Native Jovian

That was a pain in the ass in the demo. Didn't they say they were going to fix that?

My biggest complaint about Advent Children was the fact that apparently some time between the end of FFVII and the beginning of Advent Children, everyone but Cloud contracted terminal cases of suck. I mean, seriously, the only one who even really HAD a decent fight scene besides Cloud was Tifa, and she got sucker punched to death as soon as the bad guy stopped dicking around. Also, needz moar Cid.

Ow. My brain.

Fair enough! That I'll buy. So, yeah. Solar powered video games. Cool?

Or just use Winamp's media library. It works pretty much like iTunes, except you don't have to install anything extra (assuming you use Winamp already, anyway) or deal with all the crap Apple is packaging with iTunes nowadays.

Because 360's backwards compatability is software emulated instead of actually hardware supported. There's a page on Xbox's official site somewhere that has a list of all the Xbox games that work properly on the 360, but I'm at work so it's firewalled so I can't post an actual link at the moment.

Yeah, the old laptop I had at school was the same way. The thing was a beast, and certainly wasn't "portable" in the usual laptop sense, but it was still better than lugging around a desktop + monitor + mouse/keyboard/etc. Sadly, its heating issues were so bad that it eventually burned itself up from the inside. Anyway, the point is that there are legitimate reasons to get games that are available for the PC for console. Incidentally! I've gone through and beaten all the campaigns by now, but is it just me or is No Mercy (barring lameness like closet/ramp camping) still the hardest finale? I think it's the 3-D nature of the environment that does it. In the other three there's a place where you can put your back against a wall or stand in an intersection and cover every approach pretty easily and still have a pretty good LOS to far-off zombies. In No Mercy you have to worry about guys climbing up the walls and stuff, though, so there's no way to funnel enemies into your line of fire -- they literally just come from everywhere.

This is just begging the question of what "natural" really is, but since this isn't PPR I'll let it slide. Misses the point anyway. Mass production methods of raising crops aren't natural either, but there are "organic" alternatives to that which are apparently okay. Is there no such thing as "organic" meat? The question is why does "green living" apparently mean "herbivore", not why are vegitarians vegitarians.

Just out of curiosity, why do these go together so often? Livestock aren't "sustainable" or "natural", apparently?

I play the 360 version! Post your gamertag when you get the game and we'll see if we can get some games together.

I was amused by the message that appeared on Halo 3 to this effect when I first installed the new dashboard. It basically said that the game is designed to be played from a disc, not a hard drive, so loading it on a hard drive will actually decrease performance. The exact wording was something to the effect of "you'll use up a bunch of space on your hard drive, your game will load slower and be more laggy, and your friends will make fun of you." Call me cynical, but it seems to me that the "load games onto your hard drive" thing is a gimmick to sell bigger hard drives. It's pretty damn pointless in most cases.

No. (10 chars)

Send me $37.49 and a microphone headset so I can voice chat on Steam like I can on Xbox Live and you've got a deal.

I'm aware that tropes are universal and tropes in and of themselves are not bad. But when I can basically predict the whole damn episode within the first five minutes because it's nothing but a mass of tropes used exactly and played perfectly straight (as opposed to blending multiple tropes into one, or occasionally subverting/inverting/avoiding an obvious trope), then that's what I have issues with. No work is perfectly original, Hero With 1,000 Faces, yeah yeah yeah. I know. But that doesn't make Gurren Lagann any more interesting to watch.

So either I suck, the people I keep getting stuck with suck, or the finale of No Mercy is impossible. Srsly. I have to have played that damn thing like 25 times now and I've only even come CLOSE to surviving (as in, the helicopter was actually visible) once. I'd really like to assume that it's door number two, but I'm starting to get seriously annoyed that I can't beat the dame finale through, as far as I can tell, no fault of my own.

Probably that it would be awesome.

Does to me. I couldn't stand Gurren Lagann. It was just a pile of anime cliches piled together until it reached critical mass and became a black hole of super robot tropes. I could hardly stand watching it because it was so cliche that I felt like I knew what was going to happen well before it ever happened, and despite all my desperate hopes that they would do something original (read: interesting) instead, they never did. But yeah. '85-'92 anime? Gundam ZZ was from '88 and it's a fun one, though it's sort of the bastard child of the Gundam franchise -- most Gundam fans hate it because it's such a departure from Zeta Gundam (which was '87). Char's Counterattack is another good Gundam from that era, though it's only a movie and it probably won't mean much to you unless you've seen Mobile Suit Gundam already (and Gundam Zeta would help too). Yu Yu Hakusho is another good one that just makes it into the dates you've listed; it began in October '92 and ran until January '95 (or so Wikipedia tells me). Yu Yu Hakusho is an entertaining if basic beat-em-up anime, though it does tend to run into a bit of DBZ-style power-level penis-waving ("my spirit energy is three times yours, and I'm only at 12% of my full strength!") in the later half of the series.

I got Left 4 Dead for Christmas. Sweet. I'm enjoying the whole game so far (it's certainly more fun than just the first level-and-a-half of No Mercy), but standard No Mercy is all I've had time to play so far. We played the finale half a dozen times, but, long story short, my teammates sucked and we never made it to the chopper. Surely there must be someone besides me playing the 360 version of Left 4 Dead? My gamertag is "Native Jovian". If anyone else on OCR is playing L4D on Live I'd love to get together and actually hopefully make some progress on the campaigns.

Alright, I switched my whole home setup around so now there's only one router, and then I went ahead and forwarded the ports that Google said I needed. I was playing Left 4 Dead for about two hours and didn't get disconnected once, so that's certainly an improvement... Though that may just be the whimsical internet gods messing with my head. On a side note, Left 4 Dead is insanely awesome. I played most of the way through No Mercy, and we did fine up until the part where you have to wait for the helicopter. There were only three of us (Bill was being NPC'd), and the other two guys weren't particularly good, so try as I might I could get them organized enough to actually survive the ending. At one point the helicopter was actually overhead, but a Tank creamed us before we could even get out of the building with the minigun, much less get all the way over to the helipad. The short version is: I played the hell out of the demo, so I was good enough to rescue them (unless they did something insanely stupid), but whenever a boss zombie managed to get me they could never get around to rescuing me, and once I was gone they folded fast. We played the finale a good half-dozen times before giving up. Good times were had by all. And hey, my connection seems to work now!

Fail. See G Gundam for epic awesome super robot anime done RIGHT.

Actually, that's the odd thing. After it boots me, if I tell it to just reconnect to Live it says that it can't connect. But if I go back to the dashboard and run the XBL connection test, it'll say everything's fine and THEN I can reconnect. The new dashboard doesn't have all the nice technical things like the old one had; all it has is "connected to network", "connected to internet", and "connected to Xbox Live", all of which work whenever I test the connection (but it still randomly drops).

Okay, so I have a problem with my 360. (And no, it's not a RRoD, so no worries there.) Whenever I'm played on Xbox Live (which is frequently at the moment, considering that I just got Left 4 Dead for Christmas), there's a fairly good chance that I'll get randomly disconnected. There's no rhyme or reason to this that I've been able to find; it just sorta happens. Now, my setup is a bit odd. My modem is in another room, with my mom's computer, and I have both my computer and my 360 in my room. So the modem goes to a router, which splits off into my mom's computer and my room (this is a fairly long cord, which is why I only have the one). In my room is another router that splits off into my computer and my 360. So has anyone run into this sort of thing before? Have any idea how to fix it? Is my setup killing my signal or something?

Hey, let's talk about Macs in the Windows 7 thread.

Starcraft 2? Bah, what's wrong with the original! I played a 2v2v1 game with four of my friends last night, and it was glorious. (The loner won, but only because the the partnered teams were fighting each other instead of him.)

Thanks, that's exactly the sort of thing I really want to know... But what about standard DS vs. DS Lite?