syntheticgerbil

I think I completely lost interest for now, since I keep playing other games inbetween and forget that I need to do another boss on Shadow. Sorry guys. I might just end up plowing through the rest of the game on a Sunday at this point and just post what I think, since I have no idea of the schedule and I'm like 3/4ths through I think.

They might fix some of the difficulty spikes or maybe make it easier to use the bomber's notebook. I'm also curious if they would modify how the save system works at, maybe even just adding more owl statues and not having them delete your save there every time you load one. If it's for 3DS, Majora's Mask needs to be more friendly for handheld consumption, because I was able to nicely chip away at Ocarina of Time on 3DS over the course of a few months. I love Majora's Mask more than Ocarina, but it's very FAQ heavy on 100%ing, and I doubt I will remember everything all over again. I don't think there were any changes to Ocarina concerning gameplay outside of adding labels to the Water Temple (from what I hear, I actually don't remember if there were labels in the first place on the 64 version). If this happens, my Zelda Collection disc on Gamecube will be worthless, but that's okay.

I think your everything is stretching and warping, better watch out.

Okay, is this just an article promoting Nine Dots? Seems pretty fluff. From what I've heard, in general trends the industry seem to point to the hours being less and crunch being an undesirable waste of time. http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons Signs are pointing to change anyway, without Nine Dots somehow being this angelic studio from heaven we all need to care about. I mean isn't it a Double Fine policy to eliminate crunch and allow family time as much as possible after Psychonauts?

I love that album. I always thought "Spoons" sounded straight Monkey Island.

Guys, why sell them, why?!

Don't do it!

Pig inserted into anus.

Yeah, that company tends to like to tell me it doesn't want to pay for things as well.

I just extensively updated my Linkedin for the first time in 3 years and now I feel like I've been majorly productive the last five years of my life after writing it. I suppose I may have really been productive then. Time to balance that out with more video games. Kidding. Kind of.

Nah I don't usually know of specific animators outside of the directors of the shows or certain episodes, since there's not enough information I can get and I don't tend to stumble upon portfolio sites of Japanese artists or animators.

That's a lot to do with it. I'm especially fascinated with the storyboard and pencil test books because they've been pretty helpful learning good process, especially at a time when I had a job where I had to churn out a bunch of storyboards for months. The language barrier never really matters in animated production books and I mostly just flip through them getting super jealous. I don't tend to have a lot of manga though because a few of the artists I'm interested in generally don't tend to get translations of their stuff, and I usually scourge around to see if there's fan translations that someone scanned. For a guy who has had a major comics career outside of Akira, very little of Otomo's work seems to be in English. You sure like a lot more stuff than me though, so that kind of helps my expenditures. 50 different animes on a wish list would floor me. Jin-Roh looks gorgeous though, I should check that out. Maybe it will come back in print. I think the only English releases I'm awaiting that I've heard announced are two by Sayo Yamamoto, which are Machiko to Hatchin and The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. I saw her talk at a convention last year and I was fascinated by her style. It might mean Funimation is doing an online only release though which I'm dodging for a disc release. :/

Will there be pre-order only DLC?

I meant that there was no variety to the MGS2 codecs, as in any given part you were limited to 2 characters you could call. Most of the calls outside of the standard easter egg fare was mostly horrendous Rose and Raiden dialogue. None of your options consisted of characters you could call for trivia or for the fun of conversation, as Colonel/Rose or Otacon tended to gameplay and main storyline centric. MGS4 was even worse in this respect. If you compare the codec options and conversation topics, MGS2 and 4 are very different when compared to Metal Gear 1, 2, Ghost Babel, Solid, Solid 3, and Portable Ops.

Bob Iger found them and is currently shitting on all of them like a dog with newspaper.

That review spent a long time being annoyed by subjective design. I don't see what's wrong with how the console looks. The controller stuff though, I'd like to find out more, definitely feel like the buttons will confuse me. Also on the complaints of the lack of games, I thought a lot developers were in tow to make some games for release?

Don't sell it! DON'T DO IT!

Well I'm not actually coming from any nostalgia, I think I started tackling all of the games chronologically starting 2006 from Metal Gear MSX to MSG Touch. The only one I've missed out on chronologically is Metal Gear Solid Mobile because there is no way to play the full game now and so I only have the demo on my phone. I don't necessarily see the peak being the ridiculous shit coming to full culmination. I find it best when that stuff gets relegated to easter eggs and things to within the game, but when it consumes the narrative in a long winded mass of bullshit, I stop caring. The last 2-3 hours of MGS2 was nothing but that and it was obnoxious outside of laughing at the absurdity of the who multiple triple cross situation. I don't see how what you value has to be the same for everyone else to appreciate the series. If MGS3 can genuinely make me feel sad to the point of a tear or two, that's a much larger accomplishment over being annoyed and exhausted with two 45 minute cutscenes of badly written exposition with one short boss fight stuck in between in my opinion.

Because it's a failure in engaging storytelling and success in new mechanics for the series at the same time, that's why. MGS3 for instance, is not. But don't even take my word for it. If you have the special edition blu-ray that came with MGS4, Kojima says he felt pressured to include more plot twists by fans of the twists in the first one and that he got a little bit carried away. He then apologized. Metal Gear Solid 3 (or 1) does not come with an apology. I can understand why a Kojima or Metal Gear fan would like MGS2, maybe you should try understanding why the same type of fan wouldn't like MGS2. Also let's not forget that Raiden's inclusion was foremost and always based on responses from females in a focus group. Yep, sounds incredibly subversive. Let's be honest here though, a lot of the faults in the storytelling among the whole series tends to stem from Kojima not always knowing what the fuck he's doing and caring whether it's good or not. I think people tend to give Kojima more credit to his narrative abilities than is actually deserved. See this malarky for reference: http://metagearsolid.org/2012/04/mgs2-review-chapter-1/ And yet another great thing about the series that MGS2 was missing. I'm not positive, but I get the feeling that most if not all of that art in that was included in the hardcover book that came with the HD collection judging by the page count.

Fuck yeah LeChuck, kill that vapid fucking mouse!

Is that second butt a lesbian fantasy thing? I can't tell where it's coming from.

The thing I've always hated about the buy out is that Disney can now sit on the licenses for all of the original adventure games for the next 500 years or whenever they finish ruling the world and own all copyrights. Whichever comes first.

That certainly seems to be the truth for the Solid series. Although I'd say Metal Gear 2 is far superior to the first one and Metal Gear Acid 2 is refined to perfection. Where do Peacewalker and Portables Ops really fit in? Haven't played Peacewalker, but I gritted my teeth through the crap that is Portable Ops just for the storyline.

Just finished this tonight. I have some more grinding to go to get all the costumes, concept art, zombie portraits, and trophies, but I'm already making major headway on my second playthrough since Stage 5 and 6, I beat the Dad's score first time without even trying. Stage 1 and the Prologue came easy without trying as well now on my second clean up playthrough now that I have a bunch of combos as well, so hopefully I get the best rank for the remaining 3 stages without two much issues. Those were the only trophies I was somewhat worried about. But on to the game. Based on what you guys were saying here, that it's a more shallow Suda 51 game or doesn't hit his usual mark, I would assume that's true, but there seems to have been a lot of involvement with James Gunn doing whatever he does with the B movie stuff, so maybe it's more of a collaborative thing? I can't say for sure since I call myself a Suda 51 fan even though this is only the third game I've finished by him, with Liberation Maiden and Killer 7 being the other two. Those latter two are night and day in difference so I don't think I was expecting anything similar with Lollipop Chainsaw other than what the trailers showed the game to be: dumb mindless fun. Kind of just have shitty days at work every day now, so this is exactly the right kind of game to come home to. It's not too difficult, it had quicktime events I somewhat appreciated for once, the humor was downright idiotic (the kind of potty mouth embarrassing humor my girlfriend and I share), and there were many cool designs to look at within a nice well directed art style. I mean it is a trip through typical genres like you guys say, but the shallowness felt right to me. The only part I was somewhat annoyed with was that the villain was a shunned goth kid. That choice was way too obvious and uninteresting. I'm not really into this style of fight everyone type games, so I can't really give much comment on the depth. It seems a little off to have to purchase all the good combos, many of which are fighting you for stat upgrades. I spent most of the first half of the game with only a few tricks up my sleeve. Just having about 5-6 combos given to me upon starting the game would have been nice, as they make the combat much more fun to look at. I think my major disappointment was just that I cannot select the boss fight music as my in game tracks. I'm a Mindless Self Indulgence fan and Jimmy Urine made some great stuff for the bosses that's much more varied than his work with the band. The Stage 5 boss theme is an amazing song. Instead I'm kind of stuck with a 5 song soundtrack of songs that tend to be less grating after hearing them the nth time. Stage 5 and 6 didn't have any good genre songs and instead a loaded my available soundtrack up with a bunch of crappy teen type metal that was popular about 5 years back. Why even include this uninspired crap within the game after the greatness of Stage 1 and 2's "punk" and "renaissance metal?" Anyway, minor quibbles with an overloaded soundtrack in the end. Also I love when games let me press buttons to do useless shit during the credits.

Well for completionism, I probably have like 15 books on Gurren Lagann, and I don't even really like the show (this is the fault of my OCD and it's stupid I know), I think the only other books I've had rival this are ones for Akira which are gorgeous. However, I think the only other rival is about 6 official books of production art on Panty and Stocking which I also enjoy, while only 2 books were ever released for his Dead Leaves short, so most stuff pertaining to animation I enjoy from Japan tends to be inexpensive and not hard to get them all if you know where to look. A lot of time for less popular stuff or anthology shorts, there tends to be only one book released (much like Pixar films) where it's just a best of storyboards, pencil tests, production art, background art. Shopping for art books in Japan is tricky but they tend to be plentiful, so it's a lot of copying and pasting names in Japanese and searching online stores and using Google translate. When I started collecting more art books years back, I used Ebay US a few times for books but they tend to be pricey, and it's mostly a guide to know what you are buying. If you just cut out the middle man and import books yourself, it gets much cheaper. Amazon.co.jp offers better used deals than Ebay US, but even moreso I've found Mandarake.co.jp to be the best source of inexpensive books and more recent still FromJapan.co.jp allows me to use Japan only auction sites and resalers for really cheap deals on some rarer books I could not find previous. Considering the general cost of most non-Japanese art books, which rival these prices in many cases, 5,000 yen for a rarer pencil test book isn't so bad but indeed is a little pricey, especially with the shit exchange rates right now. I think the most I've spent on an art book in Japan in $125 for the painted backgrounds for Steamboy, since I bought it long after the fact, but most of the time I can find nice deals in the $20-40 range per book if I'm patient enough, but these collections go for years in the making when I have the money. Either way, it's an expensive hobby to collect them, but nothing ever nears what you'd pay for importing an anime DVD or Blu-ray. Those prices are nuts and most stuff isn't even English friendly anyway. I never understood the reasoning of just importing anime you can't even understand. For instance, that Gurren Lagann Blu-ray set contains every main episode in English in HD, but a lot of those extras which were subtitled on the earlier English DVD release will no longer be English friendly. Are there a lot of anime fanatics that don't understand Japanese but import this stuff out of fanaticism? I'm curious to see if Aniplex will see this as a mistake and make a price that doesn't just entice only the major spenders. I remember searching high and low for Robot Carnival's legit R2 Japanese release and it probably was too expensive. Had a DVD in the U.S. existed, I would have never done that as the thing is bare bones. By the time I found out about the Japanese Little Nemo DVD with the early pilot films and concept art extras, it was starting at $150 going up to $300 currently. I guess this is a normal price for a "collector's" DVD? Luckily someone finally released a nice Nemo Blu-ray stateside for like $20 with the extras, so grateful because that movie is special to me for all it's faults. I think the worst I've ever done on the rare occasion I import a Japanese DVD is for this crazy ass Mind Game boxset with 6 discs and artbooks that I blew my graduating present monies on. But most of it was English friendly or had extras that did not have any speech. I know Studio 4C will never do any English friendly DVDs again of their stuff, which sucks majorly, because apparently by putting subtitles on the expensive Mind GameDVD (I think the barebones one was still $60) made it appear on torrent sites the day of release. Admittedly that's how I saw Mind Game in the first place, but I tend to end up getting physical copies of things I like. And that was a shitload of rambling.