Brasil

If I'm not mistaken, "Nexus" is a type of gathering place. I think. It's early and I haven't slept, so I may be wrong, but isn't it a convergence of some type? I would guess "The Nexus" being placed in the gaming forum is going to turn out to be some type of convergence related to gaming. Maybe for the gamers themselves on OB. In Guild Wars, there's an OB-centric guild, Quantum Kabuki Troupe, so...maybe Nexus will be something for OB-centric guilds/clans/groups to mingle and converse? There are loads of online games OBers play, I think (Literati, what?), so it'd make sense to have something like The Nexus, if my guess is correct.

Okay, so...apparently, rumor has it that none other than Christopher Walken was being considered to play Willy Wonka in the new film that just came out. I thought to myself, I know he would have played a kick-*** Wonka, but I wonder what he might have looked like, had he gotten the part? Well...I just mocked-up what we might have seen. XD Apologies for the size (it's a bit small due to limited resolutions). [center][img]http://www.otakuboards.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=24094&stc=1[/img] [/center]

Not spamming...but for ranting, check out OL. ~_^

The thread starter obviously has never been to the Jersey Shore. 'nuff said.

[quote name='Syk3']I "shrug off comments about how this new book seems like pure Fan Fiction" because had you read the book, you'd know that such claims are rather rediculous. Yes, you can point your finger to my specific example of werewolf loving all you want, because that's all you have to go on in your argument, but it was such a miniscule part of the book that it hardly seems fair to classify the entire thing as one big fan fiction.[/quote] You see, that's part of the problem, it seems. What is the likelihood that HBP didn't need to be two novels? I think it could have been one. Just cut out all the irrelevant and extraneous relationship cheese that don't develop (and ultimately, distract from) the focus of the book...what the title refers to, no less. And some other aspects of this book are? I suppose a clumsily-written, clumsily-handled red herring is something that doesn't plague fan fiction? Having a red herring in a mystery is fine, provided that even with the red herring, the actual ending still feels inevitable. If the reader feels cheated, like the actual ending/revelation feels tacked on at the end, with no real precedent in the film...that's a lousy plot development associated with lousy writers who really don't know what they're doing. But sometimes red herring fake endings work. See The Usual Suspects. Perfect example. The revelation at the end of the film works because the film is inevitably leading up to that revelation--and there are very steady hints throughout the work that point to that particular revelation, even when there are distractions along the way. Are readers seeing that type of development in HBP? Judging from the responses here about how the titular character seems largely irrelevant to the content of the book...you be the judge. [quote]There will be romantic encounters throughout the series, and you seem quick to condemn them just because you think they might sound a little like fan fictions. I myself don't spend time reading fan fictions, but judging by your attempt to hold them in a negative light, I can tell you that despite the initial description, these sorts of things in Harry Potter work out well and realistically, lol. Summaries of subplots are hardly going to take you a long way.[/quote] Greg, I invite you to head on over to [url="http://www.fanfiction.net"]www.fanfiction.net[/url] and just browse the Harry Potter sections, the Romance sections, et cetera. A werewolf subplot like you described (by your own description, mind) is something you will find (not possibly find, not may find, [i]will[/i] find) in 99% of all the teeny angst "artistic" "social outcasts finding each other and overcoming obstacles in their lives" entries there. Those annoying subplots and plots may work better in Harry Potter...but that doesn't mean they're not fan fiction concepts through and through. The quality of the writing doesn't change a horrible fan fiction lemony concept. [quote]If you don't want to read Harry Potter, then fine, it's your loss, but honestly, please don't try to come back and support these claims without reading it first. Oooh, but I guess now I'm avoiding the question by saying that, right? :p[/QUOTE] Problem with your response here, Greg, is when I can read Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut, Pierre Boulle, Tim O'Brien, James Joyce, and so on, instead of reading highly derivative, mass-marketed adolescent "magic" novels...I don't think I'm really losing out, nor anyone who picks Gravity's Rainbow over Harry Potter and the [insert catchy, cutesy, kitschy name here]. And honestly, I don't think I really need to read a 350-page children's novel to know a bad, corny, downright lousy premise when I see one. [quote name='Syk3][color=black][size=2]Plot: [spoiler]Harry finds out about Voldemort's past in an attempt to figure out how to kill him once and for all (not to mention give us plenty of background information as readers); Voldemort and his forces have fully regained their terrorizing throne, and the magic community must take precautions to try to stop them; Malfoy has begun to work for Voldemort, and Harry, suspecting him, tries to find out what he's up to; Harry, as well as us as readers, must decide whether or not Snape is as trustworthy as Dumbledore believes; and of course, there are romances and Quidditch to worry about.[/spoiler] Hope that helped.[/size'][/color][/quote] Quick, incidental note, too. That's not a plot. That's barely a story. Plot and story are different things.

Greg, quickie little question here. You seem to just shrug off comments about how this new book seems like pure Fan Fiction...yet when I read your synopsis of one of the "love" stories... [quote name='Syk3][color=black][size=2][spoiler'] Before you knew what was really going on, it raised some mystery of perhaps a Black/Tonks pairing, or that something else was happening with Tonks, but all-in-all something to keep you thinking. In the end, it did touch upon love with a werewolf and the difficulties faced that the two finally believed that they could overcome, and it also helped develop both characters and keep them interesting. And you said it yourself: this is a two part with the next book, perhaps their romance will come into play later.[/spoiler][/quote] (I'd spoiler this, but it wouldn't have the same impact.) ...you're describing a love story that involves [spoiler]a werewolf[/spoiler], and that explores "the difficulties faced that the two finally believe they could overcome," and you don't see the Fan Fiction flavoring in that? Now, I've never laid a hand on any of the Harry Potter books for the sole reason that there are better authors out there...but I have read literature before, and I have read fan fiction before, and I can point to a wide variety of entries on Fanfiction.net that have that exact summary you gave for the love subplot. There's no fan fiction flavoring in the new novel? Unless you're not relating things well...there is a fan fiction flavoring. lol I suspect you'll disregard me because I've not read any of the Harry Potter books, but you're not going to really convince anyone by doing so. Seems to me that if you want to show that HBP in fact isn't some random HP lovefic written by HermiRonFan...you're going to have to come up with more than just "Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha...oh man." [/size][/color] [color=red][size=1]Alex, not spoilering a post because it 'would ruin the impact' is not enough. In future, please err on the side of caution. You may not care about the HP books, but others do. -- Lady Asphyxia[/size][/color]

[quote name='Roflocopter']Please do not ignore this post.... -.-[/quote] o_0?? [quote]Ok i just got GW and I wanted to know what the most user friendly class was. Could someone please tell me?[/QUOTE] Well...thing is, there's really no class like that. I mean, each class has their own strengths and weaknesses. One player will do better with Ranger than another will, and another player could do better with a Mesmer than with a Warrior. So...to answer your question, there really isn't the "most user friendly class." I suppose there are some that are easier than others, but that's largely due to individual playstyles rather than ease of professions, I think. If I had to break it down into total simplistic, black and white terms, though? Either Elementalists or Warriors. It seems that they're the "more accessible" classes from the beginning. All the other classes require much more advanced tactics to be as successful, I think. Mesmers need to stay on their toes completely and read the entire battlefield all the time. Rangers need faster reflexes than most to be able to lay down suppression fire--you could say Rangers are good containment fighters. Necromancers have lots of Hexes to throw around and kind of behave like Mesmers do. Speaking from personal experience, Necromancers and Mesmers are the two deadliest, most dangerous classes in the game when played well. They can obliterate just about anything except other Necros and Mesmers of a similar skill level. Monks, well...a lousy Monk is going to doom a team, so I'm not sure if brand spanking new players should necessarily go with Monk. So...yeah. I don't fully believe everything I've written here, because it's much more complicated than my summation above. But for the purposes of the question...yeah. heh

[quote name='Dagger]And obviously the most frightening parts of the film were those showing how [spoiler]people would react during such a crisis.[/spoiler'] That gave it a level of realism which hit me right in the gut.~Dagger~[/quote] The windshield shot...yeah. Final Remix and I saw the movie a few weeks ago, and we both thought the red there was just lighting. And then we realized what it was. I watched most of the film with either my arms hugging myself (haha), a hand up to my mouth, or just my jaw agape. Some of the stuff you see in that film...yeah. In terms of cinematography, Spielberg's at the top of his game, for sure. No other film in his canon comes close to his technique in WotW. Character-wise, E.T. still pulls at the heart-strings more, but for pure technique...WotW, hands-down.

Des, yeppers. The Warrior did help a lot. That group was spectacular because everyone knew how to play. It was very schway, indeed. And I'm glad to see you're finally experimenting with Necromancers now. I wonder if that Thirsty River group had anything to do with it? hehe And Jade ascended a few days ago. I'd agree with Des on the mirror fight, too. Kinda bleh.

[quote name='Lore][color=#6699cc']I would hate to be judged on the basis of my name.[/color][/quote] "Alexander" means "helper of mankind" or something like that. Delicious irony, eh? I'm not looking to help mankind. I'm looking to destroy it. ~_^

Funny anecdote about Thirsty River, heh. I felt like doing one of the pre-Ascension missions last night, so Desbreko and I met in Augury Rock (one of the outposts in Crystal Desert) and decided which to do. Dunes of Despair was easier, he tells me, so I think for a moment then tell him I'd like to do Thirsty River. And holy hell, the group we nabbed blasted through that mission easier than Gates of Kryta on a good day. It was...insane. We had two primary Necromancers and a secondary. One primary was using Death Magic (Bone Fiends and Putrid Explosion, I think). I was using Blood Magic and Curses. Our group only had one Warrior, and a handful of Rangers. We rocked the house. It was so sweet. I really didn't expect us to do that well, but it just goes to show you that you don't need a whole team of just Warriors and Monks to complete missions. In fact...I think Desi here was the only Monk. It was awesome. =D Just one mission left, then fight my mirror, then Ascension, baby.

[QUOTE=DeathBug]There were so many plot-holes that my head hurt. To whit: [spoiler]If the aliens actually buried their machines on Earth millenia ago, so deep that we never found them, wouldn't they have discovered their incompatability with terrestrial microbes then?[/spoiler][/quote] Because they weren't harvesting back then. [quote][spoiler]And, hey, if they had all this time to bury these things, why didn't they just take the planet then? (This is particularly irritating because they changed the invasion methods from the book; the changes made them worse! In the original book, the aliens arrive via meteorites, which are just compacted versions of their machines.)[/spoiler][/quote] Harvesting. They enjoy it (except when it kills them) [quote][spoiler]How could Cruise kill the crazy guy in the basement when that guy was twice his size, had military training, and had a weapon?[/spoiler][/quote] I don't really see how this matters in the bigger scheme of the film...because it really seems like nitpicking to the nth degree, but I'll humor you (and loosely reference Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome at the same time). Two men enter that side-room. One man leaves. [spoiler]One of them was going to die, and Ray sure as hell wasn't going to lose his daughter like he lost his son.[/spoiler] And remember the particular philosophies presented in the film, and which characters symbolize/represent what. Ray is reluctant at first but rises to the challenge. He doesn't believe in full-on conflict, particularly when that full-on conflict is a suicide mission (holding Robbie back from joining the military, for example?). Look at what Robbins' character was wanting to do. He was seriously recommending a suicide mission, to take action when it obviously was not a good idea. He was a liability. Thematically, he had to be destroyed. And Ray doesn't exactly walk out of that side-room in prime condition, either, so the fight wasn't one-sided at all. I'm sure Tim Robbins put up one hell of a fight. We just don't see it actually happen because we're "seeing" things from the daughter's perspective, and again, thematically, that makes sense, because throughout the film, Ray is constantly trying to keep her from seeing any of the violence. This sequence (shot, rather) is just another thematically-charged composition. It's a distance thing, isn't it? What Ray is going in there to do, shouldn't be a part of his daughter's life...so what do we get? Her eyes covered, her ears covered, we're sitting with her, and we have a wider shot of the entire room she's sitting in, with the door to the side-room closed. You didn't specifically have an issue with that, I know, but it's important to understand why things happened the way they did. [u][b]EDIT[/b][/u]: Actually, reading over your recent post, you apparently did take issue with how the scene was put together, so my explanation wasn't unwarranted. See, the problem is, you're required to think about the film a little tiny bit to understand why shots are arranged a certain way, why we see things from that particular angle. [quote][spoiler]How did Cruise's son survive the military attack, when the entire hillside he was on was set ablaze. And how could he get to Boston before them? And why hadn't he cleaned himself when he got there? And, for that matter, why was Boston completely unharmed, when the aliens went after tiny nameless towns?[/spoiler] I hate it when Hollywood ruins good books with crappy movies.[/QUOTE] Those are the only two "plot holes" I'm going to agree with you about, even though Boston going completely unharmed is a total overstatement, because Boston got hit the same way that other cities did (look at the higher angle shots in Boston; you'll see what I'm talking about). Unless buildings were getting cars thrown into them (or for that matter, highways, hehe), the buildings were going to stay relatively intact. You see it throughout the film. Robbie, on the other hand...yeah. [spoiler]Shoulda been toast.[/spoiler]

It's funny, because everytime I play GW lately it seems...I'm reminded just why I hate morons and incompetents (yes, I'm actually using the word as a noun). I can never get a PUG (Pick-up group) without an idiot who thinks aggroing that entire group of White Mantle Savants is a good idea. I mean, sometimes, Alesia the Healer Hench is a more appealing alternative--and that's saying a lot when you'd prefer to have Alesia over a human Ranger/Monk. I don't know why I'm posting this...probably cause I'm pissed in general, eh? Whatever the reason, I'd like to announce that my Necromancer/Warrior, Jade Ashland, hit level 20 a few days ago, and I just nabbed my first post-20 skill point. AND...Desi, Richard Chambers (Rhadagast, I think?) accompanied me on the Sanctum Cay mission earlier and I'm now exploring the Crystal Desert and holy jebus, it's schway. Level 22 Desert Hydras...all new areas, all new enemies to kill...it's glorious. I was really surprised with which the relative ease that Desbreko, Warlock and I completed Elona's Reach (one of the Pre-Ascension missions, I think). I'd heard absolutely horrible things about it, but we only attempted about 7 times (come to think of it...I think we nailed it on our 7th try...go lucky 7 if we did) and only spent about 2 or 3 hours on it, if that. I was expecting hell on earth from whiners in Guild Wars forums...but how they managed to spend 8 hours on the mission is beyond me. A good Necromancer works wonders, for sure. It was very cool--and a neat experience going all Necro, actually. Before that point, I pretended I was a Warrior. XD

[quote name='RX78']Yuu could say im heavily influenced by 80s punk, its what i listen to the most. It probably explains the mohawks. :D [/quote] And it also explains why I'm catching hints of Clockwork Orange in some of your pieces, notably the riot piece. Add in some more eyeliner, a bowler hat, and you'd have Alex DeLarge. ~_^

Unfortunately, only Primary professions can utilize runes. Primary Mesmers--Mesmer runes. Primary Monks--Monk runes. Warriors--Warrior runes. And so on. I nabbed a Major Divine Favor rune during the Riverside Province mission, and I think I still have a Major Hammer Mastery and Major Tactics (both Warrior runes). I may keep the Divine Favor for myself (Czenzi Ormonde is primary Monk), but if anyone can use any of them, let me know.

In the hands of a fool, satire fails.

[QUOTE=Radaghast]After a two week hiatus at music camp, I am back in the Guild Wars scene. My monk Richard Chambers is almost level sixteen, but he has a bunch of unfinished quests. Something like seventeen of them. If anyone needs some help with earlier quests, give me a ring. I'll be glad to get them out of my log and collect the xp. Also, my brother deleted his character, so I have an open space to fill. What character class in the guild in need of?[/QUOTE] Mesmers. Definitely Mesmers. Desi has something like 3 or 4 Mesmer runes, plus some weapons. I've got a large handful of Mesmer runes, plus some weapons. We need Primary Mesmers...badly.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words...but what happens when the picture is a picture of a few sentences? [center][URL=http://img241.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gw4632bs.jpg][IMG]http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/9673/gw4632bs.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL] [/center] There are so many things wrong in this situation, so I figured I'd post it as some kind of suggestion. When ya'll enter Ascalon Academy, you should try to be somewhere around level 6 or 7. 5 is pushing it. Anything below 5, you're a dead man, pretty much. And these four players were in there at Level 2. So...yeah. Piece of advice: PvP generally is going to hurt if you're fresh out of the womb.

Yep. It's as easy as booting up GuildWars, logging in by entering your email and password, then click "Edit Account" at the bottom left-hand side of the screen. That'll bring you to a variety of options, one of them being "Location," "Area," "Region," something to that effect. Click that, then click the Next button. It should bring you to two checkboxes, one labeled Europe, the other labeled America. Click the America checkbox, then hit OK, or Next, or whatever it is, heh. Keep in mind, though, you can only change your region a max of [size=4][u][b]5[/b][/u][/size] times, so be careful. As far as I can tell, ANet isn't easing up on this rule, so don't do things haphazardly. ^_^ Some of what I've said here may be a bit off, because I haven't had to go into Edit Account for a while now--except when I couldn't read my CD key, so now I've got two Pre-order items. The War Pick and Chimeric Prism. Go Gamestop customer service. lol But overall, I think that's how you'd do it. EDIT: Oh, and Desi...yeah, man, that's just sick.

I've always been fond of the names Jade and Kayla.

[QUOTE=r2vq]Hm. Maybe I can be a bit more specific. According to how I understand Kant... (I could be wrong) The valley before us is a real valley. The dodgeball is real. What we see, though, is not necessarily the valley. What we beleve we see is the valley. What we actually experience is the image of the valley created by light reflections and our mind processing what our eyes take in. [u][b]1) The original valley does not enter our head[/b][/u]. What hits us, is the dodgeball. [u][b]2) What we believe, is that we feel the dodgeball. What we actually experience is the ball stimulating our nerves, sending messages to our brain.[/b][/u] Our brains tell us that we feel pain. Our brains tell us that a rubbery substance is smacking us upside the head. [u][b]3) Or if it's not fast enough, our brain will not tell us much before being knocked out. If we're knocked out, our brains tell us nothing, hence blacking out[/b][/u]. There [b]is[/b] a real dodgeball and valley involved, I do not deny that. It is really the valley in front of us. It is really a dodgeball that hits us. But, what is in our minds is a recreation of the object based on our perceptions. [u][b]4) If we do not smell the valley, we will not know its smell. If we do not taste the ball, we do not know its taste.[/b][/u] In that sense, since our mind-pictures of the objects are not whole, they are not the exact objects. What we have in our mind is not the original objects, but just what we know based on our perspective. We will [b]never[/b] know the original object, but only what the object is [b]for us[/b] since our perceptions will forever be biased.[/quote] I've underlined (and numbered) a few things that seem a bit iffy. 1) I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say with this. I'd agree that the original valley isn't entering our heads, but I'd also say that no valley is actually entering our heads when we see it...in fact, nothing is actually entering our heads when we look at things. And to say that we only believe we see the valley is going somewhere that is actually pretty dangerous, because then that can be applied to virtually anything, like we [i]only believe[/i] a freighter train is speeding along the track towards us. 2) Again, we do more than believe we feel the dodgeball, because whether or not our brains tell us anything, we're still getting hit...which means we totally feel the actual (original) dodgeball. 3) You actually misinterpreted what I meant by "knocked out." In the game of dodgeball, if you get hit by the ball, you get knocked out (eliminated from the game). That's what I mean. True, some can get knocked unconscious from a particularly powerful throw, but what I meant was something purely related to the game's rules themselves. Because if we were to adopt Kant's ideas here, someone could get hit with the dodgeball in the game and claim they're not actually eliminated, because according to Kant, what we all perceive the dodgeball to be is inaccurate because of a limited metaphysical perception. And that's a load of crap. lol. I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who wouldn't lay a beatdown on someone playing Kant's argument in a game of dodgeball. 4) I don't see what taste has to do with sight. And likewise, I don't see what touch has to do with sound. What you're saying here is that if we don't lick something with our tongue, we won't know its taste. Fair enough. If we don't smell something with our nose, we won't know what it smells like. Fair enough. If we don't taste, we don't know what it tastes like. If we don't smell, we don't know what it smells like. By that same logic, if we don't see something, we don't know what it looks like. If we don't hear something, we don't know what it sounds like. Two things about that. One, we see something, we do know what it looks like, which makes the whole argument of "we don't know the object in its original state" kind of silly, because if we see an object, we know what it looks like, and if our perceptions and physical experiences with that object only confirm what we see it to be...why say we aren't actually seeing the original object? Two, regarding the "not hearing something" idea, I'd refer to the tree falling in the woods. Even though we're not there to hear the tree actually falling, we know what kind of sound it makes, for a variety of reasons: we've heard trees falling before; we know that air molecules react to moving objects the same way regardless of what perceivers are around to witness the event; we know that bashing two objects together is going to make a sound--noise, rather. "Sound" indicates meaning. What that sound issue ultimately boils down to is the only reason we don't fully experience something is not due to a faulty metaphysical perception; it's due to a physical perspective. We don't hear the tree falling because we're physically not there. We don't know what's on the other side of the hill in the valley because we're physically not there. We don't know what may be underneath the grass on that hill because we're physically not there. We can doubt whether or not we're seeing (and experiencing) things accurately all we want, but what everything ultimately comes down to is if we're not actually experiencing the original anything...our experiences would be (and would have been) radically different. But things are remaining largely constant. Baseball bats to the groin hurt. Snowfalls and blizzards are cold. People think they see oases in deserts due to heat mirages. Badly-cooked shrimp is stringy as hell. The sun is bright. Nighttime is dark. Certain pencils leave traces of lead that smear like nothing else. And nearly everyone experiences these things. Is that a sign of everyone not experiencing those events in their full "original-ness"? Or is that a sign of what we experience is actually what things are? Kant's an interesting guy, for sure, and surely, the ideas of faulty metaphysical perceptions are interesting, but they're based purely on theory, and the brief real-world examples one introduces to support that theory are weak to begin with, because [i]they[/i] all point much more strongly to the idea that what we experience/perceive is actually what is going on (the "original-ness"). [quote]Everybody has their own perspective. But even if we could see the valley from every perspective, our minds only interpret the information. This is important in metaphysics because before Kant proclaimed this (transcendental idealism ---- transcendental not transcendential) everybody -including Descartes and Hume- treated natural and universal truths as if attainable through reason or a combination of reason and empirical observation. Kant's transcendental idealism created a copernican revolution in philosophy and metaphysics.[/quote] I don't think you quite understand what I said. We were talking about the distorted image one sees as one views a valley from a hill. You were saying that our perception of that valley is limited because of something along the lines of metaphysical limitations of our perceptions. I'm saying that's not the case, because our perception of a table drastically changes if we sit on top of it rather than underneath it. How we view something (whether that something be a valley, a table, a midget, etc) is related to a matter of physical perspective...where we are physically standing/sitting/etc. From whatever physical perspective, our minds are interpreting the information, yes. But the differences we see are not a result of any flawed perception. The differences we see are results of a different perspective. Like I said above, Kant was a smart guy. I'm not about to debate that. But you have to consider just what else he was saying. I mean, he's the same guy who adamantly declared everyone should tell the truth all the time, no matter what. I tend to take most of what he says with a rather large grain of salt.

I say we bust him and the other prisoners out.

[quote name='ChibiHorsewoman][color=darkviolet'] Hey I have you beat by $.40. Okay so my job isn't permanent. But I do is stand and make stuff to go in other stuff. And if I work saturdays I make $10.50 an hour. Honestly aside from the standing the hardest part of this job is trying to avoid one of my male co-workers.[/color][/quote] And I've got you beat by $.40 + $7.50. ~_^ I'm do medical transcription right now, and actually just celebrated my 3-year anniversary. I was "hired" back in June 2002. The job has treated me well so far. The work isn't physically tiresome (apart from minor carpal tunnel syndrome already starting, but I type a lot anyway), and the pay is good ($15/hour? I'd say so.). I don't deal with customers or anything, so that's a plus. Downsides...I work at home, so I need to discipline myself to "stay in the chair." Some of the doctors in Radiology don't realize that holding the microphone up to their chest is bad. Some of them condense entire paragraphs into syllables. But all in all, the job is kick-***.

I'm not sure if many remember an older PSX game called MDK, but it was fun as hell. Shiny Entertainment developed it, so it was rife with Earthworm Jim-esque sarcasm and humor. The plot is fairly standard stuff: alien invasion. But the plot is really just there to provide a means to an end, that end being a really fun and original sci-fi romp through the sick and twisted minds of Shiny. I remember the gameplay quite fondly, because at the time, it was just so there, and so varied. I mean, it was almost like action-oriented puzzle solving. In fact, each "area" was pretty much its own problem. You're confronted with an enemy soldier on the other side of this massive, impenetrable glass wall, and in order to proceed, have to...ah...gooify the enemy soldier, and destroy the platform they're standing on, which then would set off a chain reaction that would destroy the glass wall. None of your "conventional" ("conventional" being futuristic grenades, assault cannon grafted onto your arm, heh) weapons work, but why not try the mortar sniper rifle you just picked up? It's very schway. Another really nice part to the game is the...suit, I guess, that you wear. Your character is outfitted with this techno-suit that allows you to catch wind currents and glide around. The "wings" are designed really well, because they don't look anything like any regular type of wings you'd see in any other game, lol. They're literally just bands of...whatever, heh, that pop out when you hold the button. To add to the sheer cool factor of it, you can fire the assault cannon (or any weapon, I think) while you're gliding down, so you literally rain death down upon your enemies. The game's camera is really intelligent, too. It's more or less an over-the-shoulder shot during those sequences, and it works really well. And in general, I found the camera to be very effective. It always behaved intelligently; I never saw any of the issues that more recent releases suffer from (i.e., blinding you in a corner by zooming in on your character's forehead--Ninja Gaiden, I'm looking at you). When you happen to get backed up against a corner, which happens fairly often, hehe, Kurt (the main character) simply becomes transparent. It's such a simple gameplay mechanic but it works perfectly. The art direction of the game is stunning, too, as to be expected from the guys who brought us Earthworm Jim (which is a fantastic game...go play it...and play it loud). Even the opening sequence to each level is exhilirating. Each level is one of the alien ships--rather, the surface of it. Each ship is basically a huge mining platform that's stripping away the Earth's resources. Now, since it's hovering a few miles above the surface, a ladder isn't exactly going to work. In order to get on there, you get dropped and free-fall/glide the way down to the landing zone, and have total control over this. No CG, no FMV. You're playing the intro. And all during your descent, there are anti-aircraft alien cannons firing at you, flying aliens zooming up at you (rather, you're zooming down at them XD), and various power-ups and such heading your way. It's spectacular, it really is. As if this weren't enough, your support team consists of a man who is really nothing more than a mad scientist, and a six-legged dog named Max. They both make snide comments to and about you, and their banter is written very well, and acted very well. MDK is a really nice game. It's one of those gems that you rarely get to see these days, and it's a shame. Shiny is pretty much screwed at this point, especially after the stinker of Enter the Matrix, but back in the mid to early 90s, they were top-notch, and MDK is a testament to that, I think. It's a fun, quirky, and uber-funky game. Good stuff. I'm very likely going to go searching for it in a few days...definitely one of the more innovative uses of gameplay that I've seen. Anyone else? Remember it? Played it?

Okay, I'm listing what I've picked up so far. This may violate OB's rules...but I have a feeling it's okay for the purposes of this thread. If not...*offers his bum for some good ole fashioned Mod-Rodding* [center][u][b]ELEMENTALIST[/b][/u]: [/center] Water Wand Cold damage 8-13 (req. 3 Water Magic) [strike]Fire Wand Fire damage 8-14 (req. 4 Fire Magic)[/strike] Earth Wand Earth damage 6-10 (req. 2 Earth Magic) [center][u][b]NECROMANCER[/b][/u]: [/center] Truncheon Dark damage 7-10 (req. 2 Blood Magic) Deadly Cesta Cold damage 9-16 (req. 8 Death Magic) [strike][b][color=Purple]Grim Cesta[/color][/b] Energy +9 (requires 7 Death Magic) [b][color=Purple] Health +21[/color][/b] (while enchanted)[/strike] [center][u][b]WARRIOR[/b][/u]: [/center] [color=RoyalBlue] [b]Ornate Buckler[/b][/color] Armor 10 (req. 6 Tactics) [color=RoyalBlue][b]Armor +4[/b][/color] (vs. blunt attacks) [center][u][b]MESMER[/b][/u]: [/center] [b][color=RoyalBlue]Mesmer Rune of Minor Inspiration -- [color=black]Make that two Minor Inspiration Runes. Picked another up about 20 minutes ago.[/color][/color][/b] Upgrade Component [color=RoyalBlue][b]Improves Inspiration Magic[/b][/color] [b][color=RoyalBlue]Jeweled Staff[/color][/b] Energy +7 Chaos damage 7-12 (req. 7 Illusion Magic) [color=RoyalBlue][b]Quick Recovery from Bleeding[/b][/color] [center][u][b]The above list requires serious revision. Will re-post in a later post at a later date.[/b][/u] [/center]