I know. I'll be going to that tournament too. He also was at a Dutch tournament back in August.

As a visitor, I guess? Or are you good enough to actually compete in it?

I compete. Though I'm not really good enough. In my last tournament, I won only one game. Still, it's for fun and it's the best way to get better. I won't improve if I only play against CPU's.

If your games are recorded and put on YouTube or any other site, be sure to notify me. What name will you use? Jellsprout?

Also, good luck, even though the tournament doesn't start in a few weeks.

Yeah, jellsprout. But only the semi finals and finals are generally recorded.
The guy who recorded everything at the last tournament was recording random stuff, including a friendly of my Kirby against my friend's Falcon, but he said he had troubles converting the files and he hasn't uploaded them.

So many common misconceptions about the Xbox 360 - it's technical issues have mainly been solved now. And to be honest, £40 for a year of Xbox Live is well worth it. I would happily pay more for the service that I get. Even if the PS3 is better technically, I think that the differences would be negligible. For me, the Xbox has a wider selection of quality games and is a bit cheaper as well. I don't really care, as long as I can play Modern Warfare 2, I'm a happy man.

MW2 is also on the PC.
This generation, PC games are better than console games.

I dunno, seeing as I almost only play games from 2003 - SSBM and Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne, I have no idea what's good and not.

Almost no console game released after 2004 is good. No Nintendo game released after 2004 is good.
PC has made quite the surge since then, with games such as Oblivion. Most good console games, such as MW2 and GTA IV are also released on the PC. The only exception to this are the fighters, which is quite a shame.

that's a very extreme use of the word "good", jell. You sound as if you hate videogames in general, which you probably don't.

I dunno, here's an example: I played Ocarina of Time as my first Zelda game, and then I played Twilight Princess a while after that. And I thought TP was way better than the original OoT. At first I was disappointed because it was like a remake of Oot with all the same characters and settings and stuff, but as I played the game, it was clearly twice as more fun and awesome. I really enjoyed both games a lot, but TP is definitely one of my all time favorite video games. And yet people say that it wasn't good because Nintendo used a lot of ideas and concepts that were already introduced in past games or something. Like they were expecting a completely radical change in the game? I dunno, these kinds of guys don't make any sense to me because if the game is fun, isn't it fun?

Yes it is fun (I think). Anyways I usually have play the older gems of gaming because nobody manufactures new PS2 games anymore.

On I side note I've been writing a narritive on a event in my life for Language Arts throughout the night. This has gaven me a perfect oppurtuunity to realize how uneventful my life has been, lol. I'm so desperate that I'm writing about the loss of my 1st tooth. Very exciting stuff.

lol I hate when teachers make you write about that stuff because we're too young to have interesting stories to tell. I remember every year in between 3rd and 7th grade I basically kept writing about how I moved to NJ.

This teacher of mine seriously thinks we're celebrities. She believes every single one of us has been adopted from a foreign country, then brought back home to fight off a horrible infectious disease, but left blind by it. Then we spend the next few years living in the sewers of a city. Down there, we encounter a dangerous wild animal that we miraculously fend off, only seeming to die in the proccess, but by the power of believing we come back to life.

I'm tempted one of these days to write some outragously fake narrative and see if she believes it.

lol if she doesn't, tell her that you experimenting with writing in satire, and then ask her if she could spot the point that you were trying to make through your writing.

what grade are you in? b/c if you're in 8th grade, the teachers seem to have more respect for you than if you're in the 9th grade.

I'm in 9th grade. I love throwing bits of sarcasm and dark humor into my essays, though. I believe if it's a boring topic, you might as well make the reader laugh.

this year we went over how to write college application essays, and we read this one satirical essay where this guy tried to explain how he proved the science behind the disappearance of his one of his socks whenever he dried them. He even came up with a mathematical formula derived from Einstein's equations. It was actually pretty funny.

I few weeks ago I discovered funimation.com's crazy collection of free, legal anime shows. And a while ago, I finished watching this show called Ergo Proxy; it was only 23 episodes long I think, but it was a really great show And it was well dubbed, which is always preferable to sub titles.

And right now I just found this other cool show called Casshern Sins. I found the first episode to be boring (actually, I skipped through most of it), but the rest of the episodes they put up so far were cool. I originally started looking at funimation.com because they were posting One Piece episodes with decent voice actors, and also because of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Both are great shows, but I can't but help feel that FMA B is starting to get boring.

I think I'm a few posts late...

TP is better than OoT, but not if you take into account expectation inflation. We expect more of our games today than we did back when OoT was released. TP was great for the first three dungeons, good for the next two, and basically sucked from the Temple of Time on out. The difference between OoT and TP (because there really aren't as many as one might hope) is that OoT gets more epic as the game progresses, while TP actually somehow manages to get less so. The best Zelda game is Majora's Mask, and it actually makes me a little mad that you haven't really given it the time of day, Livio. Once you beat the game, make sure you go through and get everything, though. Seeing the final boss lose in a matter of seconds, after you put in all the hard work to get the Fierce Deity mask, is the best part.

I got my Heroes of Newerth beta key today. The game doesn't seem to be worth it as it stands now, I believe DotA is superior.

TP has low difficulty, easy puzzles, it is extremely linear, there are few original events between dungeons, which also made the game very short, the overworld is about as empty as in WW, it didn't utilise its items to their fullest potential (Spinner and Ball & Chain), it has the most predictable and least original plot in all of Zelda, it only had one epic boss fight (Stallord? that skeleton dragon), it didn't have any interesting characters, it didn't utilise the wolf factor enough and finally, false advertisement.
If it didn't include the word "Zelda" in its name, it wouldn't have gotten a score higher than 7.5 anywhere.
The only department in which it beat OoT is graphics. And that isn't surprising, seeing how the game got released almost 10 years later.

The other Nintendo games are garbage compared to their precessors too. Metroid Prime 3 removes the isolation factor that turned the series into the success it is, Mario Galaxy and Sunshine removed the giant exploration levels of Mario 64 and replaced them with hyper-linear platformer levels with little variety, New Mario Bros is shorter, easier, more linear and has less innovative levels than Mario Bros 3 and Mario World, Brawl took out all the competative factors, Pokémon got reduced to the exact same plot over and over again with no variation at all, while making the entire game more linear each generation, Mario Kart Wii destroyed every balance between the karts and the weapons that ever existed. Any series I forgot?
The only Nintendo game released in the past few years that hasn't dissapointed is Phantom Hourglass. That game really is far better than I expected. As for every other game, even after expected the worst, they still dissapoint me.

This week is the anniversary of my college faculty. As part of celebration, today we had a NES and a SNES installed in the main hall (along with 6 PC's where there were UT, GTA II and RA2 LAN parties). I played a bit Mario Bros on the NES, and the game felt far more fluid and responsive than Mario Galaxy. Where in Mario Galaxy everything feels like a gimmick, in Mario Bros every last tile feels like it has been carefully planned. And that is a game released 20 years earlier.

I can even tell the main problem with the games since 2004. Casualisation. Around that time, gaming became mainstream. People started playing games not because they liked the games, but because it was cool. The gaming companies didn't have to invest as much effort in the quality of the games, but instead they invested in appearance. It didn't matter if the game was crap, if people thought it was the coolest thing ever, they would buy it.
A second thing they had to consider, was that their new target group weren't gamers. They didn't buy the games for the challenge, they bought the games to beat it and brag to their friends. As such the difficulty plummeted. If people couldn't beat a game within a few hours, they would hate it and wouldn't buy they sequel.
As of today, it takes me about three days to beat Mario 64 from start to finish with 120 stars. That is exactly how long it took me to beat Mario Galaxy from start to finish with 120 stars the first time I played it.


My favorite Zelda game has to be Link's Awakening.

I actually don't know why I haven't played it that much. Maybe because I started it right before I stopped playing video games for a long time (mainly because of school).

I don't know jell, it seems to me that you just have ridiculously high standards that take all the fun away. Or like you look at stuff with the intention of finding faults in it.

About that whole casualization thing, I think that that most likely started because in America, parents would buy their kids practically anything. So now you have a bunch of middle-schoolers getting all the crazy bloody games like Gears of War and Call of Duty even though they're rated M for ages 18+. And because American parents supposedly have bottomless pockets, they buy any game that develops even an ounce of popularity, thus reducing the demand for high-quality games, and yeah, people buying stuff b/c it's "cool".

And the way I see it, if all the good games have already been made, and no one can make good games anymore, could it be that all of your favorite games were just flukes? Or maybe you just grow so attached to the original way you saw a genre that you can't tolerate any changes in it? But I don't mean to sound like I'm insulting you or anything, it's just that you still don't sound like you enjoy video games that much.

Correction: M games are 17+.

really? I assumed 18 because that's usually the standard.

I just checked and it's the Adults Only rating that is 18+ and none of the major consoles allow the publishing of AO games. I'm actually amazed by how many crazy gory games avoid the AO rating...

I have to agree with you on that part, Livio.

GTA seems AO worthy, to me.

Woah, bm, what's with your avatar/sig? I thought that you were Chelinka for a second there.