Topics

16

General Chat / Silly Anything Else Fan Theories Thread

« on: July 09, 2013, 12:14:23 PM »

Definitely make it clear what you're talking about first, and maybe keep it to one subject per post... I dunno, just a suggestion

Dark Souls

Going Hollow is a metaphor for what happens to game characters when you give up on the game
Dark Souls is one of the most proudly video gamey games I've played in years. In the story, undead people become Hollow by losing their sanity to their immortality, their inability to escape life even after dying again and again. Sound familiar? The games you never finished and gave up on out of frustration, the characters become dead, hostile, empty shells. Lordran may be populated by thousands of Marios and Links and Arthurs and Genes.

The Plague-Infested Barbarians in Blighttown are Shrek
They're huge, they violently protect a swamp level, and drop dung pies when defeated. Their roars must translate to "DONKEHHHHH"

Estus is hot chocolate
I don't know why but it seems like something you'd make at a campfire. It didn't occur to me that it's not much of a camping staple until after I typed it

17

Fan Creations / Ludicrous Power

« on: June 23, 2013, 01:34:05 AM »

Well I have finally started making a new original comic.

The funny thing is, I've had ideas before. I'd had another original comic concept, something completely different, in mind since like 2009 that I actually did some alpha work on and plotted out how the real thing would be in great detail... and never went through with it. This, I've been mulling over for a little more than a week. I dunno how that works. I guess when you have a really good brainstorm, there's so much lightning that you have no choice but to do something with it or risk electrocution

18

Mario Chat / New Super Luigi U

« on: June 20, 2013, 05:08:48 PM »

Wow it's terrifying and merciless.

This is quality stuff. I recommend it and hope it's successful so more NSMBU DLC might happen.

19

Mario Chat / Lost Levels

« on: May 09, 2013, 02:52:24 AM »

Has anyone else actually beaten it?

Yes, anyone else: I beat 8-4 earlier and am adamantly declaring worlds 9 and A-D as post-game (although world 9 turned out to be a joke and I'm up to C-3 or C-4). No warps, alternated between Mario and Luigi as I felt would be effective, played the SNES version, hacked to fix the brick physics to work as they did in the NES version, emulated on the Wii and played with a Classic Controller.

I finally got to mark Super Mario All-Stars and Deluxe as Beaten on my Backloggery. All-Stars, the first game I ever owned. And after 16 years, I've finally beaten it.

20

General Chat / Polyphasic sleep

« on: February 20, 2013, 12:11:26 PM »

Lately I've been really sick of just how much I sleep and when. I'd stay up till 4AM, sleep till 2, feel like crap and like my day was wasted every day. And I'm not even convinced that the standard sleep schedule of 16 waking hours, 8 sleep hours, repeat even works for me when I'm actually doing it right; every time I would "reset" my sleep schedule so I'd wake up at a more normal time, I'd still stay up a long time. I feel like if I wanted to just sleep once a day and spend a third of my life unconscious, I'd stay up 20 or 25 hours and sleep 10, but the rotation of the Earth has other plans.

So I'm trying an Everyman sleep schedule. A core period of three and a half hours asleep (3:30 to 7 AM) and three 20-minute naps throughout the day (around 11AM, 3PM and 7PM). The appeal of this over the much more fascinating überman (in which you sleep for 20 minutes every three hours and forty minutes FOREVER and technically only sleep two hours a day) is the flexibility it allows. You can move naps up and down if you need or want, and it's less punishing if you mess up.

I hope this works out for me. I am excited at the prospect of only sleeping four and a half hours a day and not suffering from sleep deprivation. I'll have so much more time to do stuff. Yesterday was my first complete day of doing this and I think it's gonna be successful. Today, I struggled to make myself get out of bed at 7 but didn't oversleep. Then I had a nasty weird knot in my esophagus as my body interrogated me about what I was doing to it. But that stopped when I gave it some coffee, now I feel much like I normally do when I wake up at an AM hour.

21

General Chat / Paranatural

« on: January 26, 2013, 05:50:22 AM »

This comic. It's awesome. The art is detailed and fantastic. The writing is smart and funny. The characters are... almost all insane, but endearing, varied and interesting. I can't say enough nice things about it.

22

Mario Chat / Multiplayer Mario 64

« on: October 25, 2012, 12:54:20 PM »

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJTLOiz5kws" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJTLOiz5kws</a>

Featuring Mario and Black Mario

23

General Chat / Obsolete Things You're Glad You Don't See Anymore

« on: October 23, 2012, 12:28:47 AM »

Sometimes it surprises me how many of these I can think of. It's alarming to have "When I was your age, we had [thing] and it sucked" stories and to have told them. I can't be that old...

-Tags on T-shirts. These aren't actually completely gone, I guess, but I haven't owned a T-shirt with a tag for a long time and I am eternally grateful to whoever decided to start printing the shirt info on the inside of the shirt.

-VHS. Rewinding, the amount of space a tape took, the fragility of the things, my god. If all VHS tapes and VCRs vanished suddenly, they would not be missed.

-Disposable cameras. I seem to remember dozens of these things lying around my house when I was little, used up, and never being taken to the 1-hour photo.

24

General Chat / Blind pets

« on: April 08, 2012, 11:47:23 PM »

One of our little dogs (refresher: one of five--this one is named Zorra) is blind now. All but completely. She still shows a vague, severely delayed reaction to sights during the day, but at night she's lost. Her pupils look like storm clouds and her gaze is unfocused. She slips when you put her down if she doesn't have time to get acquainted with the floor first.

The signs had been showing up in the week or so before now--she took her sweet time avoiding the lawnmower, and nearly crashed full-speed into my unmoving leg as I stood in the kitchen. Then all of a sudden, Saturday morning, she was bumping into walls and moving slower than she ever has. It's hilarious and sad at the same time. It's one of those things where it's really pitiful, but everyone knows they'd be laughing at it if it were on TV, you know?

It doesn't help her case that she's been the weird one all these years. She's the one who did the most barking at night. She's the one who weighed the least, suddenly became the heaviest, and then suddenly became lighter than before. She's the one who flips out over dog treats and seems to live for no other reason than to get another one the next day. So she's always been something to talk about and never attached to any one person in the house like the others. She's getting her due sympathy but it's understandably not the same as if, well...

...Muff is older than Zorra by two years but has shown practically no signs of aging compared to the others. She's active, expressive, loves to play... but she has a faint cloudiness in her eyes that you can see in the light. I'm so attached to her and I fear how broken she'll be if she also goes blind. She has better natural protection from the sun and spends more time inside... but it's probably going to end up happening eventually, and that sucks. But when it does, I'm just gonna have to accept it and deal with it.

25

General Chat / Really terrifying things that thankfully will never happen, probably

« on: February 07, 2012, 01:07:27 PM »

Ever think about things like that? Things like... gravity deciding one morning it's going to repel objects away from each other. So everything, and everyone not bolted down flies off the planet, and everyone indoors at the time has to figure out how to survive on a planet that wants everything off of it. Not that it would last. All the water would be gone.

26

Mario Chat / Mario Kart 64 HUD

« on: January 02, 2012, 11:38:52 PM »

I am a fan of relatively useless and unnecessary options and features in games that are apparently there just for the heck of it, and Mario Kart 64's little changing HUD is one such thing.

I liked the third one with the racers going around the screen. It showed, roughly, what was happening to everyone at any given time, and I was crazy enough to enjoy paying attention to how bad Luigi was blowing up in 8th place over and over again.

27

General Chat / Hampture

« on: September 04, 2011, 12:13:10 PM »

A dude is making BioShock real, for hamsters, in the name of science

Holy [dukar]

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dNkYXgiH3w" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dNkYXgiH3w</a>

Holy [dukar]

28

Video Game Chat / Nintendo tips Wii over, sells as new model

« on: August 23, 2011, 03:14:19 PM »

Wii redesign on its way to Europe

Honest question, does anybody here even stand their Wii (or 360 or PS3 while we're at it) up as advertised? I used to 'cause I'll admit it looks better that way and the GameCube ports are easier to reach, but I've kept it on its side for years now. Plastic circular stand or not, it's still less prone to fall over...

29

Video Game Chat / Smash Bros. Brawl: "R2" Trophies

« on: August 12, 2011, 04:04:16 AM »

There are a few files in the trophies directory of Brawl that weren't used in the final game. A couple are from Melee (Samurai Goroh and Donkey Kong Jr.'s are in there), the playable Kongs have "donkeykongoriginal.brres" and "diddykongoriginal.brres," either suggesting they'd have alternate look trophies like Fox and Falco do, or Classic Mode would have yielded trophies depicting the character in their original appearances like in Melee... or just that they loved Barrel Blast that much...

And then a few characters have "R2" trophies. All of their standard trophies are marked with "R1," and for a while I assumed that the "R2" trophies were their Final Smashes. Then I noticed that not everyone has an R2 trophy and the Final Smash trophies are named for the move. The R2 trophies are actually just like the regular ones, but with different poses.I would guess they started making these before either deciding to have Final Smash trophies earned by All-Star Mode, at a time when trophies were planned to be earned in SSE, or maybe just for fun in case another mode was made.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which characters do and don't have these. Falco has one, Fox doesn't, Kirby, of all characters, doesn't have one, Jigglypuff does, Red has one and none of his Pokémon do, Zero Suit Samus has one and Varia Suit Samus doesn't...

(forgive how most of these are missing eyeball textures or have transparency issues, BrawlBox doesn't show 'em right)

Mario
Donkey Kong
Samus
Pikachu
Luigi
Captain Falcon (this is the only one where I changed the angle from the default front view, so his mouth is visible)
Zelda
Sheik
Falco
Pit
Diddy Kong
King Dedede
Snake
Red
Lucario
Jigglypuff

I have Sheik's, Luigi's, Samus', Jigglypuff's and Snake's in place of the originals in my game. I'll use my capture device to get pics of those in-game later. You can replace models like that if the replacement model has more bones than the original--I haven't checked all of them but most of the originals have more than the R2s. Pretty sure I've already checked Mario, Pikachu, Cap, Zelda, Pit, Dedede, and Lucario, and none of them would work.

30

Video Game Chat / Games you think are perfect

« on: June 27, 2011, 12:53:00 PM »

Perfect as in, there is not a single thing in it that you ever find yourself complaining about. Not even a minor detail you would change, add or subtract.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and for almost every game I really really love, there's still something about it that I hate. The only exception thus far has been Punch-Out!! (the Wii version from 2009, of course, it's not like I haven't treated it as the greatest thing on Earth in the past). There's nothing, nothing that I think is wrong with it.

I've also been mulling Portal over. I feel like I'm forgetting something in it that I don't like but I'm not sure.



Honorable mention: good games that are very close but still have things in them I hate

Banjo-Kazooie. What's the problem? The maze-like structure on the way to Mumbo's skull in Bubblegloop Swamp. I hate that. And unless you enter the level, get the boots, leave, smash the ice chunk blocking the way to Cheato, then do the level, plan perfectly so you finish as a crocodile, and leave, you must go through it twice at least... unless you don't want Cheato's first upgrade. What would I have changed? Instead of a tiny slot for only Croc Banjo to fit through, I would have put a door there opened by a switch in front of Mumbo's house.

Also I wish the entrance to Rusty Bucket Bay wouldn't be permanently flooded. You never actually get to walk up the steps to the open door.

Ocarina of Time. What are the problems? Time is too wonky. You can't be in Kakariko in the day, use the Sun's Song to make it night, then go to the Graveyard and see Dampé because he's already ended his tour? What. And of course there's Kaepora "That God[darn] Owl" Gaebora. And the way you can't necessarily get a quick warp to Zora's Domain, particularly in the future half of the game where you can't swim through the portal at the lake (not that anyone likes swimming across the lake in the past half). And the Iron Boots in the Water Temple. There are actually many things in OoT that make it far from perfect, in spite of how good it is. Perhaps the remake has fixed a few of these problems? I'll find out later on

BioShock. What's wrong with that one? Everything after you meet Andrew Ryan in person. A billion fetch quests and a boss who doesn't really fit the mood of the rest of the game. Especially the ending if you accidentally harvested ONE Little Sister. I was trying to reload! Honest! I don't deserve the bad ending where I become an irretrievably bad guy! The part with the bees and the splicers showing up every time you opened a hive was pretty ridiculous, too. And I don't like how you can't customize the controls (at least in the 360 version).

EarthBound 2/MOTHER 3... There's an explanation behind why they decided to make it so you can't run for a little while before Lucas or Kumatora learns a new PSI move but it's still annoying and I automatically use the workaround that makes it almost like it doesn't happen--walk around in circles until I get the move. There's also a problem most people miss that's really glaring when you notice it. Hinawa (Lucas's mother) barely has any character at all, but you're very much expected to be devastated when she dies. What went wrong here? They kill Hinawa entirely too early for it to be very striking. More interaction with Flint was really, really needed, especially since he is your player character when it happens. Claus on the other hand has a lot of screen time before being reconstructed, so his death hits a lot harder. Maybe they should've called it BROTHER instead.

A lot of people would probably say they hate Chapter 3 most because Salsa is so weak, but I disagree. Having your player character NEED to rely on a non-playable character that you hate is a pretty effective writing technique that wouldn't work in a movie. It's frustrating, but that's exactly what that part needs. You are Salsa, and you are frustrated. No problem here.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves. It's great fun, but what is WITH that one Tug-Of-War game with the vacuum!? Did they not test that one at all? There are a few microgames in there that you can never be sure you'll win by skill because the control isn't perfect, and that's baaaaad.