Haha, yeah, came in to the thread to say "oh good, Linux finally caught up with BeOS!"
Re:The only good DLC I've seen
on
When DLC Goes Wrong
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I wouldn't say L4D had DLC. It had the rest of the game that should have been there at launch, and which those of us who pre-ordered were told would be there eventually. That's not DLC, it's "whoops, we very obviously sold you 2/3 of a game at full price, so here's a patch to enable shit that was already in it but didn't work quite right so we couldn't enable it at launch, and here's a very tiny kind of crappy campaign we had the intern toss together to make up for your not having the entire game you paid for until a couple months after it was released".
We were also told there would be all kinds of extras released for free over time, like those for TF2--that part never happened, and the map editor was delayed for months, seemingly to prevent L4D from becoming too entrenched and/or preventing modders from cloning too many of L4D2's announced features (many of which were promised as free patches for L4D--go figure) so that the sequel wouldn't flop.
It was either a dick move on Valve's part, or utterly incompetent management of the L4D project. Either way, though I still like them better than most game dev companies, I won't be buying any future Valve multiplayer games until they've been out for a while and I'm sure they're going to support it as they promised and not cut its feet out from under it by announcing a sequel 6 months after its release, to hit shelves a year after its release.
And why Fallout is getting such critical acclaim mystifies me. It's another woner around in a confusing array of side plots while getting lost use mediocre graphics.
I see you're not familiar with the Fallout formula.
Seriously, that's exactly why I like the series, and part of why Fallout 3 didn't feel very Fallout-y is because Bethesda didn't embrace that formula.
Except for the getting lost part, of course. I'm not sure how one could possibly get lost in the first two Fallout games, certainly not in Tactics, and the latest two are full of hand-holding to ensure that you're never, ever lost.
Their HD quality's pretty good for me. I sit far enough back from my 42" TV that it doesn't look much different from BluRay. Every bit as good as 720p content, certainly. SD's pretty bad, though, probably a bit worse than DVD. Great selection, too; they don't always have what I'm looking for, but there are always a couple hundred other things I'd like to watch, so it doesn't matter that much.
42 is still far too long. People should be able to freely create derivative works while the material is still at least kind-of fresh. It'd be nice if artists who were inspired by works in their childhood were able to directly use or re-imagine those works no later than their 30s, rather than in their 50s or later.
I think the original 14 is plenty, personally. 14 years is a pretty damn long time when you think about it.
I agree. By far the best part of Modern Warfare 2 were the coop missions, especially the ones (only two, sadly) where one guy fires from a support aircraft while one runs on the ground.
The competitive multiplayer is full of no-life play-it-24/7 types, with a bunch of maps that look good but are functionally poor, tons of balance issues, and some addictive "high" moments (getting an AC-130) that you probably won't get often but which are just enough to keep you playing despite the fact that the rest of the time the game kind of sucks. Coop, though? A friggin' blast.
My favorite game modes are single-player, followed very closely by coop or spitscreen local competitive, with competitive online multiplayer following in a distant last on my list of things I want out of a game--especially a console game.
Sure. Mind you, I'm still slowly weeding some out, as I hadn't played a few of them before, so I judged them based on a minute or two of play and what I could find about them online. Some on the list are also personal favorites, and likely not to be everyone's idea of a good game--I'll mark those with an asterisk. There are (IIRC) two light gun games that won't work very well unless you've got some sort of gun-like pointer for your PC, or if you play them on a real NES hooked up to a CRT television, using a Zapper; I'll mark those with a dollar sign.
Note also that many very good games didn't make the cut because they are ports of games that are better on another system, or because a good re-make has been done. Some that have been re-made are still on the list, generally because the re-makes are in some way inferior (the Mega Man games, for example, the first three of which were re-made on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive) or because the NES version is just that good or important (e.g. Contra).
Sorry about the crap on each item, lameness filter was bitching about not having enough characters per line. Should be able to take the junk out in a text editor with find & replace; have it replace both "- asdf -" and "- asdfghjkl" with nothing.
- asdf -Advanced Dungeons and Dragons - Dragon Strike- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Adventures in the Magic Kingdom- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Adventures of Lolo (1,2, and 3)- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Air Fortress- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Amagon- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Bad News Baseball *- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Base Wars- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Bases Loaded *- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Batman- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Battle of Olympus, The- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Battletoads- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Bionic Commando- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Blaster Master- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Boy and His Blob, A - Trouble on Blobonia- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Bucky O'Hare- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Castlevania (I, II, and III)- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Caveman Games *- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers (1 and 2)- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Clash at Demonhead- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Cobra Command- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Code Name: Viper- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Commando- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Conflict- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Contra Force- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Contra- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Crash n' the Boys: Street Challenge- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Crystalis- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Daisenryaku (Japanese)- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Darkwing Duck- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Desert Commander *- asdfghjkl
- asdf -Double Dragon (I-III; II is by far the best)- asdfghjkl
After all, we seem to be in the dark age of video game controllers, when the d-pad has become forgotten technology from a golden age.
There are Wii Classic Controller to USB adapters. I haven't used the old style classic controller (the one that looks like an SNES controller) but the new model is possibly the best controller Nintendo's ever produced. It's that good. Excellent D-pad.
It's a shame it isn't the Wii's default input device, or at least more common and capable of attaching to the Wiimote so it could be used in games that require motion controls but still need a real controller, like NSMBW. The Wiimote is awful for stuff like that, an ergonomic nightmare with too-small and weird-feeling buttons.
I'd take issue with the "intuitive" bit, too. Maybe it's just me, but OSX makes no damn sense to me.
I hated OS9 (come on, it was a piece of shit) and was super-excited the first time I got to use OSX after reading/hearing all the hype about how it was some kind of ultra-easy-to-use OS with the power of BSD under the hood. Didn't get it, nor have I the times I've used it since then. Every time I sit down to use OSX I think it'll click and I'll realize I was just an idiot and it really is the easiest and most powerful UI I've ever seen, but that's never happened.
I don't not like it, exactly. It just confuses me. I don't think Windowmaker was even this unintuitive, the first couple times I used it. I can never figure out how to do much beyond launching the shit at the bottom of the screen.
My wife uses them at work, and it seems it's that way for her and pretty much everyone else there, too. Any time they have to do anything remotely out of the ordinary, even if it's simple, it seems like they can't get it figured out.
Now these people aren't techies, but isn't the whole point that they shouldn't have to be?
I think for OSX to be intuitive you've got to be used to its (often really unconventional) conventions, which is the opposite of intuitive. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's not intuitive.
I should clarify that by "at the most" for the PC price I mean for a machine that'll play everything out now and for the next couple years at acceptable levels of detail, resolutions, and framerate. Obviously you can spend $2000 if you really want top-end shit, but you're way the hell out of best-bang-for-your-buck territory if you're doing that, and pretty much just pissing away money when you could spend less for a weaker machine+future upgrades. Unless you're a pro gamer, also using the machine for heavy non-game-related processing, or truly in love with computer hardware there's no sense in it.
Gaming PC: $700 at the most if you have nothing, no hard drive, no optical drives, no power supply+case, nothing you can salvage from an earlier machine save for input devices and a monitor (just as we wouldn't count the TV for a console price), plus it can do all kinds of cool shit that a console (even a whiz-bang media machine like the PS3) can't.
Console: $280+ for a Wii with one full controller set (it comes with a Wiimote and Nunchuk, but you'll probably want a Classic Controller) plus a controller charger and battery packs (Wiis come incomplete and have DAMNED expensive controllers--it's a hidden cost, and part of how they're so much cheaper, superficially, than their competitors, as I discovered when I bought one--they're also by far the least-portable this generation, which is an odd change after the Gamecube). I'd leave the cost of input devices out, but it's not like you can use a controller you've already got, unless you only want to play Gamecube games on it. This $280 or so will get you a system with a much smaller library than the PC, no HD output (not even for video, like when using Netflix) and poor online multiplayer support; the other two consoles are better, but in one case you have to pay for online multiplayer, and you've still got the much-smaller-library problem, plus both cost more than the Wii. We can talk about local multiplayer, but that's gonna be another $180 or so (minimum, no classic controller or steering wheels or gun frames or any of that crap, and assuming you already have four rechargeable battery packs rather than just one or two) for three more players on the Wii, or $150 on the other two consoles.
I own a gaming PC and four consoles (and I've owned another four in the past), so it's not like I'm a PC-gaming-or-nothing kind of guy, but PC gaming isn't as bad as it's made out to be, especially when you consider how many extra features you're getting for the money and the fact that many games are best on the PC--and not just genres that are console-unfriendly like RTS, I mean games like Oblivion, which is solidly a 3/5 unmodded but approaches 5/5 territory with the right mods.
Hahaha, same here--with the regretting selling, I mean, not with the saving to buy it on my own.
I've considered picking up a new one--probably a toploader, an upgrade from what I had--but I'm not sure it would be the same. The worst part is the controllers, since I just know any I'd get now wouldn't quite feel right, and my Zapper was a known-good one, while any I'd buy used would be likely to have calibration issues.
I even forgot to copy my best High Speed score that I wrote on the top of the machine, from that time I managed to run through the machine's "story" twice in one game, and well through a third one before I lost my last ball. Damnit. Gone forever.
I hate to think what a complete copy of Crystalis, including the box and its big, nice manual in good condition would run, and I wouldn't even bother to buy that game without the manual.
About 100, actually. See my post upthread--I just finished digging through my NES rom library to weed out the crap, and couldn't get it under 130. Even if you had damn high standards (and I didn't tolerate the mediocre, mind you, nor games that are better on another platform) there's no way you're getting that number under 50, and even that would be tough.
There are around 1000 NES games playable in English, counting fan-translation ROM patches. Maybe 1100.
I just finished sorting through mine to weed out the ones that suck or that I'm otherwise not interested in (by which I mean I favorited the good ones and set my emulator manager to only show favorites--the things are so small that there's no sense in deleting any).
Even being pretty aggressive in removing games--cutting the ones that were and are good on the system, but which exist in a better form on another platform (mostly arcade ports like TMNT:Arcade, for example) and damn near all the sports games, many of which were fine then but aren't something I'm going to play now (all of the football games got cut--Sega systems all the way for that--but a few other gems like Ice Hockey are so damn good that I couldn't cut 'em) I still only got it down to a bit over 130. Cut out some that few others like but that I left on because they're personal favorites from my days playing on an actual NES (like High Speed and To the Earth) and you're looking at a bare minimum of 100 English-language games that are best on (or exclusive to) the NES and are still fun to play.
10% after 25 years in the US isn't so bad, IMO. Probably twice that many would have been considered top-notch back in 1993 or so when there weren't a lot of options on newer systems to displace NES games, and things like MAME didn't exist. I was surprised there were that many that were still good, personally; I'd never dug through the whole library like that before, and had assumed nostalgia was making the system better in my mind than it had been. It's no SNES, Playstation, or PS2 in the games-library department, but there are tons of good titles there.
I'm a long time OpenOffice user. I've opened maybe two or three hundred MS Office docs in OO.org.
From what I've seen, perfect reproduction of the document is the exception rather than the norm. It's rarely so bad that the doc is unusable, but it can throw off layouts in ugly ways.
Of course, the problem is people sending documents in editing rather than reading formats, but try telling that to... well, anyone, just just about everyone sends that crap rather than a PDF or similar.
Everyone knows it's just indestructible bedrock and the void beyond, if you go far enough.
No, the real solution is to sneak in, destroy all their torches, and knock a couple holes in their walls somewhere they won't notice, so they get overrun with creepers. Bonus if we can find a way to cut off their supply of flint so they don't have enough arrows to defend themselves.
Perhaps that is some reviewer cultural bias, since I live in the US and read English publications. However back in the past there were no problem with JRPGs getting heavy recommendations, FF3 (FF6) still routinely shows up on the "Top XX games of all time," lists for the US. Also the JRPGs I've tried have been as you and I have talked about.
All the JRPGs on real consoles this generation have been mediocre at best. The only good ones have been on handhelds, which seem to be where the action is for most genres this generation, for some reason.
Unless things pick up, this will be remembered as the worst generation of consoles in--well, since before the NES at least. Not one has a great library yet, especially if you only consider games that are exclusive to or superior on a given system. The last three generations had a clear winner in the "best library" category in the SNES, Playstation, and PS2, with other systems excelling in some niche (Genesis--sports games; N64--multiplayer; Gamecube--multiplayer again; X-box--Halo).
None of this generation's consoles stand out yet, IMO. A couple are good as media players, but as gaming consoles they're all falling pretty flat, and if you're in to JRPGs you're probably playing your DS and PSP more than any of the actual consoles.
this game just never made sense to me the very moment I heard about it, as well as FFXI. I've played I, II, V, VI, VII, IX, X, and the incredibly awesome XII (which people didn't like for being "too different" and "too non-linear"; peh)
Not why I didn't like it. They're all pretty damn linear even compared to other JRPGs, let alone Western games, and they almost always change a bunch of stuff in each new one.
I didn't like it because: -- The main character, in the sense of the one we're experiencing the story through, was awful. Like, worse-than-Tidus awful. -- WORTHLESS summons. Lots of work to get them, only to find out that they aren't ever worth bringing out. -- A boss fights were based 99% on how lucky you were with your super-attacks chains (I don't remember what they were called), with small interludes of "Basch, attack, two others do nothing but heal him" every now and then. -- Every character, including the worthless main one, had enormous potential, but the writers failed on the follow-through. How do you make Balthier/Fran boring? Somehow they managed. -- Too-long dungeons with no payoff at the end. Oh, we got five lines of wooden acting, zero character development, and news that something interesting happened--a couple hundred miles away. Hooray. On to the next three-to-four-hour dungeon. -- The only character that I (barely) gave a shit about by the mid-game disappeared a bit later, never to return to my party. -- *wooden* "you're being tempted by power", *even more wooden* "oh hey, so I am"; where the hell did that come from? Show don't tell, you incompetent writers!
My wife and I quit playing a couple hours from the end when we discovered that the game was almost over and we were still waiting for *any* story-related payoff for playing. Just watched the end on Youtube, since there wasn't time left for anything else to happen.
On the plus side, the opening video was badass. Had me excited as hell to play it, until about 15 hours in when I realized I'd been tricked.
I disagree. Yuna is important because she drives many of Tidus' choices, but she's not the main character.
We're with Tidus (more or less) the whole game. Most of the backstory that's focused on any character is focused on Tidus (by way of his dad--the memory sphere things, or whatever they're called, and frequent flashbacks) and Tidus' dad is the end boss. He's the one who grows the most, largely through his interaction with Yuna.
If you're fighting a character's dad at the end of a game, odds are that's the main character.
The initial laughing's supposed to be bad. They're forcing over-the-top laughter. At the end they laugh for real about how stupid they sounded and it sounds like actual laughter, as it should.
It's illegal to operate a motor vehicle on public highways without a drivers' permit. In other words, these experiments were illegal. You would also be convicted of drunk driving even if the vehicle were autonomous because you still have "care and control". So don't drink and drive.
If someone still has "care and control" and has a drivers' permit, I'd say the experiments weren't illegal then, right?
I've seen this mindset before... The "feh.. I'll just risk a DUI".. usually defended by arguments like "just 'cos YOU can't handle 8 beers doesn't mean I can't - the law is injust! *hiccup*".. where does that come from? The same place as "I'll just risk getting an STD"? Why risk such things at all?
I'm not saying I do it, I'm saying those are the two choices in many places: find a DD or drive drunk. Frankly, from what I've seen, far more choose the latter, and no, I don't think that's a good thing.
Honestly? You think being the designated driver is such an atrociously horrendous thing to be that you wouldn't 'impose' on someone that they be the DD? We just rotate or volunteer over here.. every once in a while I'm the DD, every once in in another while somebody else is the DD. I guess if you don't have a good time unless you get intoxicated, or if your friends make you feel like you are no fun unless you get intoxicated; yeah.
The worst part of DDing IMO isn't the not-drinking, it's getting everyone to where they need to go, which may be many miles apart and take a damn long time. And I don't need to drink to have a good time, I just prefer not to have to decide whether I'll drink or not before the night's even started--being the DD then finding out the bar you're at has La Fin du Monde on tap and tonight's dollar-off-imports night would hurt. Like, physically.
I guess I'm probably coming off like a party animal or an alcoholic in this thread, but I'm actually saying that I don't hit the bars often--hell, I don't even drink that much, probably average fewer than 0.5 servings a day over a year, and most of that only 1-2 servings at a time--but that I would go out a bit more if transportation were no concern.
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If any distro's trying to be BSD, it's Gentoo.
Personally, I prefer Linux for its greater hardware compatibility and wider array of well-supported software. BSD's a great router OS, though.
Haha, yeah, came in to the thread to say "oh good, Linux finally caught up with BeOS!"
I wouldn't say L4D had DLC. It had the rest of the game that should have been there at launch, and which those of us who pre-ordered were told would be there eventually. That's not DLC, it's "whoops, we very obviously sold you 2/3 of a game at full price, so here's a patch to enable shit that was already in it but didn't work quite right so we couldn't enable it at launch, and here's a very tiny kind of crappy campaign we had the intern toss together to make up for your not having the entire game you paid for until a couple months after it was released".
We were also told there would be all kinds of extras released for free over time, like those for TF2--that part never happened, and the map editor was delayed for months, seemingly to prevent L4D from becoming too entrenched and/or preventing modders from cloning too many of L4D2's announced features (many of which were promised as free patches for L4D--go figure) so that the sequel wouldn't flop.
It was either a dick move on Valve's part, or utterly incompetent management of the L4D project. Either way, though I still like them better than most game dev companies, I won't be buying any future Valve multiplayer games until they've been out for a while and I'm sure they're going to support it as they promised and not cut its feet out from under it by announcing a sequel 6 months after its release, to hit shelves a year after its release.
I see you're not familiar with the Fallout formula.
Seriously, that's exactly why I like the series, and part of why Fallout 3 didn't feel very Fallout-y is because Bethesda didn't embrace that formula.
Except for the getting lost part, of course. I'm not sure how one could possibly get lost in the first two Fallout games, certainly not in Tactics, and the latest two are full of hand-holding to ensure that you're never, ever lost.
To be fair, I've heard their selection in Canada is a fraction of what it is the US. Not a big fraction, either.
Their HD quality's pretty good for me. I sit far enough back from my 42" TV that it doesn't look much different from BluRay. Every bit as good as 720p content, certainly. SD's pretty bad, though, probably a bit worse than DVD. Great selection, too; they don't always have what I'm looking for, but there are always a couple hundred other things I'd like to watch, so it doesn't matter that much.
42 is still far too long. People should be able to freely create derivative works while the material is still at least kind-of fresh. It'd be nice if artists who were inspired by works in their childhood were able to directly use or re-imagine those works no later than their 30s, rather than in their 50s or later.
I think the original 14 is plenty, personally. 14 years is a pretty damn long time when you think about it.
I agree. By far the best part of Modern Warfare 2 were the coop missions, especially the ones (only two, sadly) where one guy fires from a support aircraft while one runs on the ground.
The competitive multiplayer is full of no-life play-it-24/7 types, with a bunch of maps that look good but are functionally poor, tons of balance issues, and some addictive "high" moments (getting an AC-130) that you probably won't get often but which are just enough to keep you playing despite the fact that the rest of the time the game kind of sucks. Coop, though? A friggin' blast.
My favorite game modes are single-player, followed very closely by coop or spitscreen local competitive, with competitive online multiplayer following in a distant last on my list of things I want out of a game--especially a console game.
Sure. Mind you, I'm still slowly weeding some out, as I hadn't played a few of them before, so I judged them based on a minute or two of play and what I could find about them online. Some on the list are also personal favorites, and likely not to be everyone's idea of a good game--I'll mark those with an asterisk. There are (IIRC) two light gun games that won't work very well unless you've got some sort of gun-like pointer for your PC, or if you play them on a real NES hooked up to a CRT television, using a Zapper; I'll mark those with a dollar sign.
Note also that many very good games didn't make the cut because they are ports of games that are better on another system, or because a good re-make has been done. Some that have been re-made are still on the list, generally because the re-makes are in some way inferior (the Mega Man games, for example, the first three of which were re-made on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive) or because the NES version is just that good or important (e.g. Contra).
Sorry about the crap on each item, lameness filter was bitching about not having enough characters per line. Should be able to take the junk out in a text editor with find & replace; have it replace both "- asdf -" and "- asdfghjkl" with nothing.
Holy crap. Well, maybe I will rebuild my collection...
There are Wii Classic Controller to USB adapters. I haven't used the old style classic controller (the one that looks like an SNES controller) but the new model is possibly the best controller Nintendo's ever produced. It's that good. Excellent D-pad.
It's a shame it isn't the Wii's default input device, or at least more common and capable of attaching to the Wiimote so it could be used in games that require motion controls but still need a real controller, like NSMBW. The Wiimote is awful for stuff like that, an ergonomic nightmare with too-small and weird-feeling buttons.
I'd take issue with the "intuitive" bit, too. Maybe it's just me, but OSX makes no damn sense to me.
I hated OS9 (come on, it was a piece of shit) and was super-excited the first time I got to use OSX after reading/hearing all the hype about how it was some kind of ultra-easy-to-use OS with the power of BSD under the hood. Didn't get it, nor have I the times I've used it since then. Every time I sit down to use OSX I think it'll click and I'll realize I was just an idiot and it really is the easiest and most powerful UI I've ever seen, but that's never happened.
I don't not like it, exactly. It just confuses me. I don't think Windowmaker was even this unintuitive, the first couple times I used it. I can never figure out how to do much beyond launching the shit at the bottom of the screen.
My wife uses them at work, and it seems it's that way for her and pretty much everyone else there, too. Any time they have to do anything remotely out of the ordinary, even if it's simple, it seems like they can't get it figured out.
Now these people aren't techies, but isn't the whole point that they shouldn't have to be?
I think for OSX to be intuitive you've got to be used to its (often really unconventional) conventions, which is the opposite of intuitive. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's not intuitive.
I should clarify that by "at the most" for the PC price I mean for a machine that'll play everything out now and for the next couple years at acceptable levels of detail, resolutions, and framerate. Obviously you can spend $2000 if you really want top-end shit, but you're way the hell out of best-bang-for-your-buck territory if you're doing that, and pretty much just pissing away money when you could spend less for a weaker machine+future upgrades. Unless you're a pro gamer, also using the machine for heavy non-game-related processing, or truly in love with computer hardware there's no sense in it.
More like:
Gaming PC: $700 at the most if you have nothing, no hard drive, no optical drives, no power supply+case, nothing you can salvage from an earlier machine save for input devices and a monitor (just as we wouldn't count the TV for a console price), plus it can do all kinds of cool shit that a console (even a whiz-bang media machine like the PS3) can't.
Console: $280+ for a Wii with one full controller set (it comes with a Wiimote and Nunchuk, but you'll probably want a Classic Controller) plus a controller charger and battery packs (Wiis come incomplete and have DAMNED expensive controllers--it's a hidden cost, and part of how they're so much cheaper, superficially, than their competitors, as I discovered when I bought one--they're also by far the least-portable this generation, which is an odd change after the Gamecube). I'd leave the cost of input devices out, but it's not like you can use a controller you've already got, unless you only want to play Gamecube games on it. This $280 or so will get you a system with a much smaller library than the PC, no HD output (not even for video, like when using Netflix) and poor online multiplayer support; the other two consoles are better, but in one case you have to pay for online multiplayer, and you've still got the much-smaller-library problem, plus both cost more than the Wii. We can talk about local multiplayer, but that's gonna be another $180 or so (minimum, no classic controller or steering wheels or gun frames or any of that crap, and assuming you already have four rechargeable battery packs rather than just one or two) for three more players on the Wii, or $150 on the other two consoles.
I own a gaming PC and four consoles (and I've owned another four in the past), so it's not like I'm a PC-gaming-or-nothing kind of guy, but PC gaming isn't as bad as it's made out to be, especially when you consider how many extra features you're getting for the money and the fact that many games are best on the PC--and not just genres that are console-unfriendly like RTS, I mean games like Oblivion, which is solidly a 3/5 unmodded but approaches 5/5 territory with the right mods.
Hahaha, same here--with the regretting selling, I mean, not with the saving to buy it on my own.
I've considered picking up a new one--probably a toploader, an upgrade from what I had--but I'm not sure it would be the same. The worst part is the controllers, since I just know any I'd get now wouldn't quite feel right, and my Zapper was a known-good one, while any I'd buy used would be likely to have calibration issues.
I even forgot to copy my best High Speed score that I wrote on the top of the machine, from that time I managed to run through the machine's "story" twice in one game, and well through a third one before I lost my last ball. Damnit. Gone forever.
I hate to think what a complete copy of Crystalis, including the box and its big, nice manual in good condition would run, and I wouldn't even bother to buy that game without the manual.
About 100, actually. See my post upthread--I just finished digging through my NES rom library to weed out the crap, and couldn't get it under 130. Even if you had damn high standards (and I didn't tolerate the mediocre, mind you, nor games that are better on another platform) there's no way you're getting that number under 50, and even that would be tough.
There are around 1000 NES games playable in English, counting fan-translation ROM patches. Maybe 1100.
I just finished sorting through mine to weed out the ones that suck or that I'm otherwise not interested in (by which I mean I favorited the good ones and set my emulator manager to only show favorites--the things are so small that there's no sense in deleting any).
Even being pretty aggressive in removing games--cutting the ones that were and are good on the system, but which exist in a better form on another platform (mostly arcade ports like TMNT:Arcade, for example) and damn near all the sports games, many of which were fine then but aren't something I'm going to play now (all of the football games got cut--Sega systems all the way for that--but a few other gems like Ice Hockey are so damn good that I couldn't cut 'em) I still only got it down to a bit over 130. Cut out some that few others like but that I left on because they're personal favorites from my days playing on an actual NES (like High Speed and To the Earth) and you're looking at a bare minimum of 100 English-language games that are best on (or exclusive to) the NES and are still fun to play.
10% after 25 years in the US isn't so bad, IMO. Probably twice that many would have been considered top-notch back in 1993 or so when there weren't a lot of options on newer systems to displace NES games, and things like MAME didn't exist. I was surprised there were that many that were still good, personally; I'd never dug through the whole library like that before, and had assumed nostalgia was making the system better in my mind than it had been. It's no SNES, Playstation, or PS2 in the games-library department, but there are tons of good titles there.
I'm a long time OpenOffice user. I've opened maybe two or three hundred MS Office docs in OO.org.
From what I've seen, perfect reproduction of the document is the exception rather than the norm. It's rarely so bad that the doc is unusable, but it can throw off layouts in ugly ways.
Of course, the problem is people sending documents in editing rather than reading formats, but try telling that to... well, anyone, just just about everyone sends that crap rather than a PDF or similar.
Everyone knows it's just indestructible bedrock and the void beyond, if you go far enough.
No, the real solution is to sneak in, destroy all their torches, and knock a couple holes in their walls somewhere they won't notice, so they get overrun with creepers. Bonus if we can find a way to cut off their supply of flint so they don't have enough arrows to defend themselves.
All the JRPGs on real consoles this generation have been mediocre at best. The only good ones have been on handhelds, which seem to be where the action is for most genres this generation, for some reason.
Unless things pick up, this will be remembered as the worst generation of consoles in--well, since before the NES at least. Not one has a great library yet, especially if you only consider games that are exclusive to or superior on a given system. The last three generations had a clear winner in the "best library" category in the SNES, Playstation, and PS2, with other systems excelling in some niche (Genesis--sports games; N64--multiplayer; Gamecube--multiplayer again; X-box--Halo).
None of this generation's consoles stand out yet, IMO. A couple are good as media players, but as gaming consoles they're all falling pretty flat, and if you're in to JRPGs you're probably playing your DS and PSP more than any of the actual consoles.
Not why I didn't like it. They're all pretty damn linear even compared to other JRPGs, let alone Western games, and they almost always change a bunch of stuff in each new one.
I didn't like it because:
-- The main character, in the sense of the one we're experiencing the story through, was awful. Like, worse-than-Tidus awful.
-- WORTHLESS summons. Lots of work to get them, only to find out that they aren't ever worth bringing out.
-- A boss fights were based 99% on how lucky you were with your super-attacks chains (I don't remember what they were called), with small interludes of "Basch, attack, two others do nothing but heal him" every now and then.
-- Every character, including the worthless main one, had enormous potential, but the writers failed on the follow-through. How do you make Balthier/Fran boring? Somehow they managed.
-- Too-long dungeons with no payoff at the end. Oh, we got five lines of wooden acting, zero character development, and news that something interesting happened--a couple hundred miles away. Hooray. On to the next three-to-four-hour dungeon.
-- The only character that I (barely) gave a shit about by the mid-game disappeared a bit later, never to return to my party.
-- *wooden* "you're being tempted by power", *even more wooden* "oh hey, so I am"; where the hell did that come from? Show don't tell, you incompetent writers!
My wife and I quit playing a couple hours from the end when we discovered that the game was almost over and we were still waiting for *any* story-related payoff for playing. Just watched the end on Youtube, since there wasn't time left for anything else to happen.
On the plus side, the opening video was badass. Had me excited as hell to play it, until about 15 hours in when I realized I'd been tricked.
I disagree. Yuna is important because she drives many of Tidus' choices, but she's not the main character.
We're with Tidus (more or less) the whole game. Most of the backstory that's focused on any character is focused on Tidus (by way of his dad--the memory sphere things, or whatever they're called, and frequent flashbacks) and Tidus' dad is the end boss. He's the one who grows the most, largely through his interaction with Yuna.
If you're fighting a character's dad at the end of a game, odds are that's the main character.
There's nothing wrong with that scene in X.
The initial laughing's supposed to be bad. They're forcing over-the-top laughter. At the end they laugh for real about how stupid they sounded and it sounds like actual laughter, as it should.
Pretty farking sad scene, actually.
If someone still has "care and control" and has a drivers' permit, I'd say the experiments weren't illegal then, right?
I'm not saying I do it, I'm saying those are the two choices in many places: find a DD or drive drunk. Frankly, from what I've seen, far more choose the latter, and no, I don't think that's a good thing.
The worst part of DDing IMO isn't the not-drinking, it's getting everyone to where they need to go, which may be many miles apart and take a damn long time. And I don't need to drink to have a good time, I just prefer not to have to decide whether I'll drink or not before the night's even started--being the DD then finding out the bar you're at has La Fin du Monde on tap and tonight's dollar-off-imports night would hurt. Like, physically.
I guess I'm probably coming off like a party animal or an alcoholic in this thread, but I'm actually saying that I don't hit the bars often--hell, I don't even drink that much, probably average fewer than 0.5 servings a day over a year, and most of that only 1-2 servings at a time--but that I would go out a bit more if transportation were no concern.