Superbus

WOW. I did NOT expect someone on this forum - which skews late-teens, early-20s - to come up with the original Macross. I got into anime in my late-teens, so it was relatively late that I caught the first real "holy SHIT" scene in my fandom of it, but it still sticks with me as the most memorable. It's an older anime, but this is a major spoiler, so behind a cut it goes, but it was from my first real anime: Fushigi Yuugi. It's still painful to watch. [spoiler=Major Fushigi Yuugi fight scene]

Neither Dragon's Crown nor Gravity Rush is a PSP game. They're Vita games.

The concerns with pine tar are that a pitcher might get a bit of extra bite on a breaking pitch. Big whoop. The concern with PEDs is that they're illegal - actually illegal - and are completely against physiology, force kids to make decisions about their bodies that they're not ready to make, and unnaturally prolong the career of the athlete using them with a lot of damage to their bodies in the long run. It's much like how we're just finding out now that - surprise! - people who do a job that requires being hit repeatedly in the head (football player, boxer, hockey enforcer) leads to dementia! Wheeeeee! Now imagine that football player being 40 pounds heavier and .3 seconds in a 40 yard dash faster than he would be normally. Imagine a boxer able to hit that much harder (see: Paquiao vs. Marquez IV). Imagine a hockey player going that much harder into the boards, and then fighting with that much more strength. That's the difference between "ow, I'm hurt" and being legitimately injured, possibly killed.

When I was young, when I wasn't listening to just what was being played - a LOT of Elton John and Gordon Lightfoot in my house - I listened to rap music. I was born in 1980, so this places me right in the beginning of the New Jack Swing era. I also tended to listen to a lot of pop. As I hit my teens, like a lot of people my age, I went back and forth between rap (though I was growing increasingly tired of some of the blatant misogyny and other crap that was coming out; this was when G-Funk came about) and alternative rock. This is when Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots were hot, Green Day just came out with Dookie, and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains was what we listened to when we wanted to show we had "cred" with the music geeks. Then I found Zeppelin. That was almost a life-changing experience. That was what I listened to throughout most of my later teens. Since then, my tastes tend to go back and forth between rock, rap, and lately, a lot of electronica and other music that can best be described as a fusion of sorts. That's what's fun about music lately, is that a lot of it betrays standard labels. My listening tastes careen between extremes day by day; one day, it could be Bon Iver, then it could be old Wu-Tang Clan, then it'll go towards Grum, then Bob Segar, Sally Shapiro, Danger Mouse, Daft Punk, really old Journey albums... it goes on and on. I don't like a genre as much as I like a general sound, which I can't really describe because I don't have the music knowledge to do so, but I generally like harmonies, on the lower end of the spectrum, with a lot of guitar harmony and even some piano rock. I also prefer no vocals for the most part, especially in my more electronic music.

Check out a game called Brave Story: New Traveler. You'll have to find the physical copy because licensing issues forced XSeed to take down the digital version, but it's worth it. Another solid JRPG. You can pick up the game for about $20 on eBay, give or take.

It should be noted that on the Red Sox, they have someone (Buchholz) who was also guilty of using pine tar once. Others use it, too. It's an almost open secret, as long as you at least try to hide it. Pineda, after being nailed two starts ago, went out there and did everything but wear a neon sign saying "I AM SHITTING MAPLE TREE SAP". That's really why he got nailed; he made a mockery of the game. As someone described it aptly, this wasn't drinking in the freshman dorm, this was rolling a keg past the RA's room and inviting him up for a pint. This would be the PED equivalent of having an 0 for 4 night, and then coming out of the bathroom stall during the post-game reporter scrum with a needle sticking out of your ass while holding a vial that says "STEROIDS" with Lance Armstrong's smiling face on it.

Sex is natural. Watching other people have sex can be an aphrodisiac. So yeah, it's natural, and sometimes fun. However, I will state that the nature of my porn watching has changed as I've aged, and gotten more experienced in life, in sex, etc. Simply put, pornography - especially the modern kind, which is mostly "gonzo", POV trash - is so ridiculous that it's almost impossible to get off to it unless you're really young and haven't seen - or had - much sex. Simply put, people don't fuck like that, and it's gotten to the point where most of what's out there seems to be there either to laugh at or satisfy the desires of truly depraved people. It also doesn't help that people who grow up - at even younger ages than I was - seeing porn have a completely bass-ackwards way of viewing sex because of it. Poor ladies.

Stalin wasn't communist. Maybe he was Communist, but not communist.

Drinking. Stronger and longer, every year. Such is life in your mid-30s.

There are a few reasons for this: 1) There's a difference between winning big and running up the score. As a coach, if I'm winning big, I'm putting in my lower units; I coached hockey, so that'd basically be my third and fourth lines. "Running up the score" is leaving the starters in, and letting them run roughshod in a game that's already decided. It's disrespectful. In football (soccer), the story's different, because you only get three subs and goal differential is often used as a tiebreaker. 2) If someone's running up the score on me, and being a dick about it, when I played, there was a very real, visceral possibility for violence. Some knucklehead thinking "oh, you just celebrated your fifth goal? Ok, let's see what happens when you turn your back". It gets people hurt. By the way: when I played, I was that knucklehead. 3) Some leagues actually have rules against running up the score. In Connecticut, every game where one team wins by 50 or more points in American Football gets the coach suspended the next game unless it can be definitively proven that the points were accidental (I.E.; on a safety, or some other mishap). That has unintended consequences of its own.

Irregardless of the sociological debates going on,we have a hard reality to consider: 1) Fuck 2016; the Republicans are likely taking over the Senate. Lame duck presidents rarely get anything done in the first place; now, Obama's going to be fighting against a Republican house loaded with teabaggers, and a Senate that's going to be resurgent. He's going to have to have his veto pen ready... 2) Don't think that Hillary Clinton is going to be a savior for democrats. Not only does she not have some of the advantages that Barack Obama had - she'll be 69 on Inauguration Day - but she also has a bit of a tortured history with liberal activists in her own party (the Iraq vote comes to mind). Not quite to the degree that Romney had a problem with the teabaggers, but it's not insignificant. 3) The election will not be decided by the principal parties who are running. What will decide it is simply this: post-midterms, how much influence will the tea party have? If they still have a strong influence like they did in 2012, where they basically cost Mitt Romney the election by costing him the middle, then Hillary will win the election. If, however, conservatives can get behind a proverbial "RINO" who is a bit more towards the centre - someone like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie - then I think the GOP will win. That's very bad news for social liberals, because even when the teabaggers got into power after 2010, it wasn't the economy they attacked; it was anything involving women's rights, in the name of Jesus.

Honestly? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Our experiences sitting around an Atari 2600 and NES were just as salient as the memories of modern children sitting around the PS3. If you were born in 1980 like I was, you will react to our games the same way you did to yours. The only real difference is that models are so realistic now - whether they're based on reality or just a better visualization of fantasy - that there's not as much imagination required to enjoy the setup of today's games; I.E.; chances are good that the image we had in our mind's eye is not being replicated by modern technology, or just placed in it before today's kids even know what they want to imagine. But honestly, to simulate that, we had the instruction manuals. Check out the comic that came out with Yars' Revenge (http://atariage.com/comics/comic_thumbs.html?MagazineID=48), and then reconcile that with the actual game. Our imagination turned what was in that comic into what was on the screen. That's about the only real difference, and thinking back, I would have been blown away by today's games. It was simply unfathomable. But that doesn't cheapen the memories any bit.

Those tabletop games were overrated. If you were player 2, you played the game upside-down. Many a bar did I go in as a kid where I had to play on those things to keep from being bored out of my mind. In my case, Donkey Kong was a stand-up - one of my first memories was standing on a crate to play at a pizza parlour - but I ended up playing Pac-Man on a tabletop often. Going through this thread is amazing. There was a time when I would laugh when someone would say their first game, or first JRPG, was, say, Final Fantasy VII. Now kids are saying things like Pokemon Ruby. I was in high school when Red and Blue came out! 2003, I was in my last year in the US Navy! On this page, someone's first game was Crash Bandicoot. I was getting hickeys by that point! But what's funny is this: Crash is one of his favourite games of all time, to this day. It's not mine, despite the fact that it's objectively a superior game to Super Mario Bros., which was my favourite game when I was a young child and is still one of my own favourites, and what I still call the greatest game of all time.

You're telling me. :P

Path of Radiance will almost surely go *up* in price as it becomes more rare. On the other hand, Skyrim is almost guaranteed to go on sale eventually. Likely for not much money if Steam decides to throw a huge sale. I'd get Path of Radiance and then wait out Skyrim, especially if you're playing on PC.

Donkey Kong, 1982 or '83.

I'm firmly in the "I don't get the big deal" camp, personally. It was described to me as "like Terraria, but better", but... I dunno.

Here's a question, and forgive me if I'm not going through 200 pages to find the answer: Let's say I have two identical Pokemon; for the sake of argument, Fennekin. They both start at Lv. 1. Same skills, same nature, same everything. Carbon copies. One Fennekin, I gain some levels with it, and gradually EV train it along the way. He hits full EVs at Lv. 50. The second one, I EV train it all the way to 520, before it even gains a level. They both gain the same number of EVs across the board. Will that second Fennekin be stronger, stat-wise, than the first when it hits 50?

This will happen over and over, well into adulthood. Move on, and find a new woman. You will be shocked at how easy it is once you find someone with a spark. EDIT: By the way, if you don't think these roles will be reversed at some point in your life, you're naive.

Ding.

There will always be a market for players that like our style of games. Even if they're not attached to the licenses that we want them to be - for example, if there ever does come a day where the shareholders and money whores win, and we can pay $.99 for Mario to jump just a little higher - the games will be there. They will be made by people like us, who grew up in a better time, and they will be glorious because they will be true love letters to us and our screed. Think about it this way: all those platformers my generation grew up with? They weren't altruistic. They were formulated to cash in on the people that liked Mario but beat all those games. The JRPGs that most of the guys here grew up with, particularly the FESSers? Again, a lot of them were paint-by-numbers by the time the PS2 came along. Again, just cash-ins by people with no imagination. In the end, the cream rose to the top. No one will remember FarmVille for being anything more than a fad, but Bravely Default will live forever. It's the same from my younger days; everyone remembers Mario. No one remembers Joe & Mac.

If you really think about it, the days of the publisher are kind of going by the wayside. At least temporarily. It used to be, if you didn't have a publisher, you were screwed. Hell, on the XBox, that's still the case - check out what happened to FarSight Studios regarding Pinball Arcade - but Steam, indie bundles, even Desura to a smaller extent, and guys like Jonathan Blow and Markus Persson have more or less destroyed the notion that publishers are necessary anymore; the cream rises to the top now. Nowadays, games being published tend to suck, because those publishers are only going to take on something in their niche (smaller guys like XSEED fall into this category) or are guaranteed to sell because they're so mainstream that you can see the numbers coming through the paint. Some companies like Squeenix are trying to get around that with their little indie game "support" program, but fans can see right through that. The problem is that there's now a lot more crap to sift through; for every few great games being released, ho boy are there some turds, some of which are even in a complete state (I'm not a fan of "Early Access"). But the difference between now and, say, 1983, is that we have a lot more ways to get the crap out of the way. In '83, games were being sold only in big-box retailers, who were throwing everything they could onto their shelves to take advantage of a fad, and the magazines of the time - the only way to see what was good and what wasn't - were outright bought up by companies; the articles in a lot of them might as well have been advertisements in and of themselves. Now, the internet can tell us if a game is good or not with a quick search, and simply put, there's too much content to be able to bomb Google to get rid of it. "Indie" is going to become the new normal, if it isn't already.

Oh my God, you have no fucking idea. Everything you love and hate will change probably five times before you graduate high school. Enjoy it.

Forgive me if I haven't followed the thread at large, but I have to respond to the notion that this will be "the worst" generation of gaming. It's a noxious notion, because people who think that are only judging based on the games that they can see at GameStop. They're judging wholly on AAA. In that realm, things aren't nice. Online-only games that lose their capabilities the moment the hosting company - who won't allow servers, of course - deem it no longer financially valid (and this ins't just EA, Nintendo just effectively killed Dragon Quest IX), DRM on PC games, everyone wanting you to install *their* Steam-like software to play their games, even on Steam (Ubisoft's UPlay and EA's Origin), and the fact that every game is basically the same stupid shit over and over... yeah. AAA sucks. Even analysts are saying that. And on the other end of that spectrum is the freemium, pay-to-win garbage. The less said about that mess, the better. But have you even looked at the indie scene? What about the wonderful software on the 3DS? The increasingly nice software on the Vita, most of which can be had for free via PS+? Unless you're into sports games - at which point, you either like Football Manager or you're basically EA's bitch - then you have an embarrassment of riches. Like Fire Emblem? There's a cool Steam game called Unity of Command that was just 75% off. SRPGs in general? There are two new Shadowrun campaigns out, they're $15 each. Racing games? Sonic Transformed and ModNation Racers Road Tour are free on PS+ if you own a Vita, and Little Racers STREET is less than $7. Into retro? Double Dragon Neon was just released for Steam for $10, and I think the PS3 game is free on Plus. All that, and I've still spent less than I would h ave for that shitty new Castlevania game. I have a Steam library of 500+ games. The vast majority of them were well less than $60, most of them below $30. My average purchase is about $10, maybe less due to sales. Even PSN is getting good with sales - check out this week's amazing list - so unless you only want to play the big games, the amazing games are out there, they're not expensive, and they provide hours of fun and are constantly updated. By the way, since you all are talking about it: I believe Spec Ops is still free on PSN.

That's not a gaming problem, that's a "intimidated to try new things" problem. You've said yourself you're more social than you used to be. I'm going to guess you're late-teens, early 20s. Just... do things. Go for drives. You're still figuring things out, so do what you can, while you have the time and ability, to do just that. Make some mistakes.