takua108

@insane_shadowblade85 said:

This has kind of been my thought the entire time I've been playing it, haha. I really hope I'm wrong! I really hope there's plenty of stuff to do, especially in the Dark Zone. The DZ is a cool-ass concept -- it's the Destiny "dudes just wander into your game" multiplayer, but then at the drop of a hat, they can become Dark Souls invaders that want to kill you, as if you were in a Kane & Lynch multiplayer game. Awesome! ...But there isn't much to do in the DZ when you're not having the occasional awesome PvP shootout. 90% of my time has been just wandering the streets, finding an item to loot or some NPCs to shoot every 8 minutes or so (I think)? It's been mostly boring as shit, punctuated with moments of awesome fun fighting hostile players at the loot dropoff zones.

I LOVE the cover-to-cover movement, though! Holy shit! It doesn't feel 100% perfect -- but then again, I'm playing at a pretty variable framerate on my laptop at the moment. But man! It's like you're playing Gears of War, but then you can optionally play Hybrid instead, if you want!

I'm hoping it turns out as great of an overall game as it has the potential to. If it doesn't -- I wonder if I can get a refund on Steam, since these hours have been going into the separate beta client, and not the actual game? :v

I am not going to miss it this time! Can't wait to see what the theme ends up being.

@viciousbearmauling: I beat a Frenchman one round; they're not invincible :)

If you're like me, you've been playing Windjammers with your friends locally for a couple years now, but: did you know there's totally a magical place on the Internet where you can play Windjammers online? I didn't either!

If you download FightCade and give it your Windjammers and Neo-Geo BIOS ROMs, you too can totally play the greatest eSport of all time against people all over the world. If playing competitive games online scares you (as it does me): everyone has been incredibly friendly, probably because they're just happy to have people to play Windjammers with. A couple of guys there are trying to get some just-for-fun tournaments going at some point, too.

Challenge me if I'm in the Windjammers channel and not marked as Away! My username there is adamrezich.

Remember: it is against the rules to link to or discuss how to obtain copyrighted materials. I asked the mods before posting this thread and they said it was cool, as long as everyone keeps this in mind.

Semi-professional menu designer here. The time it takes to a.) pause and b.) get through each menu is horrible, relative to the frequency at which you use them.

Imagine if pausing the game was instantaneous. If you pressed START and that menu popped up immediately, and there was no loading between submenus, the game would objectively be a better experience. I haven't played MGS3 in a few months but in my memory of playing the HD version on Xbox 360:

• Just pausing the game takes about 1-1.5 seconds
• Moving your cursor down to the "CAMO" menu takes about 1-1.5 seconds
• Changing to the "CAMO" screen is more or less instantaneous
• Moving your cursor to one of the two sub-options takes about 0.5-1.5 seconds
• Choosing the correct camouflage pattern for the situation takes anywhere from 1 to maybe like 5 seconds, depending on how full your camo list is
• Then you have to press the "CANCEL" button on your gamepad a few times to back out of all of these menus (1-2 seconds)

These times are estimates and, like I said, I haven't played MGS3 in a few months. But this sort of thing is incredibly frustrating from a user experience perspective. Imagine if, instead, you could press a dedicated button on the controller to change your camo, and from there, a series of radial menus let you choose the best camo for the situation. It would be literally the same exact mechanics, but reduce a maybe 10-20 second operation to a five-second one.

I guess it depends on how you play the game, but I changed camo a lot, and I always tended to my wounds when I got them. This made the game more tedious than anything.

Also, changing your backpack items could be so much better. As far as "menu design" goes, the MGS1/MGS2 system of "hold a damn trigger down and pick the thing you want" is pretty alright. Again, with perhaps a radial menu or something, it could be slightly improved, but when you only have sixteen or so items on each trigger, and you can change between them by holding the trigger down (which pauses the game [crucial!]) at any time, it lets the player do what they want to do in the game that much easier and efficient.

Visually, I love the look of the menus. The desaturated amber color scheme that MGS3 uses is super cool. Also, the Metal Gear games pretty much all have great menu sound effects, and MGS3 is no exception.

As a bunch of poor college students, our goal is to, as soon as possible, either acquire an AES and copy of Windjammers, or perhaps just the latter, to dump the ROM for reals and then frame on our wall. I recently purchased a Windjammers arcade flier, pictured below, and will soon frame it, too :D (Assuming the image upload works, it seems to be kind of broken.)

I've been playing Windjammers with my friends for a couple years, pretty much since Giant Bomb started talking about it. It is one of our favorite pick-up-and-play two-player competitive games, and it's great to get a group of friends together and rotate out and stuff.

Last week, we got together on the weekend and started an impromptu tournament. You can watch the whole thing here, including a bonus hour or so of Money Idol Exchanger. However, that's probably pretty boring to watch, so let's just skip to the extra-hype final game:

So yeah, we play a lot of Windjammers, and are constantly analyzing the game to learn its hidden depths and perfect our technique. I'm spearheading putting together a strategy guide for the game that contains detailed explanations about how to pull off all of the various moves, analysis of strategy for each character, descriptions of each court, and more. Needless to say, I'm way into Windjammers.

However, recently, we've been playing at school to relieve stress as the pressure before finals builds. Since my school is a nerd school for nerds, we have a big "LAN Party" event each semester near the end where people play a lot of local games, ranging from Smash to Dota 2 to Hearthstone to Artemis. We didn't think to book a room in time for the party, so we just started a tournament up in the middle of the open lab area, near my team's work space. This is the crowd that drew around the final game:

The players in the tournament consisted of both seasoned veterans as well as new blood. Off-camera, people were walking up and learning the basics of windjamming. Behind us, as you can see in the webcam feed on the stream, was a group of people playing the new Smash Bros. game. That crowd thinned out as more and more people came over to see what all this fuss about this old-looking video game was. It was amazing.

The entire tournament can be viewed here, but really, it's all about the final match, where the silver medalist from the previous tournament (Der Hui) went up against someone who was completely new to the game and only played as the previously thought-to-be-worthless-in-the-current-meta G.SCOTT (Dan) and, well... you'll have to see for yourself:

(We'll definitely get a better audio setup next time we do one of these, I know the audio is screeching and horrible. We have plural audio engineers in the League now.)

But yeah, I just thought that out of all of the Internet, the Giant Bomb community would most appreciate several videos of dudes playing highly-competitive Windjammers. If you want to see more windjamming in the future, hit up the Twitch account I made specifically for the Northwest Windjamming League. Also, if you're in the greater Seattle area (specifically Redmond) and are down to jam, we can probably work something out, too. If you attend the Redmond campus of DigiPen Institute of Technology, look forward to a Windjammers Club next semester.

People talking shit about Giant Bomb's hiring decisions are crazy. I don't know what website they've been visiting for the past few years, because for me, Giant Bomb has been nothing short of incredible. With all the shit they've been through, the decisions they've made... they have my utmost trust and respect, and have proven time and again that they are honest, silly until it's time to become serious, and just generally all-around amazing. There is no other website I trust more on the entire Internet, and Google knows the path I walk to school every day and has noticed recently that I've been catching rides with my friends and has started giving me driving time estimates instead of walking time estimates.

Keep on being amazing Giant Bomb!

That really sums the whole thing up. "Judging a game by its not-even-final cover."