Thanks a lot!

Very nice to meet you as well. Heh, I try my best to be as silly aa possible.

Here's a stranger adding you to their multitap. Your name and avatar caught me off guard, as I'm also a Mega Man fan.

Happy new year! Here's hoping this one is full of wonderful experiences for you!

I do like Final Fantasy 7, really, but that was just WAY too much hype to live up to. You have to keep in mind, too, how I approached it: I wasn't buying it because people were (heh; were) raving about how it was the best game ever made; I was approaching it as a Final Fantasy fan. I knew that it wasn't the first JRPG to ever make it to North America; I'd been a fan of Final Fantasy since the first one came over here in 1990! My friends and I were already hotly debating what the missing games were about. Final Fantasy 5 was about the war the led to Odin being turned to stone in that underground castle in 6, and how Rosa had had an affair with him. That kind of shit; I was pretty into it. That was an entertaining read, even if I disagree with some of the points. An- wait... Mass Effect had an ending?

I got Ocarina of Time when it was new enough for me to nab a gold cartridge, and I thought it had problems right from the fucking get-go. When it became such a goddamn sin for Zelda to have a fucking jump button, I don't know, but that would've solved a lot of problems. I will say that the game sucks a WHOLE lot less when you're playing the 3DS version, because the gyroscope controls make aiming average, which is a big step up from torturous. Especially when on horseback. *incomprehensible seizure of profanity lasting nearly 30 whole minutes* I find I'm hyper-critical of games everyone else loves in general, whether or not I was around when they were big. Besides, a truly great game is timeless; if a game was good "for the time", then it wasn't ever actually good; just tolerable. It's the 8.5th (pronounced ate point faivth) Generation, and we have photorealistic graphics and point-at-to-make-die interfaces for controls, and all this other fancy shit, and yet, you pick up a Mega Man game 30 years after its release and it's still good; good is timeless. Newer generation pissing and moaning about stages not being carpet-bombed with checkpoints notwithstanding.

That might be worth looking into, if it's not one of those insufferable "Well, ya did it champ, but ya didn't do it well enough, so FUCK YOU; 1/5 STARS DO BETTER!!!" Games of such a nature provoke a swift response from me: [Link]

I hear you.

I like timed challenges in the right context. In an action platformer with a good rhythm, sure.

But in an adventure game?

When done properly, it can build tension and give an adventure game a sense of urgency (King's Quest III did this well, in my eyes).

If done improperly, you get a game like Freddy Pharkas: a world you want to explore but you aren't given time to do so. What's the point in having lines and lines of professionally voice-acted humorous Al Lowe dialogue/descriptions if you're punished for spending too much time listening to them?

My problem with timed challenges and games that demand frequent restarts/replays isn't the fact that you have to replay them. It's the ones where you have to wait in order to replay. Donkey Kong Returns (and to a lesser extent, Tropical Freeze) drove me nuts in this respect when I was going for time trials. If I could just hit a button and jump back to the beginning and immediately start again, I'd be fine. But no, you have to pause the game, select Restart (while the menu animates for whatever reason), then confirm you want to restart, and then wait a good 15-20 seconds before you can try again. It's maddening in a game that demands practice. Compared to something like Celeste, where you die and you restart right away, and the game never feels punishing.

I beat the first two Solids on the Gamecube after all my difficulties with Metal Gear Solid on PS1. I don't remember them being that hard BUT I had a lot more time back then. Snake Eater is amazing but I was awful at it when fighting bosses. I'm not good at Metal Gear in general but I enjoy the weird universe.

JRPG's are my favorite genre but finding the time is difficult. I have more time on the weekends but trying to play an hour of a JRPG a day is not enough. I'm really bad at dungeon crawlers with first person perspective or limited inventory slots. Either getting lost in dungeons or losing all my items and starting over are not fun for me. I applaud the people who have the patience for these games.