PixlBit

If you get out of the Navy, make sure you put your Montgomery GI Bill to good use. That is all. :)

Izumicon is held in Oklahoma City (well, Midwest City) every November. The OU Animation Society also used to hold Ronincon every year at Dale Hall on the OU campus in Norman, but I think that disbanded a few years ago.

I went to Tokyo in Tulsa on Saturday. I played some games, looked at all the cosplayers, attended a couple of panels, and I picked up a stuffed moogle and the second season of Ah! My Goddess from the vendor area. The DVDs were actually pretty decently priced and I got a 20% discount.

Downloading. I'm interested to see what you've been doing.

I'm against review scores, too. They're just there to feed two different beasts: 1) the publisher, who may or may not be financially backing the site through advertising revenue and who may retaliate if their game doesn't get a good score, a la Ubisoft on 1UP or Eidos on Gamespot. Screw all the smaller publishers, those are the ones who get "brutal honesty" from reviewers since they don't pay for the site, and 2) Metacritic, which I feel to be a blight on gaming. Any less than perfect score badly skews a game's aggregate, and some obscure little shithole website based in Eastern Europe can tank a game that's getting solid reviews from everyone else.

When I get more spare time, I'm going to work on my own game. Thanks for letting me know about the RPG Maker Network site or whatever it is.

On Kickstarter, I don't know if I could do it myself. If I were going to go on Kickstarter I'd make damned sure I could fulfill everything I promised. There's nothing worse than looking like an online grifter, which I'm sure a lot of KS projects are. Even at that, I see all the problems that a famous developer like Double Fine is having getting its much-vaunted KS game off the ground, largely because they promised more than they could deliver and didn't have oversight.

1. Tifa

2. Samus

3. Kitana

4. Chun-Li

5. Luna (Lunar: Silver Star Story).

I'm really digging it myself.There's a lot more to it than meets the eye. I like the overall art style of the game myself, they did a pretty good job on it. It isn't likely to unseat Final Fantasy VI or Lunar among my favorite 16-bit RPGs, but I'm really regretting not getting it back in 1995, because it was probably the best game I played that came out in July.

It's just too bad Nintendo didn't finish the N64 version of Mother 3, or move it onto the Gamecube instead of the Game Boy Advance as happened with Tales of Phantasia 2 (a RPG originally planned for the N64 that eventually became Tales of Symphonia).

PS3 got off to an ugly start for sure, and that was disappointing. The PS1 and PS2 were two of my favorite consoles. The PS1 was heaven for RPG fans, the PS2 brought action games back into style.

However, to Sony's credit, they eventually got it turned around through sheer balls. My PS3 is my main console, and it's still coming out with fantastic games. The last 360 game I bought was 3 years ago, and I only use it for Tales of Vesperia and the Mistwalker RPGs.

To be fair to Microsoft, what killed the original Xbox so abruptly was a pissing contest between Microsoft and Nvidia, which made the Xbox's GPU. Microsoft's choices were either settle with Nvidia or discontinue the Xbox, and I'm sure they chose the latter because it was less pricey to just pull the plug on a system that wasn't selling that well anyway and put out the 360 as the first "next-gen" system. Of course, doing this gave them a different set of headaches, namely the RRoD and the E74 that were the result of Microsoft's shoddy workmanship. as they tried to rush the 360 to market.

I've never been a fan of Microsoft or the Xbox brand, but I did get a 360 before I got a PS3. This was mostly because at the time I bought my 360, which was in 2007, the PS3 was super-expensive and didn't have any games I wanted other than Virtua Fighter 5. The PS3's VF5 did not support online play. Frankly, it's a miracle that the PS3 did as well as it did given how badly its launch was bungled. For me, the PS3's killer app was Valkyria Chronicles, which didn't come out in 2008, and by that time I'd soured on the 360 after the headaches I'd experienced with the E74 failure I was hit with.

Most of what I did like about the 360 came early in its life-cycle, stuff like Tales of Vesperia, so that was still less incentive for me to stick with the 360 over the PS3, which had more of what I really wanted by that point.