Annie Felis

I was an admin for the KidsWB AOL chatroom back in 1997. It was volunteer, so I wasn't expecting anything. As thank you at Christmastime, the head admin for the chat sent us some Wal-Mart bargain-bin "christmas classics" CD, along with a VHS for the movie Batman and Robin. Y'know, this steaming heap of crap. As far as I know both are still at my parents' house somewhere. Speaking of parents, they bought me the shittiest shovelware when I was a kid, because I wasn't allowed to make my own video game purchases. We got games at Christmastime and any suggestions went out the window because my dad would just go buy whatever cheap crap he could find. That's why I have Bart Vs. The Space Mutants, Taz: Escape from Mars and Beavis and Butthead. At least Ecco 2 and Aladdin were pretty cool games, but since they bought me a Genesis instead of a SNES thinking it was a superior system, the cool games available in my area were pretty limited back in 1993. You never saw cool shit like Gunstar Heroes, Sword of Vermillion or the Phantasy Star games. Buffalo was kind of a black hole for cool things in the '90s. Right now we have a terrible movie called "Cactus Jack" that we got just because it looked like a terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger cowboy movie. It does not fail to deliver, and even includes gags found in Chuck Jones cartoons. I'm sure you can find it somewhere out there if you look hard enough, and kudos if you can actually get through the whole movie. I can't.

So "appealing to japanese players" really means "appealing to creepy japanese otaku who love their moe body pillows too much". Talk about a niche game. I forsee uncomfortable jailbait panty shots and similar scenes throughout the game.

Ridiculous outfits aside, those are gorgeous screenshots. You can see Rikku's eye-swirlies pretty clearly in them. The Celsius looks pretty awesome too. This almost makes me want to give FFX-2 another try. I'll be buying the package whenever it comes out here just for FFX, so I might go through FFX-2 and actually complete the game this time around.

I've got a bad feeling about this...

1. Vyse (Skies of Arcadia) 2. Alucard (Castlevania) 3. Isaac (Golden Sun) Also since all the Square-Enix ones had to be removed due to copyright issues and calling them " OCR mascots", can't you rename them something to avoid more problems like that in the future? Something like "characters" or "bios"?

When I play any cartrage game, I need to save twice, and usually in two different slots. I once had a bad experience with my FF3/FF6 game wiping because somebody bumped the reset button, so now I want to be absolutely sure something will save. I find myself still doing this with Zelda games. I also replay certain games every year at a certain time, or at least I used to when I had the free time. I replay Castlevania: Lament of Innocence every Christmas, I replay Metroid Prime every winter (usually in the room with the fireplace), and I'd replay Skies of Arcadia on Dreamcast every summer. I'd sneak a FF7 replay sometime in there too, usually in fall. And then I combine the two: when I replay Skies of Arcadia, I need two VMUs to save on, just in case one dies on me.

That's a joke, right?

The nameless goons you fight in No More Heroes, that shout things like "MY SPLEEN" when you decapitate them.

I hope that structurally it's a lot like A Link to the Past and not like the more recent Zeldas where they have you revisit the same few temples/places over and over. I'm interested, but only if it's not a Phantom Hourglass clone. Earthbound though, hell yeah. If Nintendo wants to keep porting older titles to 3DS, I'm cool with that. Here's hoping for a Super Metroid port.

I didn't see the age range and I filled it out. So my entry is outside of the demographic you're looking for. Sorry about that.

I keep watching these just to see how the cat will be worked into each video.

If this is becoming "I would have ported", then I would have ported Terranigma to the SNES in North America. I also would've done that Tales of Vesperia PS3 North American port we were teased with and never got.

Agreed, or at least sort of agreed because the game does not look as interesting as the older DMC games so I'm not bothering to buy it. And speaking of liking old vs. new... ...Other M Samus can disappear. Bye bye. She sucks with her dramatic PTSD and daddy complex. She was a strong female character turned into a weak one. That whole game could be re-written in a way that addresses issues in Samus' past, keeps canon with the official manga, sets up Adam right to tie in with Fusion, and overall not make her this whimpering little girl that needs Commanding Officer Who Has No Jurisdiction and Big Black Guy With A Big Gun to tell her what to do. Also cast somebody else as her voice. Like Jennifer Hale, who was the voice of Samus' little grunts in the Prime games. I don't know why somebody with no previous experience was cast for the role, but it resulted in an unlikable rendition of the character becoming even more unlikable.

Well yeah, the terrible minigames were one of the things that needed to go. Half of that game was minigames, so it's another JRPG guilty of padding with crap material to extend gametime. They just weren't fun, and since I'm horrible at math, Sphere Break was painful. My biggest beef is that the characters underwent magical girl transformations from looking at old videos from when Zanarkand wasn't rubble the main theme of the game. Like this is literally the main plot device, on par with FF8's "GFs ate my brain so I forgot everything" crap. Oh-so magical transformations that suddenly Yuna sings beautifully while wearing the dress that a pop singer from a thousand years ago wore, because watching those old spheres imbues people the power of MEMORIES. Except if that was the case then probably a lot more people would've known the truth abouth the Bevelle/Zanarkand war and why the whole Yevon thing was a crock. Man I can rant about the stupidity of FFX-2 and it's failings for pages. But I won't. Instead I will show you the part of the game that failed the most: http://youtu.be/Fu7FEBklnYo?t=3m23s

Fix the everything in FFX-2 and make it a proper sequal, not a joke that includes gameplay elementents and mechanics as plot.

Why does Kojima do anything, other than to supply the MGS fanbase with mindfucks over and over? I mean, Revolver Ocelot shows up on a horse? Flaming unicorns? We're probably meant to believe that some of what we're seeing is some of Big Boss' coma dreams, but it's really something else.

I don't know anything about the expert sphere grid, but I really liked sphere griddin' and sending people down different paths each time I replayed the game.

If they can have magic, they can stink. I know they're fictional characters, but whenever I read a book, watch a show or play a game my brain tends to fill in little details that make the characters seem more like people and less like characters. Cecil and Kain had voices to me before FF4 DS came out. I knew what Ned Stark looked like before Sean Bean was cast. I tend to think about this kind of crap without really trying to, my brain just assumes all the mundane little things about people that we don't normally think of in a game, even though they have absolutely no application or use in the game. It's like my imagination doesn't switch off. If you can tune out little things like "maybe the characters are getting hungry on this long walk between towns" when playing a RPG, then good for you. I just automatically think things like that. Back on topic, I'm thinking that maybe I could actually beat FFX-2 this time around. I got about 3/4 of the way through when I initially played the game, screwed up with one sidequest so I couldn't get that 100% completion and decided I didn't want to replay everything just to get that 100%. If it looks a bit prettier with a better resolution, I might give it another go. It still takes a back seat to FFX, though. Really really hoping for Dark Aeons here.

Why not? Aren't they human? Or are there no bacteria living on humans in Spira? I mean we can assume that people poop on Spira since they eat, even though nobody is talking about poop anywhere in the game. Why not assume that they sweat too since they play sports? I dunno, I'm one of those people that when I see a fantasy world with fantasy people, I always assume they have the same issues and quirks that people in our world have. When I saw that there were toilets in FF7, I was like "Aha!" because somebody designing scene layouts over at Squaresoft took the time to indicate that humans do certain things no matter where they are. I also made jokes about how people had to walk all the way to Rocket Town to poop, because I was in high school and poop jokes were funny. There are probably people on Spira with bad breath, or gas, or anything else smelly the human body does. They mention that chocobos stink, so why not people?

In places like Bevelle where they have plumbing and electricity, they probably are hygenic. Bevelle and Luca probably have access to hot water. Places like Besaid where they live in tents, or places like Kilika where they live on stilts over the ocean...no. Not unless they have magic spells that make hot water and soap. Making soap from scratch is hard work and it's very harsh on skin and hair. It literally burns. A place that gets leveled by Sin every year isn't going to have indoor plumbing. People can still wash with hot water by heating it up, sure...but hot water alone isn't that great against B.O..

Woah, Alan Young is still alive?

And Hedy Buress was also Agrias in FFT: WotL, who had a pretty crap fakey british accent. I don't think she's that great of an actress, even as Rosie. They did have Tara Strong, who was typecast as a cute little bubbly girl, although that wasn't her fault. They also had John DiMaggio, who was typecast as a big dumb guy. I'm not sure if it's a reflection on the japanese actors (who also seem to be typecast in anime/games all the damn time), or directors not trusting actors to get outside the little niche they're pictured in. A lot of my annoyance with the characters of FFX is with the bad localization and over-the-top japanese motion actors. Every time Rikku did that weird scrabbly motion I ground my teeth a little, even though she was a good character as far as the story went. I also was not in favor of Tidus putting his hands up on his head all the time, probably because I figure Spira is not a place where people use deoderant or soap very often. It'd be neat to see the game re-done with different motion actors, or even better: do what they did with FFXII and for some roles re-capture the motion with western actors for the western release.

I'm hoping for a fixed lip synch with some lines re-dubbed. Hoping, but not optimistic. If there's a japanese audio option for this I'd be happy. I really love FFX and will most likely pick this up, but man I really hate Yuna's english voice actress. Also looking forward to that inevitable FFXII International HD, because it would be so easy for them to do. I have it on PS2 emulation, but damned if I can read japanese.

It wasn't a question.

I have a 20-month-old son, who is a lot of trouble and I think he'll be taking apart our electronics by the time he's four. Here's a selfie he took of himself when he got ahold of our old busted camera, one of many, all hilarious: gpoy