n0wak

I have it for PSP and I'm good at it, so I definitely grabbed the XBLA version. Seriously, I'm great at it. I'm top 100 on a lot of leaderboards, and even then, I still play the game for over an hour at a time. Yeah, the pricing was a bit... odd. I can sort of understand the 50MB XBLA limit issue, but they don't have to gouge us with their workaround. That said, yeah, I'm a big fan so I had no issue with it. I will skip the puzzle/mission shit, though, since I never touch that anyway. :gaming:

Short answer: it depends. Your mileage may vary based on what you like/expect from an JRPG. The first one is definitely "primitive" by todays standards and forces you to do a LOT (A LOT) of power leveling. If that is really not your thing, starting with that one might not be worth it. Maybe a better option than the original Famicon FFs might be to get Final Fantasy V for the GBA when that comes out (I think around the same time as III for the DS and XII for the PS2... )

He's one of the popular kids. I think the limit is 200 100 (which is weird since they haven't updated it since XBL launched -- you'd think that they would.)

Yeah. Same. It's a very good copy, but you can see some inconsistencies and askew parts at times. Almost feels like a student video? (I mean that in a good way). At least some people are keeping this art style alive

YES! I would like to destroy people in Lumines.

FUCKING ADAMA (I just noticed that my last five games are all arcade games)

See now? See what kind of posts and threads we had to deal with in the vast internet wilderness when you guys shut down these forums? Please don't do it again. Kotaku? More like Ko-fuck-you.

While I agree that governments shouldn't get into stuff like this -- you know, taxing people on their income and sales -- they already do and earning 50k of real money selling hotdogs is no different, cash wise, than earning 50k of real money selling hot dogs in a virtual world. Seems like a no brainer to me. It's like taxing people on profits they make on stocks -- which is all "imaginary" money until you cash out. Virtual worlds are the same.

I always wear a watch. Yeah, I can get the time from my phone, but, really, it's less about the time than it is about style. A watch is the only accessory I wear. My watch looks nice. The end.

Saw this new thing someplace today and thought it was topical to this discussion.

QFT Oh shit. Sorry. For a second there I thought I was on GAF.

Got the demo today. Pretty awesome. Definitely harder. Those three button chords really fuck me up cause I'm just not used to them yet. Instant sell. Oh yeah...um... nice hair... hairey!

There's another, longer trailer floating around too. Watching either of the trailers increased my testosterone level by 300%. RAAAR Definitely comes across a bit like style over substance, though. One movie that I do want to see a lot, though, is "Pan's Labyrinth", which has been increasing its buzz by very positive festival showings. http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/004706.html

I think what started the public fawning wasn't so much the movie LiT as much as her Golden Globes appearance for the movie (at least, that's what did it for me -- that champagne dress). Golden "Globes" is right. Anyway, I'll stop

No. They make them look real, but when you're talking about interactive, the key thing is whether they feel real -- and if they don't, then the visual illusion breaks apart. Film doesn't have this problem because, like I said, it is already capturing "reality" and, by not being interactive, its own internal reality is restrained. With a game, you can have a house that looks completely real. But if you come across a wooden door that you can't open -- even with the ROCKET LAUNCHER you're carrying -- that reality breaks down. The more real that game makers make their game, the more expectations there are for everything to react in a realistic way. You can spend thousands of manhours working on models and textures, but if your superhero character can't get past a two foot high curb, what's the point? So to combat that, game designers restrain that reality by forcing the player through a very linear, scripted path. And if they're going to do that, they might as well just stick to making movies.

That's what I was thinking. Also, lips.

Yes, but games have that too. The main difference, like I said, is that with film you start with the reality and then you can do the editting, cinematography, and any post-production on the final product. With games, you start from scratch. You have to spend all that time building up the illusion of realism first... when, really, if you spent half that time working on mechanics and that post-production aesthetic stuff, you'd have a game that plays and interacts more realistically than one that looks real, but plays like shit and/or tells a lousy story.

There's a HUGE Spam Graveyard in the other thread too.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/65/15

If they really get such a boner for recreating realism, maybe they should look into this device called a "film camera". I hear it does a good job. Instead of filming what already is real, they are trying to recreate everything one grain of sand at a time. And for what? A lousy, shitty, cliche story with super restricted interactivity? What realism!

DEFCON Anyone playing it? Been playing it a little today and it's definitely fun. Very board-game-ish, with a lot of subtle rule variants and the like. Still playing around to see what strategies work and what are the key strategic points for deployment, but early on it seems like one of those seemingly simple but actually a little deep games. Which is good. It helps that the games can be sped up and slowed down if desired. The one thing that bugs me a bit is that you can't shoot nukes or bombers over the poles, which essentially makes the game a east-west affair, save for the bottlenecks in north africa and central america. It'd be nice, also, if there was an option for non-earth-based maps. But, you know, for $15 it's great. So anyone playing it? Anyone want to set up an IdleThumbs game? * Sorry for the obscure title, but you get +1 points for getting the reference

Is this the same kind of humour that is needed to appreciate the name of Prey's protagonist, Tommy Hawk? Or is it just a weak character name?

Me Seriously, when the rest of you get this, we should have an Idle Thumbs Nuclearwarathon.

Among the other X06 announcements, which as expected revealed that Microsoft plans to milk the Halo name for all its worth despite the fact that Halo 3 is supposed to be the "last Halo game", there was this gem Apparently Peter Jackson has never heard of David Cage "Filmic games", the wave of the future.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html http://www.vnunet.com/personal-computer-world/news/2043236/nice-ebook-shame-drm http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=auiwUKsr.ykY&refer=japan http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060313-6366.html Not to mention the fact that it took abyssmal sales before Sony clued in to the fact that people like mp3s on their portable music players and not some shitty proprietary ATRAC. How's that UMD movie format doing too? Yes, it's because it is Sony. It is like that because Sony have been doing one idiotic thing after another for the last few years. Many anti-customer things. Well beyond what they've been saying about the PS3 and PSP. This is what happens when the media division dictates to the hardware division what should be done. Of course they've done good things in the meantime, despite the above, but those don't generate the kind of PR that the above items do. But please don't act as though any anti-Sony sentiment is the result of biased, uninformed "fanboysim". Sony have themselves to blame.