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lazygecko

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Posts posted by lazygecko

  1. At the peak of the record industry throughout the 80's and 90's, it really shouldn't have been as practical for most signed musicians to make ends meet. Most just barely covered their losses, or even operated at a loss, while the labels counted on their handful of mega superstars to rake in the real money. This strategy was never going to be sustainable in the long term.

  2. Reached 90 today on my ever present shaman from the vanilla days. These are some of my observations so far:

    The scenery is great. Pandaria looks better than both Northrend and the Cataclysm zones and I enjoy just wandering around it.

    Having just reached 90, the endgame content also looks to be much more promising than both of the previous expansions. My biggest issue with WotLK and Cata's philosophies was how they artificially funneled players into the latest raid tier with each patch, and in the process trivialize previous tier raids and dungeons so much that people simply ignore doing them. They seem to be handling things a lot better here, while keeping people out and active in the actual game world in the process.

    In spite of being more of a return to form though, a lot of people are complaining over the game just getting old and being the same old thing, and they're very much right. They've added scenarios as an alternative to play now, but these are all very short, trivial and not very engaging. Seems more like they're just testing the waters with this to build more on it in the future as they've said scenarios are meant to replace group quests.

    I think the most significant negative change to the game over the years is how Blizzard makes more and more design decisions with each xpack that end up diminishing player interactions in the game (you know, something very fundamental to a MMORPG experience). I don't really have anything against "easy mode" content in itself, but as it is now we've reached a point where Blizzard lets players "experience all the content" with no one in the group or raid ever having to utter a single word to eachother. The removal of group quests, and adding dungeon/raid finder systems in place of players manually forming groups with eachother chip away the situations that usually act as catalysts for socializing and nurturing relationships with the players in the world. This is a pretty fundamental part of what makes MMORPGs different, and without it you ultimately get a pretty hollow experience.

  3. The top down levels in Contra 3. Unfortunately they are so frequent they killed the whole game for me, dragging it down to the lower tier of Contras. The controls were awkward, the whole screen rotating was just confusing, and needing to wander around the map and kill everything to move on set the pace apart too much from the rest of the game.

    Konami had a nasty habit of shoehorning technological gimmicks into the gameplay for their early SNES titles, but none suffered from it as much as Contra.

  4. Amnesia didn't really do anything for me. I think it plays too much on worn out tropes. I think there are many more aspects of horror out there that haven't been properly explored for games yet. Some of scariest moments I've experienced came from games that weren't even specifically regarded as horror games.

  5. Playing in a band is just a thing a lot of people do in their teens as a means to an end, the display of virtuosity and coolness factor probably has more to do with it than anything. It'll sow the right seeds in a few people and make them realize they're genuinely interested in this stuff.

  6. Case in point: all the famous personal computer-era composers like Tim Follin, Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Jon Dunn, etc. etc. Of course back in the 80s composers were much less of a big deal, in a sense.

    C64 composers were such a big deal that they'd put their names on the box art to help sell the games.

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