Sheikah

That sucks. I remember when servers used to stay online for ages. Surely it cant cost too much to keep the servers going?

It's such a dumb logic though. "lalala I won't think about you!" You could just as well apply this logic to ANY event in game you like. You just can't tell yourself what to think, that is the failing point of this argument. Once you know the story goes off the rails or changes the conclusion of a previous game/film it leaves a permanent negative mark.

You can only convince yourself something didn't happen if you're really thick. If you've half a brain cell, you will always remember it happened, especially if it's to do with a series that you like. Story is one such factor that some people like in a game. And in some of the best games, story often plays a big part. For instance, FFX has a great ending. At the time it was quite a tear jerker what with Tidus being made up and therefore technically dying at the end. But oh no. Forever now I will associate Tidus with completionist shite, simply pummelling the sequel to 100% and mashing x several times at the end brings him back to life. Sure, at the time of completing FFX this made no difference. But looking back, it does. And it affected my perception of the game when I went back to play it again. Sequels can somewhat ruin the overall 'grand story' of a series. What sequels can do is give you information about events in the first game that can taint the original. Or just extend an existing storyline into something shit.

Yeah, sometimes what you trade has to be quite a bit more valuable to get the extra item. According to the google doc, you can get bitter kiwis from Leku during the day on the archeology centre level of frontier village, providing you have 3 star affinity with the village. Again for those who want this incredibly useful resource, it's here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?pli=1&hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0Anx12MiCQejudHJfUWhOTGd5Wm1uS25ub2FDeE5BekE&type=view&gid=11&f=true&sortcolid=-1&sortasc=true&rowsperpage=250

AC:B did introduce the Assassination mode recently as part of the paid DLC where you don't have a proper pointer, although this was probably too late given Revelations is so close now. I only managed a brief play of the beta before we moved appartment (thus no proper internet for a couple of weeks) but it seems quite similar to the previous game's online. You start out with fairly little in AC:B online (not sure whether they give you lots of weapons/perks in the demo) and level up lots to get additional things. When you first start, it's good to walk between crowds, and run whenever you know you're not in the line of sight of your mark. Otherwise it can take ages to get to them. Try not to act suspicious and don't be tempted to lunge at your enemy when you're close. You lose tons of points for being discreet compared to incognito, it's not really worth it. When you unlock the smoke bomb you can get a lot more points. Basically, when you see the person after you (or have a good incling it's them), wait until they're fairly close to you and throw the bomb. Then you can stun them for easy points. Later on when you unlock poison, instead of pressing square to kill when in contact with your victim you instead use the poison ability. This nets you +200 extra points (+300 with slow-acting poison) so you can see how the points start to stack up. The temptation for some is to either a) run around like lunatics getting a fair number of kills that are worth little or b) equip the hidden gun, netting you a paltry 100 points and it takes 90 seconds to cool down. These are both silly tactics, but annoyingly a lot of people do this. It can be tempting to run after these people, and because they often run around on the rooftops you will be obvious to all your attackers. Even if you catch up with these people, you'll have done so much running that there'll probably be a chase (ie. you were so obvious that they saw you), meaning after all that running you can at best get 100 points. Not worth it, just kill a random NPC to get assigned a new target if that happens. Instead, lie low, wait for a good kill. If you end up losing lots of contracts because of this then don't worry, eventually you get a Score x2 loss streak which means after 3 lost contracts your next kill gives double points. If you do a great kill with this streak active, it's quite easy to go from near last to near first. And this is actually not a bad way to win - being first for most of the game sucks because you often have 3 people trying to hunt you, making it easy to give points away and harder to get points of your own.

"Falcoon"?! Thread title aside, happy birthday.

Suddenly, I want ice cream. Although a bigger portion than that...

At the end of the day though, it'd be quite hard to pick out whether the new player was losing simply due to inexperience or the weaponry. In fact, it's probably inexperience more than weaponry. And as soon as you gain reasonable experience, both in actual and point form, you have those weapons yourself.

Because it's a good film while garbage like Hannah Montanna isn't? :p

I think AC Brotherhood did ranking well, in ranked games you basically played people of similar level and the trickle of abilities and perks was welcome and felt like nice rewards. I do agree that if games pit you against others that have a vastly better arsenal than you that it's quite unfair.

That's one souped up laptop. Bet it cost a bit with the i7?

lol, you sound like some sexual predator. Edit: damn, too late!

Yeah what he says, basically gather all the quests you can from people with the ! above their heads (go across town at both 10:00 and 22:00 to get all available quests), and only go out of your way for them if they have timers. The refugee camp and later on the town after a certain sea have a lot of these timed quests. Also note some quests only appear after you clear others. Also a good idea is to gather lots of quests from the nearby towns of monster areas first, as they often ask you to kill lots of monster X and Y. You then end up going through the respective monster dens and probably kill loads of those monsters just as you travel. If you only get the quests after going through monster areas then you have to go back to those areas and kill monsters all over again. Saves time and rewards you for nothing basically.

I can't help but think though, there are tons of dogs/puppies out there needing homes and here we have people selectively breeding dogs, then selling them for money. That doesn't sit well with me, if I'm honest. Even if the bred dogs don't necessarily go on to have more problems than normal dogs...

I have to say, the battles in Xenoblade are incredibly well handled and still feel tactical. Once you get accustomed to the abilities your character can use you know what to use and when (e.g. when your tank character grabs the attention of the enemy so you can attack its back, use back slash). Because they have cooldowns, you really learn when best to use your abilities. You also do things like turn around the enemy before using Buster with your Monada so that you get splash damage. As well as this, you get told when the enemy is going to do an attack on one of you that will seriously injure/kill them, then you have to work out either what Monado art to use or what character to perform an action. You've also got the fact that it's more fun, with little things a little like Lost Odyssey (aligning rings on the screen for a tension/affection boost). Simply selecting menus is quite drab, but full blown real time can feel too throwaway and senseless. I think this is a great balance, and probably one of the very best RPG battle systems to date.

Oh for fuck's sake. Firstly, you assume whether an RPG will be good or not from a short trailer. Secondly, you are making out that I am saying DQX will be a shit game. This is not the case! DQX has every chance of being a great game. My issue has always been that it could have looked as good now as DQVIII did back in its day to it's audience, while ufortunately due to hardware limitations it will ultimately only look as good as a very polished Wii game. Simply put, DQX on one of the other consoles would mean it could be as good in every respect, except a lot better in one way. Absolutely irrelevant. Really. Consider why - if these games had been released on Wii alongside PS3 and 360 they would have still sucked for all the same reasons. In fact, they would have sucked somewhat more, for looking worse. The developers are responsible ultimately to produce either good or bad games. Having no/fewer limitations on how you can make the game look is a very nice bonus.

so from your present tense I take you only just checked whether what you said was BS? I find it odd that you use fixed camera angles as something to slate, as free camera control is also widely used in RPGs. As for seamless overworlds, I sense this is coming from xenoblade. Xenoblade still has fixed areas connected by load screens. And how does it manage to fit a town with some field around it? That's easy, the towns are merely shells with NPCs loitering around. The buildings have next to no detail and you can't go in them (aside from one!). I'm sorry, as much as I love the game, a lot of the mechanics are like those in FFXII (ie non original). Also take into account that games like Eternal Sonata at face value would appear to have an average old tales battle system. Except when you play, you realise it's much more. Although really none of this matters. It still stands to fact that whatever DQX could be made to be on Wii, it could be all that plus more on a better format. Which was the initial point, but some people seem to find this outrageous.

Again, they can polish it as much as they want but it's still going to be limited by the fact it's on Wii. Nothing more to add here without repeating the same thing over and over.

Yeah, crazy, ridiculous expectations, seeing that DQVIII already did. It really did look quite special for the time. Given they've done it before, there's nothing really outlandish about my expectations at all. And why is that? Do you know anything about the game other than the screenshot? And yes, the style is amazing, while I know nothing of the mechanics of the game I'd be willing to try it out. Good developers involved at least. No. I'm saying it's a shame that they opted to release it on a console that has limited the potential of the game. Nothing about wanting to take the game away from anyone at all!

If you look at that picture of DQVIII it was indeed quite groundbreaking for the time, and as you say they have previously tried to push the system to the limits. Basically, if the screenshot of DQX we have seen is also how it will look on the Wii U then they're not pushing the system anymore, unfortunately. Ni No Kuni has 10 times more charm than DQX from what little we've seen so far, might I add! It would be downright silly, hence I never complained about anything other than visuals. Which for many, particularly those with HDTVs, means something. I get quite fed up of the associated stigma with wanting better graphics - I just prefer games to not be limited by hardware (then you can at least criticise the developer), or look blurry on my TV and a decade old. DQVIII blew me away at the time in more ways than one, what's the harm with wanting that again? By releasing games on better hardware you can have everything it would have had gameplay-wise plus more. Hence it's really quite obvious why I'd prefer if one version wasn't come to Wii.

After Phantasy Star Online and Demon's Souls I don't mind the idea of playing the game with other people. What would be an issue is if the online was handled really badly, but time will tell. And yeah, the visuals are pretty poor by today's standards.

We're talking about DQ here, the series that is so polished and unchanging (apart from now, it seems) that it prints money.The comparisons to non DQ SE titles on HD consoles are really farfetched, as FF has blown big time for reasons completely different to 'graphics'. Given how polished DQVIII was, to really improve this they could have gone to town on it and produced a HD iteration a la Ni No Kuni. Honestly, I find it pretty unbeliable that anyone wouldn't prefer the game to look like the latter screenshot than the former: I know the game will probably be good, I just don't like the fact that it's limited by the hardware it's on. It's funny you should say that, Xenoblade is easily going to equal the 100+ hours I spent on DQVIII! Whether it's grinding or menial fetch quests, they all take time, but oddly have their charms.

As an investor you are absolutely right. You'd want it to make the maximum amount of money that it can. But as you, a non-investor, why would you wish for someone to make a gimped version? (this applies to both DQ and Ni no kuni)

Yes it's possible to do, but why not have the game itself without having to limit anything? Why hope something is made worse to appear on a console that's at the end of its life? Seems a bit silly to me.