Sheikah

The ridiculous pricing on the store for main PS3 titles makes me hope they don't start introducing serial codes or digital only consoles in the near future. I'd hate price to always be dictated by anything other than demand.

I see what you mean about exploring the game entirely. I love this game, but something about the lizards was grinding on me.

Absolution should let you rejoin, it undoes any hostilities between NPCs. Forest battles are good but unbalanced, as far as I know there is no level matching involved unfortunately. Doing dragon duels at the Kiln of the First Flame (final area) later is great fun though. It's awesome when you kill someone and they get into such rage that they start sending flame messages. For NG+ the best strategy I have for bosses is this - Crystal Ring Shield, Iron Flesh.

Yeah cursing seems a bit of a raw deal here but remember that when you died in Demon's Souls you were effectively cursed (halved HP) whenever you died and weren't in human form anymore! Best bet for 3k souls is to just run to the forest area. It's like 2-3k souls per kill there, very nice indeed. I would also suggest getting the cursebite ring for Seath the scaleless. And even better, forging the Crystal Ring Shield. CRS can really help out for NG+ and NG++. Just upgrading the pyromancy flame to +15, then turning it into an advanced flame using the witch by the entrance to Queelag's domain will give you a really powerful weapon that works wonders with the CRS. It does effectively 700-900 damage and is a ranged attack.

I got the platinum for this the other day. Getting the slabs is actually the easiest part since you get all you need through the required 2.5ish playthroughs (you need 3 of Sif's soul, and then on the third playthrough you need to have reached the giant blacksmith to forge the last weapon). Titanite slab as I recall is the only one you need 3 of, but these seem to drop fairly common from the crystal lizards around Ash Lake. Also drop rarely from Darkwraiths.

I'm not sure why they would be against it since it's still the same chat. It's basically opt-out chat - you're in chat by default, on the page, rather than having to 'opt-in' by loading the chat on a separate page. It very vaguely reminds me of organ donors - countries that are opt out tend to have many more donors. It's just a better way of doing it that would result in many, many more people using it.

Wow, only just saw this topic. I will say, 999 is a MUST. It's easily one of my favourite DS games. The story is superb. Really hoping this game gets released over here... it sucks that the 3DS is region locked.

That's weird, you say that it would cause more problems then list 2 problems that the shoutbox would solve! Shoutboxes are usually hosted by another site (therefore N-E server problems are irrelevant) and as I recall you simply paste a small amount of code and it appears on the page to the size/colour/position the administrator sets. Your post I think perfectly captures the general feeling of the current chat, so I think there could be a better way to implement it. Even if the shoutbox isn't considered perfect, I certainly think it's a much better way. As for if anyone questionned how it could be moderated, the chat room is already part of the main site and that is open to equally the same abuse (and potential lack of moderation). It could be set so that accounts older than 6 months only can use/see it, and there's fairly easy to set limits on post length and number of posts within a set time limit. It could even be that posts are disabled in the very early hours, and with the number of moderators always around I'm sure one could delete any potentially bad posts. Although from experience these are very few and far between.

The problem with the chat popularity is that you have to load up a program or new web page and actively switch between whatever it was you were looking at and the chat. On paper this sounds fine and not exactly strenuous, but this is enough for people to forget or give up doing it after a time, until someone makes/bumps a topic like this which only increases its popularity temporarily. Also factor in that people often have background tabs/programs with the chat loaded but because it's not actively on their screen at the time they may not respond to messages and effectively appear AFK. I think a much better way for instant chat that I have seen work better on much less popular forums is a 'shoutbox' to appear on pages of the forum. I'm sure most have seen some variation of it, and one of its best features is that it displays on the actual forum web page which means it's used a lot (in fact, everyone on the forum who is actively viewing the forum is connected to it, unless they opt to disable seeing it). That's clearly a much larger number of active users than you can hope for on IRC at one time. I have mentioned this before and I think it would be at least worth a trial. They're fairly easy to setup too.

The obvious answer there is no, I wouldn't even use FHM pages as toilet paper. :p Why do people buy it? If you're paying for softcore porn you're doing it wrong. T'internet is there.

I don't see why it has to be made by Nintendo. Provided Nintendo don't shut it down it could be good. Chrono Trigger Resurrection looked amazing until SE shut it down.

The second bell is after Queelag's Domain which is indeed in the Blighttown swamp. There's an easier way to skip most of Blighttown but it only works for now if you chose the Master Key as your gift. It basically involves going to Firelink, going down the stairs and down the lift to New Londo Ruins, then immediately going to the set of stairs to the right to the Valley of Drakes. Then there's an entrance to Blighttown with most of the level skipped. If you play through some areas in human form before you've cleared the boss of that area you can be invaded by NPC or player black phantoms. If you kill the NPCs they drop stuff, some of which you need for the rare item collection trophy (like in Valley of Giants, there's one called Leeroy). Wandering about in human form also allows you to be invaded by real player black phantoms, who basically used a cracked red eye stone or the Darkwraith covenant to invade you. If they're within a certain level range of you then they can invade you, but the downside for them is they can't use Estus (can steal heal via humanity). Here's a mega, mega tip for all. In the Darkroot Forest (place you get to by the blacksmith after buying the key for 20k from him) there's a butterfly boss. Kill it for its boss soul. Get a generic cracked shield to +10 (most shields work, but a few knight shield type weapons don't) then go to the giant blacksmith in Anor Londo. Get him to turn this into the Crystal Ring Shield. Despite the name it isn't crystal and it's fully repairable. What this does is you equip it to your left hand, and have your weapon in your right. If you press L2 you now fire a disc of light that does roughly double the damage of the weapon in your right hand. It uses 3 durability of the shield each time but costs are minimal. This a good way to do mega damage - obviously the more you level strength, the better a weapon you can afford to put in your right hand (if you don't meet the pre-reqs, the shield damage will be gimped).

Maybe one day they will be brave and make something like Majora's Mask. We'll see what this one is like anyway.

No he's using it to refer to stupid people. Case closed.

Don't talk daft. Why can't it mean lame? It means happy and homosexual, someone came up with those meanings. Why can't we come up with a another meaning for a word just because you happen to be gay? I mean gay meaning lame isn't my favourite thing, but it's one of those things that people shouldn't take seriously.

Yes, I agree. I also hate how both games had a silly travelling system, that really shouldn't be the focus of the game. When you compare them to games like Oracle of Ages they really aren't anywhere near as good. As you say, like Lite versions that appeal more to casuals.

No she does not have Down's Syndrome! Just as when you call people a retard when they're not retarded, it shouldn't be offensive. People get offended way too easily, words can have more than one meaning.

It is used non literally all the time, just as gay is. Hence it shouldn't really be offensive to anyone.

She does look a mong though. It's like when someone does something stupid and you call them a retard. You're not actually saying they have a genetic condition, but the mild link of being stupid to being retarded is there.

Always the positive one there. I'm appalled about this, especially the reaction of some Chinese to the one person who did something to help out.

The way some of you are carrying on over scores (yourself included), I'm entitled to agree!

There is no reason to be offended, mong is a great word. For those politically correct retards, he is as much referring to special people with 'mong' as the PC brigade are referring to faecal matter when they something bad is 'shit'.

None of the scores really matter. At the end of the day it's one or two guys usually who come up with the score. I use reviews as a rough guide on whether a game is probably my cup of tea and worth a purchase, but at the end of their score is still just one opinion.

Both games are astoundingly poor by Zelda standards, I wouldn't score either above 7.

Out of interest, do you have Demon's Souls or Dark Souls? I suspect not, as you otherwise wouldn't have embarrassed yourself with such ignorance.