The Author

But i have a life!!!

Must resist MMORPG addiction.

He's kinda right though. Unmod had its upsides and its downsides, but as the site grew, the bad started outweighing the good. Meh, I guess if we'd been smarter back then, Unmod would have changed and avoided deletion, but meh, internet drama is not worth getting angry about.

Now I feel stupid for not getting the lamp thing in the video.

But its a wolf shirt...

Grats on finding love and happiness!

What the hell is this crappy excuse for a speech?

You probably all know my favorite videogame commercial, and I wouldn't mind seeing it "stolen": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om84Zc4-KcQ You may want to turn down the volume becaue of the amount of awesome.

Tried the solo training, seems neat.

If you don't want to play a platforming game in Dracula's castle, then you don't play Castlevania. It seems that what some people want is a totally new experience that stays in touch with its roots. A franchise is built upon core concepts. Castlevania's core is: Platformin, and Kicking Dracula's stone cold ass. It's that simple. From the first one to SOTN to Portrait, or order of Ecclesia, it's been about killing a dude that doesn't really die. The innovation is in other aspects of the game. Look at the differences between SOTN and Aria of Sorrow. AOS has a very complex magic system where every monster is a spell, you didn't have that in SOTN. Not only are there a variety of spells, and no to play-through are going to be the same, but in the sequel they upped the ante by adding levels to spells that change the appearance and spell effects. Portrait had the dual protagonists that removed the jack of all trades aspect of the protagonist and made for interesting strategies. They built upon the many spells of AoS and DoS but still stayed away from the soul capture aspect of the previous games. Order had another core difference: they took out the weapons, making the character entirely dependent on magic. Portrait and Order also had something different: lot of time was spent outside of the castle. But yeah, they were all the same, with that platforming and killing a bad guy, just like Mario, or Ninja Gaiden. Why can,t they just make one very generic platformer and then move on?

I have a hard time seeing post SOTN as "formulaic" especially when the GBA/DS games are considered. They used the idea of SOTN but went in radical directions. If you ignore the animeish looks, the characters are ultimately different, with new ways to use weapons, or use magic. Sonic, on the other hand, was touting new features, but the core remained the same, and since that core gameplay was hardly compatible with 3D platforming, it failed badly. I think some people fail to see the inherent differences between a series of games evolving on the same basic ideal and something becoming a routine. A good example is the Mario games, where in the main series there are only 2 games that were rather close to the previous one in terms of game play: The Lost Levels and Galaxy 2.

I prefer the philosophy of: if it ain't broke, improve it.

I found it interesting and it had a lot of potential, but lacked the pacing to exploit it. Had they covered less material (Lets say from the south pole to the Zuko rescuing Aang) they could have made it better. I liked how they streamlined the South Pole events (in the series, that alone was about an hour) and they managed to do a lot with the little time they had on each plot point. But if they try to make the second book in one movie, they will make this a lot worse. That movie was simply looking for a slower pacing, which was actually surprising because pacing is one of Shyamalan's strengths in his other movies. (Although I've only seen Unbreakable and The 6th Sense...)

Some Commodore 64 title, either a game about a blue cat or something or a transformer game... It was way too long ago.

I feel like shit, but I blame the heat wave... Can't stand heat plus humidity.

Or: 9 months prior to July 6th is sure fire gettin' laid night.

Hey, happy B-day my early July birthday kindred spirit.

Virtual Virtual Boy for the win!!!

Couldn't resist even though I'm quite broke, got the borderlands DLC and complete Civ 4. Not a bad deal for 55$, although steam has been a bit of a bitch with downloading and providing me with CD Keys... still can't play borderlands and I'm downloading civ although it says no connection...

Yes, a Flossetto, sounds just perfect.

Well, Nintendo seems to be in Disney's good graces nowadays, so it might be feasible. Duck Tales Rebirth!

How hard is it to stuff better hardware in a plastic casing? If I wanted, I could build a 10 000$ computer, everything top of the line, but it wouldn't perform any differently than a 5000 or a 2000 one simply because the software isn't there. Their machines may be technologically inferior, they are in many ways much much more market friendly. When the technology becomes cheaper, Nintendo simply redoes the design and rethinks the product. Yes, it can be annoying that they release new hardware revisions every 2 years or so. The evolution went 2004: DS / 2006: DS Light / 2009: DSi and 2010: DSXL. The 3DS won't be released until at least 2011, and at that point, games for the DS will still be published. Why did the DS evolved this way and this "fast"? Batteries and LCD have been changing faster than that, they became cheaper, better quality, and more mass produced. You would be foolish to not adapt your product to the new materials available, hell, original DS components may have been removed from the production line by the newer stuff. Every company's like that, as soon as a product is released the question is: how can we make it better but not more expensive. When I worked as a tech writer, I saw whole products change radically simply because of the lowering or increasing of the cost for something as simple as a color changing LED. (Edit: Also Sony wrecked the LED market with the Blue Ray release. That too affected some product lines) Products are not obsolete when you buy them, they become obsolete the moment the design is finalized and it is taken in production. New models of cars come out every year, with new features. CPUs become faster. Cameras get better resolution and memory. TVs get bigger, better resolution, and even when it reaches the ultimate best point, in a years time it'll change. (Case in point, my previous roommate wanted and HD TV and I went shopping with him. We were presented with the best TVs ever, big, great refresh rate, 1080p, all the bells and whistle, that TV was the high end it would never get better. 2 months later that model was no longer on the floor and was replaced by something better. Now it's all about 3D TVs and how they will be the best thing ever. Can't blame Nintendo for doing what the market demands, it would be idiotic. Hell, I was surprised there were no Wii hardware redesign at E3 this year.)

Is there video of these attacks made during their conference, been wanting to see them but can't find them.

It's probably about costs. Something about Nintendo is that they always had this keeping costs low policy, and until they can lower the cost of upgraded hardware, they don't release it. And pricing changes fast depending on manufacturing techniques. (I mean, look at blue ray LEDs)

Meh, nobody's forcing you to buy them. I think Nintendo has this approach because portables have a shorter lifespan, and when you lose, break or in anyway make your portable unusable, you don't have to buy the same thing over and over again, it gets slightly better each time. Plus, I still have my DS Fat, and I haven't had any need to upgrade it in anyway for it to still play games. The stars of hardware changes this time around would be the PSP, with the different versions some dropping the UMD drive and going on downloadable only.