Native Jovian

Explain how.

This strikes me as a solution desperately looking for a problem. Also everything Cerrax said.

Well, back in the day, we didn't have all the fancy digital distribution and DLCs and whatnot and so forth that are around today. If you wanted more content, you had to shell out for a whole new cart/disc/whatever... and if it was just an add-on to a previous game, they at least admitted it and called it an "expansion pack". Nowadays it's fairly easy to add new content after the game's release (hell, look at all the DLC that Bethesda released for Oblivion and Fallout 3) so people tend to get annoyed when they're hoping for a genuinely new experience out of a sequel and they get a glorified expansion pack instead. That said, I waited for all the expansions and DLCs and whatnot to be out for Fallout 3 and then bought the Game of the Year edition with all of that shit included, so I'll probably do the same thing for New Vegas.

Was anyone expecting anything else?

Well, sure, if you didn't like Oblivion then I can see why you wouldn't like Fallout 3. But it seems like most of the people I see complaining about "Oblivion with guns" liked Oblivion, but not Fallout 3.

I find myself wondering once again why this is considered a bad thing. I haven't played any of the other Fallouts myself, and I realize that it's a significant change from the original system, but that doesn't automatically mean it sucks. I will give you that Bethesda never seems to improve on its faults (namely animations and the fact that, while they develop brilliant settings, they can't tell a story to save their lives), though, which is certainly annoying. Hopefully being done by Obsidian rather than Bethesda will help improve those in New Vegas.

That was me. I'd give the new series a chance if someone could reassure me that the characters wouldn't make me want to stab my own eyes out. Seriously, the only characters in the original series that I didn't hate either a) got little screen time, or were killed off fairly quickly... and thus got little screen time. Why am I always so negative in this thread? I actually like anime. Maybe it's just easier for me to discuss what you don't like than it is to gush about whatever I happen to think is awesome. Which usually boils down to "things being awesome." I am a man of simple tastes.

Ran...RUUUUUU!

I'd argue that it's only because it's fairly easy for a cyberbrain to be destroyed if the body is "killed" that this is true. If you could give human soldiers the same sort of immortality as tachikomas, then it'd be just as acceptable to let THEM get shredded when it was tactically advantageous to do so.

Or is it? If their experiences/memories/whatever are pulled from their bodies as they "die" (didn't they have a discussion about how they felt themselves "floating upward" after they died and eventually realized that it was because their programming or whatever was being uploaded to a satellite? Holy crap, that was retarded), does their ghost (assuming they have one) go with it? If it does, doesn't that make them effectively immortal, as long as their recovery infrastructure remains in place? And if that's true, then doesn't that make it ethical to treat them like the disposable unmanned units they originally were, given that destroying their bodies doesn't actually "kill" them? I hear from a lot of people who say that this is really really good, but goddamn I cannot get over how ugly it is. Seriously, it could be the anime equivalent of sex, and I would not be able to force myself to watch it just because of the art style.

Er, wow. That's... awkwardly passionate. It's just a TV show, dude, you know? Re: tachikomas -- I put "died" in quotes for a reason, they are death machines (they're WEAPONS, they are for KILLING THINGS), I realize that they're not discarded so cavileerly later on (which is why I said the practice was "occasional" rather than "consistent" or "constant"), and most importantly, they're not "your" tachikomas, so chill out a little, yeah? Re: season one vs. season two -- basically everything you mention is why I liked season two better. The pacing was a lot less wonky (I mean, Jesus, the first season had an episode that consisted entirely of the Major discussing the Laughing Man in a chatroom), the villains were more interesting (the "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" characterization thing doesn't do it for me, at all, plus I found the "lol I can hack an entire crowd full of people in real time" literal plothax to be a very dull way to handle him), and (something you didn't mention but I want to anyway), the Major finally bought a pair of pants. It's incredibly difficult for me to take someone seriously when they go to work in a leotard and a bomber jacket. Especially when we're repeatedly beaten over the head with how much more competent and generally superior she is to everyone else. Seriously. Put on some goddamn pants. That said, I still liked GitS:SAC overall, but we obviously like it for entirely different reasons, so I'd rather not trade arguments with you over who's "right" and just agree to disagree on this particular issue.

Wait, what? What did I do now? There are people who actually liked the first season of GitS:SAC better than the second? Huh.

We're making friends. Don't you want to be our friend, Schwaltzvald?

Neither are you but you don't hear us complainin'.

I am very angry with you for promising and failing to deliver. D:That said, since we seem to have graduated from "songs made out of anime sound effects" to "songs made out of video game sound effects" to "songs made out of sound effects in general": is one of my favorite "music made with random sound effects" sort of songs. The volume on that video's really low for some reason, so turn your speakers up!Very surprised that no one's linked either of these yet: the , and the (and the of the latter, which I only just discovered. Neat!).And just because I love this clip, Super Mario Gundam.

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Sweet, I haven't played Sky Crawlers yet and I was wondering if it was going to be any good. Now I'm actually looking forward to playing it instead of being cautiously pessimistic. Shamrock's a fucking tool, though.

That sounds like a recipe for the worst cramp ever.

Did... did you just say that you wished an already hundreds-and-hundreds-of-episodes shonen series would go slower? The hell is wrong with you? Fun fact: every series over 50 or so episodes eventually degrades into crap because the pace becomes glacial. And by "fact" I mean "my own personal opinion so try not to cause too much of a firestorm over the fact that I just insulted 90% of the most popular anime out there".

Well, sure, but why a nude model specifically? I mean, I get the fact that artists use nude models for accurate anatomy and whatnot, but it seems like the "wearing a zombie-armored spacesuit" thing would sort of obscure the details that nude modeling is supposed to be for.

Perhaps a dumb question: why do they need nude models to draw a dude wearing a full-body space suit MacGyvered into anti-space-zombie armor? I mean, even before they started bolting random bits of metal to it, it wasn't like it was skin tight.

Apparently I'm the only one who found the tachikomas creepy. They're robotic death machines with the voices of particularly shrill children. Even worse, they're occasionally discarded for a fleeting tactical advantage (as is natural for an unmanned unit), and they typically shriek in pain in their shrill childish voices while they "die". That's creepy, man.

Those games were awesome. Carry on in this thread.

Get whichever one has the games you want. Seriously, the list of exclusives for each title is fairly short. 360 has Halo. PS3 has Metal Gear. 360 has Ace Combat. PS3 has Little Big Planet. Etc etc etc. About the only other reason to get one over the other is the BluRay player on the PS3 or Xbox Live on 360 (which I hear is markedly superior to PS3's online play, but I've never messed with a PS3 online, so I couldn't tell you personally).

That reminds me of something really weird that happened a few years ago. I started a new Dragon Warrior game, and instead of doing the standard new-game thing, I started with the princess in my arms (as if I had just rescued her), at critical HP, and knowing the Cure spell (but still at level 1). And then had to start the game from there. I don't think it had anything to do with the battery (which still works fine, saved games stay saved and all), BUT I FELT LIKE MENTIONING IT ANYWAY WHATCHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT HUH?