The Bard

I'd rather not take advice from someone who seriously recommends Pilotwings as a worthwhile purchase .

Yeah Sweden is notoriously expensive.

Revelations is lame. Now I'm the sort of person who likes to substantiate his claims, but in this case, it's pretty self evident why it's so damn mediocre. I haven't tried Kid Icarus yet.

I've got a 3DS and I can't confirm the availability of any quality software. But then I'm totally jaded towards Mario and Zelda products to the point where I genuinely wouldn't care if I never played another one again. Which sort of begs the question: why in the name of sweet dancing goombas did I buy one in the first place? Well, because I like shiny new things.

Yeah, I guess you have me on that one.

The best thing is playing as the Wehrmacht online in my German war general persona. "Klaus, can you do me a favour and deploy the howitzer, Ich habe sheisse." Nothing but class. There's no reason you shouldn't check out the original to be honest, it's an incredibly well designed strategy and tactics game (tactics in that the actions of your units after deployment actually matters, so you have to manage the interations of units based on terrain, elevation etc.) and if it came out today it would still hold up well graphically to contemporary games.

No, I get it, I just have a hard time getting that worked up over things. Actually, that's a lie, I get worked up a lot, but not about iOS Rock Band. Come on now, it's not exactly the optimal way to play the game.

Drop what you're doing, fools, the best game ever is getting a sequel: I am excite. I know I never got anyone on here to play the original game with me, but it's £6.99 on Steam, and looks better than Starcraft 2, for what that's worth. You peeps should check it out

Everything on the internet is such drama. I kinda can't take it.

My point was that I doubt that there is that big of a market for Rock Band on the iOS anyway, and regardless of that, the majority of people who bought it did so as something of a cheap distraction. The idea of recommending a blanket boycot on one of the biggest publishers in gaming for a relatively smale abuse seems like...well, the kind of ridiculous, disproportionate nonsense that you typically read on a gaming forum .

Except I'd rather not skip out on the next Dead Space, Crysis, Battlefield, all Bioware games, all Maxis games and all Popcap games... Pick your battles, it's Rock Band on the iOS, who really gives a fuck?

Er...Bane's "Your punishment must be more severe" made him sound like a 1900 Viennese gentleman.

Klonoa would be wicked. One of the most underrated series ever.

Yeah, that's my point though, it's all legacy stuff, Mario Kart on Wii and 3DS we're absolutely joyless, banal experiences. Brawl paid lip service to the superficial concept of Smash Bros as a menagerie of Nintendo's shitty old characters, but not the substance of Melee as an actual, well formed fighter. We'll get the Zelda and the Metroid (the last of which they somehow managed to fuck up utterly), but they almost always feel too safe. The fact is, in the past, their games never felt like shovelware, but now that Nintendo have a new business model, it feels like they're throwing out enough to keep the hardcore market on the treadmill, while their real core market (the casual crowd) are who they are actually trying to win over.

Alright, Flinkerooney, my reference to Mario Party was a placeholder for all the other shit they churn out at a rate that'd give the termite queen a run for her money. The fact that there was a 5 year gap between the last two Mario Party games does nothing to assuage the ultimately well founded assumption that neither game should actually be played, ever. Also, I find @Aimless' comparison of Nintendo to Pixar offensive, because Pixar aren't a giant pacifier for manbabies.

From the perspective of a lapsed Nintendo fanboy though; Mario Galaxy was one of the best games the year it came out. Nintendo occasionally do come out and create something phenomenal, but then they spend the next five years shovelling incremental Mario Party sequels. Rule of thumb: never buy Nintendo hardware until at least a year after launch.

I tell you what, you're right. In fact, let's apply this logic across the board. I'm sick of all these threads about the new Call of Duty, and Prey 2 and whatnot, we need to recognise the fact that they're all shameless Doom clones.

Pretty much anything Golding wrote is fantastic. The Spire and Darkness Visible both such great novels (the only other two I've read tbh ), but there's also nothing that'll put you in quite as much despair about the human race either.

Kudos for commitment there champ.

To disabuse you of certain ridiculous notions: 1. There being no "empirical evidence." Apart from, you know, the fact that precious stones, metals and minerals had and have substantial international exchange value, and around which entire industries are centred. I think it stands to reason that if we hadn't rifled the bowels of the continent, that it might have made use of these things. Now, Africa, to my knowledge, still has substantial calculated gold reserves, for example, but none that are superficially accessible by anything other than a full scale industrial operation. The fact that plantations growing cotton, tobacco and coffee were established across the most fertile land to be found in the colonies. The reason this was a problem was that these crops naturally take a toll on the land ie. their roots dig deep and substantially drain the soil of minerals and nitrogen containing compounds. This is bad enough in itself, since the harvests aren't being used to enrich the continent itself. But then, you have to take into account the fact that agriculture consists of cycles; you reap the harvest of one season, and then the subequent cycle is spent allowing the soil to recuperate. But we didn't care about that: so long as there was another pound and another dollar to make, we kept on truckin. The raw labour power that was, lets say "appropriated," and in the process of this, the infrastructures that had arisen in Africa naturally, were totally fucked. The result: major major parts of the previously fertile land that was counted on to feed and sustain native populations are now inarable. So yeah, by "irreparable" what I mean is that I guess the west can't fix what it's already fucked up, but it can at least attempt to propitiate the symptoms of the disease it's engendered.

This isn't about some sort of abstract emotional trauma inflicted by colonial powers, it's about a disruption caused - and one that's irreparable through intervention - in the natural development of those countries. In countries where there isn't enough material sustenance for a child's prefrontal cortex to grow beyond adolescence, you're stuck with a cabal perpetually trapped in a juvenile tribe mentality, without the executive functions that keep the surge of our otherwise unnecessarily large adrenal glands in check. Except in this instance, we had fortuitous foresight to provide them with kalashnikovs and landmines, and to estrange them from their own endmic cultures which might have given them some sort of dignity, in the same way that early tribal folklore tends to enshrine virtues such as reciprocity (which in the west, we don't need culture to uphold because we have the good grace of having enough food so that our brain actually manages to grow to the point where we can reason). Also: Do you ever post anything that isn't silly bullshit? "Fiscally the debt has been repaid," doesn't account for the fact that the material wealth was robbed at a time that was actually significant to the development of the continent in question. It's like smashing your little brother's SNES when he's 5 and then buying him a ZX spectrum to make up for it when he's 50. Ok I'm done with the retarded analogies.

Complaining that Africa isn't contributing anything to the world at large is pretty much like the schoolyard bully making the observation that the runty kid has a bit of inner turmoil after he spent the last one or two hundred years being robbed of his lunch money and having his head stuck in the toilet

I'm kinda hoping this system will last me at least a couple of years into the next console cycle.