Necrotic

But to compound the terribleness is the fact that along with EGM's closure, 1UP.com just got acquired by UGO. They fired Shane Bettenhausen for God's sake. And most of the 1up staff that does the podcasts and other cool stuff. Things like The 1UP Show, Broken Pixels, Retronauts etc. are now all gone down the shitter or are going to be severely limited, and a handful of their most credible journalists either left after the announcement. Great. EGM and 1UP as we know it gone in one day. My favourite magazine and website, both of which were related and awesome. For fuck's sakes. It was like the one super credible game journalism site that was built by gamers for gamers and went above and beyond to cater to its fanbase. And now it's all falling into shambles. D:

One thing I miss about TFC that's not in TF2 is conc grenade jumping. Hilariously awesome good times. Lack of little details like that does not make TF2 a bad game however. TFC is hard to get into these days unless you're nostalgic. I agree it's more strategic and the gameplay requires some greater level of mastery (once again, things like mastering conc jumping took me months of practice for example) but at the same time that works against it for people who just want to get in, get out, and have fun. Seriously though, the TFC heyday was in the late 90's/early 2000's and I don't see it many people being willing to pick it up again, including myself.

Both systems are great and I'm not sure after having a taste of both systems I could let either of them go. The PSP is a good multifunctional system and when you hack it, it's an incredibly solid investment. I'd certainly recommend a hacked PSP over a DS, but not a vanilla PSP. If you grab a 4GB+ memory stick and slap it on that bad boy, instant classic gaming gratification. SNES emulation (Mode 7 emulation's gotten better but games with it will drain your battery FAST), CPS2, Neo-Geo. It's fantastic. It has games like MGS Portable Ops and J'eanne d'Arc which are two games I'm pretty sure anyone will like. I'm not sure how easy the newest models are to hack however, it's become increasingly difficult to my knowledge. The DS' strength, for myself, is in its games library. There are more games on the DS I tend to play, and games like Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow or Order of Eccelsia will seriously have any platforming fan keeping busy for a long time. Advanced Wars, played that for dozens of hours. In terms of how many hours I've stuck into my DS for actually playing DS games vs. playing PSP games (not counting emulation) the DS wins by far, so it's very possible that you'll experience the same thing. I've never hacked my DS, but I've heard its emulation sucks. At the same time I've heard its homebrew utilities are a lot more fun and practical to play with than the PSP's.

Was about to say that a combined option of the two was not present and would've been preferred, but you just said it for me. Not just that but when the poll was first started the only lossless option was "WAV" and not "WAV/FLAC" when I voted. It got changed I guess. This might've skewed some votes. That said, I'd still settle with 192+ kbps VBR MP3's and still not bitch and moan about it at the end of the day.

Y-Y-Yessah! Right away sah!

That still requires you to disconnect your 'net before starting the game though doesn't it? Thanks, I think. I ended up realizing that my post basically came out as a love letter to Valve, but it's not entirely inaccurate either.

I've been using Steam since it first entered beta like 5 years ago, and I can say while it isn't always perfect, the only reason it's not perfect is because it usually involves Valve doing some massive-scale project that helps benefit the community of gamers that plays their games, and that can occassionally, yes, lead to instabilility. The program itself apparently uses really heavy security measures as well and so there's really nothing to worry about in terms of instability causing you to lose your investments or anything like that. The only way that will happen is if you're stupid enough to get phished out of your account password. The reason Valve collects data from people is to aggregate all the possible configurations of hardware people have, check to see how their performance is on certain pieces of software, and create their games so that everyone on a vasy majority of PC's can play them. That's a huge problem in PC games instrustry is that 90% of games released cannot be played on a vast majority of computers at the time. Valve has the upper hand there because every single one of their games can run and look pretty on a low end PC, but look absolutely gorgeous on a high-end PC at the same time. They are by far the best company when it comes to performance scaling and they're a pretty huge leader when it comes to graphics technology. They also track things like play time just to figure out where they should be putting their time and energy into serving the community, and that's why Left 4 Dead or Team Fortress 2 ended up having so much time and energy put into it. That's rare for a company, to make sure that you're customers are 100% satisfied rather than having their fans' begrudging acceptance of slightly-better-than-mediocrioty. It's not free of problems but most can be fixed in about 2 minutes of looking up your problem on the Steam site. It's also a memory hog and you might feel the punch if your system is particularly low end. The main thing is that people make a bigger deal out of Steam having problems, or being so great, than they really need to to. The simplest answer is that it's a great, not perfect, but great platform. It has awesome community tools and pretty much goes above and beyond any other content delivery system including console ones like XBLA and PSN. But still has its faults. And it's one of the only delivery systems on PC that I trust because of how well-designed it is. When you compare it to GameTap or Direct2Drive, there really is no disparity between which is the best.

Save music from Resident Evil games. Such a majority of the game is intense and scary with lots of dark ambience. Then you get to a save room and suddenly a feeling of calmness and relaxation exudes from just being in that partciular room, so that your heart rate returns to a normal pace, and you can finally get a grip on everything that just happened over the past 30 minutes of your life spent unfolding this immense mystery and battling some of the most terrifying creatures ever imagined. Then the minute you step away from the room you get that small dose of tranquility ripped away helplessly by the sheer crushing ambience of what comes ahead, to great effect. It's brilliant. It may not technically be robust music, but the sheer ambience the music that is in the game provides makes or breaks the experience entirely. I thought about it because me and one of my house mates are going through each individual RE game.

Called it: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3170373 DSi Software is going to be region locked. That sucks, being an importer myself.

You're kidding, right? Like, being sarcastic or something? Stuff that's oriented for gamers like you and I is so ridiculously costly for a company to develop and sell, predisposed audience or not. Why make more work for themselves? They're laughing all the way to the bank, and there's no reason to stop the direction they've been going in. None at all. It's the path of least resistance. Mountains of easy money for very little effort. This is how businesses stay alive in a competitive market. Why do people not realize this.

Regarding the DSi: The removal of the GBA slot sounds pretty stupid. One thing I'm worried about is that with the addition of a downloadable games service, is the new firmware of the DS going to result in harder region locking from games released after the DSi comes out? DS game imports have been a pretty huge thing, in fact, I have a few imports myself. I'm not sold on it yet, but that doesn't mean I won't ever be. It just seems silly because if I upgrade it sure would be nice to sell my DS Lite instead of having three DS's lying around (I also have a fatty though it's semi-broken). I wouldn't be willing to sell it, otherwise I would have nothing to play my GBA games on. Regarding the rest of the conference: Fuck yes Sin and Punishment 2 etc.

I just watched the trailer on Youtube. You weren't kidding, the screenshots don't quite do it justice. After I'm finished work I'm probably gonna give it a go. Looks impressive. I agree about the animation. It's especially impressive for a guy who probably doesn't have an entire rotoscoping studio backing him.

I'm down for SFA3. AIM = NNCDeathBox Atmuh's IRC idea wins.

My world just flipped itself. I don't even know my left from rights anymore.

silly goose nobody played Legendia

Yes! I think Legendia was the only Tales game that's an exception but I could be wrong.

me and my bro went through Symphonia and Abyss together I will be getting this for sure especially since it has the Atma seal of quality

It will be. On the 1UP Show last week I heard them mention it going to have the option of having second bass pedal which would make them an automatic win. Hope it's true!

I think Axelsson's approach worked quite well with the style of melodeath that Arch Enemy played. It may not sound as brutal as Gassow's guttural growls, but Axelsson (and Thomas Lindberg of At the Gates also had a similar quality despite having completely different sounding vocals) have a sort of higher-pitched, barked voice that sounds almost tormented. Even hardcore vocalists don't sound quite like it, and that's what I love about Axelsson's/Lindbergs vocals. I agree with everything you said about Gassow etc. I've seen her getting a lot of hate lately but I don't agree with most people that she's as terrible as they say.

Into Eternity changed drummers for their new album and I was like WHOA. Only took a few shorts seconds for me to realize the drummer was different. On the other hand, I saw them live last weekend and the new drummer played the (far more interesting and arguably more challenging, IMO) drum parts of the Scattering of Ashes album nearly flawlessly. Probably the most frustrating change recently was the loss of A.J. Minette from The Human Abstract. The sound changed so completely to the point where I find their latest album pretty well unlistenable.

If you're a masochist action gamer who likes technical gameplay/combat, get Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (don't bother with the original version, you'll hate yourself if you buy it.) Includes the most fun and rewarding final boss encounter I've played in a long time. Also Shadow of the Colossus. You can't own a PS2 and NOT own this game. I'm making that an obligation now.

http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=17773 read post! ◕ ◡ ◕

nah, Bleck is good peoples ideally yeah but you're assuming it's actually EASY to figure out what the exploit is without knowing what's wrong you can't even fix it you either put the site up and deal with it forever which is tiring and stupid or spend days/weeks debugging code for a few exploits that are just quick fixes and will probably make code even more unstable

where your metaphor falls apart is that you have active control over your computer when you use it a person running a web server doesn't sit there watching to see what's happening every moment of every day so basically you put up VGMix 2 and then somebody exploits it again and then it goes down for another few days fixing while you try and put it back up then you get it back up then it gets exploited again so you spend another few days somebody exploits it again and then it goes down for another few days fixing while you try and put it back up then somebody exploits it again and then it goes down for another few days fixing while you try and put it back up then somebody exploits it again and then it goes down for another few days fixing while you try and put it back up then, etc. and you have a day job! nobody's that much of a loser to want to do that much work for a free hobby site that they pay for, because it leads to very little getting done about the problem at hand

so put up code that can be hacked? obviously if they don't have the people to make a site they don't have people to patch up gaping security issues