Steben

Look if you can't afford to pay your hosting bills, then I'm sure if you looked into sponsorship or something that you could find a way to keep the site afloat. I've noticed that EA likes to buy up smaller companies... DJP, you should give them a ring.

Guys. GUYS. It attacked OCRemix. Check the front page. http://www.ocremix.org

Hrrrrrrm... I kind of glossed over the dramarama from the past few pages, and am almost hesitant to post now, but here goes. I liked their clips, so I figured for $9 downloading the album would be worth a shot. And I like it! And I wanted to see if folks around here had heard of it! And yes they had! Oh had they.

My arms are in an exquisite pain right now. That's what I get for going all out on the weights Wednesday and Thursday after a six month-plus hiatus. Nonetheless Week 1 was a success. My schedule works out very nicely for heading to the gym in the mornings before class, which is helpful. Last semester I found myself too pushed for time to head to the student act in the mornings.

Does Smoke still post birthday cake pictures in these threads? I don't hang around these parts enough anymore...

So, after a semester of laziness, I'm going to start up working out again. Good thing too, because I've regained all the weight I lost since I started this up last May. Luckily my schedule this semester allows me to go to the university gym every morning easily enough, so the plan is to run or use the elliptical for 30 minutes each weekday, and lift weights each weekday as well. I weigh 205 now. I really should find out what percentage body fat I have, though, because if I'm building muscle from the weights, then weight isn't a good metric for my progress.

So, I have a friend who's spending a semester in England working for the US Embassy there as an intern. She's asked me a few times to come up with something for her to get me from Europe while she's over there. Until just a few moments ago, when I realized she could buy me a DS game, since it'd work on my North American DS. But, here's the trick. Are there any good DS games not released in America that are available in Europe? The only one I could think of off-hand was that Tingle game, but I'm not sure I'm man enough to ask her to buy me a game called "Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland".

Or receiving them, anyway. Amazon has this nifty new feature where you can add links to anything on your Wish Lists. I actually started listening to Zircon's Antigravity album a few minutes ago, and it made me think that I should add some albums by OCR artists to my Amazon wish list. It may be too late for me to get some of them for Christmas, but at least if they're on my list I'll eventually get around to purchasing them... or there's always my birthday. (Well, in July. Haha.) I've had the OneUps Volume 2 MP3 download on there for a bit, but what other OCR artists have albums for sale on these here internets?

Breaking it down a little more... Take e^(xi) and turn it into its Taylor series expansion. By computing the i-part of each term (i^0=1, i^1=i, i^2=-1, i^3=-i, etc.), you can then rearrange stuff like above. You get the Taylor expansion of cos(x) plus i times the Taylor expansion of sin(x). Plug in pi for x and you get cos(pi)+i*sin(pi) = -1 + i*0 = -1.

OKAY, so. Thanksgiving break was good to me. I put in about 25 hours of playtime into Mother 3 in three or four days and beat it. Some thoughts. On Flash Cards I never would have purchased a flash card if Nintendo had just localized Mother 3. I have to wonder how many people were driven to piracy by Nintendo's neglect of the English-speaking Earthbound fanbase. Because now that I've beaten Mother 3, there's definitely that temptation to use my new powers for evil... (Although why anyone would pirate Chrono Trigger DS without paying for it also is beyond me -- I like to encourage good behavior on the part of VG publishers, personally.) In any case, the M3 DS Real Bundle worked perfectly for its intended purpose. I didn't try playing Mother 3 on a GBA emulator, so I can't personally compare the combo system on the actual hardware with emulation, but other than the long load time to initially play the game I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between playing the patched ROM and a physical cartridge. Now I'm considering having backups of the games I already own on there for the convenience of not having to swap out game paks/cards. Thanks for the help again, Dshu, with helping me find where I could order the device. On Mother 3 Earthbound was an awesome game with a terrible ending. THE END? endings are only acceptable if a sequel is planned and arrives within a few years. Although I bet that's exactly why I think Nintendo's reluctant to rerelease EB on the Virtual Console - they don't want more rabid Earthbound fans clamoring for a localization of Mother 3. So for anyone who played and enjoyed Earthbound, you owe it to yourself to play Mother 3. There's some closure to be gained there, although I'm a little annoyed that (spoiler?) Ness didn't get in on the action, since he was the one who got the letter and all. Annoyed, but not surprised. Really, the rest of this could be consider spoilers, so feel free to click and drag a bit here. I posted this on my Facebook a couple days back actually... --- So what do I think about this game, which was already canceled once when it was intended for release on the Nintendo 64, and took over a full decade to finally reach an English-speaking audience? Eh, 'sall right. I say it's only "all right", but also, I'm sitting here Jonesing to do another playthrough. Hmm. I guess it's really more a case of inflated expectations. Earthbound's by far one of my favorite games, and not just because I rock the planet in SSB Brawl as Ness/Lucas. It takes the whole Japanese RPG genre and puts it on its head. Instead of controlling a team of warriors and wizards on an epic quest, the protagonists of Earthbound were a ragtag team of children, who just happened to have psychic abilities. The bad guy is your next door neighbor, the typically bully who happens to get in cahoots with an evil alien power. It's full of fourth-wall-breaking, self-referential humor and never takes itself too seriously, while still having a few heart-touching moments. You can relate to Ness because up until the start of the adventure, he lived the life you lived, a quiet life in suburbia. And here's where Mother 3 doesn't live up to its predecessor. Mothers 1 and 2 (Earthbound Zero and Earthbound respectively) both take place in a country designed after America. You play a young boy who grows up in a house with his Mom and sister(s), whose Dad is always away, presumably on some business trip? Mother 3 throws all this out the window. You don't even play as Lucas until the fourth chapter of the game (out of eight). The first three chapters serve sort of as backstory for when the real game begins in Chapter 4. So the game is rather slow starting out. I did really get into the game once Lucas's story began, however. But still other things bothered me. My biggest pet peeve with Earthbound was the point of no return at the end of the game. At a certain point, right before you fight the final boss, you travel through time, and cannot return until the game is beaten. Thus, if you save after you travel through time, you can never return to your own time and do any sidequests or shop for items or anything. Well, I figured they wouldn't have anything that silly, ten years in the future, as the genre as had time to mature. Nope. In fact, the whole game is FULL of these points of no return. Many items and enemies are not available after certain points in the game. In addition, the open-ended worlds of Mothers 1 and 2 are not represent in this new game. Instead, the game takes place on a couple of islands. I kept feeling like I should be able to leave the islands and explore a larger world, but this never happened. Maybe I'll rant about this more later. But probably not. In the end, it's not quite the game I expected. But for all the whining I've done here, it's still a very solid game. It's still laugh-out-loud funny. And, actually, I thought it was probably the most touching of three games in the trilogy. I teared up near the end. For the first time, the story really is all about your Mother, and family. In addition, I even felt a little bad for Porky (translated Pokey in Earthbound). --- Actually, I think I'm gonna work on my Hard Mode playthrough now. Because why did I actually expect to get work done this holiday? Heh.

My flash cart came in today... I let a friend borrow my DS so he could play Phoenix Wright, though, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow at least to see how it works. *excitement*

Thanks so much for this. I've ordered an M3 DS Real bundle, so hopefully I'll be able to get Mother 3 up and working on my DS in the near future.

I'm glad to see people have picked this up even when I haven't been around to push it myself. Year #1 of grad school is kicking my butt currently, but I really should reevaluate my schedule and find some time to exercise... I was running at the beginning of the semester, but eventually kept running into conflicts, since the only time in the morning (aside from waking up before 6:30 -- never going to happen) I had was between classes. What this probably means is that I need to be working out in the evenings... but then it's dark out, so I'll need to go to the Student Activities Center, which is always packed after four in the afternoon. Hmmm... I'll check back in later when I've got a plan.

QFE... I'm afraid I'm pretty clueless when it comes to homebrew. Is there any straight-forward tutorial out there which would explain what I need to buy and do in order to get Mother 3 running on my DS Lite?

What. I'm very confused as to how you could find Facebook more annoying than MySpace. The entire interface is so much cleaner, and I don't have to listen to your crappy music when I visit your profile. This post creeped me the heck out, because I was just about to post something along those lines when I realized I already had. Two years ago.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the quarter-heart damage has been there since the first Zelda. However, the life gauge rounds the health it displays to the nearest half-heart. That being said, I think the only time you ever received less than half a heart of damage was after you got some sort of armor in the old games, so it's really like Wind Waker starts you off with the blue ring/mail/whatever from the older games.

Owned. I usually am pretty good about effecting the correct form of that verb, too.

The whole Chrono Trigger DS thing reminded me of this. Their site says it's in beta testing now, but I have to wonder how the real Chrono Trigger's re-release will effect sales of this game, since most of its buzz was always about how it was like Chrono Trigger.

I used to be huge into DCI when I was in high school, but four years of college marching band at a football-centric school made me care less about the serious competitive aspect of marching band and care more about Gameday and the spectacle thereof. In the end the only DCI shows I really enjoyed were those based on music I already liked, like the Cavies' 007 show a few years back. A lot of the shows are too pretentious for my tastes. I prefer shows that are fun than technically difficult, or even executed perfectly.

I did my part.

Kind of far away. Maybe I'll hit up PAX East Coast... in a couple years.

I'm glad to see people are still participating in this. Unfortunately, personal dramarama kind of struck this past month, and I let that get in the way of my exercise routine. I went running yesterday, and didn't do very well (since it'd been a couple weeks since the last time I went out). I'm gonna keep it up though and work my way back up to where I was. Also, I've gained back about five pounds that I lost over the past month, so I need to reverse that. So now that the "summer session" that I came up with last May is about over, should we make a new thread? I think the competition board isn't a bad place for this, even if we don't keep strict tabs like I tried to do at the beginning, so I'd make it here. Maybe we should start a new thread without a time attached and just use that from now on, or perhaps I could just request a mod to change the title of this one. Thoughts?

Ha, I wasn't terribly surprised, actually. Like I said, I was at the midnight release here as well... it was pretty intense.

I tried to catch a showing tonight... I saw the midnight release, but a friend of ours didn't, so we went with her to see it again. Turns out that at 9pm, the 9:15 and 9:45 showings were both sold out. Crazy! It possibly had something to do with it being College Night at the local theater, so all showings were at matinee prices all day. But still, it's the fifth day of release.

Frankly, I consider it a nice novelty, but it's way too unforgiving for me to really consider it one of my favorite Mario games. I beat it in its All-Stars form, and got through world 9 in the Wii version. But I usually have more fun playing through the original SMB, trying to play it better rather than struggle through the Lost Levels.