Kanthos

You sure you got rid of it all? Google US and Canada seem fine to me.

I rarely play music at home nowadays, and run too much on my PC at work to let using a player there be an option, so I use my iPod at work and iTunes at home because I can't be bothered to set up something better.

And since they're the ones making the music, they have the right to charge what they want. Paying $20 voluntarily isn't being robbed; it's choosing to use your money in a manner you deem to be less than efficient.

The only load time issue I've seen in FFT so far was when a spell or attack was used for the first time in a battle. The game would go to the UMD to load the sprite data, but if the UMD wasn't spinning already, the time to start it spinning and access the right data would make the game pause a bit. Unless they made a design decision not to pre-load all spells and effects when entering a battle (i.e. figure out all that each player and each monster can do and load all the resources), then there's probably not much they can do. I suspect it works the way it does because pre-loading everything would result in much longer load times, particularly when most of the effects might not be used.

Done. Looking at question 4, are you planning on taking your mIRC MMORPG a lot further, zircon?

The problem with Oblivion is that as you get more powerful or as you finish certain quests, you get good enchanted gear, while they don't scale up the gear found on NPCs nearly as much (i.e. no one will ever be as stacked as you by the time you hit level 40 or 50 or so). Monsters suffer from that even more: all they could really do is increase a monster's health and other stats and maybe make the AI more complicated. It's a tough call: the game wouldn't feel as epic if the best equipment you could get was an unenchanted set of daedric armor and a daedric longsword, but since you can loot all equipment an NPC has when you kill them, if they had enchanted gear on par with yours, you'd get rich *really* quickly. I also disagree that games seem easier now because of acquired skill. I wasn't much of a gamer until I started university (I never owned a console before buying a Wii last month), but from going back and playing the original Zelda compared to Phantom Hourglass, there's no doubt for me that the later games are easier.

Easily. Given enough time and assuming he people involved work well together, a game can be put together with as little as 3 people (assuming no one has overlapping skill sets): an artist, a musician/sound person, and a programmer. I've coded the better part of a 2D RPG engine on my own in about a year, and that was as a beginning programmer; I could do it faster now (or at least, produce better, more reusable code that would fit better with whatever tools the level designer needed). As a one-person project, RPGs are tough to do, but for that kind of project, they have more than enough staff. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm not one to buy software without seeing a review first unless it's pretty much guaranteed to be awesome, such as Phantom Hourglass, but I will be waiting for it to come out and will likely be buying it soon after its release.

@suzumibachi: I've found that most PC RPGs based on D&D-like mechanics do a horrible job of consistent difficulty with the last boss. Those games, titles like Neverwinter Nights 2 (1's boss was more consistent with the game, although I found it to be a little on the easy side overall) and Icewind Dale are generally a waltz through all kinds of weird locales picking up 10 backpacks full of healing potions that you don't have to use, and then you get to the final boss, who is generally scaled to be much more difficult than the rest of the game. I shouldn't be able to beat the game with only a few deaths, usually near the start of the game while I figure out things like the radius of the AoE for my fireball spells, and then spend 20 or 30 tries beating the final boss, and then only do it by luck, not because I discovered some kind of strategy. @zircon: Levelling/gearing up in order to beat monsters is silly. I want to see a game make monsters level up as you do, or better yet, not even bother with levelling up and have everything scaled. Actually, I suppose Guild Wars does a great job in this regard, not so much that monsters level up, but more that in every campaign, you'll hit level 20 long before the end, and winning harder missions, especially if you're trying to complete the bonus objectives, generally involves making sure that you and your teammates not only understand your roles and skillsets well but that you're strategic as a group with selecting your builds. For anyone who doesn't know, Guild Wars characters have a ton of skills they can set and can change how they spend their stat points for free as often as they like while in town, but out of town, you're stuck with what you have, and you can only take 8 skills with you, so choosing how to build your character for a particular task is very strategic.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're interspersing the original game soundtrack audio with other recorded audio, and there isn't too much content that you created from scratch. I'd be very surprised if that kind of thing even made it to the judge's panel. I'm sure you did a good job of putting it together, but OCR's focus is about taking an original song and recreating it from scratch in your genre of choice, with a reasonable amount of melodic and harmonic interpretation, which isn't at all what you seem to have done.

Go me I discovered it through the One-Ups site directly, and somehow missed finding it when I downloaded all the OCR torrents and listened to them all to decide what I wanted to keep. Oops

Haha, yeah. Why anyone wouldn't want to refer to read e-mails is beyond me. I mean, if you have too many old e-mails that you've read in your inbox, make a folder or something!

Footer ads are fine with me. I see a problem though with ads between the original post and first reply for guests: they won't necessarily know that by registering, those ads would disappear. If you go that route, which is fine on its own, I'd add a note that registered users don't see those ads beneath the ad itself.

The melody in the first part of the new preview reminds me a bit of Better Man by Pearl Jam. I'll definitely be buying the album in whichever format is most profitable for you as soon as it is released.

Two possibilities I can think of. One is that I've noticed Thunderbird occasionally clears its list of what's in a folder; the contents aren't lost, they're just not displayed. Switching folders and switching back to my inbox would help in that case. The second is that you have some kind of message filter set up that is immediately rerouting read messages.

I have the same case as Katsurugi and I recommend it. I've been happy with it. If you get the plastic cases that can hold 4 DS games, 2 in each side, you can easily fit 8 DS games, the DS unit, and an extra stylus or 2 in that case.

Right, so FF III mail-sending anyone?

The Axiom line also includes a number of triggers; 8 I think, on the Axiom 61. I recommend that over the keyrig line as well, if you don't mind the extra weight (it's not that heavy; they're not fully-weighted keys).

Here's number 3. It's not an OCRemix (although it's probably pretty close to being OCR-worthy): Mario's Sleigh Ride by the One-Ups. You're not going to find much else that's Christmas-related here because it's pretty hard for mixers to make a mix that has enough interpretation of a game tune to meet submission standards but still includes enough of any other source material to be a Christmas song.

The best thing Linebeck does is when he totally mocks you for becoming a Goron brother on the Goron island. I just love that they put an NPC in the game who's so blatantly negative in a good way.

My favourite 2D Mario game so far has been New Super Mario Bros. for the DS. It feels like the original, the physics feels pretty tight and realistic, similar to SMB3, and some of the special moves from Mario 64 (namely the wall jump and ground pound) are in the game as well. I didn't like the GBA rerelease of SMW or SMB3; I found the controls to be backwards from what I'd been used to more recently, and found it really awkward moving from running to jumping, while NSMB seemed more natural. That doesn't of course affect the originals. It's been a while since I've played the original SMB3; I've played the Allstars version much more recently, but I found them both to have good physics, although different. The only Mario game with really bad physics IMO is SMB2. Although, who doesn't love the ability to lob turnips at people?

Thanks for the offer, but unless my math is off, that'd be between 4 AM and 7 AM for EST (UTC -5). Tomorrow morning, I'll be on the train to work and won't have wireless access, and I'm certainly not getting up that early on the weekend Thanks though.

Anyone available to help me with the Final Fantasy III mognet sidequest? I lost my copy of the game (or it was stolen by someone looking at our apartment before we moved out, I'm not sure; I lost a couple other games at the same time). I've gotten a new copy and want to get the stupid Mognet messaging done. I'm at the earliest point in the game where I can access Mognet, and intend on making a permanent save as soon as I've sent 7 messages so I don't have to do this again if I restart. You can get around the one-hour limit for sending messages if you reset your DS clock, so what I'm hoping for is to hop on AIM/MSN with someone and alternate with them between sending messages and shutting off the DS to bump the clock up an hour and a bit to resend, so all 7 get done at once. Anyone willing and able to help me out?

It wouldn't be hard to set that up, but you would, of course, need access to the site code. The remix numbers would just be records returned from a database; it'd be easy to put them in an array and then randomly play one.

The handful of true pirates are the people who actually break the encryption and write the keygen software. There aren't that many of them; it's not like there's a need for 10 different Halo 3 keygen programs. Software piracy is rampant because of your so-called "little guys" who don't do the hacking but take advantage of it. No competent software company would go out of their way to defend against 100 people pirating their software. It's when everyone feels entitled to a copy of Windows and a copy of Office for free just because they bought a computer. The little guys suffer because of piracy, but the little guys also caused the problem. Or do you believe that software companies produce software at very low costs, or aren't entitled to charge a price of their choosing for their product?

Ah, Rune Factory is the only one I've played. Well, happy pineapple growing to you then