Sheikah

lol yeah that place leads to the catacombs. Bring/make a divine weapon for that place, the skeletons in the tomb get back up when you kill them if you don't find and hunt these necromancer dudes. Firelink Shrine is one of the few light/outside areas of the game. Btw easiest place to get humanity is after you clear the catacombs, you carry on to the tomb of giants. When you get to this swamp with baby skeletons they are ridiculously easy to kill and often drop humanity. Boost your item discovery rate and go nuts, you can get 99 humanity before moving on (use like 30 humanity while there to boost your item discovery too). Well worth boosting all your bonfires since bonfires stay boosted on NG+.

You stuck in the prison area after the forced death against the boss? There should be a lever somewhere below to open the door at the top. Pyomancy is good against the squidlike people.

Tell me about it. I'm going to New Zealand for 6 months, all expenses and accomodation paid for by UCL, to work in the biotech industry. Education is the way.

Well, quite a number of the American and English universities have high prestige (they include the world's best); they know they can charge a lot and people will pay lots to go there. Pretty much any university in London can charge the odds and get away with it; the number of foreign students here in UCL with rich parents is astounding. So glad I get paid by UCL as opposed to paying. :p

Yeah Kindle is lighter than a book and you charge it like once a month, when you're asleep. All the cons it may have had are pretty much gone, bar the initial cost which isn't too bad if you consider it eliminates the need to go and physically buy (most) books. Ace to look at too.

No excuse to not get this if anyone hasn't already. An awesome title.

woot.

Yeah, really, who would read long books on a DS? Always seemed a strange idea to me.

OMFG? Not on graphics? What kind of maverick am I, to think that graphics may not necessarily need to be given a generic number that presumably means something to someone, somewhere. Now I remember why normal folk typically stay out of the Wii boards. Fanboy, trollol cesspit. ;-) Actually, the typical fanboy response can be endearing. First, they try to contain themselves, BUT THEN a few CAPITALISED words creep in, and before you know it there's Wiitards left and right marching forth under the banner of lord Nintendo because (dare I say it), somebody had something bad to say about 'their' console. Well, yeah. I'd like to say it's been a fun debate, but really it's been diabolical. Definitely won't be coming back here, unless at gunpoint.

Why on Earth would you rate poor graphics to be good because the console can't do any better? I'm sorry, that logic is baffling. And why are game reviewers even including graphics as a breakdown that must be marked? I've played games that have had crap graphics, but have been great; simply put, they don't even need to give this a score. But if they really wanted to score Wii games, well...I certainly wouldn't be giving anything a 10 for graphics. Not as a multiformat review site anyway. All of which are very valid reasons to release your game on the Wii. But if somebody (can't remember who now) starts flapping that their favourite Wii game hasn't scored highly on graphics, don't expect any sympathy! There are pros, and certainly cons, to releasing a game on the Wii as opposed to a HD console. No, no. This was a comment directed at the person complaining about the graphic review score. Nothing more. Absolute bollocks and you know it. I have no idea why we can't rate games between platforms; if we didn't, console manufacturers would have no reason to improve their console capabilities. Not only that, people do it all the time. Take Final Fantasy XIII. When it came out for PS3 and 360, people were annoyed because the 360 version wasn't actually in HD and this was somewhat noticeable. Of course they are comparable, they are both games consoles intended to do similar things, and based on the sum of their positives consumers make their choice of console to purchase.

Their available tools were vast had they chose to make it on a HD console in that case. The point is that making the game on the Wii, the graphics are limited to that of a very good, polished gamecube game. Of course they're not going to make your eyes bleed, but they're not going to wow you given that we've seen games look like this for ages. Actually, reasons why I 'fucked off' away from the Wii (as I'm sure many did): - Lack of great games, particularly from 3rd parties (a lot of great titles these days are PS3/360 multiplatform and not Wii) - Piss poor online infrastructure - Of games that are multiplatform, and therefore have the same gameplay on each version, the weakest console version graphically is almost certainly on the Wii. So please don't jump to conclusions, as you have proven to be so good at doing.

Specific and pedantic point? What planet are you on? I have given you a technical explanation as to why the highest resolution of the Wii looks blurred to me relative to HD games (nearly 3 times lower horizontal resolution). And yeah, like I said, many people on this forum will be fine with it (hence why they still like and play their Wii; most people like me have mostly fucked off to HD consoles by now), but I'm not. Passing on TV manufacturer is ultimate lol. Because your TV is so great because of the 'brand', amirite? ;-) Sorry, but having a technical conversation with you is almost like trying to have one with my grandmother.

*facepalm* Yes it bloody well does. If you have a PS3 or 360, try change the display resolution from 1080p to some SD resolution and tell me you don't notice a clear lack of crispness on your 32" TV - even on the menus, it will be extremely clear. If you don't bother doing this, don't bother replying. A component cable allows the best resolution you can get with Wii with a HDTV - 420p (or 576i). So this comes out as 720?480 pixels (480p) or 720x576 pixels (576i) Compare this to a 1080p game - which outputs at 1920 x 1080 pixels. Essentially, you are stretching out those 720 pixels horizontally to fit the width of your 32" HDTV when playing on the Wii. On the same TV, playing a 1080p game, you have nearly 3 times as many pixels in width - which your 1080p HDTV can more than happily display. tl;dr - of course the Wii will not look crisp on a relative scale. Even if it looks fine 'to you', the fact other consoles have managed to completely obliterate this in terms of 'crispness' highlights the machine as a bit of a relic for which retirement can't come soon enough. I would consider sound vs picture to be two completely different things. Retro sounds can actually be pretty cool. But going from HD, crisp visuals back to the Wii when a half decent title is released never fails to disappoint. Whatever the art style, I can't see how it could be anything but better in HD.

What you state is physically impossible - there is no way the Wii can be perfectly crisp on a 32" HDTV (coincidentally, the size of my TV too). Perfectly crisp implies high resolution, which the Wii simply does not have and therefore looks rather smeared and stretched relative to HD resolution games on a HDTV.

Yeah, let's face it back in the day you'd probably only have got the FD mask if you followed a guide to get every single mask (and to know you needed every single one) so you'd probably ruined it for yourself anyway. I remember using an Xploder gameshark back in the day and making it so I was FD Link everywhere. Couldn't actually get through most doors because he was quite large, fun though. Oh, and moon jump.

Yes, as you say, they are being made with a hardware limit. Which is why you should question why, if a company is putting a lot of effort into pushing a system graphically, why oh why choose the Wii as your system of choice? It doesn't matter whether you think it's unfair to judge this way or not, I honestly don't think we should judge the graphics on Wii relative to just other Wii games. By that logic we could say that a homebrew game for NES released yesterday has astounding graphics - of course, relative to other NES games! As it stands, there is no game on the Wii will ever have graphics that I consider 'great', for the same reason that I imagine a man who has had his legs blown off would never be 'great' at running. The game is severely limited by its hardware, and after playing a lot of titles on 360 and PS3, it certainly shows. I won't deny that Mario Galaxy has a great artistic style to it, but I can still clearly see the limitations (particularly resolution and smearedness on a large HDTV). Not a chance. I think it's more likely you're a little like my parents - someone that has to be pointed out the difference in quality between HD and SD! Also the fact your HDTV is 1080p is a rather moot point given the Wii outputs nowhere near that. Using a component cable with resolution set to max, there's still a massive difference between games I play on my PS3 and games I play on my Wii.

Hey guys, couple of questions: - Can the Vita download and play PS1 games off the PS Store? Or is this an upcoming feature? - Can you login to a US PSN account on the Vita, download a game to it, then switch back to your main UK account and continue to play the game?

I think it does mean that. What you're probably referring to is artistic style of the game as opposed to graphics. Essentially put, imagine any Wii game with a nice art style (Mario Galaxy, Okami, etc). Put this game on a PS3 or 360 with the exact same art style and it will be guaranteed to look at least twice as good. That's what I'm getting at when I say the Wii is a poor console for graphics. There's no denying that Wii games look smeared and terrible on a HDTV even using its highest resolution setting. That, and the graphics are on par with those of gamecube games. While 6-7 years ago we might have considered these graphics good, today they are sorely lacking.

Well, wanting great graphics on the Wii is foolhardy. Saying that the graphics of this game are great by Wii standards is a bit like saying a man missing half the fingers on his hand produced the best picture he could. Always annoys me that Nintendo didn't make their console HD to be honest. To think that Lost Odyssey was made much longer ago by Mistwalker and looks far better is saying something.

Chrono Chross off the US PSN Store for $10. Love the game, even after all this time.

Which is exactly what Dark Souls is. It's all about observing the enemy and environment, not rushing through and not even necessarily doing any of the level grinding, item hoarding 'bullshit' that you mention. Levels and items aren't even necessary. You usually die within one or two hits whether you have good equipment or not. Aside from shielding, which is important, but this can be done with any basic, easily obtainable shield. Some guy did a fairly quick run through of Dark Souls showing you don't need to grind anything and it's all doable if you think carefully. It's not necessarily trial and error unless you're not good at working out how to not die.

Completely agree. Final Fantasy XIII is a disgrace when compared to previous FF games, epitomising the transition from legendary gaming to flash, all style no substance, empty gameplay. Xenoblade on the other hand was great fun I thought. Should have this soon, sounds like it could be good.

There is actually a much harder game than this on PS3. If you want to feel suicidal, hit up Catherine. That game isn't funny, I wouldn't wish platinuming that on anyone.

Mass Effect 2 PS3 was a great version. It allowed you to have all the input of the decision of Mass Effect 1, without having to actually play Mass Effect 1. Plus Free DLC.

I don't get what is so difficult about the inventory stuff. You assign something to your left and right hand, then use L or R depending upon hand to use it... The only confusing thing is that weapons often have symbols next to them instead of saying what the actual stats/stat requirements are. But that's fairly easy to work out after a little while, but obviously like most games you should give it more than 30 minutes. lol @ nerd jibes at Dark Souls. This game is like the anti-nerd. Only true men emerge from this shit.