pratchett for the last few years is the most depressing thing.

  14. Posted

    I instinctively use Incognito Mode for browsing porn even though I haven't shared a computer with anyone in something like three years.

    I also use it for anything that I know will ruin things like autocomplete options and amazon recommendations. Now that Youtube's switched from recommending videos based on the current video to one based on your history, I may have to start doing the same for it. Right now I'm stuck with recommendations based on all the things I leave on as background noise, so my sidebar is full of things like "two hours of rain on a car roof," "girl reading children's book in Japanese," "unboxing Lego Architecture set," and about fifty episodes of the Ricky Gervais Show.

  15. Posted

    Pluto is probably the closest thing the manga community has to the Watchmen, although it's far more limited in scope. I also think it's author Urasawa lacks Moore's talent for making his audience feel smart, and when he attempts some of the same interconnected plot tricks that Moore pulls off so effortlessly in Watchmen they often feel laboured.

    Not sure if I'd recommend it overall but I think for someone who had more affection and knowledge for the material its examining (I've never read any of Tezuka's Astro Boy stuff) I can imagine it being worth a look.

    I read the first three volumes of Pluto, but never got around to finishing it for some reason. I've read a lot of Tezuka (including the entire run of Astro Boy), so the big difference between Pluto and Watchmen that sticks out for me is that Watchmen explores the themes and implications of superhero comics that superhero comic creators probably didn't think about much, while Pluto expands on ideas that Tezuka absolutely intended. There's lots of little authorial commentary bits in the definitive version of Astro Boy, and it becomes gradually apparent that Tezuka was always pushing for Astro Boy to be full of the bigger ideas about the human experience that dominated his later work.

  16. Posted

    Metroid: Other M - Other M is baffling. It is filled with plodding narrative, linear progression, and offensively sexist undercurrents that completely undermine Samus as a character. (Other M was developed by Team Ninja of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive fame, go figure.)

    It's a real bummer then, that there's some pretty solid character action here, and some really interesting not-quite-2d gameplay going on. It controls well and plays well... When it's not asking you to flip the wii-remote around mid-fight and suddenly point it at the screen, throwing you into a first-person aiming thing that is as clunky as it is jarring.

    The weirdest part is the gradual realization that Team Ninja is responsible for the solid Metroid gameplay parts and that Yoshio Sakamoto is responsible for the terrible narrative parts.

    I've been hoping for years that some fan community somewhere would make a fan patch that replaces all of the dialogue to make it less insultingly awful. For example, they could have easily made some excuse as to why Samus doesn't turn on the Varia Suit function until she's already gone through a large chunk of the volcano section, but they didn't. Just toss in a dubbed line of Adam telling Samus that the boss is giving off interference that jams her suit or something.

  17. Posted

    I'm trying to work out how many games used the balance board. Two, was it (Wii Fit and Wii Ski)?

    It was a surprising amount.

    I think that the strangest thing about the Wii was that it was the Negative Gamecube. While there wasn't much there to separate the Gamecube hardware from its peers, its software was full of huge departures for Nintendo's cavalcade of flagship titles. Mario had a weird jetpack, Metroid became an FPS, Donkey Kong was controlled with a pair of bongos, etc. The Wii on the other hand promised us crazy new experiences, but seemed to cater to our expectations much more frequently than usual. We got a 2D Mario console game, a new Donkey Kong Country, a new Kirby game that was actually developed from the ground up as a Kirby game for once, a new 3D Metroid that deliberately played like a 2D Metroid, etc. I think the largest source of disappointment for me personally was the tendency of first-party games to deliver something safe rather than something new.

    I also don't remember any new first-party games not based on existing franchises apart from Xenoblade and the Wii _____ lineup.

    I had a good run with the Wii, though. It really opened me up to third-party games, for one, and the combined abilities of Gamecube backwards-compatibility and Virtual Console spoiled me rotten.

    Highlights:

    -Muramasa: The Demon Blade secretly turning out to be arguably the most beautiful game of this generation, or at least the most beautiful game on the Wii. Having mostly excellent boss fights doesn't hurt either.

    -Xenoblade Chronicles had a moment where a Hode ran past me on my way through Makna Forest. I was accustomed to normally aggressive minor enemies ignoring me as I had been level grinding on the Bionis' leg for a while beforehand. A few minutes later while in a fight with a stronger enemy I gradually realized that I could hear a rhythmic thumping in the background, followed gradually by the first notes of the "you are going to get your ass kicked" battle theme beginning to fade in. I shifted the camera around and saw the same Hode tearing across the clearing I was in, being chased by a giant fucking dinosaur that was now more interested in me than in the Hode. I got chased for a few minutes and then got killed as soon as it caught up with me. I never thought a JRPG would contain a "the grenade rolled down the hill" moment.

    -Having never really played a Metroid game or a first-person game before buying it on impulse, Metroid Prime Trilogy is probably the best sixty dollars I've ever spent on a game.

    -Flying through open space for the first time in Super Mario Galaxy. I know it's just there to hide load times, but it's just so darned majestic.

    Letdowns:

    -The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword seemed to be determined to ruin its fun moments (like the boss of the fourth dungeon) by making every other part of the game be either feel tacked-on, badly-designed, or barely-functional. The crowning moment for me was a tie between making the last dungeon be a goddamned sliding tile puzzle and repeating my two most hated bosses over and over again throughout the game.

    -Metroid Other M has a number of "pixel hunts" in which you attempt to find a minor detail in a landscape. One of these involves finding a white woman in a white coat in the window of a white house on the other side of a white landscape. In a blizzard.

    -Super Paper Mario somehow managing to excise everything that made me care about the NPCs in the previous games. There was something about Flipside and Flopside that just made them tedious to navigate. It was kind of heartbreaking to see my favourite Nintendo series turn into some different, unfamiliar animal.

  18. Posted

    Does anyone here have one of these? The videos I've seen of the menu system and OS are a DISASTER. The UX seems to be totally horrid, there doesn't seem to be a jump to home button and everything is SUPER slow...

    I have one! The OS isn't particularly good, no, but there is a jump to home button of sort. The home button on the gamepad opens a mini-menu that provides you with anything that the system can launch simultaneously with a game (web browser, Miiverse, friends list, controller sync options, etc), along with a big button that lets you close your current software. It's not as elegant as it could be, but it adds an extra step at most to anything you might want to do. The biggest failing of the OS is in friends management. It makes up for having actual userIDs instead of friend codes through two tremendously stupid ideas:

    1) you have to "set up" your friends list before you can do anything online. Set up consists of answering two extremely basic yes or no questions. This isn't alluded to anywhere in the actual console setup, and any attempt at online activity before setting up this just gives you a prompt saying that the friends list needs to be set up first. And where is this friends list set up? It's not on the main menu, but in the menu that pops up whenever you press the home button, designated as one icon in a row of icons that is otherwise identical to the row at the bottom of the main menu.

    2) there are two completely separate way to add someone to your friends list, but only one gives them any sort of notification that you want to add them as a friend. There is absolutely no reason to ever use the alternative.

    Oh, and while we're at it, the dimensions of your screen have to be designated by the software you're running and not by the main OS. So to put it another way: I had to change the settings in both the eshop and in Miiverse to keep the image from stretching outside of the borders of my TV... but the main menu/Warawara Plaza does get stretched, because there's no option to change the default screen boundaries for the system itself.

    I feel like I'm being too harsh on it, though. The good news is that this time the system can actually be patched, so they do have the opportunity to fix these problems later on down the road (and as an added bonus this means that nobody will ever have to mail a copy of their Metroid: Other M save data to Japan ever again). Besides that, Nintendo Land is an amazing proof of concept game, and we know that the system will eventually be home to Pikmin 3 multiplayer. For right now, I'm satisfied with what I got.

    Incidentally, my Nintendo Netword ID is UnitNumberFive if anyone else gets a console and feels like adding me.

  19. Posted

    It's kind of weird that Watchmen is such a popular First Comic Book Ever, because it was written with the intent of deconstructing everything that came before it. I like Watchmen (and it's a perfect example of a story that only works as well as it does because it's a superhero comic), but it's like if Bioshock or something were your first game.

    Incidentally, have there been any really good manga in the last few years that I'm just not aware of? The most recent thing I remember enjoying was Fullmetal Alchemist and I never did make it to the end of that. That and Franken Fran, but I guess that hasn't been given a proper translation yet.

  21. Posted

    I may go the adoption route, and honestly it's probably more "moral" or whatever than adding one more baby to the world, but something about the idea of going to a place and choosing a child puts me off. I know it's a shitty stance to have, especially given how badly so many of those kids need loving families, but something intangible about it bothers me.
    Do you mean that you feel like you're giving an unfair advantage to a certain kid because you're making a conscious choice based on personal preferences rather than a genetic dart toss? Because while I can empathize, I personally would rather see kids chosen to go to families that are prepared to deal with their specific problems than get born into a family that's not prepared to tolerate who they are.

    While I think that the ultimate answer here is that we should probably more concerned about making the future a better place for everyone's potential children, it's becoming increasingly obvious that we're expanding at a rate that we simply don't have the resources to support. Check this shit out:

    OwjJj.png

    Terrifying.

  22. Posted

    I think I'm getting caught up in the specifics here. my original point is that comics are unusually balanced toward a certain subgenre and that there isn't enough of an effort to instill exposure for anything that doesn't fall under that label, and that that it creates a marketplace discouraging to anything else It's a problem that creates itself. Compare a decent video store or book store to a comic book store: one will have work sorted into approximate genres or styles with potential subsets; while the other is almost always going to be roughly divided into Superheroes, Manga, and Other. I personally don't think it's coincidence that we're only starting to see a wider breadth of genre diversity now that we have online marketplaces and creators aren't doomed to linger in "Other."

    Also, Maus was only a hypothetical example, but you're definitely right about Persepolis (and possibly Palestine? I'm not familiar with it). But with that being said... Grave of the Fireflies is not a comic book, and Supergods is something that was specifically not requested. Not to be confrontational, but they strike me as very unusual choices to recommend to someone based on those stipulations.

    It's not that I'm opposed to superhero comics at all, really, but they're the fossil fuels of the comic book world. They're almost universally better suited to other mediums now, for one thing (see: Infamous, Prototype, the last five years or so of Marvel films, the DC animated universe, etc), and they come across as an unnecessary gimmick at times (I love Zot!, but Scott McCloud's pointed out before that Zot! was largely inspired by manga and indie comics, but that he knew that he could only get those kinds of stories onto newsstands by making his male lead wear red spandex). While I'm always open to the general concept of the superhero archetype, there's no reason why they should be emblematic of an entire medium. It's not the specifics of their tropes, it's that oversaturation like this is inherently damaging to any medium.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is:

    Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire genre is absurd. It's like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.

    -Warren Ellis

  23. Posted

    It's actually not that hard, you just have to accept that you won't like anything by DC (not counting Vertigo) or Marvel (of course there are exceptions). If you look at other publishers like Image, IDW, Vertigo, ect. you'll find tons of great books that aren't about superheroes (along with ones that are) and if you look at someone like Top Shelf none of their comics are superhero comics.

    The difficult thing about comics isn't finding one that you'll like, it's finding two similar ones. Whenever somebody gets into comics, they are usually handed a short list of recommendations. It usually contains, among a few other mainstay titles, The Dark Knight Returns and Maus. If you like The Dark Knight Returns, and want to explore the unusually specific superhero genre further, you then have a selection of hundreds of recommended comics to read, many of them legitimately good. If you like Maus and want to explore the slightly less specific "personal drama about family and the holocaust" genre, you're basically never going to get anywhere.* Unless the artistic landscape has changed drastically in the last four years or so while I wasn't paying attention, this seems to be the biggest roadblock to reading comics. It's something I'm always worried about when it comes to games too.

    As a personal anecdotal example, I remember getting into Scott Pilgrim as a teenager back when it was about three volumes in and just starting to become a thing. Since I liked Scott Pilgrim, people would almost invariably tell me to read Sharknife. When I finally did end up reading Sharknife, I found that not only was it terrible, it had only the most superficial of similarities to the thing I had enjoyed in the first place.

    *with the exception of course of Osamu Tezuka's Message To Adolf, available now at fine retailers everywhere

  24. Posted

    Over the past few weeks I keep finding myself hovering over the "add to cart button" on amazon for the hardcover edition of Nausicaä that came out recently. I traded in the two paperback volumes I owned a few months back when it became clear that I would never find the remaining five for a reasonable price, and I've always wanted to finish the story.

    It also doesn't hurt that I love huge hardcover volumes of comics. I'm still working my way through the Tintin hardcover set.

  25. Posted

    For anyone still watching, the OUYA devkits went out recently. They're allegedly filled with bugs and don't support USB controllers, and we still haven't seen anything actually run on it, but I'm impressed that they actually made and distributed their devkits on schedule.

    I like that they chose the transparent casing for the devkits. It really reinforces that this is a game console trapped inside of a giant grain of salt.

    (Is it a faux pas to resurrect an old thread like this? It seems to vary across forums)