Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@Ninfan this is cheaper with free shipping for the cube

https://www.codejunkies.com/Products/SD-Media-Launcher__EF000...

Totally agreed. Alan Wake was one of the reasons i originally bought a 360 in the first place (and then it didn't actually come out until years after originally being announced, lol).

The follow-up game (American Nightmare, released on XBLA) was also very good.

This is getting very meta.

@Anti-Matter Take it easy, will you?

@Anti-Matter I went through 250 reviews of switch games on the nintendo UK website and there just older games they made look different .honestly I like to get a switch but maybe not

@ThanosReXXX - I’d say anyone uninitiated or inexperienced could say that, or a version of it, about any sport. If you don’t know boxing, you’d assume it’s just a sport where two people punch each other in the face. I don’t know football well enough to follow the minutiae on a screen, but in person, I can sort of see offenses setting up for opportunities on the defense. That’s what I enjoy. Having watched the NFL all my life, I’m more interested in the alignments and play calls than the actual plays. I always look forward to the Olympics for the chance to get invested in some event I’ve barely/never heard of.

For me it’s sport to sport as to whether it’s better live or on television. I can’t watch baseball or hockey on TV, but they’re two of my favorite sports to see live. Even though you can see all 22 players on the field at an NFL game, I far prefer watching a game on television. Same for boxing, even though you lose a lot of the footwork on TV, and pro wrestling.

I’m with you on the atmosphere at a live event though. I don’t like being in situations where there’s a strong chance a drunkard fan from the other team is going to throw a pint glass or a molatov cocktail at my face. I used to go to a lot of NFL games, but I’m too hot blooded for it, especially when adrenaline and alcohol are involved.

@Morpheel - How much do you love moderating a Pokémon soapbox piece on a Saturday?

I've been avoiding it to be honest.

Making some tea. Watching some videos. Noticing it has too many comments. Reading a book.

Hopefully it stays on the rails. I haven’t looked at it, but I’ve had a discussion with another NL member, and we firmly believe it will easily get over 300 comments. I wish I could bet on it. Enjoy your tea.

As part of the fandom, I can tell you that we absolutely hate any big changes.

And every Pokémon species has its own mini fandom that adores it.

All of them.

I played Pokemon competitive and yeah I'm part of the fandom, but I think people are taking it too far. Ok, yeah Game Freak should have taken longer to put all of the Pokemon in the game, but nobody realizes that Nintendo has to have a big holiday game to make money off of, and Sword and Shield will be that game. As for the Pokemon, I'll miss a few, but at the end of the day I'm ready to meet some new faces and build a new team.

@RedderRugfish Wait....who changed your name? 😂

To me the Pokémon thing is kinda of like when you get new toys at Christmas, then your parents make you choose some older ones to put in the closet because they don’t want all of the toys on the shelves and dressers and floors and countertops.

[room stares at him]

What, it wasn't me this time.

Truthfully, you were my first suspect. I imagined it was funishment for a silly statement or something

Other than the obligatory MJ eating popcorn gif, I did nothing else with that comment section. I figured it'd be a thorny one after noticing how many comments there were before clicking into the article. I'm a huge Pokemon fan, but I've always been a somewhat casual one. I didn't have the interest as a kid to get into the breeding/shiny hunting scene and had no way to really get into battling competitively (No solid way to practice, parents wouldn't have easily taken me to faraway events for something like that, etc.). Nowadays, it's down to the fact that I just don't want to dedicate so much of my limited free time to those extras when I could be playing a myriad of other awesome games. I think the last "big" thing that I did in the games was fully complete the Pokedex in Pokemon Diamond.

Personally, I understand why some people are raising a stink - I'd hate to possibly lose access to some of my hard-earned collection - but I think many are making it into more of a big deal than what it is. We don't even have all of the details for things like Pokemon Home yet.

In other news, I finally beat Mega Man X. The actual game got better once I obtained more weapons and upgrades, but those Sigma stages....Someone outside my house probably would've thought I was watching a sports game where my team was badly losing. The platforming in the game is superb, but some of the difficulty is all over the place in the normal stages. Whoever designed that platforming section in Sigma Stage 1 needs sucker-punched.

It's nice to see a bunch of familiar faces around the forums, after I took a hiatus for a few months. I still go on to the website daily, but I can't stand the comment section full of people attacking the editors here.

@Morpheel
In my mind, I have a little wish if next Pokemon games will be Open world like FF XII (segmented area so it will be easy for kids) and the Battle is like Yokai Watch 4 style and we can use until 3 Pokemons to join in battle. That's very drastic changes, but hey.... man can have a dream also. 😉

Yes, that’s an excellent example of something that would drive the fandom into self destruction mode.

@Morpheel
Lemme guess.. Status quo for Pokemon games.
Btw, i found this quite amusing to compare Pokemon games with other Monster breeding games such as Monster Rancher by TECMO.
I still remembered the drastic changes from Monster Rancher 2 to 3 and from 3 to 4. It was like Day and Night. From 2 to 3, there were a lot of missing Monsters and there were some new Monsters added and new combination added with some removal of previous combination. And for Battle system aspect, from 3 to 4, it has drastic changes from 1 vs 1 become Tag Battle. And all the monsters have their signature animation moves and directly hit onto the opponent, unlike Pokemon that looks like classic Final Fantasy long distance attacks. To be honest, i have more impression with Monster Rancher 4 PS2 in term of gameplay mechanism and monster's animation moves than Pokemon games. But too bad, Monster Rancher franchise wasn't really popular as Pokemon. That's fine, Monster Rancher was a hidden gem for me.

Status quo is very important for pokemon fans.

We are kinda priviledged in the sense that nothing major or groundbreaking has happened to the main gameplay structure of the series in over 20 years. Change is hard for us to deal with, because the series has been like this, only making the necessary upgrades and never messing with the formula too much.

I think the main problem with the series right now is that the "main series" is becoming less and less the main focus of the pokemon company. There's new more profitable sources of income now. You can even see Gamefreak trying to come out of their pokemon cocoon and trying to expand their curriculum with new games.

To have gamefreak, a relatively small company, divide its precious development power to pursue its own original games in the midst of a new pokemon generation on new (more demanding) hardware, is kinda odd if you think about it.

@Morpheel that’s probably the best description of the concern. It’s sort of like the gameplay style change in Mass Effect 1 to the next. Those were dark times. Then there was the star child in 3, but we don’t really talk about that.
I think it’s good that S/S are still months out, maybe some new things will be touched on that will ease the change