The Man in Blak

Now how exactly does the Tactics 2 system work? I've heard it's very comparable to chess and it even looked like the characters were on "game pieces", when I glanced at some screenshots a while back.

So, how's that debilitating Dynasty Warriors addiction treating you?

I'm a little late to the thread, but that's all right...because I only want to say one thing. All of you who posted stories should realize that, by doing so, you're just putting a smile on his face.

I'll second the FCE Ultra recommendation - it has the best compatibility of all of the emulators I've used. I've got to suggest using ZSNES, just because of the emulation accuracy. Both emulators are excellent, but ZSNES just seems to emulate sounds more faithfully on certain games (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, for example).

You guys do realize that Triple H won the title in a schmozz, right? Kane got the chokeslam on Goldberg and then Batista pulled Kane out of the ring. There was no crushing involved. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the HHHate (except that it's beyond cliche at this point), but at least watch the PPV before you bust a nut about the proceedings.

You know, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I've been meaning to tell you how flattered I am that you created an entire posting persona that's basically a half-assed homage/imitation of me. Big ups, Hoffmizzle. Also, in other news, I'm going to enjoy whuppin' your ass next week in Fantasy Football. *dun dun DUN*

For the love of GAWD, just read the posts. If it were a snake, it would have bit all of you right in the cock. Hell, I've been around for all of two days, and even I know who it is.

Er, I wasn't arguing that none of the other competitors had a bad game. Yes, almost all of the competitors had a poor game and, in those games, their team lost. Undoubtedly, the Heisman candidates should be the MVP candidates of their own team. It's still a lot better than some of the other teams out there. Of course, we'll never know which one is more dominant - the QB or the receivers - since Jason White never had to contend against a team without his first-string offensive players. Hence, his talent is unproven. Well, by drawing three defenders, a wideout has already cut the amount of defensive personnel for other players to focus on by more than 25%. That's a pretty decent margin. Of course, considering that the quarterback is basically the only player who initiates the offensive plays from the huddle, he's the only one that even has a shot at "controlling the game", though they have to have someone to throw to. Or to block for them. It's not basketball. Save for the one sterling example of Michael Vick, no offensive player can singlehandedly take control of a football game.

Right. Which means that most of the offensive personnel around White had a full year to mature with experience and become better football players.

Getting smoked in the biggest game of the year (up to that point) will have a lot to do with that. And considering that most of the sports press was already convinced that Oklahoma was one of the Top 25 Teams of All Time, you have to admit it was a little bit of a letdown. Welcome to the backlash. The media went to some painful lengths to hype them as the collective coming of the Jesus, so everybody naturally got angry when a college football team showed up. We build them up to tear them down, etc etc. It gets down to the fact that it's hard to tell just how good White is. He's the starting QB on a team that has one of the top three talent bases in college football. He's surrounded by an amazing level of offensive and defensive talent. Yeah, he has had a great deal of success, and it would be pure ignorance to say that, 40 touchdown passes later, that he hasn't been successful. The debate revolves around the perceived value of his talent being undefined. When White had a bad game, Oklahoma lost; therefore, it's easy to say that White is valuable to the team. However, since we haven't been able to see any stats of White losing key offensive personnel for a prolonged stretch of time, it's hard to determine whether he's really conducting the symphony of destruction by himself, or whether everybody else is helping him carry the tune. And that's where the advocacy for candidates like Fitzgerald and Manning came from. Though Eli's stats weren't mind-boggling, he was literally willing Ole Miss to win at certain parts of the year. Fitzgerald was essentially the lone offensive threat on his team, but yet he still reeled off amazing statistics while always drawing the worst that the opposing defense had to offer. It's not to say that Jason White doesn't have talent. It's just not necessarily proven in the same ways that we've seen with Fitzgerald and Manning. And, since the Heisman is more synonymous with "best player in college football" rather than "MVP", White wasn't necessarily as strong as a candidate as you felt (though it, of course, ended up being a moot point). I felt (and still feel) like Fitzgerald should have won it, but there's no questioning the Heisman Committee's blatant and consistent disrespect for wide receivers, so no dice.

Well, for a quick litmus test, you could always check out Hulk v. Iron Man (the Marvel "equivalent"), which happened in Iron Man #304 or some noise like that.

Which makes it exceedingly obvious to me that he either has lost some of his of the game or he seriously needs to get hir priorities strait. If you want to be home with the Mrs. so badly that take less money and go to an inferior team, baseball is clearly no longer as important to you as it once was. Just fucking retire. Then you can be home 24/7. Oh, grow up. Just because you can't possibly fathom why someone wouldn't want to play for New York doesn't mean Pettitte needs to get his priorities straight. You would love it if Pettitte had lost some of his game, just so that the sting of Steinbrenner being a putz wouldn't hurt so much. I bet Roger playing golf with Jeff Bagwell is really burning your ass right now, isn't it?

Exactly. And pitching closer to home and his family was more important to Andy Pettitte, so he made a choice.. Yes, Steinbrenner threw a lot of money at Pettitte, but he waited until the last second to do it. It was exceedingly obvious to EVERYONE that Pettitte was not his primary free-agent priority, and that's a great disrespect to a guy who's done a lot for the Yankees organization.

Am I? Knights of the Round can basically kill the last boss of the game in one hit, but let's just push it aside. The Bahamut series of summons all throw down decent non-elemental damage, and other summon materia like Alexander and Odin aren't exactly sneeze-worthy. And I'll cover the Ultima issue here in a second. There's the Fanatic's Tower in FFVI, where you can only use magic and you have to rely on some Reflect trickery to even hit some of the later bosses. Just surviving in the final stages of FFIV requires some ingenuity, especially when random battles essentially become mini-boss battles in the later levels. In both games, your success in battles is much more dependent upon your equipment and level-building of the characters, rather than keeping track of which under-developed materia has which faceless materia. Or you can load everybody up with materia and bomb everybody out of the water. Character-specific issues like Equipment become unimportant once you've built up the proper materia. There is no strategy in determining who gets the ultra-boosted Cure materia - the fact that it's in the battle (and it can go to anybody) doesn't add any "complexity." It makes your job a whole lot easier because you don't have to think about where you put it. Sure, but let's get a grip on the Ultima thing for a second. The big detracting force is "OMG Ultimaz Everywhar~!", but there are only two sources to learn Ultima from, and that's the Paladin Shield (which you had to go to RIDICULOUS lengths to uncurse) and Ragnarok. Both of these teach Ultima at x1. Now, that means that you're going to be power-building people for quite a while to get them Ultima - this isn't an immediate gain for the character. (as opposed to giving somebody a leveled-up Materia). And, to really break Ultima, you've got to get the Economizer, so that it only costs one MP. Contrast this with the fun-fun-fun exercise of breeding a gold chocobo so that you can go to the island to grab the game-breaking Knights of the Round materia, which takes about half of the time. Both games are easy - it's just considerably easier to break Final Fantasy VII.

It all depends on who you're talking to (www.gameforms.com). In fact, revisionist game critics (such as the peeps who threw together IGN's Top 100 Games list) have placed Final Fantasy IV on the pedestal as the "Best Final Fantasy." In FFII, to gain HP, you have to let yourself get smacked around a lot. To help build up your hit%, you've got to miss attacks. To build up MP, you've got to burn up MP casting spells. And, while it all seems to make realistic sense on paper ("That which does not kill me makes me stronger, etc etc"), it doesn't quite work in execution and, most of the time I spent playing the game, I was just gritting my teeth when it came to leveling up. It's not necessarily unplayable, but it's definitely the least amount of fun I've had building a character in a FF game.

The combat is dumbed down because there are no strategies for winning battles, other than Materia switching. Everything is so disgustingly homogeneous with characters trading around skills with no consequence (Limit Breaks, which have no consistent effect on battles, don't count - sorry) and - of course - all characters can uncork unbalanced summon spells that torch everything. Hell, even the much-disputed Final Fantasy VI had the courtesy to give everybody a specific skill (Sabin's Blitz, Cyan's SwordTech). At least with the Job system in FF3 and FF5, you find yourself dealing with advantages and disadvantages involved with switching classes. Final Fantasy VII essentially lets you juggle around Materia with impunity. Final Fantasy I isn't like that - you can't slap Fire3 on a Fighter, nor can you throw Excalibur on your White Mage. Final Fantasy IV and IX had classes. Even Final Fantasy X implemented some class-based balance with the different paths of the sphere grid. Which leaves the nearly unplayable FFII and the Junction System of FFVIII as your closest competitors. No character-specific strategy is necessary or even emphasized. And, with a few choice summon spells, no strategy is really needed to make it through the game. And that was the intention of Square, who was unabashedly catering to the mainstream audience with Final Fantasy VII. The battle system was a means to an end, a sad formality between plot points, rather than the primary gameplay component - before FFVII, the words "interactive movie" had never entered the bitter hardcore gamer's vocabulary. For all of these reasons, Final Fantasy VII is "dumbed down", in comparison to other entries in the series.

I agree wholeheartedly. Every single damn point. As a gamer, I was actually kind of offended. As a television watcher, I was just annoyed. And yes, it's worse than Raw X, even with the watchable Jericho/Mysterio match.

Meh. Final Fantasy VII is the Episode 1 of the Final Fantasy series. The huge 3D production values and in-game cutscenes, courtesy of the new technology of the Playstation, are on the very forefront of the media deluge that surrounds FFVII. Gameplay is "dumbed-down" into its most simplistic components, with equipment meaning less and summoned spells, such as Bahamut and the infamous Knights of the Round, becoming a huge part of the game's "strategy." As a backhanded courtesy to its hardcore fanbase, the Weapons make their first appearance in North America to inspire players everywhere to take full advantage of the unbalanced combat system, just so that they can have bragging rights. And then the plotline...and then the plotline. The story in Final Fantasy VII may be the most convoluted plot that the series has to offer, barring your issues with Time Compression. You'll be so busy trying to figure out exactly who the hell Zack is and why the hell Cloud is spazzing out that you'll totally pass over the fact that the character development for everyone else is abysmal (which was probably Square's intent). The characters have never been more stereotypical and cookie-cutter. The dialogue has never been more boring, despite Square throwing in a good deal of profanity (just because they could). And the ending is one of the greatest botched climaxes in video game history, an "artistic statement" from Square that provoked heated arguments that still linger today. As an introduction to the mainstream gaming populous, Final Fantasy VII worked because of the simplified gameplay and the (then) eye-popping visuals that played alongside it. In comparison to other RPGs of the time (Suikoden), however, it remains a lackluster product. Hell, it's probably not one of the top three entries in its own series. In my opinion, Final Fantasy VII is overrated.

Soul Calibur II, if only because the first one was one of the greatest games of all time and SCII seemed to trade in immersion for gimmickry. It's a good game, but it just lacked something for me. Devil May Cry 2 is an obvious choice here. X-Com Apocalypse really pissed me off by ditching the Lovecraftian alien design and getting a place in line for real-time strategy (back when that was en vogue). Bomberman 64 gets on my list for, oddly enough, not sticking with the aging gameplay design. Thankfully, Hudson figured out that all they needed to do with The Bomberman Formula was to give it better graphics and more options in Bomberman Generations.

Ah, yeah. The late and great Smarks mIRC community of six (or maybe seven) people. The only other guy I remember from there that is still here is El Psycho Diablo...though he's probably not here anymore anyway. Ah, well. Crazy hippie guy, sure. Neo-gheyme internet terrorist, not so much. EDIT: Good timing, DH. You were in that old Smarks chat too, weren't you?

You know, I have no idea exactly how CJ stepped on your balls waaaaaaaay back when, but I certainly wouldn't mind if he did it again. As for me, yeah. I popped up as (*GASP*) "The Man in Blak" during the "banana board" era, though I had actually been periodically lurking since the Rantsylvania days. I think I came in about a month before the lovely Hackmaster incident managed to piss off nearly everybody in the old community. In a strange bit of TRIVIA~! (of the non-SNKT variety), I was actually one of the people mentioned as a candidate to be a moderator here, around the time that guys like Kahran Ramsus and bps were up for election. I think areacode was the guy who suggested me, god bless his soul. Funny how that worked out, huh?

You might be able to blame whatever conservative student association at Penn State for that, actually. I know that, at my campus, the Conservative Leaders Association were responsible for bringing him to my university to speak. Of course, he must have forgot about Rude for our speech and just improvised with the liberal death threats.

It's not quite Earthbound, but Disgaea is definitely a funny game that is blessed with a roided-out interpretation on the Final Fantasy Tactics engine. Thankfully, I think it's getting mad praise through word of mouth and the internet, so it's not going to fall into obscurity or anything. I always mark out for the demonic penguins, dood.

The question is this: Is it really a shoot angle, since all of the stuff that Jericho would reference in the promo is essentially true within the storyline?

Bingo. Plus, the DVD would give an awesome variety of different matches and styles, considering that Hart worked tag teams, singles, as well as excelling in both heel and face roles. My second pick would be Benoit, but only if they could grab ahold of some of that Japanese footage (i.e. Super J Cup). Same deal with Eddy.