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Topics - WarpRattler

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46
Video Game Chat / Talk Like a Pirate, Play Like a Pirate
« on: September 19, 2009, 07:19:54 AM »
Telltale Games is giving away episode one of Tales of Monkey Island today only to celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day. (For those who are worried about that sort of thing, the installer is 189 MB.)

I played the demo back when it came out, and aside from the mouse part of the control scheme, it was fun. I'm looking forward to playing the episode proper.

Two side notes. One, anyone who already purchased Tales of Monkey Island instead gets their choice of any Telltale game for free.
Two, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is 50% off right now. Supposedly the Version For Handheld Apple Devices is similarly discounted.

47
General Chat / WarpRattler's Comic Convention Extravaganza 2009
« on: August 10, 2009, 01:40:39 AM »
After posting in the HOPEFUL thread about this one year and having it end up being entirely pointless...I present one man's account of the Chicago Comic-Con & Video Game Expo (formerly known as Wizard World Chicago, and in fact still labeled as Wizard World Chicago in many places).

Prologue

When did I stop believing in Santa Claus? In truth, this sort of silly question holds no real significance for me. However, if you were to ask me when I stopped believing that the old man wearing the red costume was Santa, then, I can confidently say, "I have never believed in Santa, ever." I knew that the Santa who appeared at m

The car ride to Iowa a week before the convention was largely uneventful and dull. After wasting a lot of time in Decatur buying some last supplies for the trip (which largely killed my netbook), we finally hit the road for real. I watched episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya until the laptop ran out of power (before we left, I copied every episode I downloaded over to the netbook so I'd finally be able to watch them), and played a lot of Aria of Sorrow after that until we got there.

Our arrival and first day at my relatives' house in Iowa was, like the trip, uneventful. As everyone except me was cosplaying this year, I had a lot of time to sit on this computer and chat in #tmk. (The Internet connection here is dial-up, sadly.)

We spent almost a week in Iowa. During this time, I finished almost two runs of Cave Story (the second run is still unfinished, as I'm stuck in Hell), got Kalee to start playing Cave Story, proved to the denizens of #tmk that Kalee exists, played a lot of Ketsui Death Label, acquired a few PC games, finished Aria of Sorrow (good end, of course), and largely utilized much of the same sleep schedule I have at home.

I finished watching season one of Haruhi, and went to begin on season two - after watching the first episode, I discovered that for whatever reason, the newer version of Media Player Classic I was using didn't want to display subtitles on the rest of the episodes, and it wasn't until the night before we left that I downloaded the real version (and codecs) and found that I was able to watch them (more on that later).

Anyway, I did a lot of neat stuff here that week. I finally tried G-TYPE, the fanmade Gradius-R-TYPE-Darius mash-up game, and found that the idea works pretty well (not surprising, since those three series consist for the most part of horizontally-scrolling shmups). I painstakingly copy-pasted the first three fan-translated Haruhi light novels and preserved the formatting (for those who don't know, when I get into a series nowadays, I tend to get a bit obsessed for a while). I also saw a non-PBS television station sign off for the night and looked at some of the other "tame" 4chan boards I hadn't checked out in the past.

Chapter 1

As with the ride to Iowa from home, the ride from Iowa to Chicago was largely uneventful. (I'm trying to think of a car ride this year that was particularly memorable and having great difficulty doing so.) We arrived at the hotel, checked in, and got into our rooms for about half an hour of rest before heading to the convention center for preview night. What we would find there would be horrifying and absolutely disgusting.

No DC.
No Marvel.
No Wizards of the Coast.
Autographs only.
Final Destination.

For those who don't want to fight with the meme, DC, Marvel, and Wizards of the Coast - easily the three largest companies that normally appear at the convention - had no floor presence whatsoever. Sure, DC and Marvel had a few panels, but those were of no importance whatsoever. Instead, a large chunk of the standard commercial floor space had been given to autograph sessions involving stars I don't give a rat's ass about.

Also something about Final Destination, I guess. Anyway, the point is, this convention set itself up to be garbage from the moment we entered the show. Preview night, for the most part, sucked - some vendors were just beginning to unpack, many of the tables in Artist's Alley were empty, and approximately none of the big booths were worth stopping at. However, what I saw of what was there ended up being good - though nothing can make up for the distinct lack of free Magic cards and DC Nation buttons, overall I had fun the first day. We later went shopping for a few items for my brother's costume and food for the hotel room. We discovered that the Wal-Mart was being converted into a SuperCenter, and were able to get all of the food items we needed there instead of having to then drive over to Meijer or Jewel Osco to do so. I also picked up five boxes of Pocky, because I knew I'd need snacks for the convention.

Later that night, I finally got around to watching episode two of season two (for those who have been following the anime, that's episode one of the Endless Eight arc). I then went to watch episode three, only to find that my netbook seemingly lacks the power necessary to play .mkv files of that quality. I won't be able to watch episodes three through eight (and so on, since there should be at least two more episodes for me to download) until I get home.

Chapter 2 and so on to come when I get to my house. Things to come: Purchases! Energy drinks! Raffles! Sketches! Walking! Pocky! Costumes! Stories of the failings of Wi-Fi!

48
Site Discussion / Lack of moderation in the chatroom
« on: April 20, 2009, 04:49:55 PM »
It seems like lately we've had a bunch of users in #tmk - some of which are FF members, though that has no bearing on anything - that do nothing but annoy everyone else. As I post this, there's someone in there advertising a channel on another server, spamming, flaming, complaining about us not talking about Mario in there - and now talking about how he's high (and there's precedent for a ban based on that alone). There are five people in there with the power to kick and ban - and all of them are idling.

I see two solutions to this:

1. The current ops and half-ops being more active. I know this isn't really possible - Chupperson left, Fifth is busy with game programming, Sapphira is obsessed with The Sims 2, Deezer is doing whatever Deezer does, Sunbun is...doing whatever Sunbun does...Bird Person isn't around often due to comics, gaming, and his connection (he has a worse satellite connection than I do), Suffix was deregistered for inactivity, and n-fani lives in a radically different timezone than the rest of us. Still, it's either this or...

2. Appointing more half-ops. There are a few channel regulars that are there during the ten hours or so of regular activity and pay attention to stuff like this going on and are competent enough to deal with this.

I'd really rather not take the route of bobman, TEM, and (until recently) SolidShroom and leave the place, and I'd also rather not pull a Mr. Melee and ignore people (story: he had Chupperson - a full op - on ignore, and had to keep putting him on his ignore list because it wouldn't stick). When we're not dealing with retards, it's pretty great - especially on those occasions when Super Caterina! visits - and I'd rather not leave that behind because of a few idiots.

49
Video Game Chat / Achievements
« on: February 22, 2009, 05:40:43 PM »
(Note: I'm going to use Spore as an example throughout this post, since the PC game has 102 of the dang things and will almost certainly get more when Galactic Adventures is released.)

Achievements are everywhere nowadays (except the Wii). You've got your Gamerscore on Xbox Live, your Trophies on PS3, and several systems on PC - even Flash games have jumped on the bandwagon.

I think that achievements, when properly balanced, are one of the best things in gaming today. By "balanced," I mean, for example, that you shouldn't get an achievement for buying a game (Eternity's Child, lolololol) or completing a simple goal in a game's story mode (finishing the Cell Stage in Spore), but you shouldn't have to play the game in a completely unfun way to earn one, either (Eternity's Child, lolololololololololololol). As far as points received for achievements go, I don't think there should be points awarded unless they actually do something (such as in Spore's Space Stage, which has specialized badges - mostly separate from the game's achievement system - that grant points required to reach higher Master Badge levels; Spore Creatures takes this to a higher level by having you trade in badge points for special creature parts and weird cheats like big head mode). Achievements that do something (Team Fortress 2's class achievements, required to unlock new weaponry) are better than regular achievements, but must still be balanced - I'm not going to play through a game on its hardest difficulty using only, say, a super-weak melee weapon, to unlock a super-powerful melee weapon that can only be used on a completed file. (In the other direction, TF2 has several achievements that are overly easy to earn, and the new Scout set will add more to that group.)

I also hate the idea of secret achievements such as those seen in Guitar Hero: World Tour. What the heck?

What do you guys think of achievements in video games?

50
Forum Games / How do I love thee? Let me count the ways FOR REAL.
« on: February 14, 2009, 02:04:58 AM »
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

51
General Chat / How do you prefer your foods to be prepared?
« on: January 01, 2008, 11:10:38 PM »
Personally, I prefer my potatoes baked or prepared Au Gratin.

52
Sapph used a comma splice.

53
General Chat / The RAISIN Thread: Talk about dried fruit here!
« on: February 03, 2007, 08:16:17 AM »
I figured we should move this out of ANGST.

Raisin + bran = win.

54
Site Discussion / Those darn Gamespy ads are getting WAY out of hand.
« on: October 05, 2004, 10:33:54 PM »
I swear, it's like every other page I view, it comes up as a full-page ad that I have to refresh to get by. Also, aren't those things only supposed to come up a certain amount of times during a session? Or did that change? Whatever happened, I really wish they'd stop with the extreme amount of ads. Oh well, at least it's not like they're showing those Army ads or those stupid Flash pop-ups that you can't even close by pressing the X. Now THOSE are annoying. Well, I should be going back to chatting now...*slaps Deezer with a large trout for no reason in particular*

("o0o") My metroid thinks you are stupid. People who
....v...v disagree with metroids often get sucked dry.<•>_<•>

55
I'm not talking about the one that topics are constantly made about(and subsequently closed). I'm talking about another secret, not linked to anywhere on the website. It's so secret, you'd never find it unless you bribed me in the chatroom or something. It is...THE SECRET SITE!(not the secret site that they keep linking to in the mailbags, the TRUE secret site)

("o0o") My metroid thinks you are stupid. People who
....v...v disagree with metroids often get sucked dry.<•>_<•>

56
Can someone tell me somewhere to put it? And no, I'm not going to use Geocities or something else like that.

("o0o") My metroid thinks you are stupid. People who
....v...v disagree with metroids often get sucked dry.<•>_<•>

57
Hey, what does your voice sound like when you have something like a Tootsie Pop or a Jolly Rancher in your mouth? I can't record a file of my own, but I'm asking all of you to.

("o0o") My metroid thinks you are stupid. People who
....v...v disagree with metroids often get sucked dry.<•>_<•>

58
Site Discussion / Just what is the FF's definition of "newbie"?
« on: April 01, 2004, 01:13:47 AM »
Is it determined by how many posts the user has? Does it depend on how long they've been a member? If neither of those, what is it?

("o0o") My metroid thinks you are stupid. People who
....v...v disagree with metroids often get sucked dry.
This is donotcare95, phasing out<•>_<•>

59
General Chat / Attention Meowrik!
« on: February 18, 2004, 07:00:42 PM »
Since you're not doing the trivia in #tmk anymore, can you send me the trivia questions file? I have trivia in my chatroom, and someone requested Mario questions, so could you send them to me?

("o0o") My metroid thinks you are stupid. People who
....v...v disagree with metroids often get sucked dry.
This is donotcare95, phasing out.

60
General Chat / I think we need a list of who's banned from the forums.
« on: November 15, 2003, 04:55:49 PM »
Who else thinks that?

("o0o") My metroid thinks you are stupid. People who
...v...v disagree with metroids often get sucked dry.
Oh, and Lizard Dude:"And there was this great Food Festival! Did you know that food this and food that...."-jon

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