Hi
 

I'm here. Really. Even if you don't believe it.

erm....who are you anyway?

;)

Hey, it's you. That person. With the cats.

How's tricks?

Cat! You're alive!

In your FACE, Schrödinger!

Um, how do you make the mini-Mickey "o" again?

I spoiled the name for you guys, didn't I? From now on, you'll never be able to think of Schrodinger's Cat without having him chase Mickey around the box, right?

Hello!

Nice to see you again :)

Alt-148, or just punch something like "umlaut" into Google and then copy/paste.

Or take it from the Windows Character Map.
Heh. :D

Hey, cat. *waves*

or simply have a german keyboard layout ;)
I can type those all day long

Hey Z, great job on CM's title. The combination of "boarding party member" and three cats on surfboards has joke possibilities that go to untold layers of wit:

1. "Boarding" as in surfboards.
2. "Boarding party" as in multiple cats having fun on surfboards.
3. "Boarding party" as in the old days of TOS when there weren't away teams, there were landing parties and boarding parties.
4. "Board" as in flat cats being used for Cat Sailing Days being as flat and hard as a board. If you don't know about CSD, please ask.
5. "Party" as in "real parties have 'cool cats' in them."

I was just wondering how fast new member titles come into effect when an avatar is changed. I have a bunch of sprites and thought it might be time to shake things up. Unless you guys identify me with Radd to such an extent that it'd be a shame to mess things up. Opinions?

Depends how quickly I notice, and whether it warrants a new title. PHJ's SpongeBob avatar certainly did, for example. Cat's title isn't new (it was in my initial round of title-bestowing after the vBulletin switch), but your five interpretations certainly are. I must admit I had two in mind, tops.

Here it is! Go Mario! Dun dun dun, duh dun duh dun Duh duh duh duh duh duh... :)

PS: Does anyone really think that Mario 3 is NOT the best NES game? Didn't think so. :)

The best NES game is Legend of Zelda.

The best Mario game is Super Mario Bros.

Known in the Good Old Days™ as Sailcats™...

Erm, no.

I played the original LOZ (GBA edition), and I just ... it wasn't very good. The graphics were great, the music was great, the enemies were great, the gameplay... just wasn't great. Too nonlinear. I am a firm believer in "even if the overworld is nonlinear, the dungeons should be arranged in a distinct linear pattern that gets progressively harder. Granted, even in OOT you can do the Fire Temple before Forest and Ice Cavern before both, but in OOT you were given incessant hints from Navi, Saria via Ocarina Wireless, Kaepora Gaebora, Shiek, etc, etc. where you should go next. Original LOZ: none of that. You just walk around and around and around and if you don't bomb EXACTLY the right rock, no dice. Sold that sucker right back. It should be theoretically possible to play any game without the strategy guide and a minimal amount of backtracking. Even games like Star Tropic (also a favorite) were good at keeping things semilinear without making you feel totally lost.

Original Mario--okay, good game. It set the trend for all that followed and all that, but to me it fails in comparison to Mario 3 in several important respects:

1. Extra lives are commonplace in Mario 3. Mario 1, hardly.
2. Get hit as Fire Mario in Mario 1, dead. Get hit in Mario 3, you still have a chance. I'm a firm believer in powerups actually increasing life energy.
3. Mario 1 is too linear. No sidetrips for necessary powerups allowed. At all.
4. No P-wings! No music boxes! No hammers! No frog suits! No Kuribo's Shoe! Come on, people!
5. White overalls and a red shirt? Can you spell "tacky?" :)

I'm the one who pointed you in the direction of KOL, remember?

Now who are you calling a person? The only tricks I've been doing are disappearing tricks, apparently.

Heh. :D

Hi Valium and musdhark. :)

Thanks for mentioning. I hadn't actually noticed the title. I like it though. :D


Why can I only use 4 emoticons? [insert sad emoticon here]

So to summarize Nate's post:

LOZ not so good because it's too non-linear.
SMB1 not so good because it's too linear.

LOZ is an awesome awesome game. I remember spending hours and hours playing it growing up, and I still do. (I'm extremely fortunate that the battery in my Zelda1 and Zelda2 cartridges hasn't died yet.) Great music, great graphics, great everything. And I never had a strategy guide for that game. As I recall, I would find a doorway, walk through it, and if it was a dungeon, I would look at the top of the screen that would say "Level 1" or whatever. If I found Level 5 and I had only beat Level 2, then I would keep searching for Level 3.

As for Mario, I agree that I like Mario3 better than Mario1, but I think a lot of that is the diversity the game added. More levels, more themes, and flying. And most importantly for a guy with a brother, a more reasonable two-player mode. As I mentioned in my fiver of SMB1, it was annoying to play a 2P game and just have to sit there until the other player finally dies on World 5. SMB3 switched off every level, and that made things more fun for two people. Especially with the sewer-mode.

Of course, that's not really to say anything bad about SMB1, which I still play frequently enough on my NES.

Never looked at it that way, but yeah, that's the basic idea.

PS: Was there any actual way to save on GBA LOZ without dying first? If there was, my manual did a LOUSY job of telling that to me. That's Gameplay Mechanics 101!

If it works like Zelda 2, you can save with Up+A on controller 2. There are quite a few games in which that works; it was sort of an open secret. The original NES came with two controllers, so you didn't even need to switch ports. (The GBA port of Zelda 2 transfers this trick to Up+Select.)

Anyone who knows my gaming habits will have no trouble predicting which side I'm on here. The original Zelda is an incredible game, especially for its day. Like the original Metroid, it's a NES game I'll never get tired of. But Mario just doesn't grab me -- never has. I can appreciate the games' reputation, but I just don't enjoy them much myself. <a href="../enterprise/fiver.php?ep=hatchery">Hoshi's difficulties</a> were based on my own.

However, I would give the "best NES game" title to neither Mario <i>nor</i> Zelda. It's not an easy call -- Metroid and Castlevania are strong contenders too -- but the winner for me is Mega Man 3.

Heya cat! I was wondering if you were still alive!

I have plenty of obscure things I could use for avatars, but I'll be nice and not.

Zelda was good, as were Castlvania and Metroid...and Ice Climbers (shut up) but I have to give it to Mega Man 3.

Just for the slide.

Bah to Mario. Duck Hunt was on the same cartridge and much better. It made more sense, too! :D

It's funny, truthfully I'm not all that big a fan of NES games in the first place. I find it hard to adjust to not having certain improvements which came along later (saving in cartridge [Zelda excepted], multiple game saves, using the D-pad to navigate menus rather than select, etc).

But for whatever reason, SMB3 just doesn't do it for me. It's just a bit too scattered and unfocused for my tastes. None of the extra upgrades are all that fantastic in my opinion, and the level design is just so bla compared to other games in the series. It's fun, but not as much as the original. Or 64. Or NSMB. All in my opinion, of course, which is very much an outlier.

LoZ deserves a place at the top of the NES heap simply because it was just so ahead of its time. It was sort of the GTA3 of its day, as I see it. The game provided a go anywhere, do anything feel that had never been seen before, and wasn't really significantly revamped until GTA3 15+ years later. It truly created a whole world and crammed it into a cartridge. That's damned significant.

Well you could always ask DD. ;)

Ah, I'm the opposite of you, IJD. I'm a huge NES fan. The reason for that may involve the lack of ownership of any later console system from any maker. A month or so ago I got a DS. It was my first game system since the NES. I have a lot of catching up to do.

But since NES is all I've ever known, and since it defined a large portion of my growing up years, mine and my brother's actually, it's what I've known and loved. Even today, even despite the recent DS purchase, I still play my NES, though I've noticed that of all the games I own for it, the main five I come back to are SMB 1, 2, and 3 and Zelda 1 and 2. For those who wonder, I never owned Metroid or Castlevania or Megaman, though I've definitely played Metroid and Megaman.

And honestly, I consider NSMB to be very much an homage to both SMB1 and SMB3. There are a lot of elements of both games in it.

That would require thinking, and also lack of laziness. Neither of which I possess.

Also, I just noticed your member title. Go me!

...I didnt do it...I promise

You didn't do what? We didn't accuse you of anything. Yet. :suspicious:

damn....did I reveal my secret?

!
 

The plot thickens!

Hey look, I'm here too! :D

I think the plot must have the consistancy of a cement block by now.

There's a plot? I didn't think we had one. We were just--

...


YOU SAW NOTHING. NOTHING!

Eeeeexcellent.

Given that this is now Halloween, that must make catalina a zombie. Right?

(It's logic, of a sort.)

Works for me.

*Waves at KJ*

Me? A zombie? I don't think-- Right.

Er, I mean
BRAAAAAIIIINNNSS! *Goes towards PHJ*

Sorry, no brains here. I do so hate to disappoint. :(

Aww... *De-zombie-izes*

What does a vegetarian zombie say?

GRAAAIIIIIIIINS!

^ Heheh :D

I'm not sure how kosher zombies would work, exactly, but it's something I feel we don't see enough of.