The Coop

Anyone who's paid that much for a home computer, please raise your hand. I wish to spend the next few months making fun of you

You know, I've come to expect certain things in life. The sun coming up, the moon being in the sky, and of course, SNK making bosses that are infuriating. In this case, a certain King Leo in Neo Geo Battle Coliseum. I wish I could say I own the game, but I can't. As such, most of my play time with this game as been at a friend's house. However, I've managed to chalk up a few hours with this interesting, and fought King Leo a good number of times. Here are my thoughts... Fuck!... Fuuuuuuuuuuck... Oh c'mon!... What the?!... Wait, he's healing himself?! FUCKIN'...! This boss is insane, and he's not even the main boss. As one would expect with SNK, his moves are fast, they do quite a bit of damage when they connect, they do damage when you block, and of course, hitting him with even good specials seems to do minimal damage to him. It's insane sitting there getting in a few good shots, only to see that his health bar's barely moved, and that it's refilling. I've yet to beat this guy, or even get him down to half a bar of health. And considering there are three other main bosses in the game, I fear to see what they do to you. I'll beat this boss yet. I can get into the low teens in wins without any time bonuses or anything, so I'm not doing that badly. I just have to find a vulnerability.

Alrighty. #s 3, 7, 8, and 9 as they were, and #s 1 and 6 with non-brown BG colors... http://www.geocities.com/arforfaborb/Bob1.gif http://www.geocities.com/arforfaborb/Bub1.gif http://www.geocities.com/arforfaborb/Mighta1.gif http://www.geocities.com/arforfaborb/Monsta1.gif http://www.geocities.com/arforfaborb/UnknownCat1.gif http://www.geocities.com/arforfaborb/WillyWhistle1.gif And here's a few color experiments with the other four. They've been trimmed to 30x30 or less... Thoughts? LT: The already approved are awesome; good to go! You're gonna hit me over the head with a plank of wood, but for the other ones, I'm definitely not feeling those BG colors. The contrast is always odd. I blame Taito! I dunno, they may be a lost cause. :'-(

I always liked that video. It's so true at times, and funny besides.

So is this thing still functional, or is it on life support? I ask because Rexy hasn't posted in here for over nine months.

I've known a number of 'Macatics' as I call them (Mac fanatics). They swear up and down that Macs out do anything and everything a PC does, no matter what they're presented with. For them, Macs are better for image work, editing, gaming... you name it, and Macs are better to them. Me? I'm not impressed with Macs at all, and this comes from several years of having to work on them in various programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightwave, and Final Cut Pro. They're every bit as crash/freeze prone as PCs, they're way more expensive, and their upgrade ability is not particularly good. But what puzzles me the most, is why anyone would find a one button mouse to be a good thing. Those things make me frustrated enough to punch a baby with how oversensitive that damned button is, but boy do Macatics praise that thing all to hell.

Sounds a lot like OCR. And like the art critiques I've sat through over the years.

Indeed. http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm There's a guide for DVD/CD media. If your parents are using any manufacturer in the third or fourth group, get them to upgrade to something in the first group if possible.

Depends on how they want to save the video. If they're trying to put them on the DVDs so that they can be popped in and watched like any DVD movie, then don't go above two hours of video on each DVD. Once you go above that, the video quality starts taking a nose dive. With two hours at high quality, the videos should look good. Of course, it depends on what their program considers "High" quality. As an example, on my copy of Ulead VideoStudio 8SE, I can make a video file with these settings.... Video Type- MPEG Resolution- 640x480 Video Bitrate- 14,000 Sample Rate 44.1kHz Audio Bitrate- 224kb/s ... and have a 30 minute video file at 687MB. That leaves plenty of room for the other hour-and-a-half at a similar high quality, and the video is nice, big and quite clean for a tranfer. Just keep in mind that the worse the quality is of the original VHS video, the larger the video file will likely be (more movement in the video affects this area too). Video files are a lot like animated gifs in that area, as a fuzzy, dirty image that moves will take up more file space than a clean one. However, since we're dealing with home videos, sacrificing the time duration on a DVD shouldn't be an issue. You'll want these things to be as good as you can get them, and if that means you only get 1:30:00 on a DVD from time to time, so be it. If on the other hand, they want to just create a video file and save those files on DVDs like a data file, then you can get more than two hours on there without sacrificing video quality. As my example above shows, a half hour of video at those settings is less than 700MB. With DVDs holding 4GB of data, they can get 2.5 to 3 hours on there, and then just play the files on their PC (or burn them to 2 hour-long watchable DVDs later). Just keep in mind, that you should try not to go much over the 4GB line with a single-sided DVD. Sometimes what fills those last few hundred MBs on a DVD can become inaccessible, especially if they're on there as data files. So it's a safe bet to make sure those DVDs stay below 4GB for some cushion (even if it's 3.98GB). Anyway, hope that helps.

Anyway, all smartassedness aside, some game companies have really thin skin when it comes to websites or magazines reviewing their games that they feel are awesomeness on a disc. They get outraged that their baby is mediocre at best in someone's eyes... especially when those eyes have some form of press available to them. But while some game companies just move on, others like Capcom in the past (and now Midway and them), take another course... they throw a hissy fit, take their ball, and go home. I guess they figure it's some kind of punishment, but it's really a type of bad press that's worse than what their game just got. Of course, it's the same thing with artists/entertainers of any kind. Some can handle the negative reviews or commentary on what they feel (or have been told) is a masterpiece by them. Others can't, or won't. They forget that it's an opinion, and not everyone is going to have the same one. As such, just because other print and digital press rags say one thing, doesn't mean every last one of them will agree with it. After all, as the saying goes, you can't please everybody.

Midway's a part of this, and a banning of their games is being talked about? Oh yeah, The wingless should be here shortly to remind us all how he hates the gaming consumer, and cite this as one of the reasons

And if you're not, you get a complimentary set of emo glasses and hair to use so you can mope about thinking no one likes you in proper style

Batman (Action Platformer) Batman: Return of the Joker (Action) Blaster Master (Action) Burai Fighter (Shmup) Casltevania (Action Platformer) Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (Action Platformer/RPG) Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse (Action Platformer) Contra (Run 'N Gun) Dragon Warrior (RPG) Dragon Warrior II (RPG) Dragon Warrior III (RPG) Dragon Warrior IV (RPG) Dr. Mario (Puzzle) Galaga (shmup) Gargoyle's Quest II (Action RPG) Guardian Legend (Shmup) Gun Nac (Shmup) Heavy Barrel (Run 'N Gun) LifeForce (Shmup) Metal Gear (Action Stealth) Metal Storm (Action) Metroid (Action Platformer) MegaMan 1-6 (Platformer) Ninja Gaiden (Action Platformer) Ninja Gaiden II (Action Platformer) Ninja Gaiden III (Action Platformer) Silk Worm (Shmup) Super C (Run 'N Gun) Tetris (Tengen version) (Puzzle) TMNT II: The Arcade Game (Action) TMNT III: The Manhattan Project (Action) Zanac (Shmup)

Perhaps I'm being naive, but if these wiki pages work anything like the ones on Wikipedia, why not have "What_Is_Darkstalkers" as the page name at the URL's end, instead of a given bio's number/name? Is there some specific formula that has to be used in this wiki URL setup, or was that your plan to begin with?

Actually, it would be Fishy who was behind that miscommunication when I joined. avaris sent me a PM first seeing if I wanted to join, then he/she forwarded my response to Fishy. I was then told by the Fish-man, that anyone with remixes on OCR was accepted without question, and not to worry about it ("it" being what I told avaris/Fishy about my setup in that response PM). As for project, I'm not fond of the idea of handing over my mixes to someone so they can apply their samples and whatnot. That quickly turns into a game of PM tag every time I adjust something, and can easily lead to having to wait weeks to see how it sounds. So I just avoid that area altogether these days, as it's proven to be more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. I tried out Reaper, and have kind of started to understand how it works. However, I've not found a single good free VST or VSTi that I liked the sound of just for the piano alone. I also can't get the soundfont samples (Squidfont, TGSF21x, and a few others) to sound like they're not heavily muffled (as in, "turn off the treble, and throw a thick blanket over the speaker"-type muffled). Selecting different sounds in a soundfont set doesn't seem to work either, and nothing I've read explains what I did wrong (if anything), or what's not working right (if anything). In short, it's pissing me off

I've made several threads about ghost stories around Halloween over the years. I would have made on last year too, but someone beat me to it. Of course, it died off just as fast as the previous ones made by me, so the symmetry is still there

Sounds like "You Keep Me Hangin' On" by The Supremes. It's been covered by a number of artists since its debut in 1966.

Well, here are my thoughts (yes, I do get them from time to time... hurts though)... Each image links to the short bio, right. In each of those short bios, I figure a few things can be done. 1) Make it so each time the word "Darkstalkers" comes up, it's automatically made a link to the "What is" page, 2) put the "What is" info somewhere on each of the short bio pages, or 3) make each image link to the "What is" page, have links to each of the seven bios on that page, and then have a link to each ones extended version on their pages, so that the linkage system would work like this... Anyway, just some possibilities.

God... you people and your sidebars. You just have to have them on everything, don't you? DON'T YOU?! But serioously, seeing as how OCR already has a sidebar, having one in FireFox would be quite redundant. And if you have a skin that's currently omitting the sidebar (like the ones Rama made a while back), then why not simply remove that skin and use the sidebar that's already there? As for browsing the newest remixes, wouldn't it be simpler to just put that option under the "browse" tab that's along the top of every OCR page?

I'm not familiar with how the wiki coding works, but couldn't you just put a URL link at the end of a short bio that goes to its long one, and then a similar link at the end of that long one that goes back to its short one? The short bios are the main pages if my understanding is correct, so it seems logical that the only way to reach the 7 extended bios is to link to them only from their short ones. ... Is that paragraph as confusing to read as it was to write?

You'll eventually hear it. It's just not looking like it'll be as a part of PoAP.

I believe "Merry-Go-Round" is open again, as I simply don't have the equipment to meet the standards of the project.