Emasher

Thanks. That helps me out quite a bit. As far as physical copies go, is there a technical reason to go for them, or is it just down to preference?

I didn't mean people wouldn't pay the higher prices. You can think the price for something is higher than it should be and still buy it. But I can see why the way I structured my post could be confusing. You make a very good point. I'm just not convinced that lowering the prices would significantly expand the market for these games. People in all likely hood are not going to be buying a Wii U or 3DS for the virtual console, so you can only really expand the market to people who already own these consoles. With the Wii U, my suspicion is that most of them are bought by people who are already quite familiar with, and are fans of Nintendo, or parents buying them for their kids as their first console, and I would imagine the 3DS is similar, but perhaps with a higher percentage being bought for children. The console obviously isn't appealing much to the CoD, Halo, etc. crowd, and given the sales numbers Nintendo are seeing, I doubt the people who bought a Wii for Wii Sports/Fit/etc. or bought a DS for Brain Training, or Nintendogs or whatever are buying nearly as many Nintendo consoles again this time around (and these people wouldn't be buying virtual console games to begin with). Now, since this information isn't actually available as far as I know, I could be completely wrong here, but these are the assumptions I'm making. So first, we have the case of the children. Since children don't normally have credit cards of their own, they're probably not going to be as tempted by impulse buys as adult gamers would be. They'd have to convince their parents to enter their credit card information, and considering how annoying that is, for most children it probably happens infrequently enough that they're not going to care that much if the game costs $0.99 or $4.99. Now, for the kids who do have access to credit cards, how many of them are really going to care about the price? Given how poorly most young adults manage their credit cards these days, I would expect most children to be much worse at it. And if the parents gave the kid a credit card in the first place, the kid probably has enough spending money that he wouldn't care that much either. Then of course, there's the other group, the Nintendo Fans. Well, they're the market I was talking about to begin with. They're the ones who are already open to buying virtual console games, and they're most likely the ones who Nintendo has optimized the prices for in the first place. Something else to consider is the fact that the reason mobile games can be sold so cheaply is there's a much bigger market for mobile games in the first place. It's estimated that over 1.75 billion people will own smartphones by the end of 2014 (the 1 billion mark being passed in 2012). The vast majority of these people most likely also own credit cards, and can easily buy games off their phone's respective digital shop. It's a vastly larger market than the Wii U's near 7 million, or even the 3DS's 44 Million, and since the size of the market is independent from development costs, lower prices are to be expected.

After realizing the other day how much I've been missing out on over the last couple years with Nintendo games, I'm planning on picking up a Wii U in the next few weeks. Probably the 32 GB New Super Mario Bros. U bundle, if I can find it in stock anywhere. A few things I'm wondering though: Is the game pad it comes with fine on its own, or should I seriously consider picking up a pro controller? Are there any other accessories that I would be strongly advised to pick up right away (I already have Wii remote(plus)s and nun chucks for any games that do require them)? How large are Wii U games on average (in terms of file size)? I'm mainly trying to figure out if I can buy a few full retail games from the eShop without having to set up an external hard drive right away. Related to that, is there some reason I should consider buying physical disks rather than digital copies at this point? Is there anything I need to know about the console that isn't obvious, or easily figured out? And finally, although there are a few games I have in mind already, I'm wondering what the must have 2 or 3 games are for it that are out right now, or coming out the next couple of weeks. I'm only really interested in Wii U exclusives here, especially first party stuff.

I put together a little review of it on my new blog when I got mine. When I wrote that, I hadn't tested a lot of games with it yet (since I don't own a lot of original cartridges), mainly just Gameboy Advance stuff. Everything I've thrown at (which still isn't a lot, but I've tested a few more NES and SNES games) has worked fine (although, there was a bit of slowdown with Metroid Zero Mission, as I mentioned in the review). Because the console uses ROMS it's ripped from the cartridges to play the games rather than using the cartridge directly, stuff like the e-reader, or anything that uses hardware in the cartridge itself doesn't work. I've also been told light gun games don't work, but not owning one, I haven't tested that for myself. Also, the console is unable to extract Pokemon save games from the cartridges, but that might be by design. The only real issue is the controller, which is terrible, but easily fixed by using a SNES controller for everything.

I've been playing a lot of older Nintendo games recently, on the virtual console, and otherwise. The overwhelming conclusion that I've come to is that I get a lot more enjoyment playing these games than the games that have been coming out for the last 5 years or so. I'm willing to pay $4.99 or whatever they're charging for a game as good as The Legend of Zelda because I know I'll get a lot more utility from it than the last several new games I've purchased combined. Prices aren't determined simply by the cost of producing a product, but also by what consumers are willing to spend on it. Nintendo likely hasn't set the prices of virtual console games arbitrarily. You can bet they've analyzed the market very carefully to determine which prices will come as close to maximizing their profits as possible. As long as there are enough people willing to pay the current prices that they can achieve these profits from the service, they aren't going to be lowering them. The main reason we think the prices are too high is most likely these 99 cent games on smartphones. Looking at the games I currently have installed on my phone, and the sorts of games that are currently selling well on the app store, it's pretty obvious that these games don't even come close to matching the quality of the games Nintendo was producing back in the 80s, 90s, and the aughts (as all the cool kids seem to be calling that decade now). We also need to consider that the market is completely different for smart phone games (it includes lots of people who aren't very serious about video games), and so many of those games require you to make several other 99 cent purchases to get the full game, or even play the game for more than a few minutes at a time (Candy Crush Saga, Two Dots, etc.). Even thought these games have aged a bit now, Nintendo are still selling a premium product, so charging what seems to be premium prices really isn't all that unreasonable.

I pre-ordered mine from Amazon back in March (luckily before they increased the price), which probably isn't much help at this point.

I haven't been following any Nintendo news for ages (probably one of the reasons I haven't been here for over a year now, glad to see this place hasn't changed much since), but when I finally got my Retron 5 a few weeks ago, I started playing through a number of my older Zelda games. Eventually, I read up on this game, and I have to say, it's the first game I've been truly excited about in a long time. I've always thought that the 3D games strayed a bit too far from the original, and I'm glad to see that Nintendo understands this, and is trying to go back to what made the early games in the series such great experiences to begin with. I think I'm definitely going to have to pick up a Wii U now, and catch up a little with Nintendo games in general.

Thanks. Being Canadian, I actually hate snow levels in games, but I thought I'd include them anyway if only because they look cool off in the distance. Anyway, I've updated Hemp and Gas to fix the everything-is-a-fuel bug, as well as added Railcraft support.

I finally did a proper release of my mods. You can find them here now: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1568267-142144forge-emashers-mods-biomes-shipwrecks-hemp-natural-gas-and-more/

I'd suggest reading through the Apple user interface guidelines a bit in that case. A lot of my suggestions were based on stuff from there actually.

What's even worse is when they invite you over for dinner, and then let their dog(s) lick off the plates and stuff like that.

I didn't download it, as I really have no interest in such an app, however, I have a few small suggestions regarding the user interface. 1) If the 'Time's Up" thing isn't a button, it looks way too much like one. 2) It's a little bit busy; I'd remove the "then" thing if it has no practical purpose, remove the numbers on the timer (or at least make them smaller), as well as reduce the length of the titles of the toolbar buttons to "Quit" and "Pass (#)" (And just "Pass" when the number is zero). 3) Make the background a little bit more transparent (maybe 50%). It's fine how it is on the title screen though. 4) The toolbar and it's buttons should be red to match the navigation bar on the other screen. Since you only have a 'Go Back' button, and one other button, you could even just use a navigation bar instead. 5) Remove the embossing on the buttons, and just give them a dark 1-2pt border. It sounds like a good idea though, I wish you luck with your sales. Speaking of that, you might want to limit the lite version a little bit more, just to make the paid version a little bit more enticing. Perhaps drop the number of names down to 50, or even 30, and maybe limit the number of teams.

I completely forgot that Dawnguard was out until yesterday. Time to get back into Skyrim again I guess. What mods are people playing with these days?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_fist It's actually pretty common. It's been used by all sorts of movements including black supremacists, white supremacists, feminists, socialists, and OWS.

I've heard people say he's actually an alright guy in person, and that a lot of his show is just an act. Anyway, I'd say Stephen Harper, and Vic Toews, would definitely be on the list. The first name you most likely recognize. He's on the list because of his party's constant war on liberty. He has done some good, like getting rid of some wasteful programs, but many of his policies make him an enemy of liberty in my country, and therefore he needs to go. Vic Towes is Canada's public safety minister. He's made the list because of certain bills he's tried to push through parliament that would take away online privacy and liberty in Canada. I'm not really sure who the 3rd person on the list would be. Perhaps the current catholic pope or some other influential person who opposes scientific advancement. That said, I don't condone unnecessary violence, and have no interest in actually killing said people.

You're running it on better hardware than I am. For the record: i5 760 @ 2.8 GHz GTX 460 1GB (Not the SE version) 4GB RAM (I'll be upgrading this to 8GB very soon) Windows 7 on an old 500 GB HDD with an additional 500 GB HDD for storage With the game running at 1920x1200 I can run the game with these settings at close to 60 FPS: Texture Quality: High Reflection Resolution: High Water Quality: Very High Shadow Quality: High Night Shadows: Very High Texture Filter Quality: Anisotropic x16 View Distance: 60 Detail Distance: 100 Vehicle Density: 100 Definition: On VSync: On Texture quality and view distance are the big ones. You should always turn those down before anything else with this game.

You must have fairly weak PCs if that's the case. I can run GTAIV on reasonably high settings (not quite the highest, but it still looks much better than the console versions) at a fairly high frame rate. I built my PC a couple years ago with middle of the road components, so it's not an absolute beast or anything either. L.A. Noire runs on max settings as well. The issue with LA Noire was that the facial capture was done at 30 frames per second, making it technically very difficult to run the game any higher than that, so the PC version is capped at 30 frames per second like the console ones. You don't notice this in the console versions because most console games are capped at 30 frames per second.

It's been a while since I've used Photoshop, but I think you can just make a copy of the brush you're trying to use and edit its pen pressure settings.

If you want something that will work on mobile phones, you should be looking for HTML 5 based games. A quick google search turns up this: http://html5games.com/category/iphoneipadmobile/

It's a Tekkit server. You need to get Tekkit from here: http://www.technicpack.net/ It installs parallel to your main Minecraft install, so you don't have to worry about screwing anything up.

It's good to see the 3.1.2 update worked out better. Just a few things though. For some reason, I can't seem to place lava from buckets (this was happening before the update too). I was wondering if you might be able to remove the trade-o-mat that someone put in my pub as well, as only the owner, or an op can destroy those. The safe in there is mine though.

I've been playing a number of the technical mods since before Tekkit actually came out, and I really can't go back now. I tried playing on a vanilla server a friend of mine was hosting, but I just found it incredibly boring. The only thing I really dislike about Tekkit is Equivalency Exchange. It really doesn't fit in with the rest of the stuff, being about magic rather than technology, and it makes some of the features in other mods (especially IC^2's artificial diamonds and UU-Matter) redundant if you use it. It's also rather cheap considering there's no real penalty for just condensing everything. Having to actually find a desert to get large amounts of sand for instance balances the game quite a bit (provided some alchemist hasn't turned the whole thing into glass ) Personally, I don't use the stuff from it, and when I host Tekkit servers, I disable it. Don't get me wrong, on its own, or with other magic mods, it is a great mod, and from my own experience creating mods for Minecraft, I can tell it does some very interesting things, but in Tekkit, it just makes the whole thing unbalanced. I do find that the other mods in it all work quite well together. Industrial-craft^2 and it's various add-ons add a number of both useful and just plain cool items and blocks. Red Power (Which a lot of people neglect) and Buildcraft add an amazing amount of automation to the game, especially with Red Power's Frames and extensions to the red stone system. Computer Craft of course adds even more automation, but is understandably not used by very many people considering you need to know how to program (mind you, Lua is a really easy language to learn) to make use of it. I do really love being able to password protect the things I build. I don't have quite as much experience with Railcraft, but once you have enough resources to start colonies and such, it adds a much cheaper way of moving energy around with MFSU carts than making tons of glass fiber cable if you have to go long distances. I'm not going to talk about the smaller mods, since others not knowing much about them gives me a slight advantage on the current server, but there's a lot of other cool stuff in there that just works really well with everything else. Overall, I'd say it's the best way to play Minecraft these days. Edit: I've got a new beta version of my mod out. It now includes shipwrecks (with treasure), as well as a few new biomes including one that resembles the Canadian shield region, a marsh, and one called foot hills that is basically a forest with less trees and more contrast in elevation (it sort of resembles the terrain generation back in the alpha releases). I've also updated the gas parts, and there are now pipes for the gas to be moved in, gas vents (which don't spawn yet) to obtain large amounts of gas, and gas tanks to store the gas in. The gas doesn't work properly yet though, as it uses random ticks, which are way too slow. A future update should fix the rendering issues with the pipes, as well as actually make the gas system work. Everything is in one package (with all 3 parts of my mod). It now requires Minecraft Forge. I don't think you need Mod Loader now though, since Forge has the same functionality built in. I don't think you need to override zg.class now either, I'm pretty sure Forge already does that, so don't do it unless the game crashes. To install it, just throw the zip file into your mods folder. As for compatibility, I still haven't added in configurable IDs for blocks, items, and biomes, so this could cause some issues. If possible, you can change the ids in the config files for other mods. DO NOT however change any config files for mods that you use with a multiplayer server. Aside from that though, it should work with anything that works with forge, as I don't override any base files. Once again, because there's a lot of new terrain generation (including new biomes), you should start a new world. If you load an old world with my mod installed, it's your own fault if it gets screwed up. Download Here Old Post New Screenshots: (For more see my original post) The view from a canyon biome with a marsh, and vanilla jungle in the background, as well as a sand forest off in the distance. The intersection of a marsh and prairie biome with a summit biome off in the distance. A sand forest at dusk (or maybe it's dawn, I can't remember). A shipwreck from above.

It does require people to use the latest version (which might still be the development one, even though 3.1.1 is now the recommended server version), so yeah, it might be better to wait a few days for that.

Just out of curiosity, are you planning on upgrading the server to Tekkit 3.1 soon?

I'll join if you still have room. My minecraft name is the same as my forum name.