BardicKnowledge

If Halo would have come out for PC (only: the only reason anyone bought it for PC is because it gained popularity on the Xbox first) instead of consoles, we would have kept playing UT99 until Unreal 2004 came out. '99 is a far superior game in damn near every way except graphics, which 2004 fixed. There's nothing like having a setting to automatically say "suck it down!" to your opponent upon a rocket kill built into your game. That said, it redefined what a console FPS could be, and that's awesome. I just like my mouse. On topic, I do think that the story for the first one was very slick. More story in FPS games is good. Compelling single-player (Halo's biggest strength over the PC games IMO) is also good. Bring us more well written story and the rest will follow.

I'll chime in and say that having finished it I also think it's the best since SOTN, and it does a lot of things _better_ than the PSX classic -- it strikes a good balance between having quests while not bogging you down with them like DoS (soul hunting = quests) or PoR did. Shanoa also strikes a good balance between physical and magical combat, and is the only hero in the entire series to do so. PoR becomes a Jonathan-fest once you get the VK, and the others are obviously all physical attack based in the endgame. There is no super / gravity jump in the maingame, which is refreshing. The mechanic to replace it kicks all kinds of ass, and can be used to propel Shanoa in all directions instead of just straight up. Oh, and if anyone wants to get in on Race mode sometime, my friend code is 2879-2723-8994. I'll even go without the speed / new super jump options if you haven't found them yet...lemme know!

It's Zero Mission (GBA) style mid-air morphing, and done on purpose. Super Metroid is the only one where mid-air morphing DOESN'T kill your momentum.

I'd like to encourage anyone that got this early to post reviews and critiques to help inform the rest of us -- it's a product that should in theory be interesting to the community, and the review I read (Gamespot) wasn't helpful at all. How much control over notes do you actually have, for instance? Is it worth the money?

^Drack, that's exactly the combo I used for the middle section of the game. Has anyone figured out a reliable way to defeat the Weapon Master? He's crazy hard -- especially with two of them on screen.

Just wanted to throw out a cool Glyph I found -- everyone should try very hard to get the Werebat drop. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a very good option against the next few bosses after you get it, and allows easy transition between physical and magical combat (which is growing more important by the room, it seems).

I love the new combo system for left/right hands. IMO this is the first one that has a better control scheme and weapon system that SOTN. I'm sure I'm not far at all, and am loving the game. And yes, Shanoa's backdash (you start with it, so no spoiler tags needed) is awesome -- anyone know if there's an item that increases distance or speed on it?

Just wanted to thank Jam and GT for being awesome. When I get my copy of Brawl back (the fact that I've loaned it out speaks volumes about the differences between it and Melee btw), I'd love to play sometime.

Definitely agreed -- at least at the moment, the metagame hasn't progressed far enough with each character. We don't have a Brawl equivalent of how Chudat's Ice Climbers changed the IC game, for instance. I'm not opposed to having some fun with this with friends -- in fact, if anyone going to MAGFest is bringing a Wii (Atmuh?), I'd love to see it. It's the idea of changing the standard ruleset to a mod that isn't standard by definition. I love the Item Standard list in Jack Kieser's SWF thread -- but I realize that even if I prefer to play that way, it should be at best an alternate setting, not the standard. What do you think of the project mentioned by SamuraiPanda to create a balance patch for Brawl? Would you prefer that to an all-out physics change? Edit: In case this comes off the wrong way, I'm a total scrub and am happy to acknowledge it. I'm just trying to pick the brains of those better at the game than I am.

I'll grab it sometime this week. Hoping to finish it before Fallout 3 comes out next week...

^It's cool that you can add wavedashing and L-Canceling back into Brawl -- but isn't that kind of missing the point? Aside from the novelty, I feel that if you need those things to be good, you should be playing Melee. This isn't a knock specifically against you, GT -- I just don't see any usefulness to the concept. For instance, tournaments (hopefully) will still be vanilla Brawl, so the wavedashing is probably not going to help in the long run too much.

I picked one remix, and one track from an OCR album. Sucks to have to choose though. I think searching for a leaning towards genre / title will be interesting. For instance, does # of remixes a game have correlate with the favorite mix here? In other words, more Terra & Ice Cap kthxbye. </sarcasm>

Haha. It's still funny to me a week later.

It gets full at primetime hours, but other than that it's great. Still, it's never full for so long that you can't sit there for 60 seconds clicking refresh to get in (in my experience, anyway).

The idea of Quake Live is great...unfortunately, I have no beta code! If anyone has extra invites, feel free to throw one my way.

First, the big news: If you download the trial for 360, you get two days of free full-featured Live play. Go get it now! Anyway, for those of you who haven't read about it: It's an RTS designed to work on the console. Vastly simpler than most, but there's something fun in there that is indescribable. IGN's Review sums things up better than I can, but doesn't mention the free multiplayer Oh, and for anyone who has played a while and is still wondering: Ships with one armor and one cannon upgrade will kill ships with two cannon upgrades -- the flip side to this is that the two cannon ship will take a level 2 town quicker (and sometimes without having to heal / respawn first). I'll be using my 2nd day of free playing today, so if anyone wants to play, just find me on Live (it's MasterTenor).

Liontamer's VGFrequency blog (which hasn't been updated in a while -- make some news already! ) had this and others a while ago. Still, it's fun to hear again.

Since you've said you don't have a lot of experience with Brawl, I would focus on an understanding of the basics of the new physics engine as opposed to any character specific things. Getting out of a Melee mindset will help you more than any advanced techs will IMO. Sorry I can't do more specific advice -- I haven't played Brawl for a good month or so, and don't want to steer you in the wrong direction.

Alas, I don't own Zelda because I didn't enjoy it as much as I was expecting after playing through it on a friend's Wii. Do I have to go rent it to get homebrew on the Wii, or is there a better way yet?

If only the sequel to SoM would release on the VC -- I'd throw down so much money for SD3. SMRPG + Shining Force II + Mana has been a solid few weeks, though...gotta buy some points!

I'm playing the AM2R tech demo, which is awesome. My first playthrough was 10/20 with no deaths -- I guess I'm better at combat, worse at finding crap. Anyway, are there any major upgrades I missed? I got the following: Bomb Missile Spider Ball Hi-Jump Boots Speed Booster Spazer

Shirt is amazing -- I'm glad the team has creative responses to all of the bullshit that is flung their way.

All stages can be done in less than two minutes, I think -- with the exception of the final stage. If you average 1:30 a stage and take 3:00 to beat the last level, then it takes you 19:30 to beat the entire game. Not easy, but mathematically possible, yes.

After reading that each campaign will be completely unique, this might actually turn out to be a good thing. So the Zerg campaign will have "RPG elements", and the Protoss campaign will feature "diplomacy". Does that mean that Kerrigan, Samir Duran, and other Zerg heroes may play more like WC3 heroes than Jim Raynor and Zeratul? And how will this effect the map editor (that should still ship with all three versions)? Ugh -- waiting for answers is terrible.

This is terrible. I'm no longer looking forward to the game nearly as much -- I sincerely hope Blizzard knows what they're doing with this one.