Jer

I don't think any Smile.dk song has ever been in an American mix, because Konami really doesn't like paying for liscensed songs for the US version. Bastards. But yeah, I'm enjoying DDRMax2 more than I thought I would. There's a lot of good stuff in there, and it's fun unlocking everything. My main gripes are that there are way too many repeats/remixes of bad songs, and that the American exclusives have weak steps. But it's still a fun mix.

Yeah, Tekken's waaay better than KI, and has a great cast of characters. Definitely put it in...

The Whistle Song (Blow My Whistle Bitch)

Aaaah I hate Cowgirl! Eeew! It'd be hard to list all the songs I love playing single. CFSiL Speed, So Deep, R+P, Exotic Ethnic, Waka Laka, Destiny Lovers, Breakdown, Tsugaru, Tsugaru Apple, Burning Heat, Cartoon Heroes, Sakura, Max300... Yeah. DDREx has too many good songs. I'm a relative doubles scrub, but I love the easy speed mixes (Dam Dariram, If You Were Here, Hero), CSFiL Speed, So Deep and Dropout because it impresses bystanders, heh. I don't freestyle, I have no creativity. I bought DDRMax2 today and it feels like I paid $10 each for Breakdown, So Deep, Tsugaru and Burning Heat. Oh well, I knew that before I bought it. I'm really looking forward to DDRExJ, because I love the new DDREx songs and the songlist is just totally stacked. 94 songs before unlocks, including all the 10 footers... wow.

FF6 was 24 megabits, or 3 MB. Everything was listed in megabits back then, I dunno why. Made things sound bigger I guess.

Yeah Cervy's juggles can look pretty badass. The fast sword attack is just while rising A+B, and 2A+B puts you into a crouch, so that combo is just 2A+B, A+B. It looks really cool, and if you're playing people that wake up with a move, the 2A+B will relaunch and you'll get the combo every time.

I haven't played the FFC version, so I can't say anything about that. But the US version that everyone seems to love has no character development at all, and a very random, shallow plot. Red XIII, Cloud and Sephiroth all have well developed characters with backstory. The rest of the cast doesn't have much going for them storywise, I'll give you that. The plot of FF7 was what I got into, not the characters, for the most part. Red XIII was an awesome character though, one of my favorites in the series. I didn't think FF7's story crumbled at all, shrug. I found it compelling the whole way through and loved the ending. I loved the world of ruin, it's probably my favorite part of any RPG. If you develop the villian as well as they developed Kefka, then you don't need him constantly doing villianous antics for him to be imposing. The world of ruin has a lot of great miniplots focusing on the characters and an imposing villian you have to eventually fight, that's good enough for me. And it has freedom but with direction, which is my ideal for RPGs. And I'd rather have no plot than a bait and switch plot. Why is it good that Golbez is doing villianous things when he's not even the villian? It felt like a huge waste of story that could have been spent on, say, developing Zemus. I just completely disagree with every bit of this. FF4 is more constrained, but that doesn't somehow make it more strategic. I beat the game by using my offensive characters' best attacks over and over while using my healer's best magic over and over. Wow, what incredible tactics that took!~! Damn, having the black mage cast Nuke every single turn, that certainly taxed my brain power! FF6 lets you use the characters you want, as opposed to being stuck with several characters that I found very unappealing like in FF4, and, if you want to put in the time, customize them to make them feel like they're yours, instead of just what you were given. That's just much more interesting than being given spells at arbitrary points through leveling, which is boring as hell. I remember one point where you had to be at level 32 to cast reflect on a boss, because that was the only way to beat it. I was at level 28, and therefore was forced to do nothing but level for four levels to get around Square's retarded "clever" boss. That's just bad design, and there's nothing like it in FF6. If you needed reflect in FF6, you'd just put an Esper on someone and learn it, not have to stop dead and waste two hours leveling for no reason. No, the World of Ruin is very nonlinear and turned out beautifully. You could cast Nuke just as fast as you could throw a potion in FF4. I'd rather not have a time delay dynamic than have a poorly balanced one like in FF4. Plus FF4 didn't even have an ATB guage, so you didn't even know when your characters would get a turn. It felt very arbitrary.

I hated Raiden. His look was fine, but MGS is the kind of series that needs a strong hero, not an obnoxious, whiny one. Angsty heroes aren't as bad in RPGs, but in a game where you're sneaking around killing people and blowing up big mechs with missiles, it's really annoying when the story is interrupted by a five minute whiny coversation with your girlfriend.

Actually the "real gamer" phrase was first introduced to the argument by DVD Spree in saying how we weren't real gamers because we didn't mark for Link, but whatever. Anyway, from browsing various Nintendo websites, the people that bought the game for Link are now "done" with it because they beat ultra hard/WMM, so my argument stands that most people who bought the game for Link are just Nintendo marks and not fighting game fans, meh. We justified our arguments at the time, you just freaked out because you didn't like them.

Hehe you really underestimate the exponential progession of computers. SNES ran at about 4 MHz with 128 KB of work RAM and 64 KB of VRAM. The entire cartridge for games was only between 1-4 MB, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. FF6... 3 MB. CT... 4 MB. That's some pretty amazing compression/programming efficiency. PS1, I think, ran at 33 MHz (either 25 or 33, I get Saturn and PS1 mixed up), with 2 MB of work RAM and 1 MB of VRAM, I think. It's been a long time since I actually saw the specs. But the point is, they both ran on hardware that by modern standards is unbelievably crappy. That doesn't add anything to the argument, but I find it interesting.

Given the weak card, I didn't think it was that bad. I enjoyed watching it, but it might have just been good company at Hooters. It still was worse than an average episode of SD, but it wasn't disasterously bad.

I actually like FF1 because it has good old school gameplay. I love the customizability, it's fun. It doesn't have a plot, but having no plot is better than having time wasted on a terrible plot, ala FF4 and FF5. The original NES version is unplayably archaic, but the PS1 remake is quite awesome. I hate FF4 because it tried to get over on the plot and the characters, but the plot and the characters all sucked. All the characters were cardboard cutouts with no depth to them at all. Why am I supposed to care when undeveloped characters sacrifice themselves to save other undeveloped characters? The only characters I liked were unplayable (Golbez and Fu So Ya), and instead of using Golbez as a villian, they used the retarded "God of Hate" that you hadn't even seen until the very end. Yuck. The gameplay was terrible too, since you had no freedom whatsoever. They always told you what to do and who to use, which felt horribly constraining after FF1, where you could choose your party and, after beating Lich, do things in whatever order you wanted. And the mangled prototype ATB was an important step towards the beauty of real ATB, but was so badly done that it's worse than turn based battle.

Yep, same here. FF6 is my favorite game ever, because it has an amazing plot and the best gameplay in the FF series, imo. I also love 7 and 10 because they had great plots that I enjoyed the whole way through. On the other hand, FF4, 5, 8 and 9 had boring characters and a boring plot, so I could never get into them, regardless of what their gameplay was like. FF5 admittedly had really cool gameplay with the class system, but the plot was so bad that I was always bored with it.

There's combos, but there's not juggles. If you hit someone while they're in the air, the attack just goes through them. It's pretty hard to go back after playing modern fighters, because I'm always expecting to be able to juggle them and you never can. MK was the first game to have any sort of juggle system.

VF launched with the Saturn months before the PS1 was available in North America. VF2 came out in January 96, mere months after Toshinden came out, and the games were considered to be comparable at the time. And Toshinden got huge amounts of critical acclaim from everyone. It got a 97% in GamePlayers, which was one of their highest scores ever, and it was a game of the year candidate in many magazines. I'd consider that to be pretty damn overrated, even if people realized how wrong they were pretty quickly. It was a fairly good game in it's own right, but that doesn't mean it wasn't hugely overrated. Everyone considered it to be better than SMW at the time, and like the article mentions, SMW2 was totally ignored because the media was so busy focusing on DKC2. Neither were bad games, but both got much more hype and critical acclaim than they deserved. One of the categories mentioned in the article were games that were hyped so much that they couldn't possibly live up to the hype, so that's probably why they have SMS on the list. It fits nicely into that category.

Tekken better *not* be in that top five, heh. I'd like to see Goldeneye there myself, it's alright, but not all that special. Seeing it above Half Life/Counterstrike on most top 100 lists is very stupid. 23) Battle Arena Toshinden - Yup. Terrible game that got over only on graphics. It's amusing that people once thought it was comparable to VF2 and TK2. 16) Mortal Kombat - Nah. It wasn't as good as SF2 like some said, but it was still a good game, and very influential, for better or worse. 14) Dead or Alive 3 - Yup. The same broken reversal driven combat, but now "great" because of ~graphics~. So many people called it the greatest fighter ever. Sigh. 10) Halo: Combat Evolved - Nah, it's certainly less overrated than Goldeneye. It deserves most of the credit it gets. 9) Donkey Kong Country - Yup. Graphics are all that this had, other than that it wasn't nearly as fun as SMW. 7) Final Fantasy VII - Bah no way. If anything should be on here it's FF8 and FF9. FF7 gets the backlash because it started the cinema driven RPG revolution, but unlike the others it was actually a great game.

I hope it's GG style, because GG style is just so much more fun. The gameplay of the games is really different though, so either way is going to feel a little weird. Still, I'm really looking forward to it.

Beatmania IIdx. The game is soo hard and I'm soo bad at it, but I love it. And VF4 to an extent. It's way too hard for me to ever get good at, but I still like playing it.

Heh Ivy scrubs are the funniest. I usually let them hit me with 6B+K every time they do it just so I can see their horrible summon suffering buffers. They hunch over the stick, get this determined look on their face and start rolling the stick as fast and hard as they can, it's hilarious. One guy couldn't do it with his left hand, so he'd actually reach over with his right hand to do the buffer. Then they try for SS even though I'm already ducking, and I just calmly throw them, and they get so mad. "How did you know?!" LOL. I've started tech ducking the SS so I can get the always fun "WTF THAT HIT YOU! CHEATER!". Much fun.

Scrubs play me all the time. They're boring, but the ones that get mad when they lose are hilarious. If I see that starting to happen, my goal is always to send them away in a rage, banging on the wall and screaming stuff like "WHAT DOES IT TAKE?!". It's pretty easy, you just do the same move over and over, while looking away from the screen and having a discussion with a friend about how broken the move that you're whoring is. In SC2, X's 3B and Mitsu's kB2 are perfect candidates for this strategy. People really seem to hate it when you beat them easily while carrying on a side conversation. If you know they're a conquest player, be sure to throw in offhand comments to your friend about how bad all conquest players are at versus. Never acknowledge them, except to smirk obnoxiously when they start to whine. It's fun!

Aaaah I saw this and it just brought on the need to go on a rant that's been a long time in the making... GameRankings review of PS2 version of SC2. Ugh, fighting game reviews are so awful. This one is representative of what's wrong with all of them, but it's not like a particularly bad one, because they're all like this. You could write this by watching someone play the game for five minutes. You could copy and paste this, make a few edits here and there and it would apply to any fighting game. No mention of actual gameplay whatsoever, no specifics, no reasons why it's somehow worse than the DC version, nothing. The guy clearly spent no more than a couple hours playing the game, and didn't learn enough about it to even mention any actual gameplay mechanics (You beat your opponents by reducing their strength bar! REALLY?! WOW!!!). Such garbage. I guess it's not as bad as last year and Tekken 4, when it got the same substanceless coverage, except it was a copy and paste form bad review instead of a copy and paste form good review. Retarded phrases such as "button-masher" got thrown around, which just means that the reviewer has no idea what they're doing. Only in the world of fighting games are you allowed to write a review without knowing how to play the game. If someone wrote a negative review of like Metroid Prime because they played it for two hours and couldn't figure out the controls, no one would take them seriously, but with fighters, that's the norm. Then you get these great positive reviews of VF4, even though it's learning curve is even higher than T4's and there's no way that any of these idiots got good enough at it for it to have been anything more than a PPP2K and low jab fest, if they even got that far. Not that there's anything wrong with VF4, but it got good reviews because of one player mode and because it was supposed to be good. The two player mode was almost never mentioned, except for the "depth" (yay buzzwords) that they always eluded to, as if they ever played any fighter long enough for that to matter. Sigh. Meh, just had to vent.

I'd say VF4 Evo if you're mostly going to be playing by yourself, and T4 if you're mostly going to be playing against other people. VF4 Evo's one player game is much better than T4's bland, empty port, but I don't find it much fun to play against other people. Unless you're willing to devote your life to it, it's just a bunch of low jabs and throw exchanges. There's nothing more frustrating than putting dozens of hours into a game and having your entire offense no-sold by an overpowered low jab. Actually I'd recommend getting both. They're only $20 each, and VF4 Evo is easily worth the purchase for the one player. And the videos. Damn, watching top level VF4 is awesome.

I was totally addicted to the arcade version a couple years ago. I'd just cash a $20 in for quarters and play until it was gone. Huge waste of money, but a lot of fun. I played a warrior. The power was great for quickly cutting through masses of enemies, and the magic wasn't that bad once his level got high.

Yeah, but people you know aren't the people that are reviewing the games. The fact that VF4 was so well recieved in Japan definitely seemed like a factor in a lot of reviews, major magazine reviews in particular. There was a lot of the attitude that Andrew described, the "American gamers have overlooked the deeper VF series for the easier Tekken series, let's hope this game changes their mind" attitude. That's not the only reason or even the main reason that VF4 got so much hype, but it's certainly a part of it. Eric, you're right that it isn't realistic to expect people to take the time to become high level at every fighter before they review it. The thing is, if they're not going to put in that kind of time, they shouldn't give an analysis that you need to be high level to give. It's not too much to ask for reviewers not to make sweeping assessments calling the game shallow or deep or easy or whatever, because they're almost never qualified to make such a judgment. I'd like them to focus most on what was added to the game (which means taking the time to figure that out, but that isn't asking too much imo). That gives a substantive, factual review without the usual bullshit hyperbole. Unfortunately, a lot of reviewers won't even put in the time to do that. My friend, who generally writes very good reviews, wrote a T4 review for a college newspaper basically saying that the game added nothing, and when I gave him examples of stuff it had added, he admitted to not knowing about any of it and said (paraphrasing) "Namco should have made it more clear what all the new stuff was in the manual.". No, you should have taken the time to play through practice mode, as you did in SC2 which has an even less comprehensive manual than T4 (in addition to being less innovative, but I'm not even going to get started on that). He even admitted, upon seeing me play the game, that it looked totally different than how it did when he played. I really don't think it's asking to much, if you're not going to bother learning the game yourself, to at least watch someone who knows what they're doing and maybe talk to them about the game before writing the review. They put in 50 hours to beat an RPG, I don't think it's asking so much to put in 2 hours going to an arcade and seeing fighters played correctly.

I can use her okay. I'm pretty solid with her poke game, but I still haven't learned all her possession stuff. She's pretty amazing to watch when someone gets all her possession transitions going really fast.