And it's still going to sell. A lot. Because it's the XBox.

--- edit ---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWgUO-Rqcw

Watching these people die inside makes me die inside OH WAIT I ALREADY AM DEAD INSIDE.

I want a company that has a CEO that just shows up at some press conference and starts... doing anything. Something amazing. Something blazingly retarded. I don't care. Just something that requires an actual soul to accomplish.

When talking about Steam, intent matters. Steam's original motivation was easy patch distribution for Valve's games, and this kind of evolved into easy/cheap distribution in general.

Also, crucially, Steam still validates games if you AREN'T online.

Oh hey it uses Metro still. Remember that time the XBox was a touch-enabled device!!

MAYBE I JUST LIKE FRUIT.

REMEMBER WHEN YOU USED TO BUY GAMES INSTEAD OF PERMISSION TO PLAY THEM THAT SURE WAS NEAT.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSJSSs9CeSQ

Attractive middle-aged men eating fruit is the new youtube sensation.

... Actually it's not but it should be.

1. All of my coworkers' kids have severe allergies. Weird, really specific allergies. And a lot of them.

I wonder if they actually have allergies, or just overreacting parents.

2. Beyond that communication with my boss is brickwalling pretty hard lately. I can't follow his logic on anything and his English skills have gotten considerably worse than when I started working there. I didn't actually DO anything at work today because getting information on what to do is... contradictory at worst and insane at best.

I think I'm getting panic attacks too. Last hour or so of work was... odd. I went to McDonalds after I left and got some oatmeal and was just really, really out of it. Maybe it was the lack of sleep last night. Maybe something else. I don't know.

Just noticed this too, but I feel like the trial music in CT is giving a bit of a nod to, uh, the Trial from The Wall.

David Bowie - Subterraneans for the last couple of days.

Low's about the only think that makes sense to me right now.

Oh christ, the last generation of consoles only had 512 megs of ram? What the HELL? Why? RAM is cheap. RAM doesn't give off a lot of heat.

The thing I found offputting about BoF1 and 2 is that a lot of magic is just hardcoded not to work on bosses. It mandates grinding, because you really CAN'T do anything in boss battles besides attack and heal. Meanwhile, AP restoring items in both games are rare enough that using magic outside of bosses is not a good idea.

It's the same kind of incoherent anti-design that plagued a lot of early JRPGs (Phantasy Star 2 comes to mind).

Sort of want Power Stone 1 or 2 but the AI is really bad and hoodafuq I gonna Dreamcast with?

Chrono Trigger - Beat Magus. Magus battle was considerably more interesting than Flea or Slash. Except it still falls into a really simple attack/heal loop, especially in the second part of the fight where Magus starts casting Dark Matter. You get the pattern down, there's no challenge, and it's just repetition. Still, I can see why the 12-year-old me loved the game: watching Crono fly up into the air, hair swaying, as Marle bathes him in ice magic is really kind of inspiring.

In retrospect this is also probably a lot better than what most JRPGs had back then too. There's probably a reason why I don't generally like JRPGs from before the 32-bit era...

Man though wrt the soul food comment, I think that makes sense for a lot of people, but for me, when I was actually into the OLD FF games, I didn't like FFIX, and by the time I LIKED FFIX, I'd really lost interest in older, traditional fantasy jarpegs.

---edit---

So maybe another way of looking at it is this: Stylistically, for me, it's not so much a return to a cherished style from a bygone era, but rather RPG classicism informed by modern sensibilities. Actively working within a set style while moving away from some of the execution-related problems that hampered the full exploitation of that style's potential.

Actually maybe that kid of mindset is what's driving demakes, too. If you think of them less as minimalist re-interpretations and more as remakes of games that never existed...

It's still, to me, a question of when you hit a certain point where it's no longer feasible to actually make use of all the hardware can do. I think that consoles are at that point.