Triad Orion

Expert Mode's a bit much for my tastes. I'm not great at shooters to begin with, so I initially stuck to Normal but my friends and I moved up to Advanced and we're going to stick with that until the game comes out. Then we switch back to Normal to get adjusted for a marathon five-map session, then go back to Advanced once we're fully acquainted with everything in the game. Sorry, I'm not hardcore enough for Expert. XD

So I tried out the demo. And it is good. Very good. I do want.

Considering other people are running the demo with an underpowered computer, I'm wondering why Valve made the minimum requirements so high. It's confusing to me.

I have the demo downloaded, which I will try tomorrow. Even though my computer's processor isn't a 3 gig, my friend who has a computer with very similar performance under the minimum was able to fairly well, so I'm going to give it a shot and hope for the best. Feliks (Who some of you may recognize from TF2) said it was amazing, so... I'll look forward to this.

Saturday never works for me, I'm afraid. That's the night very much reserved for "hanging out with friends and acting like idiots." If it's held on Saturday nights I'll probably never be able to make it until well after midnight. Even if you guys hold it on Saturday, I won't be bent out of shape about not making it. I'll see what I can do, but for me, either Friday or Sunday will be traditionally better.

Going with a third on Soule's work, based on Oblivion alone. Someone brought up TIE Fighter, and I'd also like to second that. X-Wing Alliance attempted to do a similar thing but it's questionable if it came off quite as well. Those are definitely worth looking into, I agree.

Please don't remind me, Sensai. I was stoked about that game for months until they released the minimum requirements. Can't run it on a 2.4 P4 processor. Need a 3.0. Damn.

With respect, I disagree entirely. Unless the ship is essentially a sweatshop, modern demands for workers would require some leisure space. A close personal friend of mine is a nuclear technician on a submarine and even his cramped vessel has space for a bloody *lounge.* Aircraft Carriers have things to do on board as well, and unless the vessel is quite small, I don't see why it has to be completely sparse. I never said the spaceship had to be a cruise ship, but for Pete's sake, you have to give your soldiers *something* to do besides work and sleep otherwise morale goes sinks faster than a torpedoed fishing boat. And really, do you really think Yahtzee to be like every other reviewer out there? His videos make it clear that he's not a garden variety reviewer. Pretty much all of his reviews are personal opinions on a game based off his own experiences. The soundwork may have been exceptional compared to other games in different genres, but I would venture to guess Yahtzee *expects* competent sound work for a horror game. It's a necessary part of the genre to have a capable game. And Yahtzee himself has said his fans never considered him funny when he's being nice to a game and considering ZP is a humor column as much as it is a review, he *has* to accentuate the negative to please his fanbase. Watch his BioShock review again and you pretty much see the same kinda thing. He *likes* BioShock and he spends three minutes ripping it apart. All things considered, I think he went pretty light on Dead Space, he was more harsh on its narrative rather than the game itself when you get down to it.

Well, he does comment on immersion, to some degree. At the very beginning, he remarks that the ship does not seem livable and that it's designed with the game in mind, not the other way around. Immersive level design in part comes from practicality, and if the ship doesn't feel or look realistic, then immersion is hurt somewhat. Now, not having played Dead Space I can't speak for the design of the ship's floor plan. It might actually make sense. But sometimes proper furnishings would make a place more believable. Hell, even the way-post apocalyptic Fallout 3 tries to create some sense of decent furnishings in the towns that exist, and the ruins of other, abandoned places are convincing enough. But if Dead Space's spaceship is needlessly barren or Spartan in nature, that might not make a lot of sense. It's a military ship, yes, but even real life ships are not completely devoid of comfort. As for the sound, remember Yahtzee accentuates the negative. That's his job, he's a critic. Considering he's obviously played a long line of survival-horror games, Dead Space's sound simply didn't impress him. He says that the game is competent and it's functional, which is more than he says for a lot of games. He just rails on it for being derivative, which is really about par for the course for him. Personally, I found it funny enough and enjoyed it overall.

Well, sometimes the artists do want feedback, even if it's negative, so long as it's constructive and useful. And while I admit I do feel the same hesitancy to openly criticize work, it *is* our place to do so, so long as it's done in a civilized, respectable manner. You're not a jerk for saying you're not keen on something, so long as you're reasonable and mature about it. And yes, I agree that not being a remixer myself makes it difficult to properly criticize or praise work in a specific, detailed manner. To be perfectly honest, I know very little about music composition and most of the jargon is utterly lost on me. I'd need someone to teach me what it all meant before I could even begin to get all of it. But that being said, I can still form an opinion based on what I think *sounds* good or original. So, I make do with what I can. *Shrugs* And to be perfectly honest, as others have said, the judges panel pretty much sifts through whatever wasn't polished in the WIP forums, so often times there's not a lot of negative criticism to be thrown about anyway. It's a good system. XD

Well, why don't we simply gauge interest? We've probably got at least a half dozen players willing to do an OCR only night already, and we haven't even talked to the other regulars who play the game. I mean, we haven't heard from DarkeSword or GMan yet, for example. Why not bring it up with traditional OCR players in the server like, tonight or something and see if they would like it?

The third video is definitely the lulziest.

Whoa, Rambo's back? I'd have to get in on this. Don't care if I get a pierced face from all the goddamn headshots, it'll just be fun to have him around again. He's so great at throwing teams into chaos.

Well, the idea is we don't lock it down all the time, or even most of the time. I was merely proposing a once, perhaps twice a week thing so OCR regulars who don't necessarily want the intense competition can have a chance at just having some fun together. And if it doesn't take off, then we can just stop doing it. I don't really think that's unreasonable.

This is pretty much it for me too. And with all due respect to Bahamut, no, the driving force to play TF2 for me isn't to get better and to be competitive on the server. Heck no. My drive to play TF2 is to have a good time and hang around with a community I actually *like.* Yeah, dying kinda sucks, but it's part of the game and as far as I'm concerned if you go out with a smile on your face you're doing it right. To be honest, when groups of people come into the server and just completely dominate, that does suck a lot of fun out of the game, because often at that point the "community" part of the enjoyment gets pretty demolished as far as I'm concerned. I guess what I'm getting at is I prefer to play games with my friends and just having a bloody good time of it. There are plenty of other servers I can play on that has everyone else on the internet there if I really wanted to go up with there. And hell, that's the only reason I ever played WoW in the first place is because most of my friends did. To be honest, I'm going to say I have better things to do with my time than become an ace at Team Fortress 2 just so I can stay alive a few seconds more when I'm staring down the opposite faction. When I play with you guys, I do make an attempt to help the team win. But I'm not going to devote tons of time playing against folks who will destroy me just so I'm a little better at a game I only play because I like playing it with friends. If I need a time sink, I'll put Disgaea into my PS2. On that note, I'd like to say I would be a big proponent of a Server Lockdown from the public so the OCR community people can play together a night or two a week. I think this will draw in the less intense OCR players in to be part of the community again.

*Ducks and covers from inevitable doomsday*

The news article on Interplay's website was dated back in April. So the news of the contract is technically old, but this is the first I've heard about it being confirmed. I heard plenty of rumors about TenNepal's desire to relaunch the series, but didn't know it had officially gone through. And well, that's good news. If they can make the game and animated show as funny as its originals, rock on. I'd still like Dan Castanella to do the voice of Jim, because frankly, I got so used to that after being a fan of the cartoon, it's difficult to imagine Jim as anyone else.

This. Right here. It's for this reason I've had a harrowing time looking for a career. They want experience, and moreover *relevant* experience. Granted, you don't need all the experience they say you do, but it's to make you competitive. Granted, Harmonix is a whole other demon than simply entry level work, but... damn.

Gonna have to agree with the judges that the voice samples feel largely out of place after the initial conversation. I'm not really digging the trance style, either. I'm impressed in that Raptor's been able to keep what is a short sample tune fresh for six minutes, though. The trance itself is repetitive sounding, but clearly the ideas within different sections of the song are very different and I salute him for that. But even with that appreciation, this song never really grabbed me. It really lacked a punch, though it still had energy, if that makes sense. I guess what I'm trying to get at was there wasn't a hook, and beyond that I don't really feel as though it stuck out too much. Again, I do really like the variation throughout the song in terms of ideas, but the execution just didn't do too much for me. Despite that, it's a great effort and I do hope to see more from Raptor.

Yeah, I had this problem too. Though thankfully Toon Link in Brawl ends up being a lot of fun to play with, though I tend to stick pretty heavily with Sonic. If that doesn't say I play casually with casually-minded friends, I don't know what does. XD

Adell from Disgaea 2, because that's just my style.

I get what you're trying to say here, but the two experiences are meant to be entirely different, so the analogy doesn't fit, really. Brawl doesn't *try* to be a traditional fighting game, nor is it really meant to be seen as one. Some people try to make it one, but that's not its intent to begin with. It's meant to be seen as a party game that's supposed to be chaotic and goofy and fun. That's not to argue that your opinion on Brawl is invalid. If you like fighting games, which you clearly do, Brawl is really *not* the kind of game you'd really enjoy, I'd think. As for this week's review, I enjoyed it, mostly for it skewering so many tropes in American drama writing. A lot of the points he brings up irks me as well. Romantic subplots in anything like the horror genre are generally a waste of space and distract from the point of the film/game/book/television program. Some of it may be a result of executive meddling (which is always a problem), but still...

Even as a casual? This. Just this. Though I do feel the need to remark to Sengin that the Melee/Brawl shift is quite a bit different than Zelda 1 to Zelda 2. It was pretty much unanimous among everyone that Zelda 2 was a step backward for the Zelda series. Brawl, on the other hand, has a much more divided fanbase. Competitive and tournament players have their gripes with it, while people who tend to play it casually prefer it over Melee. Considering Nintendo's market lies heavily with casual players and making an accessible experience, I don't foresee much getting changed. In fact, the people hacking the game are so far in the minority that realistically Nintendo won't really care, especially considering they bought a copy of the game to begin with. Sure, Brawl has plenty of balance issues, but so did Melee. In fact, Melee was rife with balance issues itself. Though I understand that the strategies of tourney Melee are still somewhat in flux even after seven years plus, the tiering is still pretty rigid. While you *can* beat Foxes and Falcos with lower tier characters with enough skill, assuming both players are equals, the odds skew very heavily toward the Fox or Falco player. Yes, this speaks of Nintendo not testing their games enough. I too would've liked to see a more perfectly balanced game, but such a thing is genuinely impossible in a console title. I guess Nintendo figured that maximum balancing would take a very long time and would be extremely arduous and instead decided to make Brawl reasonably balanced as far as casual play is concerned and make the whole thing functional. Given how much the Smash community experiments with the game, for Nintendo to make it perfect, Brawl would be in testing and development for another year, at least. A cop-out way of testing? Maybe. But at least, online lag excluded, the game runs, and runs well.

I'd have to agree with Dunther, at least as far as casual play is concerned. Your average Joe isn't going to be arsed to learn how to chain-grab with Dedede or Up-Tilt spam with Snake. B-Spamming Metaknights are common, but amongst casuals, it can be dealt with, either with items (gasp!) or for them to just make a mistake. I know this viewpoint won't win me any friends here in the Smash thread, but frankly, I find Brawl to be a more fun game than Melee ever was. You'll all probably think I'm an idiot for enjoying the game as a spastic, item-filled chaos-fest, but hey, it's how I like the game. Personally, I think the argument that places blame on Sakurai for expecting people to play the game by his design philosophies are ludicrous. How many linear games have everyone in here played? Those are far worse about "played the way the designer wants you to" than Brawl could ever hope to be, given the level of customization you have. Sakurai wants his game to be played within a certain frame of mind, but not so much that he shackles you to a single paradigm. Yeah, I can understand that you're all pretty miffed about a developer turning his back on you, but his design philosophies cater to the many rather than the few. It's pretty common in the industry. Sorry if I've pissed anyone off, but I just had to speak up on this. Keep in mind that even if Sakurai's design philosophies don't agree with your own, they're still valid and in fact, reasonable.

While I applaud the ingenuity of the hackers to allow those moves in Brawl, I think it's rather unnecessary as well. Brawl is a different game. It's pretty clear that Sakurai wanted it to be removed from Melee as far as it can and it's balanced to keep that in mind. And really, if these things are really so desired, go back to Melee where they were part of the meta-game. On a side note, I don't want to be an asshole, but I'm going to echo the question of why Melee has become the topic du-jour of the Brawl thread? Is it possible to change the thread name to "Super Smash Bros" (Thus expanding the scope) or make another Melee thread, considering the game is obviously still relevant amongst a number of members in the community?