I-n-j-i-n

I don't know. I generally regard most sequels as being much superior than their original. Sure, we can have nostalgic twinges here and there, but I think that's the majority rule. Though for something like Rare, where its glory days truly were in the past (not to diss them now, since they are still there and trying), or even for Nintendo when Miyamoto and crew were at their full swing where the past games were definitely better than their modern counterparts. As for the reason why a lot of sequels don't live up to our expectations, it's because the same developers don't make the sequels. Actually, the FF6 -> FF7 argument is a good one. Not because of the battle system alone, but because just about ALL the major developers for FF6 made FF7. Though after that, a lot of development changes started happening and people started faulting FF games since FF8 more and more. Even with FFXII, a lot of gamers don't acknowledge it because the core FF development team did not make it, but the storied Tactics Ogre team. I mean look at Nintendo games now. Miyamoto barely even touches any of them now, if at all. Koji Kondo only does "musical supervision" and not much of actual compositions. And the level designers, the artists, the actual programmers have hit the revolving door and they are now in other companies or have different roles in development now. That's why a lot of modern Nintendo games were really good games due to the influence of older development talent, or hit a snag because they were completely outsourced. Then look at Bioware, which basically had the same core development personnel since the beginning. Similar could be said of Epic Games, Blizzard and a few others. But smaller American game development teams seems to stick to the few knowable development talent compared to the corporate atmosphere of Japanese game development. And oh yeah, Sega used to be the best gaming company back in the day. When it actually existed as a venerable company.

If you put it that way, I can agree somewhat. But they really are pushing for the high definition gaming a lot. For obvious reasons beyond the games' usage of them, but also for the HD TV/Movie content, possible streaming HD footages, HDDVD, Bluray and etcetera. There's a lot to it even if it doesn't directly have to do with games entirely. Also, even if they have plateau'd the shockingly new appeal of graphics with games (which hasn't gone away. I mean, Gears of War and a whole slew of recent 360 games have done just that with the HD gaming. PS3 is starting to get into it too), that only means that the developers can just focus more on the gameplay at hand.

For one, High Def is definitely easier on the eyes. And you can actually READ TEXTS unlike with normal definition where a lot of on-screen texts turn blurry only 99% of the times. And almost totally unreadable unless they're on giant billboards or something. Can it make the actual gameplay better? Hell yes, because it can add a lot more things happening within the game, and make older games much more of a pleasant, new sheen. With primitive, 2D games, it might not matter much, but with 3D games, I think the clarity of picture and the graphical power means a lot. The Wii isn't going for that but the other consoles are. There's nothing wrong with what they're doing. And speaking of immersion, high def and graphically capable stuff can do amazing things as well. I mean, people mention Okami's overall artistic design, but without the graphical capability, it wouldn't have been possible. If it wasn't immersive that way, it simply would not have held up. Would it have held up if we saw still images scroll in 10 frames per second compared to a smoothly flowing game world? We already know the answer there. I mean look at the immersive aspects in Zelda Twilight Princess, and a lot of its graphical upgrades from the past generations made it look a lot more interesting and more inviting to play. Art and visual direction obviously matters a lot, but I don't think you can just say that "graphics don't matter". That's just ridiculous. And believe it or not, HD gaming and HD content in the recent years is spiking up HDTV sales. So maybe some of you might be all stubborn with the idea, but it's really starting to take off in the mainstream.

Photorealistic stuff can be great too. For simulations, they are obviously a must. For sports games, they can go for the arcadey feel or the totally realistic feel. Both can be great. As for FPS games and action games that use photo-realism, I think they play directly into the gameplay. Stuff like FEAR wouldn't be scary at all if it had Wolfenstein sprite graphics, camouflage in FarCry won't be possible with less visual power to even create the foliage, and without the physics engines, Half Life as a franchise would actually be pretty boring.

Graphics are important. Hur.

Buy a Wii60. I have that old Gamecube feeling with the Wii right now. Zelda is permanently stuck in there aside from the odd Wario session (thank god for RENTALS). And maybe a VC game or two. And wow, are they actually aiming to convert last gen games into the Wii? Color me disappointed. Again.

I'm amazed at how people are hurting themselves, pulling muscles, breaking legs and even DYING from the Wii. Amazing.

I'm afraid the music composition will be boring, "GENERATE RANDOM SOUNDS" techno/ambiance garble. I hope that's not the case.

I don't know.. NES was the f'n golden age of licensed movie/comic/cartoon games. Tiny Toons was a nigh gaming masterpiece of its time (I'd say I had more fun with Tiny Toons than even Super Mario at times), Duck Tales was awesome, RoboCop was pretty hardcore in both difficulty and gameplay, Batman is probably THE best Batman license game ever created, and even Chip and Dale was pretty fun. And I liked Tom & Jerry even though it had the typical insanely tough gameplay where you die if you touched anything.

That makes sense, but what doesn't make sense is why that is even the case with a site as a whole. You would think the mods, the judges and etcetera would make an effort to have it all gel together instead of letting it run loose if they feel that was the case. They could have mitigated it through the years instead of letting it fester so to speak. And speaking of all the criticisms of the judges and mods and the way the site is run and the way it was responded harshly, I think you can simply look at a lot of the forums that are run in the net and unless they are plain abusive or threatening, the trollings and the bickerings are to be ignored. And if an individual does something out of the line, they should be judged individually. I know, that's more effort and all, but that is the ideal anyway. It's not "bitching" about something when there were real pros and cons to all of this and a whole segment of the community was basically exiled. I find it to be a genuine complaint on one part, and I can agree that emotions have been flared over it. But is it entirely unreasonable? I don't think it is. But they already have. The move to .org for one. Some of the threads got out of hand once it became a line of porn oriented fad threads. Lots of little niche porn threads that didn't need to be there. The basic ecchi/hentai or the "boob" threads was good enough. People generally didn't flood unnecessary images too much outside those. Goatse and the like could be seen as abuses since they were the out of the norm flooding and trolling. Then it sorta got out of hand. But I think that kind of sentiment of the token "sleaze" that people see in it is the typical response to Unmod. It's just misunderstood. Much like how shock jock radio personalities are assholes or get into the 'sleaze', it's not sleaze for sleaze's sakes. Those radio personalities or comedians or other irreverent forums and sites do not take themselves too seriously. That's the whole point. It's there so that it's a fun atmosphere no matter how ridiculous it gets. That was the whole point of the forum. Yes, there has been some instances of abuses, but I think it's silly to lump everything into some preconceived notion. And that kind of preconceived notion was what made this fiasco to begin with. And another thing I find funny about that situation was that even with all the trolling and imagebombs and excessive image threads, the forum was still predominantly about videogames, anime, movies, popular culture and the like. Speaking of off-topic, I find that to be a really strange compromise of moderation and basically going "off topic" from the site's apparent interest. If that was the point of it all, I question why the forum wasn't helped along years ago before things got too out of hand.

Yes, I've read through it thoroughly, but I'm just saying that it's a bit strange since Unmod as of late has been more or less like what Gen Disc was supposed to be. And if people wanted to "prune" the forum so to speak and make it more civil or have it serve some purpose, the place could've been moderated a bit more strict in terms of the flooding and other excessive cases of fad threads and overt trolling. But I suppose that's oxymoronic since it IS unmoderated after all.

I do not understand how a community just chatting it up and having fun is considered "un-useful" as it is constantly stated. Unless the board etiquette of flooding and overt image bombing isn't used, just keeping it within reason isn't so bad.

I may also add that at first, I did trash and troll shamelessly on Unmod. At first. But I also contributed to WIP for a bit in the same time as well, giving constructive criticism along the way. And I agree with the posters who say that they see Unmod and Gen Disc as the two sides of a same coin. Maybe that's why I saw it easy going to both forums and having fun either taking OCR seriously or not. I can sorta understand the decision to delete Unmod at face value. If they were using up bandwidth or were actually making a real effort to "overthrow" the site's claim to fame as a game music oriented site. But at the same time, I do think the situation was handled very badly. I mean, it wasn't as drama-filled and crazy even compared to the banfests of Something Awful when I was there. At least they punished the individuals who were on bad terms with that site. Not a whole segment of the community and do it so abruptly. I must admit, I didn't care at all for Unmod at first. But I do see it now that it served as an outlet of sorts for OCR. Again, I can see why the decision to delete it was out there. But it didn't have to be so politically charged and come from a string of small controversies like this.

Sorta late to the party, but I wonder if I need to f'n moderate myself now. BTW, WTF is .org? Not that I really care anyway. I sorta saw this coming a mile away. I thought it'd happen earlier though.

I heard they showed this trailer along with Ben Stiller's Night at the Museum. So it's pretty old, aka from December 26th. http://www.fantasticfourmovie.com/US/index.html Looks incredible, pardon the pun, and I might actually look forward to watching it in theaters. I keep hearing how it's supposedly one of the "best comic book angles evar" and all that nonsense.

Great game so far, though I won't quite say that the game is a total makeover of the genre as it was said to be by the director. I totally missed the preorder deal. Oh, I agree with all those points. Except they were staples of Castlevania games since the beginning. Except maybe for Castlevania 4, SoTN and Dracula X. And their respective spinoffs of SoTN and Dracula X.

You don't see the relevance, do you? If Halo was to be released on a non-Microsoft system, that could indicate that Bungie could be working elsewhere or that Microsoft might be working with Nintendo. Nintendo making Nintendo games? Tell me how that is news.

Stop talking about this show seriously. I mean really. Samuel L Jackson is all blaxploitation and that's all he does. This is basically a combination of that and Samurai Jack. I'm pretty sure they intentionally made just about everything laughably over the top. BTW, the animation was just incredible. And considering there's only about five episodes of the whole thing, it's basically an OVA. Meaning the story won't be the biggest draw. It reminds me of that new Hellsing Ultimate OVA. Except that one had cooler aesthetic with the vampires instead of the weird wiry, black characters.

I must say that Elebits is pretty much a Nintendo's version of Katamari Damacy. Though still not quite as crazy, but still quirky. And I think it's great to simply rent most of the games since they are entirely too short at the moment. Great money's worth for the experience. Still waiting for something more substantial personally.

I think the question is pretty valid. Because in RPGs, I spend hours upon agonizing hours for that one moment of victory or satisfaction. Going through entire seasons of sports games just so that I get the satisfaction in the end. Playing a thousand volleyball matches for a swimsuit. Racing hundreds of tracks to unlock more track to race on. But it's fun struggling through games. For some reason.

The thing with the Wii and Nintendo sales, though, is that they always have sold well and always will, at least with the profit margin Nintendo is aiming for. And as far as the big franchises are concerned, the sales will always be high. What always gets never talked about thoroughly, if at all, are the lower profile games. Maybe understandably so since their numbers tends to be low. Another thing is that while the Gamecube had the equivalent number of sales to the Xbox, it actually had less number of 3rd party exclusives though the number evens out if you count all the 1st party exclusives. Again, I feel that Nintendo often takes too big of a spotlight with their home consoles and it might make the 3rd party less committed compared to what would otherwise be a mainly 3rd party consoles like the Xbox's and Playstations have been. We've seen the same story for the N64 and Gamecube so far. There has been some solid 3rd party games, but not nearly the torrent of titles available for the competing consoles. The sales alone aren't a reliable indicator of the 3rd party involvement. And Nextgenwars.com has its numbers updated and it seems to match my prediction. Wii has more than 2 million and 360 is close to 10. PS- The Wii will do fine and I think everybody realizes that it's not on the verge of death or anything. Though they can't simply port the games over and think things will be fine and dandy like in the Gamecube days. Simply because of the huge graphical discrepancy.

They underplay the PS3 and 360 numbers too. The way the 360 has been selling lately, it could be around 9 or 10 million instead of 8. I guess the PS3 is more predictable because of the shortage though. But I hear the actual numbers are probably a bit higher there as well. And they tend to play down the numbers for the fear of overprojecting them. And I say this again, but I see no reason why sales really matter in the long run. It's just numbers and profits that I'll never see. Purely pointless. Of course, to certain *fanatics*, it may MATTER to them.

One of the best selling titles of 2006: The Burger King series.

I wish developers more often give out free shovelware and classic titles like they do with the PCs. Though nowadays, they're trying to cash in on the whole classic compilation idea for PC games as well. But in the past, games like Command & Conquer used to be freely distributable without any legal ramifications. Duke Nukem and even Duke Nukem 3D were on the verge of being a near public domain property since they were considered to be classics. I see no reason why some ancient games could be the same. Hell, they can even ramp up the money through ad revenue if they want, by attaching ads onto the download screens. It has worked to varying degrees before.

Well, yeah. I agree on the techno savvy aspect. Though the one thing that shut Napster down was the act of intentional sabotage (at first, people thought it was pranksters. Then things got scary where more than half the files were obviously fixed by the music industry). With ROMs, yes, you do need to dig a bit for them as well. Though torrents have made things a lot easier that way. And thanks to the community aspect of torrents, all the illegal music downloads moved there too. I suspect game ROMs did too, since that's usually where they are nowadays.