So, I just started playing Twilight Princess last week. Yeah, for real. I bought it at launch, couldn't find a Wii for months, got busy, etc... But I borrowed my friend's Wii cause he is busy with Halo 3, and now I can finally get into this game. I'm loving it. I'm staying up far too late and I keep saying things like "I just want to do this last quest..." and playing for hours more. Just like the good old days.
I'm about 20 hours in. It's awesome. I smile every time the wolf howls a song form OoT or I find a Poe or whenever any nostalgic moment happens, which is pretty much constantly. :D Yay for Zelda.
Pretext: No I'm not personally affected. However, eternal vigilance and loud shouting is the only way anything ever gets changed. Enough people over react and make a big stink about this, Valve will listen. With that, onto my complaining. It is not just acceptable, but NECESSARY.
Now this is idiotic. I can understand Valve wanting, for some odd reason that I never understood but is industry standard, to control where their games are released and how easily people in certain territories can buy them. In this case though, it's TOO LATE. They already OWN the game. That said and done, you can't just shut them out. You want to sell this as a viable alternative to buying a non-steam activated game? Better play ball and let people, no matter where they bought it or what IP range they are using it in, have full access to the thing. No turning off games people paid for. You know what this does to your bottom line? Boycotts (and they are already starting, in the small numbers that always happen with these things), refunds, and of course, with that odd glitch, people won't buy the legit copies. On top of all that though, you get people who suddenly have to turn to the piracy world just to get their legitimate games running. It's Bioshock all over again.
Look, I know you have some odd controls you want, but you have to understand that no matter how cleverly you word your "contracts", that's not what people actually think is going on. By and large, the public thinks they own a game, and let me tell you, in my opinion, that's ENOUGH right there. They pretty much DO own it. You can't just do all sorts of unethical nonsense and hide behind "but they pushed a button". Yeah, a button they didn't even know they had to push until they opened the box and installed the game. "Hidden" software contracts will get their day in court of being held invalid. There's a precedent, and that's the old days of "by opening this box you give your agreement" contracts of older PC games. There's a reason they stopped using those.
This nonsense seriously has to stop, and here's the first step. Turn those games back on! For all intents and purposes, you know you owe them and it's their game.
To keep my sanity I find things to do so I dont have to listen to my brain. I have no friends around here and I guess I need some kind of semisocial interaction. I'm starting dancing lessons.
Yes. Dancing lessons.
Wait for it...... wait...
Dancing lessons.
It's the end of the world. I also run in the mornings which is fun because sometimes there's these raccoons that watch me, I give them treats but I think I should stop because they're increasing in numbers everytime I see them and they might be planning something. I'm skinny. who cares. So drawing, running, origami. I'm bored as all fuck and the stress is killing me. I have grey hairs everywhere, GREY (gray) hairs, I dont get it. But I haven't been alone like this in a long time and it sucks so much asshole that I dunno wut tado. I avoid video games, my nephew and I play some stuff here and there but I dont play by myself (reference lol) and I was wondering what the other lonely hearts do to keep themselves busy with their free time.
So AIM I guess. Dead Hepheastus. Look me up or dont. Miller, I got a facebook but I dunno what it is or what i'm doing, I joined a netherlands group and the people are odd, like leather face mask odd. Help.
Because we (re: the last part of my sig) won the division, not just the wildcard like in '04, that is, along the way back to the World Series. :) Winning the division makes it feel more legitimate to me, for some reason...
On a completely related note, people outside right now are... quite excited ... going by the noise... :)
Pod was a racing game made by one of Ubisoft's internal French studios for the PC in 1997. It was one of the first games to support Intel's then-new MMX technology and also supported DirectX (3 and 5), 3DFX Glide, and lesser cards like the S3's junk and whatever ATI had then. From day one, the game has had a lot of issues, and while time has made some things simpler (most of the myriad of patches they made are now unnecessary; you only need one to four of them, depending on configuration), it has made others more complex... which results in this: the POD folder in my Game Downloads folder being 715 files and 425MB large (though a lot of that is the track and car downloads).
Major Problems:
- The sound is broken. The CD audio music is fine, but the sound effects are broken. Voices ('3-2-1-go') crackle and break in and out, engine noises stutter loudly often nearly drowning out the music for the whole duration of the race... it's really annoying. It's kind of a blessing when the sound breaks completely...
- The process of properly installing the patches and emulator needed to run the game are a big hassle. The process: To run the game on a modern computer, first install the game from the CD, in normal DirectX3 mode. Then install the 40MB OEM-to-Retail patch if you have the OEM version CD (as I do). Next install the 24MB 3DFX patch. Then install it again; it's buggy and needs to be ran twice. Next install the Force Feedback patch if you either have a force feedback gamepad or joystick or an ATI CPU, because for some reason that patch fixes the game for them. Next, if you have a Pentium 4 (and only that, not any other Intel CPU) run the unofficial Pentium 4 exe patcher and patch the EXE to get it to run.
-Next, copy a Glide emulator and its files (I use dgVoodoo) into the Pod folder and configure the emulator to your liking. This emulates Glide so you can run Pod in higher resolutions (or 800x600, at least, maybe higher) and with better graphics than you can get in the second-best graphics patch, the (640x480-limited) D3D DX5 one. Test the game until you find settings that (hopefully) get the game to actually run on your system. dgVoodoo requires a decent video card -- I could not run Pod on my old computer because my GeForce2 wasn't good enough to display anything ingame.
-Alternately, instead of the Glide patch, if you want worse graphics but no emulator, you can install the D3D DX5 patch, if that still works with modern versions of DirectX (I have no idea). This will probably require installing the two Gameservice patches (in the correct order) to fix speed problems, as without the emulator the game tends to run too fast without the Gameservice patches.
-The game is buggy -- it can crash, even after all this. The window-switching that it does in between the menu and race is also annoying, though it's obviously an artifact of the emulator. That window-switching is also a cause of some of the crashes, I'm pretty sure...
-The game has a lot of tracks and cars -- in total, 49 cars and 56 or 57 tracks, counting ones that don't work right. 36 of those are official courses that generally work correctly. The others are user-designed ones that are more limited in function -- many have crash bugs in them, user-designed courses have no AI unless they're reskins of official courses, so they're only usable in multiplayer or timetrial modes. In addition, the game only allows you to add 32 cars and 32 tracks on top of the base 16 tracks and 8 cars. This is enough for all of the official tracks, but not all of the cars. To change which are installed you use the POD CDPatcher program, an official app that lets you install and remove extra cars and tracks. The program doesn't tell you when you get over 32, so you just need to keep track (it'll be obvious, the game will crash when next run). Ingame, while the tracks are easy to choose, broken into three 16-vehicle pages, the cars are a bit more difficult, as only eight can be selected at a time, and they are the eight that you select between and that will show up in-race. In a sub-menu you can switch which eight vehicles are selected among the up to 40 available (32 + base 8). There are no names or indicators here so you just need to select them, and no 'reset to default' option, so you need to remember which are the originals if you want to go back to the default, or uninstall all add-on cars. Blah.
Lesser Problems:
-If you want the intro and ending videos to play, figure out a way to get Intel Indeo to function on your system. Otherwise just watch them externally and skip them ingame... the video files are in an open format, so you can watch them in any video file player. (I thought I'd gotten Indeo working on this computer, but running Pod yesterday it clearly isn't working...) Modern computers and OSes don't exactly like Indeo... Annoying.
-You need to set Windows to 16-bit graphics for the game to start, even if you have dgVoodoo set to 32-bit color (which would be a bit odd given that 3DFX cards can only do 24-bit color...).
-Ubisoft shut down the online system years ago, meaning that all that's left for multiplayer is IPX, modem, 2-player splitscreen, or direct cable link. You can, I believe, do stuff like combine splitscreen with modem though, I think. I've only ever played it online (when that was available) or splitscreen.
-The game occasionally freezes for a moment, like a sudden drop in framerate that it quickly recovers from.
-The save system is a bit wonky -- save data has been known to disappear or corrupt. In addition, in championships you can only save after every four races, which is annoying at times when you keep doing badly at the last race before the save point...
-There's an odd black space between the sky textures and the track, like a black ring in the lower edges of the sky between the ground and the sky...
So um... yeah. There are a ... few ... problems with Pod. But even so it's still a great game, provided that you can actually get it running.
+Pod is a pure racing game. There are no weapons or attacks of any kind, except for just bumping into the other cars. Weapons work in a lot of futuristic racing games, sure, but in this case not having them focuses the game on the racing, and it works really, really well.
+The controls are very simple -- In fact, the game only has four controls: turn left, turn right, accelerate, and brake. Nothing more is needed. Well, there are some configuration buttons and a pause button, but none of those are related to the actual gameplay...
+ Those cars and tracks... despite the irritation of the CDPatcher, how many racing games have this kind of variety? There are a huge number of available tracks and cars in this game! 16 built-in tracks and 8 built-in cars form the basic game -- the main Championship goes through those sixteen tracks. There are an additional 20 official tracks available for download and 44 official car downloads. In addition, there are five unofficial car downloads, seven OEM versions of official original courses available (that were altered in the final release), two other beta versions of official courses available, and a bunch of user courses -- 11 new tracks (some of which crash), 8 reskins of official courses, and several reskins of user courses (some of which crash). I don't know of any other futuristic or arcade racing games with this much variety...
+The actual track DESIGNS are fantastic and unique. Pod has a visual style all its own, and unique track designs as well. The tracks are highly varied in locations, length (though overall race time is kept similar by having more laps on short courses and fewer on long ones), width, style, and difficulty, providing for great variety. This is probably the greatest strength of the game, as no other racing game ever has tracks that have the feeling and design of Pod's. The harder tracks are truly hard -- blind turns, dead ends, tricky shortcuts, mazelike arrays of passages you have to find your way through, traps, obstacles you can bump into and push around... At times, when you're winding your way through a particularly hellish maze of corridors (see: the track of doom, Megapol), the game can barely feel like a racing game at all... except for that lap time of yours, falling minutes behind the competition, that is. :D Of course, spend the time to memorize the course and you can do well too... but not all the tracks do that. Others are much more simple tracks that are not hard to navigate and have no alternate paths or trap dead ends. The game has the full variety of courses available. Note that most of the most difficult tracks are add-on tracks, not the original 16; they added harder tracks in the downloads.
+As I began in the previous point, the game also has great art design, as you might expect from a French game. The abandoned, futuristic world of Io presented here is very well designed. Each track has a consistent theme and style which comes together very well. The cars are just as well done and also come in great variety. The graphics are admittedly a product of their time -- they have a similar '1997 PC' feel to, for instance, Jedi Knight 1 -- but while this means a very limited polygon count, it also gives them a distinctive style. Considering when the game was made the graphics are fantastic, and the texture work looks amazing in emulated 3DFX mode at 800x600 or higher.
+While some of the add-on cars and tracks admittedly don't fit the game's bleak, abandoned-futuristic-world them, they end up being some of the most unique courses in the game -- the island jungle castle track with matching pirate-themed cars, the ice level with penguin obstacles, the halloween-themed course with witch, etc, cars, and more... great stuff. :)
+Even if they only work in multiplayer or timetrial and some crash, the user-made tracks that don't crash are interesting and can be as well designed as any of the official courses. There are still Pod websites active on the internet (yes, it had a real fanbase, and this has lasted. There are still Pod fansites on the internet. :)) and you can find other timetrial times to compare yours to if you wish. These fansites also provide a place or link to places to download all of the patches, emulators, track downloads, and car downloads that I've talked about from.
+There is an optional car damage system. You can set it to Off, Global (the car is one sector), or Sector, which breaks the car down into six parts which take damage separately. While cars cannot be destroyed (unlike in the intro... :)), and there is no visible car damage, just an on-screen graphic, damage affects top speed and performance, making avoiding it a very good idea. This is particularly true because while each track has a heal-area somewhere, they are always on sidings that generally delay you some, so deciding to go fix your car will usually lose you some time (but will fix your top speed). It's a tough decision on some courses...
+The championships use a flat point system, no disqualifications. There are eight cars per race. Eight points for first, seven for second, etc, to one point for last. You only win if you finish in first overall at the end of the championship, but how you get there doesn't matter. Except for the only-every-four-races save system, it's pretty much the ideal championship design. There are also random championship and custom championship options, in addition to the default one, and single race and time trial modes, as well as multiplayer.
+Despite the loss of online play, the two-player split-screen multiplayer mode works great. If you have another copy of the game (or a copy), you could also try IPX, direct-modem, or modem-to-modem play options.
+That aforementioned intro is really, really awesome. It's long -- a several-minute-long FMV -- and tells the backstory of the game, which is essentially that you are on the moon of Io, where the horrible Pod virus is destroying the planet. Most people have left, leaving only a few... and the few remaining people are having a race series. The winner gets a seat on the last ship off the planet; everyone else...
+It'll bring you back to the days when MMX was supposed to be the next great thing... (and darnit, after playing this game, I still thought it would be... oh well. :))
+When fully patched and with dgVoodoo installed, the game WORKS on a modern, Windows Vista PC! Sure, there are issues, as I listed, but the game WORKS. Considering the game's age, this is amazing. In fact, in some ways the game works better on this PC than any previous one we have owned... (well, it did work well on the P800, and functioned on the 233. It just didn't run at all on my 1500 (could get into the menus, but ingame all textures were black thanks to my videocard not being fully compatible with dgVoodoo)...)
In conclusion, despite more (quite) major and (relatively) minor flaws than probably any other game I like, Pod is one of my favorite racing games ever and has been a personal favorite of mine for ten years now. It's a great, unique game, flaws included. There's really nothing else quite like it, though that point is very hard to make clear to someone who doesn't have knowledge of the game's greatest strength, its track designs and styles. From the narrow tunnels and cool shortcut of Canyon to the long two-way road in Beltane to Skyrace's cool style and Downtown's short, twisty route, or that island Beach, icy Iceberg, awesome Hellway, the abandoned bridges and construction machines in tracks like Pompeii... Pod's tracks are unlike anything else. And that's only a few of them...
I recently picked up this PSP port of the old Playstation game, and they've changed a few things. First of all, the entire game has been retranslated, as they have often done with new games. It's a good thing when you consider that up until recently translations weren't exactly top notch. FF8 is the first game I can recall that did a truly excellent job of translation.
Anyway, the first thing they seem to have changed is remaking all the FMVs in the game, on top of outright replacing certain in-game cutscenes with FMV versions (this is as opposed to Chrono Trigger's remake where they play back both the new FMV of certain scenes and the in-game cutscene version). Whereas the FMVs in the original Tactics weren't exactly very high quality, save perhaps art direction, these ones look great. They are done in an interesting style of cel shading that reflects the art style of the character illustrations. Everything has a "sketchy" look to it as well. Further, the FMVs have voice acting, and the voice acting is pretty decent. Apparently the Japanese version had no voice acting at all so there's no way someone can criticize it by saying the US voice acting is "worse" than the Japanese version.
They've added a lot of new side missions, many of them seeming to focus on Delita, so you sort of switch perspectives in the story now. Also, a host of new unlockable characters, namely that cool guy from FFXII Balthier, further since XII is actually set in the same world as Tactics (and Vagrant Story) he actually fits. Cloud's still there, and he makes as little sense as he ever has being in this game (alternate reality machine my foot).
The gameplay has been changed up a bit. More characters can be in your party at once now, which could make things easier but it's a matter of choice anyway if you use that new capacity. However, just as in the original you make your movement choice and then your action choice, and even if you haven't locked your character's action yet your movement choice can't be undone, so pick your moves well as this isn't FFTA. Dark Knights are now available, for everyone, and so are "Onion Knights".
One thing I noticed pretty quick is there seem to be sound issues. That big ol' dark knight in the first mission? His health sucker doesn't seem to have it's full impact of sound effectism when he uses it... For the most part the sound is still good though. Also, if you are wondering, it seems to have the same delays and load time issues as the original, so they didn't really get rid of that problem. All in all, on a technical level I think they should have delayed the game for a while in order to work out these issues. There's really no excuse for them, especially the sound thing.
Back to the retranslation, the script for the original was fairly stylized as it was, but this time they REALLY went with it, fitting with the stylization of FFXII and Vagrant Story's scripts. Unlike the standard Final Fantasy game in which the dialog is more of a "realistic conversation" style, this is a lot more of a classicly trained drama style of dialog.
As an example of it, here's one line for ya.
Original:
Delita: If you must blame someone, blame yourself or god.
Remake:
Delita: Tis your birth and faith that curse you, not I.
That line in particular isn't just highly stylized though, it gives a bit of a different meaning and attitude to what he's saying. There's more of the same and it is hard for me to decide which one "works" better. I'd have an easier time deciding if I knew more of the original Japanese script. I get the feeling that the Japanese script for this game is highly stylized itself.
Oh yes, the Zodiac part of Zodiac Brave Story has more of an impact in battle. I haven't really played long enough to figure out what new effects it has though.
Among the rest there's a new multiplayer mode where you can take your team and fight another team. Unlike Fire Emblem's pitiful multiplayer, this is the real thing. Take your party and put it against another on a map and there are even new "traps" that can be set. When in this mode, everyone's units are colored either red or blue to make them easy to distinguish. Further, and a mode I found one of the best things they added to FFTA, there's a cooperative mission mode, where you and a friend go on special missions that require teamwork.
If I do end up having some issue with the new script or gameplay, it isn't something I can't do anything about. I still have the original version, and I can always rip it to play it on my PSP as well.
This does bring up one thing though. I really wish they had brought FFXII international to the states... That remake apparently really adds a lot of new things to the combat system.
Quoting Wikipedia:
Quote:An international version of the game called Final Fantasy XII International Zodiac Job System (ファイナルファンタジーXII インターナショナル ゾディアックジョブシステム, Fainaru Fantajī Tuerubu Intānashonaru Zodiakku Jobu Shisutemu?) was released in Japan on August 9, 2007 as part of both Final Fantasy 20th anniversary and Ivalice Alliance.[124] The game includes twelve License Boards available (instead of the original one), each corresponding to a different Zodiac sign and job. The battle system as a whole has been tweaked; guest characters and summons are controllable by the player, and pressing the L1 button accelerates the game's speed. Additionally, the game features the English voices and the widescreen 16:9 ratio support of the North American version, as well as a bonus disc based on the one initially released with the North American version. Other new features such as new licenses, new spells and new gambits have been shown as well. There is also a "New Game+" option, as well as a new "Trial Mode" which allows the player to hunt monsters in 100 different maps to gain items and money.[3][125][126][127]
Those "international" versions sure are adding more and more stuff... It really makes me want those editions to actually BE international.
The weirdest thing about these international versions is how they keep using the English voice acting in their versions, because apparently they like the english voices. One would think they'd at least put two DVDs in there, one with the Japanese voice acting and one with the English. If it's a special edition sold at full price that is the sort of extra I'd think they could splurge on. Oh well, it's not really my problem I guess.
Here's a game I'm looking forward to. While I have some disagreements with certain opinions of this guy, you can't say he doesn't think pretty deeply about the whole mythos here.
The guy goes on about a storyline explanation of the CANDLES in the game. That's pretty interesting. So, souls stolen by Dracula (and Death) eh?
He can't seem to figure out the meat, but for me that's the easy one. Dracula is kinda famous for inviting people to his castle (so he can manipulate them before, say, plaguing the entire world), so you'd think he would want to have a feast prepaired for them. Even if he doesn't invite people to his castle any more, he still has hordes of monsters, some of which might actually need to eat meat. For example, werewolves.
Let me just break down my confusion...
1. a ipod can not surf the web.
2. a ipod can not play video games.
3. a ipod is not able to play wma, divx, or read word documents, and rss feeds.
4. It cant play flash moves. It cant take pictures, and does not have a hi def screen with a hot sexy gooie.
5. It cant make this post. Is missing manny more feaures I neglected to mention. And it now costs $150 more to even come close.
So it's being ported to the Wii, and it'll basically be the exact same game except for the one thing that you just KNOW would work awesome, the brush controls are now controlled via Wii remote pointing.
I thought this game was always meant for the Wii from the start, and here it is! Even with just this ONE change, I feel I simply MUST obtain this version.
So they now sell their games which I thought was a major improvement, but not ALL their games are up for sale and Icewind Dale and it's sequel are STILL locked away in their "monthly fee" service. Very annoying... I don't want to rent, I want to own! This is a game, not a house! I think I can cover the bill here!
I can get over the "take over your screen" slow to load interface for loading games. I can get over the "in your face" MTV generation interface that looks like a bag of ranch flavored potato chips. I can get over the insulting advertising. All that does is prove to me that such stupid advertising methods really are utterly worthless considering Steam totally owns them every single day and it goes for a much more subdued "here's a game we have up now" advertising and simplistic, functional interface. However, I'd really like to actually buy the games I might actually be interested in from them.
