John

[I]"I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death."[/I] In my graphics department at school, it's a given that you're going to do an all-nighter at least on the night before the final, and probably for a few other projects too. Fortunately, that means actually [I]doing[/I] stuff in a room full of people, so there's a lot of energy to keep you awake. Class is first thing in the morning, so most people are able to ride that wave at least through their own presentations before they start shutting down. Jobless as I am, I've been staying up later and later. Night before last, I was still up at six, so I thought "screw it", and just didn't go to bed, since that would end up with me waking up at like, three or four in the afternoon, thus perpetuating the cycle. Yesterday turned out to be a busy day, so I was able to stay awake until I just crashed around nine and woke up at twelve today. I'd say my plan worked out well enough.

[quote name='Lunox'][FONT=trebuchet ms]Or she'll comment about how my iPod sucks, or something else obnoxious. I mean I'm pretty sure most of it is just because she's a music elitist. I mean the way she builds her music library is by going through Pitchfork and downloading the albums that were rated 8.0 or higher. It's sort of hilarious to see her in action, because she thinks of herself as some indie music buff but once I played The Arctic Monkeys and she had no idea who they were and promptly labeled their music as ****.[/FONT][/quote] Don't quote me on this, but I think it's hipper nowadays to hate Pitchfork than to love it. You should tell her she's on the verge of becoming severely uncool if she doesn't start ironically liking T-Pain and heavy metal.

[quote name='Botar'][COLOR=DarkGreen]So, I beat Link's Awakening for the Gameboy. The Wind Fish looks like a Indonesian wale. It made me chuckle. I also beat Pokemon Red. Got 100 Pokemon in 36 hours. I need to glitch-catch Mew.[/COLOR][/quote] Link's Awakening was the only game I had for my Gameboy back in the day, so I played it a lot. It's so great. I'm also playing Pokemon Red right now on my DS via flashcart, and that's close enough to playing on an actual Gameboy for me. I'm enjoying it, but I'm also really compulsive about actually using every pokemon I get, so I haven't been catching at a huge rate. And actually, I think I'm still in the casino right now, grinding away for my porygon.

[quote name='Allamorph'][FONT=Arial]Classic rock stations, girlio.[/FONT][/quote] Yeah, that's what you turn to when you don't want to hear the same ten artists over and over.

Game promises tend not to faze me anymore (except Scribblenauts, which has fully suckered me in). I expect a pretty fun game, like BioWare always puts out.

[quote name='Korey'][FONT=Franklin Gothic Medium]I sure hope this is sarcasm D:[/FONT][/quote] You included probably the most famous gay sitcom on TV in a list of archetypal man-woman love stories. You have to admit it's at least a little funny. :whoops:

[quote name='Korey'][FONT=Franklin Gothic Medium]Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Will and Grace, Dharma and Greg...etc etc.[/FONT][/quote][IMG]http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/8296/imlollinoverhere.jpg[/IMG]

[quote name='chibi-master']Makes me happy whenever I see a guy get hit where the sun don't shine with a baseball bat, or hammer, or my heavy boot. :catgirl:[/quote] Uh uh, we've had that discussion here before. A hit to the nads is worse than your period. I will not yield on that.

Lol!

[quote name='Botar'][COLOR=DarkGreen]I'm talking about a profession that would be a good job, not a pain-as-day-statment. I got fired from my manager job at Bob Evans about a month ago, i've been living with my girl for a wile now and I need a job, not a smart-alik remark.[/COLOR][/quote] English teacher.

[quote name='Vicky'][SIZE=1]'Feeding kids meat is child abuse.' Bit** slapping your child in the face with a big juicy steak repeatedly is child abuse. I love my meat.[/SIZE][/quote]Untrue. I am absolutely confident I would be a better, more disciplined, more savory-tasting person today if my parents had done that to me growing up.

[quote name='Nerdsy'][COLOR=deeppink]I think it might be a beginner's guitar for kids?[/COLOR][/quote] Is it a 3/4 size? Because if so, your hipster cred just shot through the roof. (But prepare for it to start falling again when you actually learn how to play.)

I think a lot of tattoos look great, like the mostly-black ones scattered around the arms and sternum area Taperson posted and [COLOR=Black][U][URL="http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/2072/kingdomh.jpg"]here[/URL][/U][/COLOR] as well (not to say this look is limited to women, that's just the picture that came to mind). The color and texture works well on that part of the body, I think. Koi sleeves are cool too, though pretty unoriginal. But it just baffles me why anyone would want to get something that permanent put on their skin, regardless of how cool it looks. How naive must one be to think that they'll always have the same tastes and will want something like that for the rest of their life? I know for a fact that there's simply no tattoo I could get that I wouldn't want to change eventually. I'm not going to trap myself stylistically like that. Also, what's up with so many people getting such generic tattoos? I said before that I can deal with some unoriginal stuff, but most of it is just inexcusable. Tribal tats? Who in their right mind wants a tribal tat in the year 2009?

Also, you might beware of upscaled mp3s. There are people who think converting a low-quality mp3 into a high-quality one will make it sound better, so you'll sometimes end up finding high-bitrate files that sound awful, and that'll be the reason.

AAC is Apple's proprietary format. iTunes should have an option for you to change what format it rips your music into somewhere in the settings. I think you can set it to rip mp3s up to 192kbps, and that should be high-resolution enough for you, unless you've got a decent pair of headphones/speakers and have an ear for audio quality. When you set that, go back into your library and right-click on your song. There should be an option that says something like "Convert file to mp3". I'm not certain that this works with songs downloaded from iTunes, but it should. Unless you plan on venturing into the expensive world of high-quality audio, I personally don't think there's any reason to use any file but mp3. It's far and away the most popular and well-supported, and the quality and compression are more than good enough for your average listener. [quote name='Korey'][FONT=Franklin Gothic Medium]But as far as quality goes, MP4's are the best quality of audio file that I've found. MP3's are nice, but sometimes when I download them, they end up pretty crappy. Not so with MP4's. So any song that you have in MP3 format can be converted to AAC (m4p) format and you'll actually hear the difference in quality.[/FONT][/quote] I don't think so, Tim. mp3s can come at any quality up to 320kbps, I think, and that's beyond the capacity for most human ears to tell a difference. And converting a file from one format to another [B]absolutely cannot[/B] increase fidelity; it can only keep it the same or decrease it. It's just like converting a bitmap image into a high-quality PNG and expecting it to look better because of it.

Is that so, Korey? [YOUTUBE]eX4MdXF3OWI[/YOUTUBE] [YOUTUBE]gti_D7jx7cM[/YOUTUBE] [YOUTUBE]0EuzC_eOdAE[/YOUTUBE] [YOUTUBE]nUmLvFl_HG0[/YOUTUBE] [YOUTUBE]NgWn7zbgxZ4[/YOUTUBE] [YOUTUBE]EdzLFNELeCI[/YOUTUBE]

Reading articles is for squares, the cool kids all write uninformed posts. :bdance:

[quote name='Drizzt Do'urden']I'm sort've thinking John cheated and just went to IGN and copied all those DS games...[/quote] Or not.

[B]Trackmania DS:[/B]One of the only two racing games you need for the DS. And if you think you don't need any, then you haven't played these. [B]Mario Kart DS:[/B] The other racing game you need. [B]Geometry Wars Galaxies:[/B] It may seem like a tired, "retro" shoot-'em-up if you're cynical or something, but this game has [I]the[/I] best use of combined button and stylus gameplay I've played on the DS. It was one of the first DS games I ever bought, and it simply never gets old. I've gotten more of my money's worth out of this baby than any other game I have for the system. Just make sure you get a screen protector for the touchscreen, because you'll be scratchin' that mofo up something fierce. [B]Advance Wars:[/B] There are two Advance Wars for the DS, [B]Dual Strike[/B] and [B]Days of Ruin[/B]. I've been playing through the former and haven't gotten to the latter yet. It's a really fun tactical game where young children squander the lives of their loyal troops for recreational purposes. [B]Animal Crossing: Wild World:[/B] I never really played it that much, but everyone frickin' loves it. [B]Castlevania:[/B] Two Castlevania games on the DS, [B]Dawn of Sorrow[/B] and [B]Portrait of Ruin[/B]. The former is the only Castlevania I've ever played, and the things I hated about it--grinding and overwhelmingly bad anime characters--nearly made me quit before beating it, despite all the fun I was otherwise having. Haven't given Portrait a chance because of this. I assume you're not a grump like me and can get past that stuff, so you'll love it wholesale. [B]Contact:[/B] An RPG that I've only played a little of. It in no way copies Earthbound in style, but it's clearly influenced by it. The premise is pretty charming and hinges on a severly broken fourth wall. People say the gameplay gets repetitive. You decide. [B]Lock's Quest:[/B] Sort of a tower defense type game, and another one I've spent little time with. Not to say it wasn't fun and inventive, but I've been busy with other games. It's still good. [B]Scribblenauts:[/B] From the makers of Lock's Quest. It isn't out yet, but keep your eye on the release date. It seems most people didn't know about it before E3 this year, but I suspect it'll be a huge hit, especially from the valuable in-game impressions journalists have given us. Basically, you write anything--ANYTHING--and it'll pop into the game for you to use in solving puzzles. [B]Rune Factory:[/B] Like Harvest Moon? Like swords? Like grinding? This is Harvest Moon with swords and grinding. It's totally awesome. Except for the grinding. The Harvest Moon and swords are great though. [B]The World Ends With You:[/B] I think I'm utterly alone here, but I could not [I]stand[/I] this game. The dialogue was so abysmal, and there was so much of it, and the ****ing game took so long to get up and running, probably because there was [I]so much dialogue in the way[/I], that I barely got into what fans of the game would call "the good stuff". It's from the Kingdom Hearts folks. Like Kingdom Hearts? Though so. You'll like this too. [B]Trauma Center:[/B] Another game that was supposed to be great but which deterred me with stupid, extraneous writing. Just don't listen to my opinions on these sorts of things, ok? [B]GTA: Chinatown Wars:[/B] Haven't played it. It's a top-down GTA that apparently bombed in sales but got pretty nice reviews, so don't be scared. Unless it's the fear of killing hookers and trafficking drugs, in which case now would be a great time to be scared. [B]Retro Game Challenge:[/B] A sort of minigame collection, but so much more than that. You'd have to play to see, really. There's more, but I'm either too lazy to list them or too lazy to go find my stack of DS games. This is good for now.

It's just a weird idea, and I think it could lead to not just lazy gamers, but lazy developers too. If a game is too difficult, a player should find one that fits their skill level. If there's simply a difficulty spike in one area of a game that's otherwise not so bad, then that's bad game design and we [I]shouldn't be encouraging it with Cop-Out Mode[/I]. I don't buy the "you don't have to use it if you don't want to" argument either. If an overpowered or otherwise broken feature is included in a game, people will use it anyway because we have an instinct to use what the developers give us, it just flat-out feels wrong if we don't (more wrong than if we do use it, that is), and we feel we shouldn't have to bear the burden of playing the game the way the developers [I]should[/I] have made it. A case in point is that a friend of mine plays Oblivion and Fallout 3. He hates the fast travel feature of the games, and says it sucks the life out of the exploration. He could just walk everywhere and ignore the fast travel, but that sparks a conflict between the part of him that wants to take the logical, efficient path to his destination and the part of him that yearns for the game to [I]make[/I] him walk, to [I]make[/I] him do something that he knows he'll be rewarded for in the end (they call that concept a "challenge", kids). This new "demo mode" thing is similar to the fast travel in that example. It's not as heavily encouraged, but the fact that it's there is an insult to good game design. And even though I know I probably wouldn't have much of a problem ignoring it, the fact that it's available is the sort of thing that nags at the back of your mind--it's the solution to a challenge, but it's not the solution you want, so you have to ignore it and [I]pretend[/I] you're being challenged when you know there's an easier, crappier way past. It isn't helping more casual players either, because it encourages them to either play games out of their league or skip sections that are out of their league. And all of the gameplay--all of the [I]challenge[/I]--that's getting skipped isn't replaced by anything. It's just less game, and I guarantee you a less fulfilling experience. Some sort of dynamic difficulty level would be a much more fitting solution to this "problem" of difficulty; something that senses when a player is doing poorly or too well and adjusts the game variables in response. But even that's not a really good idea because it would take difficulty control (very significant to game enjoyment) out of the hands of the developers. The best thing is to simply encourage good game design so problems like this don't come up in the first place. EDIT: Silpheed talked about difficulty while I was posting. Just to be clear, I think it's totally cool for games to include and players to use different difficulty levels in a game. I usually play on a game's Normal mode myself. That stuff requires developers to think about a player's needs according to their skills and adjust the gameplay accordingly. It isn't the same as making the player trim all the fat that the devs weren't competent enough to fix themselves.

Drink it in, loser!

Bleaaargh, I was going to say Spike, but I thought his ship was distinctly more red than pink. 1) David Ortiz 2) L

1) I'm gonna have to say Faye Valentine. Her ship looks sort of pinkish sometimes. 2) Shin got it, but I'll go ahead and give myself gold stars for saying that the backwards-name fifth-dimension thing was taken from Superman villain Mr. Mxyzptlk.

I already have an awesome custom title, so maybe I'll go easy on you kids. [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgrrQwLdME8"][COLOR=Silver]Here[/COLOR][/URL]'s my audition tape.

[quote name='Gavin'][SIZE=1]Knowing that I am already a terrible human being for owning Wal-Mart and several other corporations, I'm trying to decide just how evil it makes me for finding [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UenDYX26uN0&fmt=18"][I]this Youtube clip[/I][/URL] possibly the funniest thing I have seen this year.[/SIZE][/quote] That's small-time dark humor. Here's some infamous work safety PSAs that a friend and I have enjoyed immensely for quite some time now; in particular, the moment when the lady falls off the ladder and smashes into the glass display. That gets played over and over. [youtube="prevent-it.ca"]MwCyVku1HvI[/youtube]