Boston raped the Angels 9-3 today at Anaheim, Ca., the Twins embarassed the Yankees with a 2-0 shut-out in da Bronx, and the Cardinals beat the Dodgers 8-3. Obviously I want the Sox to win; but besides that, I'd root for the underdog...like the Twins over the Assholes; the Dodgers over the Cardinals...
Quote:LOS ANGELES - Rodney Dangerfield (news), the bug-eyed comic whose self-deprecating one-liners brought him stardom in clubs, television and movies and made his lament "I don't get no respect" a catchphrase, died Tuesday. He was 82.
Dangerfield, who fell into a coma after undergoing heart surgery, died at 1:20 p.m., said publicist Kevin Sasaki. Dangerfield had a heart valve replaced Aug. 25 at the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center.
Sasaki said in a statement that Dangerfield suffered a small stroke after the operation and developed infectious and abdominal complications. But in the past week he had emerged from the coma, the publicist said.
Clad in a black suit, red tie and white shirt with collar that seemed too tight, Dangerfield convulsed audiences with lines such as: "When I was born, I was so ugly that the doctor slapped my mother," "When I started in show business, I played one club that was so far out my act was reviewed in Field and Stream," and "Every time I get in an elevator, the operator says the same thing to me: `Basement?'"
In a 1986 interview, he explained the origin of his "respect" trademark:
"I had this joke: `I played hide and seek; they wouldn't even look for me.' To make it work better, you look for something to put in front of it: I was so poor, I was so dumb, so this, so that. I thought, `Now what fits that joke?' Well, `No one liked me' was all right. But then I thought, a more profound thing would be, `I get no respect.'"
Dangerfield is survived by his wife, Joan, and two children from a previous marriage.
He was a damn good comedian. Its a shame he died, his movies where some of the best.
Quote:CANNES, FRANCE October 5, 2004 - The three largest producers and distributors of Anime in America - ADV Films, Inc., Funimation Productions LTD and Geneon Entertainment (USA) Inc. - announced plans to form a joint venture for the development and marketing of Anime. The announcement was made here today at MIPCOM by John Ledford, CEO and President, ADV Films, Kevin Corcoran, Chief Operating Officer/Chief Financial Officer, ADV Films; Gen Fukunaga, President, Funimation Productions LTD, Daniel Cocanougher, Vice President; Funimation Productions LTD; Yosuke Kobayashi, President and CEO, Geneon Entertainment (USA) Inc. and Hideki Goto, Vice President, Business Development, Geneon Entertainment (USA) Inc.
The new joint venture will focus on developing high quality entertainment series primarily targeted to children and young adults, where the team can best maximize their respective resources, talent and expertise.
The synergy of these companies is impressive as together they reach 70 percent of the Anime home video market in the United States.
Geneon Entertainment (USA) Inc. (http://www.Geneon-ent.com) is a full-service producer and distributor of entertainment content including film, music, animation and television shows on VHS, DVD and CD. Headquartered in Long Beach, California, Geneon Entertainment's parent company is Tokyo-based advertising giant Dentsu Inc. and the company is best known as the distributor of the well-known Anime hits Pokemon and Akira.
Funimation (http://www.funimation.com) is a leading brand management company for Anime content and one of the nation's largest independent home video entertainment companies. Headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, the company is best known for creating the blockbuster franchise "Dragonball Z" in the U.S.
ADV Films is a leading producer-distributor of Japanese animation ("anime") for the North American market and has also developed a leadership position in the UK. Headquartered in Houston, the company has also launched the Anime Network, first cable channel in North America dedicated to anime with access to thousand of hours of exciting, eye-catching serialized programming
This could be a very good things for anime, or it could turn into a huge disaster and all three companies wind up going bankrupt...well maybe not.
Nothing new, just didn't want to put this in the thread where we are arguing about BG and KotOR...
I've been playing Arena for a few days now. You know, the now freeware first TES game... then yesterday I played a bit of the Daggerfall demo (thanks to one of my older demo CDs...). Interesting to see the differences and similarities. There are all kinds of techical issues (Arena requires EMS so it must be run in DOSBox, and it runs badly there so I cannot get a smooth framerate... weirdly Daggerfall runs much better than Arena in DOSBox. It also runs in Windows since it can accept XMS... but it runs a bit better in DOSBox I think.), but for now I'll ignore that and stick to more important matters.
I would say that these two, and Arena in specific (since I've mostly been playing it) are interesting contradictions. On the one hand, you have massive worlds. Arena lets you go to cities and towns (and their surroundings) across the continent. You'll visit all nine parts of Tamriel. It's older so it's got some limitations (the cities and towns are not connected by land -- you must use the Travel map to go between them, for instance.), but you can certainly see the connection... anyway, so you start in your home province and start adventuring. So what did I mean by contradictions? On the one hand, it has massive scope. 400+ towns and cities, every one with various inns, temples, equpiment stores, a palace, a mages' guild... and one gate in or out. There are also various tilesets, depending on which culture you are in. Different parts of the world will look different. They've also got their own people... the people on the streets in each province are different. And there are numerous quests you can do... you can pretty much do fetch quests forever, for instance, and there are an uncountable number of randomized dungeons littered around the world.
However... it is also limiting. Character intraction is for the most part VERY limited. People who give you quests will have something to say (just a text block and a yes/no to the quest), but other than that pretty much all you can do is ask people their name and profession (and these will start to repeat after a couple of hours of doing this, making this part mostly ignored), ask for General or Work-related information, or ask where any of the relevant places to go in town are. If you're very near the place the person will also put the name of the store on your map (the only other way to do this is to go into the store, get its name, come out, and label it on the map yourself... a tedious process.). This is important because you want to know which places are which on the automap (inn, store, or temple, mostly, except the mages' guild). The names of stores and stuff also clearly get drawn out of a pool because you'll see the same names over if you visit just a few towns. Each region is different a bit but still... it gets old fast. Especially once you consider the fact that the INSIDES of the stores, temples, and inns are EXACTLY THE SAME EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Yup, the same white humans are inside the inns with the same racially-based (as in based on your character's race) comments to make everywhere. While EVERYONE on the streets outside are of the race that is supposedly dominant in that province. This is just stupid... my character's a High Elf, so I should expect that in Summurset Isle the people in the inns should mostly be High Elves, right? Nope, they are uniformly humans with the same insulting things to say they say everywhere else. Stupid.
Really what I am trying to say is that Arena has truly massive scope but very limited variety. Four hundred towns but before you've gone to three you'll see repeating store names, jobs (if you bother to ask), answers to your 'Rumors - Work' or 'Rumors - General' questions, etc. You'll get the same, or very similar, fetch quests in towns. You can explore virtually identical dungeons. The only real differences are the tileset used for the city graphics and inhabitants (in the overworld city map that is, not in buildings) (and this only varies between provinces), the name of the city you are in, and the layout of this particular city or dungeon... and that is certainly random like so much else.
So you can spend forever if you wish in the game, but I've been playing it for like three days and am already getting tired of the repetition... makes me want to just focus on the main quest for a while and then probably not play the game anymore. After all even if you focus on the main quest it's a very long game...
As for Daggerfall, it's both similar and different. Based on the demo I can tell that it focuses on just one part of the continent, but allows travel between all parts of this section of it and has much smaller towns... which means fewer cultures to deal with which makes some of the problems with Arena less. But it's still got very limited interaction with the people where it's mostly either accepting quests, asking about rumors or work, or asking where places are. And it is certainly a massive-scope game but I've heard that that comes at the price of having lots more virtually identical towns with more virtually identical things to do in them and more virtually identical dungeons to hack through (and that's the other major contradiction -- the games tie a deep roleplaying system and massive open world to just about the simplest form of hack and slash gameplay...)... a game you can play forever if you want to, but I don't quite see how it keeps the interest for that long.
Oh yeah if anyone else wants to play it it is here
Quote:OSAKA (Reuters) - Japanese game maker Nintendo Co. Ltd. raised its full-year net profit forecast by 20 percent on Monday, citing a stronger dollar and solid demand for software titles for its handheld GameBoy Advance machine.
Nintendo, known for games featuring characters such as Mario, Donkey Kong and Pokemon, said it now expected group net profit of 84 billion yen ($758.9 million) for the year to March 2005, compared with its May forecast of 70 billion yen.
It also raised its net profit estimate for the April-September first half to 46 billion yen from an original 25 billion yen.
The sharp upward revision was due mainly to a foreign exchange-related gain of 36 billion yen, the company said. It holds about $5 billion worth of dollar-denominated deposits, which it revalues at the end of every accounting period.
The latest revision stems from a change in its assumed exchange rate from 105 yen to the U.S. dollar to 110 yen to the U.S. dollar. The dollar traded at around 110.60 yen on Monday.
Strong demand for its software titles for GameBoy Advance also helped improve its operating profit margin in the first half, more than offsetting slower-than-expected sales of its GameCube consoles, Nintendo said.
``Our GameCube hardware business was slightly hurt by price cuts by our rivals ... but we're considering launching a sales promotion campaign for the peak Christmas shopping season and expect to achieve our full-year sales target,'' Nintendo Senior Managing Director Yoshihiro Mori told a news conference.
Mori declined to comment on whether the company planned another price cut on the GameCube console.
Nintendo in September 2003 slashed prices for the GameCube console to below $100 in the United States to boost flagging sales. In the April-June first quarter it sold 650,000 GameCubes, versus 80,000 units a year ago, as a result.
The company kept its consolidated revenue forecast for the year to March 2005 unchanged at 430 billion yen.
Nintendo last month struck the first blow in what is set to be an all-out war with Sony Corp. for the lucrative handheld game console market, aggressively pricing its new dual-screen model at $149.99 and setting its U.S. launch date for Nov. 21.
In a bid to keep the dominance its GameBoy Advance has given it in the handheld market, Nintendo set the price for the ``DS'' dual-screen console at the bottom end of analysts expectations.
Gamestop has two DS boxarts up that seem to be official, and I think they look pretty cool. Looks a lot like the DC cases, eh? Two things though... "Super Mario 64 DS" sounds a bit ridiculous, and I hope they don't use the same crappy cardboard boxes that Gameboy games have always used. I'd love to see a tiny dvd-like case. That way the boxes won't just be for display. :)
Boy, Tycho sure hates good RPGs. For some reason or another he absolutely despises non-shitty RPG combat systems, i.e. anything that's not turn-based. Stuff like Star Ocean, Tales of Symphonia, Final Fantasy XII... read it for yourself:
Quote: Final Fantasy casts a shadow so large that it envelops the entire genre, which is well known. Nobody does Final Fantasy better - a truism that now includes Square-Enix itself apparently, as with their XII iteration they've shrugged off the iconic turn-based combat and gone with one of these Goddamn real-time hybrids that so appeals to a game reviewer's keen sense of novelty. This is part of a larger discussion that I have with Gabriel the Elder, and I guess now you can have it, too.
Quote:The other half of the conversation has to do with these Goddamn hybrid action systems that have come into phase in role-playing games. Tales of Symphonia is one of the worst games I've played in recent memory. Star Ocean is a joyless, grating exercise I could recommend only as penance for some grievous moral miscalculation. Certainly, their stories are caricatures of cliches based on a half-understood mishmash of Western and Eastern folklore, but I have to be honest with you when I say that applies to virtually all content Japan produces. I can't claim ignorance of it at this point, and honestly the surreal experience of having my own culture digested and projected back into my cornea is one of the reasons I seek the genre out. But both of them have different takes on this action/RPG hybrid that has bum-rushed the genre, and I'm glad that technology allows us to do things like this, but I have to tell you that I don't see it as a substantial improvement. I'm quick on the draw and I can push a button in sequence with the best of them. But there is something natural and sensible and universal about a turn-based system that allows for absolute, explicit position, clear delineation, and genuine decision making. Maybe that seems quaint to you, but dividing the sequence of play into turns has a validity that isn't diminished by advancing technology.
Wow, such strong words. I don't often disagree with Tycho but in this case I couldn't disagree more.
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