Drack

At a video game? Not yet.

I don't recommend My Japanese Coach. Though I was already well beyond the proficiency level it teaches when I tried it, there are a lot of flaws. -The stroke order for writing (Both kanji and kana) is inflexible and often wrong. For a simple example, the き hiragana (For those of you without fonts installed, thats "ki"), when TYPED, usually uses 3 strokes, but is almost always handwritten with 4 strokes (the "third" stroke, mostly vertical then curve, is separated). If you try to write it this (correct!) way, the game will mark you as wrong. This happens with a lot of characters and builds bad habits. -The method they use to teach verb conjugations is all wrong. Instead of teaching you one conjugation at a time, they dump all of them on you at once, without telling you how they're used until later, and at that time just referring to it by number (which I might add, is unique to this program .. no other sources I know of refer to conjugations by number). Some of the conjugations the program never gets around to explaining as the grammatical structures that CALL for said conjugations are well beyond the scope of the game. -There's no way to skip ahead if you know all a lesson has to offer except by playing their memorization games. Scoring PERFECT on the initial pretest only jumped me maybe 20% through the game's content. Wanting to see how deep it went meant going through each and every lesson plodding through at the game's pace. If you want a DS game to help you study Japanese, try Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten. You'll have to import it, and it won't tutor you, but it is FANTASTIC at being a cross-language dictionary and has EXCELLENT handwriting recognition (for Japanese characters ... not so much English, but has a keyboard for that). This app saved my ass MANY times when I was in Japan last summer. It won't TEACH you, but is an excellent companion to more conventional methods like books, classes, and SRS. Speaking of SRS, you should DEFINITELY look into using an SRS like anki if you really want to learn a foreign language.

Argh, I missed the Newegg deal on $215 Intel X25-M 80GB Solid State Drive.

Beaten both playthroughs, level 50 Mordecai, all quests done, all proficiencies >40 (Except launchers, they suck anyway). I think I've gotten all I can get out of this game until DLC comes around. This game has some serious flaws, but it's a hell of a lot of fun, too .. an dI'm a sucker for Diablo-style weapon generation. One of the big problems is that some specs are way better than others. To take Mordecai's case, there are really only 2 specs. Bird (Ranger I believe, whichever has the class mod that gives +4 predator) spec is completely game-breaking, bird hits >4 targets and has 1 second cooldown, heals mordecai when it comes back.. Other spec is what I call "Not Bird" which usually uses a gunslinger class mod ... Not as broken but a lot more fun, and still pretty powerful. Story is terrible. Nuff said. Claptraps ... well, they get old fast. Bosses are dumb, they reward knowing how the game's physics can be exploited (e.g. making Sledge shoot the corner between him and you by tricking the game into thinking he has line of sight) PvP is broken. Now that Phase Strike is fixed, Lilith can 1-shot people with a crit phase strike. This game needs WoW-style PvP damage scaling for duels to not be completely unfair. To add another example, my friend's got a sniper rifle that has a fire rate above 5 (It's got the "Sniper Killer... Qu'est que c'est" red text on it), kills anyone not tank specced in 1 crit or 4 body shots, duel over in <1 sec.

Just because you covered your ass doesn't mean I don't get to make a counterexample. Edit: If I hadn't responded, my non-response could be read as an acknowledgement that I DID fit into your category of people who claim to listen to various foreign music but actually only listen to Japanese music. I guess you could say I wanted to cover my own ass as well.

It's interesting that this moment as I read your post, I have a Chinese song playing. Not everyone falls into your prejudged categories.

It can be. I prefer songs with lyrics I don't understand. It makes the voice more like an instrument, and less like plain talking. Instrumental is still better, though.

Do you guys still use the friend code database I haven't updated in like a year? And organize multiplayer games using it? If so, I'll add this game and any others, lemme know what games you need added.

You have an interesting definition of most enduring ... seems to be "Has a remake a long time after the original that sold a lot of copies" In my mind, it should be a lot closer to a game that is still played by a large population despite the game's age, regardless of whether there's been a re-release on a modern platform, and regardless of what platform it's being played on now. I assert (and this is just one example of many, especially if sequels are counted) that today there are many more people playing some version of Tetris than there are people playing some version of FF7 (Perhaps even more than the entire FF series combined). This is of course excluding games like "Tetris Attack" and "Tetrisphere" which aren't really Tetris, just including games using the original formula. Even going by your definition, Super Mario 64 DS, for example, sold 639,000 copies by February 2005, 9 years after the original game. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, a 1999 remake of a 1985 game, sold 2.8 million copies 14 years after the original. FF7 is NOT the most enduring game, even by your own definition.

FF7 is not the most enduring game of all time. Not even close. Claiming it as such shows immense ignorance and invalidates the entire review straight from the beginning. Revise the cornerstone of your review, or come back when no one's heard of Super Mario Bros. This is not to say you don't have some insightful points. However, coming here to toot your own horn about your deeply flawed fanboy review is not something I appreciate.

Any JRPG will be difficult to play in a foreign language you don't understand. Why are you buying a Famicom in the first place?

Good riddance, sidebar! Let's keep it OFF the forums this time.

This strikes me as an exceptionally well disguised favorites thread.

Why not? It was developed by ONE PERSON. Or are you saying it isn't good?

Video game tester is a shitty job, guys. Terrible pay. Expected overtime, especially close to the game's release. You're VERY replaceable. If you can't handle bad working conditions, you're fired because there are plenty of people who will. You're not expected to PLAY the games so much as try everything that can be done to find bugs. And above all, the games suck. You don't get to pick and choose what games you test, and by far the majority of what's getting tested are crap games. No, I'm not a tester. But I know plenty of them.

A couple really powerful items. Black Hole = almost surefire way to remove anything. Large Air Vent = Moves things. VERY powerful and trivializes many levels. Pegasus = Great compact flight, unlimited and not hostile. Ceases to be controllable if hit. Dragon + Mind Control Device = Great melee attack flying mount. Hostile until mind controlled. Dragon + Shrink Ray + Mind Control Device = Compact powerful attacking unlimited flying mount. Use a Pterodactyl + Mind Control Device if you can sacrifice some power to use fewer items Fighter Jet or Stealth Bomber = Great ranged flying attack vehicle. Fighter shoots forward, bomber drops bombs mostly downward. Spaceship = fastest non-combat flying vehicle I've found. Shorter than UFO. For bridges, try "Bridge Ladder" or "Large steel door red" instead of bridge. They're longer. Also try Science, Xray Goggles, NVG, LOL WUT, Wand, Spell book, Nuke. Nuke + Bomb Shelter unfortunately does not work. Fun times.

Neat! I also shoot with an SX10. You may be interested in making it EVEN MORE like a DSLR by using CHDK. With CHDK it can shoot raw (in the standard DNG format), use very short or very long exposures, and do pretty much everything a DSLR does except swap lenses. It's certainly made me a better photographer. Oh, and here are some pics of mine Beppu, Japan. I need to crop the head out from the bottom, lol. When I read the wikipedia article for it, at first I thought someone posted my pic there when I saw the pic they had. Also Beppu, Japan. Pics like this one are the reason I don't use auto white balance. This last pic (of a Red Shouldered Hawk in Wakulla Springs, FL) suffers a lot from JPEG compression. Took it before I got CHDK and the cropping made the artifacts even worse >_<. Still one of my faves. I have plenty more if you want to see em.

Hot stuff. Where can I download (or buy, if they're not free) these?

One of the things I noticed about Elfen Lied is that the Japanese used in the anime is extremely simple compared to most. Learners should try watching it without subs.

Yes it is. PS3 has 2-3 frames of input lag upscaling the signal when playing PS2 (and PS1) games. This goes for both hardware and software backwards compatible PS3s. I'd rather have a responsive game than a pretty one. The real solution is a TV/Monitor with lagless upscaling + PS2 component cable.

Over 10 years ago, I heard Toxic Caves from the Sonic Spinball OST in the background of an advertisement on the radio. No OCR though.

Guys, read the thread. He already bought a PS3. He doesn't give a shit about 360 anymore. Here are some good PS3 games worth checking out. (He's already got Fallout3, GTA4, and LBP for you tards who didn't read the thread) Shooters: Metal Gear Solid 4 Call of Duty 4 Bioshock Killzone 2 The Orange Box (It's better on PC though!) Dead Space Unreal Tournament 3 Fighters: BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Street Fighter 4 King of Fighters 12 Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Everything Else: Valkyria Chronicles WipEout HD Ratchet & Clank Future Uncharted Ninja Gaiden Sigma Devil May Cry 4 Rock Band 1 & 2

This is why I disagree with laws like the DMCA that try to lock you out of your own property. If you BUY it, you should have the right to tinker with it! That being said, I know that mods often allow piracy as well as homebrew and region-unlocking. Piracy is clearly illegal, but just because someone gets their console modded is not sufficient evidence of piracy or even intention thereof. DMCA needs to die.

I found some more... This isn't reference or reuse, though. Seems more like stealing. Theme of Super Metroid at :20

Oh snap, did your cabinet use a joystick, or did it use the original (and hilarious) trackball?