J.E. Sawyer

[quote name=>' date='Jun 12 2005, 02:38 AM]i'l read this again when i actually manage to complete ninja gaiden....i cant get past the tentacle monster that eats rachel. Just use the Dragon Sword to do Flying Swallow (A toward the target, then Y) on the tentacles. Once both are off, just spam Fang of the Wolf over and over again and/or use Fire Ninpo until the tentacles go back. Repeat this process until it is dead.

Those of you without an Xbox could not know the glorious suffering that was Team NINJA's Ninja Gaiden. After learning about the upcoming Ninja Gaiden Black, I dusted off my copy and gave it another try. I'm about 2/5 of the way through the game now on Normal Difficulty. If you have already beaten Ninja Gaiden on Very Hard, check out Ninja Gaiden Black, which is coming out in September. It combines all of the elements of Hurricane Packs 1 & 2 and adds some new stuff as well. It should help tide you over until Dead or Alive 4 and Ninja Gaiden 2. In this interview, you can see an awe-inspiring video of Ninja Gaiden Black and read the hilarious gems of wisdom dispensed by Tomonobu Itagaki, head of Team NINJA. http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3140456 Things to note: * Several bosses now have a posse (Murai, Electro-Blimp Guy, Alma) * Staff weapon * Impact counterattack techniques * Most enemies get block-breaking grapples * Game speed increased * Battle against Dragon Muscle Suit Ryu * Totally awesome

The "sex sells" argument is actually pretty poorly founded when it comes to videogames. People like attractive characters, at least that's usually the case. However, most of the games with overly sexualized characters actually flop pretty badly or have mediocre sales (BloodRayne, Fear Effect, etc.). Games in which people have the option of making fairly straight laced or hyper-sexualized characters also can do very well. But people have to remember that while sex drive doesn't die at 25, it usually (for men, anyway) isn't the sort of raging fire that it was when they were 16. The average buying age of gamers is in the 20s, not teens. I used this analogy with another game developer recently: I buy ice cream for taste, not color. If you give me crap-flavored ice cream, it doesn't matter if it's my favorite color because it tastes like crap. The same thing applies to games. If a game's good, having an attractive character (or characters) is a nice bonus. But if the game's sucky, it doesn't matter how attractive the character is. Tomb Raider was a ho-hum game made more popular by an attractive character. The Dead or Alive games were great games made even better by attractive characters. P.N. 03? Dead on arrival. Stolen? The same.

Sadly, the only successful CoC game I've ever run was one where the players didn't know they were playing in the CoC setting. I used a simple homebrew system and didn't inform them of what the game was. Of course, it was a one-session game where everyone ended up dead or insane, but...

No idea. I never really liked those games. EDIT: By the way, that DoA4 video will test the macho level of your PC; it runs at 60.

Team NINJA has been evasive lately about the platform for which it is being developed. However, Dead or Alive 4, featuring Ryu Hyabusa, is an Xbox 360 launch title. http://www.gamespot.com/x360/action/deadoralive4/media.html

I'll probably get all three. Whatever platform Ninja Gaiden 2 comes out on, I will get that first.

The problem is that even historical sources use the term "morningstar" to describe fixed-head and ball-and-chain weapons. I actually try to avoid using the term at all because it just confuses people.

Pikmin Pikmin 2 Animal Crossing Ikaruga

I will probably get both. The PS3 would really be pending aftermarket controllers that don't look as ridiculous as the ones that have been shown. Seriously. Worst controller appearance ever. I'm just glad they both have the same amount of memory.

Saying it was a Buffy clone would be more accurate, since Collective developed it using the same tech. Soviets? I was beating up Nazis and Turks.

I thought Emperor's Tomb was fun.

Yes. Play 3E or 3.5.

If the character concept calls for it, yes. I've only played one multi-class character in 3E/3.5: a human fighter/rogue. He was a pirate, and going the multi-class route helped him have the skills I believed he should have.

Yes. I normally don't use store-bought miniatures, though. I print out little cards that I fold and stand up or I use small colored markers.

lol these are always great. STR 12 DEX 10 CON 10 INT 11 WIS 11 CHA 11

Sorry if this comes off as jerky, but if you step into a discussion about the computational power of consoles, switching to a discussion of the game library that has already been discussed is pretty obnoxious. Numerically, the PS2 has more games. Nobody is arguing against this. It's pretty easy for any person to state that an individual console has more titles that they prefer. No one is arguing against this. What I was arguing is that the Xbox has more powerful hardware. The Xbox could sell 2 units and have 1 game and the PS2 could sell 10,000,000 and have a library of fifty billion games and it wouldn't change the fact that 64 megs of memory is twice as much as 32 and 733 mhz is about three times as much as 250 mhz.

And I own the Xbox version. It looks notably better than the PS2 version. The Xbox version hits 30 frames with ease. The PS2 version hits 30 frames with good engineering. This is pure garbage. Look at the system specs. Why do people even make claims like this? It's like seeing a pile of $1,000,000 and saying that you can buy less stuff with it than $500,000. If someone spends $1,000,000 foolishly and someone else spends $500,000 wisely, that doesn't change the fact that $1,000,000 is twice as much money as $500,000. And Ninja Gaiden still has better visual quality than Devil May Cry 3, which doesn't even run in 480p. And RalliSport Challenge 2 still clearly has more passes than GT4 and a full vehicle damage and dirt-ification system in place. Also, as some may have noticed, the only time you see people in cars in GT4 is when it's a fixed two-car race. In RalliSport Challenge 2, you can have multiple cars with drivers and navigators animating in the car in conjunction with their movements. Still not convinced? Check out Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory on Xbox. Now check it out on PS2. It looks far better on Xbox. AND runs in 480p. AND can run in 16:9, like all Xbox games. Don't get me wrong; games like Tekken 5 and GT4 look very nice on their own and should be lauded for supporting progressive scan, but the best-looking PS2 games do not look as good as the best-looking Xbox games. And, if that doesn't convince you (since it's just a matter of opinion), just look at most of the simultaneous release cross-platform Xbox/PS2 games. Chaos Theory is the perfect example. The PS2 simply does not have the memory or processing power to do the graphical things that the Xbox does. How people continue to dispute this when there's obvious numerical evidence against them continues to amaze me.

Do you mean other than having twice as much memory, a faster clock speed, and a more powerful graphics processor? I certainly know of a lot of titles that don't or would not run on the PS2 as they do on the Xbox. Mercenaries and Riddick are two good examples. The PS2 just doesn't have enough memory to support the same amount of textures that the Xbox does. Polys pushed really isn't the issue. Having twice as much memory is the big deal. Twice as much memory at a slower speed is much better than half the memory at a faster speed. Also, there's no memory swapping on the Xbox because it has a unified memory system, unlike the PS2, which only has 4 megs of dedicated video memory.

I think the general consensus is that most people don't want to use a mouse when they're on a console. Their consoles are often in places where mouse use would be difficult, to say the least. Steel Battalion sold to a specific group of giant robot nerdlings, and not in any major volume. Also, Capcom pretty much killed that entire franchise with Line of Contact.

I often felt like I shouldn't be designing games for the BG audience because I loathed the NPCs in BG/BG2/TotSC so much.

I have to assume that by "decent" you are excluding any games you aren't personally interested in. There are plenty of Xbox exclusives that are great, like Ninja Gaiden, Halo 2, RalliSport Challenge 2, etc. There are also a whole lot of multi-platform games that just plain look better on the Xbox (Riddick, Soul Calibur II, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, etc.).

I really hope they make their own setting and rule system.

Why? The Xbox is already significantly more powerful than the PS2. And by now, it actually has a good game library. I play far more Xbox games than PS2 games these days.

"Gamers should know that Jade Empire is a true action RPG. This means that combat is contact based and pixel specific." Uhh... I think it's time for the IGN editors to learn how collision systems work and then go back and consider that statement again while watching combat in Jade Empire.