Brasil

Oh my, what a troubled love-hate relationship I have with From Software. I love Demon's and Dark Souls but hate how those games make me feel (ineffective and inferior). I haven't jumped into current gen quote yet so there's a lot of gaming I'm missing out on but I'll get there eventually...probably. Maybe. Though I can't keep track of which Souls/From games is on which system and/or generation. I want to say...DSII was PS360? And Bloodborne/DSIII is PS4? Like I said, I've been completely out of most of the console space. Then again, going PC gaming probably led to that a bit. Then again, *snuggles the 3DS and WiiU* I definitely played more Demon's than Dark. Beat a few bosses in Demon's then life happened. Didn't get too far in DSI. At all. I vaguely recall trying to mace the skeletons near the start of the game, failing miserably at that, turning around, going the opposite way, getting further, then getting gored through by a gnarly giant, then...kinda stopped. I need to get back into that, though. Those skeletons just meet their end! Right after I re-finish my basement. Heh

All right, guys and gals. Time for a thread about the WiiU's true killer app: Super Mario Maker. Sure, there have been romhack homebrew programs for this kind of thing for a while now, but this has that Nintendo Polish. If you haven't "played" this game yet, you need to rectify that immediately, because it is wonderful. It almost seamlessly blends together "new" and "old" Mario styles, characters, enemies, items, etc, and bundles it all up in a superb little package with tremendous production values, a sublime presentation (and one of the best justifications for the Gamepad+Stylus), and the whole game just oozes old-school Nintendo charm. In many ways, Super Mario Maker is quintessentially, classically Nintendo: game is easy to learn, but difficult to master. There are so many little nuances and tricks that you're going to constantly be finding new things to try in your levels and it never feels tired or stale. There's always something new to discover thanks to the game's brilliant use of the stylus. At a fundamental level, you pick objects and place them with the stylus. That's the core of most of the level-building. However, if you were to, say, grab the green Koopa Troopa and give it a shake with the stylus, that Koopa will transform into the red version, which behaves completely differently (green will walk off ledges; red will stop and turn around), which profoundly changes what you're able to do in your level; let's say you have a tall, thin mushroom platform and want to make the player's jump a bit more challenging. Just shake the green Koopa and place the red one on that mushroom. Now the player has to be very careful about getting there. Nearly every object in the game can be modified this way. Piranha plants become fire piranhas. Chain chomps become...unchain chomps. If you wonder "what would happen if..." then this is the game for you. Shake the stylus to modify enemies. Shake it again to remove power-ups from them. Yes, as you can probably tell in the banner up top, you can definitely give enemies super mushrooms. ;-) And a ton of other crazy tricks: Yes, Virginia, **** like that can happen in Super Mario Maker. I could go on and on about how marvelous this game is, but really, playing is believing. We're going to use this thread as a discussion about the game, sure, but we're also going to use it to share our level codes with each other. Charles and I are both super interested in what OB has and will come up with for these levels. Have at it, OB!

Ayup...

*cough*

[size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Finally got around to seeing TDKR. Overall, I found it to be pretty mediocre. My thoughts below are kind of jumbled, and some parts aren't written very well, so bear with me.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif][b]Miranda Tate[/b]. The Talia bit is only formally revealed in the last 10 minutes of the movie. And the entire characterization is crap, basically. There's nothing of the off-on strained romance that Bruce and Talia share in pretty much the entire LoS continuity. Nothing. At all.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]As "Miranda," she gets close to Bruce, gains his trust, etc, which fits pretty well as Talia, but a huge part of the Bruce/Talia relationship entirely exists BECAUSE Bruce knows she's Ra's' daughter, and BECAUSE Talia knows about Bruce's history with the LoS.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]By saving the Talia reveal for the end, it removes a lot of that character depth, and at that point, all it does is little more than turn Talia into a completely normal comic book villain who wants to destroy Gotham out of revenge.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And Talia dies like a completely normal comic book villain. And has a mini-speech like a completely normal comic book villain as she dies.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]I've always trusted Nolan's instincts, but here they completely missed the target. Talia [i]isn't[/i] a normal comic book villain, and she never was. In a lot of ways, she was actually one of Bruce/Bats' strongest allies, even though she was technically also one of his strongest enemies.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif][b]Bane[/b]. The whole thing reminds me of Darth Vader BEFORE James Earl Jones or ED-209. Where David Prowse's sing-songy Irish accent or whatever always sounded completely off, even if his body language was perfect.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]But Vader worked, because Prowse nailed the feel of Vader's movement, and JEJ had the growl to match it. Prowse's movement and JEJ's growl synced up perfectly, and even though Vader's face was covered...you just knew he was pissed.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Bane's mask looks like ED-209 but there's no ED-209 growl. There's no real visual cue to know when Bane's actually talking. I was able to understand him 95% of the time, but there never was a clear sync like there was with Darth.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]They should have gone post-production and mechanized parts of Bane's voice.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Hell, the mask should have been more than just a painkiller agent. It should have also helped him speak. His throat/mouth/vocal cords should have been so damaged by whatever it was that happened (seriously, it's NEVER even explained sufficiently, and that pissed me off), that mask should have been his voicebox, basically. And it desperately, desperately needed some sort of light--something, anything--to indicate when Bane was talking.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]I mean, [i]****[/i]; if a cheapo '80s TV show like Knight Rider could have a couple of crappy lightbulbs to signify when KITT was talking...why couldn't Bane's mask?[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And that's me being superficial and nitpicky, because Bane's goals throughout the film...are BACKWARDS. Seriously. He and Talia needed to swap objectives, basically. Or at least split them out better.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Bane should have completely focused on just two things:[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]1) Breaking Batman[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]2) Breaking Gotham[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]That's it. Talia's goals should have been:[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]1) Breaking Bruce emotionally[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]2) Breaking Bruce financially[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Instead, Bane leads a ridiculous assault on a trading floor, takes the city hostage, all so Talia can detonate a nuclear bomb in the city cause she wants revenge for the death of a man she never forgave...UNTIL BATMAN KILLED HIM ZOMG. I can kind of find logic in Bane leading the financial assault a bit since it ties into what Talia was doing, but it was so awkwardly handled that I just...no. Plus, if there's a war declared on a trading floor, they should have immediately locked down the trades and prevented any trades from going through at all. It shouldn't have mattered whether Bruce's prints were verified.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]On top of that, Bane's voice suffers from the same problem Bats' voice did in TDK: during shorter dialogue, it's fine. For speeches longer than a paragraph, it sounds silly. And most of Bane's longer speeches came from the financial assault sub-plot, or football field speech. Basically, whenever he's talking into a microphone, to a crowd, it gets real stupid, real fast. When he's one-on-one with Batman, or Talia, or random execs, it's PERFECT, because the situation allows him to be short and sweet.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And ditch the nuke completely. Just...ditch it completely.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]I mean, don't get me wrong. There's definitely a lot to like in TDKR. There's a lot of really solid dialogue, some decent back-and-forth between Fox and Bruce, and the first fight between Bats and Bane (the backbreak) is absolutely stunning. JGL was fantastic, and Anne Hathaway was inspired as Selina.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Though I'm kinda salty that Selina and Bruce end up together at some random cafe or something. Their relationship always seemed pretty similar to Bruce/Talia...and a lot like pretty much all of Bruce's relationships: very off-on again, very strained. Catwoman never struck me as the kind of woman willing to settle down at all. She was always pretty fiercely independent. Hathaway definitely hit a lot of those independent notes, and I think it's why I enjoyed Pfeiffer's Catwoman so much (minus the crazy and leather, obviously)...both of their portrayals really hit at a core of the character.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And I think where TDKR missed it is where Batman Returns actually got it right: Bruce and Selina wouldn't wind up together.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]I guess it's like...if Bruce is damaged goods as much as he is--and really, you'd have to be severely damaged to dress up like a bat and cruise the city at night, beating criminals to a pulp with your bare hands...getting some trim is not going to fix your deep-seated emotional issues.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif][u]I'd even argue it a step further, and say that the focus on Rachel in BB/TDK was always misplaced, as well: Bruce doesn't need to find acceptance/peace in other people...he needs to find it within himself. That's the irony in this trilogy. Bruce won't find meaning for his life in other people, yet he's continually chasing just that. Rachel, Harvey, Talia, Selina...he's constantly trying to find an [b]external[/b] validation of [i]internal[/i] torment and anguish.[/u][/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Can Bruce find peace? Yes. By himself. By retiring as Batman.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]The rest of the movie is so uneven that it's difficult to really embrace it. Particularly with regards to superhero philosophy in the Nolan trilogy.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]The way I see it, out of all of Bats' Rogues Gallery, there are maybe six characters, total, that [b]directly[/b] relate to the very core of Nolan's exploration of Batman:[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]1) Ra's al Ghul[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]2) Joker[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]3) Riddler[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]4) Bane[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]5) Scarecrow[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]6) Talia al Ghul[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And really, I'd venture that those characters are the only six that directly relate to Batman's core character in the comics/graphic novels, too. The rest of the Rogues Gallery is basically C-listers that get called up into the majors so the A-listers can take a break.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]But yeah.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]In BB, it was all about Fear. All about Bruce overcoming his, using it against his enemies--one of my favorite exchanges in all of cinema is:[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Alfred: "But why bats, sir?"[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Bruce: "Bats frighten me, Alfred...it's about time my enemies shared my dread."[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]It's [i]perfect[/i].[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]In BB, Bruce created a persona, created a symbol, and ruled Fear. He took bits from both Ra's and Scarecrow and dominated. Hell, when Crane gets gassed with his fear toxin and sees Batman as some oily Middle Ages bat-demon? PERFECT. And when Batman's flying overhead, after the Narrows get gassed, people look up at him and just see a large black monster with burning red eyes? BRILLIANT. Fear, man. BB nailed it.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]In TDK, it was all about Batman's limits. What he would and wouldn't do. How far he could and couldn't go. Both emotionally and physically. Well, mostly morally, at least. Joker kept trying to get him to break his One Rule. But even when Bats was being pushed to his limits, we still saw the physical toll. Bruises, scars, brutal injuries...and when Alfred mentioned them, what'd Bruce say?[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]"Batman has no limits."[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]"But you do, sir."[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Batman may have been emotionally broken in TDK, but he wasn't broken, physically.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Bane does break him physically in TDKR, but that whole story arc--Knightfall, I mean--where Bane focuses on Batman for the challenge...took a complete backseat to the whole financial/football field/No Man's Land plot mess. What was arguably Bane's biggest, most important philosophical hook...ended up playing second-fiddle to generic comic book movie fodder.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And you know, the more I think about it, the stronger the film would have been--and the far more relevant it would have been--if Bane had REALLY focused on breaking Batman/Gotham, and Talia had REALLY focused on breaking Bruce emotionally/financially. Remove the entire nuke plot and make the entire conflict [i]intensely[/i] personal.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Because through Bane breaking Bats/Gotham, it continues the relationship between Batman's health and Gotham's. With Batman, Gotham is a better place. Without him, it's either a cracking mask like the 8-year peace in TDKR, OR it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy like we saw in BB/TDK.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Bane focusing on Bats/Gotham emphasizes something very important:[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]There's gotta be a Batman.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And if Talia focused on breaking Bruce, it ties into the relationship between Batman and Wayne, in that Batman lives on even after Bruce. That you can do anything to Wayne. You can ruin him emotionally. You can stab him in the back. You can destroy his finances. But you cannot destroy the one thing you cannot touch: The Batman.[/font][/size] [indent=1][i]Bruce Wayne: You're vigilantes. [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Henri Ducard: No, no, no. A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Bruce Wayne: Which is?[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Henri Ducard: A legend, Mr. Wayne.[/font][/size][/i][/indent] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Talia focusing on Bruce Wayne emphasizes something very important:[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]There's gotta be a Batman.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]And Blake assuming the Bat-Mantle at the end...[i]would prove that Bane and Talia LOST[/i]. Blake assuming the Bat-Mantle proves that Joker LOST. That Scarecrow LOST. That Ra's...well that's the poetry of that, isn't it? Ra's LOST because his philosophy and advice WON.[/font][/size] [size=3][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]But sadly, instead of really developing and exploring that, they decided to just blow up the city. :-/[/font][/size]

[size=2][font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif][quote name='James' timestamp='1334199370' post='711436']I agree that the somewhat nihilistic concept that over-arches the Mass Effect story is a good idea and worthwhile to explore - for example, the idea that for once, human beings are not necessarily going to "save the day" and that perhaps saving the day doesn't even matter in the grand scheme of things. I do think that's genuinely worth exploring. But Mass Effect does it badly, and dare I say it... superficially. This has nothing to do with the ending, but with the entire plot that runs throughout the trilogy. And I think a lot of this problem is bound up with the incredibly lame explanation for the cyclical nature of the Reaper invasions. The idea of a cyclical mass extinction is definitely interesting in principle, and it has enormous potential to be philosophically powerful and poignant. But in the end, it feels like the Reapers and their ridiculously flawed motivations act to cheapen and "dumb down" what could be a very beautiful and unique idea (at least, unique in the video game world).[/quote][/font][/size] [size=2][font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif]Ayup. The finale of ME1 had me giggly with excitement over where the series was going to go. It was mildly upbeat, but undercut with this desperation that just depressed the hell out of you. The galactic fleet destroyed a Reaper, but there wasn't going to be a happy ending to the trilogy. It was ballsy to even hint at something like that. Then...I have a feeling they really weren't expecting ME1 to do as well as it did. BioWare may have had a general idea of where to take the ME world and all, but ME2 was such a disappointment, story-wise, that it completely derailed any decent theming in the first game. Would humanity gain a nice galactic politics foothold after contributing and sacrificing so much during the Citadel battle? Sure. Would they gain so much notoriety that the Reapers would want to make a Reaper out of them? And a Terminator-Reaper, at that? Uh, no. Not a chance in hell. Humans went from nothing to everything. They went from being labeled little more than primitive screwheads to suddenly being a bastion of hope across the galaxy...all within 25 hours.[/font][/size] [size=2][font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif]The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that BioWare doomed themselves during the encounter with Sovereign on Virmire. When they hyped up the Reaper's motivations as beyond comprehension...there was no way they were ever going to come up with anything to have that make sense.[/font][/size] [size=2][font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif]Hell, Sovereign really should have just said "You are food. We're going to eat you," and at least that would have fit within the cosmic Fatalism: the Reapers place all of this technology so species can advance, only to harvest them and gorge once every 50,000 years or so. Is it nuanced? No. Is it well-written? No. But at least it's consistent. Plus it'd be hilarious: we're literally at the bottom of the galactic foodchain. :-D[/font][/size] [size=2][font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif][quote]Maybe I am expecting too much of video game writing, but even acknowledging that is kind of sad. Films have been able to tackle these subjects beautifully and with nuance for years, so why not games?[/quote][/font][/size] [font=verdana, geneva, sans-serif][size=2]Easy answer.[/size][/font] [font=verdana, geneva, sans-serif][size=2]Game vs film:[/size][/font] [font=verdana, geneva, sans-serif][size=2][img]http://www.geekosystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/NathanFillionNathanDrake.jpg[/img][/size][/font] [font=verdana, geneva, sans-serif][size=2][img]http://playstationlifestyle.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/hideo-kojima.jpg[/img][img]http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y65/radioman970/1979_alien_007.jpg[/img][/size][/font] [img]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_FvHWF1Ev6ag/TUxELwYRz8I/AAAAAAAAB0Q/ivWExDIXJlE/s1600/master+chief.jpg[/img][img]http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1704/ff_terminator4_f.jpg[/img] [img]http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwvybdwI6K1r7qui1o1_500.jpg[/img] Yeah, I think it's reasonable to expect less from games. :-)

Haven't played ME3 yet, but...cannot resist a discussion about science fiction...sf indoctrination too strong...why is the Reply window default size so tiny (fixed it, but damn, son hah)... [quote name='Shinmaru' timestamp='1333121544' post='711133'] All right, so I finished [b]Mass Effect 3[/b] yesterday. I'm down with the spirit of the ending, if not so much the execution. [spoiler]I thought the **** with the little kid was terrible throughout the game, and seeing the kid representing the Catalyst is a facepalm moment. I agree with others who have suggested that the squadmate who dies on Virmire would have been a much better choice for that stuff. I don't really like Kaidan or Ashley at all, but they would at least represent a more personal connection for Shepard. And wouldn't that person's death haunt Shepard much more than some kid? The BioWare writers do such a great job of hitting emotion hard throughout the game that the kid stuff sticks out as being not so great.[/spoiler][/quote] [spoiler]I'm not entirely sure that Kaiden or Ashley acting as the Catalyst's avatar would work any better, though. The Virmire death in ME1 packed a punch, yeah, but neither game really focused on that decision. At best, ME2 devoted maybe three lines to it (basically when Jacob and Miranda talk with you about it, no more than 15 minutes into the game), and none of Shepard's responses sounded very haunted. BioWare didn't spend any time, really, punching up that emotional impact. Should Shepard have been affected? Yeah, definitely. Was he? Not from what I could tell in ME2.[/spoiler] [quote name='James' timestamp='1333332919' post='711216'] [font=palatino linotype]I finished Mass Effect 3 on the weekend. I was very eager to finish it, mostly because I really wanted to see what all the fuss is about in terms of the ending. I have to marshal my thoughts a bit here. Actually, I really need to finish the game another time, I think. At the moment I am not sure I can really do it justice, except to put forward a few initial thoughts: [spoilerblock]I think I largely agree with Shin in terms of the ending's true problems. My biggest disappointment, I think, was a general lack of closure (I hate that word) in terms of my squadmates. I don't particularly fault BioWare for this though, because you [i]do[/i] get the chance to have final words with most of the other characters prior to the ending anyway. And, depending on the ending you choose, finding out about your squadmates may be a somewhat redundant exercise. I'm finding that what I dislike about the ending is actually fairly different than a lot of people who have complained. It seems to me that many of the complaints relate to the idea that the player's choices essentially don't matter in regard to the ending, or that the ending is boiled down to a very simple game of "choose the door". Maybe my expectations were different, but as Shin said, this is very much in keeping with the rest of the series. In my view, the player's choices in Mass Effect only ever influenced the [i]journey[/i] - not the [i]destination[/i]. The fact that we had three choices for the ending (and multiple variations within those endings depending on the player's score) seems pretty reasonable to me. I can't really complain about lack of choice in that sense. My biggest complaint is probably just that Mass Effect's ending is only slightly more poetic and interesting than the overall story which led up to it. I've always felt that Mass Effect had great characters and a great universe, but with the caveat of a highly derivative plot. I mean, Saren is being controlled by the Reapers. The Collectors are being controlled by the Reapers. The Illusive Man is being controlled by the Reapers. The Reapers are being controlled by... well, [i]someone[/i]. If not the Catalyst, then a least the mysterious "we" to which the Catalyst himself belongs. This aspect of the plot (the Catalyst's "we" controlling the Reapers) appears to me to be over-reaching just a little. In this sense, the ending was really no surprise to me. I already knew long ago that the Reapers were basically attempting to maintain order by continually eradicating advanced biological life. Unfortunately, their motivation is somewhat...stupid. I was hoping for something a little more clever to be revealed, but it wasn't. I mean, the Reapers apparently conduct this "cleansing" every 50,000 years because they are trying to avert a situation where there is a conflict between synthetic and organic life (i.e. the reference to masters always being challenged). So, unless I'm missing something here... they commit mass genocide to avoid mass genocide. What? Mass Effect continually hinted at there being something grander - something "unimaginable" or unfathomable - about the Reapers and their longterm intentions. But I suspect that "unimaginable" is a placeholder for "nothing" or at least "nothing we can explain because we needed villains and we can't think of a clever twist or motivation for them". It was this aspect that disappointed me. All the way along, I strongly suspected that we'd either be hit by a totally predictable ending [i]or[/i] an attempt would be made to produce a clumsy sleight of hand. I think, in some respects, we got both - the ultimate motivation for the Reapers was nothing greater than had already been explained from the very beginning of the franchise. The only difference was that we discover that the Reapers are being controlled by the Catalyst (and/or his "kind") - but this is totally and utterly irrelevant, because the Catalyst adds absolutely nothing to the plot. Having said all of that, the end result is that I can't be too disappointed with the ending. Given the paper-thin plot, I think the multiple endings actually do more justice to said plot than it actually deserves, haha. I really have no issue with the way choices were handled in terms of the ending, as I said earlier. Maybe I would want to see a bit of tweaking in terms of a bit more exposition about what is happening, and it would have been good to know a lot more about the Catalyst - but there was simply no time for this, as a critical piece of the puzzle (which was ironically both critical and utterly redundant) appeared right before the credits rolled.[/spoilerblock] Overall, I can't say I have many complaints about the ending itself. My biggest issues with Mass Effect are, on the whole, related to the overall plot. I found that I enjoyed Mass Effect [i]despite[/i] the story and not because of it, to some extent. Or, to put it another way... the "main" plot about the Reapers was pretty boring. The Reapers themselves were awesome, but the actual story was sort of lame. I was far more interested in the Genophage, the Krogan Wars, the Quarians vs Geth, etc... I'm just really hoping that we see more Mass Effect games in the future. Apparently we will, and I'm actually very keen to see what BioWare will do with that and how they will structure those new games.[/font] [/quote] Pretty much. The worst part of ME1 was the confrontation with Sovereign on Virmire. All of this "our goals and reasons are so far beyond your comprehension blah blah blah" was amateurish and embarrassing. The big reveal in the game was a space squid who just wanted to taunt you on the cosmic scale. That's just prime. The Reapers, by themselves, were dramatically uninteresting. What [i]was[/i] interesting, however, was the effect they had on others: Saren, the Collectors (rather, [spoiler]Protheans[/spoiler]), Martin Sheen, etc. I greatly appreciated the irony of a "human-focused" organization like Cerberus being led by someone who is clearly augmented with Reaper technology. Indoctrination is such a strong narrative tool in the series and I wish there would have been more an examination of it. Now, as for the general series, I read an analysis a few weeks back that I found particularly fun: [url="http://www.popbioethics.com/2012/02/why-mass-effect-is-the-most-important-science-fiction-universe-of-our-generation/"]http://www.popbioethics.com/2012/02/why-mass-effect-is-the-most-important-science-fiction-universe-of-our-generation/[/url] The general premise is that the Mass Effect series is, at its core, a treatise on the futility of any race trying to achieve anything in the galaxy or universe. And I gotta say...I like that slant. I like how the interpretation trivializes everything in the trilogy, because that trivialization makes sense: You're a human, a race that has just barely climbed out of your primitive planet's primordial ooze, trying to fit into a galactic civilization that sees you as little more than an annoyance. Those hyper-advanced alien species, however, are less than a galactic ****-stain compared to the grand-daddy civilization of 50,000 years ago. The Protheans, despite their magnificence, were completely wiped out by a race of sentient alien lifeforms that are as old as time itself, whose origins are just as much as a mystery as their literal existence. And the Reapers, well...everything in the series has been extremely grim and Fatalistic, and the first two endings were still pretty grim. Sure, you destroyed a single Reaper, but there are others. Sure, you destroyed a half-Reaper but it was only partially finished. Those victories were the exceptions, not the rule. The rule is still that there is a race of alien-things out there that [b]will[/b] destroy all life in the galaxy, and there's nothing you can do about it on your own. So an ending that's basically a total downer...I dig it.

[quote name='Desbreko' timestamp='1322892278' post='710452'] [color=#4B0082]I think you'll like SS's combat, then, as that's pretty much what it's like. The enemies haven't been especially kill-you-in-the-face yet (I'm still between the third and fourth dungeons since I haven't played in a few days), but hearts are much less common, so even losing a heart here and there from stray hits really matters... Unless you're carrying the Heart Medal, which makes hearts drop plenty frequently like they did in OoT, but that's an optional item.[/color][/quote] Ooh that does sound nice. The enemies aren't morons, right? The braindead husks of recent Zelda games were...less than agreeable. And just how much customization have you experienced so far? Do you need to equip the Heart Medal, or just keep it in your inventory? If you need to equip it, do you have a set number of equip slots? How's the in-game economy? That's always been one of the things Zelda games desperately needed, I think. TP never gave you a use for the infinite numbers of Rupees you'd collect, WW suffered from similar issues. The wallet was always full and you never had anything to buy. That reminds me. Are they still just giving you all of the equipment you'll need, or are there actual rewards for exploration and experimentation? Like in LoZ or LttP? [quote][color=#4B0082]But yeah, that intro... If you know what to do and don't care about talking to the townspeople, you can probably get through it in about half an hour, so you might want to just look up how it goes and save yourself some raging.[/color] [/quote] :-( Game intros used to be an optional 2-second text scroll that you could bypass by just hitting Start and getting dropped right into the first level.

[quote name='James' timestamp='1322778461' post='710446'] [font=palatino linotype]I largely agree with this. The more I think about it, the more I think that [i]perfect[/i] 1:1 control is probably unnecessary. The bigger issue I have with [i]Skyward Sword[/i] is really just the need to continually re-center the controller. And as I said before, you wouldn't need "pointer-based aiming" - just "pointer-based re-centering". I'm wondering whether or not Nintendo will do something about this in the future. But to get back to the point, I think that to some extent it's better for Zelda to [i]closely approximate[/i] your gestures in some cases. One thing I was a bit worried about was that I might need to make huge arm movements to directly prompt what Link does in-game - I don't want to have to do that. It would be tiring and unnecessary, and would make long play sessions tedious. So in that sense, the game has to be able to accommodate the fact that a) different players will have different gesture sizes and b) that not everybody wants to stand there and flail for hours on end. The only [i]slight[/i] problem I've encountered with sword control - and it's a minor complaint - is that when you have to move fast, the response time is a little too noticeable sometimes. But generally this is not an issue, and when it arises, it's not really an impediment to gameplay.[/font][/quote] Still hoping for an analog stick on the next Wiimote! :-) Although the WiiU controller is supposed to have dual analog in some capacity, so I may still luck out...I hope. Speaking about SS, though, I wouldn't expect the need to make huge arm movements, either way. The size of the Wiimote versus the size of the in-game sword is in the player's favor, I think. The amount of space required to move the sword in Wii Sports Resort, for example, was relative. I never had to make large, sweeping strikes (although doing so was way more fun) in order to effectively target the opponent. All I had to do was move the Wiimote an appropriate distance relative to the on-screen space. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever had to move my arm outside my strike zone in a major capacity. Good, controlled wrist action (ahem) was all you needed there. Outside of having to hold the nunchuk, I don't see why it couldn't be terribly different for Zelda. Plus the Wii really has been begging for a wireless first-party nunchuk for years. lol When I do play SS, I'm hoping for a more tempered combat system anyway. Loved the faster-paced, hyper-responsive arcade-style killing in WW, but I'd like to see something more methodical. Give me a few slower enemies and make'em murderously deadly instead of a bunch of cannon fodder whose corpses will explode into Rupees. Would help with the difficulty, too. [quote][font=palatino linotype]I need to try this. I got MM on Virtual Console and, yeah... it's okay. Unfortunately I'm playing it on a TV that [i]clearly[/i] isn't its natural habitat, haha.[/font][/quote] It's surprisingly glorious. I've run Mario 64, OoT, MM, Blast Corps, Turok, GE, PD...and it's incredible how much better they all are. The visuals scale up ridiculously well. Like, scarily well. There's something about those games that works really nicely at 720p. The guys with monster rigs I've seen around usually have N64 games looking better than TP, run at the same resolution and graphical flourishes, too. It really is insane what that simpler art style can do. Plus, those games run ridiculously smoothly. I've never seen Turok, GE, and PD run like that. There's no frame-dropping at all. Everything is crystal-clear. The explosions in Turok look fantastic, too! And the sound, oh holy crap. Yeah, it still sounds like N64 games--and rightly so--but that's even a dramatic improvement. The bass really comes through with Turok and GE, in particular. I gotta say...a gaming PC breathes new life into A LOT of different titles. Not looking forward to replacing my processor in two years, though. My socket type probably won't be supported anymore. :-( [quote][font=palatino linotype]It sounds like you haven't played it, heh. You [i]have[/i] to play it. The opening of the game [i]is[/i] frustrating. And you've seen my criticisms of the re-centering. But despite these two annoyances, the game is really unfolding brilliantly. The first boss alone is a revelation - and I mean, a revelation for gaming in general. The experience is quite special and it'll definitely make you smile. There are quite a few moments like this in [i]Skyward Sword[/i]. It's one game you definitely can't miss, despite the flaws.[/font][/quote] Haven't yet, but will...some time. Remember, I could barely get through TP's opening without wanting to kick a kitten into an electric fan. And I loathe trying to play SMG1 on account of its horribly-paced opening. If I can't get into the action quickly...I get cranky, and fast. Especially moreso these days.

[quote name='James' timestamp='1322545031' post='710396'](Where's Alex when you need him - he might not believe that I actually have a critical word to say about Nintendo, haha).[/quote] rofl, I say. :-) My relationship with Motion+ was...peculiar. Loved a lot of its implementation in Wii Sports Resort. Then never bought another game for it. To this day the two Motion+ attachments are sitting behind my computer monitor, where they've resided for probably a year now. Wii Sports Resort is tucked on the shelf next to me, nestled between Lego Indy and Umbrella Chronicles. My gaming has been so odd over the past couple of years. I've got months worth of Wii gaming to enjoy on a single shelf...Metroid Prime Trilogy, Super Paper Mario, SMG2...and a few others somewhere around here. It's sad that I rarely play the Wii if I'm not playing RE4, REmake, NSMB Wii or...Virtual Console stuff? And even then, I purchase VC just so I can be "street-legal" when I'm running N64 games through an emulator on my PC. Though, there IS something incredibly awesome and oh-so-wrong about playing MM, naturally rendered at 720p, with a 360 controller mapped out to mimic GCN. haha Very peculiar times, these have been. Plunging into IT probably doesn't help matters, either. You end up scouring NewEgg, seeing good deals on parts, and within a month or two, you've built yourself a decent gaming rig. Then the Steam sales come. And then you don't play consoles at all. Yet every so often there are games that pull you back to the PS3, 360 or Wii. Recently, Arkham City and GoldenEye Reloaded were the 360 pullers. GE:R is actually fantastic, too. I played through it on Wii and very much enjoyed it, but split-screen multi was complete ass (is that going to be censored?) and graphically, it was horrid. Even running it through Dolphin didn't do much better. Slowdown. Graphical hiccups and bugs. Wired 360 controller can only do so much, I guess. :-/ Initially, Skyward Sword was looking to be the Wii puller game for me. Love the art style. Love the idea of it using Motion+. Love the concept of changing up the overworld/dungeon relationship. But now I'm kind of glad I held off on it. Sounds like the opening would drive me absolutely mad. And...sounds like the controls are...strange? I have a feeling that overall, I'm kind of done with most Nintendo stuff for this generation. Eh, no. I'm done with most motion controls this generation. Kinect is decent and MS is doing some neat things with it, but it's more a UI device than anything. I've been hearing extremely lukewarm things about Move. And Motion+ was really just an interesting experiment for me, gaming-wise, I suppose. I guess the biggest challenge with SS is the same kind of challenge every company's been trying to figure out: how to reconcile motion controls with "standard" gameplay. Doesn't seem like they're hitting that happy medium between intuition and performance: Kinect breaks your Avatar's arm. Move has drift. Motion+ needs to re-calibrate after IR. I had high hopes that SS might pull it off. Guess 1:1 won't happen for a while, huh? Maybe it's just as well. I'm trying to play through Deus Ex HR, DC Universe Online (you should play it, seriously), plus all the stuff I got for free on Black Friday. Amazon Rewards Points love me.

[quote name='James' timestamp='1317338354' post='709672'][font=palatino linotype]So, here's a new Skyward Sword trailer from Nintendo. What do you guys think? The more I see this game the more I'm loving the art style. This trailer really makes the game worlds look so imaginative and colourful - I think this looks a whole lot more interesting than Twilight Princess, at least in terms of the overall feel of the world. Some of the art design is really very impressive, including the character animation. And I'm glad to see a broader variety of environments than were shown previously, too. [/font] [/quote] 0:27 and 0:41 got me hard. 27s mark has me excited because if the combat works, I'm going to LOVE knocking enemies off of the plank. Wait, we already did pirating in WW. 41s is well...that view reminds me of: [IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v151/madsatirist/legend_of_zelda_conceptart_TcDH9.jpg[/IMG]

This thread still sort of around? What I find most peculiar is that you're hitting visual slowdown in a Source engine game, on a 2.8GHz processor. Unless you, like Des said, are on a single core CPU...you shouldn't have any issues at all on your processor side. I mean, the Source engine scales [b]absurdly[/b] well. It's actually pretty ridiculous. I was able to actually play HL2 waaaay back on my old PC, the one running with a mid-range AMD CPU and a Radeon 9200. Was it pretty? Nope. Was it flashy? Hell no. Did it play well, at least, at 1024x768? Oh you betcha. Now, granted, L4D2 has [b]a lot[/b] going on that may push your system harder than most other Source games, but at its core, it's still Source, and still L4D. Slowdown and lag sound more like a video card issue than anything processor-related, because unless you, again like Des said, have a bunch of other crap running while you play...a 2.8GHz processor is perfectly adequate for L4D2. Plus, here's the thing. Don't trust the hardware spec analysis that comes with L4D2. It tells me my video card may not be up to snuff and that I may suffer degraded performance blah blah blah. But I throw it up to almost max settings (a few of the little graphical flourishes disabled) and it's perfectly fine. And hell, my current CPU is a Core i5 750, at 2.66GHz...it's a slower quad-core processor and there are no issues with L4D1/2. How current is your graphics card? Based on what you've described, it sounds like your GPU is somehow the issue. Maybe a driver update is required?

My Steam ID: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Al_Easton My GamerTag: Al Easton My PSN ID: al_easton Note about the PSN one...I can't remember whether there's an underscore in it or not. I want to say there isn't. But I can't be sure. hah. I guess try both ways and see which one works? James, by the way, I just added you on Live.

This thread still alive, right? Good. Such a long, sordid history I have with many of you! Apparently I joined as PoisonTongue back in...April 2003, so technically I'm sort of around the 2001-ish era. Hell, I figure when it comes to anyone who joined around the start of the [i]decade[/i]--wow....decade--a few years doesn't make much difference. I forget when it was, exactly, but I believe it was around my birthday of last year when I received a HAPPY BIRTHDAY email from...OtakuBoards? That didn't sound right at all, so I investigated. I mean, as far as I knew, I was still way long-since banned. Especially given my fun little antics of yesteryear. But lo and behold, the account was unbanned. I asked James about it, and it had to do with an older database getting scrubbed for a new version of OB or something. So I figured, hell, why not poke around. I'm amazed to see so many other oldies goofing off. White, Gavin, Shy, Sara, NEIL (!!)...crazy, crazy stuff, guys. What's equally amazing is that we're all on Facebook and yet here we are, too. Old habits die hard, I guess?

I was doing a bit of searching for some older fiction brain-storming, and stumbled across this: http://www.otakuboards.com/index.php?/topic/16952-challenge-to-charles/page__p__312482__hl__EPICITY__fromsearch__1&#entry311636 Ignore the search parameters and just read the spar that Charles and I did with each other waaaay back in the day. This thing brings back serious memories for me. Back in 2003, Charles and I were still at Rutgers. Took a few writing courses together. Talked shop during breaks on campus. Bounced ideas off of each other. Helped each other edit papers/stories. We still do most of that, just not as concentrated. That spar was probably the purest distillation of our writing we'd ever done together. You can tell we had fun with it. It's got all of our weird senses of humor. It's a bit mean-spirited. It's a bit kind-hearted and jovial. It's got a dark mythic edge sometimes, and ridiculously comical sensibilities other places. Man. What amazes me the most is how goddamn good it still is, [u][b]7 years later[/b][/u]. Rarely have I gone back and re-read something I wrote and genuinely thought "Wow, that's still really fricking good." When I've re-read a work, I always ended up appreciating the [i]idea[/i] more than the execution. But this spar? I'm digging both the idea and the execution. Ah, the good ole days. lol

[quote name='Desbreko' date='18 July 2010 - 04:57 AM' timestamp='1279443470' post='697418'] [color=#4B0082]Not to say TP's textures are great, but you probably shouldn't judge them based on a crappily compressed JPG screen shot. I can see a ton of compression artifacts in that screen that aren't the fault of the textures.[/quote] I see a few, too, but I'm not seeing them at the buckles, the topside of his armlets, etc. Even the stitchwork on his tunic is decidedly low-res. Crappily compressed JPG or not, there are horridly dated textures going on in TP. Remember screenshots of Hyrule Field? How the field looked more like green/brown vomit than grass? They should have never gone with a realistic style. Skyward Sword has the right idea with its hybrid approach. [quote]Also, you guys should keep in mind that TP is natively a GameCube game. Compared to other GameCube games, it's not the best â?? the Metroid Prime games definitely look better â?? but it certainly isn't terrible.[/quote] Well, the issue with the Gamecube library (and by extension, the Wii's) is that there weren't too many "realistic" (God I hate that word) games to begin with. In fact, a few of the realistic games on the Wii are actually GCN games from years ago, so there's a bizarre amount of comparative overlap happening. To point, RE4 and REmake. Both GCN games like TP, both ported to the Wii like TP. But has either game really aged well? RE4 hasn't. There are still some gorgeous areas but it really cannot be played on anything but a 20-inch SD or EDTV. Anything larger than that with any resolution higher than 480p and you've got a visual mess on your screen. I try to tell myself that the film grain is intentional, but I know it isn't. RE4 is a game that really couldn't make the leap successfully, unlike Metroid Prime, TWW, Mario Sunshine, TimeSplitters, even Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance. I'm especially surprised by Deadly Alliance still looking as good as it does, but then again, it pulls more toward a slapstick Looney Tunes style rather than anything truly gritty, so it's got a lot more graphical leeway as the years go on. But the one game to rule them all? REmake. Capcom REALLY knocked it out of the park on that game. It's kind of mind-boggling that a re-imagined PSX title still holds a space in the top five best-looking GCN games, and became one of the top five best-looking Wii games due to a technicality. But it's also testament to Capcom's brilliant art direction. They took ultra-realistic character models, photo-realistic pre-rendered backgrounds, and a combination of fixed and dynamic lighting, threw them on a pretty humble machine, and the results were jaw-dropping even to this day. They were working with art assets that should have rapidly aged. Everything about REmake should be fugly today. Yet it looks no different today than it did upon release on GCN in 2002/03. In fact, I'd say it gives most HD Twin games a run for their money. So, yeah, TP was a GCN game before it went to the Wii. But so were Metroid Prime, REmake, RE4, etc, so TP still has a difficult time not looking awful compared to "similar" games on the same system.

[quote name='CaNz' date='12 July 2010 - 09:08 PM' timestamp='1278983304' post='697205'] http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/aa143/Sabaku-no-Gaara23/TwilightPrincessLink.jpg new http://i619.photobucket.com/albums/tt278/PandasQ/3413-zelda2.jpg old you cant base a game on time it came out... nostalgic views just cloud judgments. there is a huge improvement in graphics. and compare tp to any other Wii game it looks great(wii doesn't have the same abilities as 360 or ps3... so your not being fair anyways)[/quote] I'm not basing a game on when it came out, though. I'm judging OoT on how it looks today compared to games being developed a decade later, and quite honestly, there is not a huge graphical improvement. Look at the textures. In the OoT screen, the two texture problem areas are Link's fingers and his boots. Everything else is clean and simple, and still looks great. Now look at TP. There are muddy textures nearly everywhere. His belt(s), belt buckles, the folds in the tunic, his armlet, etc. Really, the only thing with crisp edges is his hair, and even that has texture issues. The wall behind him is just grainy. Whether than grain is accidental or part of the art style is a moot point, because it's going to look far worse in the next few years as games with a similar art style evolve far past it. Furthermore, compared to any other Wii game, TP does not look great. It looks dreadfully dated compared to Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, or Metroid Prime Trilogy, de Blob, Punch Out, ExciteTruck, Raving Rabbids, etc. Now you might say that's an unfair comparison, because those games use very stylized approaches, but it's part of my point: that stylized games often look far better, especially years down the line. Additionally, even "realistic" games like RE4 and Tomb Raider Anniversary have areas that outclass TP. I recall Tomb Raider in particular wowing me pretty frequently. And let's not forget REmake (oh god, REmake, how I love you and hate you) outclassing most Wii games to begin with. [quote]as far as camera goes i almost never had a problem with it in tp... it actually seemed to work for me, even with the odd weapons that used the screen. and the only time controls was an issue was flying that friggen bird in the mini-game. in Oot there were quite a few issues... like being forced to blind fire bombs because the camera would switch on you in mid run, or being stuck underwater cause you couldn't see the ceiling... i know i drowned that way once. and the controlls in combat were good for the most part. but there were issues with the horse, z-targeting... i don't remember all of them... but id say they were good, but not as good as TP with more things and an game changing controller.[/quote] I recall more than one occasion where I wanted to manually position the camera to give me the best view of my environment but the best I could do was click Z to recenter it behind Link. Most notably the magnetic boots areas. The camera is so tight on you there that you're only able to plan one or two movements ahead because you can only see one or two movements ahead. In a franchise that's built itself upon player creativity, experimentation and improvisation, a tight, fixed camera feels horribly out-of-place. One of the biggest disappointments with TWW was that it had a full manual camera but rarely needed it. Inversely, one of the biggest disappointments with TP is that is doesn't have a full manual camera yet desperately needs it. As for OoT, like I said: I'd expect awful camera performance in early 3D. It's no less forgivable today than it was 10 years ago. But that doesn't excuse awful camera performance today in modern games. [quote]I have replayed TP twice now, and that game is quite long. so i dont find that its aging quickly to me... but i found a lot of fun in it.[/quote] Give it 5 or 10 years. [quote]as sidequests go... i figure structured ones can be just as fun as those lying around. if you went strait from dungeon to dungeon... you arnt playing zelda correctly. quite francly the only reason why i was exploring in the first zelda was because i couldnt beat the next dungeon... it wass a difficult game to win... and those heart pieces inside of rocks seemed more mandatory to me than a optional sidequest... but im not as good at it as others.[/quote] You go straight from dungeon to dungeon in Twilight Princess because there's virtually nothing worth doing in-between. The "hidden" rupees and heart pieces are there for the sake of being there. The majority of items you acquire are of zero use to you once you complete their respective dungeon. And as much as TP introduced a lot of neat item combinations, their practical application was extremely limited. I can't even recall a real use for bomb-arrows. And why do you think you were able to explore so freely in the original Zelda? Because the game wasn't supposed to shuttle you from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon. In fact, NES Zelda is probably still the purest realization of Miyamoto's original vision and inspiration.

[quote name='James' date='11 July 2010 - 11:26 PM' timestamp='1278905163' post='697147'][font="Palatino Linotype"]Resident Evil 5 may have been lame in terms of plot, but it's really no worse than much of the series. Have you played Code Veronica, lately? The word "Ashford" makes me want to cry.[/font][/quote] I haven't played Code Veronica so I can't speak to that, but I have played nearly every other mainstream RE game multiple times, and while they all have rubbish stories, the better RE games always balanced their plot with dry humor, top-notch atmosphere, and Hitchcockian pacing. The two best examples are RE1 and 4. Both feature some of the most British humor in the series (Leon's "Your right hand comes off?" retort comes to mind), and RE1 is rife with dry, awkward, stilted dialogue that feels perfectly in place with the campy B-movie nature of the game. If the developers were trying to make a game inspired by George Romero, they succeeded with flying colors. Along those lines, I'd challenge anyone here to point out any environments in other RE games that can rival the unsettling quiet of RE1's mansion or the dread we feel when we re-enter the village in RE4. The best RE games owe a lot to Hitchcock in that the real stars of the games were never the characters...the setting was. Look at Psycho or Notorious. Sure, Norman Bates was technically the star, and Ingrid Bergman was a center of attention, but they both paled in comparison to the amount of time Hitchcock took in developing the Bates house and Alexander's home. For Hitchcock, his settings were just as, if not more, important than his actors. And you can see that. He uses staircases like nobody else. He constantly revisits those locations, especially in Psycho and Notorious. In Psycho, we move up and down the staircase multiple times, and each time we're approaching it from a new, different psychological point of view. And at the very last staircase moment, well, it still makes a room full of 30-something college students jump. As for Notorious, the first time we enter Claude Rains' house, we're immediately awed by that long, winding staircase. It's a gloriously beautiful piece of architecture and it kind of puts you at ease. The entire house does. But what happens at the end? Through repetition, Hitchcock turned that austere staircase into something horrifyingly dreadful. Within 2 hours, we went from high society to high anxiety on the same damn staircase. That was one of Hitchcock's strengths: turning something familiar into something terrifying. The best RE games use Hitchcock's techniques to almost perfection. As you backtrack to the mansion for the first time after completing the guardhouse area, for example, aren't you feeling just a bit more confident that you may actually survive? You've got more ammo, a few better weapons, and you feel like you're finally clawing your way up the food chain. Hell, in the past few hours you've killed a giant plant monster, a mutant shark, dozens of murderous canines, a few spiders...quite the long way from relying on Barry to kill the first zombie you encountered. But even in light of all of that, what happens when you enter the mansion again? HUNTERS! At that moment, where you may have approached a door fairly confidently, you're now moving with a hint of trepidation again. Where you would have been perfectly fine going up that staircase, now you aren't so sure you want to venture upstairs, even though you've got a magnum. RE4 is filled with those kinds of moments, as well. The tone of the game after the lake boss, for example. Prior to that fight, you're coming to terms with the combat...how to deal with certain enemies. You're (again) clawing your way up the food chain. Then what happens? John Carpenter's The Thing! Puts you on edge again almost immediately. Suddenly you're back down to the bottom and wishing you hadn't sold those flash grenades. ;-) So, yeah, I won't disagree that RE has always had lame stories. But they had a lot going for them otherwise. RE5 doesn't. [quote=CaNz]when i think about tp compared to Oot... i cant see too many things tp did worse... I liked the story in Ooc better, but story never really mattered much. almost all of the negatives your bringing up were in that game as well for the most part. the graphics were worse, the controls could be touchy. (riding epona was a pain) the camra was decent but at times it would work against you. Taaht entire game was dungeon after dungeon. all the side-quests really were 100% optional. and your biggest benifit was the biggoron sword. (awesome weapon, but it got rid of the skill in combat of attack and defend, you had a large range and double the power.. your pretty much a god. at least the magic armor had its limits your wallet). I would easily pick Oot over Tp though... and i dont know why... but my only guess is i fell in love with that game. having it as my favorite for years and years has probably effected my ability to judge which one is better. [/quote] Graphically? Ehhh...re-play Twilight Princess in 10 years and tell me OoT's graphics are still worse. OoT has simple textures with simple polygons, which will age far more gracefully than TP, which looked dated almost immediately upon release. And no, I'm not talking "dated" as compared to PS3 or 360. I'm talking "dated" as compared to other games on the same platform. Nintendo picked a terrible art style for TP, because it'll show its age extremely quickly. The controls could be touchy with regards to 3D movement and positioning themselves, but combat was and still is pretty damn snappy...and it's the combat I'm focusing on in my criticism of TP. For the camera...I'd expect some shitty camera performance from early 3D. But shitty camera performance in Twilight Princess is just completely inexcusable. With regards to the sidequests...I've always preferred the Blue Ring moments and not "official" sidequests. Give me a bag of bombs and a candle and let me discover what secrets lay hidden. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Not the mask salesman from OoT. Not defending a wagon from attack in TP. I couldn't care less about that nonsense. What I care about is having a world open to me and being able to explore without being belabored by idiotic forced pacing. And in that regard, OoT ran circles around TP, because OoT was [i]not[/i] all about dungeon after dungeon. There was actually stuff to explore. Places to go. Sights to see. In Twilight Princess, if you weren't in the next dungeon already, you were on your way there. It was a terrible Zelda game. Maybe a decent action/adventure game. But a terrible Zelda game. And frankly, if you were being honest with yourself, I think you would know the real reason why you would pick OoT over TP: because OoT is the better, more balanced Zelda experience when all is said and done.

[quote name='James' date='10 July 2010 - 03:08 PM' timestamp='1278788919' post='697058'][font="Palatino Linotype"]Don't get me wrong - Twilight Princess was undoubtedly a brilliant game in its own right. I think Brasil would say that too.[/font][/quote] Possibly. I tend to look at TP the same way I look at RE5: there's fun to be had, but not when you place the title within its franchise. As a stand-alone action game, RE5 is decently entertaining. The gameplay is functional. The combat is serviceable. The curb-stomps and other context-sensitive attacks add a lot to your character's repertoire. The game has a good speed to it. The front half of the game is pretty damned fantastic. Some of the set-pieces are fun to play. As a stand-alone title--one that exists outside of the established RE franchise, RE5 has its place...even though it'd completely bomb if not for the Resident Evil namesake. Had it used generic action heroes with generic villains, enemies, locations, story, etc., RE5 would have gotten completely lost in the shuffle. But as a Resident Evil game, RE5 is massively disappointing, if not an abject failure. It functions more like a collection of Greatest Hits rather than a game that really understands why prior RE games were great. There's next to no atmosphere. The game is one long stretch of disjointed linear action sequences. Gone is the weird, dry awkward humor, replaced with overly serious dissertations on the nature of humanity. Wesker has become a complete ******* joke...he went from a ***** of a middle manager to some ultra-Matrix-leather movie villain but he's completely lacking Hugo Weaving's suave sinister charm. Twilight Princess is a lot like that. As a non-Zelda game, it does some interesting things and could be pretty good if not for the Zelda name.

[quote name='CaNz' date='08 July 2010 - 02:19 AM' timestamp='1278569983' post='696848']your right, the skill tree still isnt that big in zelda, so it naturally is not that big of a deal in TP. on my first playthrough i looked for the wolfs... but on the second time i just went through the story till they were close by. also sword improvements are in a lot of zelda games... especially OoT where you get two spin move upgrades. a link to the past had the magical blast later on. its always small things though.[/quote] The size is of the skill tree doesn't really matter. What matters is that [i]basic abilities[/i] are locked out until you reach X point in the game. And by X point in the game, I don't mean getting a beefed up sword spin by blowing up a boulder after you get bombs like in OoT. The one or two upgrades there required some basic level of ingenuity and exploration. They rewarded experimentation. They rewarded the "hey I wonder what happens if/when I do this" kind of mindset. And it's that kind of mindset that's completely lacking in TP's sword skills acquisition. Acquiring the sword skills amount to little more than a game of Pacman: follow the corridor to get your power pellet. You know exactly where to go. You know exactly what to do. In Mario games, that approach works. But Zelda's always been a weird hybrid between Mario and Metroid; it straddles the line between Mario-esque strict linearity in dungeons and Metroid-style exploration and discovery in the overworld. Twilight Princess missed that Metroid-style exploration and discovery and it shows in something as simple as learning a new sword skill. The skill tree is a huge deal in TP because it goes against every design philosophy that made Zelda unique. For as much ridicule as OoT received early on in its dev cycle ("lolz it's Mario with a sword"), Twilight Princess has come even closer to "lolz Mario with a sword." [quote]as for hour long tutorial dungeons... thats still a dungeon. and if there was no progression in difficulty with dungeons it wouldnt be fun to go to ganon's castle...do you need it... no, but i love the journey... you character doesnt improve much... but you feel like you have been through a lot, i enjoy them for the trial, not the difficulty. its not that hard, but you gotta do it.[/quote] You don't need hour long tutorial dungeons to establish a progression in difficulty. The clearest example of that is NES Zelda. Where were the tutorials there? The only real tutorial was "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." The first dungeon was short, sweet and challenging. It introduced you to some enemy/movement/attack concepts and the game built from there. For all intents and purposes, that first dungeon [i]was[/i] the tutorial dungeon. And yet you saw no shortage of difficulty progression in the next 7 dungeons. Furthermore, I'd argue that it made the journey to Death Mountain even that much more satisfying, having had a consistent challenge all the way through that tested every single skill I'd developed from dungeon 1 all the way up through dungeon 8, where I didn't have to waste time at the start of the game being taught how to herd goats or how to hold a damn sword or throw a frigging boomerang. And I sure as hell appreciated the original games not forcing me to watch a giant baboon slap its ass at me (Jesus, that entire bossfight made me feel like I was watching Zelda as envisioned by David Fincher). Make no mistake: hour long tutorial dungeons are completely unnecessary. [quote]i know you arnt saying demon souls isnt perfect and your scoping out the best features, but all that your saying is the bad parts of zelda, all of its problems. there are so many fun things about the game that it overshadows all the problems in my opinion.[/quote] No, I'm talking about the fun things in Zelda...and how Twilight Princess seemed to miss what those fun parts in Zelda were...and why Skyward Sword needs to avoid TP. Come on, to sit there and say I'm ripping on Zelda, when I've spent huge chunks of my posts praising OoT and TWW, is highly disingenuous. I'm not focusing on the bad parts of Zelda. Quite the contrary, actually. I'm focusing on the good parts and illustrating why Twilight Princess was a tremendous step backward for the series.

[quote name='CaNz' date='07 July 2010 - 02:54 AM' timestamp='1278485661' post='696696'] it wouldnt make sence if you knew how to do all the special moves at start... and since most of them were not even necessary (though very helpful) to have... and the hoops were spoon fed, but you still had to do it. and that means take time off the main quest. usually just doing one thing is an excuse to do a bunch of other sidequests so i think it was fine. plus... tell me you didnt like drawing on people. that was so cool it made my heart jump. i loved running up to a lizard killing it in one hit, doing the cool sheath as another one runs up, then doing it again. also the helm splitter and shield bash was fun. it made the normal projectile return more challenging. the major ones were very unnecessary but at the same time fun to try and pull off. and the last one works well in combination with the magic armor and a ton of money.[/quote] How would it not make sense to know the special moves at the start of the game? Zelda's never been a traditional, skill tree-based RPG, where abilities are locked until you reach X area/level. Apart from two very rare examples in Zelda 2, the series has always focused on giving the player full, unfettered access to any combat skills Link would use. This is especially true in the original game. From the wooden sword to magical sword, your techniques remained the same and the game was better for it. Darknuts were susceptible to the same strategy no matter if you used the wooden sword or white sword. Tektites were just as vulnerable to a boomerang-sword combo regardless of the kind of sword you used. The combat timing was always yours to learn and manipulate at your own speed. Learning to counter an attack didn't rely on you reaching X Point in the game. All that mattered there was learning how the enemy moved and attacked. That's why it doesn't make sense to NOT know all the special moves at the start of the game. Because the player never really learns anything when they can't do anything and at that point, the game becomes a sluggish, aging, dated behemoth that ends up being far outclassed by other far more competent game properties. Seriously. We shouldn't have hour-long tutorials at this point in this franchise. We shouldn't be forced to slog through tutorial dungeons just to learn a few basic combat tactics. And we sure as **** shouldn't have to engage in trivial sidequests to learn special moves that aren't all that special in the first place. If you want skill tree development that actually means something, play Crackdown. To this day, Crackdown 1 still has some of the best stat development I've played in a very long time...because it feels like a natural evolution of your character and not just some hamfisted attempt at "depth." [quote]plus i know you like demon souls but that game was not perfect. there was barely a storyline. the customization was nice, except you never see your characters face in the dark setting let alone the armor. plus a major difference is the feel of the game. I loved exploring around in zelda, going at my own pace... smelling a flower on the way... demon souls was like an infinite struggle... till it was over... fun, but scary... dying was just to dang easy to die. it was a slight panic during every fight. the bosses were bad too but in zelda a challenging boss meant something. in DS every fight was tough so even though bosses were extra tough i never looked forward to them like i do in zelda. Id also like to reiterate on just how dark that game was. It had very nice graphics and scenery if you could see them. the game can be really good and yet still have things people dont like.[/quote] Eh, I haven't been talking about Demon's Souls like it's perfection, and I've discussed how brutally unpolished the game is. There are collision issues; I've gotten stuck on tiny little bits of wood so many times it's become a joke. There are camera issues; trying to position the camera for a decent view of the narrow walkway in front of you, only to have your vision obscured by a piece of ceiling because the environment and camera never work together is infuriating. Your character has a weight and momentum that doesn't always cooperate with all the tight, narrow pathways. Make no mistake. I operate under no pretense that Demon's Souls is perfect. But it excels where it matters the most: the gameplay. Everything else is pointless window-dressing. Like story. The story is typical Diablo-inspired fantasy lore fare. King unleashed evil. You come to try to save the kingdom. By the end of the game I'll be expecting to save the king's son. But let's be perfectly fair here. Zelda has no story, either. It's just overwrought gibberish that's been taking itself too seriously for a decade. There was a brief moment where I thought TWW was going to turn it all around. The core story was the same, but they actually created fun characters. They gave Ganon some depth beyond just wanting to destroy Hyrule. The dynamic between Link and Tetra felt like classic Saturday morning cartoons. TWW's story and characters were some of the best things to happen to the series, and yet what happens? TWW gets shoved into some bullshit alt timeline and we return to overbearing dreck in Twilight Princess. Even Midna couldn't save it, and that's saying a lot, because Midna was a fantastic character. If you want to talk storyline, there's no difference between the two properties. The only real difference between Demon's Souls and Zelda is that Zelda has recognizable characters. Speaking of recognizable characters, if Demon's Souls is too dark to where you can't see your character's face or the differences in armor, you need to adjust your TV settings. lol And I'd hardly agree that Zelda has challenging boss fights these days. Maybe compared to the rest of the game they're mildly challenging, but they're still a total cakewalk and hardly mean anything largely due to the stagnation that's gripped the series: in Dungeon A, you know you'll use Item A to defeat Boss A, and you know that Boss A's weakpoint will be made completely obvious to you. The bosses mean nothing because everything is telegraphed for you beforehand. [quote=Desbreko]To be fair, this actually has its roots in Zelda II. You can't perform the down thrust or up thrust until learning them from people. And the down thrust is hella useful. You're right about TP being particularly bad about it, though. (And on the 2D side of things, The Minish Cap also suffers the same fate.) I prefer TP's manual system to TWW's automated one because it lets you actually chain moves together and it's just more fun for me than simply tapping the A button. But because you don't learn a lot of the moves until late in the game, you don't get nearly as much opportunity to use them as you do in TWW.[/quote] Well, I tend to give Zelda 2 a pass on that, because it's two abilities in a game where you get far more mileage out of learning and perfecting the jump jab. Darknuts only occasionally give me problems after getting that fakeout jump down pat. Not to mention figuring out the timing of the neutral block/counter is absolutely essential in killing most regular enemies. And as much as Stalfos die much faster with the u-air and d-air, knowing how to kill them quickly using your "standard" moveset is monumentally beneficial. As for TP, the game really dooms itself by forcing the player on that long tutorial treadmill grind. The game starts ungodly slowly and really never speeds up until the back third of it. Until that point, it feels like one huge training session. We're never really able to go at our own pace...just being funneled to where the developer wants us to go next. Any little activities off the beaten path are so insignificant that TP feels like Mass Effect 2 with swords, which is not a good feeling. haha

[quote name='Desbreko' date='02 July 2010 - 05:18 AM' timestamp='1278062295' post='696336']I think the equipment thing basically comes down to what Brasil said in his first post about the Blue Ring moments. In the original Zelda and LttP, there were plenty of useful items and upgrades to be found just from exploring the overworld. I personally wouldn't want that aspect of the game to become like an RPG where you get new weapons and armor after pretty much every dungeon, but I agree that more optional equipment would be a welcome return to the classic Zelda style instead of having every single item handed to you as part of the storyline.[/quote] One of my favorite moments from LttP is the waterfall upgrade surprise. Completely normal looking waterfall yet you can receive some fantastic upgrades by doing something completely random. Er, not random in the sense that there'd be no way to know to do it without a guide. Random more in the "wow I did not expect to be able to do that" way. And the fact that you can throw just about any item into there and be met with a different reaction depending on the item really emphasized and developed that classic Nintendo game experimentation. Throw in a candle, the Zora (I think it was a Zora) asked if you dropped it. Throw in a shield, though, and the result is far more exciting. I don't know if it ever rivaled the score display discovery in SMB1, or the white block trick in SMB3, or having the white sword before you entered the first dungeon in Zelda 1, but it was a great gameplay experience nonetheless, and an experience that's been missing in Zelda games of the past decade. Speaking of the white sword, actually, the relationship between equipment and movesets desperately needs to change. As it stands now, our equipment stays the same and we "learn" new ways to use it. Even though OoT and TWW are pretty guilty of that, Twilight Princess especially sucked in that regard. It forced you to hunt down stones just to learn basic combat techniques. Didn't matter if you the player knew how to do them from the very start; the game wasn't going to let you the character perform them until you jumped through ridiculous spoonfeeding hoops first. To add insult to injury, most of the moves weren't all that fun or engaging. Ending Blow was the highlight of them all and that's really only because of the Smash Bros influence (Link's d-air became Ending Blow). Everything else looked and felt sloppy. For a lot of it, I much preferred TWW's button-prompt system; it was snappier, more reliable, looked better, animated more smoothly, and the sound/music effect was much more exciting. And that's coming from someone who is completely in love with Demon's Souls' ultra-manual parry system, even though I still kind of suck at it 15 hours into the game. Speaking of Demon's Souls again...that's got a really great equipment/moveset relationship: you have the same moveset through the entire game but certain equipment is better for certain situations. If you want to do quick armor-piercing damage, go with a rapier. If your target isn't heavily armored, use a sword. Fighting in tight corridors? Shield and a long spear are your best bet. Skeletons are far more susceptible to blunt weaponry. Those are simple examples and conditions, but they work really, really well in-game...and there's a lot more complexity in weapon management the further you get in the game. But the real kicker in all of that is your moveset is generally the same with a spear as it is with a warhammer. There's a different range, sure. There's a different swing, sure. There's a different way you hold/use the shield, sure. But it's all built upon a few core principles: block, parry, timing, spacing. Everything flows from those principles. And it's all manual. Nothing is automated. If a Red Eye Knight is bearing down on you with a gigantic two-handed broadsword, you'd better know just how far he can reach with it, how long it'll take him to recover from his blade striking you or the ground, if your fatigue level is going to absorb the shock (or if your block will break, leaving you dazed and helpless), etc. Plus, anything you can do to the enemy, the enemy can do to you. So they'll punish you for being too aggressive just like you would for them. Hell, they'll punish you for being too passive. The game constantly forces you to strike that healthy balance between offense and defense. Your armor plays a large part in finding that balance, as well. Each armor piece has its own encumbrance rating. Sure, encumbrance will affect how much you can carry, but it also affects how much you can equip, which affects your overall movement speed, which means a heavily-armored warrior isn't going to dodge as easily as say, someone clad in leather armor. It's actually kind of comical, seeing a warrior try to roll, only to CLANG-SHOULDERPLANT on the ground next to the foe. When you aren't some brutish knight, however, and do actually have some speed and agility to you, it makes the roll-backstab that much more satisfying, because it's an instant-kill, usually against a tough enemy (because throwing yourself out of position with your back toward a group of regular enemies is a bad, bad idea). It's a great system and one that Zelda needs to learn, because some of the dynamics in Demon's Souls could go a long way in making the combat in Zelda feel fresh and dynamic...like TWW's, only with Motion+. [quote]By the way, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who rages at SMG1's camera.[/quote] The next step forward for SMG needs to be getting rid of the stars all together. They've started structuring it to where you have just about the 60 stars necessary to beat the game by the end of the game. So it really becomes no different from early SMB games, which means I want to see them do away with window dressings completely. SMG2 was a huge step in the right direction. There wasn't a bullshit tutorial. Training videos were optional little billboards in-game. The story was kept to a minimum. Starship Mario was a fantastic change, as was the galaxy map screen. However, the stars have become pointless, so once they get rid of them, they need to start doing classic Mario gaming styles in 3D, which is what I've been wanting for a very long time. Every time I saw traditional pipes, bricks, Goombas, etc, in SMG2, I couldn't help but think how wonderful it would be if they could adapt NES Mario into the 3D quasi-planetoid format: keep some of the spherical design but use it within the Mushroom Kingdom. I really do miss unique worlds. As great as SMG2 is, and as much variety they were able to crank in with each new world, I really, really missed Fire World, Plant World, etc.

[quote name='James' date='27 June 2010 - 07:29 PM' timestamp='1277681375' post='696063'] [font="Palatino Linotype"]I'm wondering, though, how much would you be prepared for it to change?[/font][/quote] How would I be prepared for it to change? Hm. Well, the biggest change I'm aching for is for Aonuma to step down. Or at the very least, for him to stop trying to make/top OoT, because OoT is never going to be matched. It's the kind of game that works on nearly all fronts, that challenges you without breaking you, that gives you freedom with direction, that realizes a 3D overworld without it feeling sparse/underpopulated or completely stuffed. OoT is really almost the perfect realization of traditional Zelda in 3D. Not bad for right out of the gate, but very bad for anyone trying to make the next OoT. Hell, I think it's extraordinarily telling that the two most highly-praised, well-regarded 3D Zelda games since then have been Majora's Mask and Wind Waker. And they both did something radically different from their predecessor(s). Neither game tried to be OoT and they were better off for it. MM and TWW kind of followed in Zelda 2's footsteps. Had Zelda 2 simply been a retread of Zelda 1, it wouldn't have found this fanbase. It wouldn't have become a sort of under-appreciated gaming treasure. It certainly wouldn't have been as brilliant as it is...and I doubt it'd be as playable as it is today. If Aonuma would just forget about OoT, the games would improve. It's like EA or Activision's quest to make "the next GoldenEye." It just isn't going to happen. The best Bond game EA cranked out was Everything or Nothing. It was an amazing title for two reasons. One, it was just a damn fine game. The Bond moments were amazing. The action sequences [i]worked[/i]. The game ran smoothly, and the level design was actually impeccably well done. Two, EoN didn't try to be GoldenEye. Now, in EA's defense, Rogue Agent was actually pretty fun at times. The dual wielding system allowed for a surprising amount of freedom...it was actually better than Halo's, believe it or not. There weren't too many limits on which weapons you could dual wield, which means remote mine thrower in one hand with an assault rifle in the other. Made for some immensely satisfying gunfights. On top of that, the story was bizarre and wacky to where it was actually entertaining in a sort of "so bad it's good" way. Really, Rogue Agent had just the right amount of mean-spirited campy fun. Come to think of it, Rogue Agent actually fit perfectly within the old-school James Bond era it used. And that mean-spirited camp could have really made the game stand out...if there wasn't "GoldenEye" in the title. That alone torpedoed the entire game. The "GoldenEye" in-game was horridly implemented. Totally clumsy and was never fun to use. Had EA let Rogue Agent do its own thing, went full-steam ahead with that mean-spirited concept, and really polished the game up...it would have been incredible. Lastly, it's idiotic that Activision didn't learn from EA's countless mistakes. Here they had what, over a decade, of clear what-not-to-do examples and instead go full-on and remake GoldenEye. Anyone who remains optimistic or cautiously optimistic about Activision's GoldenEye is a fool. The game is going to suck so much ass that people won't know what the hell is going on. Mark my words, it'll feel like an empty Call of Duty reskin long before it resembles anything Bond-related. And it's going to look like crap, to boot. GE64 still looks good to this day because it had a very simple and clean style to it. Yeah, GE64 doesn't look great, but it's going to age far better than Activision's...thing. Asides, uh, aside, that's one of the big things I'm looking for: for them to stop trying to remake a classic and start doing their own thing again. Additionally, they've gotta do something about equipment. Go Oblivion and have tons of armor or go Demon's Souls and let you upgrade stuff. I'd like to see the Demon's Souls route, because then they could actually make rupees useful again. Have a few classes of swords, a few axes, etc., and just let us upgrade to our heart's delight. Later on in the game, give us the Master Sword. But make it late in the game. Make it feel like the Master Sword is actually a master of something and not just the weapon you're always going to use. Past few games (TWW included) have fallen into this dungeons1-3>Master Sword>dungeons 4-8 rut and desperately need to break out of it. An upgrade system could go a long way in mitigating that fatigue. Plus our wallets wouldn't be stupidly full all the time! As for Mario Galaxy, it should be noted that I loathe almost the entirety of SMG1. For every moment of brilliance, there are five places where I hit my "**** this ****" threshold. SMG1 was as much a revival/revolution as it was an exercise in frustration. At times I was in love with the level design. Other times, I cursed the camera's first-born. It was such a strange, uneven game. The movement/camera relationship was what really did the game in, because Mario games have always been about an innate, intuitive relationship between Mario and the player. In NES Mario, there was never any question how you would move. Left was always left. Right was always right. Jump was always jump. There was a consistency there. It was that consistency that allowed Mario to become an extension of the player, rather than some vague, remotely controlled avatar. In NES Mario, your brain easily made the connections between button presses and on-screen responses almost immediately. That was not the case in SMG1. When the camera changed, your joystick directions changed, which means any little wave of the camera forces your brain to re-acquire spatial information and it [i]completely[/i] removed me from the experience. Scripted fall off of a large pillar, only to have the camera land upside-down and my movement became reversed? I'm sorry, but spontaneous reversal of direction should be left to poison powerdowns in Bomberman, NOT platforming segments depending on ultra-precise jumps. Furthermore, SMG1 lacked the holy crap game-breaker moments in NES Mario. I mean, take, for example, the first time in SMB1 where you broke through the ceiling and were running in front of the score display. It was frigging mind-blowing. And suddenly, within that one second, the entire game changed forever. And really, gaming itself changed forever. NES Mario rewarded experimentation. It encouraged you to break the game. And it rewarded you when you thought outside the box...or in the case of SMB1...thought outside the level. Big reason [b]why I love, love, love SMG2[/b] is because it brought back the experimentation and game-breaking. There have been a dozen times in my 80-star game where I've found some mind-blowing shortcuts...stuff that rivaled the score display stuff in SMB1. But all things considered, SMG1 did it right by refocusing on platforming, even though there wasn't too much of a stagnation going on within the Mario platforming franchise, proper, to begin with. Thankfully, Zelda has a lot more room to improve. So...yeah. I guess to answer your question? I'm ready for an almost complete overhaul. I no longer want to be spoon-fed gear in each dungeon. I'm ready to have next to no tutorials. All that fat that's accumulated on the series over the years? I want it gone. Give me a shitty wooden sword, an empty sack on my shoulder, and a Moblin ready to gore me through the face with a gnarly spear...and I'll be gloriously well-fed.

How is this news?

For Skyward Sword to succeed, it really just needs to avoid everything Twilight Princess did. You hear this time and time again, but repetition doesn't make it any less true. TP fell victim to a strict adherence to a rigid formula where getting the player from Dungeon A to Dungeon B was the only thing that mattered. And the game suffered for it. Between dungeons, you were given next to nothing to do. Hyrule Field was gigantic, sure, but it was also gigantically empty. At best, you found a heart piece or a rupee slightly off the beaten path. But even those were colossal disappointments, because you rarely needed extra hearts, and you most certainly rarely needed extra rupees. Didn't help matters that the game had a ridiculous "You got a ____ rupee!" cut-scene every single time. It's almost as if the game didn't trust the player to realize they picked up some cash. Now, to be fair, it's not as if the heart piece/rupee placement is anything new. Even the original game had its fair share of useless caves and pointless dead-ends. But it was nowhere near as bad as TP. There were long stretches of cave that gave you nothing. Where NES Zelda may have had one or two screens when you went down into a freshly bombed hole, TP had a winding cave structure with ups and downs, candles, enemies...but for what? A purple rupee you couldn't even carry because you were maxed out. Yay. I suppose that's one of the things that needs to change. Zelda games need some sort of an economy again. The original was perfect in that regard; you bombed a rock and maybe found a merchant selling arrows. It gave you incentive to try exploring your environment. It gave you a reason to actually keep cash on hand. It gave you an incentive to gear up. Sure, the game gave you mission-critical gear in dungeons (ladder, raft, red candle, etc) but being able to grab the blue candle or magic shield or bombs right at the start of the game added an immense depth (for lack of a better word) to the game. Hell, if you look online, there have been people doing no-sword runs in NES Zelda...and by "no sword" I don't mean they simply just don't use the sword. I mean they don't even grab the sword at the start of the game. There was incentive to experiment and explore and the freedom to do so. Later Zelda games lost that incentive when they started giving you [i]all[/i] of your necessary gear. I think OoT was the last Zelda game to really engage merchant shops on a substantial level. You had civilized shops in Kokiri Village, Goron Village, Castle Town, Kakariko, etc, but then you had hidden shops around Hyrule Field, Death Mountain Pass, etc. After that, it all kind of sputtered out. Rupees have become so useless that they should just be removed all together. I mean, think about it. What did you ever really need rupees for in the past couple of Zelda games? You always knew you'd get the right armor and shield by going through ABC dungeons. You always knew you'd get the Hookshot in Dungeon X. You always knew the game would give you bombs when you needed them in Dungeon Z. There were no real surprises. There were no true "OMG Blue Ring" moments. Again, I think OoT was probably the last Zelda game to really embrace those "OMG Blue Ring" moments. First time I got a Bomb Bag, I know I went around, blowing up rocks, stumbled across one or two fairy fountains. It was a great experience, and I'd venture it's because of those kinds of experiences why people regard OoT so fondly and pan TP in the same breath. The closest thing to Blue Ring moments I saw in TP was the sword skill acquisitions but eventually they got repetitive and ultimately became an annoyance because I seem to recall the howling stones being marked on your map, which kind of took the fun out of the exploration and discovery. Beyond sword skills, what, realistically, did you really have in the ways of Blue Ring moments in TP? So that's another thing I'd like to see in Skyward Sword. The return of true Blue Ring moments. Now, do I believe that Skyward Sword is really going to improve upon the trouble areas? Not really. For as much talk as I hear about changing the formula, I remain cynical. They haven't changed the current formula in over a decade and in many ways, it's just gotten worse. So I'm not entirely convinced they'll be able to pull off something akin to Zelda 1 or 2. And Des is absolutely right about mentioning Zelda 2, because it's a phenomenal game, and I'd say it's my favorite Zelda game ever. Sure, it's filled with cheap hits and cheap deaths, with enemies that steal xp from you, and areas designed to just beat you into a bloody pulpy mess on the ground, and by the first quarter of the game, Ganon's laughter will have been burned into your (and your fiancee's) memory...but it does click with you eventually. And once it clicks, it becomes one of the single most rewarding gaming experiences you'll ever have. In a lot of ways, it really was the predecessor to Demon's Souls on PS3. If you're hurting for classic Zelda in a current gen system, Demon's Souls will certainly tickle your fancy. The games aren't exactly alike, but there are enough similarities to where DS feels like a spiritual successor to where 2D Zelda left off back in the 1990s. Come to think of it, with Demon's Souls basically working as a next-gen Zelda game should, it almost makes me wonder why bother with Zelda-proper. Probably the Nintendo polish, I guess. Demon's Souls is horribly unpolished. Or at least, it's horribly depressing. You occasionally see ghosts of other players running around in real-time as they play the same levels you are. You'll see bloodstains that show how other players died just moments or steps before you. Most of the NPCs you'll interact with are actually dead. Hell, you're actually dead throughout the entire game, I suppose. You spend most of your homebase time in the Nexus, which is basically the afterlife. And everything is bound to the Nexus, even when you have a body. Plus, when you "die," it's not really death, per se...just losing your physical form. You resurrect in your spirit form and have to touch your bloodstain to get your souls (xp) back...but you never get your body back (unless you use these soul stone things). Great game, just horribly depressing. So Zelda is probably a much needed variation. lol