bishopcruz

Pure is actually supposed to be pretty good. Never played it tho.

I dunno, the empty look only really works for some of the games. The second ICO one being a perfect example.

Personal faves are:

The Rez one, holy fuckawesome

The Wipeout one

The Grim Fandango one.

1st Mirror's Edge one.

Gah, remake of the Gameboy game makes me care a whole lot less.

Fireballs shooting from the whip is gay.

I like your world of forced ignorance, it must be warm there. I think I will cry again.

In another note, they really need to remake Simon's Quest.

Judgment?

Yes, fucking judgment.

Wow Maria, you sure changed in the year between this game and SoTN.

Fuck them so hard. And if you hated this game, you have no soul.

No seriously, it's a scientific fact.

Off the top of my head I believe that the canon goes,

 

lament of Innocence, PS2, XBOX (Play through twice to get Pumpkin!)

Castlevania Legends, GB

Castlevania 3, NES

Curse of Darkness, PS2, XBOX

Casltevania Adventure 1, GB

Casltevania Adventure 2, GB

Casltevania 1, NES

Casltevania 2, NES (Almost as bad as the N64 Games)

Harmony of Dissonance, GBA

Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, SNES, PC Engine (Best Platform Castlevania Game well the PC Engine one anyway)

Symphony of the Night: Saturn, PSX (What is a Man? A mirsable pile of secrets!)

Circle of the Moon, GBA (might be non canon)

Legacy of Darkness, N64

Castlevania 64, N64

Castlevania Bloodlines, SEGA MEGA AWSEOME DRIVE! (2nd Best Platfrom Castlevania game!!!)

Portrait of Ruin, NDS (Johnathon! Charlotte! Johnathon! Charlotte! Johnathon! Charlotte!)

Aria of Sorrow, GBA (Best ARRR-PG Castlevania!)

Dawn of Sorrow, NDS

 

and the rest are non canon.

 

Ta-Da!!

Legends is non canon, past that I think they all are.

Even... sigh... Judgement.

http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Castlevania_Timeline

I think I'll cry now... fuck that game.

Halo has some awesome music overall, Marty O'Donnell is one of the best composers in the biz. Halo:ODST's soundtrack was a lot different, but amazing.

amazing piece.

Some of his lesser known stuff:

Myth: The Fallen Lords, one of the best Tactical RTS games of all time.

and my favorite from Halo 2, best soundtrack in the series IMO:

and after the last notes of that were heard at the end of HALO 2, players around the world screamed WHAT THE FUCK?

Some lesser known badass game tunes:

This game is 22 years old. Jesus fucking christ!

Ultima VIII, a controversial game, but a badass soundtrack moody as hell, and great for PC MIDI

Ultima Online had amazing music as well

Since I always have to shout out to Konami:

Snatcher's Theme, barely heard in the Sega CD version:

it's pretty cool, but then we get the Official Konami remix on the Black Disck OST, HOLY GOD!!! Please Remake Snatcher Kojima, and include this as the theme!

and because it rocks! Phoenix Wright - Objection! 2001

and the Orchestral Remix of the Objection! Themes from each of the first three games:

I'll give it a try, people hated on FFXII with abandon just because it was different. Maybe this will work. I'm not particularly hopeful from the sounds of things, and the lack of towns and exploration makes worry, but I have yet to play a completely awful FF. Even 8 only sucked in comparison to the rest of the series.

I really thought everybody knew about BS Zelda.

On to stuff that likely on Nick and I care about, PSIV originally had 3-d dungeons, and apparently the Sega CD version was a completely different game, it was known as Return of Alisa, but it never happened. Weird, but true.

There was also a Mega CD version of Ys IV in the works that never came out, and oddly enough it was the only one that was developed by Falcom. As it stands Ys IV is the only one in the series that does not have a game developed by the development house that created the series. strange but true.

Duke Nukem Forever's loss makes baby Jesus cry.

Konami, sitting along Falcom on the game music Mt. Olympus:

Akira Yamaoka composer of Silent Hill is a fucking god. Tommy Tallarico is a tool, but at least we got this! Silent Hill 2 live.

BOO!!! Too soon!

Macross Plus

Danger Zone

Awesome!

So I grabbed Sacred 2 yesterday because, uh, it's an RPG I haven't played. I'm starting a game, looking thru the class/races that are available. Pretty typical fantasy fare: Human, Undead Human, High Elf, Wood Elf, Dark Elf and...ROBOTIC JACKAL WITH SAMAS ARAN ARM BLASTER! Well shit, that makes my character selection process pretty easy, but still...

WTF?!?

That almost reaches lofty levels of absurdity populated by Roo the boxing kangaroo from Streets of Rage 3 and Yappy the chihuahua from Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Darkside.

I suddenly want to play this game now.

It is an odd game. It makes DMC look sane.

Demo was cool, it's no NG, but seems about on the level of DMC4, with some crazy ass attacks. Shame the PS3 one has some performance issues from what I hear, especially since I know a lot of people prefer that controller for these type of games.

 

so good.

Back to King of Fighters:

A WHITE KYO AND IORI? Maggie Q as Mai? Terry Bogard, CIA agent? Why do they always thing this crap will work?

I just died a little bit inside. At least Mature and Vice look acceptable.

I never said they would do a good job, I said wait and see and don't assume it will be shit. Occasionally stuff surprises you end up with adaptations that should suck actually being awesome. LOTR is a non-anime example. Also, AKIRA is trippy, but outside of a few scenes it isn't all that surreal.

Man you're all a buncha haters. Considering the film is supposedly pretty damn close to the Manga story outside of some setting issues, it COULD turn out ok, adaptations are not automatically shit. With a good budget it could be amazing, with the wrong crew it could be shit, much like any other translated property. If they decide to dragonball it, and change everything that made the original story what it was, then it will suck, if they stay reasonably close, then it had a good chance of being a fun watch. Neo-Tokyo could look great in live action, and some of the stuff from the last half of the manga would be incredible to see in motion. Passing judgment before ANYTHING has even been shown is a bit premature I think. So I'm glad its back on.

As for bebop, again it's a wait and see. It's essentially a Hong Kong action movie in anime form for its main arc, and if they stick to that, it'll probably be decent, so long as the rumors of Keanu Reeves playing Spike end up being false.

Dear god, I remember that series (I just couldn't remember the name).

Continuing with way to catchy openings:

still amazed at how much of an anime influence a lot of these shows had. Then again, Japan was then what Korea is now, the place where a lot of the animation was farmed out to. I'd love to find out who the directors of these openings were.

Also, why has Duck Tales not appeared yet?

Moving back to the "Openings with Animation Better than It Has any Right to Be" category, I give you Jem! Much like Thundercats, Silverhawks and Transformers, the quality in the opening was jarringly better than anything the show could have hoped to offer.

And now the song is stuck in your head for the rest of the day!

You're welcome!

The bright side is, with a good card, once hte CPU overhead is taken care of, the res isn't that much more of a strain. FFXII looks fan-fuckingtabulous in HD, as does Shadow, but I can't QUITE get the framerates I want on them.

dont you go badmouthin' the clone saga, now. you clearly caught the very, very tail end when the editors were desperate to get back to status quo/reader sales, but there was like a year or two of awesome preceding that.

The ending sucked, the rest was a lot of fun. We've discussed this.

the joker comparisons i wanna say stemmed from Wizard. you gotta understand, there's been debates for years on spidey's true archnemesis (again, due to him having a lotta good villains - obviously my gen defaulted with venom, though) and the older generation points to Goblin, but a Goblin that played more the dualistic role i was talking about, in pete's masked and unmasked life to such an unavoidable extent that he felt like a force of nature. a recent arc with Norman trying to get his now-back son shoe-horned onto one of his many teams showed that: Pete basically snapping for seeing Harry try to fly the straight & narrow while Osborn's dominant will inevitably steers him otherwise.

 

the best thing spidey 1-2 (films) captured was a hint of the unique feel of an everyman, lighthearted story that knocks you on its ass with a form of shakespearean tragedy out of nowhere - ie, in the 70s Pete goes from "charlie brown/superhero on the low that cant catch a break" to "WTF norman just killed the love of my life" (in an era when that wasnt commonplace).

 

but hey, after angel trashing Weapon X, ive a hard time gauging what holds up over time for some people. again, silver age, early spider-man is hokey but a lotve fun, and the stuff im referring to when it really got going is classic for a reason, but i cant help but point to the last 6 months or so of amazing spider-man if you wanna check out some of this, its really catching the feeling of the book during its high points.

I'll check it out when I get a chance.

i dont mean to discount it; i just dont think its ok to run with the animated in lieu of the books when the latter has about the longest running history of any mainstream character. im comfortable dismissing much of the golden age (prolly much of the silver, too) but ima jump on you defending these classic villains who've had dozens and dozens of stories of their own, each, and not being able to point to any of em. I get that TAS updated/refined a lot of things, and bless Dini for it, but even that's like 10 years ago, there oughta be at least an arc or two to point at and say "this epitomizes/shows why this villain's great", i think.

Two-face has a bunch of great shorts, and Long Halloween alone elevates him to pure awesome. Mr. Freeze has his introduction comic, and I cannot for the life of me remember the run where he was basically trying to stop bats from rescuing a kid, it war pretty good stuff. Catwoman, I have trouble seeing her as a villain, but Bru really made her his own. Scarecrow always stuck with me since the "last of the Golden Age" comics from way back when. Bane was a badass in Knightfall, Hush even, worst new villain in ages has actually gotten goo after Dini's run. And Ra's there are two many to count. I mean, the whole Son of the Demon arc, while very late 80's is great, and his introduction, alliance and eventual hatred of Batman were amazing for the time. Poison Ivy's arc in No man's land was great, as were some of the follow ups. (Not to mention one CREEPY as hell Detective Comics issue.)

But I still say discounting the Animated series is a mistake, it's been 17 years or so since it started, but it really ended up MAKING some of these villains. As I said, Freeze did not exist post-crisis until the Animated Series made him awesome, many of the stories that defined the character existed there. It's different from the way it usually works, but that's pretty much what happened in the series. Freeze's best stories were told in the Animated Series, and they were so damn good that pretty much every Bat-fan has him in their top 10 villains. I think it's BS to say "those don't count". It's like me pointing at some horrible post-clone Norman shit and saying that anything before or after that doesn't count. Or picking and choosing the worst Venom stories (and there are some stinkers) and saying that those are the defining ones.

Every villain, even the best of the best, have had some shit stories. Probably a lot of shit stories. We don't judge them by those though, we judge by the best of them, and those Mr. Freeze episodes were such a great take on the character that not only did they stick with fans a decade and a half later, they basically influenced everything that came after them. Those ARE character defining stories, Heart of Ice is one of the best Batman stories ever, and that's why he deserves to be on the list.

yeah, the contrast is definitely a clear one. just dont let all the happy merch and movies sell you pete as happy-go-lucky; id argue he's dealt with more death of close/loved ones and maddening shit than wolverine on a lot of days. its why the unmasking in civil war was so balls out: yeah, DD did it first (and god do i love that), and Matt's got more to lose on a career level, but Matt chose his path years ago, the current book just tows that line excellently. Pete genuinely tries to do right, and then gets rewarded by shit like the fallout of House of M where i swear i thought he'd put a gun in his mouth, continuity be damned.

 

bats' darkness, however, was tried once in the 90s under Tom Defalco, i wanna say, and it went horribly as youd imagine. the last issue of "The Shrieking" featured parker in the dark, crouched, eating his mask and saying "I AM THE SPIDER." its the kind of thing that's gonna be a meme one day when the wounds fully heal.

How much death with Pete are we talking? Gwen was ages ago, Aunt May has died like 3 times, and gotten better, as has Harry. Though to be fair, that's just comics for you. I'm still waiting for Gwen's Osbo-Baby to show up sometime.

Also, even Bats has problems when he gets TOO dark, part of the reason he needs a Robin.

I AM THE SPIDER!