Avatar of Justice

Is it just me or is Shinobi for the PS2 more like what Ninja Gaiden Xbox should have been if Ninja Gaiden Xbox had wanted to be a 3-D translation of the quick, hard as hell, platforming gameplay of Ninja Gaiden NES? I tried out the Ninja Gaiden Sigma demo and it just seemed like Devil May Cry with ninjas. On a related note, I got in Ninja Gaiden III earlier this week making me the proud owner of the entire trilogy. I also got in Final Fantasy I for the NES as well. I've heard that it is the version to play if you want it to be fun, since the GBA version has been nerfed. Does anybody else here still try to play games on a real NES/SNES instead of emulating? One of my gamer quirks is that I like to play games on the original hardware if at all possible. That's right, I have an NES plugged into an HDTV. They usually don't look too bad. You can E-bay most NES games for <$20. I recently played through Link's Awakening on a Game Boy and Super Game Boy. Damn, Game Boy's have shitty lighting.

Yeah, one nice thing about Wing is that it IS pretty easy to keep track of the enemy suits. I think a lot of it has to do with the logical progression of the suits and the fact that there are less of them (and that they don't all look really similar). Original Gundam and Zeta Gundam just constantly throw new suits at you and they just don't seem that different besides maybe being a different color. 00 suffered from that too.

As someone who loves moral ambiguity in story telling, I don't have a problem if 00 had actually managed it. However, the main characters of the show just seemed like what they were fighting, except they babbled vague nonsense about how they have to change and the future. Moral ambiguity is no fun if one of the sides doesn't have a good point.

My biggest problem with Gundam 00 is that it pussied out on the issues it presents initially in the show. To me, the whole theme of Gundam 00 was "Is it acceptable to use force to bring about world peace?" In Season Two we are supposed to accept that it is not because we are supposed to just accept that the A-LAWS are bad. Sure, the A-LAWS do horrible shit. But if people had not opposed them, the A-LAWS presumably would not have attacked them. Were the A-LAWs exploiting them somehow? All I saw was idiots opposing authority and being beat down for it which is what it would take to enforce world peace. Setsuna & co. would just babble some nonsense about how they now fight for the future and we were supposed to just side with them. I remember when Billy confronts Sumeragi at the end and lays out why he supports the A-LAWS. I said "You know what? You're right. Shoot that bitch!" Celestial Being just came off as big hypocrites to me. So, an organization like the A-LAWS that goes around attacking people who fight against world government is bad. And yet, Celestial Being, an organization that is implied to be the big watchdog of the world at the end of the show is the exact same thing. It's members simply have no one in the world government giving them oversight and we are just supposed to trust them. I have no problem with the concept, but I don't like it when the A-LAWS stood for the same thing and are for some reason villains for it while Celestial Being is A-OK.

Not sure how you are assuming all games have the same barrier to entry. If you start looking at niche games at all you'll find games that really don't want you to play them easily and aren't just pick up and play. Just read up about Knights in the Nightmare (http://www.atlus.com/knights/), a game that is a combination of a bullet-hell shooter and tactical RPG. I can't imagine someone relatively new to the gaming would particularly enjoy it, having no experience with turn-based strategy games. I would certainly qualify that as not casual. My mom and dad would have no idea what the hell was going on. How about fighting games? Yes, you can play them without knowing combos, cancels, or even basic character moves and not spend the time and effort practicing at all. But I would argue that person has not played the game really. Not achieving some level of proficiency through practice in a fighting game is like playing Super Mario Bros. and quitting after the first level. You can't really say you played it. I think any game that requires repetitive time and practice isn't "casual." Gameplay aside, there are also series like Metal Gear Solid that discourage "casuals" due to the storyline. In order to really know what was going on, you'd have to go back and play 3 other games at a minimum to play MGS4. You can't just casually jump into it if you want to experience the game as Hideo Kojima intended. There's also games like No More Heroes that parody games. If you aren't a gamer who is somewhat familiar with video games and how their storylines, gameplay, and characters operate, you are missing out on a lot of the humor, something most people consider to be an integral part of the game. That's not really casual either.

Yeah, it jumped the shark at a specific moment for me. Like, that moment was dumb when I saw it, and looking back, after that moment, the entire show went downhill. I think it is exactly the halfway point too. My thoughts on Destiny are complicated. It is very obvious that the writers didn't know where they were going most of the show and just sort of cobbled the plot together. And yet, it has awesome moments (the final confrontation between Kira and Dullindal (Durandal?), the episodes where Kira and Athrun are fighting yet again, Kira vs. Shinn). Those moments get my pulse racing, so I can forgive the show for that. People tend to hate Kira and Lacus in Destiny a bit and are unhappy with what happened to Cagalli. As far as Cagalli goes, I can see how two years of dealing with a bunch of political d-bags (I imagine all of Orb's cool politicians died with her father in SEED) would grind a person down, especially someone like Cagalli who is much more of a warrior than a politician. Kira and Lacus are accused of being too perfect, but since Lacus is my anime dream woman my response is "She's perfect and that's a problem?" Someone who is feminine, talented, intelligent, a great leader, and who hands out Gundams to stop wars sounds like an awesome package to me.

A friend and I are preparing for a Gundam SEED rewatch. One of my favorite pieces of fiction ever.

What? There's a season 2 of Haruhi? Holy shit.

Tylor was the first anime comedy I could really get into. It was nice to see something trying to be funny without being stupid school kids and something that had a very endearing cast. Cryburn and Andressen are win.

I wish Bandai would make another non-Gundam show as good as Eureka 7 (or Geass). I fucking loved it. Gundam 00 is a total joke starting around the halfway point of season 2.

Rocks have had a huge impact on the cultural and technological advancement of the human race. Rocks have been used by Homo sapiens and other hominids for more than 2 million years. Lithic technology marks some of the oldest and continuously used technologies. The mining of rocks for their metal ore content has been one of the most important factors of human advancement, which has progressed at different rates in different places in part because of the kind of metals available from the rocks of a region. The prehistory and history of civilization is classified into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Although the stone age has ended virtually everywhere, rocks continue to be used to construct buildings and infrastructure. When so used, rocks are called dimension stone.

I think Square-Enix got asked about a Last Remnant PS3 release at a press conference and pretty much ignored/dodged the question. It's kind of disappointing because The Last Remnant seemed like a spiritual successor of sorts to FF12. My only choice would be to play the PC version and either drag my PC downstairs to play it on my TV, or just play it on my smaller computer monitor.

I've been looking forward to this dropping ever since I heard about it at the OCR MAGFest panel. The Might of Baron is one of the most badass songs I've ever heard. Good job guys!

It's funny, I realize that there is a problem, yet I still like my high budget games. One of the reasons I love Final Fantasy is the full experience of it. The production values are ridiculously high and the games are so long, you feel like you get your money's worth. I mean, I paid $70 for the limited edition of FF12 and I felt like I got a bargain for a game that gave me over 125 hours of gameplay. The games always feel incredibly polished. I guess my biggest fear is that the current generation of consoles requires game budgets to be so large that niche games are being driven off the home market onto portables (look at Valkyria Chronicles which had its sequel announced for the PSP). The downside to this is that developers (Japanese ones in particular) gear many portable games to a younger audience, leaving those of who like niche games that appeal to adults without a "home." This is why I think a niche RPG franchise like Suikoden saw a DS release, but Suikoden fans have yet to see a full budget Suikoden VI home release. Another problem is that 2-D HD games look beautiful, but the cost of making HD sprites is prohibitively expensive, making 2-D HD games hard to find.

The thing that bugs me about Smash Brothers is that it has all this random shit that can happen in the game that alters the match (items, crazy arenas) yet I am told the tourney level players just cut all that off and play the most boring levels (Final Destination). It seems to me that they are basically stripping out the feature that makes the game unique compared to other fighting games.

I buy new because I like games that are becoming increasingly more and more niche. If I liked mainstream stuff like Gears of War or Halo, I wouldn't care, but I feel the need to get my "vote" out for games like Valkyria Chronicles and The World Ends With You. I really want them to keep making games like those (TWEWY is my favorite game PERIOD).

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/071709-us-video-game-sales-sink.html I for one have only bought two games this year, namely Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus and BlazBlue (I am possibly a ArcSys 2-D fighter fan ). Oh, and the PC version of Braid. I guess my main reason for this is that Resident Evil 5 seemed like an inferior version of RE4 and that nothing else new besides Knights in the Nightmare has interested me. My play time this year has been split between stuff I bought last year like Valkyria Chronicles and The World Ends With You and even stuff from 2007 like Phantom Hourglass I hadn't gotten around to but has been on my shelf for a long time. So why haven't you all been doing your part in keeping the charity we call the video game industry afloat? Less game buying overall or have you just started buying more used games?

Because I don't feel like undoing 6 years worth of fighting game playing on a D-pad and being reduced back to sucking. I also don't want to spend $150 on a stick only to discover that I don't like them. If I knew someone who had one I could borrow and play around with for a few weeks, that'd be one thing, but to spend the money on a total crapshoot, no thanks. Not sure how you can equate that the PS3's D-pad is as bad for fighting games as the 360's. It IS better (the 360's D-pad is just a piece of plastic made to look like a D-pad mounted on a stick). Not to mention that even if I personally converted to a stick, my friends aren't going to, and then I'd own a version of the game they couldn't play with me, and that would suck.

One reason I own a PS3 over a 360 is because as a traditional 2-D fighting game fan who uses the D-pad, the 360 is completely worthless to me. It seems that the Wii isn't really getting many fighting games (although they did get Guilty Gear XX Accent Core). I still feel like the PlayStation is the place to be for the genre with games like BlazBlue, Street Fighter IV, and King of Fighters 12 not on the Wii and the 360's D-pad being total dick.

Death by Gundam would be an honor. One that I am unsure that I am worthy of.

Here is the technical explanation for all things Gundam (UC at least). It's Minovsky Particles.

God I wish it was staying up permanently. Getting my picture in front of that 1/1 Gundam would be the highlight of my life. <-------------- Huge Gundam nerd

Suikoden 1 though predated it by a couple of years (one of the first RPG's on the PS1) and has a lot of tracks that sound like live instruments. Considering that Suikoden was only on a single disc, I can't imagine they were using mp3 or WAV. Thus, it seems to me that FF7 would have no excuse (if you're in the anti-MIDI camp).

Heh, I've always considered the MIDI'ish sound of FF7's soundtrack to be one of its defining qualities. In a positive way. Considering how good Suikoden's soundtrack sounds, it does make you wonder though why FF7 did things with that old school MIDI.

That's a hard question to answer. It has something to do with the fact that Sammy and Sega merged and Sammy had the rights to publish GG. Ishiwatari (creator of GG) has implied that that's the reason Guilty Gear 2: Overture didn't feature most of the GG cast, and instead only had the few characters Arc System Works has the original rights to (which means Sol and Ky I guess). However, Ishiwatari has also stated that he plans to continue Guilty Gear in both 2D and 3D forms in the future. Some people think that ArcSys is waiting for the publications rights to expire and when that happens will get back to GG. Honestly, I'm kind of relived that BB is a restart that clears the ground a bit. GG XX Accent Core is super-complex and super-technical. I'd expect GG XXX to only be MORE complex and MORE technical. BB with it's smaller cast and less shit to have to deal with (Force Roman Cancels) has a much lower barrier to entry.