While the idea in itself was pretty decent, an next generation PSO, the game became quickly stale and more or less boring. Sega seemed to think it was an awesome business model to lock content in online mode and unlock it on a not so regular basis and advertise it as “Awesome and new content”.

Sadly, the game was doomed from the very beginning with the inclusion of the Playstation 2 as supported systems. If they didn’t include this system, they might have lost out on a good chunk of sales. I guess they also included it because, well seeing how horrible the unlocking of content went, adding real new content would have ended up in a disaster. I mean, seeing how this game was plagued with errors in the updates, errors in the GL server with a lot of updates, I don’t want to imagine how many things could have gone wrong if they created new content.

The playstation 2 port was unplayable with more than 3 people in the party. It ran at a poor framerate and you could always hear the drive loading endlessly. Other than that, it was fine. Even more hilarious is the fact that the PS2 port didn’t have the slow down issues that the 360 port was suffering.

The 360 port seemed to run at a smooth framerate most of the time. The graphics were alright and smooth but oh boy did the game become a slideshow when the engine had to load the poor graphical effects of PSU. Running Sakura Blast on A or S? Enjoy the slowdown during the final mob. Enjoying robots? Then deal with the inevitable slow down resulting in a memory leak which was probably never fixed. Overall, as long as the engine didn’t have to render any special effects, the game was running fine. It seemed to be a pretty rushed port.

The PC version, well it started with the game not having any kind of CD key to prevent piracy. It’s either Sega didn’t know how to do that, or they simply speculated that: More Piracy = More incoming monthly fees.

The fanbase in itself is quite hilarious as well. As soon as something seemed fishy, a witch hunt was started. Sure, one could say “Well they’re still scarred from PSO BB and how poorly Sega handled that”. But seriously, scarred from an online game? Give me a break. A lot of people wanted this game to be an equivalent to WoW and ultimately believed this game to be such. Other people completely denied the existence of the technical issues of the game.  Especially on the 360 side, many people outright denied the existence of the Robot Memory Leak. I’d say that the WoW fanbase with their RP fetish is pathetic, but the PSU fanbase really takes the cake with it’s bickering, delusional behavior, silly witch hunts and their goal to become the ultimate DPS machine on a game that’s already running in easy mode.

Then we have the administration of the game. When the first hacking occurred in the game, the administration acted as if it wasn’t there and didn’t bother to do anything about it. Even more hilarious when I remember the interview that some big gaming site had with one of the PSU developers, who claimed that it’s easy to prevent hacking and patch the game instantly. Well, that never happened. The economy went down the shitter and Meseta was duped en masse. What’s even more hilarious, most of the early cheating was possible because, while a lot of things were handled by the server, the decision which item board is currently in your partner machine and which item will come out, hell even the time left, was decided by the client, not the server. In that regard it was like a reverse world.
What I find the most hilarious was how Sega treated updates/unlocking. They added some kind of story/fantasy to their update notes. “Finally guardians can venture forth into….Finally guardians can upgrade to the newest gear in…..” It’s quite hilarious since it appears that even the administration is believing this.

The communication was also very poor and the forums were a great mess. The best part was, that at one point, Ruby allowed Crono to be on the game, despite him being permanently banned. While I have no qualms with Crono, I find it hilarious how the staff finally stopped caring about these things. It might also be, because Ruby had an account on the private PSO Servers. In any case, this is quite hilarious, how some single Admin can ignore the actual rules and do favors for his buddies. Gives you an idea how the NA team is handling this game.

How this game is still up and running is beyond me. It’s outright shit and not really worth the monthly fee. In the end, those people are not any better or worse than the people who buy “unlock” DLC such as Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 Versus mode or the costumes for SSF4.

I really hope Sega will never venture into online RPGs. They charge for outdated tech, it’s like as if they’re living in a time rift which causes them to live 10 years in the past where they think their way of handling online games is new and awesome. It’s a shame that so many people eat the poop up that sega delivers them. But fanboys will be fanboys I guess.

So I finally got around to play Trinity Universe after having it lying around for 2 months.

To be honest, I didn’t expect much from it. I expected it to be another Cross Edge (Since it’s another Cross Over game by NIS). Which isn’t a bad thing for me, but a lot of people are turned off by that.

The game advertises itself as being the first NIS game with 3D Character models instead of sprites. The models themselves aren’t all that bad. But they really aren’t anything exciting and take a lot of time to get used to. Especially Etna’s flat chest or Prinny who is colored a bit too dark. Overall, the models are pretty simple. I think they should have stayed with sprites, might have reduced development costs.

Overall the visuals of the game aren’t breathtaking and one wonders if you’re playing a PS2 game in HD. That’s what it truly looks like. It also appears to be running a bit sluggish at times. At least that was my first impression when I popped in the game for the first time.

The battle system reminds me a lot of Cross Edge. Not necessarily bad. It’s turn based and quite simple. No extensive Menus. Basic attacks are done with 3 buttons and those can be strung together for combos. At times you’re able to unleash special attacks by clicking R3. The combo system really reminds one of Cross Edge or even Disgaea 3. Pulling off combos in the hundreds, dealing insane amount of damage, all these things I’ve seen in Disgaea 3 and Cross Edge are back.

The game also advertises AAA (Animation Asomething Awhatever) basically, during cutscenes, hi res models of the characters are displayed. Just like in Disgaea 3 and Cross Edge. Unlike the latter two, the hi res pictures in Trinity Universe are animated. Somewhat. Mostly the images blink and have some kind of breathing animation. It looks nice, but it really isn’t something that should be advertised as a feature.

The voice acting isn’t incredibly good but neither is it incredibly bad. It works. Of course, just like Cross Edge, not everything was voiced in English. Some scenes are missing english voice over. Though I don’t know if, like Cross Edge, the scenes are voiced if playing with japanese Voices. I suppose that’s the case again. NIS likes to cut down on english Voice work. The english voices aren’t incredibly bad. The only one that has you wanting to tear your ears off is Pamela. But even I got used to it and now her high pitched voice is somewhat cute and adorable.

I really appreciate the pointless story with the over the top HORSE WIENER humor in a age where pointless stories that attempt to be serious define the market. Just like Cross Edge and Disgaea 3 I appreciate the silly story which is quite laughable at times and Prinny adds a lot of slapstick, irony and sarcasm to the conversations. But, like Cross Edge, the story shouldn’t be entirely dismissed as pointless. It’s there and even if over the top at times, it can be appreciated for making one laugh and being simply silly in a age full of serious stories that usually end up completely retarded. I suppose the main charm is that, unlike in a serious story, you expect the story to become shit.

The music is alright too. If you like J pop and J rock then the music is for you.

Another thing this game advertises in-game is the main hub of the game. It tells you that you can visit various locations from the hub or, can just turn off the menu and watch the universe and marvel at it. At first I laughed, but I often find myself just doing that. The hub is the universe the game takes place. In the middle is the planet the game takes place on and around the planet, are various things orbiting it. Those things go from space shuttles to rice crackers.

A lot of the mechanics are borrowed from Disgaea 3 and Cross Edge. Especially the synthesis System, which is used to create new items, is taken directly from Cross Edge. The synthesis System makes sure that you’ll spend hours upon hours grinding away for that one material that you’ll need to make a better weapon/armor/accessory. The Dungeons are pretty simple and filled with random battles. After a set amount of time a “Lurker” will appear in form of a black cloud. The game early on tells you that Lurkers are slightly stronger than the average enemy in the dungeon. Oh boy did that game lie to me. However, beating those nets a nice amount of exp and gold.

Overall, the game is nothing spectacular, but if you liked grinding away in Disgaea 3 and the visuals of Cross Edge didn’t scare you away, then this game is worth the 40$ Price Tag. But, if poor graphics and a story lacking any kind of seriousness aren’t your thing then stay away from this game.

Thankfully Sychosis kept me up to date regarding the E3 and the failure that was Microsoft’s presentation. It seems that microsoft is just blindly trying to lure every kind of customer in that they can get. Sadly, people are going to eat that shit.
Then they launched the Xbox Slim. I remember that, during the launch of the PS2 Slim, M$ was asked if they’d offer a slimmed down Xbox Hueg model. Their response was something along the lines of “Well, we don’t need to resort to such cheap money milking tactics”

Ah well, the new Slim Model is lacking the red LEDs (No RROD OLOLOL) and when it overheats, it shuts down. Fucking genius. Then, the cheap tray loading drive is still lacking the required bumpers to hold the disc in place. Sure, how many times do you move your console when it’s playing a game? But accidents can always happen and then you’d be glad if it had the bumpers.
No other system I’ve had would do that. Hell, even the Sega CD didn’t scratch the discs if moved.

Sony’s presentation was more or less okay. Nothing outrageous, neither negative nor positive. I however liked the idea of playing Heavy Rain with Move. Other than that, nothing great really. Not too pumped for Portal 2 but I’m interested in how Steamworks will work out.

Nintendo on the other hand caught the attention of a lot of people and also went on to show the hypocrisy of the Nintendo fanbois. While it’s cool to see actual sequels to games that I used to play back in the day it’s amusing to see how Nintendo fanbois look at sequels from other companies as rehashes but treat the games that nintendo keeps pumping out as fucking masterpieces.
While about the quality of sequels from either nintendo or some other company can be argued back and forth, it doesn’t change the fact that people are hilarious.

Europe finally got it’s BlazBlue and Demon’s Souls and I’m looking forward to King of Fighters XIII. Ash is finally getting the beating he deserves, or at least I hope so.

And it seems Sega has been found out:
http://forum.diadu.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2553
Fucking hilarious.

The rumors were true, and my dick is hard. Anybody else play the previous entries in the series? I only recently got into DSII (Had it for years though, just never played it) but goddamn. It’s like Diablo with a story that doesn’t reek of DOOM: Repercussions of Evil.

My only concern is that if it releases anywhere near the same time as D3, the game is fucked, hard, until it bleeds.

Anyway, Obsidian Entertainment is heading up development along with Squeenix with advising from Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor and his bros. There were rumors that the game is heading more towards a Diablo style with you controlling a single character rather than a party which probably better meshes with the NWN2/KotOR2 style of “moral choices” which seem to be planned.

Info and concept art: http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/55203/Dungeon-Siege-III-Official-Announcement-Screenshots

I can’t say I disagree with them but I did have some expectation that this is going to be a good squeenix game.

This gen, JRPGs have been, in my opinion, pretty much shit except Lost Odyssey and Tales of Vesperia.
I used to be into JRPGs when I had a PSOne and a PS2. But midway through the lifespan of the PS2 I got tired of them.

There are multiple reasons why I can’t stand most of the JRPGs nowadays.
For one, you have the horrible character design. Everyone’s a pretty boy. Most of the time they’re also underageb&s. The clothes are mostly pretty revealing. Now this isn’t always a bad thing on the female party members but this trend also carried over to the male members of your party. Belts, Zippers, holes here and there to show some skin, shorts, etc.
While I’m not really homophobic and don’t mind some nudity on either side, it’s getting really ridiculous in these games.
I never really understood why Tidus is wearing the clothes he’s wearing. Same with Wakka. Or take a look at some of the cast from Star Ocean. To me this is getting really dumb and boring. As if the developers try to be edgy and hip with their pretty cast.

Then the characters are so overly emotional to the point it’s sickening.
Let me remind you of Edge from Star Ocean. I quit the game the moment he continuously cried over blowing up counter earth.
Tidus from FFX wasn’t any better. One big crybaby.
Cloud, while he was an acceptable main in FFVII, turned into a complete whiney douchebag in Advent Children.
Watching the dialogues of modern JRPGs is like watching a bad soap opera. Full of clichés and awkward emotional baggage unloaded at ungodly times.

Next there’s the battle system.
I grew up with the simple turn based battle system and many variations. Sure, the same old System gets old and boring over time. I’ve seen quite a lot of variations of turn based battle systems and up to this date I prefer them over the real time stuff that some companies tried to pull off.
I feel that the current, real time, systems don’t give me the full control over my party - which in some way defeats the point of having a party. There was Infinite Undiscovery.
You could only control one character in battle. Your other party members spread out and randomly beat up other enemies.
Healing was done by the press of a button. Of course, that didn’t always work out because the Healer, more often, was caught up pounding enemies or preparing some long attack. (Don’t get me started on the inventory).
Then there was Star Ocean. To me the whole battle system felt confusing as fuck when it came to ordering your other party members. I somehow get the feeling, that the developers aren’t even really trying to give you proper control over your party. These days it feels like your party is just there to distract the enemy while you pound the hell out of them.
I heard people complain that turn based battles are boring and unrealistic, but we’re talking about JRPGs here, nothing in those games is meant to be realistic and most of the time, those real time mechanics feel like a big clunky mess.
Playing Lost Odyssey between these messes really made me appreciate the turn based system again and love how I could control the actions of my party. While dated, it still gets the job done better than most other systems I’ve seen.

I really wonder what happened to having a “normal” cast of characters, having a solid battle system and a not so emo loaded story.

And, while this is actually well known, have at this anyway.
http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html

Ade was really something.
Back in the day, that was, when I still was a GM on shithack, I bumped into Ade.
I didn’t think much of him, he seemed to be an okay person, asked some questions and whatnot and he, overall, seemed like an okay person.

Then Wild One and Tink (Server Admins) decided to make a quest. I forgot what the title of the Quest was. It was, basically, Endless Nightmare 1 with a LOT more enemies and a Hildeblue/ -Torr at the end. This sparked quite the controversy among the Forums and Community. Well, not really. I dare to say that 10% of the whole Gamecube population really cared. Sure, it lowered the value of the Frozen Shooter, but, come on, sooner or later there were going to be plenty of them anyway.
Ade was among the most vocal oppositions to this quest. He ranted and ranted and compared himself to Socrates and how he has to endure the same hardships as him.

It was decided that the quest remained active and that people should simply stop complaining about it. Well, things calmed down. I went back online to PSO and I saw Ade complaining about the quest, sparking another huge argument.
I was talking to a fellow GM (Who shall remain anonymous) about this and he was asking me if he should ban Ade.
Then, suddenly, Ade disappeared from the lobby. In short, I banned him. We both lol’d and PSO life continued as normal. For a while.

Shortly after Ade ran rampant on the forums, whining and moaning, sending angry PM’s to me, demanding that I unban him and that I’m doing him injustice and all that jazz. Needless to say, I lol’d more.

Things calmed down and he disappeared.
Well, in any case, he resurfaced and posted about how he got drunk and smashed a table (Pity I don’t have the picture).
A meme was born.

He disappeared again only to resurface during PSOBB Beta, demanding that his items be restored. I suspended him for an infinite amount of time.

Schthack removed the suspension and he resurfaced once more. This time complaining about Forces and how he is the only good Force in the game and how he hates hunters (He used to play a HUmar in his endless quest of finding the SJS sword, which he never found - this also sparked a lot of ranting topics). People proved him wrong time and time again but he didn’t want to understand this. I suspended him again. We all laughed.

Then I quit PSO and everything related to it. He still popped up every now and then, which was pretty funny to read.
Which brings us back to the recent topic created by him found on the top of this article.

This is it, a small little something to remember Ade by.

Here’s a random chatlog

Let’s round this up with a picture I found:

This being said, until next time.

“We will fight for equal rights”

What are they talking about?
They’re not facing the same problems that homosexuals or racial minorities are facing.
There is no law that prevents them from fucking each other in the butt while wearing a fursuit.
There is no law that prevents them from wearing a fursuit in public and there are no laws that make being a furry illegal.

So what is their problem? Is it the fact that people view their fetish as disgusting? Is it because people reject their ideals because Furries try to force their lifestyle on other people? I bet most of the people wouldn’t hate them if it wasn’t for them trying to rub their disgusting lifestyle into other peoples faces.

I mean, you don’t see someone who is into scat run around and forcing his shit fetish on other people, telling them that it’s great and they have to accept it. If it’s up to me, you can shit yourself in a fursuit all day, but don’t tell me about it.

Sure, homosexuals had to face the same things, but they had it far worse. But the Furries don’t want to know about that. They just make a simple analogy and think they’re right.

Pig disgusting

Bottom line, furries are digusting and they’re bringing it all upon themselves with their sick fetish. I mean, a lot of fetishes are sick, but these people don’t run around and rub it into everybody’s face and start crying when people resent their fetish.

Furries should be ejected into the sun. No exceptions.

Here are some furry links for you to laugh at.

Lifejournal Fursuit
Awesome thread on Diadu
A Furry on Shithack

So, today the PS3 users of Fallout 3 are finally supposed to get the first DLC Pack. Broken Steel.

The next two packs, Operation WW1 and The Pitt are supposed to arrive on October 1st and the last two “Forgot the name” and “Alien” are supposed to arrive on the 8th of October.

Great! Bethesda finally is thinking of the PS3 users! Hooray!

But wait. I remember very well from some Interview that one of the higher ups at Bethesda said that there are no plans to release anything for Fallout 3 on the PS3. Then, when the DLC was announced months ago, they said “Well, we always wanted to”.
Now, what was really going on is up to the reader to decide.
Many people believe that, when the good people from Bethesda went to work they found a few brown bags with an obligatory $ sign and a M before the $ sign on their desks.
Others believe that Bethesda was just too damn lazy to find out how the PS Store works.

Whatever it is, we always got to hear “No comment” from Bethesda.

I find it quite pathetic for companies to shroud themselves in secrecy.
I mean, we live in an age of information. Rumors are everywhere. We have the internet. This secrecy policy, that some Companies still try to employ, might have worked back then during the Genesis/SNES era, but it’s completely out of place in this era.

There was some woman from Bethesda on the Playstation Blog, answering questions from users. I felt sorry for her, because she had to take plenty of shit from disgruntled PS3 users. I can’t blame them. First they “lie” to a whole userbase about the DLC, then they release a version of Fallout 3 that does NOT get the Trophy Patch (Which included the “latest” bug fixes for the PS3 Version) and then they’re all like “Oh please here, take this DLC”.

As I’ve said, that poor woman had to take a lot of shit from the userbase and only because her company decided it would be awesome to follow Sega and Lionhead Studios.
Sega: “No there are no hackers on PSU, we see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing”
Lionhead: “There are no bugs in Fable 2, the game runs perfectly fine”

I still don’t understand how Companies can make this pathetic secrecy choice instead of coming out of the closet and say:
“Yes, we royally fucked this one up”
or
“Yes, we took money from this and this company to make it a timed exclusive”

But nah, instead they seem to believe that lying to your userbase or saying nothing at all won’t make them angry at all.

Personally, I’m going to sell my Copy of Fallout 3 and buy a cheap GOTY Edition. I mean, it’s only 3 more weeks until it’s release.