drqshadow

I saw about ten minutes of AotS this week, and couldn't believe how far it's slipped.

Yeah, you have to beat all the bosses in the dark world to even get to the point where it's possible to beat her. Otherwise, it's a nice collection of 9999 attacks. You can also get around the status effects by picking up the ribbons in treasure chests on the way to each of the four dark world bosses, but to get each of them you have to beat another (fairly easy, but still lengthy) extra boss. So actually if you don't want to die within moments and don't want to get turned into a frog, you have to fight eight bosses, watch ten minutes of conversation and weather fistfuls of extra-hard random encounters. THEN you have to beat that pain in the ass boss. Unsurprisingly, I've put the game aside for the time being and plan to finish it at a later date. WHY couldn't they just put a save point right behind that final teleporter? WHY.

Not the Cobracon from your avatar?

That's a pretty big "if" :angel: I met him at the SDCC one year, really cool, personable guy. Surprisingly, my buddy and I were the only ones in line for his booth. Got him to sketch Morpheus from The Sandman for me, on the backing board of one of the books I'd just bought. I was seriously standing there, shooting the shit with him for half an hour while he worked on it. The dude's awesome, but slow as can be.

Travis Charest is one of my all-time favorite artists, but god I wish the man could produce art in a more timely manner...

Oh, it's time for a rant then... :smile: What pissed me off even more about her is every time I level up a few times and think I might have a legitimate shot at her, I do even worse than I did the previous time. The first time I fought her, I took off right around 100,000 HP before she obliterated me (she's got around 120K). I've never taken off that much since. My levels are right around the same level as your's, too. Her timing is what kills me. My party has a ninja, a dragoon, a summoner and one of those super white mages (devout? I can't remember the name...) and every round I'll do the same thing: Throw shuriken, jump, summon Bahamut and curaja the whole team. It'll usually take off between 15-25K HP a round (depending on when the dragoon lands) and in theory should heal everybody up from the damage she spits out. But she likes to change her attack timing so that she strikes after the mage has healed everyone, then attack next round before the mage gets her turn. Terribly frustrating, I think I'm going to have to convert my dragoon to another ninja and my summoner to another white megamage. It wouldn't be nearly as bad if you didn't have to beat four side-bosses and watch about fifteen minutes of unskippable cutscenes just to get to her. Put a save point before that final teleporter, you heartless bastards! Back on topic: I'm finally working my way through Resident Evil 4.

Good to get another slant on this - I think my enjoyment of it had a lot to do with my growing desire to play more simplistic, less complicated games. I'm getting tired of memorizing configurations for fifteen different buttons before I can advance beyond the first stage of a new game, and NSMB delivered a quick and easy escape in that same vein. Everyone knows how to play this game, without ever picking it up. I agree that the inability to save at your own discretion was annoying, although I must play in longer sessions than most because I found them regularly enough to avoid any major headaches. It looks like we agree that the new powers and touch screen were both cute, but ultimately unnecessary. Anyway, I can't really refute most of your points because many come down to personal taste (I never found the levels to be repetitive or boring, for instance) and I felt it was a bit harder than you gave it credit for, but it's always cool to see the other side of the coin.

Should we copy and paste our responses to each other here too? :laugh:

I'm copying and pasting from the Oratory again, because I know there are some folks who post here that don't hang around over there... Finale spoilers if, per chance, you haven't seen the final episode yet... I thought it was OK, definitely not the best episode of the season or anything. And for a show that prides itself on its realism, that ending made about zero sense. OK, so Peter's going to explode... that's a granted. Here are your options; -Somebody shoots him in the head. He falls down, the crisis is averted. He can even presumably be saved if somebody (maybe DL) can reach in there and pull the bullet back out. Worst case scenario, Peter dies and that's the end of the story. -Nathan flies him into orbit and they both go kablooey. If the blast is radioactive, as we've been led to believe this entire series, the fallout isn't just contained to New York, and the entire continent is irradiated. Nathan is disintegrated, and Peter is presumed dead (even if he can regenerate, how does that help him breathe in space? I know, I know, he'll be back, but this is reality we're supposedly talking about here). Two heroes down, possibly thousands more when the radioactive cloud floats over the nation. -Peter flies him fucking SELF into orbit. The guy can fly. Why did he let his brother sacrifice himself? Same set of risks as above, but there's only the potential for one main cast fatality and even that's a longshot. Of the three, if I'm in that situation I tell Nathan to step down and find somebody with the nuts to shoot Peter in the head. Aside from the goofy ending (and I'm not overlooking Sylar transforming into a cockroach here, either) I thought the episode took itself to be more dramatic than it really was. I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if they didn't play the heavy, serious music the entire episode and the big wrap-up in the square wasn't over and done with in a heartbeat. Good, not great.

Manda posted the Frustration Mario one somewhere else, and the Halo one I found years ago - I just happen upon a lot of this stuff though. There's lots of crazy stuff on YouTube, if you search for the right keywords.

Everybody sounds like this when they get angry at Mario

I'm stuck on the last boss in FFIII (which is doubly annoying, since it takes over an hour just to GET to her - then she proceeds to beat my ass with relative ease) but I've really enjoyed the transition to 3D. FFIV is one of the best, too, so I'd be on it in a heartbeat. I just hope they use to top screen more often - I was really disappointed at the way it was ignored for most of III. Put an interactive item menu on the bottom screen permanently when you're in a dungeon or a battle, show some Amano artwork, give us an alternate camera angle - anything but the plain black screen they used 75% of the time.

Oh, I know that's not what you were implying... but it led my train of thought in that direction, and it's not something I'd put past them.

That's right, Connors had a leftover piece of the symbiote. God, I hope they don't combine Lizard and Carnage...

Her, and the two boys cheering on the fight at the end all have the last name Raimi, so expect to see them a lot in the future Spider-man movies. When they showed those kids going "WHOHHAAHHH AWESOMMMMEE YESSS" I turned to Autumn and said "That's exactly what the writers were saying when they came up with this scene."

:doh: :doh: :doh: :doh:

Hahaha, that right there is exactly why a lot of perfectly good characters will never see the light of day on the silver screen. Too funny.

I always love looking at the glitches people find in games. An old favorite...

Copied and pasted from the Oratory because... well, they're my opinions of the film. My opinion is that I really hope they don't make another. The first two were so good that it was hard to go into this one without some weighty expectations, and it didn't even come close to reaching them. It wasn't a bad movie at all, and had dozens of strong redeeming factors, but it wasn't a good one either and a lot of the comedic moments were really forced and borderline unwatchable. Probably the only light scenes I laughed at were with Bruce Campbell and his french wait staff, constantly parading out the champagne, only to be shooed back behind the curtains again... and that was being balanced with the emotion of the Peter / MJ fight. I hated how insanely cheesy the "evil Pete" scenes were. If I could cut that whole fifteen minutes out of the film, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. I hated the gooey, touchy-feely half hour of happiness and joy that opened the film, too. I realize that they wanted to establish how happy he was so the later fall would have more emotional impact, but this crap was way, way over the top. I must have rolled my eyes about a dozen times. Again, pull that half hour out and I enjoy the movie more. I loved the Sandman, from the acting to the effects to the backstory, but he felt like a sideshow in the grand scheme of things and didn't even get a proper send-off. He floats through the sky and all is right with the world? Right. I thought the Goblin face turn was poorly done and hurried - OK, now he knows Spidey didn't kill his dad. What about, I don't know, the GIANT DISFIGURING SCAR Pete gave him days before? I'd be doubly pissed. And, I swear to god, if I saw one more tremblin' lip and sobby eye, I was ready to puke. The last ten minutes were like watching a chick flick about cancer or something, and I couldn't have given less of a fuck. The first two films treated the source material with honor and respect, and they were outstanding movies. This one treated them like kiddie material, and felt like it came from an entirely different director / writer. It had its moments, but they were scattered and on the whole I was disappointed. At least they gave Venom the awesome giant spider icon on his chest, for all of the three minutes we got to see it. Why did Brock's teeth change even when he wasn't wearing the suit? Did the symbiote make him a vampire? Fuck, this movie was stupid sometimes...

The only thing that looked really interesting in that trailer was the Surfer himself - I love Fishburne as the voice. The rest of it - not really looking all that good to me.

Agreed - DuckTales and Rescue Rangers were both outstanding NES games. My buddies and I spent ages figuring out all the hidden stuff in DuckTales especially.

Are they going to subtitle most of the bots' conversations? Because I caught about four words of that. One of which was "starscream."

I don't think she's missing hair, I think the colorist just got kind of carried away with the lighting in the backdrop.

Wow, I didn't expect them to cast a name I actually recognized. Impressive.

Why would there be uproar about that? Most of them did that in the cartoon, with one or two noteworthy exceptions.