The Gamer's Quarter

Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

It's so nice that there's at least one place I can go where it isn't gospel truth that Pan's Labyrinth is the greatest movie of recent times. I'm tired of being met with blank stares when I say I didn't like it and a roomful of people stuttering 'but- but- I thought it was magical!''

It's just a Miyazaki film but minus the humour and plus ultra-violence and a simplistic Hollywood sense of good/evil.

dessgeega · Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2007 8:05 pm Post subject:

hey i find this discussion of pan's labyrinth's worth as a film fascinating but will someone please tell me how long i have to download and watch the movie after i pay for it

also i dropped my controller and now it turns off whenever i fire a rocket at someone in crackdown. it's not the button. nothing else makes it turn off. it only happens when a rocket hits or is about to hit its target. does anyone have any idea what would make that happen?
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extrabastardformula · . Joined: 08 Feb 2007 Posts: 295

The faq says 14 days, and 24 hours after you first start up the film.

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

I liked it quite a bit
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Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

Also watching Pan dorking around in that dumb costume really break the spell of the film. It's a pretty silly movie. Some really nice sequences though.

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Dess, I find it heartwarming how much time you're spending with your 360. I honestly expected you to only use it occasionally.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

dessgeega · Posted: Tue Jul 03, 2007 4:32 pm Post subject:

well, i need to assure myself that the money i spent on it didn't go to waste.

also whenever you see me playing guitar hero II that's actually my sister, playing guitar hero while chatting up her boyfriend (who is usually playing gears of war).
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dessgeega · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 1:24 am Post subject:

a 360 pad with a decent d-pad, and it won't waste batteries either? has anyone used this? i'm not entirely sold, but i want to believe.
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Ethoscapade · . Joined: 30 Oct 2005 Posts: 276

i've heard that it's remarkably not bad for a madcatz pad!

Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

I played a little Dead Rising the other day. You could start a whole list thread of 'Games you have nothing but fond memories of even though in actual fact they used to irritate you to fuck'. Like Mario Sunshine, I must have bought that game, then got rid of it, then bought it again a few months later about 4 times. You somehow forget you hated it. 'Man, I could SUUUURE play some Dead Rising about now! That game was awesome! Why did I ever trade it in, that game's a KEEPER!!'

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

did anyone ever make a GC controller w/ a good D-pad?

that's one of the pains of dr. mario / panel de pon on that system...

and does the name really come from "directional pad"?
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Pijaibros · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 9:56 am Post subject:

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Pijaibros · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 10:24 am Post subject:

I think I saw a black one on a forum once, but they wanted $50!

Where were they sold in the US? I never got to see one in person. I just kept finding them out of stock on online websites.

I was hoping I would come across a few when people were selling their lives in the Wii Frenzy. Unfortunately the kind of people who would actually buy a Hori pad are more about collecting than anything.

Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

I bought a Hori pad because I wanted to play GBA reissues of SNES games on my Cube's GBA player. This is before the GBA player came out. I thought it would be like like playing on a real SNES!

The Wii's classic controller is much, much better, anyway. You don't want a Hori Snes pad that badly, trust me.

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Can you use the Wii classic controller in GC emulation?

It's funny, because it totally sucked for Star Fox 64... but the GC Controller was *perfect*, much better than for the actual StarFox GC game.

I did a comparison w/ the GC and GBA... the crosspad is exactly the same size, to my surprise. It's just the hand angle is a lot better on the latter.

Finally, how frickin annoying is it that you seem to NEED the Wiimote in pointer mode to navigate the main menu... super annoying when you just want to get into a GC or VC game.
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Scratchmonkey · . Joined: 02 Mar 2005 Posts: 1439

I heard that they sold the Hori pad at the Nintendo Store in NYC -- I believe that Sub said that he'd seen them there in the last 2 years or so.

dessgeega · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 12:16 pm Post subject:

i can verify this.
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

I bought mine in an actual store in Baton Rouge about two years ago. It had an English box and everything. It was $20. Worth the $20, but I can't imagine paying much more for it.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

No way, because I played the N64 version a hell of a lot, right up until just before the Wii came out and I sold my N64 in fact. The N64 stick gives you a heck of a lot of nuance in your control compared to the clacky Gamecube stick.

Ethoscapade · . Joined: 30 Oct 2005 Posts: 276

they've since patched up the sensitivity a bit, but yeah, hard to argue with stick worse buttons better on the wavebird vs the n64 pad.

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 12:21 am Post subject:

so i couldn't finish pan's labyrinth. i watched up to the part where ofelia finds her dress covered in mud, and then it cuts to her terrible step-father looking at his stopwatch. i was too scared to keep watching.

so i played carcassonne instead, and finally managed to beat a medium-level computer opponent. i got the chance to play with shaper the other day, too. i think we should have a gamer's quarter friends of alternative games journalism tournament.

shaper also also pointed out i can load a custom soundtrack by plugging in the ipod my sister gave me for the plane trip in march. finally, a use for that thing!

oh, and stainless's missile command remake is on live now. my reaction to their centipede/millipede was "i would be excited about this if i was excited about centipede/millipede", so i was curious what they'd do with a game i actually care about. unfortunately, they got it wrong. the magical lightning guns in "evolved" mode (are you required to use that term on live arcade?) don't telegraph their timing anywhere near as well as the original's streak cannons. it's better than anything digital eclipse ever scotch taped together, at any rate.
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 11:15 pm Post subject:

so i bought missile command. i'm sorry. i was playing the handful of demo stages over and over and i decided i might as well buy the thing. time will tell if i've made the right decision. i did play enough of the demo to get the sense of the lightning guns' timing. it plays pretty well once you've done that, and i like the cleanness of its presentation. that the original arcade version of one of the greatest games ever made is included does not hurt.
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dessgeega · Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 3:03 am Post subject:

my sister's boyfriend has the marathon logo as his gamer pic (or whatever it's called). what does this mean?
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Ethoscapade · . Joined: 30 Oct 2005 Posts: 276

menage?

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Lets speculate on if Dess will get Bomberman Live(r)
I think she will get it and a Gold Account.

Also, you should check to see if there are any "gamer pictures" for Marathon on the Market place. If not it probably means he has a live vision camera and just took a pic of it.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

dessgeega · Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 8:22 am Post subject:

i looked under "new arrivals" for gamerpics and i didn't see it. i was hoping it meant durandal was out.

hey, where can you find release dates for live arcade games?
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Hey! Marathon is actually fairly specific for XBLA releases: Summer 2000. It is wikipedia though... so yeah.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

SuperWes · Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 9:20 am Post subject:

ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Cycle · Mac daddy Joined: 08 Sep 2006 Posts: 2767

Marathon is all about the number 7! To this day, I'm still not sure why. I have theories, though!

And haha, wow, Freeverse are making a Live game? I remember back in the day they were a pretty high profile mac developer. Oh, how things have changed. They also had a great sense of humour. They seem to have gone downhill last I checked on them...
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Chlazza · . Joined: 05 Jun 2007 Posts: 9 Location: Lh'owon

Quick off topic question for dessgeega:

I was wondering if you could clarify something for me:
Does Microsoft require every Xbox 360 be associated with a MSN Profile/Gamertag/whatever or is there any kind of run-once boot screen where MS requires the device to be registered in some way?
I'm thinking about getting a 360, but I don't want to plug in a credit card number - something that was required the last time I saw somebody make a Gamertag - or anything else really. I'm hoping I can get a console and just drop a game disk in and go.

Harveyjames · the meteor kid Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 3636

Hey I joined the HD revolution today! My dad (who I am living with for one grisly month) got his HDTV back from the menders so we could see it displaying in HD for the first time. And WOW! You get used to it so very quickly! It's amazing how little time it takes for the future to become the present.

Dead Rising is the only game that truly benefits from it because there's so much detail you can make out that you couldn't before- it's like a moving Geof Darrow comic or something. Plus you can finally make out the fucking words which is a plus. The other games... bleh. The worst thing is, I know that if we didn't have HD I'd be playing these games wishing we did. Getting an HDTV eliminates the desire to buy an HDTV. And that's all. There's an important lesson in there somewhere.

Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 2:02 am Post subject:

thanks, mr. mech!

i don't feel like i'm missing a lot by not having a big television, but the fact that i don't have stereo speakers is sort of annoying. in pac-man i don't hear sound effects when i'm on the right side of the screen; in half-life 2, i can't hear what people are saying unless i'm looking right at them. theoretically i could just buy a set of speakers, but i don't think they come cheap.
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Mr. Mechanical · Friendly Stranger Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 1276

Might I suggest a nice pair of headphones, dess, or is that not feasible?
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Ethoscapade · . Joined: 30 Oct 2005 Posts: 276

or just get one of those $5 radioshack things that condenses L/R RCA plugs into just one.

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 8:24 am Post subject:

oh, that sounds pretty right.
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SuperWes · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 8:26 am Post subject:

A cheaper option is to just go to the rightmost blade on the 360 menus and turn the sound options to mono.

-Wes
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dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 8:33 am Post subject:

oh, hey. i thought the 360 just laughed in the faces of people with cheaper televisions. thanks wes!
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dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 10:33 am Post subject:

can you tell me exactly where the mono option is? i can't find it for the life of me.
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SuperWes · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 10:39 am Post subject:

Pijaibros · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 11:26 am Post subject:

Follow these steps, Dess:

1. Open the System blade of the Xbox 360 Dashboard.

2. Select Console Settings and press the A button.

3. Pick the Audio option.

4. Pick the Analog Output option.

5. Under there you'll find the Mono option.

dessgeega · Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 11:36 am Post subject:

i don't remember seeing an analog output option.
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