Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Samopoznanie

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 15
1
I would have to say Ayla. Not because of her lack of central involvement with the plot (a fair point), but because her primitive language doesn't doesn't have the same flexibility as the other characters'. The rest of the cast's dialogue is more or less plain english with subtle stylistic quirks (Frog's occasional medieval-isms, Marle's enthusiasm, Magus's brooding reflections). Which works great, as you can capture different moods and humour easily and still give them individual voices. Ayla, you're more restricted in how well you can express things as it has to be in cave[wo]man speak.

Interesting to see Crono as the runner up -- I guess silent protagonists are going out of fashion these days?  He was always a favourite of mine (after Frog), precisely because so much of his personality was left to your own imagination. The amount of creative license you had as far as what Crono was thinking or saying, combined with the clever use of sprites that Bekkler mentioned... I thought it worked great.

2
General Discussion / Re: Secret of Mana Character Popularity Poll
« on: June 21, 2011, 09:18:33 pm »
Mana was fantastic... It was the reason I bought a multi-tap for my SNES back in the day!  For an RPG as opposed to a sports game, go figure. 

I had to vote for Neko.  Classic bit character.

3
Chrono News / Re: Rare Moment: Radical Dreamers on YAJ
« on: June 18, 2011, 09:48:43 am »
Wow.... super cool. :shock:

$570 CDN at the moment... not bad!

4
Chrono / Gameplay Casual Discussion / Re: Was Chrono Cross too easy ?
« on: June 16, 2011, 10:40:57 am »
As I recall, any easiness was balanced out by the muddled storytelling in the second half of the game... I remember being quite confused at times, when I first played through it!

5
Wow - that Black Sigil game totally slipped under my radar. I'm going to have to head to Amazon after making this post.  Encounter rate be damned -- I grew up on the original Dragon Warrior for NES, and Albert Odyssey: Legend of Eldean was one of my favourite games on the Saturn.  The nostalgia gamer in me would buy this just for the graphics.  Thanks for the heads-up!

6
General Discussion / Re: 2011 Summer reading list
« on: March 04, 2011, 05:16:21 pm »
^^^ Sorry about that, Ramsus -- didn't realize!  I can blab for ages about books...

Of the ones I mentioned,  I'd suggest Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins for fiction, and Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House by Richard Reeves for non-fiction. 

7
General Discussion / Re: 2011 Summer reading list
« on: March 04, 2011, 12:39:25 am »
Good idea for a topic, keen to see others' suggestions.  

Fiction:
Quote
Kangaroo by Yuz Aleshkovsky.

Fan Fanych receives a call to report to the KGB. They've matched his profile to an unsolved crime, and plan to find him guilty in a showtrial as a means of diverting public attention from political realities. The crime? The rape and murder of a kangaroo named Gemma, in a St Petersburg zoo, known only to have taken place somewhere between the years 1789 and 1905 (i.e. the French and [first] Russian Revolutions). Sort of like a warped film noir satire, with hilariously crude language.
Quote
Death And the Penguin by Andrei Kurkov

Black humour at its finest, with a few touching scenes and phrases to make you half-grimace, half-smile. Viktor is a failed short story writer who lives with his adopted king penguin, Misha, in the chaotic scene of mid 1990s Ukraine. He gets a job writing obituaries for a newspaper and becomes unwittingly involved with the Mob.
Quote
Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje.

At the time I read this, I had spent the previous two years working at hospitals and old folks homes. The poetic language and themes of nameless victims of war [patients], and the main character's struggle to give a face to Sailor, a single casualty in a nation of ghosts and dying men really struck me.
Quote
Jitterbug Perfume, and Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins.

One of my favourite authors. I don't think I'd ever had such a vivid sense of colour and scents from a novel as Jitterbug Perfume.  Roadside Attraction is my favourite of the two. Playful and philosophical, quotable... kind of like post-Beatnik adventure stuff. Hard to describe quickly.

Non-Fiction:
Quote
Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House by Richard Reeves

This is a great biography of Nixon – for me, one of the most interesting Presidents of the 20th century. Well-written. What makes it unique is that all of Nixon’s dialogue is taken straight from the White House Tapes. Every word he says in this book is straight from his own mouth.
Quote
Battlecry of Freedom by James M. Mcpherson

The title may make you wince, but give the author a break - this was written in the days before Bush turned ‘freedom’ into a bad word. This is a great, captivating history of the US Civil War. It reads like a novel. It’s something like 900-pages, but you can blaze through it.
Quote
An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison

I experienced a depression that lasted about two years in my late teens / early twenties... This memoir by a psychologist, reflecting on her experience with bi-polar was like a wakeup call. Thoughtful and interesting.
 

8
Sad news.  I wasn't terribly familiar with the site, having only downloaded a couple of things over the years.  But the layout and depth / variety of content were fantastic.  The only time I ever tried my hand at things was back when one of the RPG Maker games was released for Playstation, and I just got nowhere with it.  I'm still wow'ed by the quality of some of the fan-made content out there.  Never would've imagined such a vibrant indie scene back in 1995. 

I'll have to put aside some time to dig through the site and check out some of the cooler looking stuff on there before it closes down.

9
General Discussion / Re: Video Game Discussion Thread
« on: February 20, 2011, 05:47:21 pm »
I just ordered a copy of Radiant Historia.  After the disappointment that was Sands of Destruction (which I pre-ordered ASAP), I was kind of hesitant to fork out the full price before taking things for a test drive or consulting in depth reviews.   I've never been a big fan of Atlus outside of the Ogre Battle series, but I like what I've seen and read so far. And it will probably be one of the last big DS titles before the 3DS hits the market. That, and Dragon Quest VI was $15 more expensive.  :picardno

10
General Discussion / Re: Quote Digest
« on: February 14, 2011, 02:48:36 am »
Quote from: Richard Nixon, in 1971
‎"Homosexuality, dope, and immorality are the basic enemies of a strong society, and that's why the Russians are pushing it here, in order to destroy us."
One of my favourite political leaders when it comes to quoteable -isms.  :lol:

11
It's a tough call for me.  The look of the original will never be outdone for me, as far as the CT franchise goes.  But as a few people mentioned, just the Dragon Ball fatigue in the last decade or so... It would be hard to shake the association.  I remember when I first got the PS re-release, and the cutscenes just frustrated me.  Same with the look of the Dragon Quest re-releases on DS.

On the other hand, I wasn't a big fan of CC's look.  Out of the whole grand cast there were maybe 4 or 5 characters that I liked the look (and personality) of.  I thought they did do a good job of re-creating some of the old characters and locales (Ozzy, Slash, Flea, the world map graphic) while giving it a new feel though.  I'm sure they could find a good balance between new 3D graphics and the original game, without going for the pokey-haired Toriyama look. I just hope they'd avoid the zippers look that's dogged the FF series for years now. 

I do like the idea of a cel-shaded take on things, I think it could really bring out the vibrant sense of colour that made CT stand out for me, visually, at the time it was released.

12
General Discussion / Re: Stuff you LOVE, baby
« on: February 11, 2011, 04:16:26 am »
^^^ I agree with both of you. Especially if you're stuck in the city, a hot summer day can be just gross... reason to stay inside with the blinds closed and a fan on. I always liked this quote as far as -isms about the weather go.
Quote
"Autumn, season of dying nature, of melancholy, of seeking the past, was best for writing obituaries. Winter, joyous in itself - bracing frost, snow sparkling in the sun - was good for living." ~ Andrei Kurkov, 'Death And The Penguin'

13
General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: January 29, 2011, 04:46:05 am »
Quote from: Lord J

How do you reconcile the apparent likelihood that test-taking is also a vehicle to education? How do you respond to the fact that failing a test, or otherwise bombing on an assignment, can still generate an educational effect? Do you think grading should be reformed to reflect this, or not? If so, how?
For me, I have very mixed feelings on tests, as it takes a particular sort of student to perform well under pressure and a short time-span.  In one case last year, one of my best students had slow and borderline illegible handwriting.  It was very difficult to grade him accurately, and so I suggested that he approach disabilities services to get permission to type his exams.  I had done the same in high school, because I have very slow handwriting.  He did, and the university turned him down because they demanded a doctor's note and a fee of a couple hundred dollars.  It's tough to deal with these things sometimes...

I like the idea of having different options for how to compose the grade. I.E. having the choice of written or oral exams, or the alternative of a few essays. That can accommodate peoples different strengths while still testing their knowledge.  

If there are to be tests,  I would prefer that there be many of them, worth relatively little. I.E. bi-weekly ones,  to make sure that people are keeping up with things and that concepts / facts are sticking.  I've taken a few language classes like this (French, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian), and it does a good job of reinforcing things.  

I'm opposed to reforming the grading system to accomodate failure though. This is what they've done in high schools in my home province: percentile grades were eliminated in 2003, replaced with letters.  'F' was not one of them; the lowest is 'S' for 'Some progress'. Likewise, the most negative comment teachers can choose from now is "Needs Improvement". The only way a student could fail is if they didn't hand in the work. Increasingly, the logic behind the schoolboard seems to be, "Johnny can't read, but he sure feels good about himself!"  

:picardno

By modifying things to avoid competition or failure,  you end up hurting the brightest students, some of whom lose interest out of boredom. Failing is no fun, to be sure. I've still got the F on my transcript from bombing Calculus in my freshman year. But it's part of life, not just in school but outside of it.  If someone doesn't like to fail, then they should try harder, not just take satisfaction in the praise they get for making the effort.

But I do think that the grading system could be given more flexibility to focus more on what knowledge kids have taken in,  rather than investing 45% of the grade on an exam that only tests one outlet for expression.

14
Welcome / Birthday / Seeya! Forum / Re: I'm old today.
« on: January 22, 2011, 02:12:49 pm »
Happy Belated.

26 isn't so bad.  I found 20 to be much worse, myself.  Back then it was like the shock of getting old - "Holy shit, I've been around two decades!".  Nowadays at 26 though, you'll be able to invoke your great age for the purposes of nostalgia  ("Ah, back in the 90s..." "That is soooo 1993..." etc), and patronizing those who were born after the wall fell, who can't remember a day when there wasn't a family computer in the house. ("Why, when I was your age...")

Now 30, there's a number I'm terrified of.  :shock:

15
General Discussion / Re: Video Game Discussion Thread
« on: January 22, 2011, 02:03:09 pm »
Do any of you  guys play 'warcraft'?
I did, back when it first came out for PC... but then I'm showing my age there.  :shock:

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 15