BardicKnowledge

Happy birthday, everyone!

I would suggest to you that taking down their service purposely for so long makes no sense financially -- Capcom was fuming that they as a 3rd party was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I understand that you don't like Sony -- I'm not a huge fan either after they got rid of OtherOS. But this is going way too far into the land of crazy conspiracy theory. No company would hurt their image this badly on purpose, period.

I am all for the concept of rewarding polite, mature players. Zircon and I would still be playing HoN now if the community weren't largely made up of total jerks -- let's find a way to fix this before DotA 2, please. Edit: Related to this topic is how attitude affects e-sports: http://www.toptiertactics.com/2011/05/the-real-reason-e-sports-cant-go-mainstream-anytime-soon/

One last minute donation from me at last! Hopefully next year we'll be able to do more than $50 -- wait for us to get out of grad school

Soul Calibur is the only fighting game (series) I can get Addie to play -- assuming you're not being sarcastic, what is it about SC compared to something like street fighter or marvel? 3d movement / lack of a need for complex button inputs (comparatively)?

She's vastly improved over CS1 from what I hear -- maybe I'm remembering CT when her bolts all hit three times. Edit: Frog doing almost no damage is part of the overall damage nerf, but you _really_ notice it.

For those of you that have BBCS, the 700 MB rebalance patch is out today. Get it! (On 360, anyway. PSN players will be able to get it when the store goes back up...) Edit: Platinum the Trinity is also released, though I don't plan on buying her. In any case, I've noticed a ton of changes to the couple characters I've been able to try out. Here's my short changelist (though I'm sure you can visit dustloop.com for a complete one). Damage appears to be lower across the board, making the game last longer than two combos (for most of us -- there are still 50% combos or more, they're just the old 85-90% combos). Litchi: Can't cancel into itsuu (staff spin special block + launch) anymore -- this effectively erases all of her good CS1 combos. Forward throw does not launch anymore, but instead leaves them in a stunned, standing state. Rachel: Lightning doesn't hit as many times as before. Frog does almost no damage now. Lambda-11: She has the old 5DD, 2DD, j. DD, 2DD, j. DD, 2DD, 214D combo ender than Nu-13 used to have.

Hey, congratulations everybody! ....I am still yet to make my donation for the drive. So you'll end up with slightly more than you currently have, assuming you're still counting through 5/12.

If you record the concert, upload stuff for those of us who can't make it please! Sounds like it'll be an awesome show.

Thor was good because they kept the involvement of everyone from Earth to a minimum, with the exception of Agent Coulson. Clark Gregg continues to be the perfect straight-man for the Marvel movies, and he gets a slightly bigger role than usual here. That being said, if you come to this film expecting a great plot that ends up with Natalie Portman getting it on with the god of thunder, you'll be very disappointed. This is a film about the non-Earth Marvel universe that happens to have some stuff take place on Earth. The only problem involves our knowledge of upcoming Marvel films (Avengers) and the ending, which isn't as dramatic as it would otherwise be as a result. Still, a good film that I enjoyed a great deal.

I am going to run all of my classes in a points-accumulative fashion -- when those principles are applied without the explicit game aspects thrown in, it's known as "contract grading". Essentially, the syllabus states the requirements for an A compared to a B and a C -- you choose the grade you want and do the appropriate amount of work. If I ever teach a VGM or film music class (hopefully!) then I will go all out with the game aspects also, and include an ARG for the class to work through as the review for the midterm exam (extra credit for finishing the game, which covers the midterm topics and assists in study anyway).

Awesome news -- I hope you do well!

I'm seeing it tonight, impressions to come!

I got my copies a few days ago -- great stuff for my car that will live there a long time. I'm looking forward to the final album! Seriously though, if anyone is reading this thread and did not at least get the digital version of all this great music, go get it now -- you're missing out on a great set or three of music.

Vs random people it still kind of sucks. Playing us works fine though, which you should do more of. :p

ThatGameCompany gets paid by Sony whenever someone downloads a copy. Giving all of your customers a $10 game as a result of something like this isn't a huge deal for Sony (Microsoft made Undertow free for a week following a big outage of Live service).

When Journey releases, make it free to download on Sony's dime for the first five days. Each end user gets something they didn't have, a great company gets some extra promotion, and Sony looks like they give a crap about their customers. Everybody wins!

Kizyr, you're awesome. I was coming anyway, but that's super rad.

Dan, If you haven't seen Karen Collins' book on game audio, have a look at it, as its a great resource for academics. Your questions lack a certain amount of substance, but I will answer them anyway: I judge whether or not I like VGM using the same criteria as I would in a concert hall. I don't find all orchestral music compelling, nor do I find all VGM compelling (note: you should probably not use "video game music" as a genre -- there's obviously a big difference between something like a Baroque fugue and a pop ballad, right?). I will say that, especially early on, a focus on a clear and memorable melody was present in VGM moreso than in other media. I don't think mixing for games is much different than mixing as an indie artist -- good production is good production across the board.

Well, the challenge was to fully orchestrate the level, so the orchestral style is kind of set in advance. If you want to do other styles, go for it -- just don't expect contest rules to accommodate you.

One of the biggest issues is that they did not acknowledge the existence or relevance of the Prime games when making Other M -- how you could think that those games are not canon is beyond me. Metroid Prime is one of the most atmospheric games I've ever played. One would think you would be striving to re-create that feeling as much as possible... In any case, there are really only two places where the upgrade thing really annoyed me. Obviously, the varia thing -- running a lava zone without the varia suit as part of standard gameplay was incredibly stupid and should never be required (though it's a neat thing to make possible to facilitate speed runs). Second, while I can see good story reasons for not wanting to have Samus use her extra gear -- "We want to do as little damage to the ship as possible -- no missiles unless absolutely necessary" would have been fine, and speed boost / power bombs also makes sense so the crew is not endangered...it's much harder to justify the restriction of the grapple beam. Really though, the bigger problem was that of monologue, as the episode points out. This was entirely too much flashback. Have Samus greet Adam, and as she speaks show us a quick glimpse of young Samus standing in line with the squad, leaving the rest to our imagination -- after Fusion, I'm sure the majority of players would be able to fill in the gap. Just because it hasn't happened in the timeline doesn't mean that players are unaware of the connection. Similarly, except for Anthony, I don't know that we need to know the names and roles of the people on the squad. It's not likely that Samus knows each and every one of them still, is it? Make Anthony the squad leader of the losery NPC's, have him do the cool action stuff he does (all of which is admittedly pretty awesome -- his scenes are the best cutscenes in the game), and just have other people get killed off. Samus doesn't care about them, and neither do we.

Unfortunately, there are only about 2-3 viable builds per starting class, and you _must_ get your stats right or they're a total waste. Take the time to read a guide and pick the class you want if you're going to play RO...especially on a server with crap (official) drop rates.

I agree entirely -- Sony's past record sucks terribly. It is unbelievable how much crap they have pulled and gotten away with lately. While I respect zircon's point that GE and other large companies are screwing us over more than Sony ever has, there's something more personal about Sony's activities (GE, while running away with truckloads of our collective cash, has not ever attempted to install a rootkit on my computer, for instance) that really upsets me. This combined with Stevo / sephire's point about "You don't fuck with people who install Linux on their Playstations" spells a storm of bad trouble that was headed Sony's way. If they hadn't removed the advertised feature of the PS3, none of this would have happened...which doesn't excuse their poor security model, but that's more of a side point than the focus.

One positive thing that arises out of all of this is that there's (slightly) more public awareness of Sony removing an advertised feature (the ability to install Linux) from their PS3s. Yes, it sucks that PSN is down. However, it also sucks that people who bought a PS3 over a 360 primarily because of the ability to use it as a Linux computer can't do that anymore.

Actually, for calling your plays in footbal, the VMU was ideal -- it showed you a short list of plays that your opponent could not see. So it was used for gameplay applications, just fyi.