ZealPath

His review of the Sega CD was pretty hilarious, as well as TMNT 1 for the NES. Not a huge fan overall but I have gotten some laughs out of it.

Congratulations Tweex!

Just the PC beta at the moment, there has been no mention of the PS3 beta yet. Regarding open beta, I believe there was mention of it towards the end but I dunno, I almost can't see SE doing that, maybe because at the moment beta just doesn't seem ready at all, time will tell. Keep in mind that so far, even those in beta have not been able to log in often at all yet (one 4 hour window, same as alpha, and two sets of 10 hour windows, which was a considerable improvement), in about the 2 weeks the beta has been going now. To me, it still feels like alpha except you can play in fullscreen with much better character creation, but, I guess we'll see how quickly they roll out more improvements.

I was at Distant Worlds Vancouver last year and it was spectacular aside from the fact that Nobuo himself could not make it. The conductor Arnie Roth, same guy from that video was there and doing his thing however. I did a fairly long writeup post about as well, it's around here somewhere. And just so this stays vaguely on topic, I also distincly remember Mr. Roth announcing that the reason Nobuo could not be present was because he was busy working on the FFXIV OST, which at the time I don't think was common knowledge.

The idea of new official Mega Man content is exciting but like some others I am mostly left wondering what the hell this is really going to be. Seeing Arthur was cool though, Ghouls n' Ghosts needs some love. Trailer seemed really low quality too, like I almost didn't believe it was official.

While I have no idea on the "release readiness" of TERA, my thought process on this is that a delay is generally a good thing, as you don't want to be paying your monthly fee to essentially beta the game. As this relates to FFXIV, this is one of my lingering fears, and why I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who actually wants them to delay it, as I think they're being a little too ambitious with that September release date. Maybe that's easy to say when I have access to it via beta (when it's actually up anyway), but I dunno, if you were to ask me if I thought you were missing out, my answer would at the moment be "not really."

Been in since day 1 of alpha, it's not great yet, but I still have hopes for it considering how long I played FFXI. Biggest problem by a country mile is the fact that the interface is just as clunky and console-friendly, pc-unfriendly as XI's was. The mouse is a software-based afterthought, and the camera moves as if you were moving an analog stick. Mouse control was terrible in XI as well but back then I didn't so much mind just playing with the keyboard. Years later, I don't think it's too much to expect a standard wasd+mouse functionality. They've got the wasd, but not the mouse, so far. Aside from that the graphics are glorious, especially now that we can finally play in fullscreen (alpha was limited to a 1280x720 window). Levelling systems aren't terrible but still need polish, once again you can change your class at any point, and levelling multiple classes is essentially required so that you can have secondary skills to go with your main's. There are a lot of quests, so yes, to some degree it has taken that page from WoW or EQ2, but to me it still feels a lot like FFXI with better graphics, a slightly better interface, amazing graphics, and a long way to go (hopefully, to the point where they realize the Sept release date is insanity and push it back).

Amazing how many random little places seem to have found OCR material now. Personally I'd take anyone wanting to use my music as a compliment but who knows I guess .

Definitely liked the original song better, was one of my favorite parts of the update actually. I guess I'll settle for just manually listening to a copy of the original, new one isn't that different after about a minute when the random harmonica goes away at least.

Looking forward to the guitar taunt more than anything! I will definitely be putting in some Engi time soon to work on the achievements and stuff, but maybe not till this dies down a little.

According to this, you're probably good to go, but your "video card" is the bare minimum and also is not nvidia or ATI so I wouldn't be able to guarantee it. This is always the killer on laptops, as their processors and memory are usually fine, but you can't get the same video cards for laptops that you can for desktops (in most cases you can't even get video cards in the truest sense of the term). My guess would be that it would run, but could suffer from some video related slowdown.

If it didn't actually cap at 255, I would love to see someone with an emulator attempt to hit this absolute maximum number of lives. How bored one would have to be to do that, I don't know, but it would still be awesome.

I would have to agree, I do not have much musical knowledge in the technical sense but I always feel like I can provide SOME sort of feedback for the artist. Just do it indeed!

I want to place my order but I can't decide where to. I have actually never been to a Gamestop in my life (was still EB "back then"), but I guess that will be changing. I haven't picked up a physical game in a store in years now (thanks Steam!), so this will feel a little strange, probably still my best bet though, for the most part I always got my call on release day to come pick things up, except when I really really wanted something, then of course it would be days late . Actually, now that I think about it, the last physical game I bought was... the last FFXI expansion, Wings of the Goddess in late 2007, which btw, STILL isn't complete content wise (that's almost a 3 year wait for the expansion's content to become fully available, glad I'm done with FFXI. I've gone through hell with MMO or expansion launches and not getting the discs on time, I'll never forget the absolute hell of waiting a full week into launch to get my EQ2 box and being way behind my friends to start. This is why I love DLC, completely removes that possibility, though I don't think that will be available for FFXIV's launch which in a way is fine, that would be a bandwidth killer. Such is life for the hardcore MMORPG player I guess, which I guess I am about to become again for FFXIV. I guess that's the real reason I was content to wait a little longer for FFXIV, too many games to play as it is and now I have to spend all day on FFXIV... damn . Part of me is joking here but, considering how one of the big benefits of the CE is the early start, I really really want to make sure I get it on launch day, be nice if they ship early!

Official release date announced for Sept 30, 2010 Official Japanese site with info To me, this feels way too early, that means about 2 months and a bit to beta, and beta still has not started since alpha closed. I do like the Collectors Edition though, that will be a must purchase for me. Also, this release is for PC only, people who planned to play on PS3 will have to wait until sometime in 2011, so, no more cross platform launch. Anyone who played XI shouldn't be too shocked by this though, there were many different releases over time, starting with JP PS2, JP PC, NA PC, NA PS2, Xbox360, etc.

Very nice, heavy and companion cube were my 1 and 2, and Zero? Well he should have been there years ago!

When it comes to chillout I really have to recommend McVaffe's Crystalline Caverns. There are so many other things to choose from no doubt, but since I'm not writing an essay here, that is one of my favorites. Beaten to the punch but you'd definitely do well checking out almost anything by Joshua Morse as well, especially the Sonata of the Damned Album, and just since i like it so much, Morse's Morsecode.

Dosbox works just fine in 7, you'll be good to go once you've got it set up! God I love Dosbox, sometimes I'll launch it just to look around my classics collection and change directories for pure nostalgia.

It's still the same relatively slow combat (played XI for probably close to 6 years), though it has some new features that make controlling combat a little like FFXIII, in that you can queue up actions. There is a UI element specifically for this to make abilities much easier to access (in XI everything had to be accessed with a macro, no icons), and there is no auto-attack, so in some cases, you might simulate auto-attack by queuing up a series of say, punches to accumulate TP, then use a TP move of some sort. What's cool is that TP moves require different amounts, as opposed to in FFXI where each one required 100 (a good few hits, for those who did not play). I expect FFXIV to mostly appeal to the same people who liked FFXI, with the advantage that it is more quest driven so it will have a better chance of luring in anyone who was leery of FFXI's grind. I doubt we'll see too many more MMORPGs with a focus on grinding, that's just too old (and generally boring) a mechanic for a new game these days (though doing the same quests over and over isn't much better, time will have to tell where XIV stands on that).

Kinda want to play that map now for the novelty factor, probably just once, but I'm way too curious now . Speaking of silly novelty maps, there's also cp_balloonrace which is terrible aside from the fact that you'll be laughing at how silly it is when you play it.

Hmm, well, I had been watching those two for a deal for quite a while, and last week there was a week-long sale on EA titles. The key aspect of it of course, was that on each day, a themed selection of EA titles had fairly good discounts, but only for that one day. With "EA Week" concluded, and this new "Perils of Summer" deal in effect till July 4th, I would expect that you would have no chance of seeing a deal on the previously discounted EA titles until at least then (I could of course, be dead wrong). Unfortunately, I also doubt that they will go on sale anytime shortly after that, just based on how long it took for them to go on sale in the first place, and then, only for one day. I think that when it comes to those titles, they (whether EA controls this or Valve does, I have no idea) understand that they are both hugely popular and in demand, and that they don't really "need" to discount them significantly in order to get people to buy (the ME1+ME2 Deluxe Edition came to a little over 40 USD, and DA Deluxe + the expanision over 50), so even on sale, these games still called for a decent chunk of cash. Now one thing I can tell you is that Steam is a goldmine come Christmas time, the key being that you have to check every day as there are a lot of daily specials (basically what Darkesword said above). That's admittedly a while away, but it's the only time I can guarantee you'll have a chance to get virtually every title available on Steam at a significant discount, as long as you are vigilant with your daily checking. In general your best strategy is to check Steam's deals daily, as they do fluctuate a fair amount even during non-big sale times, and you never know what you might find. One game I think anyone should check out who hasn't already is Trine, I had loads of fun with that game, and it's 80% off, costing a whole 4 bucks today. If you have ever enjoyed platformers in your life, it's hard to mess this one up for the price.

I kinda forgot about Beat Hazard, just went ahead and grabbed that. My rule with pretty much anything on Steam is that it needs to be on sale for me to buy it, which isn't really that much of a challenge as long as you're a little patient. The EA sale last week got me 2 (4?) games I've been waiting for a good while to try in Mass Effect 1 & 2 and Dragon Age + Expansion, so I'm not exactly dying for more games, but, another few bucks won't kill me.

I'm pretty sure you can already pre-order it on Steam, but whether it gets full on Mac support, hard to say. If it did, I'm sure it would be a buy once, play on both platforms kinda of deal though like TF2 and the small group of games that fit into "Steamplay" category now. I actually don't play Civ but my brother has always loved it, and I'm sure 5 will be the next level of awesomeness for anyone into the series.

Congratulations on finishing your project, unofficial as it may be. I've never played Oracle of Ages but I will definitely check it out soon! If history is any indication, one does not need to have played said game to enjoy said remix album, so I'll probably find some gems here too. I remember seeing the thread for the start of the project years ago and wondering if it had a chance just based on how many other, more popular projects were going on, but clearly, any doubts were misplaced, nice job!

At first I was wondering why anyone would want to go against Steam (or even the other providers like D2D), but this really seems to be more of a focused thing with unique content. That said, the content doesn't look very interesting at the moment, I guess it has a chance depending on what it gets and who is interested in this stuff. Overall I'm more curious about what the inspiration and goal behind this was than anything.