Mento

I said it elsewhere (and am paraphrasing from a Jimquisition episode if I'm being totally honest), but Microsoft screwed up by not focusing on the games first and foremost. By talking up the All in One TV/internet/media features they weren't trying to compete with just Sony and Nintendo, but with the hundred different devices that provide similar services in the living room including many new TVs. I don't think they can win that contest, especially given how relatively cheap and compact a lot of those devices are and how likely the well-off gadget-loving type that would buy a game console brand new will probably already own as many of the aforementioned devices as they need.

Microsoft have a chance come E3 to make it up by concentrating entirely on the games instead, since they've all but said everything they needed to about everything else relating to the XOne, but I think that reveal shattered any illusions people had about MS knowing what the hell they were doing and it really doesn't help their case that almost every horror story about the user experience appears to be true, whether it's because it's actually true or because they're being too ambiguous about it. The Xone isn't dead on arrival, far from it, but it's discouraging how badly that initial conference was botched and it does not bode well for future presentations of the thing.

On a final note the dog thing was just ridiculous, but that's more Activision's fault than Microsoft's, who may have rightfully believed that a new Call of Duty was one game announcement that could potentially excite a lot of people and didn't look too closely at what was actually in the presentation beforehand. Adding a dog is something you do to the fifth consecutive game in a single generation, where you don't have a huge leap in technology from which to draw any real innovations. I guess it's no surprise that CoD continues to be creatively bankrupt, but the desperation is tangible.

House of the Dead was a pretty dumb but exciting Arcade game. That's generally true for any light-gun shooter you care to mention. As far as narrative depth and quality voice acting goes, is HotD any better or worse than the various Time Crises and Enforcers of a Legal nature?

Typing of the Dead is just inspired though. The new ways the game found to make the bosses work (the one where you need to guess which head will attack next is now a quiz, the one where you need to keep shooting a pursuing monster now has really long, fully-structured sentences to type out, etc.) was clever enough but where the original tried to disorient you through its horror elements (or tried to), TotD does so through its non-sequitur comedy. You're definitely right about it elevating the original source material.

As for Popeye: Eigo no Asobi, it was one of the first NES games ever produced and it shows. When Nintendo launched the thing in 83, they kind of visualized it as a home computer that could also play ports of their Arcade games. So that's why you end up with a conversion of their Popeye Arcade game with English learning tutorials plastered over it. I've been watching a lot of Chrontendo and it's interesting to see how developers initially treated the NES (largely a split between arcade game ports and home computer game ports) before they began to appreciate its unique role.

I was just about to send you a message about it AW. Should have guessed you were already on top of this.

I've put it on the GOG wishlist. I have so many games to play right now, more so after a month of nothing but Indie games, that I can afford to wait until it goes on sale. From I've heard from you and Snide over the past few years though I imagine it'll be something akin to the second coming of ToEE.

Yeah, it does that sometimes. Just check back in an hour if the changes didn't seem to go through.

The error messages are the worst though. As far as I can tell it always means that it hasn't acknowledged any changes you made. @jeff might want to add to his How-To guides that you should update wikis in smaller chunks and save any lengthy written additions in Wordpad first.

@bisonhero: To be fair, regarding the light sources and where they terminate, it just takes a little while to get used to it. I lost a lot of keys by accidentally letting them outside the light aura and watching them tumble off into darkness. Annoying, but I'm sure after a few more hour I'd know to put them in more stable locations and have a better sense of how far the light extends.

Braid's masterstroke was its rewinding: you never had to worry about messing up a puzzle unless you did something wrong a while back and couldn't rewind that far. You also have games like Pushmo with a similar rewind feature which made those cases where you get 10 minutes into a puzzle and fuck up a jump far less irritating. Were Closure's stages a little longer, having to rely on so many accuracy-demanding steps without a safety net would be frustrating as heck. As it is, it's just a minor bugbear.

It actually fixed itself for me. Was going to come in here to thank you for doing whatever it was you did.

Is it weird I've written 90+ lists and never used a page's "add to list" feature when it was around? I suppose it's better suited for wish lists and other general purposes.

But yeah, I'm glad to hear the whole list system is getting rebuilt. It's had a whole range of problems since the redesign. If I can make a suggestion, would it be possible to make the text area of each item not link to the item's page when clicked? Writing lists on the old site, a lot of people included external links in those areas (and some even embedded videos; still not entirely sure how they did that) and none of those links are accessible right now.

Ooh, see if you have that Style Guide you created saved somewhere and talk about some of those rules. Many of the common mistakes I've seen on GB's wiki pages were due to writing in a certain way that perhaps wouldn't be prohibited on other wikis but is frowned upon for Giant Bomb, due to a decision you or the moderators made some time ago. I'm talking about things like how video game titles shouldn't be bolded or italicized in the wiki's body text, or how Japanese titles should be written in romaji for Releases, aliases and page titles. You could also tell people to only write in third person and in the present tense too.

Other than that, maybe just a basic step by step guide to creating a full page from its genesis to a roughly complete status? So you'd create the page with its blurb/deck and its box art image, add pictures, add releases, add the general info, add its related pages, add body text (with a cursory look at what headers to use: Overview, Gameplay, etc.) and anything else a page needs. You could create a new page for a game everyone knows about like Super Mario World to make the guide easier to follow, and then delete it afterwards, or a page for some made-up game you can leave around for demonstration purposes.

As for specific sections, I don't know what else there is to cover. I've never tinkered with the DLC or Guide tabs, so maybe those?

@video_game_king: I think so. Even with the three separate physical damage types P3 has, Metatron's whole gimmick is that he's this super buff metallic angel that has a whole bunch of Repel/Null traits. Just need to get him the right skills from those four angels you need to merge together, which takes a while. I forget how effective he is at hitting shit, I would imagine not very with half his skills being defensive-only, but he can take anything save one of those Megido nukes.

Honestly, as strong as some of the other super high level Personae are, I just like the idea of a Persona that makes you completely invincible. You can just stand there like a badass while everything bounces off you.

Best part about Metatron is you can fuse one that's immune to everything. Well, besides Megidolaon. Trouble is, the optional boss just instantly fries you if you try that shit with them.

I specifically built an indestructible Metatron to whiz through Persona 4 on a second playthrough if I ever had the desire (though now I'd probably go with P4G). Of course, I didn't reckon on the Compendium charging ten times more money than you could ever earn in the first half of the game. Probably should've saved some cash before making that Clear save.