fisk0

Since I don't live in the US, nor have a 3DS, I can't use the Mighty Gunvolt code I got as a backer of Mighty No. 9.

Mighty Gunvolt is the demake game that is otherwise bundled with Azure Striker Gunvolt, which you could see in the tail end of the Quick Look:

Either way, here's the download code for the US 3DS E-shop: A05JVCS51145DGCU TAKEN

Since I guess there may be other non-US backers that are also GB users, I decided to make this a thread in case other people want to share their codes too.

Yeah, From Software have been doing Dark Souls-esque games for well over 20 years by now. Only a few of them ever made it over to the west though so they were clearly not made for a western audience. For a long time it wasn't even certain that Demon's Souls would be released in the west. Turned out it became pretty popular once they decided to, but that wasn't a given.

The fact that the game is set in an medieval European setting doesn't really say that the game is targeted towards westerners. As @believer258 said, the first JRPG's were inspired by the Wizardry series, originally made by SirTech in the US - to the point that the Wizardry became more popular in Japan than in the west, and from around 1996 and onwards, there were more Japanese Wizardry games made than American ones. The Wizardry franchise is still popular there, whereas there haven't been a single US made Wizardry game since 2001. I still think you can see traces of Wizardry, particularly Wizardry IV in the Souls series.

Pretty much this, yeah.

And exactly this.

When the fan falls off and starts damaging other components in the machine. That has happened.

I guess in general I'd say when the games won't run at acceptable framerates at medium-low settings.

So maybe every five years or so. Hard to say right now as we're still early on in the new generation of consoles. While they are not all that powerful, it's still a noteworthy step up from the past machines, where multiplatform games generally ran at medium or high settings even on integrated ATi chipsets from 2007 and onwards.

I'd like to add that I've seen quite a few influences from theatre in some JRPG's, whereas as you say, Western games tend to draw a lot from cinema.

The most obvious theatrical thing is of course in Final Fantasy V where instead of having movie like cuts between events at two places, they present the screen as a stage, tone down the lighting on the side with the protagonists, pans over to another part of the stage where we are presented with the events that we are to understand are set somewhere far away. But apart from Final Fantasy V I know I've seen the depiction of the playfield as a stage in other Japanese games too.

I'd say, over all they don't seem to think it's as bad to tear down the fourth wall as we tend to in the west. In theatre it's not all that uncommon for the performers to turn towards and address the audience, something that is fairly uncommon in cinema inspired western games, except when it's done for laughs.

It's pretty much the only of the current consoles that actually has any games. It's also the only one with backwards compatibility, increasing the library by thousands of titles.

@illuminosopher said:

Whatever the end of Quiet Earth was.

OH SHIT, I've only seen that movie on a degraded VHS tape back in the 90's. I could make out that he stared at a Saturn like planet, but those weird cloud trees, tornados or whatever they are were not visible. I need to rewatch that movie in better quality, because that image looks way better than my memory of it.

While I love the Mad Max movies, I think I'd probably have the best chance to survive in the world of Waterworld. And I kinda enjoyed that movie more than I should have.

Yeah. And I really miss when they had "Giant Bomb is a site about X and Y and viewers like you" before the redesign. Especially when they mentioned the shop music from Hot Rod.

Yeah, their best stuff have been the things where they just chose to try something out and end up making a regular feature of it - the Bioforge endurance run started as funny thing on UPF, Load our last save/souls started out with Drew or someone just noticing they still had a save game from Halo (if I recall correctly that was the first part) on their Xbox one and decided to finish it, and then returned with other games they had incomplete saves from.

UPF has had it's low points probably exactly because it is a scheduled feature where they have to do something even when they don't really have any enthusiasm or ideas for that week. So it's probably best that they stick to doing the stuff they think is fun and sharing that as premium features, rather than being obliged to do some feature every week. I do wish Patrick, Dan, Jeff etc did feel like sharing their private streams on GB more often though. For some reason when Patrick played Dark Souls he didn't want to put it on the site, Dan has streamed Diablo III but never put any archived of it on the site, and Jeff has done similar stuff with C64 games. If they just put that stuff up as premium archives, I don't think we'd be starved for premium content.