The Damned

I'm about... six hours from being able to watch Perfect Blue. Satoshi Kon's work is actually pretty damn good overall. I liked Millennium Actress the most, though.

OK, two WIPs threads need commenting and there's an announcement that needs reading in the forums. Go! Go now!

Ugh... maybe it was having to watch two episodes every week at the local anime club, or maybe it was the insane amount of characters and the pointless little introduction screens that popped up whenever they showed a new face, or maybe it was the orderline hard-on that the blond guy had for the chinese guy... or the fact that we constantly sang "Spaaaaaaaace, NaaaaazIEEEEES! whenever it started... I didn't think it was that great. Too long, too slow, too political,

Short story: it was high school and I needed a cool, intimidating name for networks games of Descent. Long story: during lunch and after school in the computer lab in high school, there were the usual group of twenty or so people that would hang out and play network games. Now, this is 1995, before Windows 95 and all its "improvements", so when we set up a nework game, we actually set them up. Manual loading and initializing programs and protocols. DOS was our war zone, and our battlefields were whatever could run safely on 486 66Mhz processors and 8 megs of RAM. Any way, Descent was a big favorite back then. Terminal Velocity, Doom 2, Warcraft 2, even once we got Quake on the newer, better computers next door, it didn't matter; Descent was first and foremost the game we played. Even after weeks of playing it and then going onto something else for a change, Descent was always sitting there, ready to be played again. Oh, and how we played. Winter was great, because it was too cold to go anywhere outside and there were times when they actually told us not to leave the building during lunch. The summer was wonderful because our favorite teacher (one of two, I suppose, but for different reasons; the first, our computer teacher, was nice enough to let us use the computer lab for games. The second, because he was a surly old bastard that liked to give us fun assignments like "make paper cut-out puppets and put on a show discussing historical events for class". He also told the principal to fuck off in front of our class and we loved him for it. He also gave us options and opportunities to escape the dreaded "pep rallies" that plagued us every semester. Fuck that shit, we ran every chance we had) he would let us "help upgrade" the computers and we could spend our summers playing more games all the time. He let us order pizzas and drinks, so long as we didn't eat or drink at the computers. Any way, we played Descent. I believe I mentioned this a bit by now. And after seeing how everyone else had cool names (Psychofish, Gridlock, Doomguy, etc...), I was determined to have one for myself. I tried a few, but they were either derivative, or boring. I spent a few nights looking things up in whatever books I had access to at home (this was before internet access was common. In fact, most of the schools in region didn't have dial-up. We barely even had a working ISDN for a few years). I poured over pages and pages, checked out the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the medical books (ick... too many pictures. I stopped after the first chapter on skin conditions. Good thing too. Otherwise I'd be known here as The Seborrheic Keratosis. Not exactly the image I wanted to convey in the heat of missile fights. There came a point where I just wanted something that wounded cool, awesome, dark and mysterious. Something that would send a chill down the spines of my opponents. Like... BATMAN! But that was taken. Not only by the comic book character, but also by one of the younger kids that sneaked in from time to time. We shot him many times. With Mega Missiles. If he was up against someone that was far better than him, which was pretty much everyone there, we'd just shoot flares at him. Flares cost one energy point and did one point of shield damage. A freshly spawned player had 100 points of shields. It was the Descent equivalent of a taunt, or insult. It made an annoying crash sound on anyone that had a sound card, and it stuck on your screen for five or so seconds and obscured your view. There was no real limit to how many you could shot into someone's face; there were times when all a player could see was flares sticking out of their canopy. Sorry, getting off topic a bit. The point was that we shot him with flares a lot, and there were time when he was so besieged by us, that someone got a lucky flare in at the right time and killed him. It was cause for many room-wide cheers and laughs. I eventually decided on the handle "Aurora". Then someone pointed out to me that was a rather girly name. Fuck this, I thought. I'll go with... Damn it. Damn. Damn something something. The Damn something. The Damned. Yeah, that's sooooo cool. At this moment, I'd like to point out that this was 1995, and there were no goths in high school. Not like the ones we have now. No, the few goths we did have just dressed up that way because they liked it. They didn't listen to shitty music, there was no emo scene back then. No emo style, no emo music, nothing. If it existed then it didn't reach our part of the world yet. And it wouldn't for a good ten years or so. Any way, I was not part of the "goth" group, and while I did know a few of them and we did talk and hang out sometimes, I was not part of their click or whatever the word is. So,no, I was not a goth. I am not a goth. Never have I been, nor do I plan to be, a goth. So, the fateful day when I would use my new name to terrify my opponents and see them flee before me had come. It was lunch time. The network had been secured and readied by those who could get there faster. Seats were saved and games had been started, only waiting for people to sit down and join. I saw the game list, and looked at the names of those who had already started the fray. I selected the one with seven other people (Descent only let eight players total at a time, which was actually a rather big number back then). I quickly went to create a new account and typed in my awesome new name! Being the DOS ear, files (like, say... Descent player profiles) were limited to eight characters and a three letter file type. So for Descent, a player's profile would be named "player01.pfl" or whatever the file type was. And the profile file was named after the player's name. So "Gridlock" was "gridlock.pfl", and Steve would be "steve.pfl". "The Damned" is 1, 2, 3, 4... 10 letters, counting the space. Fuck. Even if I take the space out, I still have one too many. How can I fix this. I like this name. It's an awesome name! It's the name that will destroy my enemies without even firing a single shot! I must USE IT! "thedamnd" was what I eventually got. It was clear enough to understand, and it kept the cool mysterious evil thing. Oh yeah, now it's time. Yes, yes indeed! I clicked on create, joined the game, and waited for the reaction. A few seconds passed. Surely they were in awe of this new player name. Then, from the other side of the room, I heard one fateful voice. "Who the hell is 'theada-munned'?" There was no fear in his voice. No recoil of terror. Not even a slight bit of curiosity or even a sliver of a hint of anything I wanted people to have, to feel when they saw my name. Instead, he had this sort of "what kind of name is this, and why is it so hard to read?" quality. I casually raised my hand and said "It's 'The Damned'". At which point someone shot me with a charged up Fusion cannon blast and my screen switched to a Pyro GX with my colors on it exploding. "Oh. Yeah, I can see it now. Only 8 letters sucks, huh?" I respawned into the level, and reply "Yeah. It does." Since then, I have used the name for everything game and internet related. It's an old name (not like the ancient evils of the netherworld that it was supposed to be drawn from, of course), and while it's been showing signs of age and overuse by other things (some vampire movie based on a vampire book came out, there was this shitty metal band, and then someone even went so far as to go back in time and make a movie about a whole village filled with psychic children and named it after me... bastards), it's not time to retire it. No, this is my name. I had it back when most of the internet wasn't even conceived of yet. Most of the games I used it on are now free-ware or abandon-ware. Hell, some of the companies that made those games don't exist anymore. This name has outlived a lot of things, and will continue to do so for quite some time. After all, it's super cool awesome! /tl;dr

This one time, at band camp... (I really should find out what the rest of that line is...)

NEEEEERRRRRRDDD!!! Actually, a barcode could be kind of useful. It could contain the join date and status of a OCR member, like judge/remixer/project head/mod... you would have to make up a program that would actually make sense of said barcode, but for that extra touch of awesomeness, you can make it encode actual info. But does anyone here know how to make barcodes? And would it really be worth the effort? Maybe if we ever needed a crazy secret ID card for something, like an OCR only room MAGFest or something. And mods, project leaders, big contributors, etc... Why stop with just staff. This whole page is full of elitist bastards like us. No turntables, please. That's so 90s. There are about sixty trillion artists here at any given time, and most of them do sig image requests. Lots of potential talent to use.

No, I'm saying that Luxray has shitty defenses and can't take the hits that pile up in Doubles. Look up "glass cannon" and you'll understand what I mean. Unlike Singles, where you can afford to take the occasional hit in favor of a stat-up move or to let an ability to activate, in Doubles, you're facing a more offensive based metagame. Your opponent might use both his pokes to attack one of yours. Even a tough defensive poke will be hurting from that. In most cases, you'll end up being short on poke by the end of the first round. That's a big disadvantage. Even if you manage to do some damage with both your pokes, you'll still be facing two opponents to your one (or two, but with lowered HP). If he attacks both your pokes, then you're getting close to a stalemate. Unless you have managed to nail a few critical hits in that first round, it's going to be a close battle. Close battles are where really knowing your team and what the other player is trying to do makes a huge difference in winning. Of course, simply using only offensive pokes isn't going to work. But trying to use stat-up moves and relying on type coverage isn't going to do jack shit. And seeing how Earthquake is common as hell, having a pure Fire and a pure Electric isn't a good idea. You've created a duo that has a big, common, shared weakness. One popular tactic in Doubles is having a team where one or more pokemon uses a move that will hit everyone in battle including its teammates. But the other(s) have a move or ability that will negate damage from said attacks. Example one would be EQ and Flying type/Levitate/Protect. Team one uses Protect (or just attacks if it's Flying type or has Levitate) on the first poke, and has the second use EQ (usually something with obscene attack and speed since you need to hit hard and fast). Protect is a priority move, so it goes first above all the other moves. The EQ goes through and hits both opponents. Example two would be using a Ghost type with a bunch of Exploders. I've seen this used a lot back in Gen 3, and it still works pretty well today. Get something like a Gengar, and then three more pokes that can make good use of Explosion. Explosion is Normal type, so it can't hit Ghost types. The Explosion hits both opponents and the Ghost type is still free that round to attack. Once the turn ends, bring out your next kamikaze and repeat. Example three would be the lesser used Surf and water absorbing ability combo. Surf's damage is divided in gen 4, so it's even less usefl now, but the basic idea is that using a water absorbing abilty, you can heal your teammate and hit both opponents at the same time. This is just one of the sort of things you can expect from Double battles. There are other strategies out there, but they all revolve around doing a much damage to the other team as fast as possible. There is no time for Belly Drumming or Baton Passing chains. By the time you got that ready to use, you're already down to the point where you can't recover. Even if you go with using status changes like paralysis, by the end, you might not make it. Using Toxic is just stupid. There's no way you could crag a battle out long enough to make it do enough damage. But yeah, Doubles is really offensive based. And to survive in that, you need that something that can take and deal out hits. Luxray does not do this.

Variety and Iron Tail (HAAA HAAA HAAAA! IRON TAIL IN AN ACTUAL BATTLE? HAAA HAAAAA!) are not going to help Luxray survive in the more offensively minded Double Battle metagame. Even with a +Speed nature and a full set of Speed EVs, he's out sped by a lot of popular Doubles standards. Throw in some rather mediocre defenses and the guy can't take a hit. Glass cannon syndrome. And a limited use one, at that. He has some uses in the single battle UU arena, but once you start using him out of that, he's going to show how outclassed he is.

Why hasn't this been declared a favorites thread and locked yet? It's obviously going that way, and fast.

OCR whore much? What, you work there or something?

Who's pixelticks? Some noob?

OHMYGODZ TORRENTZ PLS!

Forums are down. And it was working fine a few hours ago. Must just be moody or something.

Booo! Double Team is banned from standard competitive battles. You suck. OK, actually, it's the majority of Japanese players that seem to suck. Several times, I've read articles or interviews with top internet players, and they say that once they start playing against Japanese players (even though they are obsessive as fuck about the games) they don't EV train, breed for IVs, or bother with Natures or standard movesets. It seems that North America and Europe are the top regions for competitive playing.

So they can make another series when they want more money? There's lots of stuff to still cover from the novels and even the manga (although I suspect that the manga was born from the popularity of the series... feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that). They could easily do another season if they wanted. It might be sort of rushed and not exactly the best, but it could happen.

That was a common occurrence for shows during that year. It was like every show I watched that season just had super-shitty endings.

This thread. OK, seriously now. I'm not reading much these days.

Never mind.

Yeah, never mind. Trades completed. Carry on.

Well... maybe I can just play with the sound effects and voices turned off. That's a option, right? No shitty voices? Only the good ones?

FTFY. Pointless quote-fix for the win!

Yes, we are still working on this. Everyone's just going about at their own pace.

Now, you see, that Cerrax guy? I know him. Well, i know of him. He's done some work here, and he's also done some remixes for my project. He comes here, and he says check that page out? I'd be moe willing to do so.

Maybe it's the fact that they pump out games of low quality all the time. Maybe it's the fact that they are becoming a monopoly and no one seems to want to do anything about it. Maybe people don't like that they buy out studios with proven track records and then transfer or even fire the very people that made the studio so good. Maybe it's that they then pump out sequels to good games that aren't up to the quality of the originals. It could just be them, though.

I believe there was a blog by a EA workers wife that chronicled the long list of things, like extra hours of work with no breaks or overtime pay, no notice of termination, violating several state and federal labor laws... someone else will surely post the link after this.