Native Jovian

It wasn't aimed only at Darkesword. You agreed with him and specifically noted that it was why Spirits Within sucked, so consider yourself an intended recipient as well.

Great story.

If you manage to make an aircraft carrier with nothing but paper and wooden rods -- even a crude version -- I shall be very impressed. (Protip: Kitty Hawk is a town in North Carolina, which happens to be the namesake of a United States Navy aircraft carrier. The heavier-than-air aircraft built by the Wright brothers in said location is something else entirely. I don't believe that it even has a name...)

I never understood this logic. Okay, so it didn't have chocobos or Bahamut or battleship-with-helicopter-blades style airships... But that doesn't, in and of itself, make it a bad movie. It wasn't what you were expecting. Okay, fine. Maybe you'd even say that it wasn't really Final Fantasy. Okay, fine. But that doesn't make it a bad movie. There are lots of great movies that have nothing to do with Final Fantasy. I watched The Spirits Within as a scifi movie with the fully-CG thing as an interesting sidenote. It had an interesting premise, excellent characters (the heroine, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, her doctor/mentor, the military officer that serves as the antaognist), neat visuals (anyone who says that the ghost-spirit-things weren't visually interesting is a liar), a decent plot, and good writing. Wow, I'd take any three of those five and call it a movie worth watching. Let me focus on that last one, though. The Spirits Within was well-written. This is the one thing I was dreading most when I first saw the movie; that we would get gems like "this guy are sick". (Yes, I realize that was primarily a translation error; point is that video games in general -- even ones like Final Fantasy which are known for their story -- aren't exactly great works of literature.) Instead, we got well-defined characters with believable flaws, relationships with one another, and reactions to the situations they find themselves it. It helps that the voice actors were uniformly excellent as well. The impression I got from The Spirits Within most of all was that the characters were ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. They weren't destined heroes and didn't have tales of personal rivalry against their enemies. They were regular people, just like you or me, doing their best to protect their friends/loved ones/species from an unexpected and mysterious threat. Maybe that's why I liked The Spirits Within, despite the flaws that other people find in it. I've always been a sucker for the story where the average Joe steps up and saves the day. It's ironic that people consider The Spirits Within to have attempted to cash in on the Final Fantasy name and simultaneously slam it for having nothing to do with Final Fantasy. Which is it? Are they slapping Final Fantasy on it for quick cash, or are they distancing themselves from the franchise in an attempt to have a decent work outside the realm of Final Fantasy? If anything, it's Advent Children that I see as cashing in on the franchise. If you took a movie exactly like Advent Children and but without the Final Fantasy part of it, how well would it have done? Okay, I'm sure that some people would have enjoyed the visual style and the fight scenes regardless, but the vast majority of the appeal of Advent Children was "hey, look, it's Cloud and those guys again! Awesome!" Now, I'm not trying to claim that Spirits Within was more cerebral or had greater literary merit or something (it was a movie about fighting alien monsters, after all) but far from relying on the Final Fantasy name, it tried to stand on its own merits. It didn't work and it was a commercial failure; okay, well, so are a lot of movies. So are a lot of good movies for that matter. Advent Children, on the other hand, had no appeal outside FFVII fans. Have you ever tried showing Advent Children to someone who didn't know anything about FFVII? I imagine their reaction was poor. It doesn't make any sense outside of FFVII. It can't stand on its own merits. Which is fine. It was meant to be a movie for FFVII fans -- which is, apparently, a large enough target audience to make Square some money. Great, that's fine. I liked Advent Children too. The point I'm trying to make is that Advent Children and Spirits Within are two completely different movies -- two completely different kinds of movies. Comparing them with one another does both of them a disservice. Advent Children was unashamedly tapping into people's fond memories of FFVII, turning the volume up to 11, and kicking ass. The Spirits Within tried to introduce a new setting, with new characters and new situations, and do something interesting and entertaining with it. Both were good at what they did. I preferred what Spirits Within did over what Advent Children did. Most people preferred what Advent Children did over what Spirits within did. Fine. But most people seem to hate Spirits Within for not doing what Advent Children did. That's what gets to me. Don't hate a good movie for not being a different good movie.

Man, everyone else is talking about when they're like six or seven. My best memories come from when I was fourteen. I wasn't really a gamer when I was younger. Yeah, I had an NES and SNES and N64, but it wasn't really a big part of my life. I remember talking about Ocarina of Time with my friends in middle school or playing Golden Axe on my buddy's Genesis in elementary school, but it was a way to pass the time when other forms of entertainment were unavailable, not a thing to be done for its own sake When I was 13 I moved from Florida to Connecticut. My new house had a basement, which was a new thing to me, as any basement in Florida would instantly fill with water. It wasn't finished, but we spent some time cleaning it up and reorganizing all the crap down there, and threw in an old couch, some rugs, and the old entertainment center that didn't fit in our new living room. We also put all our various video game systems down there. So for the first time I had a nice, quite, comfortable place where I could play video games without having to lie on the floor (because the couch was too far away for the controller cords to reach) or get kicked out every ten minutes so someone could watch TV, or be distracted by conversations going on around me, or anything. It was basically the perfect place for gaming. At some point my older brother had picked up a used Playstation, and so, like a good little brother, I used it for myself constantly. Holy crap. PS1 RPGs. So many good ones. Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX. Chrono Cross. Xenogears. Legend of Dragoon. Final Fantasy Anthologies, Chronologies and Origins, eventually. This was in 2000/2001, well after the initial FFVII wave (but I'd already gotten it for PC -- ha!), but just in time for FFIX and Chrono Cross. Lots and lots of good times. That basement was awesome; cool in the summer, because it was underground, but warm in the winter, because we had a wood stove down there to help keep our heating costs down, and nice and quiet all year round. I can't remember how many days I'd come home from school and have the house to myself, go downstairs and light a fire in the stove, then sit down and play games with my dog on the couch next to me. Nor were PS1 RPGs exclusively what I played. Lots of N64 titles too. Harvest Moon 64. Majora's Mask. Banjo-Kazooie. Great times. The one image that captures all of that for me is the PS1 bootup sequence. The dark screen bringing up the PS1 logo, with the very distinctive sound effect breaking the silence... and then the screen moving into the Squaresoft logo. Goddamn. I threw Final Fantasy Chronologies into my PS2 the other day to play Chrono Trigger again and I got that little sequence unexpectedly. Practically sent shivers down my spine.

Fix' d.

Because Doom was an awesome movie. And the first Resident Evil. (The second not so much. But the third was okay again.)

This. The Spanish flair thing seems to make more sense to me for a duelist-type character, while a rogue puts me more in the mindset of sneaking around and avoiding conflict if possible, for which a Pink Panther style smooth jazz thing would work brilliantly. Puts you in the mind of suave and clever and stylish.

Xbox Live works with "gamertags" (read: usernames). You set your gamertag when you first activate the account, and that the name that follows you for the life of that account. If someone wants to add you as a friend, they can either type in your gamertag through the "add a friend" menu or they can select your account through an in-game menu (most games have a menu of people you're currently playing with or have recently played with) and just add them as a friend from there. Once someone's on your friends list, you can see what game they're playing if they're online, and get pop-up messages showing when they log on and off and stuff. Playing-with-friends is handled differently in each game, but generally speaking you can just choose to join them in a game (if possible) or you can set up a "party" of people who always move through the various games together, always playing with the same people.

Fun times had recently in L4D: I was playing through Blood Harvest, and we heard a witch right around the part where you have to jump down a cliff right in front of a barn. I jumped across to the awning of the barn rather than dropping straight down to the ground and went into the rafters through a window. The witch was there, right below me. I had the other three players stay outside so they wouldn't get toasted, and dropped a molotov right on her. Woohoo! Burn the Witch achievement complete. I figured that since there was no route to me (I was in the rafters, after all, which were only accessable via jumping directly off the cliff, and the cliff was too high to jump back up) she'd run in circles or something while her pathfinding algorithm has a seizure. Instead she ran straight toward my three allies clustered by the door. I figured that since she couldn't get to me she just went for the nearest victim. The three guys were freaking out over their headsets -- it was hilarious. I was like "hahaha, oh man, hey, sorry guys, I didn't think she'd FUCK SHIT OW DAMN FUCK!" The last part was because the witch had run straight PAST them, gotten up onto the roof of the barn (somehow? I wasn't watching and couldn't have seen from where I was anyway), and charged me from behind. Luckily for me, she knocked me off the rafters before she incap'd me, and the three other guys managed to kill her and then help me back up. But the moral of the story is that witches are smarter than you think. Damn Valve and their damn high-quality pathfinding algorithms....

Oh, man, that game was awesome. The main plotline didn't really pick up until about halfway through the second disc (of four), and the translation was mediocre throughout.... but the whole damn thing was great fun anyway. Had some really great music, too. Other great-fun-but-terrible-otherwise games? Anything with the name "Zoids" on it. I remember a Zoids game for Gamecube, (Zoids Battle Legends, I think?) which was so horribly unbalanced that it was amazing, but was great fun to play anyway. Anything melee-oriented automatically won, period. Between two melee-based zoids, the one with the better melee weapon won. Between two zoids with the same melee weapon, the faster one won. No exceptions. To put this in perspective, this meant that a Rev Raptor (the epitome of cannon fodder, with only a single weak melee attack) could take out an Ultrasaurus (which was essentially a mobile base, equipping cannons that could shoot down satellites) fairly easily. Zoids Legacy is a Gameboy Advance RPG, and essentially the zoids equivalent of Super Robot Wars in that it throws together every zoid and pilot (despite the fact that most of them are from different time periods or even alternate universes) into one giant combination of awesome. Terrible translation, nonsensical plot regardless of the terrible translation, and yet so much badass.

Well, all you need to do to fix all that is change everything to "Final Fantasy 1" instead of plain "Final Fantasy" and all that goes away. FF1 gets sent to the front of the list, and Tactics/Mystic Quest sent to their own sections. It's simple, it's easy, and it makes everything much neater. I think it's worth doing. I dunno about anyone else's iPod, but mine automatically sorts all albums by track numbers and only defaults to sorting alphabetically by title if there are no track numbers (or all track numbers are equal). So no, no way that I know of to sort album http://www.ocremix.org by title if there are track numbers there.

Why yes, there was.

As far as this issue, I'd suggest using digits in the filename but Roman numerals in the ID3 tag. A quick check shows that Windows XP is in fact smart enough to know that 1 < 2-9 < 10+, but the original Final Fantasy isn't tagged as "Final Fantasy 1" so it gets all messed up. It classes numbers as higher than letters alphabetically, so FF1 is AFTER all the other Final Fantasy games. Also, Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest get all mixed in with the Final Fantasy 1 games because it sorts all those mixes in with the FF1 songs at "T" and "M" respectively. That leads to another question. While filenames are smart enough to order themselves like that, are MP3 players? Maybe we'd be better off sticking with digits the whole way through to make those sorts of sorting issues nonexistent in any medium. Another random issue I noticed! There are two Chrono Trigger mixes (KnightsComeMarchingHome and Downwind) that get messed up in order because, unlike any other remix that I'm aware of, they're listed as coming from multiple games. Knights is listed as "Chrono Trigger & FF9", while Downwind is "Chrono Trigger & Xenogears". There are other mixes from multiple unrelated games and they've never done this, so it should probably be standardized to listing the filename only under the "main" game. OCR mix ID could easily go under track number.... however, this would mean that playing album "http://www.ocremix.org" would automatically sort by mix ID rather than by title, so that's something we'd probably want to avoid unless there was another easy way to sort by game, and I'm not aware of one. Perhaps put it under Disc? My iPod doesn't sort by disc number (something that has annoyed me intensely, actually), just track number within a particular album... Not an ideal solution, but the only one I can think of at the moment. Either Album Artist/Band or Publisher seems to be a logical place to list the game the mix comes from, but I don't think that there's an option to sort by those fields in most MP3 players, so it'd be a bit pointless as far as that goes. Methinks the best solution for that is to just keep things as-is and have the game be the first part of the title.

Revolution?

We're sorry, but your beta is in another server.

Seems to build well but never get anywhere. But honestly, that's a problem with the source as well... The beginning is great, but after the brief peak at 0:17 it slows back down again when I think it would work better if it got faster and punchier. There seems to be way too much background and not enough actual song. The high piano part (eg 0:23-0:29, 0:40-0:45, and the brief snippet at 1:18-19) is the real centerpiece here -- it cuts through so clearly, it's beautiful. But they're so spread out and disconnected that it never really goes anywhere. I would make that part the focus of the piece instead of just leaving it as an accent every so often. That would really change the feel of the song, of course, but that's sort of the point. Feel free to tell me to go to hell if that's not the direction you want to take things.

No Mercy seems to be the hardest of the campaigns in general. It seems to be the most cramped, the least open of all the campaigns, and that means that you have less time to react to situations because both a) you don't see things until they're closer to you, and they spawn closer in the first place. While all the campaigns have both closed-in and spacious open areas, No Mercy seems to have the highest ratio of "cramped" to "exposed". What is your favorite campaign, anyway? I have to admit that I'm a big fan of Dead Air. There's just something about it that gives the impression of an empty city better than any of the others do, and it's fun as hell to shoot your way through zombified airline pilots and runway workers. Its finale isn't the greatest -- it's a bit too open, and if you move over to the area by the respawn closet with assault rifles (and maybe one hunting rifle to take care of obnoxious smokers) you can annihilate everything before it even gets close. My favorite finale is definitely Blood Harvest -- I love bracing for the assault at the top of the stairs. One person covers the stairs, and one gets each end of the hallway, which leaves the fourth free to heal, reload, make a break for ammo downstairs during a lull, or just help out whoever needs it most. It's that sense of teamwork, where everyone has a clearly defined role and everyone needs to pull their own weight in order for the team to survive, that makes for great times.

Clubbin' seals and wrestling polar bears. Hell yeah!

Holy shit, someone else actually liked that movie? I rather enjoyed Spirits Within, but everyone I ever talk to hates it. In b4 "zomg uncanny valley".

http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=19479 ?

'Cause the man's got some class.

I was amused.

YouTube is firewalled here so I can't listen to the song, but if I'm reading you right, it's not even submittable to OCR. If by "regular song" you mean "not made specifically for Kinetica", then it won't be accepted at OCR. Sorry, man.

So, wait, they did fix it? One of the reasons I haven't picked up this game yet was because the tiny tiny text annoyed the ever-living hell out of me. If they made it readable then it'll have to go back on the "pick it up if you see it for cheap" list.