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I took a Latin class in Middle school (In case you forgot, I'm a huge nerd), and my teacher for the class showed us a video on Joseph Campbell when we talked about some of the classic stories by Virgil and Ovid. After the video was over, he told us about a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. For me, it was a fascinating read, because up until that point I'd had little exposure to myths and stories of non-Christian religions.
My interest in more obscure religions and mythologies was strengthened later by things like MegaTen. When I encounter figures in those games who are unfamiliar, I spend a good amount of time looking into their origins. -
Halphas. He and I are both classy as hell, have hoarse voices and we're both Earls. Er... no wait. Oh screw it we're not alike at all. He's just cool.
http://i474.photobucket.com/albums/rr108/DavidDWinn/4232898.gif -
I definitely want to, and I have the resources. I just need to get off my lazy ass and make it happen.
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It's hard to give a definite answer on that one. As far as generally accepted quality goes, Silent Hill 2 is a brilliant game that I love for it's story. There are also the Marathon games which use unconventional ways to tell their stories (you get these incredibly well-written monologues at text terminals from AI's that are freaking out) and are legitimately good science fiction. Both of those games are great for their integration of their stories into the experience in very different and organic ways. They also have plots that are good enough that I can talk about them with non-gamers and not become massively embarrassed.
As for game stories I've felt a personal connection to and love because of the way the resonated with me, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (Which is really the game that turned me into the weirdo I am now). When I played it, I was in the middle of high school and a bunch of shit was going down, which I won't be chronicling here, that was disturbingly analogous to what was happening in the game. It's a loose analogy, of course, but it made me think about what was happening in my life from a different perspective, and that's a value in stories that is immeasurable. -
Sure. I realize that they're not Nobokov or something, but I do enjoy their stories.
That's how I feel about most games though. -
I got them out about one year ago. It wasn't as bad as everyone says. After a few hours I didn't really need painkillers or anything.
The most annoying part was constantly having a few ounces of blood in my mouth. The bleeding lasted for a few days, so sneezing was a hazard to my surroundings. I also had to be careful about where I was sleeping since sometimes my mouth hangs open. -
Vladamir Nabokov is one of my favorite writers and the Boxokov pun was just too good to pass up.
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Not really. I don't really care for Modern Warfare, but I don't despise it. My tastes lie outside of the mainstream quite often and I tend to be more ambivalent toward a lot popular titles.
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I want to say I was participating in old 1UP threads in 2006, but I might have only started in 2007. I only became really active in late '07 and '08 though.
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Hell yes I would.
Of course I'd win; I've only lost one fight in my life. -
Mysterious Voyage of Homer. Psychedelic vision quests are sweet.
my close second is Marge Vs. The Monorail. -
All of them except the ones that are rocks, magnets etc.
PokePETA would probably yell at you for eating Arcanine and Persian though -
There are Jrpgs that aren't MegaTen!?
Uh...
Chrono Trigger
Paper Mario
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy X (I was tempted to say X-2)
The World Ends With You -
Since she started doing the MGS 2 comics. I was a bandwagon jumper.
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Chrono Cross is pretty high up there. Outside of the two stupid rock opera songs, it's a cohesive, beautiful refinement of Yasunori Mitsuda's Gaelic style.
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Super Mario World.
I, was until about 97, stuck with an NES and Genesis as my only gaming systems, and I didn't have many games for them. When I visited some newly made friend's house and discovered a whole trove of games and gaming systems I'd never seen, I felt like I had just stepped into some ancient library of secret video games. I wasn't reading about games at that point, so I didn't quite realize that Mario was such a big deal or that the snes was most popular system around, I just knew that I had a Mario 3 and that it was pretty fun.
That feeling of discovery made me want to know everything about games. I wanted to know what all the great games that I had missed were and play them all. In many ways, along with downloading nes roms from geocities pages, turned me into the type of person I am now who loves old games and learning about obscurities that most people don't give a second glance. -
It might be easier to just say that I like most genres and list the ones I don't care much for.
Simulation racing, most sports games, and RTSes.
I have respect for all of those genres, but cannot connect with them at all.
I also have a love/hate relationship with point and click adventures. -
Little did you suspect that I've written on this already!
I should say before this wall of text, I do like Persona 4. I've played through it three times now. It's just that P3 had a structure that was considerate of the player; it offered a lot of freedom in your after school activities, as well as letting you proceed though the dungeon at your own rate. Persona 4 feels much more prescribed in its pacing. There isn't much to do on rainy days so you're forced to go into the dungeon, unless you want to just skip out on doing anything at all. Having a hard deadline to make it through the dungeon also put much more pressure on the player to do what the game was telling you first as opposed to P3 which lets you advance at your own pace.
The bosses in P4 were boring. Most of them were damage sponges that required little more strategy than "fight fight heal." Persona 3 (as well as many other MegaTen games) was far more interesting because of the gimmicks it employed. It was more like trying to find the solution to a puzzle than endlessly exchanging blows in a war of attrition.
While the dungeons did change cosmetically, the actual geometry was the exact same. I guess if you're really looking for a visual change it's slightly better, but outside of the single floor that they mixed up in each dungeon they're architecturally identical. I'd actually argue that Tartarus was better because each floor was smaller and you could advance through a block more quickly. Persona 4's floors were much larger and ended up feeling like rat mazes.
Little things were tweaked and became much more annoying. Since enemies can hear (sense maybe?) you coming, you rarely get an advantage in battle, and, because of the narrow hallways, they are nigh-impossible to avoid meaning you'll end up in a number of battles you don't want just trying to get to chests or flights of stairs.
They made shuffle time (the post battle mini-game which determines your bonuses for winning) an annoying test of reflex and luck, which is exacerbated with the slot machine-esque variation. This is much more annoying since they added cards that can eliminate not only your bonuses but the money and experience from the battle.
The S-links were generally inferior. It seems like they were attempting to make the characters a bit more believable, more mundane, but they swung too far and made them boring. Absolutely nothing happens in certain links and characters will undergo a pathetic excuse for an arc for no reason at all. Since links you get from your friends have crazy bonuses there’s not a lot of motivation to hang out with other people, particularly in the first few months.
**MINOR PERSONA 2 SPOILERS**
That’s not aided by characters awakening to their personae either. They baldly state all of the character’s personality as opposed to letting them develop normally. I might have been more impressed if this hadn’t already been done better in Persona 2 nine years earlier. In Persona 2 you met the characters’ shadows well after they were developed, and those encounters gave some new insights for their personalities. There's even a shadow version of you who's dialogue is determined by choices you make in the game.
**GIANT PERSONA 4 SPOILERS**
The story's twists are largely unsatisfying. The events in December come off as a cheap attempt to toy with your emotions, when they kill off Nanako only to have her come back five seconds later.
Adachi had potential as the murderer, but ultimately turned into a manically cackling chaotic stupid villain who babbled nonsense at you for a few minutes without an interesting motivation. It’s one thing to do that in a game like Final Fantasy VI with Kefka, since characters are painted in such broad strokes, but here, it’s pretty jarring to have an antagonist who has worse character development than many of the NPCs hanging around town.
**END OF SPOILER ZONE**
If you look at individual moments in the game, Persona 4 seems like the superior game, but in the holistic view, I'd say 3 is better by a wide margin. -
Absolutely. I sometimes even entertain the notion that I have an idea of how their underpinnings work as well.
My personal favorite (Unless you're one of those crazy people who think Zelda is an rpg) is Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. It has a great blend of mechanics (deep but not obtuse), story (minimal, but nuanced), atmosphere (Kazuma Kaneko is my favorite artist and Meguro is a fantastic composer) and exploration (some of the dungeons are real bastards) that appeals to me. -
Uh... Composition means a lot of things within the music world, between genres and subgenres.
I guess the best composer* is Frank Zappa
*best in this case being on of the most subjective things on the planet.
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