fuchikoma

This was how I spent my Saturday afternoon... I dumped the UMD to an ISO (ok, I lied - but I own the real UMD and an ISO of it...) Opened it up and dumped a 1 GB .CVM file from it, which is apparently a "CRI ROFS file," similar to an ISO Dumped a ton of stuff out of that, including a bunch of ADX files. Got a converter to rip those to WAV. Got a utility to show me where they're supposed to loop. Got the newest version of Audacity for good measure. Opened the songs in Audacity, viewed where the volume clipped, and it did, lots. Reduced the volume a bit, then told it to rebuild the clipping parts automatically. Selected everything from the spot indicated by the loop point finder to the end of the song, copied it, and pasted it onto the end of the song twice to lengthen it. Then faded the end out because these songs don't have ends (they get interrupted by other music in the game.) Saved an MP3. Grabbed the cover art and took a crash course in using Windows Movie Maker to put music on Youtube. ...and that's the result!

Don't know a lot about the canonical character whose theme this is based on... in fanon she seems to be regarded as a super powerful sadistic boss character type... But the more important thing is this version is by Shibayan!

I just wanted to point out - on that US score/spending chart, as I understand it, the scores are percentage change year by year, so for all we know, they could be holding solid at about 95%. Do you have stats for what kind of scores are actually being seen?

That's tragic, IMO. I really got out of fighting games after the 90s, and while I liked SF4 at first, I got out of it after a month or so (it felt to me like the AI difficulty was completely random all the time. Sometimes they couldn't lift a finger in defense, other times the 2nd level guy would counter 99% of moves on easy. It's absurd - it seemed to depend what mood the game was in.) But BB really felt well made enough to devote the time to learn it, at least short of combos. It's so cool how every character is a bit like playing a different game, yet they still all work together. It seems extremely polished and well thought out, so I'd have hoped more people would play it. Most of the other current titles... really don't draw me in. I'd probably buy the newer ones BB games if I knew anyone locally who plays or was able to join online matches more regularly.

In the Canadian system, universities can grant degrees, while colleges do certificates and diplomas, often with certain programs counting as credits in university courses with participating universities. We also have technical institutes that grant diplomas and industry tickets/certifications, though certs can be had via colleges as well. I don't really know how it all works behind the scenes in Canada, though I suspect I inspired this thread, griping the most about the cost of university... I do know that foreign students pay significantly more than Cdn. citizens. For the extremely adept, there are various scholarships that typically depend on keeping a high GPA. There are student loans to help out, but of course that just means paying the full amount of tuition plus interest. Here is an article from 2010 about rising tuition costs and averages throughout the country, and another from 2011 - like much of the world(?) rates are shooting upward rather fast. Residents of Quebec are heavily subsidized and pay extremely little for tuition. Lately students have been protesting there because there's a possibility they may have to pay as much as half as much as other parts of the country. Also, natives (Aboriginal peoples) including Metis get educational subsidies and/or grants but I'm not sure of the particulars. I knew a guy in college who technically qualified as Metis and he told me how awesome it was that his textbooks were pretty much free. There are some new grants that can be applied to for assistance for low-income families. Generally though, it comes down to paying the listed prices for tuition, enrollment, student health plans and other various fees, and a widely varying range of prices for textbooks depending on course and school - when I took Computer Systems Technology at my local college, if I remember right, textbooks ranged from about $50 (thin business writing guide) to $200-300 (500+ page current, in-depth technical texts). Also since I mentioned wanting a J.D., I should mention that one cannot even begin study for one until acquiring another degree, so it would be a 6-7 year undertaking at best. However, once one has one, there are professional networks to help find placement and give tips and support to law students.

I can't find it on the official site, but I heard that when you get Retro City Rampage for Vita, you also get it for PS3. Then, these guys are going DRM-free and releasing the PC version on the service of your choice, etc. too, so they're quite liberal with their user licensing.

Wow! Pure Chess is sure kicking some ass... It sounds like it'd be really detailed, but I'm surprised to see it doing so well when there's no preview or anything (or wasn't when I checked.)

Like the rest of you, I'd make sure the family is comfortable and taken care of. That wouldn't take much. Then I'd go to university. It's something I've always wanted, but man, if I got partway through a $20,000 program and failed, the recovery would be brutal. It's a luxury for the rich these days... so if I were rich I'd definitely do it! Actually I'd probably spend a lot of time as a "professional student" as they call them here. I think it'd be cool to get a B.Sc in comp sci, then a JD, then just take a bunch of stuff out of personal interest, like psychology, linguistics, and brush up on my accounting for practical reasons. When that's done, I'd get a decent house or condo with room to build a library and workshop in, and a nice (~$50k) car like a Lancer Evo 9. Maybe do a miniature version of Long Way Round - get some friends and a small support team together and tour a on motorbikes. Maybe do the main part of the Shikoku pilgrimage - it seems like it'd be a really scenic, positive experience. After that... invest a portion of it wisely and save another part to use as needed. Lacking greater ambitions, I'd probably try to find the perfect job and keep the lottery winnings low-key.

I find the XMB quick, light, logical and easy to use - categories on X, specifics on Y. The Dashboard, or whatever MS is calling it now (NXE? Is that current?) on the other hand... is more confusing than any other game system I've used, has multiple ways to get to some things, though getting to things like indie games is infamously hard. It even goes so far as to have a second parallel interface for many features (when you press the "X" logo button), their store leaks out all over the interface instead of being contained in its own app like most systems so I'm always skimming ads looking for real local content, and auto-playing video banner ads with sound can die in a fire. It's especially aggravating when you pay them for service but they still spam the interface with ads. When they rolled out the new system, I wandered around for like 10-15 min searching, then looked it up online to see how to customize my avatar. There are definitely things I love about my 360, but their basic interface is just painful for me. It makes me think of the really huge "big box" stores that you can't even see end to end inside, and how sometimes they'll shuffle their departments so you go in looking for one simple thing, but wander around for a half an hour looking at everything else while you're trying to find what you came in for. Tying this in to the thread topic, the Vita interface... I could take it or leave it. It's sort of amorphous, but it gets the job done. I'd really hoped for XMB, but this is ok too. I just wish they'd allow d-pad and button navigation, or at least allow it to control movies.

Building on that, I HATE manga hosting sites that carry fan-translated works and only let you read them on the website, page by page, serving up banners per page. I mean, it's already legally grey to actually illegal to scan, translate, and distribute this stuff but for series that aren't officially translated it's generally accepted. These guys on the other hand take work that fans do for free, and cash in big time on it. It's like the difference between subtitling a show and offering it for download vs selling unauthorized pressed DVDs of it. To make matters worse, it's become such a de facto standard now, you can even get iPhone apps for some of these sites and if you point out to Apple that it's illegal in numerous ways... meh, whatever... they just ignore it and let them keep going as usual.

You can brand me a curmudgeon for holding such an old grudge, but ever since John Markoff made his fortune by vilifying Kevin Mitnick, I've taken NYT with a grain of salt. I guess if they're giving official space to Kotaku articles, I'll make that a heaping tablespoon of salt!

I'm also way out of Pokemon - I played Red... and Diamond for a while, then SoulSilver until I lost my Pokewalker. I think it'd be neat if they made one that had visible Pokemon wandering the map, and like many MMOs, had some that were aggressive, some that are passive, and some that are passive until one is attacked, at which point others will join the fight.

There's no real reason to assume that though. For one thing, the way the Vita works, you pretty much install the card and forget it. There's not much reason to be swapping cards out all the time. Besides, it's a cache - even if you switched cards and it wasn't present, it's not going to bring the system to a halt - it'd just download from scratch and build a new one. Even if you accessed the trophies with no card inserted, it could just download the icons for that session alone. Apart from possible speed issues, there is no reason not to cache on removable media as long as it doesn't get removed in mid-write.

Yes, Unreal Engine and even in theory, DirectX are already moving things in that direction - it's by no means an original idea, I just think it solves the problem better than locking everyone into a similar architecture or platform. And I agree there are other S-E properties, but I think it's true that he's a bit out of place pushing for a new console generation when the flagship titles have barely appeared on the current gen, and the other sub-studios' works didn't exactly seem to be straining at the boundaries of what the current gen can do. It could be a different story if they had been, even if FF hadn't made a strong showing. Still though, I think the Square name is still very much synonymous with Final Fantasy, even if they have diversified a bit and acquired companies that make very different products. It's not that those other games aren't Square games - they are - much like how Vitaminwater is Coca Cola.

I think it's important to look at what the Square-Enix brand, Square in particular, is known for. They've traditionally done their own development and made Final Fantasy their flagship franchise, so if suddenly FF doesn't matter and publishing works by their owned studios counts as Square developing games, then I think it's important to examine this massive shift. It'd be like if Nintendo decided to stop using Mario and started leaning on third parties to make "Nintendo" games (not sure who this would be now... traditionally I guess studios like Hudson and Rare would have fit the bill...) By the broader definition as a publisher, I suppose you could even call an S-E game, though it's really not what comes to mind when you bring their name up... Personally, I still really support innovation in hardware architecture. They seem to be getting more conventional as generations go on, but there is still a LOT that can be done that's out of the box. (Personally, I really want to see a heavily multicore system, maybe powered by something like a CUDA family processor, but with at least 64GB of RAM, to allow heavy use of things like procedural content generation and high resolution voxel-based game engines...) One thing I haven't heard people propose though is rather than a unified console architecture, how about a unified software development platform? It would still be tailored to each system to allow optimizing and playing to each system's strengths, but it would also be made so that a lot of the high-level code would be easily ported, and if you're relying on a "default" engine (say, UE4) common tasks like level design, AI modelling, event scripting, 3D modelling, etc would be identical regardless of what system you're working on, so you wouldn't have to sort of reverse-engineer a game to port it, or port the tools used to edit it, or other reinventions of the wheel.

W&S makes a good point though - what would fill the void left by "gay"? When and where I grew up, people saying "that's gay" came into fashion. I really don't remember it at all before the 90s. At least around here, it seemed to catch on in the mid 90s and got really thoroughly cemented by 2000. I think one of the biggest problems with using it and getting rid of it is that it's usually a crutch for ineloquent people who don't really know what it means, they just know it feels like it fits. At least as far as I've seen, it seems to be used by people who are frustrated by something that seems arbitrary or capricious (like... um... Mario Party. Or wallhack.) Linguistically, replacing it faces some huge hurdles: mainly, it seems that to replace a word, it's much easier to get acceptance for something with the same or fewer syllables, makes sense, and is catchy. But what else sums up "frustrating, arbitrary and capricious?" I'm thinking existing terms like "cheap," "weak," "lame" come closest, but don't always fit the exact same space, so... I'm not really sure what would replace it outright. It's definitely not needed in the first place though, since we're not exactly left with a great gap in expression without it...

That's cool, Strangelove... You keep pointing out Sony features I want that are already there, haha - I set it up so long ago I thought it was an account-level, not system-level thing. And FDS, it may not have a spinning magnetic platter, but anyone who wants to save games and other data has a memory card installed in it. Right now I've loaded mine with high res videos just to put it to use, but I still have like 20+ GB free, so putting like, 2MB of that toward icons wouldn't be a big loss. (* Though I'm not certainly assuming that's the real bottleneck - it looks like it's at least one of them.)

It's interesting how Vita trophies don't quite seem to count as trophies - I have it set up so that new PS3 trophies appear on Facebook, but it doesn't seem possible on the Vita yet - and like TCP said, you can't even view them on a PS3. There's really no technical limitation on this - I think it would just take a PS3 software update, depending on how they really implement it on the Vita. Though honestly, if I could change anything about the trophy system, I'd have the PS3 and Vita cache game icons... It's kind of ridiculous that you go to compare trophies with someone and it sits there... loads a few games from the end, grabs a few from the start... some pop in from the middle... some icons appear... etc. It's one area XBL has them beat, and hard - I can compare games with someone in the moments between games or levels on the 360, but on the PS3 it's like something you'd only want to start up in your downtime when you're not doing anything else.

At my last job I replaced dozens of PSUs, though in almost every case, it was just because the fans were starting to grind and buzz and annoy the users - we could try to blow them out and clean them, but it usually comes back. Could have removed the supply and opened it up to take the fan apart and clean it, but that has real potential to kill if a mistake is made, and also a good chance of not fixing the problem... But these were cheap, old hp-Compaq towers with "generic" supplies (or brands like "Sparkle"). We actually used to order whole boxes full of replacements, equal or a bit better, for around $10-12 each. I think we had one batch that was from LiteOn.

The natural order of things has been restored...

Sorry for the quality... while Youtube may have everything, they don't always have it above 240p...

A huge number of people have asked them to transfer games from account to account or merge accounts. For instance, I forgot everything about my original account, but had to make one to play Orange Box. Later, I remembered the old account info. They always refuse to transfer or merge though - always. It doesn't matter if you can prove ownership of both sides, or if you're ok with one account being completely deactivated, it's just something they won't do.