I need this guy to talk me through every game I play.



We can be heroes. Sonic heroes.

Street Fighter 4 is the gaming event of the century for everyone who can remember this commercial, and what it meant:



Capcom games fill a void in my soul that no other games can. They've always been there for me. I want to give everyone who has ever worked for Capcom a big hug. Thanks, guys.

Can I tell you that the only game I give a FUCK about in the upcoming months is the Nintendo DS revision of Dragon Quest IV? Little Big Planet? I don't even know what that is. Gears Of War 2? I've had enough oat meal skinned space marines thanks! And I don't even know what the heck is coming out for the Wii this fall. I don't think I even care!

Nope, just Dragon Quest IV thanks. I even swallowed my pride and pre-ordered it at a GameStop so that I can get it right on day 1 when the store opens. Maybe I'll bring my DS and just play it there instead of going right home. I think when I get it I will just play through it three times. The first time will be within a week from it's release. I hereby proclaim September 17th - 24th, 2008 as Dragon Quest Week here at BIG.



I wish I was this dude, playing Dragon Quest IV on my Nintendo DS Lite hand held gaming device! Stretched out on my bed with a Coke on my nightstand.

I love how they are re-using the engine from Dragon Quest VII for these DS remakes. It looks like 3D Super NES! You see how fast the game transitions from battles? This game doesn't jerk you around no sir. It doesn't waste your time, it doesn't assume you have nothing better to do than to play this game. You're it's guest.

I've been hearing a lot of debate over remakes in general. I am all for them, if the game is worthy. Lately I have been playing the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy IV, which is damn good! Taking into consideration the crappyness of the Gameboy Advance version of the game, this is the first good portable version. Final Fantasy IV and Dragon Quest IV-VI are important entries in the genre, and their respective series. They deserve to be ported and remade again and again. After all no one is forcing you to buy them, and the games remain faithful enough to the originals so that one doesn't feel totally obligated to purchase them.

Now Square-Enix, make a DS card with Dragon Quest I-III on it.

Why do so many group pictures of the universal monsters leave Gillman out of the lineup completely? You can include the Invisible Man who isn't more than a set of glasses and a hat floating in the air yet the dopest monster gets left out? Is he somehow more of an outcast than the rest of the group of monsters that he is in a new sub-group of outcasts? He is a monster's monster I guess. Maybe the box office draw and overall mind share of the Creature movies just couldn't compare to the rest of the roster and in the already niche fan base for these type of movies his visibility somehow was reduced to less than the rest of the gang.

I want a slick comedy movie about the Universal monster gang assimilating into contemporary society(Maybe in the 80s though, it wouldn't even be slightly plausible in the 90s and onward) where Gillman gets like near top billing and has a perennial feel-good scene where he is at a high school dance or something and shows EVERYONE up with his kool moves to some anthemic dance party song. Don't know what that song would be, i've never been to a dance party but I'm thinking "Can't Let Go" by Earth Wind and Fire.

Monster Party got it right though, put him front and center on that cover. Lets all have a monster party.

Man this looks sick. Its like X-Men vs Street Fighter, this is exactly what I need in my life. Bring back the fun times, playing XvSF on Saturn with the ram cart.

I seriously cant get over it. I hope all these new fighters do well.

Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin is a pretty great strategy game. It's got lots of different units and terrain types, enormous maps and you can even play with a friend via Nintendo's Wi-Fi matching service! Suffice to say if you are craving a turn based strategy game in these long summer nights, then Intelligent System's(Fire Emblem, Paper Mario) Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for the Nintendo DS is the title for you!



What's most interesting about this game has nothing to really do with the gameplay(which for the most part is the same as the other games in the Advance Wars series, but the aesthetic shift from those games to it's newest iteration. Where the older games in the series had a very lighthearted and cartoon-like art style, Days of Ruin's characters are drawn in a much more "mature" fashion. Commander Brenner looks closer to the oatmeal skinned gorillas of Gears Of War than anything in the previous games in the series. While Brenner looks quite brutish, the main protagonists, Will and Isabella, look more akin to a shonen manga or a Square-Enix game.

Just for reference here is the cover of the first Advance Wars game for the Gameboy Advance:

Doesn't it just look so fun? The whole gang has loaded up into the tank and we're off for some warfare! War is fun! Hey mom have you seen my baseball cap anywhere? I need to put it on my head backwards and command my forces to victory! Even the tank is cute. I guess all the bright colors turn off the type of people who buy the most videogames.

What's most jarring about the visuals of Days of Ruin is that when viewing the overhead map of a battle, your units appear the same as they did in the previous games. It still uses "super deformed tanks", even when it cuts away to show 10 tanks firing on 10 infantry men. It's like when in Final Fantasy 7 you got a cut scene of a more realistic Cloud riding on his motorcycle, and then the game brought you right back to his SD version.

So the question is, why did they change the art style so much for Days of Ruin? Well I suppose it helps reinforce the more "serious" story. The Earth has been laid to waste by a colossal meteor shower, leaving most of the population dead. Will, a low ranking member of the Rubinelle military has clawed his way back to the surface to join Brenner and his troops, and try to rebuild civilization. The story doesn't get any less silly as it goes on. In fact it even adds an amnesiac girl with mysterious powers, and a disease that turns people into plants. The only decent part of the story is the idea that it will be natural forces that destroy the Earth, and not war between nations.

The place where Advance Wars: Days of Ruin falters most is in it's storytelling. The story is told primarily through conversations between characters that occur before and after battles. What you'll see is the large portraits of characters displayed right next to eachother on the bottom screen, and a background image, and their text. Occasionally their will be larger picture that takes up both screens of the DS but these are few and far between, and can only go so far in telling a story. While it's possible to tell a great story using only text(novels), Days of Ruin's problem is that it only has dialog, and nothing else to give added characterization and depth to it's story. What's worse is the dialog is filled with moralizing, though not on the same level as Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

Everyone is very extreme in their viewpoints, and they don't really change that much! Once you've met a character once you pretty much know everything about them. Well except that mysterious amnesiac girl.

The game is pretty much an utter failure in terms of telling a story. But still, the gameplay is fantastic. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is fun to play in bed or on the go. The AI can be pretty brutal as well, so you can not add it to the list of Nintendo franchises that have been made babyshit easy since the Gamecube era(Legend Of Zelda, Super Mario). What I enjoy most is that the game isn't stressful at all. It might get frustrating when you've been playing the same battle for an hour and the AI just took over your headquarters, thus defeating you. But at least you don't have to worry about grinding for levels after that. I don't really get a sense of despair when that happens, I am more anxious to alter my strategy for the next round and try again. Thankfully I can skip those awful dialog scenes by just pressing START.

Ahh, summer is here. Even after transplanting from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest under depressing circumstances the nights this time of year still hold a certain amount of wonder, practically begging for me to stay up as long as I possibly can.

For nearly the last 10 years of my life a consistent force has been playing Starcraft in the late hours of the night. I'll play public games vs Koreans, I'll play with friends and watch them play, I go on and ladder when I am in the right spirit for it. When the evening hits and I start playing, chatting and watching replays time practically melts away. I do not actually think anything else I have ever encountered quite feels the same way. It feels as good as any great moment I had as a teenager during my summer breaks; yet the whole time I am alone. Usually listening to laid back dance music, a certain saccharine quality exists in all my playlists. There is too a bittersweet quality to the act of playing the game this way.

I don't get paid to play the game, I've never made a cent despite winning a few tournaments(Always the "check is in the mail"), I've never been particularly well known in the international circuit of players. I glide along just below the cliques that permeate competitive online worlds, taking my wins and losses vs the most well known occasionally and then going right back to my grind of simply playing for the love of it.



I've played Starcraft from the beginning of the truly competitive era. I was 19 or 20 with the naive idea of being a professional at the game. Getting up early when I had no job just to play Game-i at 9 in the morning during the free hours. I had the idea to maybe get good enough to take a trip to Korea, maybe teach english like so many dudes I met online were doing. But I never really quite put in enough effort, always cooling off whenever I got truly serious about being great. Who was I kidding, uprooting myself would have been impossible. Leaving friends behind to go, yet at the same time my obsession with the game slowly crippled me. Months would go by of the same routine of playing for 6 hours during the night, going to fast food drive thru's late at night so I would avoid contact with people. But my unhealthy lifestyle hampered me more than anything. When a tournament would come up and I would make a hardcore gaming schedule I would get burnt out because my life simply was not balanced, I play because I like the game and what I can accomplish in it. Yet I don't really long to be the best, the absolute top of the heap. I just play for the experience. I play because I like the players. I like the camaraderie - You lose a series that friends set up vs a good player they know, but even though you lost they still respect you. You put your skills on the line and on that particular day you lost. You can laugh about it, dwell on it, think about it. But they know your abilities and encourage you to examine the games and try again another time.

Maybe next time you win it. That's why I play. For one more win.

So Capcom announced Rocku Man 9 like a few weeks ago and it looked pretty cool, the first footage was aight. Some people felt like they were limiting themselves to the Nintendo feel too much and apparently hear the music cutting out when sound effects were happening(I couldn't hear it over the Dragon Force playlist I have cranked to 11 at all times) and aside from the block effect that probably wasnt possible on the NES it looked very NES

Now we get the following video



Shit looks pretty hype to me but my original thoughts were that they would really push the envelope on the NES style of games. And it still seems true, but something about it just isn't blowing me away quite enough. I see some gimmicky new shit like a little dude carrying Megaman across the ground really fast, a weird spin block like in Top Mans stage except it spins you vertically instead of horizontally.. I mean the backgrounds generally look fresh. And the black or solid color backgrounds are always classic, even the music sounds good.. I am just hoping that the gameplay stays really true.

Part of me wants them to use Megaman 1 as the primary inspiration. Just make it super hard, no continuing via passwords. No sliding, no charging. Limited amount of Misc equipment. Get rid of Rush and most of the gay ass fan service cast. Make it really light on story.

I guess Rush and Roll are in that trailer actually, and I think I read there will be a shop system like in Megaman 7-8. So I can assume this game will pretty much suck compared to Megaman 1 and 2. Hopefully it still manages to impress

In a thread about some new gay old game download service: "$5 for a version guaranteed to work in XP? No brainer.

I'm a PC gamer. $5? It's nothing. NOTHING. I spend $1,000 dollars US on video cards every year."

5 dollars for mediocre PC games?? Bleh thats NOTHING, I spend thousands every year to pad my patently worthless existence. If I want to play games on my 10k gamin' rig that could run on an old Pentium II its my problem OK??



Yoyo check out my unhealthy obsession with a mediocre first person flying shooter series from 10 years ago.

Nice lil thread about collecting gaming art to put in your 500/month studio apartment, on the wall between your katana set and anime wall scrollz http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=326463

I find packing games up for a move to be pretty terrifying.

I've spent most of my life playing and collecting tons of games. These aren't just games to me, they each hold memories of their very own. Super Mario World isn't just a Super NES cartridge, it is also the feeling of triumph I felt when finally defeating Bowser. Castlevania for NES is the broken controller and the Game Over screen. I keep all of my games someplace easily accessible, either in my bedroom or in the room where I play games the most. Sometimes I just pull them out and look at them. It's like a book you keep on the shelf, only having read it once, but you take it down every now and then to leaf through the pages. It gives you a reflective moment, that for me satisfies my need for nostalgia.

Packing them all up in boxes and throwing them in a truck is worrying me. It's a pretty horrible/crazy thing to worry about games, most of which I don't actively play any more. I'm the type of person who gets really upset when a game has the slightest imperfection on it's disc or box. I can't help it, it's just how I am. It's a compulsive desire that comes with collecting anything. Comic book collectors of course are known for obsessively preserving their comics in polybags and acid free boxes. Gamers are the same way. Browsing the forum NeoGAF's 2008 Gaming Setup Thread you find many people's gaming areas to be uniform. Games are organized usually by system, then alphabetically. Some people do by developer or series. All of their games are in one place. Sometimes they have a designated "game room" in their home, or sometimes their entire apartment is devoured by gaming.

Then there's this need to show it off, the reason threads like this exist, and have hundreds of pages on some forums. Are gamers just interested in finding the optimum method for displaying and shelving their games? Or are they just looking for some validation? If other people are doing it then it makes it feel alright.

Not that this is wrong. I'm the same way. But is it really healthy to keep all these things around? I have a bunch of Gameboy games just sitting around, but I no longer have a device capable of playing original Gameboy cartridges. I have both a PlayStation and a PlayStation 2 around even though I have a PlayStation 3 that can play all of my PlayStation platform games. I have no use for these items. But am I really going to discard or sell my copy of Pokemon Blue that I sunk so many hours into 10 years ago? Remembering those days is not enough, for a collector there is a desire to keep physical evidence of those memories around because it makes them feel more real.

So Capcom finally is making another vs game and it looks sweet, only problem is no one knows what Tatsunooko is. Some anime?? Gay shows!! I'll be pickin Ryu and Akuma as always who cares!!

Do u think it will be as dope as Marvel 2? Or a button mashing scrub fest like 3rd Strike?

Will u be pickin Ryu or Ken? And what will you're 2nd character be.. Akuma or maybe Sean? Will it have yet another limited edition joystick? Will Capcom finally put in some net play that doesn't suck? Will they finally consult the GGPO krew? I cant wait to find out!

Castlevania 2, I wanna get to know u better..














Castlevania 2 is probably the illest new game to have come out this year with fresh tile designs and pumpin' tunes. But if u are like me you are wonderin'.. "Yo what up with those dolla signz. This game got me seein' em even when my eyes closed."

Do you think Konami thought this would appeal to American gamers who are fixated on wealth and status? Maybe Konami is really trying to make a statement with this hot new game title.

Perhaps by doing this Konami is sayin "Yo, chill out and just enjoy the game. Stop bein' so serious, PRO gamers." Just some random thoughts for yall. But if you'll will excuse me..

*Straps on diving goggles, makes sure Capri sun is firmly placed in cup holder and pulls up lever on La-Z-Boy*

After a long day of 'ardcore gamin' do you ever just think to yourself "What would I do if I wasn't this INTO games?"

Prob something you think about a lot. Hardcores are known for bein pretty cerebral heh

Next week I am moving out of my childhood home. I have a PS3 and a Wii and a DS, but right now, I am playing my Super Nintendo the most. A few nights ago it struck me to hook it up. It's odd that with all these boxes around me I've decided to take an old system out of it's box which it's been resigned to for a few years.

The only games I dug out with it were Super Castlevania 4, Final Fantasy 3 and Super Mario All-stars. I had to clean my system with tons of alcohol wipes first, because I guess I had spilled a Coke on it at some point.



What I've found myself playing the most is FF3. I've started a new quest and am up to the Phantom Train sequence. I had forgotten how great this game is. For a few years now I've considered FF2/4j to be my favorite Final Fantasy game title. Although for the record I don't really consider there to be much competition as of all the recent games(7-12) only 12 is actually worth a damn and of the older games(1-6) 1-3 are pretty awful to play today, which really just leaves me to rank 4, 5, 6 and 12.

For the record the official ranking for me is:
6
4
12
5

ANYWAY. FF3 does a lot of things that I wish more RPGs would do today. And I am saying this as someone who really LIKES Japanese role playing games, even newer ones.

For one, the battle system is fast. Random battles are a pretty difficult to reason abstraction in JRPGs(though not all have them), and the less time spent in them, the better. While they are fast(and you can make them even faster if you choose, by altering the battle speed in the CONFIG menu), they are not devoid of strategy.

Also the story is linear, however it is very good at making you think that it's not. Early on, after maybe 2 hours of playtime(FF3 is pretty short as well, maybe 30-35 hours tops. Not bad!) you get to decide on the order you want to play through three scenarios. The game of course will only let you do these three, so it maintains some form of linearity, however the player is given a degree of choice. Want to get stealthy with Locke in South Figaro? Go for it. How about find out where Sabin went after that battle with Ultros? That's your choice. It makes the player have more interest in the story, as it makes them feel they have a more active role in it. Off the top of my head I can't think of any other RPGs that do this, although I am probably wrong.



Lastly, in the second half of the game FF3 takes a major risk by becoming a more open, free form game. In the World Of Ruin section you can choose to go tackle the final dungeon/bosses with only three characters. You need to split your team into teams of 4 for the dungeon(which is by far one of the best dungeons ever designed), so if you really wanted a challenge you could just use parties of one. The game doesn't force you to find all the characters again, it merely gives you incentive to do so. If you don't, then you are in for a tought, though not impossible challenge. If you do, then the dungeon is easier for you, and you get to do sidequests that are actually linked with the story, and provide closure/resolution for the characters.

So yeah, Super Nintendo. I think it would be really nice to play through Super Mario Bros 3 on the day before the move, hopefully I can do that. It would just seem really fitting. I will do a post sometime about SMB3 and how it is the pinnacle of human achievement.

Squaresoft-Enix-Electronic-Arts makes excellent games! I am playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance A2 and it is truly wonderful. What graphics this game has. So many classes and skills, I love em!



I feel like a teen mom with a new baby! This shit owns! Need weapons to get class skills? TIGHT. No 3D battlefields so that you cant see where your cursor is half the time? NICE. No ability to skip cutscenes that you have to watch every time before a battle! SCORE.

Good to know Japanese developers are staying on the cutting edge of gameplay regression technology(GRT). After slaving thru the first two battles I found out you cant really customize classes early on in the game, you really just gotta wait it out. I wonder if I will ever even beat this game(or turn it on again)

Now where the heeeeeck are Dragon Quest 4-9 on DS. I want a box set of em