Darklink42

Well, I've managed to get 7 coals in a row, traded them all in for this. Totally worth it so far... >_> Anyone want to trade?

So it's taking a lot longer than I thought to get the one part of the present in, which means it likely won't get there by Christmas. That being said, if it doesn't arrive at least to my place by then so I can ship it, I'll send a consolation gift for the interim wait. My apologies ahead of time, I swear you didn't get a dead beat Santa.

Surprisingly enough, where Ataradan is, to attend Humboldt State University. Never been up there before, but from all I've heard and seen from friends that have, it's beautiful and well worth the hoops to jump through for admission.

Well I'm always up for another norcal meetup, but I'm moving next month up closer to Oregon for college, putting me about 6 more hours away from SF. We'll see how that plays out, but definitely keeping my eye on this thread.

Mine's going to take a little longer to get ready and ship out, but rest assured that I've already got a plan. Just needs some creative finishing touches.

As per last year, I'm not that picky when it comes to a gift. I have Steam, and a short wishlist on there if that makes anything easy, but a Gamestop or Amazon card also works. I actually got an OCR shirt for my birthday, so that's off the list. Um...I really like most game series, but the trouble is I have all the games from my favorite ones (Zelda, Kingdom Hearts, Assassin's Creed, Final Fantasy) with one exception, that being LoZ: Skyward Sword. But I'm also down with books, art, or really just anything you can afford/think will make me smile. For the most part it's just nice to get a gift during the holiday season at all, so whoever got me, don't stress it too much. Unless you're super rich, in which case go nuts. Edit: I forgot to say that I love gaming memorabilia/swag, especially Zelda and KH stuff.

You have my financial support.

Hey, count me in again this year, I like thinking of something witty and awesome to send out.

For all intents and purposes, after escaping Monstro, it WAS Traverse Town. I'm guessing they're going to tone down the smoking cigars and drinking from the original movie?

My dad's band Skeauxsha uses Reverbnation a little bit, but the opportunities thing is entirely useless. The one time that he tried to use it, he paid 7 dollars with the promise that one of their songs would be reviewed for use. It generated an automatic message in less than five minutes telling him they weren't accepted, but only after he'd paid for it. My advice, if it isn't free, skip it.

Well keep in mind that Traverse Town is a nexus for people that have lost their own worlds. So it's not unusual that Neku would be there by himself and not be able to travel. It's not the real Traverse Town (from what I gather of the story) but I imagine that the function of the place remains relatively the same.

I'm just glad to see they're not rehashing the exact same worlds for the fifth time and finally getting some new stuff in, whether it's Disney stuff or Nomura's own creations. Looking forward to seeing Neku again, I really liked The World Ends with You, it had a good story and interesting, unique characters. Nomura has a great sense of storytelling, and I'm interested to see how he ties all of this together with what we know so far, and how he justifies introducing new worlds through, I'm assuming, Sora and Riku's dream states. Kind of curious to see more of the freeflow mechanic, and whether it makes the gameplay too hectic. Right now it seems like it has that possibility, given the series' perpetual issues with camera wrangling. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the series, but generally speaking it's seemed like the faster the characters move and the more they do, the harder time the camera has keeping up with it or keeping it all on screen. Even BBS had that problem. From what I saw on the video though, it looks like a lot of fun to use in combat.

The desert tower in the far far east is mine. I've also got two houses, one on a floating island near a mountain (should have a sign in front of it) and a lake house in the relative vicinity of the tower.

Big giant face-sphere of death? Or was there an even worse fate than Hell that I somehow missed. Because I'm not going back to find out. I don't know how I was so patient in my youth, but I can't even fathom repeating that feat a second time.

I just remembered another one: In almost every HALO game, I've managed to get the warthog into places it shouldn't be able to go during the story mode, usually on legendary. The most recent was in Reach, after my friend insisted it wasn't possible. I got the Gauss-hog over the barrier at the ONI base, and used it to kill the two hunters in the base, along with some elites.

There are probably a lot I'm going to forget, but let me see how many I can remember in one go: -Pokemon Red: Caught Mewtwo with a pokeball. Ran out of Ultra balls for the third time, had nothing left but 99 regular pokeballs, started tossing them and caught him around the thirtieth attempt. -Fire Emblem GBA: Beat a supposedly unbeatable character (Fargus) after losing a guy to the arena. Later went on the beat the final dragon boss with a triangle attack with the three pegasus knights. -Cave Story: Beat the final, final boss without using any of the recommended weaponry. This involved basically hovering around the ceiling by firing one gun at the ground and trying to hit him with it as he went by. Ended up taking about 3 hours. -Mario 64: Found the glitch room behind the front doors of the castle before the internet was cool enough to point out stuff like that. Used to be able to get to and beat final bowser in only a handful of hours (maybe 4?) -Professor Layton and the Curious Village: beat the whole game in a couple of days without ever looking up a walkthrough or using the hints. -RPGs: I can't even count the number of times I've taken on bosses and final bosses at well below the recommended level and won. I'm just patient when I know a tactic works, even if it takes longer than it's supposed to.) I know I've done it in Kingdom Hearts, FF1,7,10,12, and tactics (At least until I fought Wiegraf), EarthBound, Pokemon Red (I beat the Elite four around levels 35-50, no legendaries), Star Ocean 3, and Secret of Mana (Didn't know about grinding up magic, in addition to playing solo. Really ups the difficulty.)

That's the closest to my original intention, actually. I don't how that slipped through my proofread, and I thank pu_freak for pointing that out. I was playing New Vegas at the time, but I hadn't progressed very far and, as a result, didn't know very much about the character I was playing aside from what I could assign to him as background. I hate to say it, but I might have just made the assumption that he was going to be a vault dweller descendant without triple checking that fact. That being said, I think it would seem fair to change the bio to say that it's typical for the player to control a vault dweller descendant, since that was the pre-established pattern up until New Vegas. If that's not acceptable, I can go back and come up with a more appropriate sentence to put in it's place.

I've been playing Duodecim Dissidia, and even though the gameplay is frustrating as hell sometimes, the music (classic and reimagined) keeps me playing anyways. Sign me up.

I remembered another one today while I was going through my games. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. It wasn't really that this game sucked in terms of gameplay, because it was basically the previous game just with more stuff added and a re-balanced weapons system. What made this one such a disappointment to me was the overall feeling that the game had been phoned in. It had something like 50 recruitable characters, but it was so short that you only end up using the same few characters all the way through. The balance between new characters and returning characters was broken as hell, it was nearly worthless to transfer the data of the previous game to the new one (if you could get it to work), and the story just never managed the grand feeling that the handhelds and even it's predecessor on the Cube had. There was a lot of focus on the little graphical improvements, but anywhere there was bigger issues just seems glossed over. There's even a major typo right in one of the menus. But the biggest disappointment of all was that, for a move from the Gamecube to the Wii, there was no technological improvements. No wiimote capability, no multiplayer, no replayability, not even a boost in graphics. For such a generally well done series, this was a huge drop of the ball. My hope is that, should they ever try a console Fire Emblem again, they'll do a hell of a lot more innovating.

THIS^^^ I don't think I've ever been more completely disheartened by a sequel than this game. It took everything that made the first game competent and challenging, and took a huge shit all over it. The levels are linear as hell, the camera was horrid, the enemies are beyond cheap, and everything you learned in the first game to make you feel like a badass is negated when you get hit with any number of completely unblockable combos, waves of nothing but spammed ranged attacks, and bosses that feel less like accomplishments upon their defeat and more like someone tore your arm off and beat you with it. Worst of all, and this is just inexcusable, it has graphics slowdown like a bitch. I wanted to beat the game, but the further I got in, the worse it got. It's still the only game I had to give up on. Other sequels (suquels?): Startropics 2: kind of similar gameplay, but the story was not nearly as interesting and it felt sort of shortened and dumbed down. Soul Calibur 3: I've pointed this out several times, but this is the game that made me blow up a PS2 controller out of sheer anger. Everything about this game felt like it was unbalanced, cheap, and lazy. Especially riding ont he back of how fun SC2 was.

I really love instruction manuals. My favorite part is to read the story and setting page before even diving into the instructions. Even though these days, a lot of them have just resorted to using tiny screenshots instead of hand drawn artwork, there were and are still some out there that really kick ass. I hope, at the very least, that Nintendo keeps putting out quality booklets. They've always done them right. Some of my favorites include: -FF7, because of how in depth it was covering the characters, the world, and even providing a brief walkthrough for the first reactor. -Startropics. Anyone who ever played it knows about the radio code and the water. Genius way to make use of every part that came with the game. -Link's Awakening. I can still remember reading through the manual as a 6 year old and loving every second of it. A lot of the abilities are given their own pictures, and the first two pages have a whole work of art just to show the scene of Link being found on the beach. Later on, both of the Oracles games did a good job overall as well.

Man, that makes me more sick than the videos of the tsunami. "God is on our side" "Nature didn't forget" I know my country is filled with some pretty soulless people, but this just takes the cake on all time low blows. How depressing that there are people who had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor and whose families likely had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor over 60 years later mustering ever ounce of self-righteousness in the face of a terrible tragedy while it's still happening. Never mind everything we did to Japan during and after the war. Nuclear bombs, invasions of many of their islands, firebombings, forced culture-shift, forced military occupation, and let's not forget the Japanese internment camps we built right here at home. I think they suffered enough for a war that's long since been over. As The Damned pointed out, I bet every one of those assholes uses something either made in or developed by Japan. I'd even go further to say that these are the same people that sat and watched Katrina and bitched about how nothing got done, but did nothing themselves. Man, cowardice really knows no limit. For my brighter note: I'm working a fund raiser in my area for the Red Cross, so we can send some relief money Japan's way. Here's to doing something instead of playing internet tough guy. Cheers.

You know, I'd like to point out how much of a pleasure it is to work with you guys, and to watch you work on the other bios as well. The both of you always manage to bring up the perfect points on how to improve a piece, while at the same time putting it in a way that isn't (at least to me) offensive. Thank you to both of you for that.

Please tell me it's not going to have that giant controller display taking up an entire 1/4 of the screen or that we can have the option to turn it off. That looks really ridiculous. You know, as curious and interested as I am in this one (and I usually am when it comes to new Zelda games), that was a surprisingly unexciting trailer. I gather it's for a tech show and all, but other than a few tiny tidbits, it seems mostly like they're still trying to sell the gimmick, instead of the game itself. Aside from that though, the game looks really good visually and sound-wise. I'm also very curious to know more about the dude sitting on the statue.

This series is genius. Keep up the