Messages

201

TalkBack / Re: Aonuma: Ocarina of Time

« on: November 27, 2009, 02:30:26 AM »

Sure, if people played Twilight Princess before Ocarina of Time, they probably wouldn't like it as much. But I'll bet they'd still play through the game, because it is entirely playable today.

Oddly enough, I actually did play OoT after TP.  I got the bonus GC port of OoT with WW, but had never played it (I never had it for the N64 at all); after I finished TP, I wanted more Zelda Action, so just popped OoT in right away.

My first reaction, as you might expect, was "yuck!" but that feeling pretty quickly faded and I enjoyed the game very much.

I don't agree that nothing can equal the 2d-3d change -- you even point out yourself how similar in feel the 2d and 3d games are, and I think there are many changes that could dramatically alter that while still retaining other elements of the Zelda formula.

202

TalkBack / Re: Happy Thanksgiving from NWR!

« on: November 27, 2009, 02:09:07 AM »

I am thankful for antioxidants and people returning phone calls.

People return your phone calls??

203

TalkBack / Re: Happy Thanksgiving from NWR!

« on: November 26, 2009, 07:27:30 PM »

no family here, and not in the U.S. so it's not even a holiday, but my DS was there for me!
my character got turned into a cat tho
hmm that's actually pretty cool

204

TalkBack / Re: DSi LL Launches in Japan

« on: November 23, 2009, 10:42:18 PM »

any confirmation if the screen resolution is the same or if they decided to really improve it ?

The number of pixels seems to be exactly the same, they're just bigger.

[The controls etc also seems to be pretty much exactly the same, the physical casing's just been sort of stretched to contain the bigger displays]

205

TalkBack / Re: DSi LL Launches in Japan

« on: November 23, 2009, 10:40:20 PM »

Why must Nintendo do this to the weak, loyal consumers.

Keep in mind that this isn't a replacement for the DSi, it's an alternative.  For many/most people the LL will simply be too big (it's really big compared to the ordinary DSi).

Also, I think frankly the bigger screen doesn't look as good:  besides the bigger and more obvious pixels, the LL displays I saw seemed to flicker in a way that the DSi doesn't (I'm not totally sure exactly what the problem is, but that's the sense I got).

So for someone with bad eyesight, it's a great product, but I don't think it's for everyone.

[Of course, the very fact that Nintendo is worrying about niche audiences like that gives an idea how dominant the DS is...]

206

Nintendo Gaming / Re: New Wii Zelda

« on: November 23, 2009, 10:26:51 PM »

If your going to praise Link's Awakening and Link to the Past, then Takashi Tezuka is the man you need to be praising.  Tezuka was the director of both of those games and resposible for the actual design and gameplay.  Not to mention Tezuka was a producer on both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.  It also turns out he was a producer on Wind Waker as well and a supervisor for Twilight Princess.

Hmm, so what's he doing now?

207

Nintendo Gaming / Re: New Wii Zelda

« on: November 23, 2009, 02:13:35 AM »

How come everybody calls NinGurl69 "Pro"?

208

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles

« on: November 22, 2009, 10:38:40 PM »

Female zombies also have boob physics. It's wierd, but I'm okay with it.

If there's enough, um, movement, do chunks fly off?

209

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Official Wii Sales Thread

« on: November 21, 2009, 09:38:30 AM »

I was in a video game store tonight (picked up 光の４戦士, man I'm such a tool...), and they had a big FF:CC display.  I observed two different couples where the girl was saying "hey hey let's get this [FF:CC]", and the guy was going "nerfghsdf.. PS3..asdfjlkj" (...girl keeps dragging guy back, guy keeps resisting...).

[That actually happens pretty often in my experience... it's always the girl going for the wii game, with the guy looking stressed and trying to escape...]

210

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles

« on: November 20, 2009, 09:15:13 PM »

soooooo, you basically have no control whatsoever over your character, it's just aiming the gun...?

211

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles

« on: November 20, 2009, 09:13:36 PM »

(i don't own an iPhone)

Nice to know I'm not the only one left...

212

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles

« on: November 19, 2009, 01:22:28 AM »

Well sure, but the main thing is to nip this stupid on-rails thing in the bud...
all else is irrelevant until that problem is solved.

213

Nintendo Gaming / Re: New Wii Zelda

« on: November 19, 2009, 01:20:55 AM »

Curse you all and your inability to talk about my voice work theory!

As long as midna's onscreen, Link could be yodeling broadway tunes and I probably wouldn't notice...

214

Nintendo Gaming / Re: New Wii Zelda

« on: November 19, 2009, 12:52:19 AM »

i mean, pre-change midna, of course... (i never got to the end of that game, so never saw the "change" happen)

215

Nintendo Gaming / Re: New Wii Zelda

« on: November 19, 2009, 12:50:25 AM »

m0ar midna!

216

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles

« on: November 19, 2009, 12:37:10 AM »

RE4 wasn't horrifying? It had a spooky atmosphere and zombies and all that creepy stuff.

The stuff in the "facility" (?) with the mummy-wrapped guys (which you could only hurt by multiple sniper-rifle shots on specific spots) creeped me out big time...  scary, scary...

217

General Gaming / Re: Sony getting hit Hard lately

« on: November 15, 2009, 10:45:52 PM »

That's kinda funny. I don't know why he didn't make a scene inside the store where countless people would have seen and something could have been done then.

It seems pretty likely he just made up the entire story to try and explain why he stole his stepfather's credit card and bought a PS3 with it...

218

General Gaming / Re: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Official Best Single-Player Game Ever Thread

« on: November 15, 2009, 08:23:38 PM »

One thing I found kind of funny was one of the shootouts near the end, where you're with both the female partners (in some sort of indoor "arena" like area with a sort of big statue thing in the middlee).  I was in a good safe position on top of the entry staircase, but ... I ran out of ammo (that's the problem with shooting from a safe location, it's often hard to stay stocked up)!

My two partners kept shooting like crazy (I guess they never run out), but they never, ever, seemed to kill anybody, and the bad guys just kept pouring in... do shots from your partners actually have any effect?  Or, do they wound but not kill?  I seriously waited like 30 minutes (used the bathroom, cooked a snack, ...) while my partners were just pumping endless shots into the mass of bad guys (only some of who were armored), and as far as I could tell, not a single one died.  [This is very different than Uncharted 1, where often you could just hide and let your partner kill everybody!]

[I eventually gave up and started running down into the mass of baddies to grab ammo (and then back to the hidey-hole), but it took me forever to clear that area...]

219

TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Unveils the Nintendo DSi LL/XL

« on: November 15, 2009, 08:13:35 PM »

I don't know why people are whining about this (ok, ok, I know, "people like to whine").

The "dsi phat" doesn't just have a bigger screen, the unit itself is much bigger (for obvious reasons), so there's a clear tradeoff between screen size and portability.  Many/most people who are happy with the existing DS/DSi won't want to carry around the bigger and clumsier Phat, but people with vision problems may find it a welcome alternative, and people who avoided buying the original because of the small screen may be tempted by the Phat.

So really it's an attempt to widen their audience and offer alternatives for people with different needs.  This seems quite reasonable to me...

220

TalkBack / Re: The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks to Feature New Instrument

« on: November 15, 2009, 07:15:36 PM »

I'm looking forward to this game -- the train sounds awesome, I thought the PH touch controls were absolutely brilliant, and, well, general Zelda goodness!

Yes it's all a bit formulaic, but so are 99% of other games, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game's fun or not.

The blowing does seem stupid, but it sounds like it will rare.

221

TalkBack / Re: Final Fantasy Gaiden: The Light Warriors a Breakout Hit in Japan

« on: November 15, 2009, 06:50:58 PM »

Another thing is that the artwork looks very cute, which should help sell a few copies -- I was actually thinking of picking it up (before I saw this story), simply because I saw an advertising poster for it, and thought "ooooh, cute..."

Hmm, maybe there are now no copies left for me to pick up tho...

222

General Gaming / Re: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Official Best Single-Player Game Ever Thread

« on: October 29, 2009, 08:40:29 PM »

Unrelated, if you guys were Drake, who would you take, Elena or Chloe?

Elena every time -- sweetly sarcastic and smart, pretty, and strong in a way that says "determined and capable" rather than "I've got a metal rod up my ass."  Every once in a while, a little vulnerable and girly, but never so much as to be annoying.

Elena is clearly channelling Helen Hunt if you ask me... (and this has got to be intentional -- voice, mannerisms, and appearance are a dead ringer; it was quite disconcerting seeing the making-of videos, since the actress looks nothing like HH, but sounds exactly like her)

Now that I think about it, Elena's character is amazingly well written and acted for a video game, given the usual tendency towards walking stereotypes.  The other main characters in Uncharted are not so bad (better than most games), but she seems by far the most real person in the whole game.

223

General Gaming / Re: Sony bad-mouths Nintendo yet again

« on: October 29, 2009, 02:19:29 AM »

You animal killer you.

Well what about that blacknmild guy?!  He immerses chickens in boiling oil (my god the pain must be unbearable), and then devours their ravaged corpses -- and then he dances and sings about it, as if to desecrate even their memory!

I think I'm going to be ill.

224

General Gaming / Re: Who is going to buy a PS3 Slim?

« on: October 27, 2009, 11:41:44 PM »

I just discovered the plane wreckage. I think I killed like twenty guys.

Even more fun on "crushing" difficulty! 

They seemed to have spent a lot of time fine-tuning the fight areas.  I've noticed that they designed many of them so that's often impossible to hole up and just snipe -- no matter where you hide, you usually have to watch your back too because they enemies will most definitely be trying to sneak up behind you (and even when there are such hidey holes, you usually have to leave them and expose your self at some point to advance through the fight) -- but there's enough cover so that with care and a bit of skill, you can always manage to do it.

The checkpoint frequency also seems spot on, so that when you do die, although it's annoying, you feel psyched to try again instead of screaming and tossing the ps3 out the window (games where you have to replay huge portions of the level just drive me nuts).  I think this is the main reason why I rarely felt frustrated, despite the slightly absurd wave-after-wave-of-bad-guys feel of some fights.  On "hard" and "crushing" it got more frustrating, but never became impossible.

The fact that the characters actually reflect the absurdity seems kinda cool too (lots of dialog like "where are all these guys coming from?!")

225

General Gaming / Re: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Official Best Single-Player Game Ever Thread

« on: October 23, 2009, 09:57:59 PM »

Finished Uncharted 2 a few days ago, and ... man, what a stupid ending.

Most of the game is impressive and fun tho.

(spoilers)
Not only was it way too easy (on normal difficulty), but just seemed ... abrupt, underwhelming, and almost offensive -- they destroyed freakin' Shangri-La (with a single bullet?!) as if it were a random alien base in a random xbox FPS!  And afterwards, the characters don't even seem to have noticed, it's just a few (very lame) jokes and fini; it was like the ending to an episode of Scooby-Doo, only more distasteful.

It seems kinda clear they ran out of time and just tacked on the ending.