JackKieser

Ahhhhh.... this is so good! So beautifully played! And I can really feel your enjoyment through the sound, as well. It's too short! I want more!

I'm not going to lie; my favorite part of this mix was when the Ballad of the Goddess first comes in; it sounded to me just like something you'd hear in Tales of Symphonia as the BGM for a town or city. That's a good thing, by the way.

Well, it's the 5th, which means that there are only 4 more days left for round one voting. If anyone still needs to vote, now's definitely the time to do it.

Lol, can someone please quote me calling people "heartless" or something? People be assumin' and projectin'. Anyway, as for matters relevant to sick kids, there are two main votes. Right now, Chase customers can nominate the charities they think should be a part of the official September poll. Once that's done, everyone nominated who accepts Chase's invitation will be a part of a poll in September on chase.com and Facebook, which anyone can vote in. That poll will determine the final ranking, and the top 196 charities get cash.

I do have a lovely attitude! It just so happens that the mods / higher ups on this site and I tend to butt heads a lot. Either way, CP is the big gaming charity, so it shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Also, because of the rules of the program, eligible charities have to be registered in a particular way with... some charity organization that I don't remember off the top of my head. The point is, really small ones, though they might legitimately need the cash, might not be able to be nominated because they aren't registered properly (which, if it's a small enough operation, I could see happening). As far as I'm concerned, CP is the best gaming-oriented charity to donate to, simply because its so well run, does such a good job, and is so visible. Anyway, if your issue with a thread about giving money to charity is "TL;DR", that's... not really something I should be concerned with? I don't know, it's not that long of a post. :/ Certainly, the time is worth it for sick kids? Or at least any other charity that could be nominated. If you don't think it's worth your time... I don't really know how to respond to that.

You know, you can upvote multiple charities; it's not like only one will get cash. Unless you think that there are 195 more deserving charities than CP (because the top 195 charities with the most votes get cash monies), then you should be voting. If I were a more cynical person, I'd think it's because this is a JackKieser thread. Good thing I'm not that cynical. EDIT: I've added some info from official flyers to the OP; it explains some of the finer details, such as the fact that any charity that makes it to voting and responds to Chase's invitation to Round 2 in a timely manner gets to share in and extra 2.5 million dollars, whether they win the vote or not, much better than my OP. So there's, you know, even more reason to nominate right now.

Bah. They're more popular than this thread is making it seem. I just checked the Members List; the forum has over 22 thousand total members. "But Jack," I'm hearing you type, "most of those accounts are inactive, and a lot of those people don't visit regularly." True, which is why I also sorted the list by last date of activity to see how many people are regulars. If we're talking being active in the last couple of days, it's over 450 active members, which this thread is approaching. If we're talking the past month? Over 1200. That's a lot more than this thread is getting views for. Which means, people aren't spreading the word to their fellow forum-goers. If this were just a random ad thread, I wouldn't consider it an issue, except this is to raise a LOT of money for sick kids. The least people could do is send PMs to people they know are even kind of active. EDIT: WOW. Ok, so... how is it that a thread to help BGC's wife win a Facebook contest has over 650 views and 22 replies... but a thread that will help get a charity that helps sick children worldwide to get over (potentially) 25 thousand dollars has barely over 250 views and 6 replies, three being my own? Not trying to hate on BGC, 'cause I'm sure he's a cool dude... but seriously. This seems off to me.

The only thing they haven't been able to do is add new character slots to the CSS. Additional stage slots? Not a problem. Additional character slots? The game explodes. All I know is that it has to do with .rel files. I think.

Yes, multiple times, and I mean full on crying like a baby. Including (but not limited to): * The end of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Specifically the music at the "The End" screen. * Naomi's sacrifice in MGS4. * The end of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (I was really sad that it was over). * The end of Tuchanka in ME3 (I played a Paragon run). * The aforementioned EBA song. Games be moving, yo.

All of the damn time. The greatest disappointment in gaming in the last 20 years, in my opinion, is EA getting their hands on BioWare, specifically in this instance.

My take: it's a decent bit of work if taken on its own, separate from the rest of the trilogy; it is definitely flawed, but it still has its moments and is overall a quality product. As an ending to the Mass Effect trilogy, it still falls hopelessly short. Yes, it explains more. Unfortunately, the explanations are about already illogical things, and so it ends up just highlighting what was already wrong about the original. It fixes nothing that was significantly wrong with the original (and no, the fact that the future was left unexplained was not a flaw of the original; it was a setup for future games), and ends up lacking purpose; everything added was not asked for by the general public, and the people who DID ask for things didn't get what they asked for, anyway. Honestly, the extended cut just seems pointless by the end. I'm planning on writing an essay on it, which will probably be turned into a video or something easier to digest, so I'm going to flesh out these claims, before anyone starts yelling "butthurt fanboy" or something else ridiculous. Watch some of those original ending commentary videos (especially "Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage"), compare to the EC DLC, and tell me that the fans who actually complained about the ending (I mean, seriously complained) didn't get ignored (if not trolled).

Bardic, you posted? Is your SWF username the same as it is here?

Nah, I've just never been the kind of person to let people spout inaccuracies on the Internet. ISP holds its own when it comes to serious scrutiny; people like Derrit are just trolls and, aside from the inaccuracies, all of the flamebaiting can be easily ignored. Besides, anyone who has anything to say worth listening to on the subject is on another website, anyway. Although, that's a serious case of misreading if you interpreted that post as emotional or something. :/

I'm too tired from work to multiquote correct people, so I'm just going to bullet-point this out: * "Item Standard Play", as a project, was never intended to be the official standard for all play. That would be stupid... at least for Brawl. Even by late 2008, when ISP came out with it's first full ruleset, it was too late for items in Brawl thanks to the scrubtastic community left over after the Melee exodus and EVO. By the metric of popularity, it's a miserable failure. Luckily, that was never the point: the bet that started it all was that items were, by definition, unviable for competitive play, and whether it is widespread or not, ISP disproves that sentiment handily. There is a nontrivial chance that an ISP-like system could be a day-1 standard when SSB4 comes out, assuming the community leadership steps up and learns from the mistakes of the Brawl launch (assuming the Tekken team doesn't change the mechanics too much, of course), but that doesn't mean that ANYONE, including anyone a part of ISP, has, is, or will push for widespread ISP use now. * No one, and I want to stress this, not a single person who has ever been a part of ISP, including me, has EVER claimed that ISP is better than anything else. Every ruleset, items or no, has its strengths and weaknesses, and comparing them all to each other is an epistemic nightmare. The only claim we, as a project, have ever made is that ISP is legitimately competitive and competitively valid on its own, on its own merit. That claim has withstood scrutiny by top TOs, players, Smash researchers, and even the community writ large; regardless of personal opinion, almost no one who seriously reads the ISP thread ever has a bad thing to say about it. * Scrubs and people with a passing knowledge of competitive Brawl or competitive Brawl history think all sorts of stupid, uneducated stuff about ISP. At the end of the day, it's a great project full of amazingly talented people and players, and not a day goes by where I'm not 150% proud of the work they did to make it a reality. It has served its community well, and that's the end of the discussion, full stop. I know it's a lot, but anyone who wants to badmouth ISP has a lot of reading to do first (82 full forum pages of reading, to be precise). That means you, Derrit.

Say LOL all you want, chief. You didn't personally preside over the largest national item-play tournament since Melee and succeed, getting top players to admit to the viability of a ruleset that had been never attempted before. I did. umad.jpeg

So, this thread is at 170~ views, yet the Penny Arcade thread for this is at over 1.2 thousand. This is an issue.

Meh, it's decent. Balanced Brawl fixed everything that was a serious issue with Brawl and did it before P:M was even a concept. You can fix Brawl's issues without making it indistinct from its predecessor. I always saw P:M as less of a balancing / competitive issue and more of a "we can't move on / want to bring back the Melee players" issue. Um, items are already open to competitive play, and have been since 2008. I'm just hoping that Sakurai has the good sense to listen to the Tekken team, instead of just use them for manpower.

Oh man, it took a while to get it going, but once it loaded up, FUN. My girlfriend and I were playing the first tutorial section together (since she speaks / reads Japanese), and it's really fun so far.

Wow, sorry to double-post and self-bump and whatnot, but nothing so far? That's disconcerting.

Before I say anything, full disclosure: I work at Chase. Part of the federal Community Reinvestment Act states that banks have to "give back" to their communities in a monetary sense every year. This year, as opposed to previous years, Chase is asking for outside opinions on where to give this money. Chase is going to give over $5 million dollars to various charities this year, and the charities that will receive these grants (and the amounts of the grants themselves) will be determined by popular vote. I want Child's Play to get one of the top spots, if not the top spot itself; as soon as I heard about the program, I knew that gamers could mobilize to get a lot of money for a lot of sick kids. So, here's how it works: 1 ) There will be two rounds of voting. The first round, active right now, is a nomination process that will determine which charities get on the final ballot AND what order they are placed on it; the more nominations, the better placement. The second round of voting will determine a final global ranking of charities, and their placement on that ranking will determine how much (if any) the charity gets in grant money. 2 ) The first round of voting is supposed to be open only to Chase customers (more on that later). Right now, you can go to www.chasegiving.com, log in with your Chase.com user info, and nominate a charity. Obviously, I'm recommending you nominate Child's Play by simply searching for "Child's Play" (exactly like that, minus the " "'s, otherwise you'll get other unrelated charities in your results), and filling out the information it asks for (mainly if you know any updated contact info for the charity). 3 ) The second round of voting is open to EVERYONE, period, and will be done in two places: the Chase Giving site and Facebook. As stated earlier, this poll will be for final ranking, so every vote counts. The highest ranked charities will get mad cash monies. Incidentally, Chase is also guaranteeing a certain number (I don't know how many) of charities money IF they originate in Western Washington (which Child's Play does). Now, even though the first round is only supposed to be open to Chase customers, there are reports on the PA forums that non-customers are able to vote. Reports have included situations such as changing the URL to back-door your way in, using old Chase.com logins from when you USED to be a customer, etc. Obviously, I cannot condone such practices. That being said, this is the internet, and I can't stop you from using them... so... Anyway, I think Child's Play can really do well and get a LOT of money IF gamers everywhere mobilize. So, get the word out. PM other OCRemixer and let them know. Post about this on Twitter and Facebook. Crosspost this to other gaming blogs or forums. Email games sites, like PA or Kotaku, to get front-page recognition. Harass your friends and neighbors, whatever you need to do to get people moving. ...discuss. EDIT: So, I've got some more info for you, courtesy of the Chase Legal team:

They had a dev roundtable. It was also a big pile of nothing. The devs for NintendoLand just reiterated what the conference said, and any time a significant question was posed (like, "What about games bundled with the console?"), it was either flat-out ignored or punted.

That was such a disappointment. At least I know that I'm going to have plenty of not-spent money this Xmas.

I saw it. I wasn't impressed. I mean, it's a neat little teaser for the E3 presentation, but it's going to take a lot of work to make this year's presentation show that the hardcore should invest in Nintendo again. I'm still waiting to see Nintendo's answer to Xbox LIVE, and a bunch of Mii's spouting tweets on a home screen is not it. Nintendo is great at hardware innovation, but hasn't been ahead on software innovation in decades. Yes, Nintendo's been doing a lot of things that no one else has ever done before lately... but now it's time for them to swallow their pride and admit that it's time for them to play catch up and do things that everyone else has done before. Until I see that, I'm not going to be too interested in throwing down 350$+ on a new Nintendo system.

A couple of things: I know you technically wrote the words "I could be wrong", but it came off as a formality of writing; you stated pretty plainly multiple times that you thought you were right, and I have no illusions about whether you honestly think you are correct or not (you do). That's fine, you can think what you do, but I thought it necessary to point out a problem. Technically, I didn't say anything because you guys tend not to like my usual long-ass posts, and because I didn't feel it necessary to reproduce in text what was already done in video. That being said, I never said that you were entirely wrong (the "Jacob's ladder" stuff was interesting), just that your points were moot because of more fundamental problems. This is a big issue with the ending right now: the difference between "able to be enjoyed" and "objectively good". You were able to enjoy the ending, and were even able to point out some neat stuff about it, and made a good attempt at justifying the good-ness of the ending (I wasn't being facetious, btw; it was a good attempt), but the underlying problems, which are MUCH more fundamental than what you go over in your write up, still make it a bad ending, in a scholarly literary sense. This has been verified by actual lit professors on the BSN, as well, so it's not really up for debate anymore. That, of course, doesn't mean that people can't enjoy it (people somehow manage to like "Jersey Shore"). Doubtful. The DLC has already been confirmed, by multiple people at multiple occasions, not to retcon the endings ANY, which means they will be adding more to what is already crap. You can write a whole 'nother game after the ending, full of clarification and closure, and the ending (that is to say, the scenes that comprise the last 10 or so minutes of the game as of now) will still be bad because it's problem is NOT clarity-related. I'm interested, sure, but without retcons, not much substantial can be done because BioWare thinks that the ending is bad for the wrong reasons. EDIT: Also, I'm not leaving the thread I started myself, and I'm not ruining anything. It's not my fault if certain people in a Mass Effect thread have never seen Mass Effect related image macros before. Christ, it's not like anything I've posted so far is even a modicum as bad as what OCRemixers have posted in other threads, never mind what I've posted in other threads. Calm the fuck down. ;

Oh, go figure! Another person butthurt that someone has the audacity to disagree with an OCRemixer and present justification as to why.