Apparently 200 prototypes of this thing were made, but all were ordered destroyed when the deal fell through... but a maintenance guy kept one, and his son just posted pictures of it. There's no power cord, so until we see that proof I'll be at least a bit skeptical, but the article above adds a lot more credibility to the story than just the initial pictures (also in that article) do. Presuming it is real, I wonder what's on the cart and the CD...
Quote:IGN: So earlier, I brought up the similarities in the approach. The outfits remind me of gear-driven games like Monster Hunter and MMOs. Part of what ties into equipment-driven games is a player has a choice between choosing a male or female. I'm curious if, in this game, players will have a choice between a male avatar or a female avatar, especially since the story doesn't seem tied to a specific gender?
Hiromasa Shikata: I’m going to tell you a little bit about the story quickly and we'll circle around, here. There's this kingdom, an event happens, and the king needs heroes. So, he puts out a call for heroes to gather and one of those is this guy Link. He sees this audition, basically, ‘Heroes needed; apply here.’ And, that's the start of his adventure.
The story calls for this sort of legend/prophecy where heroes will come together to help solve a problem. And in that, they are male characters. So, because the game is set with that as the story background, you cannot choose a gender; you are a male character.
IGN: I guess I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't express some slight disappointment with that, especially because there is a Zelda outfit Link wears in the game. It just feels like it's one step closer to giving the Zelda series' female audience the chance to explore that universe from another perspective.
Shikata: Understood. I understand what you're saying, and just as general information, we do have a lot of female staff members who are playing this game and enjoying it. It doesn't seem to be a big issue to them. They still are getting emotional investment in this game. And to be honest, Link isn't the most masculine of guys in the world, depending on how you want to project yourself into the character.
That's one weak, weak excuse, Nintendo. Has this guy ever heard of the concept of a female hero before? And it'd be REALLY easy to make a female version of the model, too.
My childhoods! I think it's great that they both seem to have such huge respect for each other, and then they both just goof off and pay some homage to Charlie Chaplin and then Miyamoto plays with a Star Fox muppet! (He's surprisingly adept at it.)
Seriously, he's always been an awful person, but now... now he's gone too far, to a crazy degree.
So, Paul LePage, Governor of Maine and just re-elected last November because the people in this state made some bad decisions in the voting booth, basically is throwing a massive fit right now. Fortunately the State House stayed Democratic, so while the Republicans picked up the State Senate, they don't hold all the power.
This most recent set of incidents started with him getting mad that the state representatives won't pass the tax plan he wants. The Republicans and Democrats in the statehouse worked together and passed a budget, without his regressive tax changes included. He vetoed it (back to vetoes soon), and they overrode the veto and passed it. This made him mad.
So, he vowed to veto every single bill that had a Democratic co-sponsor until the Dems cave in and give him his stupid tax plan. They refused, so the vetoes started mounting up. And when Republicans in the statehouse decided to support over-riding some of those vetoes, he ... promised to veto almost every single bill with either a Republican OR Democratic sponsor! Yes, that means pretty much everything. Wonderful. He also put 72 line-item vetoes in to try to change that budget to cut things he disliked; the statehouse overrode all 72. Now, some of his numerous vetoes of bills did hold up, but most have been overridden. This whole veto-everything idiocy made me seriously start wondering if he's lost it.
And then... then he did something worse than anything he's done before: He got the Democratic leader in the statehouse fired from his new job. Now, state legislators don't make nearly enough money to live off of that salary, so they need other jobs. This guy, Mark Eves, is a teacher, and got a job at a charter school for disadvantaged children. Charter schools are an idea the right love but liberals do not (basically, most charter schools draw students and money out of the public school system, hurting most students), and only were approved for the first time fairly recently. Eves opposed allowing charter schools when they came up to vote, but it did pass, and now he was going to work at one... until LePage decided that he didn't want that to happen.
So, LePage threatened the school, telling them that he would REVOKE THEIR STATE FUNDING if they let Eves stay at his new job, purely because of his personal dislike of Eves' politics. So, the school was forced to fire Eves, they don't want to be shut down. But this didn't stay hidden, and the news of this insane overreach has become something of a scandal. I hope it hurts LePage badly, you cannot get someone fired just because you dislike them for their political opinions, that's insane!
Some talk is starting up of impeachment, but that would require a 2/3rds majority in the Republican-led state Senate, so that'll be difficult. It sure would be nice if LePage would go, though.
Oh, in other news about LePage, he just made a hilarious joke about shooting a Bangor Daily News cartoonist who he disagrees with. Isn't he just a riot? :bummed: (He's said things like this before, too.)
Unicode by itself makes sense. Standardize the lettering from written languages around the world so that it "just works" on any machine that supports it. I try to use unicode whenever possible.
Emoji are illustrated versions of emoticons.
These: :crap::D:):evil::loopy::(
Now, in theory, adding graphical representations of certain symbols to unicode isn't a bad idea. It's just an expansion of a standard meant to help people around the world communicate more easily. You've got things like the six universal human facial expressions, arrows, and certain other universal signs that cut across cultures. Then you've got emoji. They are routinely bloating up standardized emoji with more and more pointless symbols that, more often than not, don't really cut across cultures so easily. A lot of their hand gestures, for example, are very western-centric, and as such there's not much point including them here. More importantly, anyone who wants to support Unicode 8, for example now needs to dedicate time and artists towards illustrating EVERY emoji in the standard. As the emoji part of the standard becomes more and more bloated, individual companies will start to feel less inclined to use the full standard. Once they start cutting some of the standard, who's to say they won't cut more, like Hebrew characters? Eventually, there'll be no point to it.
Now, I say "bloated" but it's absolutely true that unicode has "room" for way more than this before the standard is actually anywhere near "full". Still, what a bunch of work to give people to do. Also, every single face is another chance for some artist to screw something up and draw something horribly offensive. Just, you know, a possible issue there.
I'm judging mostly based on whether they had games I want to play.
Nintendo World Championships - A. Great show! I hope that in the future Nintendo goes back to live press conferences (with more reveals), but this tourney was great fun, I really liked watching it.
Nintendo - A-. Nintendo showed almost nothing for next year, but their library for this year is great, stronger for 3DS than Wii U but the Wii U has some good-looking games as well -- Star Fox and Mario Maker look fantastic, and hopefully Xenoblade Chronicles X as well. Yeah, I also wish that the conference had had a big reveal of some major upcoming Wii U game, but otherwise it was quite good. The hate Nintendo is receiving here is crazy. The 3DS got some great stuff announced (new Zelda! New Mario RPG! And maybe the Metroid game too, MP Hunters was fun.), and this year's Wii U library is pretty good.
Sony - B to B+. Yeah, the three big reveals are a big deal, and they showed some other great stuff that's a ways off too (Horizon could be good), but Sony showed NOTHING for this year. Sony and Nintendo really are opposites here, and while shocking reveals are great, why wait all that time for the games with nothing until then, when Nintendo has good games now AND will surely also have other good games in the future, even if they haven't announced them yet? And as for those three reveals... FFVII isn't a game I've ever found interesting enough to stick with, but it is cool it's getting a remake; TLG looks okay but dated; and I found Shenmue 1 quite boring so I doubt I'd like this new one either. So yeah, as cool as it was to see them, for me personally the games aren't my favorite things.
Square-Enix - B. Square's conference was pretty impressive, loaded with pretty good-looking games that look pretty interesting. I hope Star Ocean 5 is good! The main thing holding back this conference was that the biggest titles were already shown yesterday at other conferences -- FFVII Remake, World of Final Fantasy (is this an F2P game, or a traditional RPG? I can't tell.), Tomb Raider, etc. Still pretty good, though, though they could work a bit on their presentation.
Microsoft- C+. This was one of MS's better conferences, but still was a bit thin on games. MS definitely has a better 2015 library than Sony, but they didn't have the big reveals Sony did, and we already know about their major titles for this year. Recore and the Rare game could be good, but I'll need to see more. Also I really find it annoying that MS won't talk much about PC in their conferences. Microsoft, so long as you show that PC isn't important by not talking about it in your conference, I'll never believe your "we care now about PC gaming, really!" talk. And trolling PC gamers by later announcing that KI and Gears remaster or whatever are getting PC ports but not Halo or Forza is kind of annoying; I'm not really a fan of any of those four franchises, but still, if you're going to support the PC, release your major titles for it. It IS a Microsoft platform after all.
Ubisoft - C. The conference was well presented and as entertaining as ever, but they showed very few games I really want to play. I like Ubisoft's racing and platformer games the most, but they had almost none of those apart from a new console Trackmania game. That'll probably be cool, but otherwise the conference was just way too much Tom Clancy stuff I'll probably never play. Still, Ubi does always have one of the funniest conferences, and that is worth something.
EA - C-. Mirror's Edge 2 and the yarn game were the highlights, and those look great. I am particularly happy to hear that Mirror's Edge 2 won't have guns, that's a step in the right direction! Mass Effect could be good too, but they showed little of it. Still, this conference was mostly bland. There wasn't much interesting here, but nothing completely terrible either.
Bethesda - D. Dishonored 2 could be great, but nothing else here was at all interesting. Doom, looks pretty seriously disappointing, and the only Fallout games I care about were made by Black Isle. I don't like Bethesda much, and this conference was a good example of why.
I can't rate the PC Gamer conference for sure right now, haven't watched it all. It looks interesting, but low-budget and light on reveals. Still, it's great that it happened at all. MS showed their usual lack of interest in the PC, so someone had to step up! And they had lots of great and interesting PC games to show, even if they were't new. So yeah, B-something grade probably.
![[Image: 2015-07-13-tributetomriwata.png]](http://cdn.brawlinthefamily.keenspot.com/comics/2015-07-13-tributetomriwata.png)
:D:)
:evil:
:loopy:
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