mikeszekely

I'm not sure if I'd say "primitive." My thoughts have usually been that GNOME is too minimalist. But like I said, Ubuntu 9.10 actually seems quite nice.

Even though I really disliked XII (and I still maintain that the series peaked with IV), I'm not prepared to write off FFXIII just yet. It is, however, going to have to go on the backburner for a bit. After paying the ol' bills I've been a bit tight lately, and I just realized the other day that God of War III and the retail expansion for Dragon Age come out the same day, so I've gotta figure out how to pay those off first.

I've grown to accept the Bayformers aesthetic within the confines of his movies... that's one Transformers universe in the collective Transformers multiverse, much as I accept that in Animated they look like the Teen Titans or in Cybertron very few of them have alt modes that look like they belong on Earth even after coming to Earth. The Bayformers aesthetic is not my preferred look, though, and seeing it recycled for Transformers Prime is a downer not so much because I can't tolerate it but because it indicates that, in an effort to bank on Bay's wildly successful movies, we're going to see less original designs and more aping of a design I wish they'd move away from.

Any Linux users here? It's been about two years since I've really used it. I'd always preferred KDE to GNOME, and I really enjoyed Kubuntu 8.04. But Kubuntu stopped using KDE 3 when 8.10 came out, and KDE 4 seemed kinda half-done to me. I sold that Linux box, and hadn't bothered with it again until a little bit ago. I got a stand for my laptop so I could use it while playing games on my desktop, but the stand was designed for a desktop. So I pulled my HTPC out of my home theater (it's probably been more than a year since I booted it anyway), hooked it up to my monitor's VGA input (my Windows desktop is on DVI), and I installed Ubuntu 9.10. I'm rather pleased with it so far. I guess Ubuntu takes some flak with some parts of the Linux community for being too "mainstream" and not "hardcore" enough, but I think that's kind of silly. Canonical has done an excellent job organizing a dedicated community, and the result is one of the more polished distros I've used. I just installed KDE 4 via the Terminal. Maybe it's improved as much as GNOME has...

I still say put it in the PS3 thread. It's where 90% of the discussion has been so far, and even if a few people plan on getting it for the 360, I think they've figured out that people are talking FFXIII in the PS3 thread. Maybe, but I still kinda doubt it. My Mac is a 1st-gen 13" MacBook. 1.83GHz Core Duo (no 2 in the middle), with an Intel GMA 950 for graphics. At least I had the good sense to upgrade the 80GB hard drive to a 160GB (or was it a 250GB?) hard drive, and take the RAM from 512MB to 2GB. Not that gaming on my MacBook is a priority for me. It would have been nice back when I got it and it was the only entertainment I had at a job where I basically sat for 11 hours doing jack, but nowadays I've got a home-built gaming PC and Asus gaming laptop. Not to mention a job where I'm usually too busy to take a lunch, let alone play Portal.

Apparently the next Transfomers show, Transformers Prime, is going to be taking less after G1 and more after Bayformers. Blech.

I doubt my Mac would run them. But as someone who's platform agnostic, I think it's a good thing when a great game has a chance to reach a wider audience.

I've always found it amusing that, at least here in the States, anime is treated as a genre unto itself. It seems that there are a lot of people who simply say that they love anime and will watch pretty much any anime as if Midori no Hibi and Z Gundam were functionally equivalent by virtue of having been made in Japan. You want me to offer my advice on how to pick a good anime? Check to see if there are any giant robots in it. If there are, you're set.

It works, you just have to wait for it to autopatch after it's installed.

Yeah, the Sense of Right Alliance is pretty awesome. It's like Batman and Superman decided to team up with Spider-Man, who decided they needed more muscle, so they called in Shrek, Lightning McQueen, and the Yellow Ranger. But Bruce Wayne becoming Spider-Man... man, I was laughing so hard I was in tears.

That's fine. And moldy bread is better than a sack of dog turds. That doesn't mean you should consume either.

Me. I reserved my copy the other day. Are dudes hitting on you? You could try what I do and just don't visit Home. It seemed pointless the first and only time I tried it, and I've heard nothing to convince me that that's changed.

I enjoyed III, and I'd probably have really liked IV if that was my first experience with it. As it stands, though, I think the SNES/GBA version(s) was/were better.

There's always the GBA versions. Or, dare I say it, an SNES emulator and some ROMs. On this we agree. Final Fantasy IV was the pinnacle of the series. A memorable cast, party members that had unique abilities, villains who weren't part of an evil empire/corporation, hidden villains pulling the strings from behind the scenes, and a trip to the freaking moon. And while the story was large (at least for the time) and touched on a lot of themes (jealousy, revenge, betrayal, forgiveness, redemption, etc) it was extremely coherent, which is something I think later games in the series lack.

I'm not denying that it's impact. It absolutely did make the PSX, and it also made JRPGs (and especially the Final Fantasy series itself) more mainstream. I'm not even denying that it's an experience. Putting peanut butter on a slice of bread, then pressing the bread peanut butter-side up on the ceiling to see if it sticks is also an experience. Whether or not the game was "good" is subjective, and to that end I'd just say it was kind of so-so. I give it credit for being a large, ambitious game with CGI scenes that were good at the time. Most of the rest of the graphics were pretty sub-par, even by PSX standards, and the characters were just dull. I don't get all the drama about Aeris that floats around to this day. My reaction to her death wasn't tears, it was "dude just offed the dead weight in my party." The plot was meandering. And having a character's aptitude for magic tied to Materia limited the reasons why you'd take one party member over another (granted, this was a problem with the Magicites in Final Fantasy VI, too). Ultimately, it wasn't bad. But even at the time, I thought it was my least favorite Final Fantasy game (I can safely say now that XII and II are worse). But the way people go on about it like it was the pinnacle of not just the Final Fantasy series, but gaming in general, is pretty ridiculous. Hence, why I think it's so overrated. I couldn't tell you. The first and only Lunar game I played was Silver Star Story, and I actually didn't care for it. Due to lack of money, I missed a lot of JRPGs I wish I would have played during the PSX days, and the only ones I really got into during the PS2 days were the Shin Megami Tensei games, and that was more by choice. I've actually yet to play a JRPG during this console generation, as Western RPGs like Dragon Age and Mass Effect seem to have better stories and mechanics.

And I totally would, if there wasn't another big game in less than two weeks for the same console that I really want to play more.

I did too. But it wasn't as good as Mass Effect. I liked it, but I think it clearly marks the departure from a fantasy-style RPG where everyone in the party has unique jobs to the sort of sci-fi games they've become with a cavalcade of characters that are carbon copies of the previous games'. Yeah, VI was still pretty good, but VII was the most over-rated game in the history of games, VIII was interesting but they had to start screwing with the battle system, IX was a nice homage to the older games in the series, X was likable but linear, XI is a freaking MMORPG, and XII's battle system was so terrible that I found the game to be nigh unplayable. I'm reserving judgment on XIII until I get a demo. I'm certainly not buying it without trying it this time.

Interesting, sure. Innovative, maybe. Bold, certainly. Important? That's stretching it, to put it mildly. Important to whom? Sony? I have a feeling that God of War III and Final Fantasy XIII will have more of an impact in PlayStation land. Important to the "Games as Art" crowd? While Heavy Rain is definitely pushing some envelopes, I think most people already have picked their sides in that debate, and I don't really see it changing too many minds.

Yep. Final Fantasy IV was 19 years ago.

Saw, as in the cheesy torture-porn movies? Are you sure you want to dump on God of War III and then tell us in the same post you're picking up a game with a Gamerankings score of 59.81% (compared to Batman AA's 91.67%). And for the record, God of War's story doesn't come together until the last half of the first game, but it's there, and quite good. For the record, the scores for the God of War games are 93.7% (GoW), 92.56% (GoWII), and 90.81% (CoO). GoWIII has a 90.00%, but there's only one review so far. And yeah, I get that opinions are subjective, and I'm guilty of enjoying my share of less-liked games while not caring for other popular ones. But you might want to double-check where you heard Saw was better than Batman, because they're definitely a minority opinion.

They did, and they're talking about it in the PS3 thread. Which this one got merged into. All is right with the world.

I didn't realize he was attached to his piledrivers in that pic! Yeah, I see now. Well, that's not too bad... I guess it works about as well as turning into a tape.

Does he transform?

I think you just answered your own question. Like yourself, I'm holding out for the PS3 version.

3GB of system RAM, and 512MB of VRAM. I could add another 1GB RAM stick, since I have an empty slot, but why would I? Windows would only address another 512MB. And that's what most people refer to as "waste of money." For the record, I've never claimed my rig is an "ultimate machine." The reason I keep referencing is that a lot of people visiting this thread are looking to get decent performance on a budget, and I'm pointing out that you can have that without quad-core CPUs, multiple graphics cards, or more RAM than you know what to do with. And yeah, maybe developers are going backwards in game making. My system can handle Crysis just fun, just not at the highest settings. And I'm not convinced people with two GTX 280's in SLI can play Crysis at the highest settings. My system plays plenty more recent games at the highest settings just fine, though, including Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect 2, Modern Warfare 2, Star Trek Online, etc. By the way, maybe your multitasking is why you're having such a hard time enjoying games lately. Try playing in fullscreen and enjoying the game's score.