lobotomy42

You win! (for using the phrase "union or intersection")

I think it'll be fine. Really, of all the things to like about Fallout, was the combat system the best? Really? The article I assume you read made me cautiously optimistic. Yeah, there's still lots of room to screw up, but I'm more worried they'll screw up the style and humor than any new-fangled gameplay. They refined the third person view, and are keeping Karma and Special and lots of choices, so I think it'll all be good. Stop panicking! Really!

I have no time for video games anymore! What's up with that? The game I've been working on for like the past six months is Metroid Prime 2. I have played NOTHING ELSE. And now I'm stuck on this bloody Quadraxis, kicking myself because it's like a 20 minute boss fight, and dying at the end of it sucks, and I still haven't played Okami which I bought in December or *either* Half Life game which I've been meaning to play since the dawn of time. *sigh* Work sucks! Maybe this weekend is video game weekend... (Well, ok, I did beat Cat Dart Golf at 10 under par earlier today. But if you can beat the entire game in ten minutes, it doesn't count.)

I know, it's awful, isn't it? But until a few months ago, you had never played Ocarina of Time, so watch it Say it....Say it!

Ha! Hahahaha! I beat you, Metroid Prime 2! I beat you beat you beat you! Ok, admittedly, I *did* use a FAQ to figure out how to fight the various final bosses...but still! I am the one who pressed the buttons with the right combination of manual dexterity and strategic timing such that the villains onscreen met their demise! Hahahaha! Alright, now onto...Okami? Or should I finally play the Half-Life games everyone tells me are so good...

This happens to me all the time...which is why *this* time, I'm so determined to finish! It took me, using the above system, about 3 years to finish the first Metroid and Wind Waker. (And I've still never finished Ocarina.) With the "blow straight through it" method, it's taken me 5 months to get "almost done" with Metroid Prime 2. Dammit, that still sounds pathetic.

My job is fine...it's just the time it takes out of my gaming schedule that I mind!

Man, I am totally psyched for this. I don't usually like RTS games, but I *love* Blizzard's sense of aesthetics and I really, really love Starcraft....so yeah! Also, it's not "tough guys in space" it's "rednecks in space" which makes the whole thing work. The marines are less an emulation of every video game army-guy ever and more a parody of every video game army-guy ever. And it doesn't matter, because the Zerg will kill all your asses anyway!

Also, Cat Dart Golf is awesome.

This is what is known as a "Catch 22"

That's something Nintendo's never been clear on.

Yeah, Minish Cap was pretty good. I never finished it, because I was playing a borrowed copy from a friend. But I got about 3/4 of the way through, and I enjoyed it. I really liked how they gave all these weird items like "Thing that flips over things upside down" instead of the more traditional Zelda items.

Woot! That's a much shorter gap between 2 and 3 than between 1 and 2, which is always a good thing.

I've been playing Prime 2 lately, and I must say I've been pleasantly surprised. Although I enjoyed the first Metroid Prime, I wasn't blown away by it. It was a decent translation of Super Metroid into 3D, but not much more than that. Prime 2 uses the same basic mechanics and setup...but just adds a whole new shiny layer of polish to the experience. The art direction especially is greatly improved. The game's major areas, instead of being neatly divided into "Ice World," "Fire World," "Desert World," etc. like the first game, blend into each other nicely. You get a much better impression that all these little rooms make up a cohesive planet as certain pieces of architecture crop up again and again. The Aether ( a "dark world" mirror a la Link to the Past ) is also designed and implemented well enough to make the player truly want to avoid going there. It's dark, so difficult to see, you constantly have your health drained, and there are monsters everywhere! There's also lots of little tweaks and adjustments that, minor by themselves, go a long way to making the whole experience more immersing. A few specific items (dead bodies, mostly) appear to have some physics code attached to them. Descriptions of "item container" objects are moderately clever: "This plant grows around useful items, containing them." Sparse voice acting is used, most notably as Samus' suit. The enemy design seems more geared directly to the control scheme, as well - multiple enemies have the ability to dissolve and reform a few feet away, breaking the L-button's target lock. The graphics pale compared to other shooters released around the same time, but manage to still look good, thanks to the aforementioned solid art direction and thick layer of polish. It's fun, and it's Metroid. Nothing revolutionary, but a nice evolution nonetheless. Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm bringing this game up. I haven't finished it yet, and I just started playing it on a whim. It's pretty cheap now, if you want to go find it and entertain your Wii with something while you wait for Super Paper Mario to come out.

Kinda low, because I'm dirt poor, and the games I *really* want aren't coming out right now. Still, there are exciting things on the horizon, so a 4.

Hardcore Zelda fans tend not to like it, because it differs significantly in style and tone from most of the other console Zelda titles. But I, and many others, like it for this very reason. It was the first Zelda directed by Aonuma he's clearly experimenting with the formula. Although it uses essentially the Ocarina engine, it has a completely different feel and art design. In fact, when most people watch or play the first twenty minutes, they go "WTF? Is this Zelda on LSD?" But, frankly, the game is awesome, and almost assuredly the most creative Zelda game, ever. So I say, go for it.

Yeah, I definitely went off a little, didn't I? Well, all I can say is "Whoops!" and slowly back out of the room with my tail between my legs.

Wait, what? You mean the "Here's my pet peeve about America/Canada/Economics/Politics/Big People/Small People/Smart People/Dumb People/Religion/Atheists/Roads/Frogs/Dairy Queen/Marmalade/Sub-zero Temperatures/Art, and my big stupid idea on how to fix it" type of book? The "Here's some anecdote about George Washington/Napoleon/China/The Sun/Frogs/Marmalade/Kabuki Theater/Solipsism that I will stretch out across 300 pages even though I have a grand total of 2 sentences of noteworthy insight about the topic" kind of book? The kind that tell you basically what you already know, but you read anyway because you love to hear your own opinions re-affirmed? The ones on the NY Times bestseller list and in the windows of Barnes & Nobles? Or did you mean "the classic" non-fiction, a la Euclid, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Confucius, Hegel, Rousseau, Newton, etc.?* Either way, I would argue fiction usually turns out to be more important than non-fiction. Even among the "classics," however you define them, I would bet there's more fiction than non-fiction. We have all (I hope) read Shakespeare and at least heard of Don Quixote, The Inferno, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Candide, etc. How many straight political writings are that familiar? Sure, there's a few, but I maintain that by and large the books/movies/plays that have the most impact and last the longest are fiction. Even when an author *does* want to write about specific "non-fiction" type material, fiction is more likely to entice and demonstrate his point. (How many have read 1984 or Animal Farm? How many have read "Politics and the English Language?") My point here isn't to start a debate or pick on you, brkl, but merely to dispel the common idea that fiction, especially genre fiction, is somehow "not important" or less worthy to be read than a class of books that largely consists of really long essays. Essays are important and great, but so are works of fiction and pop culture (most culture was "pop culture" to someone). I just want to nip in the bud this somehow-popular idea that people that are writing directly about the real world are somehow inherently more serious-minded than those who write from their imagination. (End Rant.) And this ties into sci-fi* on the Xbox, how? Because sci-fi, in recent years, has been kinda dead. (Sci-fi films boomed in 80's, fizzled slowly in the 90's, and were shot in the head by Lord of the Rings in 2001. Books, too, are increasingly barren - most stores' sci-fi sections are filled with Star Wars, Star Trek and military-in-space knock-offs.) Less so in video games, but even there we've seen it. Although games have been a natural haven for sci-fi since forever, the previous generation was dominated by World War II, sports, and "gritty realism." The point being, anything anyone does to move a bunch of games into other genres is okay in my book. Welcomed with open arms. The more settings/genres, the better. I just want some creativity and imagination in my world, dammit. Alright, I'm done ranting for real now. *These "classics" were pulled out of my ass, just now, and as such are probably not representative of the full range of classical works. You get my point. *I use sci-fi here to refer to the setting of "aliens and lasers" and fantasy to "elves and magic wands." I know, we could get more specific and break things down into sub-genres and labels, but ultimately they're just names. So these are mine.

Eh...I'd recommend either Metroid Fusion or Metroid Zero Mission for GBA over Hunters. Hunters isn't bad, but it's a spin-off of a spin-off of actual Metroid. If you want to experience Metroid, start with one of the 2D ones. On the other hand, if you're just looking for a good 3D shooter on a handheld, then Hunters probably is the better choice.

Clearly, you didn't go around presenting profiles of characters to other characters all the time, as I did...because this often DOES trigger non-generic responses, as well as giving you additional clues as to how the characters feel about each other.

YES! Feel the Magic is amazing, and The Rub Rabbits is...well, it's the next best thing if you can't find Feel the Magic. Really short, but really fun games that are just absolutely bursting with summer lovin'. If you can find either game in stores, grab one!

Say whaaaaaa?

Well, seeing as films in recent years have veered away from sci-fi and more into fantasy, I am all for a glut of sci-fi games. Sci-fi beats "gritty army guys" any day in my book, so I am all for it. Now, there's the problem that most of these new sci-fi games seem to still have the "gritty realism" aspect attached to them still (Gears, Halo, to some extent Mass Effect and Too Human), but whatever. Still an improvement.

My impression thus far has been that it is, in fact, a good deal MORE difficult than Prime. Boss battles in an arenas where you are constantly losing health just by standing still are not picnics. Still, this seems to me to be in keeping with the Metroid spirit. The fight with Mother Brain was somewhat similar: the constant torrent of lasers and projectiles all added up to an experience that was, well, basically "you're constantly losing health so just make sure Mother Brain loses health at an even faster rate than you." I don't mind the challenge, as long as it's the game itself that is challenging, and not the controls or some stupid shit.

Alright! This thread is way old, but I finally finished Phoenix Wright: JFA, and am totally ready to talk about it! I liked it. But not nearly on the level with the first game, almost entirely for narrative reasons. Here are my complaints. Spoilers follow: My biggest problem was with the characters. The game felt like it couldn't really decide who to focus on, and as a result, no one felt like they got any serious development. Franziska seemed like she might be a major player, but was basically thrown away in the last case. Maya spent too much time elsewhere/arrested/kidnapped for anything serious to happen, despite the hints at romance with Nick. Pearl, although introduced early, vanished every single time we went to trial to be replaced with Mia. Speaking of which, Mia IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD. Now, I don't object to her presence (see what I did there?), but if she can just inhabit bodies indefinitely and hang out throughout the entire trial, then what the hell is the point of dying? In the first game, she played the Obi-Wan Kenobi role - jumping in to give Phoenix ambiguous advice only at the last second when it was absolutely critical. It seems cheap to have her just hang around all the time, especially when she's taking up space that could be used for more time with my girls Maya and Pearl. And what is it with dangling plot threads? It seems like this game is loaded with them. The Fey political infighting, the Maya-in-love-with-Nick...thing, whatever was happening between Edgeworth and Franziska, and...other things. Were they leaving things open for a sequel, or did this plot just not cohere the way the first did so brilliantly? On top of all that, the frequent spelling and grammar problems didn't raise my impression of the game much, either. However, all that being, said... This game is still EXCELLENT. In spite of the numerous problems with the writing I just mentioned, it's still heads and shoulders above the writing in most video games. This is a sequel that can completely fail to live up to the original game and still doesn't disappoint in the least. I loved it!