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Happy Commentary from a Cheerful Mind

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 6:37 pm
by Green Gibbon!
I have begun receiving threatening emails, which I generally regard as a signal that it's time to update the front page. Since last I expulsed my admittedly harsh (yet thoroughly, 100% accurate) opinions upon this dusty, neglected corner of the infobahn:

Sonic Riders was released and has promptly joined the recent legion of Sonic games I have thus far been unable to motivate myself to play. If you count Sonic Gems, the total number is now up to 4, or 4½ if you include Advance 3, which I left unfinished. I am now farther behind in my Sonic playing than I ever have been since the inception of the series. However, though I may yet be ignorant to hoverboard-riding bird gangs and flame-wielding lavender cats, I am still quite on top of my hedgehogian lore. All of the museum pages up to Sonic & Tails 2 have been brushed up yet again, and I am, for the moment, satisfied with them. I've added some new info here and there, so if you haven't checked up in a while, it might be worth your time (relatively speaking) to browse through the museum articles through the year 1994. (Special thanks yet again to HarihariSonic of <a href="http://www.clavis.ne.jp/~sonic/segasonic/index.htm">Act Select</a>, whose relentless crusade to educate the masses in the most obscure knowledge of the entire Sonic continuum has allowed me to update the Gameworld and Music Maker pages with the same level of info found elsewhere on the site.)

Actually, in regards to the <a href="/sonic/s&t2/s&t2.html">Sonic & Tails 2</a> page - some of those enemy names I hesitate to toss around as canon. The manual uses some very peculiar kana combinations, and my translations are halfway to being wild guesses. As usual, the original kana is included on the museum page, so if anyone can come up with some better romanizations, by all means, have at it.

A couple of months ago, Game Pro (which is, against all justice and probability, still in publication) ran a short article on the upcoming 360/PS3 Sonic game. As is to be expected, the article is puerile and contrived and wouldn't be worth mentioning at all except that it confirms the game's director is Shun Nakamura. That is, <i>not</i> Takashi Iizuka, who is presently #1 on my list of "People I Want to Bitch Slap", who has directed every major Sonic game since Sonic Adventure, and who ran out of ideas in 2001. Nakamura's only major credit that I can find is director of Samba de Amigo - which, mind, is a <i>good</i> credit, but that's a very different sort of game. It's hard to speculate at this point just how effective a talent shift will be, and the early crop of screenshots trickling from Sega's PR regions, while they have offered some small relief, have also failed to impress. There is tension in the air.

Sega's updated the <a href="http://sonic.sega.jp/">Sonic Channel</a> website with all the usual schtick. The layout has been improved and the excruciating flash interface has thankfully been dropped. Of particular interest is the character survey, which rounds up 28 of the more prominent cast members and invites readers to select their favorites. The results, the site promises, will be posted on June 23, Sonic's 15th birthday. The poll, unfortunately, is only in Japanese, but here I offer my clumsy 101 C- translations for we happy foreigners who would have our opinions known in this affair:
<b>1)</b> Pick your 3 favorite characters in descending order.
<b>2)</b> This one is either asking which character you like playing as, which character you would like to become, or which character is best in bed. I'm not totally certain.
<b>3)</b> Which character would you like to see more of?
<b>4)</b> If you were going on an adventure, which character would you choose as your partner?
<b>5)</b> Which character would you choose to go on a trip with?
<b>6)</b> Which character would you like to play sports with?

The bottom three questions are just personal information: your prefecture (the bottommost option in the drop-down menu I think says "outside Japan", which is most likely the correct choice if you're reading this), your gender (boy, girl), and your age. The drop-down menus for each of the first 6 questions list the characters in the same order they appear in at the top of the page. For the record, I disavow all responsibility as to the accuracy of the above translations, and if you end up identifying yourself as an 83 year old post-op transsexual from North Korea who would love to co-star with Charmy Bee in a syndicated cooking show, don't blame me.

Reminding the people of Earth once again that I do not play World of Warcraft and never will.

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 8:37 pm
by j-man
Well, you should. It's brilliant, mate.

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 8:39 pm
by Segaholic2
Seeing my roommate spend 8+ hours per day on WoW completely turned me off to the game, and I've never played it. I bought it and was going to start when I had free time like in the summer, but I changed my mind because of him.

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 8:41 pm
by j-man
Dude, since my girlfriend cheated on me and I kicked her ass to the curb, it's been my only guilty pleasure. I even wrote a love song about it. It's pretty catchy.

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 8:56 pm
by Green Gibbon!
I think what finally terrified me beyond the point of no return was when my fucking dad starting playing it. I am now the only male member of my immediate family who doesn't spend every waking moment playing the game, thinking about the game, or thinking of ways to spend more time playing the game.

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 8:58 pm
by Segaholic2
Okay, now that's pretty scary.

Your entire family plays it? Do they play together in-game?

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 9:13 pm
by Light Speed
WoW is pure evil. The problem is it is so easy for casual gamers to get into because it really isn't a complicated MMO. It is still really good for hardcore gamers, or even smart people, but that means you pretty much have to join a high end raiding guild. I finally quit when I realized for the last two months I played I was planning my life around raid schedules. Also I totally bombed a complex variables test. Failing math tests isn't something I usually do, well at least it wasn't something I usually did (another matter entirely).

What is really gay is that about 6 months later, I still have the occasional urge to play again. One way to quell that might be to sell my account. Anyone want an account with a 60 mage on a PVE and a 60 warlock on a PVP? The lock has tons of epics, but mainly Molten Core ones, I quit right as we were finishing up Blackwing Lair. Both alliance, even though I know no one here cares.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 12:17 am
by Double-S-
PVE is for suckers. And pansies.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 3:40 am
by Light Speed
They are more or less the exact same thing now because the only pvp worth doing is in battlegrounds.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 10:14 am
by Omni Hunter
j-man wrote:Dude, since my girlfriend cheated on me and I kicked her ass to the curb, it's been my only guilty pleasure. I even wrote a love song about it. It's pretty catchy.
I remember that tune, I kinda liked it.

I tend to avoid online games now though, my PC is shit anyway so it can't really handle anything above Pong.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 10:30 am
by Popcorn
MMORPGs are one of those genres I really want to like but generally can't. I had a long and satisfying relationship with PSO, but that's as close as I've gotten to it. I did actually fire up World of Warcraft at one point-- Martin, if anyone remembers him, was an orc or something, and he showed me the ropes.

Everything about the game sickened me to my soul. I hate orcs!

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 12:11 pm
by Delphine
The only MMORPG I play is Kingdom Of Loathing.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 12:24 pm
by Double-S-
Light Speed wrote:They are more or less the exact same thing now because the only pvp worth doing is in battlegrounds.
See, by "worth" you mean Honor. When you aren't doing something that should be fun for the sake of having fun, that's when it gets pointless to play. If I ever get to that point, thinking "I need to grind Honor so I can get a discount on my epic mount" and not "I want to go kill the hell out of some Horde", I am going to quit immediately.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 1:55 pm
by Baba O'Reily
I played Diablo II for a while, hated it.

Then I switched to FFXI, and I got bored every time I got to level 7. Plus, the chat rooms are really fucking weird.

Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 4:47 pm
by Light Speed
Double-S- wrote:
Light Speed wrote:They are more or less the exact same thing now because the only pvp worth doing is in battlegrounds.
See, by "worth" you mean Honor. When you aren't doing something that should be fun for the sake of having fun, that's when it gets pointless to play. If I ever get to that point, thinking "I need to grind Honor so I can get a discount on my epic mount" and not "I want to go kill the hell out of some Horde", I am going to quit immediately.
Yeah, but most people enjoy progressing their characters. Which is pretty much all that game is about. Plus, the more you progress your character the more you capable you are of killing the horde.

My problem was I was in one of those guilds that everyone knew and didn't bother to even try fighting. So battlegrounds kinda sucked cause we would just do Arathi Basin over and over, but the horde would quit out as soon as they saw us and we would win within the 5 minutes before the game ended. It allowed us to monopolize the whole honor system though, that was kinda cool.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 9:39 pm
by FlashTHD
I have begun receiving threatening emails, which I generally regard as a signal that it's time to update the front page.
Hey guys, a loophole!

Let's hear it for wishful thinking

I'm curious, what has officially been the longest drought between updates here?

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 3:16 am
by James McGeachie
What's the likelyhood of the recent games ever getting sections on the site now? 5, maybe 10% chance of happening?

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 8:53 am
by Tsuyoshi-kun
Whenever GG! has cash to burn at this point, it seems.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 9:13 am
by Shadow Hog
Or at least when the games stop sucking.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 12:15 pm
by Delphine
He's not a teenager with too much time on his hands anymore. He'll get to it when he gets to it.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 4:00 pm
by Green Gibbon!
I've actually made several attempts to update in the past month and a half but I work too much at a job that makes me miserable. I spend most of my work days vowing all day to find another job, then when I get home the thought of repeating the process all over again the next day plus the foresight to know that I'll probably hate my next job just as much tends to quell any remaining energy I might have so I end up spending my hour and a half of free time downloading porn and sifting through old game roms. If this is what adulthood is supposed to be, I don't want it.

The Chaotix page is about 80% done, anyway.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 6:06 pm
by Brazillian Cara
What do you do, anyway? Still working in Best Buy?
And c'mon, there must be something you enjoy doing that you can work on.

Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 11:37 pm
by Guest
why didn't you just call them about it?