Melbu Frahma

String together two soup cans, tie them onto a USB cord, and you're good to go, man. That's how headphones work, right?

Fuck you too, Microsoft. Seriously. Comments like this make me not want to buy any of their products again, ever. Except Windows and Office. I'll let them slide on that.

Yeah, lack of BC + used games maybe costing extra money to activate has me turned off. I'm frugal by nature, and charging customers for buying used games in any way, shape or form is too anti-consumerist for my liking. Plus, I want my systems to be able to pick up the slack for my older systems when they eventually bite the dust, because no matter how well you take care of it, your Game Boy and your PS1 and your N64 will not operate forever, unless you have a way to manufacture the parts in your own basement. They simply won't - fact of life. No. The next game system I'll buy, if I do buy another one, will be a PS2. Or I'll just get a tower PC for gaming, seeing as how 90% of my gaming is done on Steam these days.

This, but Dart Feld. Although I guess he kind of still has a chance.

Classy move, BS.

I think there's a difference between it feeling like work and recognizing that there's a need for work, though. For instance, my wife and I recognize that our communication skills need some improving - I don't always clearly communicate that I'm joking/playing around to her, and she recognizes that she needs to rein in her reflex of communicating defensively. But when we work on that aspect of our relationship, it doesn't feel like work. It's like the difference between going to a job you love, and a job that just pays the bills; they both require work, but one's work that you enjoy and one's work that you dread. I think the former is something you should expect, and maybe even want, to have in your relationship, and the latter should make you question the validity of your relationship. For me, it's the difference between my relationship with the woman I was with just before I met my wife, and my wife. With my wife, I enjoy the work on our relationship ~90% of the time, because it's fun and fulfilling, and the 10% of the time I don't enjoy it is due to my wife having a knack for picking the worst times possible to work on our relationship (when I'm falling asleep on the couch, on break at work, etc.); with the woman before her, it just felt like a chore even talking to her, because she would always bring up some cockamamie issue with our relationship she had discovered she had that morning (usually, something along the lines of "why are you still holding the fact I was sleeping with my ex during the beginning of our relationship against me?") and nothing ever got resolved or improved, because I was the only one doing any compromising. Hence, a large part of the reason I left her, and married who I did.

I am all sorts of okay with this news.

I'll be trying to see this over the weekend, fo sho.

Yeah, as much as I love Uematsu and Amano's work, it seems like this is the kind of game that might be coming out of this. And if so, count me out.

Every year, you get the same game with a vaguely improved engine and 99% of the same characters as last year? Seriously though, this depressed me.

Oh hay there.

Hah, I tend to do that too, particularly in games where you can actually see the weapons. Except I do it for armor, accessories, and all other types of equippable items, too. I like being able to compare the stats, and I'm always afraid that one accessory that I feel is worthless will be super useful later on in the game.

My body wasn't even ready to read it.

I used to have the same problem. Magic Carpet and Descent were the two games (well, and NHL 95) I had growing up that were worth playing growing up until I got a Gameboy at 11 years of age, and let me tell you, to this day it still messes with my mind whenever I'm playing an FPS or flight sim and the joystick doesn't invert when I go to fly. Man, I miss playing Descent.

Eh, I figured what the heck and joined. I'm mostly working on upper body (arms and pectoral) strength, while trying to gain weight. Unfortunately, I really don't have much time, so my workouts comprise mostly of pushups and pullups. So yeah. You may see me in here from time to time.

^ seconded. Also, for some reason, always helps me feel better, no matter what type of negative emotions I'm feeling or what their source is. Could be just that I freakin' love the song though.

I have to wear shorts or pj pants when I start a new game. Mostly because I really put a large chunk of time (for me) into games when I start them - usually at least 2 1/2 hours, compared to the 30 minutes I can usually manage to spend on a game at a time - and I've GOT to be comfortable when I do.

I was under the impression OCR couldn't use Square(soft) stuff anymore.

That makes me very, very, very, very happy if it turns out to be true. And (although I'm sure I'll say it again when the album releases) major kudos to ALL the staff and Remixers who got this together. Can't have been an easy undertaking.

Well, there IS always this, so I guess a case COULD be made....

No, what I'm saying is that it's a difference between exploring established characters and creating proactive female protagonists by altering the dynamics between them/exploring new aspects of the character as they already exist, and changing a long-established character's basic traits when there's no necessary reason to do so. In the Link/Zelda dynamic, for instance, you already have the potential to have a proactive, positive female lead - all you have to do is tweak the basic story to one where Ganon decides to kidnap Link, and we follow Zelda (and Sheik, if you must, although I think just Zelda as herself would be a far more interesting idea) as she fulfils the same basic role as Link... but with the noticeable and unique character traits belonging to her within the series. In the Uhura/Kirk dynamic, as another example, there are very, very distinct differences in their personalities, that would make it far, far more interesting to see the Uhura we already know explore more possibilities within the character as established, than it would be to see a retread of Kirk, but as a woman now! (Conversely, that was what made each subsequent captain - including Janeway, a female - interesting to the show's fandom: the differences in their command style, the differences in their universal views. I guarantee, if they had tried to make "Star Trek with old British Kirk, Star Trek with African American Kirk, and Star Trek with Irish female Kirk," none of those shows would have done as well as they did.) Now, on a personal level, what I can get behind - and what I'd like to see - is changing the gender of "characters" within universes where character entropy is recognized more fully than within LoZ/SM. For example, I would be very okay with more female lead/proactive protagonists in series such as Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, etc. I get what you're saying, and I agree to a certain point. To react to changing a character's gender with a kneejerk "Screw you, stop stealing our man characters!!1!" is sexist. To react to it with, "Why don't you just take the established character dynamic and change it to where Peach rescues Mario, or Zelda saves the world without even a sliver of help from Link?" is, I posit, not.

1. Dart Feld - Legend of Dragoon (Come on, you had to know I'd vote for him, look at my avatar ) 2. Saren - Mass Effect 3. Pikachu - Pokemon

I would have to disagree with you on that, Bleck, mainly because I think it's where some gamers' umbrage at the whole topic is coming from. While I'm sure that many are upset at the concept of changing the formula to where Zelda is the "active" protagonist and Link is the "passive" one, I'd also bet that there's a good portion - not large, necessarily, but a goodly amount - who would not mind that, but would mind a gender swap on the characters. To my mind, and I'm sure to many, there's a difference between trying to create more proactive female roles by tinkering with the dynamics between established characters, and creating more proactive female roles by altering the character's basic nature. It's the difference between creating an episode of Star Trek where Kirk and the rest of the command staff is injured and Uhura has to take command of the Starship Enterprise, showing off what a competent officer she is at doing other things than just saying "hailing frequencies open, Captain," and what a strong individual she is, and creating an episode of Star Trek where suddenly Kirk is a woman and Uhura is a man just because and proceeding as if everything is normal. Which, incidentally, was the plot of at least one published short story from the late 70s in that universe, and wasn't half bad, but that's besides the point.

I think that's a valid point to make; going back to your own Puritan example, images depicting a woman showing bare forearms/lower legs would probably be decried as oversexualized, whereas in modern society it wouldn't even cause an eyelash to be batted by the vast majority of living human beings. And for all we know, what we consider hypersexualized today might be considered tame by 2125 standards. Then again, for all we know, the trend/cultural norm might swing back the other way (as it has tended to do from time to time, throughout history) and we might be back to a 1920's standard of decency. Something that I've found gets ignored in using a term like that, too, is that typically the concept that subcultures within an overriding culture can have vastly different concepts of what falls under such headings. For instance, I have a group of friends comprised primarily of former dancers, models, performing artists, etc., to whom an image of an advertisement of skinny women wandering around in bikinis isn't worth a second glance. Then there's another group of friends, inherited through my wife, who called a similar image "way too sexualized" and "off-putting" the other day. Yet too often, I see the term (and similar ones) tossed around as an absolute, which I don't believe it to be.

More Descent music is always a good thing, especially when it's as well executed as this is. I was a bit hesitant of the track at first, but it slowly won me over, and when I realized around the 3:00 mark I was enjoying myself thoroughly I just gave in. Great debut track!