Sheikah

So, got a copy of this preowned for under a tenner before Christmas. Completed this yesterday and loved it. It makes me think that Fallout should be like this; the levels are so brilliantly designed, and you can actually run out of ammo (or at least good ammo). All while still having a perk system and item scavanging. Don't think I'll be playing it again for non-lethal or no alarm triggering trophies, it would probably be quite tedious although I'm sure rewarding at the end.

After reading about this game after it having been out it's interesting reading back through this topic and seeing how people rashly (and somewhat naively) judged this game. It has racked up some pretty good reviews and chimes as something utterly different to the roster of cliched games we see constantly selling these days. Looking forward to this arriving, I'm expecting good things.

Bollocks and you know it.

You guys judging people for custom firmwaring, now would be a more suitable time to be morally outraged. :p

Good topic, I think I'll give a few examples of what I like to see best (as well as what shouldn't be done). Good Main protagonists: - Rookie soldier eager to prove his worth (e.g. Squall/Cloud) - Slightly cheeky and generally nice, carefree (e.g. Zidane) - Emotionally awkward / room to develop socially - Cold or somewhat detached with room for gradual change Poor main protagonists: - Jerks (e.g. Luke from Tales of the Abyss) - Generally annoying in behaviour/appearance/overall attitude (e.g. Vaan, or to a lesser extent Tidus; a bit douchey really) - Mutes (works for certain traditional games but I'd never consider that character themself to be memorable, or interesting) - Anyone terribly voice acted. Can really ruin shit. Good supporting characters: - All-round cool (Auron, Zell, Shadow, Yuri from Shadow Hearts, Vincent, most of the characters in Dragon Quest VIII) - Pretty much just being cool, really. Bad supporting characters: - Really annoyingly voice acted (e.g. Vanille from FFXIII, many of the characters from Tales of Legendia) - Just plain stupidly included characters that add nothing/little to the game (Kimahri, Cait Sith) - Usually child characters (Vivi excluded on account of being cool). They tend to be freaking annoying, and often are immune to being killed off. What I like to see in villains: - Being intelligent and also cool. Not being completely one-dimensional and potentially being evil - Good guys turning bad. Possibly even during the play of the game - Often being the result of some rivalry / there is history with the main character. Potentially tries to save you after seeing error of ways at the end (e.g. Kuja). What I hate to see in villains: Flamboyance (except possibly Kuja). Generic 'bad guy' persona; one-dimensional. An order of villains that you must kill in sequence to open up the highest rank bad guy (poorly imagined villains).

?30 new from Grainger Games online. It's highly praised, looking forward to it.

Is the deal not supposed to be ?215 for the Vita and the memory card, then a reduced cost of certain games (?15). ie. ?230, then potentially first class delivery on top of that?

When you say load times are ridiculous, is that in a good or bad way?

Yes they could, they had a UMD passport system in Japan which they then decided not to bring anywhere else. It's simple why people outside of Japan would choose to use custom firmware and rip their games. Why carry around your Vita and an outdated, somewhat weighty PSP to have your full PSP and Vita library than just your Vita? All because you chose to buy physical copies of your PSP games over digital downloads? To do this would be a sign of common sense, not pirating or immorality or whatever crap some people might think this means.

And yet, if you have the ability to not have to buy the same game again, you wouldn't do so? Custom Firmware isn't illegal. Iso ripping software isn't illegal. Therefore the only act of making your own backups and playing them that could be detected (providing you play offline) is downloading the actual programs to do it, which isn't illegal. It's a senseless law to restrict something that is physically impossible to detect and has in all likeliness never been prosecuted. And really, the ethics of charging you again is a bit dodgy.

I don't claim by any means to have done exhaustive research on this... but is it true that Sony don't have a UMD passport scheme in place for the EU? ie. all purchased physical UMD games will not be playable on Vita? If that's the case then I have no idea why people are against Debug Mode morally. It would be counter common sense to choose to buy your games again or keep an old paperweight for the purpose of playing them.

I'm fairly sure sometimes I've pressed circle to an update and I've stayed signed in to PSN (could see all my friends online anyway). I know that's not the case for the 360, but I think it just stops you playing online rather than actually disconnecting you?

Yep. I think Symphonia must have had a lot of places to visit because of it having two worlds. Certainly nowhere near the amount of revisiting in that anyway. Symphonia characters like Kratos, Mithos, etc were a lot cooler I thought. Generally the coliseum was awesome in Symphonia too, as was the music, as was the main character (Luke is basically a douche, whereas Asch is an overly angry a-hole).

Yeah they really did come up with a load of garbage regarding the Fon, it's really convoluted. I think they were trying too hard to make it, in some fantasy terms, believable, by explaining every intricacy of it. Simply putting it down to magic/mystery would have been more sensible. I'm looking back on the game and kinda wishing now they had made you less of an errand boy in constantly travelling between cities you've already visited to talk to NPCs. Not better than Symphonia by a long shot really, although the cutscenes/animation is much improved.

So that fund could essentially serve as a deposit? You are saving really then, the way you were saying it before with regards to going into your overdraft every month made it sound like you weren't.

The point is that you would essentially rent to the grave, whereas with a mortgage you pay it off at some point and therefore have something to pass down/more money by the end of it. Ideally. I get that ReZ has had redundancies and whatnot. But the extreme view that a mortgage is out of reach, therefore spend any and all money up every month seems like an utterly backwards reaction. Surely if you're saying you don't have money, don't spend all money? Also waiting until you earn 30k is crazy. As said, people in my lab earn 16k tax free as a stipend (so that's still under/around 20k realistically with tax) and afford mortgages for houses in London. From my understanding they had a deposit to pay (which I could probably pay, from savings), but then their repayments are clearly based on what they continue to earn (ie. relatively little as a PhD student).

It's entirely possible. I could probably get a mortgage right now if I wanted to (hell, people in my lab in the exact same position of me have got mortgages and they're on an even lower stipend). I earn 18.5k per year (tax free PhD stipend) but 2 people in my lab are on 16k and have got mortgages for houses in London. Obviously not far from central London as our lab is as central London as you can get (UCL, right near Euston station) and they get here pretty quickly, so they're living reasonably close to London on a PhD wage. It's all about not spending too much money and saving where you can. If not for a mortgage, something important. Again, see above 2 examples. It is possible, you have to be good at saving though. Also assuming you believe you will one day earn a higher salary (I'd hope you think you will) you would need a deposit to take out a mortgage, so saving rather than spending everything every month is good in the long term.

Surely you should be planning on saving for obvious future needs e.g. mortgage? I can't say I agree with the whole going into overdraft monthly culture (ie. spending everything you get and living above your means). I'll get a Vita but I'll be waiting until there's some decent games out for it.

On foot is soooo slow though. The warhawks had a ridiculously strong arsenal though. In terms of fighting a foot soldier they could: Cluster bomb (pretty much instant death if they had no ceiling cover) Stealth (meaning there's no way you could RPG the warhawk and it makes the thing harder to see) The fully charged electricity bolt - what you use when they are under ceiling cover and pretty much wipes them out instantly over a wide area The controllable missile meaning you can take them out from a distance Then when you consider they need to hit you with two missiles and not just one, as well as the fact you only need to shake off one missile at a time (or dispel lockon equipped as you machine gun them to death) means it's quite hard to die to a foot soldier if you remotely know what you are doing in a warhawk. :p

Decisive Battle is a brilliant choice for this kind of game, I want to jump in and play the thing. In saying that, this game looks a bit amateurish (odd sprite design choice). We'll see eh.

Go for it EEVIL, so many good titles for it. At £144 they're practically giving it away.

Favourite comment was 'Skeever vs Khajit Caravan".

The one I had was Oddworld Adventures, which was a condensed port of Abe's Oddysse. Never knew they did another actually.

I never got that impression Goafer! A warhawk could take down a person early A warhawk could take down a vehicle easily... etc. RPGs were really easy to dodge, then just cluster bomb the culprit. I love Warhawk, the plane flying was done really well. I need to patch the beta to play Starhawk, I'm hoping they balanced the other modes of play to make them more powerful.

That's weird, I'm at my parents' house for the weekend (who have BT infinity) and the Store speed matches their line speed. I downloaded FFV since it was free and it was downloading at the rate of 1MB every half second, which is pretty damn quick.