fuchikoma

I think Machine Hunter, Intelligent Qube, Bushido Blade, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Tail Concerto would make great handheld games.

I haven't heard anything from Momoi since Yume no Baton, but Wikipedia says she put out some stuff about a year ago, so if she's still in business, the next thing will probably be any time now.

I finally grabbed a UPS last year and it's been great. The 750VA version of this - it's pretty cheap. Maybe there's an equivalent in the British market? The other day the power went out and I heard it kick in, so I finished the article I was reading on my desktop and shut it down. And Vecha - if you bought a good supply, it's never a waste since it'll take out that much more guesswork later. My video card frequently flips out and takes the whole system out, requiring shutdown, wait, and cold boot. So I got a Kingwin Stryker STR-500 PSU. It's way more efficient than my last one, has no fans at all so it's nice and quiet, and it definitely has power to spare in addition to supplying clean stable power on every line. Sadly that didn't fix the video card issue, but now I know it's not that.

Shiny shirt! Menacing mandible? Satisfactory score.

Deadly Premonition. I think I probably learned of it from hearing Shane Bettenhausen rant about its zaniness on a podcast. I would have completely avoided it otherwise - it's a crudely made survival horror game - but the characters are such weirdos, especially the protagonist. There are all sorts of weird little things too, like if you go too long without washing or changing your outfit, you'll be swarmed by bugs... It's been too long since I played; I can't remember many more crazy features, but it's way more entertaining than it seems at first. If I could change anything... I'd just add a minimap or navigation system because looking at a small piece of a big map and then hitting the highway for several minutes in a wonky go-kart steering car just isn't good.

That's not the argument I'm making at all though. It's not that they should automatically get a cut of the money for any used sales. It's rather that they should have no obligation to spend the smallest amount of their resources to assist people who are not profiting them at all. It's like the issue with online passes - if one customer sells a used copy to another without involving the publisher, fine, the publisher sees nothing and the user sells their property. If the second owner wants to play on the company's servers, they pay a small fee to justify it. Yes, the license would have allowed the original owner to be playing in their place, but that's not what actually happened - they stopped playing the game and sold it. I don't think any company assumes every copy sold will be owned by someone who never gets tired of their game. You can't just go to a buffet, eat until you're full and then tag the next person and let them start in your place. That's true, but comparably, a used DDL sale is still spending company resources on a non-customer. Considering the maximum possible application of this, it stands to reason that they'd get some sort of renumeration for it. It's fine if a few people do it, but what about when half of their downloads are for copies they don't get paid for? What about 3/4? The costs for hosting are vastly less than physical production, but the situation is analogous to having to mint new discs for every copy sold at GameStop (or... whatever used game chain dominates the market there, assuming one does?) Yep. that'd be the state of affairs. Steam sells game to me. I now own the game. I can then sell said game on for however many pennies I want and Steam won't see an extra penny. Cos that's how it works. Maybe... I'm still not fully convinced it's free of loopholes to exploit. Regardless of whether the rightholder loses their legal exclusive distribution right, as an inherent property of the system, they physically maintain exclusive distribution capability. If they don't set the resale price, perhaps they could add a system access fee that they waive for original customers. Or maybe in the EU, your first 5 downloads will be free, but after that, they will cost a small fee. The ruling also seems to apply very specifically to licenses for an unlimited period, so I wonder if this would even apply to a lot of games since we are essentially paying to make use of them until the publisher decides otherwise? Maybe this will hasten the transition of games into services rather than property? Maybe EU customers will start "buying" games on a 99-year lease? If it only goes so far as to say they cannot punish customers for buying and selling used copies, it's not so onerous. If it requires companies like Valve to reengineer the systems at the core of their business in order to facilitate transfer of goods, or hire people to manually override and manage software licenses... again, for free... then it would be quite onerous. Of course, it's a little hard to say how it will apply at this point since Oracle and Valve are so different - maybe they just have to allow the selling of whole user accounts as many have speculated, since it doesn't allow the resale of partial site licenses. Standard disclaimer applies of course: I am not a lawyer, but Ethan is, and will probably drop by to shoot this full of holes eventually. But hey, it's discussion.

If you wait a couple years, you could probably have it for $5, particularly if you don't mind having it used... but then, when do you want it and how much are you willing to pay?

It is a strange situation, but I could probably have been clearer. The part about getting out of print games would be a hypothetical reason to support used game sales. Generally apart from that, I side with the publishers in that since they won't see any profit from used sales, they should have no obligation to facilitate them. For used downloadable sales, it seems they'd have to put in more effort than usual to transfer from one account to another, but on top of that, they'd still have to provide the same hosting/download/account update service as if the buyer had bought it from them directly, but hypothetically, they'd see less or even no profit for it. That doesn't seem right to me. So I was suggesting used sales at original price or higher. The thing is, in a system like this, you can't say the distributor isn't part of the sale anymore - they're always a part of it by design. Is it really not up to them to set the price? I don't think there's enough precedent for this kind of thing to be sure of that yet. So I was suggesting that unless it's specifically proscribed by law, the scenario could be: You buy a game for $5.99, but you want to sell it to a friend. The game distributor allows you to do this - for $5.99 - and just as required, it will be removed from your account and added to theirs. Their cut includes 100% of the original price since they're still providing 120% of the service, and if you want to actually profit from the sale, maybe you can add on up to 30% additional cost and convince them to pay it. After all, this isn't something the company would be doing to try to make a profit - it'd be something they'd implement to comply with onerous EU regulations.

While I'm all for systems that help collectors get out of print games and so on, I don't see that this will really facilitate that, since used downloadable game sales will surely rely on the same infrastructure as the first sale did. So with that unchanged... I'm not sure how I feel about the ruling. I don't think I oppose it, unless it starts to demand unreasonable additional development costs and security issues on the game distributor. I don't really see a reason to support it either though - I mean, used sales are worthless to publishers since they make nothing from them. On here, they could hypothetically be pressured into discounting their products when the service they provide is actually greater than if they were offering the product new, so that's not really right either. So I was thinking: Even if they are forced to allow individual sales of used games, I don't see what would stop them from simply insisting that new games will be sold at 100% of the new price, plus whatever commission the user wants to make as profit. Possibly also plus a transfer fee of pretty much anything they decide on.

I worried about becoming a hipster before it was cool... No - that's not right... If anything I'm worried about sounding like a hipster because I get into (and sometimes out of) things before they're cool. IMO it'd be fine if the stuff I'm into never got cool - somehow it seems worse to have once been cool and then fallen out of favour instead of simply never appearing on people's radar... The person below me wears goggles.

Well, I've heard at least 2 Vanilla Ice songs, so I could do that if I tried Spotify... There are a lot of hard to meet requirements in this thread and a lot of people seem to just deny it and add their own rule. The person below me has tried brushing their teeth with bar soap before.

The look and feel on the Vita is fine by me. I just wish they'd allow a button-based fallback, at least for basic things like movie playback.

So has anyone noticed that issues surrounding terms of use for Google services are really sketchy on the Vita?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVwFJog1S44 "Flowering Night" rearranged by C-CLAYS. (Or how about an ? haha...) Didn't know Tetla Pot did a new video. That was... zany. I always liked . I looked all over the place for a way to post that animation resized on here, but there's just no instructions for that "size" field.

Yuusuke doesn't need to use bullets to shoot a gun at something... Also bonus points for repping one of the first shows I downloaded over the Internet. I give it... 2 flying oars - because who needs three?

I've been saying a lot how much I like Unit 13. I'm reeeeally sick of FPS/TPS games so it usually takes a lot to impress me, but this one won me over with its simple bite-sized missions and great moment to moment feel - it's very polished (suffers the usual third person grenade issues though...) To those who haven't played, imagine a stealth action game like MGS... but no meaningful plot beyond some motivation for each mission. Also, controls that are VASTLY more intuitive. Trying to get back into MGS2 lately, I'll take fire, run to take cover and automatically spin 180 when I do, so I can't return fire, so I stand up and get shot while turning around, then crouch down, try to take cover and go prone, then crawl around and stand up and get shot some more, etc... In Unit 13... I'd run up to cover and take cover, then peek around the edge and shoot guys. There are "direct action" missions, where you approach how you like - I like to sneak around and assassinate guys until hell breaks loose, then turn it into a tactical firefight. There are "elite" missions that are the same, but your health doesn't regenerate like it usually does - you just get one bar that lasts for one objective, and most missions have a few objectives. There are covert missions, where if you are spotted, you have to kill the spotter before anyone else is alerted - and they may be alarmed to see the spotter die... if an alarm goes off, you're done for. Then there are timed missions where you have to charge in like a maniac with guns blazing - I find that mode uncovers any and all flaws in the game, the layout, and so on. Hate that kind of mission... There are also video cameras, proximity mines and laser sensors on doors that may trigger alarms, bombs, or poison gas. I love using gas and bombs to take guys out when they come after me... This also plays into another neat but overlooked feature: It's kind of like "The Club" in that whenever you do a skilled action such as headshot, killing a guy who's unaware, killing a guy with a pistol, defusing a bomb, etc, it starts a little timer bar in the corner of the screen, and you can up your score multiplier by comboing these actions. Different operatives have different specialty skills, so for instance one may reward you more for long shots and another for stealthy play, etc. The main problems for me are... often I'll lose a whole mission from one of two things: There are grenade throws that no able-bodied human could miss, but sometimes I'll just bounce the grenade off a nearby wall or the box I'm hiding behind, and land it at my feet - dying instantly. (Oh, and everyone can throw grenades super far - it's not usually a problem, but sometimes it's interesting to see a grunt lob a nade 100 ft at you...) The other issue is that there are touch sensitive actions, and one of them is to leap over your current cover - which appears just to the left of the right stick, so sometimes I aim... and leap right into a hail of bullets automatically. Luckily, the missions are small and very replayable so it's not a huge loss. For me though, the basic nature of the missions (plant bombs, defuse bombs, assassinate VIPs, steal documents, sabotage machines, rescue hostages (untie them and you're good - no escorting)) is a huge selling point. In MGS 2 on Vita, I'm right where I am in the PS2 version... at the slide show... getting caught by some random quirk or another, every single time... forever... and there's no way to advance the game until that's cleared... I'm starting to think I'll never see the end of this game. If a mission in U13 stumps you - try another one. Ultimately, you just need the "stars" you get when you're graded 1-5 for beating each mission. If a mission is insufferable - move on.

I never owned one, but I've played on them before and have a healthy respect for them. My god, the multimedia abilities of those things! I got into emulating them on my 500 MHz Pentium 3, and some of the coding demos would still make it chug. While I wasn't hugely into them, especially in the 90s, I did listen to a lot of MOD/S3M/IT/XM/etc tracked music. I actually used to use a command line app in MS-DOS on my 286 to feed them through a Disney Sound Source (and a similar, compatible device I made from plans before that - very, very simple device, basically a row of resistors.) Ah, great stuff. I also loved playing Boulder Dash on an Amiga at a friend's place and making hellishly devious maps for it. I found it a while ago on another system - XBox, or maybe PC... great strategic digging game. I grew up playing Digger, and this was like a whole new dimension of that.

That is exactly the kind of position I can respect, even if I may disagree about the particular conclusion in the context of my own life. I've never seen you try to proselytize, and really, didn't know what your religious beliefs were. You challenged your faith and rigorously examined it rather than simply following the crowd or a leader. Even now, you eloquently explain your position rather than fighting over who is right and wrong. I worked with a guy who had a similar philosophy and we'd have great in-depth religious vs atheist philosophical discussions between the guys in my office pretty regularly - I know that's one of the things you absolutely shouldn't do at work, but with this group it never really got heated or disrespectful - we were just trying to explore the others' standpoints. I'd like to offer an alternative atheist approach to this dilemma. Rather than asking what caused the first cause, I'm curious why it is more believable that an all-knowing all-powerful creator was more likely the first thing to exist, as opposed to the simplest possible forms of matter/energy (for instance, QGP)? If it does not require an intelligent will to create a being of unknowable complexity, then why does it require one to make something, rather than nothing? Don't take this as a refutation, but rather as a good starting point for explaining my own beliefs: As for the possibility of infinite causes, I find that less implausible from my standpoint. I've considered the possibility of the beginning of time with this thought experiment: When did time begin? What was "zero time?" Beginning, like all verbs, is dependent on the substrate of time itself. With no time, nothing happens, even observation. For time to begin, there must be a "time before time" - and that is meaningless. Even the smallest increment before time would last for all eternity, as there could be no beginning and no end. So time must go back eternally - it just seems to be an inherent law of the universe. As for the age of existence - the universe, even before the assumed "big bang" or any other cause for its inception - try to imagine the passage of time without the existence of physical space. How does that even work? If nothing exists, can time be said to pass at all? We have even found that the rate of time's passage varies depending on the subject's relative position to concentrations of mass and energy, and even to its velocity (I should say "vector") relative to the observer. So it would seem that space and time are inextricable, leading one to conclude that if there has always been time, there has always been space. As for how spacetime came to be, I don't know. I'm certainly not the greatest astrophysicist to ever exist (or *cough* one at all...) I think that, when it's hard to even accurately imagine day to day human life 500 years ago, it would be completely ridiculous for me to presume I deeply understand universal astrophysics an infinite amount of time - or even 13.75 billion years - ago.

I played the original STALKER and it was very buggy and had a lot of assets disabled in the retail version. I probably played a total of about... 3-4 hours before I gave up on it. I've seen a friend turn it into something pretty interesting by extensively modding it, but I personally can't recommend a buggy game to someone, especially as a must-have. Never played complete collections/rereleases though.

I didn't know it was possible. I just went to configure it in the XMB and there's no such option there... though keep in mind, like I said I can't get as far back as it recommends, so it may work fairly well within spec. On the other hand though, I can fire up any Wii lightgun game and regardless of recommended distance, I can play it if it's within sensor range. Just to break it down if anyone's curious (aaargh! I made an awesome table that displayed in the editor, then the board ate it when it actually posted...): Move knows: Yaw (sometimes... if the compass works) When seen by the camera: X (horiz) Y (vert) Z (depth) Wii knows: When it sees the sensor bar: Yaw Pitch Roll Z Both estimate X, Y, and Z movements, and rotation along Yaw, Pitch, or Roll, but may drift without absolute references.

I've never seen an influx of new users like this! In the interest of not flooding this thread with greeting spam, welcome, all of you! If even half of you become active users, this is gonna change things up! Cool. I made sure to use mine up before I left... It was worth it, to call Joel out for calling the Razer Blade laptop "[not just] the future of PC gaming - it may be the future of PCs." I mean, he fawned all over that thing (which seems to have failed utterly to make any impression on the market) like he wanted to have its babies, and I've never seen such a negative response in the comments, but he seemed genuinely shocked to think someone would suspect him of paid editorial... or he was just mad he was caught so easily. Sadly since Gawker depends on unique visitor impressions, that was probably one of the most successful articles ever... and that's when I knew there was no place at the site for me. Though I got my first star back when it was network-wide, and lost it when it was site-wide, so I still had one everywhere else after that... but then in a while they required third party logins to comment, so I never went back to a Gawker site.

I have the same problem as Ethan. I made a huge CotW on Kotaku ages ago about it, but basically the Wii is inherently suited for lightgun shooters (judges angles by looking at the sensor bar,) and Move really isn't (judges angles by MEMS gyroscope sensor and compass.) I can't get as far back as it wants me to, but I have Time Crisis: Razing Storm for PS3 and I've never been able to play it because the aim calibration drifts off before I even leave the calibration screen. It simply doesn't work at all. I've fixed it in the XMB too. Other Move games are alright, but light gun games just don't work in the least - within a minute I'm aiming 90 degrees sideways in order to shoot straight.