Semjaza

[quote name='Ikillion][color=#56995e][SIZE=1][FONT=Comic Sans MS]Yet when one thinks of it there are many parallels between it and mario. Princess gets kidnapped, the hero must go save her blah blah blah.[/FONT][/SIZE'][/COLOR][/quote] That's true of probably the majority of stories on any medium out there, though. Even if we replaced "princess" with someone else that needs saving. It's kind of just an easy thing to fall back to... but in that case, what makes them so insanely different are the characters and just the universe they inhabit. So, basically, I don't think it'd be much of an issue.

Frankly, I'm surprised anyone finds any of the games in this series to be "scary". There's kind of a difference between feeling anxiety and fear as opposed to being surprised when some thing jumps up suddenly... and, really, the latter is about all RE has ever really offered. There was only one thing in the entire series I thought was genuinely creepy... that was the story of that girl that was added to the RE remake on the Gamecube. Mostly the motivations of those involved, I suppose.

I think of David McCormack, largely.

I think the show is pretty stupid. However, isn't it, you know, the responsibility of the parents complaining to attempt to stop their apparently extremely impressionable children from watching the show in the first place?

I think what they've done is pretty interesting and I certainly commend them for it. At the same time, I've never personally really got that super into Goldeneye's multiplayer because I always had heavy access to PC shooters that I felt were a bit more entertaining on that end. To each their own with that. It's still cool, either way. I'm kind of surprised anyone has bothered to do this much with it, since it would probably be easier to model these levels in another FPS game for fun.

I don't think PW:AA will become super rare again, but it will definitely become uncommon. On the plus side, there's another game in the series coming out here... If you absolutely cannot wait, the import actually has a full English option.

The only stuff I find myself ordering are whisky and straight vodka. I prefer the whisky. Maker's Mark is good. I drink very, very rarely though. It's not really something I care to do by myself or out in a group. It's not really my thing... maybe once every several weeks, if even that.

I have those Ocarina of Time action figures. You got them by pre-ordering at some places. I have a lot of Megami Tensei related stuff. It's a video game series from Namco and later Atlus. Most of it is Japanese only, so you're stuck importing most of the things of note. Admittedly, most of this is because I run what's one of the biggest English Megaten related sites on the internet:[URL]http://www.digitaldevildb.com[/URL] I kind of have to list all of them together for the scope to be understood. I don't know that any one of these by itself is super geeky. Altogether, yeah. I have three sets of One Coin figures related to the series. The sets have like 6 or 7 characters in them each and they're not always very cheap. I don't do much with them, although the Jack Frost one is cute. I have a five art books, all of which involve almost soley Kazuma Kaneko, who does most of the art for the franchise. Three of them are just collections of enemies and characters. Another one is full of full page art of his, random sketches and a lot of weird photos. The last one is hard cover and involves some of his first art for the series. All of them are fully color and pretty large. All of them are out of print and relatively hard to find, although that hardcover book I mentioned is the most recent and thus most likely to pop up somewhere. I have three fully Japanese guide books: Persona 3, Persona World Guidebook and the Devil Summoner World Guide book. The latter two are not very common and are hard to find in the quality I have them in. I have a full box of Devil Children TCG cards. There's like 30 packs of cards in there. I also have another full box of packs of collectors Megami Tensei cards that are made of plastic. Games wise I have a bunch of random imports... Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Soul Hackers, Soul Hackers Limited Box, Shin Megami Tensei Nine, Devil Summoner, the original Famicom and Super Famicom games, etc. I only buy them if they're complete. I have a few Japanese posters used to promote the games. Some random soundtracks, preview DVDs, singles and such from Japan as well. I have random E3/game show crap related to the series as well. A lanyard with a Jack Frost emblem on it, random catalogs, official press ads (that Shinmaru sent me), ads I've pulled out of magazines. In terms of the few English things, I have perfect copies of Persona, Persona 2, Nocturne, DDS, DDS2, Devil Summoner, Maken X, both Demi-Kids games... Plus guides for Nocturne, Persona 2 and Devil Summoner as well. I'm missing Jack Bros. still. I have cels from that terrible Digital Devil anime. Some of you might have seen it. I have about six of these and a handful of drawings. They're original ones from the movie and not reproductions. The thing I probably like the most is my autographed Devil Summoner lithograph. Kazuma Kaneko signed about 250 of these at E3 2006. I have it framed on the wall. I know I'm missing some random stuff. About the only thing I don't have related to the series is clothing. This is the only sort of thing I'm this "obessive" about. I couldn't care less about anime or manga or anything else... unless they relate to Megaten, anyway. I have other hobbies, but most of them aren't really as involved.

The 360 does that really easily out of the box for literally every game, so I have to hope the PS3 will as well. It seems like a big no-brainer... particularly for racers. One nice thing is that with the 360 I can actually stream music from my PC instead of having to rip it onto the hard drive. I don't know how feasible that'd be for the PS3 (since, you know, MS makes Windows too), but it's a cool feature. It would be nice to see it on there... you save a lot of space.

Free online gaming would be a bit more exciting if most of what was coming out around launch was even capable of utilizing it. That will be a big deal next year, though.

They just released God Hand too, which is getting some polarizing reviews. Some seem to "get it" and others just think it's terrible. It seems to be something beat 'em up fans would love, though, from what I've read. In some senses, I don't know that this is that terrible. It's sad, but I'm willing to bet Inaba and friends will be opening their own studio sooner rather than later. They were given the option to join the main Capcom arm and declined, which I'd be willing to bet someone in their shoes wouldn't do unless they had other promising prospects.

I read the other day about some lady trying to ban the book in some southern state in the US, which I assume the opening post was referring to. Some specific town. It's funny because previously they decided to not spend any money on books in Spanish for their library because it might "help" illegal immigrants in some remote capacity. It was later shot down for being anti-Hispanic, but it's kind of clear that the problem isn't the book's content as much as it's simply general intolerance. I've not understood any of this stuff anyway. Harry Potter deals with fantasy magic. It doesn't deal with Wiccan belief systems or anything else. And even if it did, I don't know that that's necessarily something government agencies (even small-town ones) should be "protecting" anyone from... last I heard the US has freedom of religion laws in place. I could be wrong. Should someone of Hindu belief be upset that there's Christian books aimed at children? I mean, where does that begin and end? I suppose that's another idea altogether.

Yeah, in Dagger's case, we're talking nearly $100 for a decent copy of the original VP. That's how much I sold mine for, anyway. I love offbeat RPGs and such, but even still I find myself thinking the game is kind of overrated in so-called "hardcore" circles. Sometimes I think a lot of it is simply thanks to its overall rarity. I've not played VP2, though. Maybe sooner or later. I guess technically the last game I bought was Dig Dug on Xbox Live... I just got it like 20 minutes ago and played a couple of games. I love old arcade games. Beyond that, however, I picked up Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner today. It just came out. I'm extremely excited about it. If anyone actually cares, I can probably post impressions for it soon. If not, I won't bother. I also picked up Capcom Classics Mini-Mix or whatever that's called. It's a GBA cart for $20 with the NES versions of Strider, Mighty Final Fight and Bionic Commando. All are excellent games, but Capcom really took a super barebones approach with it that kind of annoys me. At least it was cheap.

[quote name='RiflesAtRecess][size=1][font=arial]And also, Tony, I wasn't saying that Bloc Party were undeserving of this thread or anything like that. I just mentioned that they weren't Punk or Emo. I don't know if you were pointing your post at me or not.[/font'][/size][/quote] No. There was just a mention somewhere along the way about them being more popular than the person who first posted about them seemed to think.

Sigma is PS3 only at this point. Maybe that'll change, but I doubt it. The reasoning I read by the developers was that "there's finally a Playstation that can handle the game". Obviously they're upgrading the graphics and such as well. It's worth noting that Itagaki has nothing to do with the remake/port and seems to be concentrating on other things. Currently it still looks like Ninja Gaiden 2 will be hitting 360 at some point or another, so it's not a total loss.

With "indie" bands I think people who use the internet a lot or pay attention to the "scene" don't really understand how things translate to overall sales. Bloc Party is an example of this. Are they doing really well compared to most of their contemporaries or bands people would stuff in the same vague category? Of course. Are they comparing in sales popularity to anything major? No way. A good example of this was Art Brut. Super popular as far as "indie" kids were concerned, got great reviews, have the highest selling album of their label's history. How many albums did they sell? 10,000 or so. Bloc Party is certainly more popular, but that popularity is FAR stronger in Europe than it was int he US. They didn't even break the charts in the states. So I could see Bloc Party appearing in a thread about what some one's friends might know of. I know people who don't even know who the hell David Bowie is, so it's all pretty relative.

Yeah, it's definitely cool that it'll reach more people. I've kind of wished I could get the PC version, myself. The fact that it's the only one that can utilize user made mods is a semi-big deal for me... but my video card could never ever handle it. Compromises, I guess.

After spending time with this there's really no reason to recommend Silent Hill heavily over it. They play very similarly in most senses. Silent Hill doesn't exactly have an interesting combat system to begin with, although it's a bit less frustrating than in Rule of Rose. The problem with Silent Hill, for me, is that over the course of four games the entire thing just got kind of stale. I enjoyed the first two, but that was kind of the end of it. Rule of Rose, while kind of a darker psychological tale in the same sort of basic vein, deals with a rather different concept that I personally have enjoyed on a higher level than most similar games as of late. With most of these horror titles you kind of wind up with great gameplay or great story. They very rarely combine. Even in RE4, I cannot say I gave two shits about the convoluted nonsense spouted out over the course of the game, but the gameplay itself was awesome. With Rule of Rose, the gameplay is rather typical (and hurt by the combat), but the story and atmosphere are top notch. I've been particularly impressed by the use of music in the game. It's largely very sparse, but it builds tension really well... to an extent I don't even think many horror movies have successfully accomplished in recent years. I did notice EGM gave it bad scores. They compare it to Training Ground, which really has no comparison to this game beyond featuring a dog and a girl. The controls are not that bad, you're not really supposed to fight every last enemy, etc. In a world where people seriously think FEAR is a compelling and scary game, I have to wonder how something as well composed as Rule of Rose doesn't work for them.

Considering the PS3 is getting the game almost a year later, I have to [I]hope[/I] it would look better and have some added aspects. I own the 360 one and personally it doesn't bother me at all lol. You also have to remember that Bethesda sells content for both the 360 and PC versions of the title. It wouldn't take them much time to put up a download for that new faction.

This is somewhat older news. The only reason most people wouldn't know that is because no on really cares. It's clear Mattel isn't going to be marketing this towards the people who would buy a real, dedicated console. That's probably the best thing they can do. I don't know that it will flop, but I could see it doing well enough to jusify further releases and enough sales for small companies and Mattel itself to release for it. A lot of people simply cannot afford modern consoles and this is the only real alternative I think those people have.

I rented it the other day. I have to say that reviews led me to believe it was basically horrible, but honestly it's at least in "average" territory. I'd certainly put it up there with some of the more overrated RPGs that magically get 8s and 9s on mainstream review sites. That's not to say it's amazing or even deserves great scores, but it is decently presented. The battle system, while a bit underexplained at first and somewhat messy, is certainly more interesting than the simple pick from a menu approach. I also enjoy that you can form your own "golems" to fight alongside you... which reminds me a bit of the Shin Megami Tensei games in a sense. It's a pretty typical story, but the characters are, if nothing else, kind of goofy and therefore enjoyable. I've found the main bad guy (at least the main one in the first few hours, no idea if that changes) to be quite badass, which is always a plus. It's not bad. Considering it's the only US released Japanese RPG on the system it doesn't have much competition... and I'm certain Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata (which are all getting US releases) will beat the hell out of it. For now I do think it's adequate.

The show wasn't bad. I've been looking forward to it for a while. I felt some of the ideas behind it weren't well presented (largely the father's research), but there's tons of room to explain that more in the rest of the season. The preview afterwards for the upcoming episodes looked very promising and I think the show is just going to get a lot better. My only real complaint is when the teacher in the beginning goes on about "they say humans only use 10% of their brains". Sometimes I wonder if writers even really research things because most people should know by now that that's just a load of crap pushed by psychics and other weirdos to explain their non-existant abilities and potential.

I think it's interesting and it's definitely good to call more attention to stuff like this... but at the same time, the show itself is overly sensationalized, in my opinion. Also, at the rate they're going, they show this "special" so often that it might as well just be another show altogether. I don't even know why they bother keeping it part of Dateline at this point. How many have they done already?

More people should be interested in this. I suppose it helps that it is now scheduled for US release under the name Eternal Concerto or something to that effect. The game's concept is just really interesting to me. It's still a "save the world!" kind of RPG, but the whole Chopin angle is really unique. The entire game is basically his dream while he's on his death bed. Definitely one I'll be watching out for.

It's weird how Last.fm just must be marketed better. When they were Audioscrobbler, I didn't know anyone that ever used it. I guess they're doing something right this time around.