Daeval

Hey, at least their saying something. I'd like to make this clear, there is no proper way to make a Final Fantasy. Ever. There never was one and there never will be. SEQUALS ALL THE WAY! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What's that supposed to mean? Just keep doing them, however you do them? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Pull a Capcom and milk the series of all it's got. Hey, it's working for Capcom right now. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Heh. While I don't disagree with you, it's only fair to point out that there are countless game companies that have done the same thing, not all of which are terrible entities of evil.

The turks were the best thing in that game, and it appears they'll be showing up. Coolness.

Hey, at least their saying something. I'd like to make this clear, there is no proper way to make a Final Fantasy. Ever. There never was one and there never will be. SEQUALS ALL THE WAY! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What's that supposed to mean? Just keep doing them, however you do them?

A while ago, it had a release window of "right after CS:S." The situation reminds me too much of TF2 to be hopeful.

Team Fortress 2 And while we're at it: Day of Defeat: Source.

Agreed. It's amusing, but I don't salivate over it like many of the folks I know.

Rock n' Roll Racing - RC Pro-Am, eat your heart out.

Shock Troopers 2 - Ikari Warriors on steroids. Much fun.

I'm guessing the word "job" isn't either.

I get a 404 when I hit the downloads link on the front page. Where is it?

Sure, what the hell.

Agreed. Handcuffing sounds harsh (knee-jerk America, let's do it!) but trying to restrain her by hand is more dangerous to both her AND the officers involved. A vice-grip on her wrist or arm will leave one hell of a mark, or a mean burn if she squirms, and there's the possibility of breaking or dislocating a bone if something goes awry in the struggle. Handcuffing keeps her restrained, keeps others from getting hurt, and let's the officers do their job without it looking like a prolonged assault. Until you see white kids do worse stuff, and these same three police officers get called in about it, you can't judge this case based on those. It has to be taken at face value.

Time to rape zophar's? Hehehe.. Should we be putting every emulator up, or just the relatively good ones?

I did notice one slight problem. The larger version of Shade will appear to have funky white pixels on his wingtips against a darker background. This is because Shade actually has lighter wingtips in the game. Thanks for the kind words, everybody! Enjoy

While playing the venerable Secret of Mana tonight in a seriously old-school session, I was inspired to do something I've been putting off forever. A few hours and quite a few sprite rips later, I present to you a complete set of eight magic icons fom Secret of Mana: These should scale based on what size you view them in. In "list" mode (the smallest) they use the menu art (the art you see when you're selecting which spell to cast). If you view them in "icon" mode (the default for the desktop), they'll appear as their casting/summoning sprite. "Tile" mode, the largest, uses a scaled-up, touched-up version of the larger sprite. Download as a single Icon Library for ease of use: Secret of Mana Icons (ICL) Download as individual.ICO files in a zip: Secret of Mana Icons (ICO) If you need instructions, the ones I wrote for my SVC icons should work. You can find those here. Oops, this should have gone in Emulation Art. I always forget we have that section. Feel free to move it, thanks.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of BS that gets reported on in the news here in good ol' America. This one was all over the idiot-box today. I'm not sure if it's just that this kind of thing happens in America, or that our media loves to report any one-sided, poorly presented "story" that will solicit a knee-jerk reaction from the public.

I was most impressed by someone who started to draw things with the letters by overlapping them to form lines, instead of trying to spell cuss words like just about everyone else.

Secret of Mana - On an actual SNES with a multitap, with about 5 people on and off between the three characters. This game absolutely rules.

It would be cooler if they'd made it more believable. And who's going to stumble upon that obscure site, and then believe it, anyway?

I played in the brief E3 beta/demo last year (I think it was). It was alright.. It seemed to me to be a combination of match making service and one-shot MMORPG gameplay. A session consisted of finding people to play with (or not) and then creating one of the "instanced worlds" they talk about - which is essentially a private server like those for FPS games - to play on. Gameplay ranged from MMORPG style monster-bashing, to things like PVP CTF and something like UT's Assault. It was not a bad system, but when all was said and done, it was still an MMORPG system. Combat was boring as usual, but that's just my opinion.

That's part of it, I'm sure. Another big part of it is that releasing warez, and even downloading them from a peer-to-peer network, assists other people in stealing even more of the product. It's as though you snuck into a video store, stole their entire stock, and started handing them out in front of the store. That's a lot more people who won't be paying for the product, and the store is out wholesale costs AND profits on all that product. In the case of filesharing, large corporations lose out on profits, even though they paid the same production costs, and retail stores further down the chain lose out on sales as well. Even if the file was only available for sharing for 20 minutes from your system, that's 20 minutes you were assisting others in stealing that product, so it makes sense that the fine is higher than for stealing the product itself. However, I think the proportion is a little off. If you were sharing for 20 minutes, and maybe 15 people got a total of 30K of a 600MB file from you, the fines they are hitting people with would be way out of proportion. That would be like stealing a movie, letting a friend record 3 minutes of it, and getting fined $10,000. Releasing full albums as part of a release group, and similar larger-scale operations are a different story. Those guys know they are commiting major crimes, and the damage they do is different. These are people who bust the front door in and put a big sign out at the street so everyone knows. But I guess it's a question of ethics then.

Excellent find. Almost some kind of twisted social experiment.

Aerobiz Supersonic on SNES. I was looking for a decent strategy/management game, and this seems to have scratched the itch for now.

Sounds like you're judging it based on the beta. I started using it near the end of the beta and it's never been anywhere near that bad for me. HL1, CS1 and DoD worked without any problems, offline and on. HL2 authed in seconds for me just a few days after launch. Granted, not being able to auth it on launch day would have been an issue, but I consider it a growing pain. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as it were.

For all of its faults, Steam is actually a pretty good system. In fact, there's really only one major fault, and that's the temporary server issues at release time. But maybe I'm biased. Anything that could lead to greater creative control, and therefore variety, and/or lower costs in games is ok by me. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Steam is the first venture of its kind so it's not going to be perfect. I have never had any problems with it (minus Steam Friends NEVER working) so I like it a lot. I want my money to go directly to Valve. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Exactly. It isn't a perfect system yet, but it's a step in a new direction. Since that direction might possibly lead to some much-needed reform in the industry, to the benefit of developers and consumers alike, I am in support of it. And yeah, all the trash talk I've heard about Steam has been totally blown out of proportion. It takes five seconds longer to load on my system than Half Life did before it, that's it. That's not worth getting all butthurt about, IMO.