JackKieser

Ahhhhh.... this is so good! So beautifully played! And I can really feel your enjoyment through the sound, as well. It's too short! I want more!

I'm not going to lie; my favorite part of this mix was when the Ballad of the Goddess first comes in; it sounded to me just like something you'd hear in Tales of Symphonia as the BGM for a town or city. That's a good thing, by the way.

Well, it's the 5th, which means that there are only 4 more days left for round one voting. If anyone still needs to vote, now's definitely the time to do it.

Lol, can someone please quote me calling people "heartless" or something? People be assumin' and projectin'. Anyway, as for matters relevant to sick kids, there are two main votes. Right now, Chase customers can nominate the charities they think should be a part of the official September poll. Once that's done, everyone nominated who accepts Chase's invitation will be a part of a poll in September on chase.com and Facebook, which anyone can vote in. That poll will determine the final ranking, and the top 196 charities get cash.

I do have a lovely attitude! It just so happens that the mods / higher ups on this site and I tend to butt heads a lot. Either way, CP is the big gaming charity, so it shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Also, because of the rules of the program, eligible charities have to be registered in a particular way with... some charity organization that I don't remember off the top of my head. The point is, really small ones, though they might legitimately need the cash, might not be able to be nominated because they aren't registered properly (which, if it's a small enough operation, I could see happening). As far as I'm concerned, CP is the best gaming-oriented charity to donate to, simply because its so well run, does such a good job, and is so visible. Anyway, if your issue with a thread about giving money to charity is "TL;DR", that's... not really something I should be concerned with? I don't know, it's not that long of a post. :/ Certainly, the time is worth it for sick kids? Or at least any other charity that could be nominated. If you don't think it's worth your time... I don't really know how to respond to that.

You know, you can upvote multiple charities; it's not like only one will get cash. Unless you think that there are 195 more deserving charities than CP (because the top 195 charities with the most votes get cash monies), then you should be voting. If I were a more cynical person, I'd think it's because this is a JackKieser thread. Good thing I'm not that cynical. EDIT: I've added some info from official flyers to the OP; it explains some of the finer details, such as the fact that any charity that makes it to voting and responds to Chase's invitation to Round 2 in a timely manner gets to share in and extra 2.5 million dollars, whether they win the vote or not, much better than my OP. So there's, you know, even more reason to nominate right now.

Bah. They're more popular than this thread is making it seem. I just checked the Members List; the forum has over 22 thousand total members. "But Jack," I'm hearing you type, "most of those accounts are inactive, and a lot of those people don't visit regularly." True, which is why I also sorted the list by last date of activity to see how many people are regulars. If we're talking being active in the last couple of days, it's over 450 active members, which this thread is approaching. If we're talking the past month? Over 1200. That's a lot more than this thread is getting views for. Which means, people aren't spreading the word to their fellow forum-goers. If this were just a random ad thread, I wouldn't consider it an issue, except this is to raise a LOT of money for sick kids. The least people could do is send PMs to people they know are even kind of active. EDIT: WOW. Ok, so... how is it that a thread to help BGC's wife win a Facebook contest has over 650 views and 22 replies... but a thread that will help get a charity that helps sick children worldwide to get over (potentially) 25 thousand dollars has barely over 250 views and 6 replies, three being my own? Not trying to hate on BGC, 'cause I'm sure he's a cool dude... but seriously. This seems off to me.

The only thing they haven't been able to do is add new character slots to the CSS. Additional stage slots? Not a problem. Additional character slots? The game explodes. All I know is that it has to do with .rel files. I think.

Yes, multiple times, and I mean full on crying like a baby. Including (but not limited to): * The end of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Specifically the music at the "The End" screen. * Naomi's sacrifice in MGS4. * The end of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (I was really sad that it was over). * The end of Tuchanka in ME3 (I played a Paragon run). * The aforementioned EBA song. Games be moving, yo.

All of the damn time. The greatest disappointment in gaming in the last 20 years, in my opinion, is EA getting their hands on BioWare, specifically in this instance.

My take: it's a decent bit of work if taken on its own, separate from the rest of the trilogy; it is definitely flawed, but it still has its moments and is overall a quality product. As an ending to the Mass Effect trilogy, it still falls hopelessly short. Yes, it explains more. Unfortunately, the explanations are about already illogical things, and so it ends up just highlighting what was already wrong about the original. It fixes nothing that was significantly wrong with the original (and no, the fact that the future was left unexplained was not a flaw of the original; it was a setup for future games), and ends up lacking purpose; everything added was not asked for by the general public, and the people who DID ask for things didn't get what they asked for, anyway. Honestly, the extended cut just seems pointless by the end. I'm planning on writing an essay on it, which will probably be turned into a video or something easier to digest, so I'm going to flesh out these claims, before anyone starts yelling "butthurt fanboy" or something else ridiculous. Watch some of those original ending commentary videos (especially "Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage"), compare to the EC DLC, and tell me that the fans who actually complained about the ending (I mean, seriously complained) didn't get ignored (if not trolled).

Bardic, you posted? Is your SWF username the same as it is here?

Nah, I've just never been the kind of person to let people spout inaccuracies on the Internet. ISP holds its own when it comes to serious scrutiny; people like Derrit are just trolls and, aside from the inaccuracies, all of the flamebaiting can be easily ignored. Besides, anyone who has anything to say worth listening to on the subject is on another website, anyway. Although, that's a serious case of misreading if you interpreted that post as emotional or something. :/

I'm too tired from work to multiquote correct people, so I'm just going to bullet-point this out: * "Item Standard Play", as a project, was never intended to be the official standard for all play. That would be stupid... at least for Brawl. Even by late 2008, when ISP came out with it's first full ruleset, it was too late for items in Brawl thanks to the scrubtastic community left over after the Melee exodus and EVO. By the metric of popularity, it's a miserable failure. Luckily, that was never the point: the bet that started it all was that items were, by definition, unviable for competitive play, and whether it is widespread or not, ISP disproves that sentiment handily. There is a nontrivial chance that an ISP-like system could be a day-1 standard when SSB4 comes out, assuming the community leadership steps up and learns from the mistakes of the Brawl launch (assuming the Tekken team doesn't change the mechanics too much, of course), but that doesn't mean that ANYONE, including anyone a part of ISP, has, is, or will push for widespread ISP use now. * No one, and I want to stress this, not a single person who has ever been a part of ISP, including me, has EVER claimed that ISP is better than anything else. Every ruleset, items or no, has its strengths and weaknesses, and comparing them all to each other is an epistemic nightmare. The only claim we, as a project, have ever made is that ISP is legitimately competitive and competitively valid on its own, on its own merit. That claim has withstood scrutiny by top TOs, players, Smash researchers, and even the community writ large; regardless of personal opinion, almost no one who seriously reads the ISP thread ever has a bad thing to say about it. * Scrubs and people with a passing knowledge of competitive Brawl or competitive Brawl history think all sorts of stupid, uneducated stuff about ISP. At the end of the day, it's a great project full of amazingly talented people and players, and not a day goes by where I'm not 150% proud of the work they did to make it a reality. It has served its community well, and that's the end of the discussion, full stop. I know it's a lot, but anyone who wants to badmouth ISP has a lot of reading to do first (82 full forum pages of reading, to be precise). That means you, Derrit.

Say LOL all you want, chief. You didn't personally preside over the largest national item-play tournament since Melee and succeed, getting top players to admit to the viability of a ruleset that had been never attempted before. I did. umad.jpeg