fuchikoma

Thanks. I will try to escalate the current attempt if it goes badly. So far, I'm pretty shocked by this because while I'm pretty cynical about digital download services, I figured they'd be able to just check the history of the account and see that my info was originally there... maybe the guy I got was just lazy...

It's certainly interesting to see the twists and turns that come up in a project like this. Unfortunate that it got sidelined like it has, but I get the feeling this is a pretty normal example of game development?

I'll give them one more try first - it's possible the rep I got was just an idiot, though since I gave them specific dates, I figured they'd be able to look back in their DB to see that my info was on file before. I'm a little apprehensive about blowing the whistle on Reddit since I can't really prove anything here, especially without totally exposing my info to the world, and they can say literally anything - they could go "oh, here's your info on file. You misspelled your last name, dummy!" (after the rep has told me that everything is different in a private support session, mind you.) Still, I will definitely keep it in mind as I've seen the pressure that mob can exert on crooked companies. Then... with the unshakable love for Steam I've seen, I could just get downvoted to -3000 and called an EA shill, heh. I've found it seems taboo to criticize them.

Well, now I'm tempted to pirate anything I want from Steam... let me explain: Someone tried to reset the password on my account. I received the reset confirmation email, but of course I didn't respond to it, so it should not have changed. Then I downloaded Steam and tried to log into it - failed. Then I requested a password reset... and never got the email for it! I must have requested over 40 resets and not one went through. So I contacted support, and explained it to them. They asked for my billing and contact info, and I gave it to them. There is no room for ambiguity here, because I've only ever had one credit card, have not changed my address, etc - but apparently my name, email address, AND billing info all mismatch the account! The email address they sent a password reset email to before I requested it is not the one on the account, and now my whole account is gone because I can't guess what the hijacker changed it to. So yeah, they just stole a whole account's worth of games from me - from now on, I am ["very angry" - redacted in case this gains notoriety], since the ethereal nature of digital products means any legal approaches would fail. My games are gone, but my money is still in their pockets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhCXAiNz9Jo Not sure if this is giving me a craving for PSP or Guitar Hero...

Ditto. I'd even go with a $1 coin. I'll even go so far as to agree with Barry when he says we should think about changing our coinage to make it less expensive. I'd eliminate the penny and make the nickel out of a different metal. In Canada, we killed the $0.50 cent coin, brought in a standard $1 coin and killed the $1 bill, then later replaced the $2 bill with a coin and it's pretty convenient I guess. I hardly noticed the difference! Oddly enough though... pennies everywhere, still. Most small stores have a little tray full of them that you can give or take from freely if you want to pay with exact change. My wallet gets too fat when I carry real money in it - I tend to leave coins smaller than a quarter at home. Also, apparently all the coins under a dollar are plated steel now. This is off on a tangent, but I have a 1 yen coin and it's pure aluminum! (or aluminium for some of you. ) I wonder how much that costs to make...

Definitely common all through North America. Though "pinched" and "nicked" are not used, I'm betting they're fairly well understood.

In Canada, there was an issue of people getting grey market satellite TV receivers and watching American TV stations for free. At one point, the issue went to court, and it was found that because these companies are not selling their signal in Canada, then legally, it has no value and if people are able to decode it, they can go ahead. I'm not sure where that stands today. It was basically found though that since they were not depriving the owner of material or profits, that it could not be called stealing. This seems very close to software that is not offered in certain regions.

I agree with this argument. When people can pay for media they consume, they should. By extension, you would think that also means that if they can't pay, they shouldn't consume the media, but as a moral relativist, I can't make a solid case for that because if they cannot pay in the first place, what else they do is really moot and irrelevant unless they've actively affecting the profits another way. The slippery slope is that if they can justify to themselves that they couldn't afford it, they get free games, so there's a strong temptation to intellectual dishonesty. Nonetheless, advocating a position based on a slippery slope argument is not only a fallacy, it's formally recognized as one. Personally though, not as a philosopher? Yes, buy if you can because it rewards good material and encourages further development. I couldn't justify piracy with that, but I have to nitpick the idea of $2/hr being a fantastic gaming deal. Personally, I see each game as "worth what it's worth" as a whole - I bought the whole Orange Box set because I wanted Portal on a disc... and I don't regret it, even if it was a TERRIBLE cash value per hour. Still, I could buy something like Jetpack Joyride for $0.99 and play it for 99 hours at $0.01/hr. It's ridiculous to think you'd only play it once, as a short game, so the replayability is really a matter of personal taste. To be more realistic though, I tend to like short arcade type games over epic narratives, so to take real world examples, I could buy something like Resonance of Fate, or Deadly Premonition, which I enjoyed both of... but to me, a game that takes that many hours to clear is like craving beef and trying to eat an entire cow. I could only ever see the end of a game that long if I lived in a vacuum where no games were ever released again. I probably got about 3 hours in to RoF and maybe 8-10 into DP. Terrible hourly rate. I've also bought games like Touhou Komakyou - Embodiment of Scarlet Devil for around $20, and sunk dozens of hours into them, so games like that I pay probably closer to $0.50/hr and still falling. I don't even have to describe what the hourly rate is for a game like Minecraft... But... I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I really feel that a game's worth is more abstract than dollars per hour, justifying a AAA title on its cost per hour will always make it look like a horrible ripoff in the modern gaming climate when competing with things like iPhone games, PSP Minis, regular DS and PSP games, Steam sales, and things like the Humble Indie Bundle. Again, I'm just nitpicking, but with my play style, when I realized this, I practically stopped buying big name games because the value was so awful compared to smaller, simpler games that I play for years instead of weeks. I'm actually deterred from buying a game that advertises dozens of hours because I know I'll never get half of what I paid for out of it.

It shit the bed on you?! What does that mean where you're from? Over here 'shit the bed' is an exclamation, like going 'shit' or 'crap' when something bad happens. It ain't a verb! Gone tits up. Bought the farm. Borked. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it'd be pushing up the daisies! (Ok, I admit I just wanted to use the .)

I've had some fun with Home, pre-revamp. It was a neat way to sightsee and fool around. Basically, to do the things I spent 2/3 of the time doing when playing MMOs anyway. My main problem with it was that whenever I got alone, it liked to kick me off the server every minute or two, so I eventually just gave up trying to use it. In public, this never happened. It's funny though - does anyone remember the PSN launch title, Shiki-tei? You get a little one-room Japanese house and garden, and can place a few things outside - you cannot enter the house. Home + Japanese apartment? 100x better than Shiki-tei. You have a nice large building, bigger yard, and can place all sorts of things everywhere. Photos from my hard drive hang on the walls, I have a working Galaga machine in my gazebo next to an easy chair and a rack of archery gear. Swords and guns line one wall of the house, while the living room has a nice couch and collectible trinkets from Namco. This is all stuff that was free too, I'm fairly certain. I bought a couple little things, but very little. But it's not a videogame itself (if you don't count their special zone - what was it, "oxygen", "thorium", or some other element - where you stomp on scorpions...) It's more like taking a walk IN a video game and running into other people who play it. Home isn't something you'd play instead of a game, but if you don't feel like fending off a thousand attempted assassins at the moment, it's a good place to just go be virtual and wander around a bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlcYw3Pg4jY Antipimpin'

For sure. I'll study a bit, it's just that the only games I'd really get into taking them down to the bones are MMOs. I prefer to learn fighters by playing, not studying hitbox sheets, which moves take 23 frames vs 28, or trying to nail supposed BnBs with 20 steps a thousand times in training mode (*cough* BBCS). Also, I'm not really saying that the newer combo-heavy forms aren't valid... it's just alienated me from a genre I was eyeballs-deep in until that got popular. IMO it's practically a different genre when you hit high level play (or midlevel? I see it all the time online, and rarely in tournaments...) Would you believe I haven't tried MotW yet? I've heard too much praise for it though - I think I need to fix this and actually see what it's about. I mostly played the year-numbered KoF games of the 1990s. Haven't tried 12 because the roster wasn't enough, but I'm hopeful for 13! I also completely forgot to mention Rival Schools... I had so much fun with the imported "evolution disc" of that game. The attack cancels and air combos ("air raves" in that game?) were fun, but by no means decisive in a match. Until BB it was the most RPG I'd seen in a fighter too. Also, welcome to the site! That's kind of implied since if you like games, you'll fit in here!

I used to be obsessed with SF2 as a kid, and used to like mastering all moves by all fighters. That style has gone the way of the dodo now that it's all no-holds-barred online deathmatch, so people just specialize on one guy (as a kid, that was "cheap.") I played various SF games, until Alpha, which turned me off from the series until IV came out. At some point, I learned of SNK games and instantly loved how freely the characters can move around, and the speed you could find in some matches. I liked Samurai Shodown 4 (Ukyo, Kyoshiro), Last Blade (Akari, Washizuka), and various KoF games. I really liked Capcom vs SNK 2000, which only got me more into SNK. Wasn't so big on CvS 2 - I could be wrong, but it always felt like SNK got nerfed hard there. I vaguely remember finding half the moves I tried to do just weren't included. Great look and sound though, FWIW. Yuri + Benimaru + Iori FTW... A friend showed me Guilty Gear, but I thought it was a joke, because after literally 30 seconds of showing me how to play, I'd kill him within a minute with a finishing move every single round... Later, I tried GGX and loved the speed and responsiveness (Chipp vs Jam!) but barely dabbled in the mechanics of it. Now I really like BBCS, usually playing Tao or Carl. I don't play online though, because fighting games have become about combo recitation and I hate that... it's as far from fun as it gets for me, you should never be able to lock out your opponent's inputs on an ongoing basis, and it's nothing like having a real fight - it's like doing a kata while your opponent watches. So, preferring things like mindgames, spacing, timing, etc to first-hit-kill matches and opponents who literally reverse engineer the game down to the pixel and frame, I stick to the AI opponents. I beat DoA1 and thought it was close to lame, but decent for a brand that doesn't make fighters. Loved DoA2 and played it for years - I had a friend who got into it too, so we'd literally be tied 50-50 in vs mode some days. Never had an XBox, so it kind of died there for me. Now I have DoA4, but have barely playtested it - I beat it several times, but never went nuts for it. The boss may be cheap, but has nothing on most fighters, IMO; she's just harder than Tengu, which isn't hard to do. I also got DoA:Dimensions for the 3DS, and it's convinced me that the series is over - there's no challenge whatsoever in it until I get several dozen opponents into survival mode... Finally, I agree about Soul Calibur (1). I don't know where the tactics are - I found mashing with Maxi was the deadliest thing I could do, followed by randomness with Voldo. At least it looked totally gorgeous. So... tl;dr, I like Street Fighter games generally, but I've really come to like SNK. I also like BB, but you'll never see me spamming combos or exploiting infinite loops or even invulnerability frames and frame advantage. I realize it's hard to pull off long combos, but it's no longer against the opponent - it's just against the game mechanics - and that sucks because a fight should always be two-way. So I guess while I'd have "mastered" these games in the early to mid 90s, that now makes me a "scrub." *froths, spits* but they're still really fun games if you ignore the modern communities around them and just play with friends who don't devote their lives to deconstructing them.

This forum is great. It may not be an uncountable flood of activity, but it has the members/community that made Kotaku great, without the massive amount of noise and nerdbaiting that made it... not so great. Definitely appreciate the work that's put into it behind the scenes.

While it was supposedly around in some forms since the 80s, I never even heard someone say "emo" until after 2000. I've tried to see what the musical distinction was, but "back in my day" we just called it rock, pop, or alt rock - though I can hear the pop punk influence in some of the major bands. I mean... Weezer? No one here called that emo in the 90s but apparently Pinkerton was "the most important emo album of the 90s." I don't know... I think the term was always kind of ambiguous because it defined things that were already defined. Then, but the time it got really big, I was out of any environment that would be saturated with it so maybe there's some hidden nuance to it I'm missing? It seems to be the clothes...

When I was in high school, emo hadn't quite been discovered yet. There were a few percent worth of goths. Mostly, I think goths didn't want to be confused with Vampire (the Masquerade) players, and rivetheads didn't want to be confused with goths - but no one knew who they were anyway so outside those niches, anyone conspicuously dark was "goth."

Initial D! Once in a while I'll still put on one of the soundtracks and drift around in Forza 3 with an AE86 or FD3S... such a fun and ridiculous show when you get to the races. To think it started as a comedy one-shot too... Here's a folksy take on Touhou 12, stage 5. The 's done on an electric organ with klaxons going off in-game, but this is still strangely well fitting. (I'm also currently stuck continuing here... on easy. *cries* Damn you, mini-pagoda!)

So that's a Model M! I still have my first keyboard and it appears to be a clone of that. It has an XT connector, and an XT/AT switch on the bottom. It also chirps with each keypress until you hit Ctrl+Pause. I use a modern Apple USB keyboard with keypad. I took one from a Mac user at work when they were giving up their MacBook Pro, and after using it a bit, I fell in love and bought my own for home. It's wafer-thin, very solid and sturdy; can't feel it flex at all. Nothing gets stuck between the keys, they're all flat-topped and short-throw, and the board itself is very quiet - there's a little clicking as the keys spring up, but no real acoustics since there's so little space inside it. It's fantastic for Beatmania clones like BM98 since my fingers never hook the edges of a key or drag on raised key edges, and they press down so fast and easily (and all resist with the same force. Also, space works no matter where you press it, no jamming.) I use Win7, so I took an app called SharpKeys that easily hacks the registry to remap keys, since it's not quite 1:1 with an IBM board. I switched the left Alt and "Windows" (command) keys so they're in the right places for a PC user, turned right Win/command into PrintScreen so I can take screenshots, then turned F13-19 into mute, vol-, vol+, prev, stop, play/pause, and next.

I didn't expect a lot out of this game when I got the Voxatron debut bundle - not sure why, I guess it's because I'm not so big on Smash TV and Robotron type games and it drives me nuts when I try to dodge and ram against a level feature. I'm having a lot of fun with it though! I should have figured... I was one of the original buyers of Gish and have raved about it for years and also really liked Super Meat Boy (couldn't stand "Meat Boy" the browser game tho...) Edmund McMillen makes some fun games. His warped sense of humour also really helps. Since getting into it yesterday, Isaac has found For controller support, they recommend "Joy2Key." I used the Logitech control panel for mine - WASD on d-pad, UDLR (cursors) on the face buttons, right bumper to bomb (E?), left bumper for item/interaction (space), and left trigger for special item (Q). Start button mapped to escape so I can pause it. Hmm... and right now I'm going to map select to "F" because the game never remembers to stay in fullscreen.

Yes, and I don't want to make it sound like it was badly written - just that I wouldn't put it on the top shelf for dialogue between characters, and that I did get the feeling at several points that these were just essays the writer wanted people to hear. Still an extremely poignant movie today though. This was very much an "essay" scene, but still excellent political commentary: Looking at the related videos for this clip, I also need to get around to watching Chaplin's "The Great Dictator." I've seen the speech at the end and it was moving both in its inspirational positive message and heartbreaking that so little progress has been made since then. I have a copy of it, I just haven't watched yet.

At least 15... I don't watch a lot of movies. In fact, I don't watch a lot... I have spools of discs of unwatched movies and TV shows/anime, but usually I surf the net and play video games instead... Lately I've been planning to pull a few anime marathons to shrink the backlog, but I'm just not as fanatical as I was back in high school. If I watch for 15-20 min, I feel like I should be DOING something. To this day, I don't think I've watched an entire James Bond movie, though I've caught largish pieces of several. Also, if I could do a write-in, I'd want to add the 2001 "Waiting for Godot." Godot, Casablanca, and Bakemonogatari are the only titles I'd put on that tier for well crafted dialogue that I've seen so far. Network had some nice moments, but it felt more like the characters were delivering soliloquies or reading essays.

I found in GTA4, the races were quite easy... They were just a matter of bringing a sports car, not smashing it to bits on the AI drivers in the first few moments (you don't NEED to pass right away, and they WILL screw up,) then braking before corners. Before long, I'd practically (or literally) be lapping the other guys. I've got a handful, since I brainstormed and figured some would be covered in the first 9 pages: Random alternate game modes: You can't just have a pure game anymore it seems. Developers worry too much about the player getting bored, or seeking more from their game that they feel the need to shoehorn alternate modes into the middle of it. This is why we can't have a proper Starfox game anymore, where you fly, shoot, dodge, and fly some more. Or why for some reason games about running around shooting guys have to include a vehicle section or two, or a turret sequence. Living cutscenes: I must be in a minority since people loved Half-Life 2 and Bioshock, but there's just about nothing I hate more than half-playing cutscenes where you get locked into a room, have your weapon disabled for you, and then you get talked at or forced to watch a scripted event. It just feels more patronizing than anything else in gaming to me. If you're going to take away my freedom to move and to act, then don't pretend I'm still playing! Just show me a movie or something, because even if I can turn the camera and hop on desks, I'm clearly not really playing! It's like driving a little kid somewhere and giving them a steering wheel toy so they can pretend they're driving. I'm not a little kid; I know I'm not really participating in the scene... Some say this is more immersive than cutscenes, but I find it more jarring than if they were to just stop the game and make you read a few pages of text. Ironically it's the attempt to hide that the game is shifting between modes that makes it stand out the most, because instead of accepting that the game has changed to a non-interactive mode, it goes into a sort of limbo where most things don't work anymore. Boss fights: I'm also usually against these. There are awesome bosses out there, and some games depend on them, but in a lot of games (particularly fighters) it just feels like an excuse to cheat. It's like obviously the designers didn't want you to finish, so they make the difficulty curve go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 15, 60. It's a cop-out, and an artifact from milking players for quarters in arcades. What's the sense in learning a system and training to thrive within its rules if you're just going to fight a guy who doesn't play by the same rules? Go ahead, walk through that solid wall. Shoot an endless stream of automatically-hitting unblockable missiles. Throw me while you're stunned and unable to move. Be super powered, super-fast, able to counter anything, AND have several times the HP of all the other guys. It's cool - your game will just end at 95% for me because I have actual FUN things to do elsewhere. Also, achievements you can only get by buying DLC! I played a ton of Forza 3 and figured it might be fun to try to get all the achievements... then I realized I had to buy another game's worth of content to do it, so it's not going to happen. Speaking of Forza 3 - racing sims you can't rewind. I've been spoiled now, and it's just inexcusable to play through 3 or more grueling laps, only to get near the end and have a guy shove out my rear end as I head into a corner, sending me flying off the track, into a wall, and out of the race. Did I deserve that? I don't think so! I was driving properly and couldn't even see him, but because the AI has no self preservation interest, they play bumper cars while I try to survive AND win. I'm looking at you, Real Racing 2. Dishonourable mentions (not super common, but it's happened): Invincible special characters: Like the cats in the Tenchu games. They can spot you and alert enemies, but you could attack them until they should be bone meal, and they'll keep running around yowling and alerting people. Locked multiplayer: WHY? You get a cool game, it says it does multiplayer, so you take it to a friend's place, and you're not allowed to play MP yet, so you fool around with SP a bit trying to unlock it and then give up and play a real MP game. How is that a good thing? Powerups that kill you: I thought that died off with games like Nethack, but apparently not! In NH, you could find rotten food, or random, unlabelled potions that would poison you. I was just playing The Binding of Isaac and I'd killed everything on level 3. My shots were powered up and rapid-fire. I had more items than I knew what to do with. I'd used a tarot card before and it gave me an item, so use up the powerups I had, I used a tarot card I found, and... a foot came from above and crushed me dead. Game over. What IS the gameplay point of that, other than to just kick the player in the junk and give them the finger?