Desbreko

[color=#4B0082]I, too, found the remote sound effects to be really annoying until I turned down the speaker's volume. Midna's laugh, especially. But with it quieter I don't mind it anymore. Anyway, I just beat the game. The end dungeon was really great, possibly even my favorite in the game, for one simple reason: There's lots of enemies. It's the only area of the game, aside from the Cave of Ordeals, where the combat plays as large a role as the puzzles. And the puzzles that are there (a couple of which were pretty clever) make use of nearly all your items, which was cool. I really wish all of the game's dungeons had been balanced more like it. The end fight was great as well, though I found a couple annoyances. First, [spoiler]when you change to wolf form to fight Ganon, the game seems way too picky about making you charge and "lock horns." (Link doesn't have horns, but you know what I mean.) It took me five tries to get it to work even though I'd hold A as soon as the prompt appeared on screen. I have no idea why it worked the fifth time, either.[/spoiler] Second, [spoiler]when you're dueling Ganondorf in the final phase of the fight, he's invulnerable exept during designated openings after certain attacks of his. One time when he jumped I dodged his first slash as he landed and rolled around behind him to use a Back Slash before he could start his spin attack. I pulled it off perfectly; my sword went right through the back of his neck. But he's invincible all through that attack sequence, so I was then hit by his spin attack even though I managed to dodge and counter-attack, which is just not right.[/spoiler] In the end, Twilight Princess turned out to be my favorite of the 3D Zeldas even though it suffers from a lot of the same problems as the others. Lack of significant enemies in all but the final dungeon and overall difficulty are the two big things, as well as the "stun and slash" boss syndrome that I complain about so much. It's very much a bigger and better Ocarina of Time, improving on nearly every aspect of that game while also fixing the problems with TWW's combat system. TP isn't quite what I had hoped for, but it came pretty close and I'm happy that it's at least made improvements in the 3D games' lacking areas. Now, the long wait for Wii Zelda. . . .[/color]

[QUOTE=Hanabishi Recca]Remember now, you can do your daily work and still live like its your last, ya? You can always live likes it your last, for example, you can always be happy or try to make up with people quickly. Because you know, there is no telling when you or anyone else is going to die. We could go anytime. I mean, it works for me. I always think about it. What if this was my last day? Would I go and have fun or sit here and be depressed? Its easy to tell which one I would pick. Basically, I think that its easy to not become depressed. All you have to do is stay happy. Of course other people have other ways of being happy and expressing it. I don't always sound happy, but its probably because I'm tierd. *laughs* Dae[/QUOTE][color=#4B0082]Yeah, I know what you mean. But the expression, "live every day like it's your last," really isn't an accurate desciption of what you're talking about. There's a big difference between simply not putting things off and actually living like you're going to die tomorrow. When you don't put things off you still care about what's going to happen in the future, but if you truly expect to die within a day anything that will happen in the future is irrelevant, which changes your priorities and thus your behavior. I've never liked the expression because of that.[/color]

[quote name='Hanabishi Recca']Why not live every day like its your last?[/quote][color=#4B0082]That's a nice sentiment but it doesn't actually work in practice. Who would bother going to work/school on the last day of their life? Anyway, first things first: I would beat Zelda: Twilight Princess since I've been going slow and I still have the final dungeon to complete. There's no way I'm going out with a Zelda game incomplete. If I left that undone I'd probably have to come back and haunt something out of spite. Second, I'd visit OB one last time to resign from my position. Disappearing without any notice whatsoever to leave people wondering is just rude. Though whether or not I would tell people that I was going to die would probably depend on my mood. Most likely, though, I wouldn't want to upset people. Third, I think I'd relax with a cup of coffee, reflect on things, and generally just screw around. I imagine that when you know you only have a day to live a lot of stuff would seem rather pointless. Most likely I would just do whatever seemed to be most enjoyable at the time. Then I'd fade away and wouldn't care anymore.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]I've been watching Cardcaptor Sakura (the subtitled version of course) and I'm currently I'm up to episode 49, so I'm just starting on the second story arc. When I first started watching the series, after stumbling on an AMV and then the first episode on YouTube, I didn't expect to like it near as much as I do. It seemed really cheesy at first but it had a certain charm that kept me watching. Sakura is, of course, incredibly cute. But, more than that, I really enjoy the range of thought and emotion that the series displays through facial expressions and body language. Plenty of series have made me laugh because of the art but CCS does it a lot more often. Even if the dialogue isn't expecially funny, the characters' reactions are always great. The story isn't half bad when things actually start happening, either. I like the way you get to see a little more and a little more of Sakura's dream all through the first story arc. Though the two series are completely different, it reminded me of Noir and Mireille's flashback, which I also really enjoyed. The plot wasn't terribly complex or hard to predict but piecing things together bit by bit at least kept it interesting.[/color]

[img]http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/342/jonathonnu1.jpg[/img] [color=#4B0082][b]Name:[/b] Jonathon[/color]

[quote name='Aaryanna][COLOR=Red']Well all I have to say about pickup lines is that they guy in question would have to be pretty damn cute for me to overlook it.[/COLOR][/quote][color=#4B0082]Hey baby, wanna ban all members?[/color]

[color=#4B0082]I'm curious about what you mean by less degrees of freedom in TP, since I didn't notice much of a change from TWW in the gameplay mechanics, other than the obvious addition of horseback combat and other stuff that just wasn't in TWW. The game does suffer from the problem of leading you around to each area of the overworld in turn without letting you explore other areas, but on the other hand, there wasn't much to explore in TWW's ocean. About sidling along walls, though, you can actually still get across narrow ledges in TP. You can't sidle, but you can hang off the edge and move across that way, so the basic functionality is still there. It's not used much, but it was a pretty pointless feature in TWW to begin with. And you can still either throw items or set them back down again, it just depends on whether you're running or not, like in OoT/MM. If you're running, it throws; if you're stationary, it sets it down. I actually like the automatic use of the shield, too. The only reason there's ever been not to keep your shield raised whenever you're not attacking is so you can use the automatic counter-attack in TWW and that was removed to make the sword techniques manual. It saves me from having to hold in R all the time while fighting. Plus, your shield being able to block stuff all the time, not just when you're actively defending, is really nice.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]Whee! It's time for volume two of Dessy's Guide to TP Sword Techniques! :catgirl: There's a really simple little trick to pulling off the shield attack every time, which is annoyingly omitted from the in-game instructions. That is, when you want to do a shield attack, flick your wrist forward [i]and downward.[/i] The motion should be made primarily with the wrist, though depending on how you're holding the nunchuk you may have to raise your arm a little so you can comfortably flick your wrist in a downward direction. I found the downward motion to be really important in getting the shield attack to work right every time. And, doing it that way, I've never had the motion mistaken for a spin attack. The spin attack, by the way, is best performed with a single side-to-side flick of the wrist. I find it more comfortable to flick left and then right but the order doesn't matter so long as you do [i]one motion in each direction.[/i] Shaking the nunchuk back and forth ten times will only make the move harder to perform; I've watched people try to do spin attacks that way and they'll sit there for five seconds before the game finally registers all the flailing as a spin attack.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]The free Internet Channel trial was just released. I'm posting this from my Wii, in fact. So far it looks okay for browsing but typing with the on-screen keyboard is really, really slow. I imagine I'm only going to use it if my PC goes down and I can't access the net from it. But hey, at least it beats cell phone browsers. It's a neat feature, but like the Forecast Channel, I really can't see why anyone would use it instead of a PC.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]Even without the Hawkeye I suppose it's not terribly difficult to hit faraway targets. I mainly just prefer aiming manually with the pointer and having to keep a steady hand. Using the Hawkeye to zoom in with a crosshair while having your aim stay steady whenever you're not moving it with the control stick is a bit too cheap for me when enemies won't shoot back from that distance. I love sniping, but sniping a target who doesn't shoot back or even move isn't much fun. :sleep:[/color]

[color=#4B0082]In places where most people would use the Hawkeye, I shoot without it. And still hit. :p Picking off the Bokoblins on top of those towers in the desert when they were still too far away to even start shooting at me was fun. I just wish they respawned so I could go back and practice my horseback archery on them. For me, the only place the Hawkeye has really been useful in combination with the bow has been that little western sequence. If you stand under the archway at the start you can pick off about half of the Bokoblins without them noticing you. But, when I did it again ([spoiler]'cause I got the last sword technique in the middle of doing it[/spoiler] and that made me start over), I found it a lot more fun to just rampage through town with my sword and standard bow. I pulled some sweet moves, darting into buildings to take out Bokoblins while others shot at me from the balconies. Now that I think about it, I think adding Bokoblin archers is one of the best things that they did for enemies in TP. Baddies with projectile weapons were sorely lacking in previous 3D Zeldas compared to the 2D games. They actually give you a reason to pull out your bow other than to hit switches or to cheap a melee enemy (Bow > Iron Knuckle without armor) to death from long range.[/color]

[quote name='Tekkaman][font=Century Gothic][size=2][color=gray]Oh yeah, I remember [color=indigo]Desbreko[/color] saying that he couldn't understand the specifics of Mafia in this thread; hopefully, he has been watching and figuring out what's been going on. It's actually very simplistic, fun and mysterious.[/color][/size'][/font][/quote][color=#4B0082]Meh? I hadn't posted in this thread (or any of the others) before this. You must be thinking of someone else.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]So, the Forecast Channel finally went live today. I downloaded the update and checked it out. It's neat and could actually be useful. . . . Except that the only cities you can view weather data from in the Sacramento Valley are Redding and Sacramento. They're on the farth north and south ends of the valley, respectively. I live about half way between them in the center of the valley. Temperature tends to vary quite a bit as you move north through the valley and get farther away from the delta. So you can see my problem here: No matter which of the two I choose, neither is going to be very accurate for where I live. It looks like anyone who doesn't live in or close to a major city pretty much just gets the shaft. I really hope they add more cities later or else I have almost no use for the feature.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]About the Cave of Ordeals, I'd recommend going through the first level when you find it, since that lets you [spoiler]get fairies anytime you want at the Ordon spring.[/spoiler] But don't bother going farther until you've beaten the seventh dungeon. Since each level past the first requires another dungeon item to progress, you can't actually complete it until you've beaten the seventh dungeon, and leaving part way through just makes you start over from the beginning.[/color]

[quote name='G/S/B Master']I remember HBomb, Adam, Raiha, Lady Katana, Desbreko...[/quote][color=#4B0082]Aww, I feel special now. . . . Oh, wait, that's just gas. :fart: I remember you hanging out in the Pokemon forum a fair bit back in the day. Welcome back. Myself, I've been here the whole time, working away on the staff. Only now I'm an admin so I get to send [strike]my lackeys[/strike] mods to deal with the annoying members. :p February 14 will mark the beginning of my sixth year on the staff. Seems kind of crazy that I've been doing this for so long.[/color]

[quote name='Desbreko][QUOTE=Papa Smurf]Don't read into the awful translation and misplaced grammar.[/QUOTE][color=#4B0082]I'm going to laugh so hard if, when TP is released, it turns out I was right.[/color][/quote][QUOTE=Treble][size=2']From what I've read, the graphics between the GCN and the Wii are identical. However, I did found out that the GCN version of the game is mirrored from the Wii version, meaning that what is left in the Wii version is right on the GCN version.[/size][/quote][color=#4B0082]Excuse me for a moment. . . . *laughs so hard*[/color]

[color=#4B0082]The original lava lamp had their name in all lower case. And now they're lavalamp without the space since I had to change it to let darkisMINE have the name. I figured it wouldn't matter since the original got banned and wouldn't be using it anyway. Maybe someone should write an Otakupedia article about this exciting turn of events. It should also be added in his article that DeadSeraphim is [strike]terrible[/strike] great at judging class.[/color]

[quote name='James][font=arial]I've been playing a little more and I'm now up to the [spoiler]Lakebed Temple[/spoiler']. How many dungeons are there in total, by the way?[/font][/quote][color=#4B0082]I'm pretty sure there are eight dungeons altogether. I've done seven so far and I have eighteen heart containers, I know I'll get at least one more from pieces of heart, and I know that the end dungeon won't give me one (since the end boss obviously won't drop a heart container). So either eight or nine dungeons, but I'm betting on eight since it's a pretty standard number for the Zelda series and the storyline seems to be leaning that way. Also, you bring up a good point which I also noticed, about the game being broken up by sequences like the wagon run from Castle Town to Kakariko Village. I really like how they added more of those kinds of events. In OoT, once you got the Master Sword and had explored nearly the entire overworld it was mainly just dungeon-to-dungeon with little else in between. The Gerudo Fortress was about the only change of pace throughout the rest of the game. In TP I find it really nice how they always give you something to do in between each dungeon. For most of them that means traversing a new area of the overworld. But even ones that don't involve much extra exploration, they always manage to put something in to keep you from getting burned out on the dungeons. My favorite so far has been the sequence between the sixth and seventh dungeons. The pseudo-western-style shoot-out was just awesome and it was made all the better by the Wii's pointer control for the bow. You've got a lot to look forward to, Jeh. :)[/color]

[quote name='Charles']Anyway, I'm still liking this game a lot. Thanks to some advice from Desbreko, I've managed to master the backslash, which was one of the only things annoying me.[/quote][color=#4B0082]It's such an awesome move once you get it down. I use it more than any other sword technique, short of the spin attack. Oh yeah, and if you want to hear the orchestrated theme from the E3 2005 trailer you can just let the game sit at the title screen for a bit. It'll go through the little opening where Link rides around Hyrule Field then go to a new trailer set to the same music. The composition of it is really similar to the E3 trailer, only it uses clips from the final game (obviously) instead of the in-development version. The difficulty. . . . Yeah, it's pretty safe to say I'm disappointed. I beat the seventh dungeon yesterday and I can say that it never gets much harder than the second dungeon. And what's really sad is that the mini-bosses are usually just as hard, if not harder, than the actual bosses. On the plus side, the boss of the seventh dungeon was a lot of fun to fight, if still really easy. It's definitely my favorite in the game so far, possibly my favorite boss out of all the 3D Zeldas. The underlying mechanics of the fight were great, they just needed to make it do two or three times as much damage and move/attack about twice as fast. I mean, seriously, getting thrown back through the air by a stream of flames and then falling a hundred feet should do more than two hearts. lol Overall, I think TP is a little easier than OoT. (Hearts in pots coming back when you leave and re-enter the room has a lot to do with making the game as easy as it is.) Thankfully I'd say it's harder than TWW, though. The removal of the auto-counter, instead making you do the moves manually, makes a big difference there. Along with not giving you triple heart drops from every other enemy. . . . But in terms of how much I'm enjoying the game, TP wins out by far over the other 3D Zeldas. There's so many improvements over OoT in terms of play control, dungeon design, storyline and character depth, combat. . . . I think TP improves on OoT in every possible way except difficulty. A lot of the same things apply to the MM/TP comparison as well, though the gap between storyline and character depth is a bit narrowed. And the TWW/TP comparison swings the other way, with the gap closer in the combat and dungeon design areas. Oh! One thing I should mention, though: Twilight Princess does have at least one hard area. It's the Cave of Ordeals and it consists of room after room of enemies with almost zero heart drops. It's a lot like the cave on Outset Island in TWW only it puts that cave's difficulty to shame. Some of the later rooms can easily bring you down from full life and kill you if you're not really, really careful. I haven't managed to beat it yet; right now I'm going around collecting all the pieces of heart that I missed and I'm going to give it another try after I'm all stocked up.[/color]

[QUOTE=DeadSeraphim][COLOR=Indigo][SIZE=1][FONT=Arial] That must be a pretty debilitating disability. That link has been there for over [i]two years[/i].[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/QUOTE][quote]DeadSeraphim: woah woah WOAH DeadSeraphim: Des DeadSeraphim: You never told me you were Link IRL DeadSeraphim: When did this happen?! Desbreko: Since Charles made that one pic of me as Link. DeadSeraphim: JESUS CHRIST DeadSeraphim: WHEN WAS THIS Desbreko: I dunno. Two, three years ago?[/quote][color=#4B0082]pwned lolz[/color]

[color=#4B0082]"We're elite beat agents, ma'am. [i][b]Are you READY?[/b][/i]"[/color]

[color=#4B0082]I looked at the source code for your page and I'm only seeing the HTML you posted used in one of the archived posts, inside the old Cloud background. (It should be outside the old background if the new one were being applied through the Post Styles setting.) Are you sure you're having it apply the new HTML? Make sure you have the "Slow but advanced customization" bubble filled on the Post Styles page rather than the "Fast and painless customization" bubble. Also, as Japan mentioned, you'll need to strip out the old HTML from your archived posts or else it will conflict with the HTML you set on the Post Styles page. I don't think this is the problem, since I couldn't even find the new HTML anywhere but that one spot in the page's source code, but it's something to remember.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]Yeah, you can just go to [url]www.guildwars.com[/url] and they have a big "Download the Client" button on the front page. No CDs required but it [i]is[/i] a huge-*** download, especially if you're on 56k. And then there's tons of crap to stream each time you load a new zone, too. Oh, and it looks like [url=http://www.gamestop.com/product.asp?product%5Fid=646706][u]GameStop[/u][/url] still has Nightfall on sale for $25, at least online. I'll keep an eye out for you in game, Neil. If you do get Nightfall I can bring one of my characters through along with you.[/color]

[color=#4B0082]I didn't do much with the system itself. But, well, whenever I get a new Zelda game . . . I sniff the cartridge/disc. Hard. Like I'm snorting crack or something. Yeah. :shifty:[/color]

[color=#4B0082][url=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=javascript+snow&btnG=Google+Search][u]Google[/u][/url] is a wonderful thing.[/color]