miffy495

I was thinking about getting Amped for a while there, but then there was something of a glut of new games that I wanted to play and I forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me. I'll have to pick that up when I have some spare cash in a month or so.

I wouldn't mind a Quebec localized version where he yells "TABARNAK!"

Ummm... help you with what?

Yeah, cost me about the same. Although it's only $10 more than GH was on the PS2 when it first came out. It seems significantly more expensive, sure, but the fact that I bought GH1 with help from a gift certificate is probably my main reason for that. If you don't have it on PS2, Kennyken, go for it.

If it helps, I'm currently feeling the same way with Jet Set Radio Future on Xbox 360. The version I have happens to be from some old pack-in that MS did with the original Xbox. It has both JSRF and Sega GT 2002 on the same disk. Both of these games are on the BC list for 360, but this specific disk will not run as MS apparently hadn't prepared for people to try to play this version.

HOLY SHIT THEY LISTENED!!! Just out today, the newest BC update includes: Jet Set Radio Future Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee Panzer Dragoon: Orta Soul Calibur 2 Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes YES! :woohoo: ...I'm gonna go play me some JSRF and Orta now. Also, celebrating that MS was apparently monitoring my post and decided to be very, very nice to me. UPDATE: Damn, my copy of JSRF doesn't work. Apparently it'll run only the original version of the game, not the one that's on that bundle disk with Sega GT 200(whatever) so I'm sol for now. At least I got in some quality time with Orta. Maybe I'll bust out the Dreamcast for some Jet Grind Radio to make myself feel better.

Well, that's just over $30 for me, which means that the stores will crank it to around $40 as they're still operating under the assumption that the US-Canadian exchange rate is what it was about 10 years ago. Give it another $10 and I'll be set.

Agreed for BC. I'm playing Ninja Gaiden on 360 right now as I'd been wanting to have another go at it. I just wish I could go back and check out the rest of my library as well. Panzer Dragoon and Jet Set Radio Future are just sitting there mocking me, and why would I bother playing Dead Or Alive Ultimate when DoA4 is already on 360? I just ordered a copy as it's pretty cheap now, and I guess the ability to play DoA2 on 360 will hold me until it arrives, but it really does seem like they're focusing on all the wrong games.

As for the why exactly, I'm really not sure. All I know is what I need to work with. As I recall from when I learned all this stuff during my training, it's due to a competition between the two major formats (1.85 and 2.35) back in the day that never really got resolved. Some filmmakers liked the wider angle to play with, (certainly works better for action movies and those with a focus on scenery) some prefered using 1.85 for dealing with the characters more intimately. While all this was going on, Europe was off doing it's own thing and having its film industry take off, using its own format all the while and oblivious to the war going on in North America between the others. 1.33:1 movies are not unheard of either, but they mostly disappeared around the time that sound came in, so I doubt you'd ever run into one nowadays. As for why go wide at all, dunno the specifics. You'd kinda have to ask the people back when they did it in the first place. I suspect it's nothing more than the fact that it looks a lot nicer when you can see more of the scene as it's happening. Allows directors more room to play and such.

I'm applauding.

It seems to me like one of those situations where all the reviewers bashed it and a whole lot of players really dug it. Haven't tried it myself (aside from the unimpressive demo) but it is from Q? so it can't be all bad. I'm personally waiting for the price to go below $30 before I check it out. It's at about $35 now, so I may be tempted sooner or later anyway.

Holy fucking God. That is all.

Working as a projectionist, I will only ever really see 3 ratios. There's the afforementioned 2.35:1 (Cinemascope) which is indeed wider than a widescreen TV, thus the letterboxing. The other two are broadly referred to as "Flat" (because the lense they use doesn't curve at all to widen the image, as it does for scope) and are 1.85:1 and 1.66:1. 1.85:1 is your standard 16:9 widescreen TV format. I'd say about half of our movies show up in this one. The only reason that would letterbox on your TV is if the manufacturers have made some kind of weird choice in their TV's native resolution. Unfortunately, for God knows what reason, many do. Always check when you're buying a TV to see if it's actually 16:9/720p/whatever lest you should have to deal with this. 1.66:1 is decidedly more rare in North American cinemas, yet for some reason remains popular in Europe. This means that I'll only deal with it when we get European films in, and even then it'll be a toss-up. It's a tad more narrow, so on a 16:9 TV there would actually be a bit of horizontal letterboxing. At our theater, we cope with this by blowing the image up a little extra and cutting a tiny amount off the top and bottom to make it project at the same size, but I'm not sure what a TV would do to remedy the same issue. Aaaaaaaaand there's your intro to projection! As for why they would make TVs at a different ratio than 1.85:1, not a fucking clue. Doesn't make a bit of sense to me.

Agreed, Crackdown is amazing. I also left it out for the same reasons though. Guns and explosions everywhere and grittiness abound, despite it all being in an outrageous way. One of my favorite experiences was doing a race circuit in the agency truck cab for the hell of it and realizing that once you hit a certain speed, any car you collide with will instanly explode. Barrelling along a highway running a race in oncoming traffic with explosions going off everywhere was crazy fun. Also, anytime you start tallying up enough kills on a rampage to have the narrator say "Amazing!" is a good run.

Well, now you know how I feel whenever I boot up Geometry Wars and see your name sitting far above mine, your high score more than double what I can hope to achieve on a miraculous run.

Heh. Stragely appropriate. Stick around. After that post, I'm pretty confident you'll do well. Well, after getting over the double-post thing anyway.

What can I say? I'm a rhythm game whore. Set a game to music and I'll obsess until I've conquered it entirely. If it helps any, Hitman kicks my ass every time I start it up and I suck horribly at most FPSs over the easiest setting. Grrr... still haven't managed to re-achieve 5 star Free Bird on 360 yet. Was 25000 points off earlier today, which would still be over 50000 less than my PS2 high score. I just want to get that damn 5 star rating. Soon, Free Bird, you will bow to me...

Man, this one seemed a lot harder to me. Not that that's bad, just something I noticed. 3 things in particular: Still, only one of those (Bosco's) is really unintuitive, and even that only took a whole lot of dialogue tree exploring. Overall, well done again. Maybe not as good as last episode, but still more than worth playing.

I'm going to go with Lego Star Wars, Earth Defense Force, Rockstar Table Tennis, and Viva Pinata. Granted, EDF is pretty violent, but it does so in the finest crazy B-movie tradition in that it's about creating a fantastic spectacle with no regard for realism. That counts as fun in my book. Table Tennis is the other end of the spectrum, with realism as job one, but the game is so simple and pure that it's an absorbing and entertaining experience that you can just get sucked into and forget you're playing. Also fun. Lego Star Wars and Viva Pinata I don't think require justification. They're just fun, nothing more needed. There's also some stuff on Arcade, but I get the feeling you were asking about full games, so I'm leaving that out. Back to Guitar Hero: Has anyone else noticed a squeak in their strum bar yet? It happened to me on the PS2 as well, but it took a good 6 months of play before it reared its ugly head. Maybe it's because that's also how long it took me to get to Expert in GH1 and the stress doesn't hit the thing until the higher levels, but it's happening already with my X-plorer. Stupid squeaky strum bar. I'll have to take the guitar apart soon to see if I can get to the bottom of it.

Yeah, I find I'm playing my Wii less lately as well, but I'm holding out for stuff like No More Heroes and just assuming that it's the same kind of post-launch "what the hell can we do with this thing?" stumble that the DS had before it got really awesome. Can't say you really made a horrible choice though, given how much I play my 360. I played Vegas on PC. My computer was a little sluggish for it, but the game itself was quite good. Never really grabbed me in a major way, but tactical shooters have never been my thing anyway. What I played, I enjoyed. Considering that I'm not a fan of the genre, that's a pretty good sign. Feel free to add me, gamertag is the same as my name here on the thumb. Enjoy your new console.

Oh, definitely. There's no way I could move my fingers fast enough to nail that end segment last year. Now, not so much a problem. Still, now that I can do it, the fact that I'm at four stars is driving me a little nuts. The goal is now to be able to say I'v five-starred BaTM. Hello, repetitive stress disorder!

I got it, it's a nice distraction when I don't want/have time to trot out the X-plorer for an extended round of GH. The face buttons aren't particularly hard to learn the mappings of, if you've had either Xbox for a reasonable amount of time you should have no problem. I do find that for some of the 2-at-once ones I need to think about what angle my thumb should be on, but that's about as tricky as it gets. The music is hit and miss. I dig their take on Moonlight Sonata, for instance, but not so much the William Tell. Still, when you get a solid combo going and you send the game into it's freaky super-explosion mode it get's really trance-like. I'd almost call it Mizuguchi-lite, as if it were trying really hard to recreate the magic of a Mizuguchi title and falling just short. Not short enough that it's not worth trying, but short enough that I'm not going around reccommending it to everyone like I do Rez, Space Channel 5, Lumines, etc. Speaking as a total rhythm game addict, it's fun, pretty solid at the higher levels, and a decent time if you're going for the unlockable fireworks. Otherwise, the demo is the way to go until you get a chance to play it for yourself on someone else's system.

Oooh! Love Harvey Birdman, love Phoenix Wright. Unfortunately, the developer's track record doesn't instill the greatest amount of confidence. As long as they still have Colbert doing Reducto and Phil, it'll at least be worth a laugh.

Dunno what I did, but thanks. Feel a little guilty that I just finished telling you off in the other thread now. At any rate, more content is always welcome but even if the thumb were to go down in flames, please tell me that the forum would survive. I really just have this one forum that I give a shit about, and having it die would suck on some fundamental and primal level of suck too disheartening to imagine.

Would Dr Mario be put under suspicion for doping? Does Dinosaur Land have a national anthem to be played should Yoshi win? Can Baby Bowser compete without a permission slip? Is Lakitu a valid strategy for the high jump? There are many questions that must be answered before this game hits retail, most of them quite dumb. Still, it's fun to wonder.