SleazyC

Holy crap, it's been way too long since I lasted visited the site. I was at PAX East and attended the OCremix panel, got to meet Bahamut and zircon there and I also took some pictures the night before of people at the Jamspace. Was a treat meeting Bahamut and zircon in person, hopefully I can make it down to Magfest this coming year and meet some more people.

Yea, I read that, but you still have chance in the game that you will get a crit or not. If you wanted to boil the game down to pure skill crits are an unwanted factor.

I agree with much that zircon said, mainly that crits should stay on the server. I would love to play on a serve without crits but I guess for me the removal of crits should only be for serious play (i.e. leagues or tourneys) as it is just one more factor that removes chance from the game and pinpoints it down more so on individual skill leve. Crits are a random chance, they have nothing to do with skill so if the server were to move away from a more pub-environment to say a private-community based server (where a lot of "pro" players scrim or play on) then yes I would probably advocate the removal of crits. As it stands now I think crits on the server are fine and as zircon said, can really even out some stacked teams or turn the tide of a battle.

Well I just bought another 2GB of RAM for whenever I update to Vista (and I had to RMA my old 2GB) so I guess I'll use 4GB in there whenever I get back my old RAM.

Does 3.5 gigs of RAM still function in dual channel? If it doesn't then running 3.5 gigs of RAM is kinda moot for me since I'd rather have it running dual channel.

That would work fine if he didn't want to play TF2. He could have bought a Intel Mac but the price would have skyrocketed compared to the components he got. Installing Linux wouldn't really work as your casual PC gamer probably wouldn't spend the time to get their games up and running at full speed (if they could be played at full speed).

He got a Gigabyte DS3L, and yes I do believe he will be using Vista. Not many other options if you want to use 4GB's of RAM.

You can do this pretty damn easy with the PC version of Guitar Hero 3. There are tools out there and it takes about 2-3 minutes to add a song in there so it takes a little to add a whole batch of songs but once you are just adding singles its pretty damn easy. I recorded a couple remix customs using fraps and they can be seen here: http://www.vimeo.com/763002 (virt - My Frequency is 140.85) http://www.vimeo.com/764007 (SnappleMan - Break the Silence) and not a remix, but VGM releated.. http://www.vimeo.com/765900 (Black Mages - Vamo'Alla Flamenco)

What's your budget? You can build a pretty damn powerful computer now for under $800 that will run most games out currently at high settings. Here are some pretty simple recommendations (match with what some have said in the thread already) CPU: E8400 Motherboard: Gigabyte DS3L RAM: Unless you overclock this doesn't matter, just get 2 gigs of DDR2800 Graphics Card: 8800GT Hard drive: Cheap as hell now, buy whatever you can here Case: I like the Antec P18x line or the Antec 900 but these cases can run sorta expensive unless you find a nice deal Power Supply: Antec, Corsair, OCZ, Seasonic are some brands I would recommend looking at. Don't skimp here it can really hurt if you buy something cheap.

At 40" and $1500 you are pretty much restricting yourself to LCD's. I would really recommend going with any of the 8G Pioneers as they are probably the best flat-panel tech TV's but their 1080p variants are also pretty damn expensive. Samsung is a pretty safe bet, their 81-series uses a semi-flawed LED diming technology that gives pretty damn good black levels for an LCD. I think they would also fall around your level. By no means are the cheaper HDTV manufacturers bad products but when you spend a little more you usually see it in areas like the TV's scaler, black levels, and other aspects of the picture quality that may not bother your casual user but could become problems if you can easily spot out impurities. Also pretty much no TV out there is pefect (well, HDTV CRT's are about as close as you'll get but they also weigh about 200+ lbs.) so you'll have to deal with whatever flaws the set you buy is going to have. Shoot over to avsforum if you want to read up more on the sort of things you should look for when buying an HDTV.

You'd really need a multimeter to check out a power supply. How are you handling your RAM when you get it? ESD can be pretty common with computer components if you aren't careful. Just ground yourself and then handle the RAM or use an antistatic wristrap or mat.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIR! I HOPE YOU HAVE A FINE NIGHT!

Doing everything last minute, it looks like I will be going. Bought a ticket when they announced the show but I wasn't 100% sure if I could go. Looks like I am going now.

You'll have to wait a long time to see Blu-ray prices dropping down to DVD prices. It is a fair trade off to me as normal DVD's don't cut it on HDTV's even with upscaling DVD players or receivers. I used to pay $15-$20 for all the DVD's I was buying a couple years back and it didn't bother me at all so these prices are fine. Seeing movies in HD with a good transfer is amazing and more than makes up for the couple $ I lose.

Your story of sitting behind Marty O'Donnell reminds me of my story of going to the PLAY! premiere in Chicago. I had nabbed front row seats and came sort of early. As I walked by my seats I saw some seats with paper on them and didn't think much of them until I got situated. I turned around again to look at the paper and they had these names written on them: Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yuzo Koshiro etc. I can't remember everyone who was there but good to say I was seating right in front of about 5 or so pretty prominent Japanese composers. Was pretty cool and I didn't really have the guts to turn around and say anything to them (my Japanese was much much weaker than it is now so they probably wouldn't have understood me). Oh yea Jason Hayes (WoW composer) sat to my left and I did get to talk to him a bit. I also think Jeremy Soule was either to my left or right.

During the war you had a B1G1 or B2G1 all the freaking time alongside sales. I have about 20 movies on blu-ray and I don't think I've paid over $25 for any of them.

Creativeness/Innovation!= Sales. I know Nintendo demolishes every other developer with its sales but innovativeness and creativity do not equal sales. Nor does great art direction (Okami much?). If Nintendo slaps their name on something you can expect that it will be quality 90% of the time and this is the recognition that will they will always get over Sony since Nintendo has been around longer and is a much more storied game developer. EA isn't exactly the best company to compare them to as EA's ports are a joke. Probably 70% of their revenue is from rehashes of their sports games. E ither way I never said that having unique games will equal sales and it definitely has hurt sales just as many times as it may have helped and broken out new genres, ideas, or directions for games to go in.

Well we can always pray can't we? I seriously do hope that the game turns out good but given Sega USA's track record as of late I am going to wait on passing any judgment.

Sony has the biggest conglomeration of developers both first and second party under its wings and although it usually isn't recognized for its games I would say that Sony does have the best first/second party developments houses. Nintendo has the nostalgia factor which will probably always get it more recognition but the developers that work under Sony are all very talented, moreso talented then Nintendo's in my opinion.

It's being developed by Sega USA. Run for your lives.

Revenant Wings actually looks pretty decent as far as spinoff's go. I'm interested in seeing how they evolve the combat system to fit into a portable-gaming environment in comparison to the console environment. As far as FFVII spinoffs go Crisis Core looks absolutely stunning for a PSP game but I am still a bit wary since Dirge. I really want to believe that it will be a good game and regardless the game looks just so damn pretty I may buy it. PICTURE SPAM INCOMING:

Can't argue against this one really as Nintendo is the king of software but if we look at the crux of why fanboys call Nintendo "kiddy" it is due to the fact that they really lack the diverse lineup that has allowed Sony to introduce Little Big Planet without the cries off "kiddy game." If Nintendo were to go third party I still don't think you would see Microsoft of Sony being labeled kiddy due to my previous point that at the moment their current and previous consoles had much more diverse lineups to the point that fanboys couldn't point out and say that all Nintendo made were kiddy games. Currently Nintendo has a pretty damn huge market share not only in the handheld market (which they have owned for years and years) but they are picking up incredible steam in the console market as well. Even then they had incredibly good tie-ratios with the Gamecube. One thing that is pretty consistent with Nintendo and any hardware they bring out is that they can also bring the software sales. In the end I think the true fault lies with third parties letting this stigma of Nintendo having a "kiddy" image get to them. They could always weasel their way out of it with the Gamecube saying that sales were too low but given the Wii's current sales and its projected sales that isn't an excuse for developers anymore. I look forward to seeing some more mature games released on the Wii (not only talking about only blood, guts, and sex here) but I really don't see how people argue that some type of double standard is being pulled because LBP looks to be something that Nintendo would have brought out and people aren't calling them out for releasing a "kiddy" game.

Maybe because Sony has offered a diverse lineup with a pretty large selection of mature games (not just M rated games) while Nintendo systems have always been stigmatized as having a much more family oriented approach and much less mature games in comparison. I think the whole kiddy argument is pretty stupid but when it comes down to image you can hardly argue that Sony has held a much more mature one when compared to Nintendo if we just look at all the M rated games published by Nintendo versus Sony (not talking about third party here but first or second party games). My two cents anyways...

XNA is a pretty amazing push by MS to tap the Indie and Hobbyist sectors to bring out some fun and innovative games. What Sony is doing on the other hand is allowing the end user to install another OS (at the time only Linux but I assume we might see something else later down the road) and then stopping there. Running Linux we could theoretically see a lot done with the PS3 but it's really a different direction then XNA. With XNA you can develop games that utilize the full hardware of the 360 but you won't see Media Players or emulators coming out. Now when we can finally inject some different OS into the flash of the 360 we might see an explosion of homebrew but at the moment most of it is restricted to flashing the firmware of the optical drive and thus is tied to piracy mainly.

You can already run emulators, media players, web browsers, etc on a PS3 with the option to install one of the various flavors of Linux. The problem is that when running a separate OS you do not have access to the RSX so any type of video acceleration is a no go. When using a media player you have to use software-rendered full screen and playback suffers depending on your resolutions and bitrates. I was able to full screen SD Xvid encoded video files but trying to full screen h.264 or HD encoded video files resulted in choppy playback. I was able to get Snes9x up and running with some minor sound problems as well as MAME up and running with the same sound problems. If anyone ever goes about optimizing software to use an SPE to handle things like video acceleration the PS3 could easily substitute as an HTPC. At the moment the lack of optimization and lack of access to RSX kills most of its value.