Yeah, I spent time in Arizona seeing family, then I spent 3 days in San Diego and 3 days in San Simeon, which is about halfway between L.A. and San Francisco.
For your pretend birthday present, you get a date with the Amazon. How's that? :)
Happy belated Birthday! Sorry I missed it. I was on vacation on the West Coast at the time.
On Chronicles of Mystara, I was interested in getting it and would have gotten it EXCEPT for the fact that it came out far too close to Dragon's Crown, and Dragon's Crown is a far superior game (however, George Kamitani did work on D&D when he was with Capcom.)
Castle of Illusion kind of interests me, and I will probably pick up Hatsune Miku as a curiosity. i like it when we get off-the-wall titles like that in the US.
That cake was pretty nice, BTW. Kudos to your coworker for the nice birthday surprise.
It isn't just gaming, bud. Read any Wall Street Journal article about Apple or Google. The discourse in the comments there makes gamers look like Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen A. Douglas.
Moderator: Please disregard my accidental clicking of "reporting." Wasn't paying attention, sorry. :(
One thing I hate about game scores is Metacritic. Metacritic is a beast that needs to die in a fire, and then the fire needs to be thrown into the sun, and the sun then needs to be flung into a black hole. :) Hyperbole, yes, but it's sad that some shitty hole in the wall website in the Czech Republic can tank an otherwise solid game's MC scores. That kills sales and studios. Obsidian, for instance, missed out on a huge bonus payment promised to them if Fallout: New Vegas merited an 85 or greater on Metacritic. It got an 84. And I thought that gameplaywise, it was far superior to Fallout 3 (Metacritic 91). Obsidian lost their bonus in spite of the fact that New Vegas went on to sell millions.
I do think that ad hominem attacks, like the cheap shots at Ms. Petit over her transgenderism, are out of line.
Cat Lady kind of reminds me of a 1990s point-and-click game from Empire Interactive, Dreamweb. You were tasked by the keepers of the Dreamweb to kill seven people who would be responsible for a nuclear war, but the way the documentation and the background story was written, it was ambiguous as to whether you were saving the world or were just a serial killer driven by paranoid delusions. The game ends with you walking into a police ambush and being gunned down.
Dreamweb also had an excellent soundtrack from Matt Seldon.
This sums it up perfectly. The publisher got all the money they're entitled to from that copy, per the First Sale Doctrine of the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 109, which is a critical consumer protection. For my part, I have never had a used copy pushed on me at GS. They've always given me a new, factory-sealed copy unless the game is completely out of print.
People did complain somewhat about Miranda and her costume which looked more like body paint on her bare ass than a real costume, and the gratuitous close-ups of said painted ass. Bioware didn't throw that stuff in for artistic effect, they did it because sex sells. Whether that was an idea that came from EA brass or from Bioware producer Casey Hudson himself, it was still a case of "sex sells." And Machocruz is exactly right. Bioware was, at the time, a can-do-no-wrong critical darling while Konami is a "dirty Japanese developer" in the eyes of the Western press.
Personally, I think the outcry is a bit stupid. MGS is military fantasy. I didn't care about Miranda's painted ass, I rather liked the Sorceress and Amazon designs in Dragon's Crown, and I'm kind of "meh" about Quiet's design.
But that isn't exclusive to video games, either. Look on any Forbes or Fortune article about smartphones and you'll find people supposedly mature enough to be involved in the business community at high levels throwing shit at each other regarding their preferences for iOS/Android. Or Apple vs. Samsung. Cars are even worse, especially in the Chevy/Ford debates or the US/foreign car wars. Women in the 50s used to fight about Maytag washers vs. Whirlpool washers.
Gaming never was, and never will be as mainstream as TV/movies. Even the cell phone games mainstream business publications keep blathering about are only diversions for ADD people to keep their hands busy while they're sitting on the toilet, and once they find something less demanding the mobile games industry is going to follow Zynga and implode.
That said, I don't really give a damn about mainstream acceptance. If I'm waiting at the doctor's office, I reach for my 3DS, not my iPhone, because as much as I otherwise like my iPhone, it is a shitty game platform. My wife is a gamer. I have nothing to prove to anyone. If they think I'm weird, fuck them, that's their problem, not mine.
I'd download the free version from GOG.com for the PC. I'd also get a utility called Pix's Ultima Patcher to patch some music and color into the game.
