yangfeili

Tracks 2 and 16 from the Katamari Damacy soundtrack. You might check out Pizzicato Five as well (the singer did a track for We Love Katamari). Also, look up Shinohara Tomoe. I can't stand her, but I keep a few of her songs around for comedic effect.

I picked up a bunch of the Ys games direct from Falcom a while back. They take international orders through email. Usually much cheaper than going through an import store. The best part is that Ys I+II Complete and Ys: Oath in Felghana both have fan translation patches available. Form email and ordering details: http://nick.serveblog.net/forums/index.php?topic=10.0 They also have some good special deals regularly listed under this section: http://www.falcom.co.jp/mailorder/special/index.html For example, I snagged Felghana Special Edition + Ys Origin for more than 50% off during a special back in August (the extra copy of Felghana sold on ebay and pretty much paid for the whole thing, so in the end it was like getting a free copy of Origin for no reason).

Gotta love Nintendo's added "import fee" to their already inflated VC prices. Because, you know, it costs an extra 20% to send that ROM all the way from Japan.

Mario, as explained below:

I once carried on a surprisingly lengthy e-mail correspondence with a scammer claiming to be a Nigerian banker. The main reason I say "surprisingly lengthy" is because the entire time, I was writing in the persona of "Captain Lance McWafer" (a name I derived from a package of crackers which was at hand) and I kept going on about how we could "Stash the booty at me secret base on Skull Isle," and so on (I think I dropped a few Monkey Island references here and there). For some reason, it took several e-mails before the guy caught on.

Really? All I could think while I watched my brother play Skytown was "When is Lando going to come out and greet you?"

The day after Columbine, a classmate who I had gone to school with since kindergarten asked me if I was going to shoot up the school, apparently because I owned a trench coat (tan, not black), played video games, and had a somewhat dark sense of humor. For the record, my response was to ask "Do you want me to shoot up the school?" "Haha, no." "Then shut the fuck up, you stupid bitch." (Which had all the more impact because I was known as a fairly mild mannered guy who was rather averse to swearing.) My point is... I don't even know what it is. Just something about the way people get labeled, the way that even people who have known you your whole life won't hesitate to slap some label on you.

MKDS was probably the best Mario Kart since MK64... at least in terms of playing offline or against friends over wireless. The online was a mess, Nintendo really should have tested things better and corrected the snaking, and they really needed to adjust the items. It gets pretty annoying how you can do an entire race perfectly while your opponent intentionally hangs back so that the game gives them a blue shell, which they hold for the entire race and then unleash right before you cross the finish line. I think it's a very good example of Nintendo's flawed philosophy of trying to "even the odds" for beginners at the back of the pack. I also don't have a lot of confidence in the wheel thing. I would think a much better setup would be to use the nunchuk to steer and use the remote to aim projectiles. I just have a bad feeling that the wheel is going to be far less responsive than a plain old-fashioned analog stick, much as Zelda's remote swinging was less responsive and inferior to a simple button press (the bow controls worked great, though).

I think part of what makes Earthbound so great is that it can be appreciated at different levels, kind of like Calvin and Hobbes. When I was younger, I thought all the nonsensical stuff like evil hippies and trippy backgrounds was funny. But when I replayed the game years later, I was better able to recognize and appreciate a lot of the meta-humor regarding game design and the conventions of the RPG genre (my favorite being the message if you try to use the Insignificant Item, which I understood as a jab at completionist gamers). I'd love to see a new game which does to the post-FFVII RPG genre what Earthbound did to the Dragon Warrior-era games.

Bethesda needs to buddy up with these guys to make some promotional items for the game: http://www.wetanz.com/rayguns/index.php?itemid=20&catid=4&catid=4#more

I've got old issues back to Volume 26, and it was pretty cool back in the NES/SNES days, when it had pages and pages of maps of levels from sidescrolling stages, which to my mind is a fascinating and bizarre phenomenon. Some of the "bonus strategy guides" were good, especially the Mario Mania one, which was about half Super Mario World strategy guide and half history of Mario. I actually first subscribed on on the deal where you got the NES, Gameboy, SNES, and Mario Mania guides for signing up. It really went downhill around the time of Pokemon/N64 though. The shocking day eventually came when I did not renew my subscription. I got three free issues a while back for registering some stuff at Nintendo.com, and it was depressing to see how low the magazine had sunk.

Well, I think I speak for everyone when I say that I was both surprised and massively disappointed when I discovered that this is what Super Mario Strikers wasn't.

Waaaay before Columbine, when I was in 7th or 8th grade, I was planning to make a Duke Nukem map of my school. Not because I was some crazy maniac, but because it was something that I and all the friends I played the game with had a personal connection to, something which we all shared and were familiar with. Plus, there's the challenge of trying to recreate a familiar environment. It wasn't a sign of some sort of violent disconnect with my peers: it was the exact opposite, a product of a sense of camaraderie. It's no more crazy than having a water gun fight in the school hallway during a summer program--something else we did a couple of times. I've seen maps for games based on famous sites like the Parthenon. Do we need to crack down on those as well, and on anyone who attempts to recreate a real world location?

I'd like to suggest that commercialization should itself be considered artistic. Limitation is considered an artistic technique, and it seems pretty obvious to me that working within the bounds of commercialization is a form of limitation. In fact, I'd like to start a broader movement which overtly embraces and expresses pride in commercialized consumer culture.

That was the problem I had with ToS: true, it had lots of character interaction, but it was eye-rollingly bad character interaction. I very nearly permanently shut the game off in protest right before the final boss battle after listening to the awful dialogue ("Discrimination is in the heart!") I like for my games to be games, not misguided and poorly executed efforts at social commentary by writers who clearly lack the talent to adequately address the subject matter.

That's what I loved about TP. They finally took the focus back off of the town and the goofy over-characterized townsfolk.

Some how I have a feeling that a guy using a plain old mouse and keyboard would completely destroy a guy using this thing on pretty much any game.

Galneryus - The Flag of Punishment They ought to contribute to a Castlevania soundtrack some time.

When I was a kid, I always thought it would be really awesome if they made some sort of system where you could put in two different game cartridges, and it would produce a hybrid of the two games. Actually, I seem to recall playing a flash game a while back which had Metroid's areas and enemies, put you played as Mega Man with the standard Mega Man controls and moves.

The Japanese genre of Shibuya kei occasionally borrows from that particular style of music. Check out "Trailer Music" by Pizzicato Five (from the album Happy End of the World) for an example of what I mean.

Look into Jack Vance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance Good place to start would probably be Tales of the Dying Earth (for fantasy), or Planet of Adventure or The Demon Princes (for sci-fi, although Vance's sci-fi is very different from most sci-fi). Honestly, Vance made me throw out a lot of the stuff I had been reading. It's gotten to the point where I find it very hard to enjoy anything by any other author. The few who I do enjoy are usually authors who were inspired by Vance (Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun comes to mind), or who inspired Vance himself (Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, P.G. Wodehouse).

I've experienced a bit of the game at a friend's house, and I'm not massively impressed. A major beef I've had with just about every RPG that has come out after FF7 is that their primary emphasis seems to be on the story, with the gameplay consisting exclusively of a string of battles utilizing a system which simply can not hold up for 50+ hours. Even when a game has a "good" story relative to other games, it's never that great on an absolute scale, and I often feel like the ambitions of the writers are grossly out of line with their actual talents. "That's what RPGs have always been," you might reasonably reply. Fair enough; however, older RPGs weren't as long, and their battle systems held up well enough for 20+ hours. Plus the battles often felt more streamlined and enjoyable, whereas these days they often seem a little over-animated and clunky (which seems cool at first, but starts to drag on one's patience after a while). Plus they didn't beat you over the head quite so much with their story. Most importantly, I thought I saw a faint glimmer of hope for the future of RPGs in FF7. The motorcycle chase scene led me to believe that there was going to be an upcoming revolution in the genre: RPGs where you do more than just commit monster genocide in a repetitive battle system, RPGs that incorporate a variety of gameplay styles, thus becoming more like their namesake and less like Vaguely Interactive Anime Simulation Games. Sneak into the enemy base using a stealth system! Bribe your way past the guards using the negotiation system! Escape using the vehicle system! I don't know, it just seems like we should have moved past the point where an RPG is really nothing but a battle system. And no, cooking systems in games like Tales of Symphonia don't count. Western RPGs tend to go in this direction a bit more, but they tend to do it in sort of a bland way. I think if JRPGs tried to take this approach, they could do it with a lot more flare and style. Regardless, all of the developers seem to have seized on the flashy cutscenes and big story as the aspects that made FF7 "good," and relentlessly copied those elements rather than trying to build on at least what I think were its more important contributions. FF7 felt like the next small step in a natural evolutionary process; everything after it has felt like grotesquely exaggerated bastard clones produced in a laboratory. I think FFXII definitely deserves credit for trying to do something new with the battle system. But I think the best direction to take in the movement away from the oldschool "menu selection" system is either a full-on turn-based strategic system (something like FFT), or a straight-up realtime action system (Secret of Mana). This sort of hybrid MMORPG thing just doesn't work for me.