BardicKnowledge

The fastest ways to get treasures / customs are: On DS: Smash Run and be wildly good at it; otherwise, Classic Mode and game the roulette wheel by using the Home button. On Wii U: Have four Amiibos fight each other for an hour long match -- do something productive while they fight. Retrieve all your presents after, repeat! Short of that, All-Star on Hard gives the most custom parts if you're good enough to get the achievements for clear speed; otherwise, Palutena's custom "get off me" special is the best for Trophy Rush. As for custom equipment, you've asked for characters that play very differently. For Kirby, I would put his defense up so you can make really great use of his awesome recovery. For Samus, I'd go with a more speed-oriented build so she can keep up her camping game. On Falco, hit as hard as possible -- his recovery is always going to suck, and he is fast enough, you just need to make the hits count. For Marth, I'd avoid boosting stats and instead go for special properties. He's a good all-around cast member on stats, so any mechanical advantage you can gain will be extremely useful -- maybe the burning dash or quicker Smash charging? Question for you (and for everyone else as well): What custom special move setups is everyone using? And does anyone have definitive word on if custom special moves will be allowed in the big tournaments? I continue to hope for that, haha. (Aside: Obviously custom equipment won't be allowed, nor should it be).

Good resolution! For me, I'll borrow that and add 2. Finish my dissertation before Christmas.

1) Faith Connors 2) Ezio Auditore da Firenze 3) Rosalina

^Ah, the arcade release didn't have such a mode, and I'm only familiar with the arcade edition of Alpha 3...which also means no Fei Long or PSP bonus characters for me in that game. My favorite part of Alpha 3 is that for each -ism I have a different Bison doll. Juni is best with X-ism to max out her 360 throw damage, Juli has a fireball kick that chains into uppercut on V-ism, and Cammy on A-ism gets the Bumblebee super, the game's coolest looking attack. I usually play V-ism Cody for his 3D dodge and infinite combo.

Thus far: 3DS Luigi Case Amazon gift card Wii U Pro Controller Hammerwatch (Steam game) Miracle on 34th Street The Godfather Trilogy Back to the Future Trilogy Nvidia GTS450 (a replacement for my GTX260 to enable DX11 games) Piano Guys CD x4 Gingerbread Twix, Toffee flavored Andes chocolates ("mint" shaped but no mint, tastes like butterscotch) $100 check (thanks, parents! Addie got one too, so $200 total to help us pay moving expenses / bills...or buy more Wii U games, haha) More to come when Addie's family arrives tomorrow... Update: Got a Zelda Amiibo and NES Remix Pack for Wii U from the inlaws -- the latter highly recommended if you kick a lot of ass at old games.

The Alpha storyline is really amazing, but the gameplay of both 2 and 3 is pretty broken and stupid at high levels of play -- mainly focused around using the custom combo activation to create unblockable situations and then infinite combos until you die (this is especially true of 3).

Marvel et al has long combos, but the skill requirement to OHKO a character for 2-3 meters is very low compared to the skill requirement for optimal combos in Street Fighter IV. For instance, there are far fewer one-frame links in Marvel than there are in SFIV. I actually don't mind the focus attack as an additional baiting layer -- it's the cancel combos with such tight timing that I dislike. Overall though, I am definitely with Andy -- they haven't ever had a game as hype as Street Fighter II. This is why all of us gather around the ST cabinet every MAGFest

Got my present today -- 3DS case and $20 on Amazon, both of which are awesome. Also came with a $10 coupon to World Market in the packaging that Addie will put to good use. Thanks a bunch, Shaggy! I'll get a pic up of the case after my school meetings today...

The boat song from Final Fantasy 1, on piano.

Glad you like it! This year's OCR present is finally shipping today -- Owen has had the flu, so my whole house shut down for a few days. Looking forward to sending it out in a short while, and to seeing what I get this year!

For those of you looking to unlock custom special moves on the Wii U, I have found a nice way to do it! I currently own only one Amiibo, a Yoshi for Owen. After training it up to Level 50 by having it fight capable players, I set it against three CPUs in a 30 stock match -- it takes about 40 minutes to finish, and I get 3 trophies and 6 custom items. Multiply that by 4x Amiibos (after Christmas for me) and you'll get 24 custom parts in 40 minutes of time that you didn't have to play Smash. You might be able to grind them out faster in All-Star mode on Hard (which gives 8 customs per completion), but even though I can clear it, I can't guarantee that I can clear it three times in 40 minutes. That also requires actual time investment, haha.

I'll be shipping my gift off tomorrow. Looking forward to sending it!

If you don't make one of them MK8, you have failed. It's easily the best iteration of the series post-DLC, and was a strong contender beforehand.

I'll be relatively nearby in Indiana starting with the new year.

I'm with Koriantor on this one -- downloading a program authored by someone one doesn't know is foolish anywhere on the Internet. I'm all for helping people out, and I benefit from the assistance of this community for my own academic work, but asking someone to put a program on their computer is a big ask. I'm happy to throw my music library list to you, incidentally, but getting some code up on Github is a good suggestion.

I am signed up, hooray!

*grabs hammer* It's a chicken/egg situation, IMO. Women entering the industry at equal rates as men (or at least more proportionate rates -- 50/50 is overly optimistic) would solve lots of problems, I agree. But why should they be part of an industry that by and large produces products that alienate them, ascribing them to some sort of exoticised/eroticized Other? I imagine that Sarkeesian would argue if we reduce sexism in mainstream gaming on the consumer side, we open the door for more women to enter gaming on the development side.

I love the sentence about Abrams here. I don't think that summer blockbusters are immune to criticism, however; on the contrary, if no one performs any critique about the ways with which they engage culture, then there are never going to be any resources or reasons to try and change things at the smaller scale you mention. The first Tropes vs. Women video is probably her best, though I'd have to rewatch them all to give a fair opinion on that -- she merely points out that the act of damseling (a verb she invents, but one that I really, really like) is lazy plot writing at best, and alienates the female audience by being offensive given how common the trope is at worst. This _does_ hurt the industry. Even if for some reason you don't buy the argument that the misproportion of damselled female characters to empowered ones impacts the market potential for video games, lazy writing is bad. Even if it sells (and I admit that it does), it should be taken to task, because games both could and should continue to improve in their ability to effectively tell a story and engage a player. Cultural criticism helps remind readers (or viewers, in Anita's case) that the art form has numerous avenues of growth. If that growth usually happens first in the indie scene (a point with which I agree with Tom above), so be it.

Jarel even though it's a couple months early, the next time you check this thread please move me from Minneapolis to Lafayette, Indiana. Hooray, moving!

I got up some flyers in Ferguson Hall at UMN and will announce it next week in class. Looking forward to being on the panel and seeing a few of you!

In addition to the Touhou games, which I recommend again even though you mentioned that you'd get to them, if you have a PS4 or PS Vita I can't recommend Velocity 2X enough. It's a really great take on the twitch-based shooter, and one of my choices for game of the year. An older choice that no one has mentioned is that Konami outsourced the development of Gradius V to Treasure, and the result is a beautifully difficult shmup that rewards multiple loops of play. It's available on the PS2.

That particular incident, in which Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot following his low review score because Eidos threatened to pull advertising revenue from the site, happened seven years ago. It was explained to the public in detail at least two years ago at this link: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/116360-Jeff-Gerstmann-Explains-His-Departure-From-Gamespot If that's the only example of a posted review you have to critique, you're extremely late to the party. Hell, Gamespot and Giant Bomb (the site Gerstmann went on to found after being fired) are now owned by the same parent company and their offices are in the same building. Why wait until fall of 2014 to complain? Similarly, anyone complaining about Arthur Gies' review (for Polygon) of Bayonetta 2, in which Gies gives it a significantly lower score than almost any other outlet, isn't complaining about developer/publisher influenced corruption. If you read the review, one gets the impression that Gies lowers the score because he feels the game is too sexist for 2014. It's an opinion I happen to disagree with (I come down on the side that Bayonetta is both an empowerment figure and sex symbol simultaneously -- dual identities are fine), but it's not one that reeks of any corruption.

This is certainly how she (read: her Feminist Frequency work) is being used in academia. She is an interesting speaker/writer/presenter doing great research not because it ends a conversation, but because it begins one. My own thoughts are close to Dave's -- one or two tone adjustments and I'm on board. This is very common in academic circles, and it isn't anywhere near as big a problem as anyone thinks it is, at least as far as citing her work as a source that helps enable future research on games and gender issues. My biggest problem thus far has not been with her at all, but the people ardently defending her work as unassailable in any context whatsoever. They are actually denying the very purpose of academic research! We are supposed to wrestle with the claims she's making, and we are supposed to respond in thoughtful ways -- see Larry's quote about about using only pieces of the work. Anyone that doesn't allow for those sorts of conversations to take place is just as detrimental to the maturation of games as an artistic medium as the people trying to prevent her work from being heard are.* This last thought was inspired by my social-media-linked reading for today, entitled "The Offense Industry on the Offense." I for one am extremely glad we have these videos to work with and I hope that we get more material from Anita before all is said and done. Not because I agree with everything she puts out there (in fact, I have more and more problems with the videos the more of them I watch), but because the videos invite serious conversations about gaming, something that we -- even/especially OverClocked ReMix we, given the mission statement about "...the promotion of video game music as an art form" -- should be happy to engage. *Caveat: The threats against Anita are absolutely horrifying, and they compound the fact that the Internet (especially Twitter) has a nasty tendency to polarize everything into a "my side or their side" situation. As a result, the threats cause a secondary problem -- they make it even more difficult to maintain a nuanced response, since of course I support that someone is causing us to have these types of conversations!

Depends on how backtracking to town (or non-combat) works. Diablo (I) is one dungeon and it's a fantastic game that still holds up today. Similarly, I didn't mind the back half of FFIV: The After Years because every couple of floors I could warp back to the ship to restock, heal, and switch out party members.

Owen probably watches 30 minutes of gaming per day in addition to 30 minutes of television. He likes to watch me play Mario before he goes to bed, and the TV watching is almost always the 11:30 AM showing of Jeopardy, which he enjoys watching me play along with before his nap. I agree that going for zero screen time probably just isn't going to work in today's world given how often we check our cell phones for e-mail and text messages.