Arcana

A lot of people are hating on this track. I don't see what the big deal is - yeah it sounds like Linkin Park, complete with HARDCORE BADASS lyrics! It's pretty cheesy... but that's just the nature of the style. The chorus section is really cool, the lyrics are great. My personal issue is that the rap sections could have been a bit more tightly aligned with the rhythm (it sometimes sounds out of sync). As DJP it sounds like they were pasted on. But as an overall package this song was really fun to listen to.

For everyone who's listening "Us Monkeys Together", the lyrics are in Mandarin, not Cantonese or Japanese (as some people previously in this the read have implied).

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/03/xbla-perfect-dark-a-golden-eye-for-detail.ars I played the original Perfect Dark for a few months when I borrowed an N64 for a while. I never really got that far in it but I did have a bit of fun in two-player split-screen mode. Updated graphics and online action? Hot damn!

I need some connections so I can start doing games-related software engineering research.

As someone who studies software engineering, I would like to point out that in the dot com craze of the late 1990s, it was commonplace and expected for you to work far over 8 hours a day in the office. To make it more tolerable, you got perks like a weight room, in-house (free) catered food, free coffee and tea, regular snacks, and game rooms. Eventually, the bubble burst and the first things to go were all of these free extras like gourmet coffee and tea (they replaced it with ordinary coffee and orange pekoe), free lunches, and the personal trainers. Next to go were people's jobs. For a while longer there continued to be a culture of "who can stay the latest" due to fear of layoffs. Now the industry (outside of gaming, to many extents) has righted itself especially as the workforce is getting older and as the experienced, valuable employees get families. However, one big difference between gaming and other software industries is that other software tends to need to do things like maintain large codebases, support customers, and maintain legacy code. In gaming, that doesn't happen quite so often - you often have a lot of creative staff and much of the work is spent on that side of things (art, design, music, etc). The reality is though that 60-hour work weeks is starting to become the "bad thing" and if you're an employee who expects 60+ hours a week from your employees when it's not critical (ex: the week before your project goes gold) then you're going to be finding new employees.

You don't get off quoting me scott-free. Yes, it's a free album and you reserve your right to comment on the tracks, but it is polite to give the tracks a good listen and then to comment on what elements that you didn't like. Be specific. Maybe you didn't like the timbre of the vocals or the lyrics or the annunciation, or you thought vocals didn't fit into the originals. But, don't be rude. Be critical, but not rude. I'm still going through a lot of the tracks personally. A lot of them are really funky tracks. I like the style and the overall vibe the album's presenting so far. It's a very fast-paced, upbeat album. Lots of heavy beats and rhythms. It's a very fun listen. I imagine that a lot of this music will become a permanent part of people's car music.

I was actually a big fan of the funky hybrid. Someone said that this track was all orchestral and I was like, "What? I want my funky rhythms!" Glad I got it with this track. The verses really do it for me, as well as the marcato strings that back the entire track up. The chines are a lovely touch. Yeah they channel Elfman a bit. The thing I would have liked to hear more of would have been more of a 'rocking' synth solo at 2:22. No matter. Good work!

Everyone has the right to offer their opinion on something, just as we each have a right to dismiss their opinions ans biased, unfair, or just plain silly. Alas music is something people feel strongly about regardless of how much it cost them. Personally? I skipped directly TO the vocal tracks. The two that I knew where vocals (Flickerfall and Nicole Adams, et al.) were just fine. The only reason I would want to see an instrumental version of them would be so we could karaoke at a meetup or something.

A lot of that stuff looks clerical, like doing paperwork and making purchasing decisions or setting up appointments with voice actors. Obviously those are things that happen once or twice in a project but need to be done at some point by someone.

It's not, did you read anything else in my post or did you just zero in on this one issue because it looked like an easy target? It's the only thing that people chose to discuss out of my post out of my 10 or so paragraphs, so

Ha ha anyone wanting to buy a Prius now could probably get someone to pay them to take it off of their hands.

They put the pink-haired chick from Aion on this poster ("first" row). Surprised.

I'm from Canada as well and I definitely plan to fly as well. For me though it's possibly cheaper to fly from Victoria to Seattle than it is to travel to Vancouver to fly from there.

I don't see anything in common between this game and an FPS other than the pace of the story. Normally Final Fantasy games give you the impression that it occurs over months whereas FPS games occur over a few days. FF XIII on the other hand is short in comparison. Regarding saves, I just feel that, for such a forward-thinking series, they have a remarkably outdated mechanic. I don't mind manually-saving either, but having save points and no autosaves just strikes me as antiquated in games now - just like monster-grinding, using passwords for game progress, SDTV, and status windows that take up 2/3 of your screen all the time. As I said - the game really should just autosave itself into a new file for each significant checkpoint, and in addition allow the player to, in addition, save whenever he or she wants to do so manually. Saving nowadays breaks up the game play more so than "Now loading" screens do and only remind me that "I'm playing a game". And prohpet, I did play the PC version of DA:O. It autosaved pretty much every time you entered a new room, but you also got the opportunity to save manually, which I used frequently. Dragon Age was much less linear of a game than FF13, which also meant that you saved and loaded a lot. I'm not about to recommend that someone not play Final Fantasy XIII because it uses an antiquated save feature. I just think that being prompted, every 30 minutes, with a "Do you want to save?" is an outdated mechanic.

Well the Pentium 4 architecture had an artificially deep pipeline simply to increase the clock speed. Recall that 5 years ago, you had a 3 GHz computer... check the clock speed of your computer now. If it's an Intel Core 2 Duo, chances are it's in the 2.5 to 3.5 GHz speed. If he got a 1.6 GHz computer from 3 years ago it was probably an Intel Core Duo - a decent reference point is that 4 years ago, Apple released its first Intel MacBook and it was a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo. But yeah, Propellerheads makes it a point of pride to say that their system is extremely efficient. They are extremely proud of it. Also, they don't use VSTs which might add some overhead to the whole system.

I have not. But "no manual saves" is bad design too.

That doesn't remove the opportunity for the player to walk up to the save point and select, "Save" though. I don't know if in Fallout 3 there were save points or save-anywhere features; the games I've played that featured autosave always did it on saves separate from the player's manual save slots. Final Fantasy doesn't force you to save either, you have to also go up to the save point and select "Save?" then "Want to save in a new file?"

That doesn't surprise me. Still, I maintain the lack of need for the game asking you to save and instead maintaining an automatic save for the lazy and/or motivated. Every time you pass by a save point for the first time, it should automatically save in a new file (or overwrite the oldest file in a set of X autosaves allocated on the memory unit). The player as well is also provided the option to manually save (as the game already does) when he wants to experiment.

Then how does Dragon Age: Origins, a game that's much less linear than FF XIII, get away with keeping an autosave file for you? There was a game that I actually saved and loaded repeatedly. Do you know how you get into experimenting? Allow the player to keep both manual and automatic saves. I think this "experimenting" is virtually nonexistent anyway. Maybe later in the game, but in the first ten hours I've had zero desire to go back and take different decisions, whereas I have wished that I didn't have to go through 3-level deep save menus that destroy the immersiveness of the game. It's like watching a movie in the theatre that has commercials in the middle of the damn movie. I'm quite able to change the discs myself, thank you - and if you read my white text you'll see that the disc thing was an extremely minor gripe. No need for insults now. But thanks for the information about game installing. I didn't know you could install games on the XBox 360 (you'd think manuals would talk about this kind of thing).

I just bought this and I'm about 9 hours in (just switched to Disc 2). I don't know, this game's interesting enough for me to have played nine hours in a single night (heh heh) but there's something... missing from it. I'm going to blank out everything below just to prevent people from being spoiled even though I know most of you are ahead of me. -Begin maybe spoilers- My main problem with this game so far has been pacing. The game moves like molasses even though tons has happened. You know what's wrong with the pacing? Up until just now (the scene with Snow and Cid on the airship), there's been a lack of any formidable villain character. And, all prior to that, there's been little direction other than, "Let's get out of here". The problem is, as a viewer, I have one burning question: Once they do get out, where are they going to go? The Lightning/Hope arc is not bad because they actually made a plan, but even though I agree that Sazh is the best character in the game thus far, the parts with him and Vanille are mind-numbing at best and downright disturbing at worst (I really, really really hope that they don't get together. They have absolutely no chemistry together and they totally deserve other people in the world who will love them). About two hours in, it's pretty exciting because you find out that they all get together, they become L'cie, and all of that, but then you're like "Uhhhhhhhh" and the "uhhhh" goes on for about 4 hours with maybe an hour worth of flashbacks. The motivating elements aren't there and it's kind of annoying that me, as a player, am playing with a pray-hope that it picks up. I mean, I like "desperate survival situations" and all, but it seems that there's not enough discussion of "Where should we go?", "How will we live our life now?", or even "What are we going to eat tonight?" for me to suspend disbelief. I would have been totally happy seeing them in a scene scrounging for food or something if only because it helps satisfy my longing for grounding in realism and an illustration of the desperation of their situation while they determine how they are exactly getting off of whatever area of the world they're in. I think it would have helped actually if there was either some kind of world map, or at least an indication that the characters knew where to go and that eventually, if they walked in the same direction long enough, they would get to that one town that slips my mind at the moment. I think it's in elements like this that make the game's lack of a central map a bit harder to digest because you can't really orient yourself around the game world. They all talk about the world Cocoon, and the outer rim and the inner rim and the characters all know what it's like, but you the player still have no idea what it is like, what the countryside is like, and what the cities are like (though you get a taste of Bodhum in cutscenes). While this doesn't matter in a game like Doom 3 or Gears of War, it matters when the game is so character-focused and when the characters talk about things like missing home and trying to find their way home and things like that. In fact the game reminds me a LOT of Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter in terms of its layout so far (by the way, BoF V is an excellent, excellent, excellent game and is thoroughly overlooked) because of its focus on dungeons and fighting, rather than on towns and character interaction. But at the same time, I'm reminded of the importance of towns in RPGs - towns are designed to immerse you and make you if not CARE about the world's inhabitants, then at least to make you understand a little about them. FFX's implementation of a town was good in that it was not a "base of operations" more than it was a "part of the story that you got involved in". FFX III is sorely lacking in that "everyday normal human stuff" so far. The flashbacks are by far the best at immersing people into what people's everyday lives were like (which is the point of them, I do understand that). Basically, I've played for 9 hours and I'm pretty disappointed that more hasn't happened. Remember, in FF7, 9 hours of play got you out of Midgar and into Junon. In FF10, 9 hours got you significantly into Yuna's pilgrimage. In FF13? 9 hours later and you're just starting to get out of this barren underwasteland you crashed into after trying to get out of a crystallized lake that you also crashed into. I understand the pacing in this story is very different from the other games, but... yeah, in my opinion it's slow. Also, while I rarely wonder about things like, "what are the characters going to eat?" that's because they normally have things like Inns and similar. Even in Final Fantasy X Tidus says, "I'm hungry!" I dunno. I don't wonder in Gears of War, Doom 3, or similar games because the entire game, even if it takes 15 hours, usually happens in what is presumably the span of the evening (Gears of War for example starts during the day, and ends the next morning). I think we all expect the scope of a Final Fantasy game to cover the span of many, many, many days and that the story will end up being really long. I do agree with statements about Vanille's voice though I didn't really notice her 'squeaking' so much just because it's such typical Japanese girl fare to squeak and do orgasm-grunts. She's kind of annoying, but she's such a stereotypical character that I've learned to look past it. I don't get urges to beat her head in with a bat or anything. As far as Snow goes... I don't like him. I think it's because he seems to try to be such a cliche Japanese-tough guy, right down to the beanie hat and unshaven chin and shit-eating grin. He's too archetypical. I hate his girlfriend Serah way more than Vanille, by the way. Lightning goes into the archetype totally the other way, being the total "bitch girl". In fact, one of the more believable characters I found was Hope because he's actually responding to the situation how most people I would think would respond - with despair, depression, thoughts of suicide, and desperately trying to prove himself useful in a (pathetic) attempt to get over it. Yeah, he's a whiney kid, but you'd probably be a whiney kid too if your mom was killed violently and you were branded to death. Story-wise, I appreciate the fact that the party doesn't like each other. I kind of lamented the teen rating because I really anticipated people calling Lightning "a real bitch". The shifting perspectives is pretty fun as well as the mandatory party changes (something I haven't really experienced since Final Fantasy IV, and it was something I really missed). -End maybe spoilers- The combat keeps getting better as the game goes on (though really I'm surprised it took them 9 hours to explain all of the combat elements and I bet there's still a few tutorials to go). I only realised just now that the stagger meter actually indicates the % bonus damage each hit does :0 I'm bad. Also, thanks Malaki for the tip of "organic" vs "machine" parts for weapons upgrading, I was wondering how I got XP bonuses from some items but not from others. For a while when playing it (especially the first two hours) the combat was dreadfully boring because you don't have any options to select from. Getting the roles and paradigms in though makes the game far more interesting. Finally, I am kind of concerned about the intricacies of the Crystal system. It doesn't look, well, significantly interesting. To me it kind of reminds of the implementation of the World of Warcraft talent point system, where a spec is a particular role and that there's pretty much One True Way to spec, with no variations whatsoever. There are no branches in the FF13 system (unlike the sphere system) and to me the system is just about "picking a tree and pressing A until you run out of points". When you max out a tree (so far, in the early game, it hasn't been hard to max out the trees at all, though I expect this to get super hard later on) you just pick the second-most useful tree and work on that until it's maxed out. Oh and a couple more things... Does anyone think this constant "Would you like to save your game?" is totally archaic? Of all the things that FF XIII is progressive about (fast complex battles, no HP loss between combat, streamlined exploration), WHY does the game insist on asking you if you want to save every time? Can't it just assume that you want to save, and do it? Or, even better, couldn't it just keep a set of two or three autosave files that it automatically saves to, like every other video game I've ever played? I've gotten so used to not having to keep track of saved games (or conversely having the option to save anywhere) that it's really a bummer that the game keeps asking you. Also, I hate how, by default, it asks me to save a NEW game every time. Again - I really don't need a new file whenever I save the game. Can't you just keep it on the old one? Or... yes, guess what. Autosaving is good. Please learn how to implement it for Final Fantasy XV, you'll only have about 7 years to learn how to do it in time for the XBox 720 and PS4. (Also whenever I start the game, it asks me what device I should load games to, and brings up my hard drive as the one and only option... I don't know if this is an XBox system issue or a FF XIII issue, but you'd think if it finds only one disc device on the computer it would default to that one). "Loading... please wait" and "Please insert Disc 2" sucks, but it's a CD-based console game so I kind of expected it. It's a shame though. I have 90 GB free on the XBox 360, I wish they could allow me to install the game onto the hard drive. Anyway, I had zero expectations of this game so although it sounds like I'm hating on it quite a bit, I'm not - I think it's interesting and I intend to play more of it. I think the basic story concept is good and I like the multiple character perspectives as well as the battle system. Even if the characters, individually, don't really strike me as being excellent, their interactions and situations are involving enough for me to want to keep playing. I'm hoping it picks up story-wise though. Oh and before I forget... Anyone else think that the image of Snow riding the bike is VAGUELY suggestive: http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-09/ff13-shiva-bike.html ?

Also note that the phenomenon of age and video games, while an issue before, didn't really start to take centre stage until the widespread use of voice communication for gaming. I'm sure back in the original counterstrike days when everyone played pick-up games without voice, no one cared about the age of the players on the same team.

I think it's just the "third stereotype" that people in North America tend to enjoy but that people in Japan don't really see as much. It's the "mature, adult woman" type, the mentor and guardian character. This is becoming a more common archetype, possibly as gamers get older, as development shifts from Japanese views to Western views, and as tastes change (boys aren't as afraid to admit to having an older woman "show them the ropes" now).

Well, I would see making up a story about how he had a vocal chord speech impediment being more a problem than saying "I don't have a mic". There's lying, and then there's lying. You're right in that he is more mature than most kids his age (we talked to him later on - his voice was changing actually - and he was telling us about how he was doing well in school, doing competitive tennis tournaments, and how he was trying to avoid drugs and smoking). But I still think that trying to make up a story is a bit on the problematic "drama" side. I think it happens to many people on this online age though, where people try to pretend to be someone they're not due to the ease of doing so (especially on online communities and games). In many persistent communities (what I mean by persistent is a community where the same people regularly speak to each other, so a guild in a game, or a writing club, or even a group like OCR) the young people in the community either have to grow up or get out. If they act like "kids" so to speak, then they're going to get mocked. I think there's a lot of pressure in that respect to gain acceptance from older peers if you do happen to be young and want to fit in. This pressure definitely doesn't exist in incidental or emergent communities that get together fleetingly.

Wasn't there a similar thread where Harmony or BCG or someone linked an article where, when given the exact same version of a song, except one was made louder or something, almost everyone preferred the louder version?

Oh the other thing with kids is that you have to censor your own language too like The Author said. Even though you have it somewhere in the back of your mind that the kid already knows everything there is to know about bad oral sex jokes, you don't want to be that guy who cracks those jokes precisely when the kids can hear them.