Jer

The rules weren't even posted anywhere, meh. If the rules aren't posted, it's perfectly reasonable to be ignorant of them. Oh whatever, even if that's true, it's his right to do so, as it is, after all, his board. Why do you care so much? I can see someone getting banned caring because it actually affects them, but it's hard to understand why you'd be so emotional about someone else not getting banned.

Yeah, FF8, but at least I enjoyed it the first time through. The GF animations being unskippable was inexcusable though. FF9 was a bigger disappointment for me, because it was hyped up as this awesome return to old school. If they meant a return to boring, lame characters, then yeah, that's about right. Annoying heroes, good villians who didn't do as much as they should have, and a *terrible* ending made for a pretty lame game. Not terrible, but disappointing. Chrono Cross. Because although it was a decent game on it's own, it had the Chrono name, and no connections to Chrono Trigger whatsoever, except for that very lame reference to Lavos at the end. I also hated the battle mode with a passion. It had potential, but the fact that all attack magic basically did the same thing really made it pointless and repetative. I'm trying to think of some non-RPG that was really disappointing, but none come to mind. Weird that I seem to only be disappointed in RPGs. Well actually DDRMax2 USA was pretty disappointing. After huge improvements from DDRUSA to Konamix and Konamix to Max1, Max2 was a step in the wrong direction with fewer songs and lots of generic radio trance that wasn't stepped very well. Especially compared to DDRExtreme, which came out almost the same time in Japan and had nearly double the number of songs and higher song quality, Max2 was really flat.

I vastly prefer Japanese sticks, they last forever and I prefer the higher sensitivity. When I go back to American sticks I'm annoyed by how much I have to move them to get them to register an input. What's wrong with Horis? I love them, and I've never seen or heard of them breaking.

$100-$130? Sheesh American sticks are too expensive. You can get an Hori for $60-$70, and they don't get much higher quality than that. I'm curious to see some pics too...

Sigh this is so weak. Damaramu is an obnoxious little shit that goes from thread to thread picking fights with Sakura, and Sakura makes a thread with a joke title *in NHB* and gets banned for it? What is this, GameFaqs? Eh whatever. There's no point of having an NHB forum if something that small and stupid is banworthy. Ugh I'm gonna miss one of the few worthwhile posters in videogames.

Yeah, it seems like my situation is the same as a lot of other people's. I used to really love RPGs, they were by far my favorite genre, but it's getting harder and harder for me to get myself to play them. I don't have huge blocks of free time like I used to, and I get more and more impatient with them, especially since they seem to be getting longer and longer. FF6 is my favorite game ever and I love lots of old school RPGs and a fair number of new ones, but they're starting to feel like more and more of a chore. Recently I've just been playing rhythm games and fighters, because I can play them in small doses and still enjoy myself. I liked FFX and I'll probably get FFX-2, but I'm not really looking forward to it that much. I don't mind a new singer doing Real Emotion, I didn't think Koda Kumi was all that special. TMD, your hypocracy and obsession with Sakura is getting a little annoying. You never qualify your statements with imo (like when you said KotoR was better than FFX, *very* debatable), so why should everyone else? Dragging your feud from thread to thread is stupid.

Oh really? State College has a nice local thread, I thought all the other cities would too. Oh well.

You can find pretty much everything you'd ever want about all 2D fighters at shoryuken.com. Check the region boards, there might be a thread for your city. It's worth it to find people to play, even if you're not planning to start travelling to tourneys or anything.

Hahahaha. Come to Pitt and see what it actually means to be good at GGXX, you scrub.

Wow, no one's said anything even the least bit substantive about 3D fighters, so I might as well write up some stuff. There actually is depth to 3D fighter gameplay, even if you wouldn't realize it from these posts. 3D fighters are poke games! It's amazing how few people actually realize this. People think of 3D fighters as games where you hit a launcher and they float into a big juggle, and while that does happen, high and low pokes are going to make up the majority of a good player's offense. In Tekken, jabs (11, 12 or 112 usually) are what you use both as a poke on offense to set up your bigger stuff, and to interrupt your opponent's rush. Low jabs (d1 or d2) are also very useful as an interrupt move, and get you into full crouch so that you can do fc or wr moves. More than half your offense is usually going to be some sort of poke. If you don't realize this and just throw out big stuff, you're going to get killed by a decent player. Know how fast your character's jabs are and what they interrupt. Tekken jabs are usually 8 or 10 frames, SC2 jabs (quick slashes, like AA) usually range from 10 to 13 frames. You don't need to know the frame data of every move in the game or anything, but you should know which commonly used moves you can interrupt with a jab or low jab. If you don't, you're going to be at the mercy of long strings, especially in Tekken where there's no GI. No, ten strings aren't good! Most people play 3D fighters very badly. If you ever want to stop being a scrub, you're going to have to learn what actually works in the games you play. Go online, learn the conventions and then read a strategy FAQ. tekkenzaibatsu.com and soulcalibur.com are great resources for those games. I'm not saying you should stick with exactly what's on the FAQ, but they'll give you an idea of where to start. Where to *not* start is to do the high damage flashy stuff, because it almost never is going to work. Ten strings suck. Multipart throws suck. Unblockables (almost always) suck. Any move that does more than 90 damage (almost always) sucks. Don't do that stuff just because it looks cool, find out what actually works and learn to do it. Nope, throws aren't lame! As much as people like to whine about them, throws aren't lame in the least. You just have to learn how to deal with them. You should get in the habit of buffering a throw break whenever you think you might be thrown. In T4, if you buffer a 2 break, you'll break the throw 90% of the time because all 2+4 throws are 2 breaks. In SC2, if you buffer a break, you'll break the throw half the time. You can also just duck the throw, in which case you're at major advantage if they miss. Following on that, realize that throws, because they can be broken or ducked, aren't always the best thing you can do. Just because you have a guaranteed throw doesn't mean you should take it. That's the most true in SC2, where I always see people throw after a GI. Why go for a 50% chance at 60 damage when you can get something that does more damage and is guaranteed? Just for example, Cervy can do 3B, 2A+B, 33B after a GI if they don't re-GI, and that's unescapable and does a lot more than a throw. You aren't contractually obligated to finish your strings! This is really important. Just because you can do a four string doesn't mean that you have to, or even that you should. Tekken is a game of broken strings. If you stop your string after one or two hits, then you've got a natural mixup between a followup or finishing the string. Law's 123 is good, but it's even better if you sometimes stop after the 12 and do something else, like ff3+4. Finishing really telegraphed strings is often a really bad idea, because anyone decent is going to know how to block or punish you for it. Don't do Kilik's 66KKB, because they'll just GI the last hit. Stop after the 66KK, let them whiff the GI, and punish them for it. Take full advantage of step! There's a lot more to step than step throw. In fact, step throw is almost always one of your worst options. If they whiff a move because you stepped it, you can often punish them really hard. Most characters in SC2 have a big launcher off of step (11_77, 22_88 or 33_99). Step a move into the launcher and you'll do more than a throw, and it won't be escapable. Learn the more sophisticated strategies of stepping if you really want to get good at a game. If you step guard in SC2 (2~G/8~G), you'll cancel the step if they do a horizontal. That basically makes step safe, because if they do a vertical you'll step it, and if they do a horizontal you'll cancel the step and guard it. Doing this makes step a much more powerful weapon than it is for most players, who just use normal 8WR and get punished for it with horizontals. For SC2: GI dos and don'ts Unfortunately, the SC2 AI, also known as the worst abomination of an AI in the history of videogames, makes people think that top level SC2 is about GI wars. In reality, it's virtually the opposite. GIs are very risky and give you a huge disadvantage (something like -30 frames, or a full half second) on whiff. As a result, it's almost always much safer to block. Don't GI just because you think they might do something, or more often than not you'll get punished hard for it. Use GI remembering that it gives you a fairly small advantage if you hit it, and leaves you at a huge disadvantage if you whiff. The main time to use it is either at the end of a set string or slow move (in which case you're basically guaranteed to get it unless you screw up), or to stop a mid/low mixup. 4+G GIs both mids and lows, so some nasty mid/low mixups like X's 3A/3B or Mitsu's 2KB/66K both get GIed by a 4+G. Besides that, the only other real time to use it is after the opponent GIs you. People tend to do a throw or guaranteed move after a GI, and the only way to avoid that is to GI back. If you run into a GI happy opponent, twitch cancels are your biggest weapon. A~G, B~G or K~G, watch them GI seeing the motion, and hit them with your strongest move. The same thing is true with people who love to re-GI. Either just do a delay move (Nightmare's 66B, Asta's PT or Mitsu's 66A+B are good examples), or twitch cancel into something big. Train them not to re-GI, and then throw out moves that hit them unless they re-GI, like most 3Bs. It's a fun little mindgame, and it's totally to your advantage if you understand how to use GIs and they don't. The thing not to do is a bunch of 6+G -> throw, which can result in seven or eight re-GIs. That looks cool to spectators, but doing an A~G into 3B or PT is a hell of a lot more efficient. That's all for now, tired of writing.

I'm totally with DropToeHoldOntoChair here, I'm kind of shocked by all this raving over what I thought was a very weak show. I went to a near-empty Hooters with my roommate, and we both were sitting there laughing at how bad everything was and walked out shaking our heads. It was a good time, but not because of the quality of the PPV. Tajiri/Rey was a nice enough opener and Brock/Taker was better than I expected, but it had a horrible ending and felt a little slow. Everything else was either bland, or in the case of Steph/Vince and Show/Eddy, really really bad. Benoit's carry job of Albert was pretty amazing, but it still wasn't a very good match. I'm probably the only one, but I found myself getting into Summerslam and Unforgiven more than this. Shrug.

Beatmania IIdx. Best game ever.

Come To Me - Baby VOX My brother was planning to enter it in Tournamix 4+ so I listened to it, and really liked it. I'll probably download some more of their stuff.

Well, the size of the serious/tournament community is totally unrelated to the number of people that buy the game. Games like GGXX or CvS2, where the tournament community is huge yet the sales are terrible, indicate that the game is underrated. If serious players love it and the masses ignore it, that's underrated. With VF4, the game actually sold relatively well, better than any 2D fighter has sold in ages, but the tournament level players just didn't care about it. If the serious players are playing it but not getting into it, it indicates that there's something wrong with the game itself, not that it's underrated.

I'm actually starting to agree with that. I would have put SC2 over TTT a year ago, but SC2 is starting to feel a little too glitchy. TTT was relatively glitch free, balanced and fun. It may very well be the best 3D fighter ever.

SC2 *is* better, because it's actually fun to play against other people. VF4:E kills SC2 in terms of everything one player and is the greatest single player fighter ever, but, as was true of VF4, it's just not fun to play against humans unless you dedicate your life to it. You've got to put in hundreds of hours to get good enough to get around low jabs and easy high/low strings, and most people, even most hardcore fighting game players, don't have that kind of time. Versus is just frustrating, because you want to do all the cool offense you spent time practicing, but it loses to low jab -> throw. Not cool. But I'll admit, high level VF4 is awesome to watch. The videos in VF4:E are soo cool. Anyway, being thought of as worse than SC2 is hardly grounds for being the second most underrated game of all time. SC2 is an awesome game. Underrated is people saying T4 was worse than DOA3. What a joke.

VF4:E? What the hell? Did any critic *not* give the game a 90+ score? Plus it was realeased in a Greatest Hits box because the original VF4 sold over 400,000 copies stateside. Just because it doesn't outsell Tekken doesn't mean that it doesn't sell. And VF4:E *isn't* a rehash of VF4? Yeah... Terrible pick.

Eh whatever, Suikoden 2 is one of my all time favorite games. Most RPGs are overshadowed by FF, but most RPGs aren't as good as Suik 2 and thus don't deserve as high a place on the list, imo. I want to see Vagrant Story on there. Amazing game, completely ignored for no reason.

The list is focusing on what the media said, not what hardcore RPG fans on message boards say. Suik 2 was totally ignored in favor of FF8 despite being infinately better than FF8, and was relegated to one paragraph reviews from people that didn't play it. EGM gave it a 7.0 because characters couldn't move diagonally. So yes, in terms of the media, it's unbelievably underrated. I'd have it higher up, myself.

Halo is questionable, but DoA3 is absolutely deserving of its place on the list. It's a perfectly fine casual play fighter, but it was hailed by a good number of people as the best or one of the best fighters of all time, and it's clearly not. It's just DoA2 with better graphics and all the same flaws, but lots of people were so smitten with the graphics that they didn't seem to notice.

Mario Kart sold something like four million copies, and came out first quarter 97, about six months before Goldeneye. It was Mario Kart's popularity that got Nintendo so focused on making everything four player. And FPS games still aren't big on consoles. After Goldeneye, the only FPS games that have really made a big impact on consoles are Perfect Dark and Halo. Two games in five years is hardly changing game making forever. PS2 launched without a major FPS, and seems to be doing just fine.

... No it didn't. It didn't do anything for game making. Four player gaming was already big, with Mario Kart and Starfox being extremely popular. If any game popularized four player and helped sell N64s, it was Mario Kart. FPS games were popularized with Doom, and Quake and Duke 3D already had multiplayer way beyond anything in Goldeneye. I didn't even think Goldeneye was particularly good in 1997, and it certainly wasn't innovative.

Yeah, me too, as long as there's good gameplay. You do still need good gameplay underneath all the gloss though, no matter how good the cutscenes are. Without gameplay it's just a movie.

Is that actually true? I heard some rumor about a 9th Mix that would supposedly be two DVDs and about 600 songs, but I have no idea of the truth of that. Did Konami officially confirm that 8th Mix would be the last one?

Heh Konami has moved on to many new things, there's tons of different Bemani games and several mixes of most of them. There's no reason for them to stop DDR, though. I doubt I'll ever get tired of the gameplay. The only thing I get tired of are the mixes, and as long as they keep making good new ones, there'll always be a reason for me to keep playing.