EC2151

At the end of the Native Instruments deal, I am wondering to myself whether or not it's worth it to get the Evolve Mutations bundle, or go an extra $25 to get the big Evolve set... Does the big Evolve contain both Mutation sets?

Best of luck with the project, MysteriousOctopuss! Hope everything works out for you and your team finishing up the game!

Doesn't change how retarded that thought is, though. No one loves a game because of the "surprise" of a cutscene. Content is king and the real reward.

I think it's hilarious that Sakurai thought that the story was important enough in Brawl that he just couldn't stand to ruin the surprise in the next installment, removing the mode entirely. It's completely absurd, and points to a serious mixing up of priorities!

Well, not really =( Maybe one of the Evolve kits would be more up my alley.

Myself I'm wondering if I should get Absynth... I'd love a sale of FM8 though...

I really like the trailer, and any game that looks a bit towards Evil Zone for inspiration is a-ok in my book! I dropped you a message.

Sometimes it's refreshing to play games with mature content in it, eg System Shock, Deus Ex, Resident Evil, House of the Dead: Overkill, etc. You know, because games don't have to always be inoffensive. If the next RE game was E for Everyone, wouldn't it make a difference?

Well, "interesting" in that it's a shmup (which is always interesting), that it's a tactical tank-based shooter, which is not the norm, and that it's headed up by one of my favorite still-active companies, G.REV. It's basically an old-school game released on new hardware, which is, for me, always something to be excited about. Professional arcade-style games are very rare these days, outside of a small PC niche. is always a plus (which is why the lack of soundtrack CD is saddening).

The question isn't so much effort and production, it's where they put it, e.g. hiring three studios to develop the most shittastically-retarded Metroid game ever created, vs. not getting a decent soundtrack for the NSMB games (still a fucking travesty).

It didn't have a strong presence, ultimately, and it's only sort of "looking back" at the Gamecube that you see widespread appreciation, because at the time it was seen as the kiddy box. If you look at sales, it was a flop. I liked the GC library, and some of its games were still profitable, but that was a different economic climate back then. A repeat of a "gamecube generation" would be very damaging to Nintendo. Nintendo made the Wii and DS in response to the failure of the Gamecube. They knew they needed a different strategy because the GC had made them irrelevant among its competition.

Do you watch Disney movies? Pikmin fans may be passionate, but probably not passionate enough to make Pikmin 3 sell more than a million copies. Still, a Nintendo game that isn't WiiSports selling over a million is still fairly decent - Corruption sold roughly 1.7 million, if I recall. And that's one of the best-selling Metroid games of all time! The trick, as always, is to keep costs down. However, with the advent of HD visuals, that's going to be harder and harder to do.

Hello! I worked along with a several other members on this forum on a Dynamite Headdy tribute album a few years back, titled Secret Bonus Point. You can check it out here. There is an oriental orchestral arrange of That's the way the boss is killed on there, by Chernabogue. But more Headdy remixes could never hurt!

So, a game I've been wanting to be localized for almost a year now is finally slated to come to the U.S. and E.U. A tank shooter directed by the Hiroshi Iuchi of Ikaruga fame, Kokuga! http://kokuga.net/index_e.html Unfortunately, it will be eshop-only. Which is a shame, because the Japanese release was really slick, with a soundtrack CD included. It's hard to get niche genres published with physical copies, I guess. Still, this brings the number of games that would justify me buying a 3DS up to three!

If they rushed two generations of hardware to churn out faulty pieces of junk, what makes you think that "third time's the charm"? MS gives less that two shits.

The Galaxy games definitely had a lot more thought, imagination, and ambition put into them... Which is why it mystifies me that they never thought of putting any of that imagination etc. into the NSMB, especially when it was literally a system-seller (which the Galaxy games were not!).

I actually wish more effort was put into the aesthetics of the NSMB games, because if they actually had the fun design concepts and fantastic sound design of the 3D Mario games, they'd probably be the masterpieces of the generation. But Nintendo clearly doesn't think their best-selling series deserves any effort, so we get BAH BAH music and Ice-Fire-Jungle worlds from Nintendo's B-squad.

The United States is the only country in the world where the Xbox actually has a chance to sell - Europe is a lost battleground, and Japan gives less than two fucks about MS already. Why bother to release the Xbone in Japan?

Extra DRM on a console is unnecessary. The console itself is the DRM. It's why by and large you can't pop in burned dvds into your Xbox and play games without serious modifications. Extraneous anti-used-game DRM is, as mentioned, only a tool to control gamers into acting exactly as EA and Activision want us to act (only buy the newest updates of their boring games, new, always). As Crowbar and Toadofsky have mentioned, this is punishing consumers for the mistakes of the publishers, which means a less fulfilling game experience for the rest of us. The only people who will swallow this load a) deserve it, and just need to play their latest updates of Forza, COD Ghosts, Battlefield, etc.

I'm glad we can have a whole bunch of unnecessary shit so we can have behavioral AI in Forza. C'mon, it's a bullshit justification and anyone can see that. As for DRM, it's big publishers that push for it in the first place, because they want to run the industry. The trend of the last decade is to see medium-sized publishers close or get bought-out by larger houses, and these big companies want to set the rules. MS doesn't at its base care about DRM or used games, but it cares about having unquestioned support from EA and Activision, who would love to ream their consumers day in and day out. The Xbone is more or less caving in to big publisher demands at the expense of the average gamer. I suspect this will translate into by-and-large apathy towards the console. Not to mention that Apple and Steam have DRM-free products - there's at least a choice involved.

They are deal breakers, and the high-price-point during an economic recession more or less guarantees lackluster sales. Though you can already count on the Xbone performing poorly in Japan and Europe (where it has traditionally sold like shit). So this is the console primarily for the American FIFA/Madden/Forza/COD player. But will those groups, many of them lower-income brackets, put up with the Xbone? My guess is: no.

With something like always-online (even if it's once-a-day), used-game passes, and kinect data-mining - because Kinect always being on is just used for that, data mining for advertisements - you have to think of how the majority is going to react, especially in a bad economy. Are you telling me I have to pay new for a game each and every time? Why? I can buy used movies and books. The thing needs to be connected to the internet all the time? Why? And let's not forget Microsoft's precedent for releasing faulty hardware, or is everyone just sitting pretty on their third 360? Especially when it's highly likely that it will be more expensive than the PS4 and WiiU, both of which have neither of those pitfalls. The only people willing to buy in to this are the 360's core market, and not its total consumer-base. There will be the idiots who buy it for the COD and whatever, and they deserve whatever shit Microsoft and the game industry shove down their throats. But this machine doesn't have any sort of mainstream appeal, of actually broadening its consumer-base and making progress in the "console wars." Everything points to MS saying "we want to squeeze every last drop out of our core users." That's not a strategy for success - it's a strategy for decline.

On the plus side, Diablo 3 ultimately caused Jay "Fuck that loser" Wilson to quit.

While my reaction towards the WiiU has likewise been lukewarm thus far (there aren't any games that interest me on the machine yet), it seems to be the one of the three that focuses and emphasizes video-games the most, even without the pointless social-media junk. The plus side is that the Wii has one of the best libraries, and most of the really excellent Wii games are cheap, if you skipped out on last generation.

Well, you don't want to use SNES spc soundfonts if you have something "better-sounding" lying around. I love the sound of synthesizers, warm analogue strings, and stuff like that, so I often eschew realism because I know I don't have the budget or samples to pull it off all that convincingly. You always have to play to your strengths. My FL "mentor", whom I learned a lot of my starting-out stuff from, told me that 99% of your sound from the DAW will come not exactly from your samples or instruments, but from filter effects and how you use them. I have found that this is the case, and I tend to just, mix, match, and tweak the preset filter options to get things that sound interesting or good to my ear.