They added a lot of nice tweaks this time around. Sound card support for Kingdom O' Magic is better, among a lot of other things. Steadily they head towards perfect hardware emulation.
I have to say, she does seem to know what she's doing. I have to award reluctant kudos to Hillary. Now, if she can pull this off, and the PF DO in fact pass meaningful, effective sanctions, then that would be quite... meritous.
In playing through a lot of PS1 games, I've also been checking out some old IGN and Gamespot reviews. It's funny because a lot of them are little more than three our four short paragraphs that say almost nothing at all about the game. I though, surely, the reviews for bigger games must be better, more in-depth.
I checked out IGN's review of FF7 and, though longer, I have no idea how anyone not familiar with the game already would have any idea at all about what the game actually is from reading the review. Everything is pitifully vague, if it even gets mentioned at all [the music isn't, nor does the review give even the most basic outline of the plot]. Heck, the review doesn't even mention anywhere that the combat is turn-based, it just assumes that you already know that.
In fact, you could glance through the manual and crank out the exact same review in a couple of minutes. Which may actually be the case since the review mentions the play time of Next Generation Online, rather than his own, in discussing the game's length.
The review also mentions that the backgrounds are "hand-drawn".
...I'm not sure if I've ever linked my Deviant Art account to here or not but if I haven't, check it out. If I have, then pay no attention to this thread because there's nothing new there.
Holographic lifeform A: It's like his body has been transformed into pure matter!
Holographic lifeform B: So like, lead, water, baryonic, dark, what?
A: Just, pure matter!
If you see why that sort of statement makes no sense, maybe you'll get my big issue with this common cliche in sci-fi. It's just lazy writing, and it makes no sense by the very definition of what energy is. I'd have accepted "unobtanium force" or "spirit energy" or even "magic energy" but "pure energy"? That's just gibberish!
Aside from a long-wanted ability to customize settings quickly on a per-site basis (above all, I really want to be able to have a setup where Flash is disabled unless I enable it, and for it's being enabled to be remembered automatically on a per-site basis), copying Chrome's placing of tabs on the title bar is a nice space saver (though I don't want it too simplified, that status bar is something I like having).
The big copy I like to see is MS's big push towards hardware accelerated graphics. Honestly I'm shocked it took until now for them to actually DO this, but with MS making the big change, it's good to see all the others are following a very healthy trend (it's fair, MS has been copying everyone else for years).
Since I don't know for sure when I'll be making the big upgrade to Windows 7, I can safely say that as IE9 won't be made available for XP, I'm probably going to be making a big switch to some other browser. It'll likely be either Chrome or Firefox, whichever I like better when one of them implements hardware acceleration. I don't really care for Opera at all (my main use of it is through the Wii every now and then, and that plus my very limited trial of the PC version pretty much sealed up any interest I might have for that awkard interface), and Safari (which suffers from the standard problem of all Apple software ported to PC, Apple seems dead-set on "demonstrating" PC inferiority by intentionally making their software SUCK in their Windows form, and by suck I mean suck resources and bloat down the startup with all their own little bits of nonsense I have to root out and disable. Annoying, and not a good way to get me to use Apple products. I hate Quicktime in particular because there is NO way to disable the quicktime "quick loader" save setting up a script to clean up the startup registry it inserts EVERY TIME you run the application.
