Kenogu Labz

There's two different discussions, one having to do with server having the invisible empty-but-not slot preventing people from auto-joining the server. And then there's the other discussion, which has to do with the fact that Powerlord briefly turned team auto-join on due to pubbers.

Economics does not mean reduced prices. Just like many people enjoy having physical copies of books over e-books, some would prefer to have a hard copy of a game they can install from. And for consoles, you really don't have much of a choice, especially when available memory is limited. You can only copy so many games to memory, and consoles are designed to run relatively quickly from discs. And if the publishers handle marketing strategies and project funding, then there's really no way to separate them from the market without killing it. Basic C++ or Java would not be enough to create a fully-fledged game, even text-based. You would need to understand how to design a system that is properly modular, very efficient, stores its data in a highly-compressed manner, retrieves it and expands it quickly... not to mention having to make it flexible enough to accept a new DLC package with all its resources and have it seam flawlessly with the original game. Plus, you'd probably want some sort of system to search for and download said DLC. Overall, I'd say two years minimum.

You can only do so much with DLC. You can't change the core mechanics of a game with DLC (though you may be able to add slight supplementary changes, depending on how flexible the system is). The point of DLC is that it's downloadable content: it's resources that supplement a game, whether it be a set of weapons, an addendum to the storyline, or other non-necessary material. And, as TD mentioned, save-files would have to have some pretty nasty structure in order to be able to store any progress involving extended content. And believe me, Jack. Being a software engineering major, I can tell you that it's not simple to make a system such as that. The entire game engine needs to be build with the modularity of DLC in mind, and it's no easy task to make an architecture with that in mind.

It could be a social phenomena. People who go along with others they know in hating it in public... but when it comes time to hit the ratings button, they reflect: "Hey, story stank, but I had FUN playing this. Meh, who's gonna know? *9*"

Personal attacks do not proper behavior make. While debate's fine, trolling is not, and at this rate, you're starting to act trollish. I'm not trying to shut you up, but do please keep comments towards others civil. Debates can be had without personal attacks. Quite honestly, I don't see how they can say the storytelling was at fault. As far as I know (which is not terribly far), Japan has imitated America's style in their media; sure, they've embellished it and shaped it to their culture somewhat, but the roots are still there; I've never had a hard time understanding, "Why are they telling a story with dialogue? Can't we just have little pictographs instead?" The only case where stories tend to come across differently is when native culture is incorporated into the story itself, like in FFX; even then, while it may evoke a sense of fondness and beauty in Japan, it brings a completely different feeling of wonder and curiosity to Western audiences, to which those concepts and references are unfamiliar, and yet hauntingly similar to blurred memories of pictures from Japanese history. Some things are universal, some or not. I just don't see that being the problem in FF XIII.

Heh, you can't spoil FF XII's story. It's already not all that great. The world-building is where it's at. (No whining about Ivalice continuity!)

The Judge system in FFTA? That was brilliant! It forced you to use other strategies, and to think of new solutions to problems you may or may not have seen before. It was actually forcing the player to use Tactics. Similarly, grinding can be boring... unless you use it as a chance to hone your skill and learn strategies, or play with abilities you haven't dared to try yet. I've heard XIII's chapter 11 is pretty bad with grinding, even for an RPG, though. Then again, who didn't grind on the Veldt in VI, just to get Gau or Stragus some moves? Or to keep fighting that one rare monster and get his mad loots? They created a place where grinding had extra benefits for specific party members, which made it a bit more bearable than just pointlessly waiting to level up. In terms of making XIII-2 DLC: You have to actually program the DLC system in the first place. Square-Enix assumed XIII would be enough of a success to not warrant any form of DLC. As a matter of fact, I can't recall any Square-Enix RPGs that do contain it. (Can anyone validate that?) Their games sell well enough on their own, and they're packaged as a complete story, beginning to end (or some variation thereof). To add more without breaking the story, they really have to develop a whole new game, hence X-2, XIII-2, and spinoffs. So DLC really doesn't make sense in context of the bigger picture. Mass Effect can handle DLC, since certain key people are still living after each game (I'm assuming, haven't finished the second game), which allows them to build some new story into the continuity without breaking anything. Does this approximate what the DLC actually is for those games?

That's a basic principle of software development. Once you're that deep into the project, you can't just turn around and make major design changes without pushing a fortune into it. Even Square-Enix Can't take that kind of risk. So they finished their product and shipped it out. And it sold. Whether it was as good as everyone had hoped it would be, it paid for itself. That gives them the resources to try again, but now with the opportunity to revise some of those decisions without the same painful cost.

Eeeexactly. Which is why we all play this superbly broken game. Funny how that works. xD

My guess is a sort of processing-frame-lag compensation. When you implement a basic game loop, you look at how much time has passed since the last processing loop. Based on that, you perform a number of processing cycles to match the passed time. For example, if your game is running at 60 fps, and 1/60th of a second has passed since the last processing loop, the game will handle one frame's worth of input. The graphics, on the other hand, must be running in parallel, since they continue updating through the processing cycle, and at a non-accelerated rate; it just shows the state of the system at a certain time.

I bough a PSP with Dissidia around Christmastime. Been playing it almost exclusively. Takes awhile to get used to, and while the story is... well, practically non-existent, and wrapped in stifling layers of pseudo-philosophy, the gameplay itself is boatloads of fun. Onion Knight has been my personal favorite so far; he's light and easy to maneuver, and most of his attacks deal BRV damage. Especially fun once he unlocks his combo skills; get in close, drain their BRV, then sweep right into a hard-hitting HP attack. Hard for them to get back at you after it, too.

The most laughs in the series are shared between IX and VI, too. As bizarre and irritating Quina was (not to mention almost impossibly difficult to make eat things), he ends up being the butt of one of the funniest moments in the game. Remember the wedding scene in Conde Petie? Funniest of all was that, at this point, Vivi is still of indeterminate gender, if I recall correctly (either that, or he's just a stuffed doll; you can't really tell), and Quina is always of indeterminate gender. Your destination is a honeymoon-ritual location for the dwarves, and they won't allow it to be used for other purposes. Hilarity ensues.

It's because good music ties its motifs to specific experiences, people, items, and events. Games, especially, have a great chance to reinforce their motifs repeatedly; you hear that villain's theme, you wanna kick his butt. The legendary artifact you were after has its own recurring theme? Bet you'll recall some of the epic scenes containing it as soon as the first few notes start playing. On the other hand, it's still very possible for music from games you haven't played to be great to listen to. I've loved the Castlevania soundtracks for ages, but I've only played a couple of the games; ironically, I don't listen to the soundtrack from those. Certain composers have music that span outside the boundary of the game, and are excellent in their own right. Sometimes, finding a great song can lead you to an equally good game. As such, I'm giving the list a shot, to see if I find any new gems to check out.

I thought that was one of the fun things about the system, you didn't need MP. Simple, but I thought it actually worked fine without it. And make it so you can't restock from the same spell pool every so often. Finding a Flare or Meltdown pool was fun, but also felt cheap when you realized you could go do something, come back and grab more. Interesting idea, but that might be attaching too many threads to the junction system. After all, that means that the more you use a spell, the less powerful it gets (which is understandable, but would make certain enemies/bosses nigh impossible). There needs to be several points of interaction that operate independently of junctioning. Hadn't thought of this. Maybe they could shift the system to attach the spells to the GFs themselves, which wouldn't make for a major difference, and could be the key to the 'jack-of-all-trades' problem. If they can revamp VII to have a more clever system (I'm talking waaay better than the original materia system, which I always found rather dull), it would go a long way in making it more interesting, at least in my opinion. Still need to get around to playing it, though.

True enough. I'm just hedging my bets against SE thinking that the best way to recreate one of their favorite games is an essential re-release. They want to make money off of both an old market (who will have nostalgia drawing them in), and a new market (who've heard of it, but haven't bothered or been willing to play it). Will they hit that market with a game identical to the original? Highly doubt it. From everything I've seen, VII worked because it hit a market that didn't expect anything like it. Now, when everyone views new FFs as FF VII spin-offs and clones (true or otherwise), it's entering a saturated market. It'll be rough to differentiate itself from other games in the competition when it isn't actually differentiating from anything.

My bet is, if they wanted to remake it with 3-d, they'd go all out and just release it on PS3 with new fanceh graphics. After all, what better than an RPG, with all its flashy battle effects, to add a little extra flair to? That's just a guess, anyway. Wonder how long it'll be 'til we see the first RPG that makes 3-d look good...

Mostly in terms of architecture and manner of dress, and those follow relatively closely in line with VII's, except with more polygons. (Speaking as someone who actually enjoyed FF VIII.) I wouldn't mind them putting off VI, if it meant we had a true remake, not a DS makeover. They could make it absolutely stunning, I bet. Wonder if they could patch up the holes in VIII's system, and make the magic-attachment system work right, because that was a kick-butt concept that never made it there. Whatever their new projects are, though, I think they'd be better off avoiding remakes. SE is having a hard enough time getting their new games working well. A remake of VII would hit a generation who wouldn't understand it or appreciate it as much as the one who played it over a decade ago.

We _gotta_ get an album listening party in that joint. With live performance in center field, of course!

Those two are so massive that a project would really need direction before it can start. If I recall correctly, VotL, one of (if not the) largest OCR album to date took several years. It's quite a lot of work. Both Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI are on that magnitude, in quality, if not quantity. Although I still say Final Fantasy VI could be made into a beautiful opera.

1. I'm pretty sure change in momentum gets propagated down. If you're driving down a roadway, your momentum is constant, and therefore no motion occurs. In the next level down, you may feel the effects of a momentum shift as a gravity shift, but unless your momentum on that level is shifted (AKA it causes you to move), it won't propagate to the next level. Violent momentum shifts also act as kicks. 2. They were able to go down at most three dream-levels with the sedatives they had. That worked well for their goal, since, as seen, Inception needs about that many layers to make the idea seem self-generated. Limbo is pretty much 'collective unconscious' dream-space where anyone can make changes. Think of it as a giant sandbox. The story touches on it and how you can end up trapped in it, but the rules governing it (such as time-scale) are still a bit of a mystery. We can infer some basic rules from what we've seen in the movie (such as the fact that anything made in Limbo remains, even when the dreamer wakes), but there's much more to explore.

Inception didn't have any plot holes that I've noticed, but that's not what really makes it great. There were two things I saw that made it incredible: If you were paying even the slightest bit of attention, you will walk away thinking. Christopher Nolan has an incredible talent for making movies that leave you asking questions for days afterward, most of which won't directly tie into the plot, but are inspired by logical consequences from it. The Prestige was another one that fits this bill well (though that one's much harder to full grok the first time around. That movie would also make it into the list of masterpieces. In fact... Christopher Nolan seems to be full of them. Here's hoping he keeps going strong!) Inception also set up a framework: a system which could easily be built onto, either with more films, novels, games... there are so many directions this could go. He chose to focus on one scenario, leaving further development of the structure to others. What happens in the dreams of the mentally unstable, slow, or the savant? Speaking of savants, could there be savants who manifest bizarre effects in dreams? Can people be killed from within a dream, and could it set the stage for the perfect murder? Are there more rules to Limbo than we've seen, or does everyone have a 'real estate plot' to use as a sandbox in the collective unconscious? So many possibilities to explore, and all with the potential to create powerful stories and moral dilemmas. These alone make it a masterpiece, IMHO.

Generally, for pre-selected names, I leave them the same. That's how they wrote the narrative, that's how I'll read it. However, names that aren't pre-selected, I'll use one of several names, usually depending on the gender. Kenogu serves as a general-purpose character that doesn't seem too awesome at the moment. Midanya can serve as a woman or an effeminate-looking lead. Darte is usually for a more heroic-looking character. Doesn't really help that you know nothing about the character you're naming the first time around, though.

It's a fun take on the hex-grid RPG, with a troop-based spin, but it has caused my computer to blue-screen several times; something to do with the Nvidia graphics drivers. Tried replacing the driver to no avail, so I'll have to wait 'til I pick up a new computer to play it. Enjoyed the parts I did get to, though. Definitely not easy, but certainly fun.

Peter Hajba is amazing. Started in the demoscene, and never lost his touch. He's not so productive on the music end anymore, though; he works on the graphics side of games, nowadays. But we will always have his classics, like the Bejeweled 2 Suite. Hah! Haven't heard that in ages. Had a demo of it in an old sampler pack. Crazy good demo, too. Kept me occupied for months.

Machinarium's cheap again, beautiful buy if you haven't already. Mirror's Edge and KOTOR both look like good deals, too, though haven't played Mirror's Edge myself. Anyone know if Neverwinter Nights 2 is worth it if you haven't played the first?