darksnowman

Not sure how but great news. There should be someone playing an EO game at all times. Luckily that is normally covered by yourself. Not just your classic team but that is THE classic team. I tinkered with Ronin and the Hexer in EO but reverted back to the same team as that before long. Maybe if they were unlocked sooner it would have given them more of a chance to bed in. Yeah but even with the extra skill points and levelling, the post game stratum is scaled to take this into accordance, yeah? Its not like you are marching in with level 99 characters to take on a boss thats designed for a level 70 guild. So the Grimoire Stones act like the Augments in the FF IV DS remake, or (sort of like) like Materia in FF VII? Like sub sub classing. The things I've read about Millennium Girl didn't go into the details of what Grimoire Stones are so much as complain about how annoying/ random they are to obtain. Could you, in theory then, get Medic skills dropped as Grimoire Stones and thus not need an actual Medic in your party any more?

I mentioned I was in a bit of an FF IV mood recently. Instead of starting a new file in it, or NG+ on the DS version, I've put the OCRemix Echoes of Betrayal, Shadows of Redemption album back on the iPod. A few stand out tracks have been: Audio Smiling Hilltop for Four Hands (aka Mt Ordeals!) Audio Almost Fell for the Trojan (aka Troia!) Audio Theme of Love for Guitar Duet Audio Evoking the Dawn (aka Prelude!) Audio Bridge to Eternity (Within the Giant)

Like plenty of other gamers, I was waiting and waiting for this twist in Skyward Sword but it never came.

Great stuff Ike. I hope to one day get round to this too. Top achievement.

This sounds annoying. Hope it gets sorted for you. Keep us posted!

I've thought for a while that the Virtual Console should be like this. Sort of akin to the Kindle lending library. (pretty sure they discussed this on Retronauts once upon a time too.)

I've only played a bit of Persona 3 due to SMT and it being available in different regions and/or different consoles to what I have. You should really play P4G if you have it - I'm envious.

Great price - almost makes the wait worth it. I was prepared to pay double this to be honest. Roll on September!

I was a fan of Pokémon for a while and its not like I hate it nowadays or anything. I got a US version of Pokémon Red cos NMS (what the Official Nintendo Mag used to be called) had mentioned that some Pocket Monsters thing was catching on in Japan. Then of course I got Pokémon Gold day one and Ruby which I dropped a lot of hours into, so went on to get Emerald which I couldn't motivate myself to play through. That was probably the start of my Poké decline but I got Diamond day one which I enjoyed up to a point... (going to Sunnyshore Town or something)... then... just never played it again.

16-bit surely had to be THE era for 3rd party output? Cartoon/ film tie in games were genuinely great (also applies to 8-bit) as well as Squaresoft, Konami, EA, Ocean (remember them!) and more firing out some great stuff. It was a fun time when games were colourful and wacky. Of course not every single game was a classic, I'm sure we could name atleast one game we had to convince ourselves was great because we had nothing else new to play til our next Christmas or birthday. Third parties seemed to lose their way for a while with the shift to 3D. It was difficult for them master creating fluid gameplay merged with a seamless camera system. Nowadays though, the stinkers are the exception and the blockbusters the rule. Personally, I'd vouch for the retro generations but you'd be disregarding alot of quality titles if you discounted the current gen. Big studio's doing their thing while indy guys supply the 2D, nostalgic stuff isn't a shabby combo.

And now I don't know who the Pokémon are but I'll thank ya anyway cos they are still great sketches. :awesome:

The GoNintendo podcast does have a structure that they stick to every week but I do agree, its a tough listen and sounds extremely random. I've played it in browser a few times too but don't make a point of it. One thing you should do with it is load it up and fast forward to the last 15-20 mins. They do a name the game music quiz which is good fun!

I've read up on Fantasy Life very little over the years. But you just know its going to be great. In Level-5 we trust.

Impossible. :wink:

I did it! In the end, it was getting a Raichu out there who could do 30 damage plus deal 10 damage to three benched cards that saw me through. It took a couple of retries to get Lady Luck on my side for each of the battles, but when it worked, it worked. In the final one I got the Raichu out there and had a Magmar (for attack and poison) plus a Dragonair (for Hyper Beam) sitting in the wings. Okay I didn't need them, but that's the kind of tactical work I wanted to be able to put together for every duel... if only it didn't always boil down to luck. I notched up about 11 hours on the clock, and you can add on a bit more for all the retries I had throughout. Overall the game was easier than I remembered. Thinking back, I reckon it was the unfairness of getting a bad shuffle that made me feel like I was rubbish back first time round on the GBC. Over the past few weeks playing on the VC with you guys, I managed to attain a Zen state of detachment, a feeling of que sera sera. So, those times when I got beaten in two turns, I knew on another go it would be me winning in two turns. No skill required, just fortune and patience.

Cobbled together a watery deck to try out this fire woman again. I won't go into the details because, Jonnas, you wouldn't sleep tonight if you knew how shoddily put together this deck is. All the best (imo) support cards are in my original deck so anything else just contains the leftover scraps. Pity you can't share cards between decks - not like you can use more than one deck at a time, so what would be the big deal? So. Fire chick. Shall I tell you's something you all knew already? Fire is susceptible to water. Magmar vs Psyduck was simples. Then Moltres, the legendary FIRE bird, vs Psyduck? For some reason, Moltres' fire was able to withstand my water attacks. I mean come on game, what are you breaking your own rules for! Well, I squeezed past her (killing three Moltres) and felt really chuffed with myself and my leet card skillz, :awesome: only for the next guy to waltz out and wipe me off the face of the earth because my deck only yielded me one Pokémon card. Luck was not on my side, Jonnas. Now I have to start again with the fire trainer. This is how the Elite 4 works in Pokémon, I know. But don't you get exp for trying, get stronger in the process of repeated runs through the Elite 4 in the RPGs until you can defeat them all? In this one I have earned nothing from the victory. No booster packs (TCG's version of exp) or anything. Just me and my Psyducks back where we started.

Are those missable, the Pika cards? But I'm telling you, I can FEEL how the coin toss will go. Even watching a Ninetails decimate me repeatedly there now, I could predict whether the CPU was getting heads or tails based on the timing of them flipping the coin. Just watch it and when its starting to face towards you, flip it for a heads. Seemples. And yon Ninetails that pwned me time and again this past 20 mins was none other than that of the Elite 4 lady's. Which means that yes, for the first time ever, I have reached a new area in this game. :awesome: The fighting people were a pain so I made a new deck based on Jonnas saying use flying. Basically, I saw the flying Pokémon I have are all colourless so bunged them in a deck, with double colourless energies and grass, a few psychic and fighting cards to boot. I needed to fill the deck up to 60 cards as you know, so I added in some evil Prof Oak cards and seeing as I had grass energies, lobbed in some Bulbas and its evolutions to pad it out. This probably sounds like nails on a chalkboard to you TCG connoisseurs. :p The remaining fighting club member still caused me bother because instead of sending out their Hitmons and Machokes, she put out normal types and a magmar when I tried my Bulbas...!! Hmm. Then @Hero\-of\-Time said to me he mainly used Nidorans and Pikachus because they could attack for cheap energy card costs. So it was out with the Bulbas and in with the Nidorans - didn't want to dismantle my other deck to get the Pikas and lightening energy cards. Low and behold the Nidoran card was the difference! I defeated that girl and went to take on the club leader. He went down first time - having only drawn two or three Pokémon cards, I was able to tear through them without losing one before he could build high energy up on his Hitmons. It's all about luck I tells you! The fire woman means business but for now, its a success story.

I share @Jonnas point of view closest to anyone thats responded so far. Though I haven't turned against consoles or anything like he has. Yeah nothing wrong with buying anything, anytime you want but do you need to expect some magical, sacred experience each and every time? We, each of us, aren't the younger, bright sparkly eyed gamers we once were - even a generation ago. As you get older that magic that we are still chasing after comes less and less. Maybe its the older gamers that are in denial. I'd wager that kids playing Wii U Mario and all at the minute are building memories similar to what we all have from way back. I could also type away about why haven't Nintendo recreated the experience I had the Christmas when I got a SNES bundled with a Super Gameboy or any number of other experiences, but life goes on for all of us and we change and appreciate games in different ways. The Wii was a breath of fresh air, of course it was. Anyone with some foresight could tell gaming was going to soon get stale if the generational leaps simply remained graphical. Something had to give and Nintendo took a punt on the remote and Wii Sports. For the Wii U they stuck on a touch screen which we all thought was a good idea at the time (once we figured out the Wii U was a full console upgrade and not just the controller ) but if it hasn't panned out for you and you'd rather go back to a traditional controller on another console, then thats cool too. Its all about preference and options, same as everything you do in your non-gaming life, right? Nintendo don't owe you, me, or any of us anything. They are creative people who still develop creative and fun games. I think its the gamers that have changed more than Nintendo... (in before thats coz Nintendo are still in the dark ages and we are cool and want to shoot each other online now.) (Yes I'm using the paragraph you aimed at Jonnas here as well as that bit at me) I don't get the point you are trying to make. People don't have to buy everything as soon as its available. Some do and others buy games and consoles later on, when theres a library of games more to their liking, a price that suits them better. You can like Nintendo games and replay older ones, or buy older ones you haven't played before, or just buy 3DS or a Wii U and enjoy concentrating on that in the meantime. There are plenty of ways to play light hearted and fun Nintendo games without needing to have everything delivered two days before the street release date from Shopto just to increase your pride stat. :wink: If you don't buy something, it doesn't make you a lesser, or strange, person or gamer. As for me, no I don't have a Wii U. I've had life stuff going on since it launched, I've somehow found myself having less and less time to get stuck into my backlog, things I don't feel the need to entirely expand upon on here because I rarely speak about my real life on here, ya know. Games are fun, but as I'm sure most can appreciate, we don't have weeks or months off school and uni to play games any more, or even that time each night after getting homework done and out of the way. Those days are done and your life structure changes. When I have a cupboard of previous generation games sitting here, alot of which are still sealed, can I really justify dropping £300 odd on a new machine, to collect more games and stuff for? Twould be unwise. I don't have the latest Sony or Microsoft systems either and don't intend to. If and when I buy my next home console, it will be Nintendo. I still appreciate what they are doing and the approach they are taking to games - the 3DS shows me that. I hope this hasn't come across like some mindless defence of a company that I do full well know still operate in an archaic fashion, compared to its competitors. If, like I said, I was 100% on top of my gaming, then I'd have the time to worry and complain about the stuff Nintendon't do. The truth is, as we all know, Nintendo operate by their own rules and ideals. That's their charm and that's what we, as lifelong Nintendo gamers, repeatedly buy into. (Then complain Nintendo aren't mirroring the others and here we are... all... the... time...) I've so many trains of thought I'd like to convey to you, and everyone but I'm looking towards the clock and thinking I've work tomorrow, I can't debate online about things that are, in reality, neither here nor there. I'd like to play a little bit of Pokémon TCG on 3DS VC, which is what I'd set aside this evening to do cos, ya know what? I might not get a chance to flip the 3DS open again til Saturday. Can someone post that jpg about 'I'd rather complain on message boards than play the damn games.'

Re: the Pika's, I'll check round the NPCs, thanks. It totally is about luck. I have Bills and Oaks but you still need a kind shuffle to get them out of the deck in a timely fashion. Yeah, you can minimise the luck aspect, I get that, but if I get one base Pokémon card out and they kill it in one or two turns... there's times you are just plain powerless. As for the coin toss, I feel like its timing based. I can land poison nearly every single time!

Sometime's (more like most of the time) I wish we could have threads flourish so quickly about actually playing Nintendo console games. Debates about droughts and online aside, there is actually heaps of games between Wii U and 3DS to be getting on with. Sigh. This is unfortunate because Nintendo have lost your plus one on the sales graphs etc but much more importantly because your level headed and constructive posts have been, and will continue to be missed round the Nintendo boards. I want to make some longwinded response but you used to have a Chrono Trigger avatar and sig so you SHOULD be cool. Even if your posts don't read cool. PS you will just make Serebii more bullish in his stance. :wink: Yeah, there's no shame in holding off. Last console I got at launch was the original DS. I waited a little while for the Wii and 3DS and still haven't grabbed a Wii U. Pretty sure I would enjoy playing one but its more a time thing (without sounding all look at me I'm so busy). Its not like I'm on top of my back catalogue of games either so I'm kinda content for the time being. I don't think I've actually experience a game drought since I was in P6 or something. That Christmas I got surprised with FOUR (!) SNES games and have not been on top of my collection since. The additions have poured in for the last 20+ years! Pity though that you feel the need to jump ship, as many others round this forum have. The boards are tumbleweedtastic these days except when its Nintendo are teh doomed topics. It just depends what you need from games, doesn't it. Anyhoo, I'm gonna wander back off and check if anyone has posted anything about Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy (I'm actually in an FF IV mood at the minute), Etrian Odyssey, Persona, Chrono Trigger...any RPG. But, sigh, of course you's won't have. Maybe I'll make a thread to complain about that but, sigh, you's won't reply to that anyway. Or I'll flip open the 3DS and play something a little while instead of spending so much time typing about it.

By SmogMar you mean the one that has Smog and the poison inflicting move? I've a couple of those in my deck. It works a treat, the poison move! OH MY! Hey, good stuff. How's the progress going? Good show! You playing bro? Me, I've one more badge to go. The fighting one. I thought I'd talked to everyone but still need to track down and defeat two of the the fighting club minions before the boss dude will let me at him. I want the flying and surfing Pikachu cards so repeatedly battled the girl who uses them but she hasn't dropped any. Might give up on it as my fire/electric deck (no grass or anything any more) has seen me through ok. Actually, I've added a dratini and dragonair seeing as they use colourless attack cards. Considering dropping the charmanders and charmeleons. The game is all about luck though. Only a couple of times have I genuinely felt like I've thought myself out of a predicament. (By this I mean using a succession of item cards to turn things around in a turn.) Either you get useful cards out of your deck in a good order and you prevail, or you don't and you get steamrolled. I think it was this randomness that my younger self couldn't cope with back when it originally came out. Still, can't deny that I've felt like a genius when my deck has fell nicely for me. :wink:

Wave Race isn't the greatest. The DKL trilogy aren't outright amazing either. They tried to squeeze too much in - I guess their ambition should be applauded - but I don't think they pulled it off, entirely. They have too much going on graphically, so playing on the monochrome Gameboy it could at times be difficult to pick your Kong out from the background, what with everything being green and black. Even the controls didn't 'feel' as good. Its very responsive (its from Rare at their peak) but feels lighter and bouncier than the SNES trilogy. What I'm saying is its a good job you only "kinda" want these games. Especially as the States seem to get an Atlus sale every other week!