While surfing Nintendo.com, I found out something important.
http://www.nintendo.com/newsarticle?page...70d05f9d7a
While in Japan, everyone who buys it, whatever time, gets a free link cable, here in the US you have to reserve it to get that free cable. I know I am, because even though I already HAVE one, not everyone I know does, and it's good to have extras.
Let us go into the miasma!
Not to rub it in or anything...actually, yes to rub it in...I'm getting Crystal Chronicles for free.
I'll just let my friends get it and bring my GBA over to their house. :D
I've never preordered before and very much doubt I'll start now.
Hey, I not only don't have a GC-GBA cable, I don't have a GBA link cable... just my old Universal Link Cable...
I've been playing the import FF:CC and am quite undecided about it still. The game seems like its going to be short as in less than 15 hours which is terrible for an FF game of any type. The fighting is kind of weak and the way it is done makes the game a bit too hard for 1 person in some spots. My other large complaint has to be the fact that multiplayer involves GBA's. Nintendo needs to get off the connectivity thing as it is hurting games they release.
When I buy a Cube title, I expect to be able to play it to its fullest potential. Hidden little games and shit are ok for GBA connectivity... but not to enjoy multipayer.
I just hope they don't pull some crap like this in order to play Metriod Prime 2 in multi mode.
Only because of that new reviewer they got. See the thrashing she got from PA?
Yeah. Made some pretty good points about it... Gamespot's is definitely more balanced. But either way I doubt I'll get the game... I already have several in the genre for the Cube and I'm not THAT interested in it to get another one, and this one seems even more focused on multiplay with that impossible GBA requirement I'd almost never see in one place...
Gamespot's reviews are still shit. Just look at their Zero Mission review.
It did harp too much on length, I'll give you that...
i'm gonna try to hook up my GBA player to the gamecube so i will have 2 GBA's of my own. then i'll only need 1 more for some sweet 3 player action.
Um, the Gameboy Player will NOT act as another GB, for VERY obvious reasons. The Gameboy Player is proprietary, so either you are playing a GB game or a Gamecube game, but NOT both at once. For that matter, you only have ONE screen ya know. Sorry, utterly impossible.
Unless you have two Cubes, in which case it's possible. :)
not only do i have 2 gamecubes (mine and my roommates) but 3 tv's (mine and two of my roommates) so, i see no reason why it wouldn't work. i'd be using a gamecube and a TV as a really expensive GBA. but at the same time it's saving me from having to spend money that isn't already spent...so, it's good.
Then, it will work, I expect... after all the GB Player has a link port...
Yes, I had thought of that myself a while after posting it, but decided there's no way you had another GC lying around if you didn't want to get a GBA (silly me :D). Funnily enough, I've experimented and found the GBP will easily allow single cart multi so you can have a main game on an actual GBA and have the hookup upload the game to an empty GBP :D. Well, seemed kinda funny at the time.
Oh and one last thing, the plane that was supposed to be coming to the Tulsa airport with Crystal Chronicles was delayed for some reason so I'll have to wait until tomorrow to get that game... Nuts... I feel like some commoner in some town without an airport who has to wait until the day AFTER a game's released to get it!
my roomie picked it up today and i delved into the single player adventure for a few hours and so far it's not as bad as people say...maybe because it's so beautiful, i don't know. it's repetative, but not terrible. haven't tried multiplayer yet because i realize that setting up that whole gbp/tv thing actually takes effort.
painting moogles rocks.
IGN's review was bad but others were better... the decent reviews give it okay scores (Gamespot had a 8.0), which sounds right given what I've heard. Higher if you have the equipment and friends for multiplay though. :)
still haven't played a moment of multiplayer, but i've put almost 7 hours into single player...it's really not bad. it's a little easy though. this is definately one of the most beautiful GC games though. i just saw a lvl 3 spell for the first time today...quite impressive. it's also more non-linear than i was lead to believe. certainly not a bad game, not super ultra awesome great, but it's an enjoyable little title.
i played the multiplayer for the first time today. it's actually quite fun, very different from single player. i do not know where all the complaints in the reviews are coming from. the game is slightly tedious, but no more so that diablo, and the environments and subtle story touches make it worth playing. i think the slight redundancy is easy to overlook. it's no final fantasy 7, (i know it's not a "real" final fantasy game, but i'm gonna compare it to them anyway), but i think it's much, much better than 8 so far and i may be enjoying it even more than 10.
just to let you know how long i've played while still not being bored, i'm 11 hours into the single player adventure and keep coming back for more. it's weird, i really do think it's a quite good game.
and it's extremely non-linear now that i've put more time into it, so i don't know why some reviewers said that it faked non-linearity. in fact, i've played levels in the first 3 hours of multiplayer that i haven't even considered going to yet in single player and i've opted not to visit certain places in multiplayer that i had already visited at that point in single player.
oh, another cool thing about single player. you can create up tp 8 characters and i think they all fit in the one 22 block save. anyway, when you have only one character there are a lot of empty homes in your town, but as you play as different characters, these houses fill up and you can have families with different jobs living in your town to assist you. for example, i couldn't find a tailor to make me accessories anywhere, so i started a character with a taylor family and now i can make any accessory i have the plans for. it's really rather cool.
anyway, i really like the game.
Most reviews were better than IGN's... they just didn't seem to know what they were doing. Penny Arcade had a good rebuttal of their stupid review... :)
Oh, and you need a seperate savefile for each person, right? Or do they share those eight?
i'm pretty sure they share the save files
I've enjoyed it quite a bit. While I'm not as wowed at the graphics as big guy (likely due to having played other current gen RPGs before this one), they are nice and the style is great too. Something like FF9 meets FFT. Diablo? It's far less tedius than Diablo if you ask me.
As for saves, each file you make can store up to 8 characters. I personally will have one file for single and another for multi (though you ARE allowed to use the same file for BOTH if you want to).
Love that opening song... love it. It's been a standard since FF8 that all major Square (now , Square-Enix) games have to have a main vocal theme in there. I actually hope the next Zelda game will have a vocal track, likely during the ending credits rather than the opening like most games that have those.
Like in Gauntlet Legends you can save one of every character (8 normal, 9 unlockable, and over a dozen hidden with codes) in your savefile, but you have to have a seperate file for each person...
No, like I said, you can have a single file (that stores progress in the game) with up to 8 characters stored in that file. Well, unless you were only talking about Gauntlet. Oh, before I forget, yes you CAN import characters from other save files by inviting them as "guests".
I meant Dark Legacy for the Cube. In Legends for N64 each save file is just one character. :)
However, each Legends file is 4 pages and you can save in any slot in all four memory cards... in Dark Legacy for Cube you're limited to 8 saves on the card and it only reads slot one... I have 9 Legends saves between my two n64 memcards, and already have four of the 9 slot DL saves on my GC card... but the DL saves are admittedly more flexible and usable by multiple people because of how it lets you use any of the characters and saves each one's progress seperately -- as I said it's like 18 saves in one, except you can only use one of them at a time. :) Legends let you switch between the five hidden characters (not the original four), but they were all the same file (same level, progress, etc., just with a different character).
Those 9 Legends saves are a big part of why I have two n64 memcards and both are mostly full in slots yet have massive amounts of free pages... well that, and the three 4 page Excitebike tracks, and the fact that my other seven or eight games saved to the thing are almost all below 10 pages...
Fortunatly, you aren't limited with CC. You can make as many files as you have room for and on whatever card you want. Nice of them :D. (AKA, what everyone ELSE should be doing anyway! It WOULD be nice, Nintendo, if you would allow us to not only pick the memory card slot we want to load and save on, but ALSO make as many save files on a card as we have room for. Getting a LITTLE sick of having ALL this room but being limited to 3 files for whatever reason.)
Edit: Yes ABF, I realized that right after I posted, but I figured no one would care. Gee, silly me.
You forgot your end parentesis... ... what, it's just something that bugs me...
And yes, all games should support all slots. It's really annoying that a lot of games limit you to slot one... and yes save file limiting these days is really, really stupid and pointless. Make it one save per file, not one file that has three saves in it! That is so dumb, and wastes a lot of space!
Yes, and more than that, limits you to 3 or sometimes 4 save slots per card. I'm not paying to get space when I already HAVE it to start with.
I DO see ONE thing here. Making more files means that the card has to store a lot of image data for the save file icon and the big ol' save banner image down below. Meaning, 3 files saved individually will take up more room than 3 in one file due to having multiple icon images. More than that, in the case of Metroid Prime for instance, 3 saves fit in one block easily due to them taking the time to be GOOD at managing save files. However, split that across 3 files, and since the minimum size is one block (for well, EVERY memory system come to think of it, but computers use a much smaller block size), and you take up 3 times the space on the card for 3 files. Easy fix for BOTH problems though if you ask me. Simply have the system capable of making multiple files AND have all those files store whatever number of save files they prefer. The manager would basically show little brackets or something showing where one file ends and the next begins when you save or load a game.
Or just use megabytes and unlimited slots.
Megabyte sizes blocks? That's CRIMINALLY inefficient! Kilobyte sized blocks, THAT'S sensible. (It's exactly why even an empty text file on your computer still takes up a whole kilobyte, that's the block size.)
I was offering a quick fix for the current file system though.
Anyway, all memory cards should have kilobyte sized blocks, and the maximum file number should be the number of blocks the card has. Same maximum file limit as FAT32 and NTFS uses for instance, which as far as I know (I REALLY should look into this) is the same as the number of blocks, up to the maximum the file system can handle, which I believe is 2 terabytes.
Megabytes as in use a normal file system! Make a very small minimum file size... for instnace in FAT32 (which is what I have) it's 32kb, but I'm sure it's smaller in others... I don't know what NTFS uses... given I don't have an NT-based OS... :)
I just checked. Memory Card 59 is, I believe, .5MB (512kB). That's broken into 64 blocks, five for the formatting. The 251 is a 2MB card with the same 5 block programming (256 actual). That means 8kB per block... how this compares to FAT32/NTFS I don't know because I know those have smaller block sizes the smaller the disc -- it is 32kB minimum file size (the largest minimum size I think?) in my 40GB partitions, but it's certainly lower in something that would be 2MB or less... so I don't know how it compares, really. The biggest problems are that 2MB isn't much and that limiting the number of files of a game on one machine to something as low as three is annoying.
Of course a lot of GBA games have just one save slot, or maybe two if you're lucky, but that's because of the limitations of how big a battery (or however they do it now) save can be...
Pardon? Most GBA games I have have 3 save slots. The ones with 2 or 1 are the rarity. Pokemon is certainly one of these acceptions due to the sheer amount of data being stored. Other RPGs I have use 3 slots though. Oh yes, the one game I have with 2 slots is Sword of Mana, and I really don't know why they had to limit it to that. I'm not sure the save files would really use up all that much more data than Golden Sun for instance.
Oh yes, they no longer use batteries in carts. GBA games, and you can check this by opening one up, use the same thing memory cards do. That is, a small part is flash rom. Never dies, never needs recharging or replacing.
My copy of Crystal Chronicle should be coming in on Wednesday and it cost me a grand total of $22 [and that includes shipping]. Sam Goody made a mistake on their website so instead of the price of CC being $45 it was only $15. Score!
Advance Wars 2 has one block (though it has seperate ones for normal and multiplay -- a much better system would just be several slots and letting you save in them in any mode, like in a normal PC strategy game...). FFTA and Sword of Mana have two. My other game is Metroid Fusion and that does have three...
Quote:Oh yes, they no longer use batteries in carts. GBA games, and you can check this by opening one up, use the same thing memory cards do. That is, a small part is flash rom. Never dies, never needs recharging or replacing.
Thought so, which is why I qualified it... but GB and GBC games all have batteries. GBC games are clear so you can see the batteries in them...
Oh, probably the best advance in the Game Boy Advance was the final admission of the third parties that saving is nice and people hate passwords. Before the GBA, you might recall, a third party game with a battery was one in a million...
Having only a few GBC games (and yes, they do use batteries, and yes it IS very obvious), I wasn't aware that even with GBC they weren't using batteries in many carts. Well, not that big a suprise I suppose. It took until the N64 for console carts to have save that often (I remember many SNES games lacked save with the exception of RPGs and SOME 1st party games, and even then I've played one RPG on SNES that used passwords, PASSWORDS). Actually, even with N64, now that I think about it, it WAS just 1st and 2nd party games that had save, but at least they had it on ALL of those. Most 3rd party games still didn't have on cart save, but at least used a memory card.
Yeah, I believe GBA IS the first time all companies try using save data on the cart on most if not all of their games. If I'm wrong about N64 carts and they too use batteries, then the reason is likely due to flash ROM being cheap enough to easily put it on every cart.
I have 14 GBC games... well 13 and one I lost. Well 9 and 4 GB-GBC black carts. :) Of them six weren't published by Nintendo... Nintendo published some third-party developed titles (published WarLocked, R-Type DX, the Capcom Zeldas... and made Bionic Commando Elite Forces...). Anyway, of those six games, two have batteries -- Heroes of Might & Magic, a game that really could not be without one, and Survival Kids, which is the same way. Three have passwords (including Micro Machines 3, the game I lost the cart of...). The other one doesn't have saving (Micro Machines 1&2 Twin Turbo).
All 8 games published by Nintendo have batteries.
Of the 26 classic GB games I have owned (I now have 23), ... first, I'm not sure if Rare or Nintendo published Super RC Pro-Am. It says 'Nintendo presents' but it also says that it's liscenced to Rare... I'll assume Nintendo published it though, for now, unless someone knows better... anyway, 16 are Nintendo releases and 10 third parties. Of the Nintendo releases, 11 have batteries and 5 don't (SML, Kirby 1 (which I gave to my cousins years back, who lost the cart), Yoshi, and my two copies of Super RC Pro-Am). Of the third party games, one has a battery (Final Fantasy Adventure), four use passwords, and the other five have no saving...
Total between the GB and GBC is 19 of the 24 Nintendo releases I have for GB/C have batteries. None use passwords. And for third parties, of 16 games, three have batteries, eight passwords, and five no saving...
As for the GBA I have two first and two third party releases and all have batteries.
And yes, the N64 is very similar -- first party games almost all have batteries and third party titles make frequent use of the memory card. Some third party titles do use on-cart save (Rocket and Star Soldier, of the ones I have... that is unless Rare self-published games count as third party (Jet Force Gemini), but I don't know about that... I wouldn't really...), but it's pretty rare...that is two out of nine (and none of five Midway games. One, Mace, doesn't have any kind of saving at all, my only N64 game like that!). But the other seven have the memcard to save on... well the six that use it. :)
Of course some Nintendo releases used the memcard too -- Bomberman 64 for the multiplayer character save, Perfect Dark for ... something ... that requires a massive 30 block save, DKR can use it, Blast Corps (always remove those mem cards before play if you want to use the oncart slot!), Excitebike tracks...
Isn't Bomberman by Hudson? It's not owned by Nintendo as I've seen Bomberman games on PS before. Was that PARTICULAR game under some strange liscensing deal like Wario and Bomberman?
As I said -- Nintendo sometimes publishes third party titles. Nintendo published Irem's R-Type DX as well as some Hudson games like Bomberman 64... Hudson, though, I think, published my two GB Bombermans (Pocket and GB). Though they do have some kind of "weird relationship" -- Hudson makes a lot of games Nintendo publishes actually. Bomberman 64 being a good example, as well (I think) as some of the other N64 Bombermans...
Oh, and didn't Hudson make Mario Party?
I do believe they did, as one of those interesting parts of that weird relationship of being both 2nd and 3rd party.
Hudson has always made lots of games for non-Nintendo systems... it is odd Nintendo published some Bomberman games because there have been a lot of Bomberman games on non-Nintendo systems. Maybe they paid Hudson to make it? I don't know... :)
Hudson is hardly the only one making Nintendo-character games of course... they did the Mario Party games, Camelot (though they're a developer really not a publisher) Mario Golf and Tennis, Capcom those GB Zeldas... and of course F-Zero from Sega... they jsut seem to have put their name less prominently on the game than Sega or Capcom, or some reason.
I gotta say I'm enjoying the journey. It is hard to get some people together sometimes, but it turns out I actually LIKE playing it by myself as well. The fighting has just enough strategy rather than JUST bashing to make it fun. While the return to having limited item slots is a little annoying (not seen since FF4), in this sort of game it works out pretty well actually.
I'll only add that multiplayer is great fun, but only when your friends can GET IT TOGETHER and not constantly bicker about meaningless stuff.
i agree about the friends bickering thing...although i felt it actually added to the game a little when there were only 2 of us (3 and we couldn't get anything done). anyway, once in 2 player i was given the bonus "don't heal yourself" and my room mate was given the bonus "don't cast spells." unfotunately in multiplayer you can't freeze the game to use items like you can in the single player adventure and my greedy bastard of a room mate wouldn't cast cure on me because he wanted his bonus BAAAAAAAAD. so i ran around for most of the boss fight with one heart screaming in terror and yelling at him to cure me before finally saying "fuck it" and running in and killing the boss. still had 1/2 heart left too. anyway, afterwords we both had a good laugh about the whole thing and i realized what makes the multiplayer so fun. (although 3 player was no fun at all IMO, then again we were playing with a girl from across the hall and it was her first time and we were both fairly experienced...the fact still remains that she was terrible and i died too many times trying to cast life on her...maybe if the third player didn't suck it'd be more fun). anyway, it's a fun game but i haven't played it in a while because warcraft 3 is like cigarettes, you can pull yourself away for a little while but eventually you start to miss it and you always end up hooked again.
The voice of experience?
Well, anyway I'll only say that after a certain point my friends and I decided to totally ignore the bonus scores and just be nice and give each other whatever artifacts we most wanted.
A few things.
One, who are you?
Two, you didn't "find" that, you just came here specifically to advertise your own site, didn't you?
Three, why didn't you just make your own thread instead of ressurecting an old one that has nothing to do with Bomberman?
Because then the secret would be out!