I'm an early PS4 adopter and I also own a Wii U, but honestly there isn't much to invest in the next generation just yet. Hell, the PS3 still has a full slate of great games coming in 2014, and I've really been digging the 3DS now that I finally got one, although I guess the 3DS belongs to the equivalent generation in handhelds that the PS4, Wii U, and Xbone do.
Thanks for the shout-out. Surprisingly, though, when I first got my 360, one of the first games I got with it was Halo 3. And I actually spent a fairish amount of time on it. I wasn't great at it, but for the most part I had fun, as long as my mic was muted or I was playing with friends. The actual people playing were mostly assholes, however, and when you consider that during the game, you can only talk to your teammates, that brings to mind the old cliche "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
Before I finally gave up on Halo 3, my finest moment in the game came when I was playing team deathmatch. I was in one of the big Wraith tanks, I aimed and fired at an enemy that was dead in my sights, and some dumbass from my own team runs out in front of me and gets his ass blasted. The dumbass then gets on his mic, screaming about how I ruined his killstreak and for everyone on the team to "kill the n****r f****t." Next thing I knew, my teammates were after me. The other team must have wondered why our team suddenly stopped attacking them. Anyway, after I realized what was happening, I drove my Wraith over to our base, parked it there, and invited my "allies" to bring it on. Long story short: We were up by about ten points when the friendly fire incident happened, and my team was down twenty before they finally booted me in desperation. That was my proudest moment in Halo 3.
Halo 3 is the only Halo game I own. I didn't bother with ODST, Reach, or Halo 4, and I have no plans to buy an Xbox One in the foreseeable future, so that leaves out Halo 5. But honestly, although Halo isn't my cup of tea, I greatly prefer its style of gameplay and artistic design over the likes of Call of Duty or Battlefield.
This list of anticipated games is a list after my own heart. You know I'm down with Namco's flurry of Tales love. I'll be getting FFX/X2 HD, but I hope Square will consider a HD remake of FFXII, perhaps for PS4. I'll probably get most of these games, in fact. I already have Bravely Default's CE on preorder. Oh, and let me know when you get back into FFXIV. I'll be getting the PS4 version as well. I have it on PS3, but supposedly you're supposed to be able to upgrade to the PS4 version.
I've got my collectors' edition of Bravely Default reserved. Lots of good Wii U choices. As far as the indies go, I'm looking forward to Pier Solar HD, which was a homebrew Sega Genesis RPG originally that got big acclaim. I'll probably get it on PS4, but it's coming to all the big consoles and PCs. I think they're even making a Dreamcast version of it.
Definitely looking forward to Zestiria!
I haven't downloaded the demo myself. I did go and preorder the Collectors' Edition yesterday. I have the Zelda 3DS XL, so I'm good on screen size.
I like Kid Icarus, and it's an epic game for the 8-bit era, but it definitely had issues. The bottom of the screen is your mortal enemy in that game, and while that isn't so bad in the horizontal Overworld, which is rather Mario-like, it's a nightmare in the vertical Underworld and Skyworld. The Skyworld will keep you biting your nails every time you jump. The Game Boy game's biggest improvement was the elimination of all those cheap deaths from falling.
Good words to remember if you get the NES game: "ICARUS FIGHTS MEDUSA ANGELS".
Okami was awesome, as was Twilight Princess and FFXII.
Ni no Kuni is my GOTY. Haven't seen an RPG this good since the PS2 days (well, other than the SRPG Valkyria Chronicles, that is), and the only two PS2 RPGs that are in Ni no Kuni's league IMO are Dragon Quest VIII, from the same developers no less, and Final Fantasy XII.
As for the "bad press", the gaming press has long since fallen far its heyday in the late-90s-early 2000s The days of EGM, Gamefan, and others are long dead. Mackey's review in 1UP was crap. The industry is also infected with an ugly metastasizing cancer called Metacritic. Ni no Kuni is indeed awesome. Is it perfect? No, but neither are any games that are made by Bioware, Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, Square Enix, or anyone else or that matter.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the former Disney stars are afraid of being typecast in their frothy, feel-good kid roles and never being able to hack it in more serious films, ending up in the same obscurity as the Brady kids or at worst, like George Reeves, who played Superman in the 1950s, and was so typecast by the Superman role that his career completely ground to a halt. He killed himself at the age of 45.
Right now, it's a sign of a generally tense political environment in this country on the subject going both ways. We saw some of this with the recent brouhaha over a certain reality TV celebrity. I also agree with Machocruz in that "segregated" is not a correct concept for this. If the LGBT gamers were only allowed in this particular area, by law, it would be segregation. Rather, this is a cover-your-ass move by Penny Arcade so as not to attract any more controversy on this particular subject. I'm not saying it was a great idea, but it is what it is.
A lot of LGBT "wear their LGBT status on their sleeves," as said above, because they can, and because I think a lot of them feel that for safety reasons it's better to be open with it than to keep it in the closet. While others may protest loudly saying they don't really care what someone else does in their bedroom as long as they don't "shove it on my face", the reality is that people are nosy and intrusive, especially when they're prone to snoop around for scandal and gossip. When LGBT people are quiet about their status, the too-curious will notice certain things amiss in a person compared to their perception of "normal", ask increasingly intrusive questions, and figure it out on their own anyway. I've seen plenty of folks who are absolutely outraged at finding out that someone they've known for years was gay/lesbian/transgendered, and never told them, feeling that they had been "deceived" and "betrayed" by the person living a "double life". In some cases, that suddenly becomes a big safety issue for the LGBT person. Yes, this still happens even today.
