At the moment, I'm playing Dark Souls (360) and Forza Motorsport 4.


Dark Souls is a pretty good game let down by a few technical issues.
There is an issue with it chugging, such as in the New Londo Ruins on the bridges leading to the ghosts, but it hasn't ruined the game for me (installing doesn't solve this, but I can't say if it's worse without installing as I install whatever I'm playing).
There's also some iffy modelling and collision detection leading to floating rubble (not a physics enabled object, just poor placement) and to my character getting stuck at times (trying to climb up to the nest to get back to the undead asylum for example).
If you're one to rage quit, stay away from Dark Souls as you will die quite a lot, though that didn't bother me too much as you don't lose anything as long as you can get back to where you died without dying again.


I started out as a knight for the higher HP and the knights armour, but after a while, I decided to roll a new character (killing the merchant by accident also contributed to this decision) and created a thief for the master key item (for the few doors I've found that it works on) as well as the tiny persons ring.
I've been more successful with my second character as he's now a knight \ archer using the drake sword to one shot pretty much anything weaker a Balder type enemy.
I need to get some better armour for him (currently using black leather and chain mail), but I know exactly where to get it as my other character already has it (Elite Knight armour).


Forza 4 is pretty much Forza 3 on steroids with better graphics and the calender based career mode swapped out for a world tour system.
The guy they got to do the voice work for the game makes some of the stuff in Autovista sound pretty dull, though.
Definitely better than Gran Tourismo 5 in my opinion (I've owned GT5 and it just didn't feel like they finished parts of it).

It depends on the PSU really.
If your system wasn't built as a gaming machine, there's a good chance that your PSU will be some crappy generic piece of tat that's not really going to be well suited to feeding a decent graphics card.
My system, for example, only came with a GeForce GT 420, which isn't designed for gaming (runs Dead Island on high setting pretty well, but cries at the thought of running games like Champions Online or Deus Ex: HR with anything near), but the rest of my system is fairly decent (2.8Ghz i5 with 6GiB of DDR3).
Because it's not powering a good graphics card, my PSU is some weedy little box of crap that only pumps out around 250W, which isn't enough to power, say, an AMD Radeon 6850, which needs at least a 500W PSU.


Your best bet would be to open your system, find out how much power your PSU can pump out and what connectors it has.


Also, while I'm here...
Does anyone know if the XFX AMD Radeon 6850 or 6870 are any good?
I'm planning on buying a new graphics card and PSU between now and early 2012, but I don't want to spend more than about £200-£210 on the graphics card and £70 on the PSU.
Also, yes, I know about AMD's iffy numbering system (6870 is below 5870 and such).

Edit: The main bad guy in The Iron Man 2 is played by John Romero and he is an evil russian with a grudge going back to the 60s cold war again.

Wait, what?
Ivan Vanko A.K.A. Whiplash (the ugly Russian one) is played by Mickey Rourke and Justin Hammer (the American douche with power armour that forces your spine out of your ass) is played by Sam Rockwell.


I own both Iron Man movies on Blu-Ray (1 from when I owned a PS3 and 2 because the triple-play version with all the extra features was cheaper than the 2 disc DVD version O_o) and although there's been some hate towards them, I liked them, though I thought Iron Man 1 suffered a bit by being lumbered with the origin stuff (because we need to see inside his boots to understand that he can fly using a magic bullshit generator mounted in his chest!).
Downey is pretty much perfect for the role of Tony Stark, and I'm hoping that The Avengers will be good and that if Marvel \ Disney (ugh!) does any more later on, they don't throw random characters in to please the drooling masses (no, you can't have Deadpool in there, or Wolverine damnit!).

X-Men: First Class.  It sucked.

It was pretty hilarious though.  Other than the acting (McAvoy, Fassbender, and Bacon [to a lesser extent] were all great), it was a godawful movie.  I got some chuckles though; especially seeing how bad Beast looked.  I kept waiting for him to start howling and playing basketball.

My friends and I would laugh every single time it started playing the ominous music behind Erik and Raven's speechifying.  "If I were you, I wouldn't change a thing."  DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN.  Man, he's so evil.

What a crappy movie.  I'm genuinely shocked that it's getting such praise.

It's like the movie was both too much and too little at the same time.  It was too much in the sense that they threw everything at the wall; all kinds of characters, powers, motivations, war plots, etc.  But so little of it stuck, and what it ended up seeming like was a veritable checklist:  we have to make sure we explain Cerebro, we have to explain why Raven goes with Erik, why Xavier's in a wheelchair, why Erik has the helmet, etc.  None of it seemed necessary, and some of the mutants they chose were, quite frankly, ridiculous.  I guess it was mostly Darwin and Angel that I had a beef with, but Azazel was stupid too (but then again, if Nightcrawler wasn't so well known, I'd probably think he was dumb as well).

For the most part, the actors were good enough to carry it, but the script was pretty awful.  The story moved far too fast; the movie never really felt like a movie.  It was pretty much montage climax montage climax montage.  I wouldn't say you get to know any character very well at all, certainly not enough to like ANY of them except perhaps Xavier, and I'd still say 95% of that was due to McAvoy's fantastic acting.  Patrick Stewart should be proud.

Everything was rushed; same problem with X-Men: The Last Stand.  I'd say this is barely better.  A two star movie at the absolute most.

You know, after seeing all the reviews of First Class, I was eager to see it, but now that I have, I'd have to agree with most of this.


Magneto probably comes off the best out of this movie as it paints him as someone doing bad things with good intentions.
With First Class, Magneto was obviously supposed to fill the role that Wolverine did in the other films as the "go it alone" bad ass type who learns the value of teamwork and friendship, and other than the scenes where he's using his powers for stuff like levitating submarines, there's little difference between them in terms of writing.


Xavier was pretty decent, but Austin Powers kept doing a happy dance inside my head every time he started calling things "groovy" >:[


Mystique was... well... pretty much a younger version of Mystique from the other movies in terms of looks, which means more red oil slick hair and almost boobs, but they seemed to use her shape shifting less than in the rest of the movies, where she was more bad ass (still waiting for the "glue bits of rubber over actress' boobs" job opening o_o).


Moira MacTaggart goes from being a SCOTTISH geneticist with a mutant son, to being an American (played by an Australian) CIA agent, despite the fact that she's clearly back to her usual medical faffing in canonically later films (though I'll avoid ranting about Last Stand and how Prof. X wouldn't have his voice in another man's body... BLARGH!).


January Jones as Emma Frost... Well, at least she looks decent enough, but they could have easily used a cardboard cut out and saved some cash.
Also, Magneto can damage her diamond form with generic bits of hollow metal from a bed... WTF?
Emma Frost's diamond form is supposed to be nigh on indestructible unless she's hit between the eyes with a diamond or something harder such as adamantium, so strangling her wouldn't cause her neck to crack :/


Beast was one of the good things about Last Stand as it was pretty much like transplanting Beast from the cartoon into live action.
In Last Stand, he lacks most of his physical attributes prior to turning blue (didn't McCoy have enlarged hands and slightly longer arms as well as he was supposed to be more ape like, becoming more feline later on) and his enhanced form didn't sit with me as well as his more human form from Last Stand.
Also, with First Class being a prequel to the other X-Men movies, it kind of screws up as McCoy is shown in his human guise in X2: X-Men United, but I'll get to that later.
Also, a general Beast question: If he's such a genius, why did McCoy never test out his cure before using it on himself?
That's like inventing a cure for cancer, using it, and then complaining when it turns everyone into flesh eating monsters.


Banshee and Angel Salvadore (NOT the mutant code named Angel) are only in it so that they can include aerial combat scenes and panty shots (seriously, Salvadore starts as a stripper, MacTaggart strips off to get into the Hell Fire Club, Emma Frost's outfit is basically a bra and stockings and Mystique does what she's done in all the X-Men movies and decides she doesn't need clothes at all as a few strategically placed scales will do).


Darwin... Now I actually laughed at Darwin.
Darwin was black and the first X-Man to die... I know that shouldn't be funny, but with his power being evolution, I could only think "I've seen this movie and the black guy dies first!"... Yeah, I'm going to hell for watching David Duchovny movies.


Havok was only in First Class because they wanted to use Cyclops without actually using Cyclops.
Both Havok and Cyclops have the same sort of powers (technically, Havok fires plasma instead of concussive energy, but he usually uses his powers for the same effect) and both need some kind of bolt on piece of equipment to use their powers properly (Cyclops constantly fires massive eye beams of death without his visor while Havok just looks more retarded using his powers in the movie without his power management guff).


In First Class, Beast designs both the Blackbird and Cerebro, but in X-Men, Xavier says that Magneto helped him to build them without so much as a mention of Beast.
Xavier trying to recruit Wolverine adds another plot hole as this is apparently not present in the other X-Men movies where Xavier doesn't seem to know anyrthing about Logan \ James Howitt prior to the X-Men rescuing him and Rogue.
As mentioned, Beast being blue in this movie causes a plot issue with X2, where he's shown in his human form in a cameo on a TV.
In a case of bad writing, as pointed out by Empire, Beast's serum is designed to make mutants look normal without removing their powers, but his powers in the movie basically require that he keeps his monkey feet.
Magneto pulls a sub out of the water while hanging off of the landing gear of the Blackbird, but I'm pretty sure that unless he was levitating the plane as well, it's engines wouldn't allow it to carry so much weight.


Were First Class a full on reboot, the plot issues wouldn't bother me, but it's supposed to be a prequel to X-Men and X2: X-Men United (1, Manchester City: nil... sorry).
From what I've read, Singer wanted to do a reboot, but Fox wanted a prequel, so it ended up being somewhere in the middle and it just doesn't work for me and it ends up more confusing than a reboot would be (Fox wanted a prequel as they thought a reboot would confuse fans... Because comic book fans can't handle reboots, even if we are on about the 90th incarnation of the X-Men for no real reason, unlike DC which devotes entire series to explaining what the hell is going on with Power Girls tits stopping her from being destroyed along with the rest of her universe or whatever).


Also, I am not dead... yet.

Yes, I am kinda necroposting, but who cares :/
I kind of gave up on using a laptop and got a small (ish) tower.

Intel core i5 2.8Ghz quad core (up from a 1.66Ghz Core 2 Duo).
6GiB DDR3 RAM (up from 2GiB DDR2 RAM).
1TiB HDD (up from 250GiB).
More card readers than I'll ever use ._.
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit (I used to use Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit).
Nvidia GeForce GT 420 1GiB (up from a GeForce FX something mobile chip with 128MiB of dedicated and 128MiB of shared RAM).. Not brilliant, I know, but I'll upgrade it I start playing newer PC games.
It would have the same problem as HybridZero's, as although the light on the button is smaller, it has a glowing logo on the front and nice looking glowing lines that fade off towards the back and bottom of the case, but thankfully, they thought of putting a button on the top to turn the lighting off.
I keep my camera and iPhone (3G :[ ) ][/ )]http://i55.tinypic.com/ng6glz.jpg[/img]
The 32in widescreen HDTV I'm using as a monitor at the moment.
Also home to my Wii, 360S and a crappy Sony P90 or whatever that I use as an alarm clock because it's horrible resistive screen hardly works, meaning that by the time I get it to shut up, I'm usually wide awake.
Just out of shot is my old 360, which sadly died not long after the 360S came out, but which was always on it's last legs (fixed 3 times).

- a piece of hardware you own doesn't have proper drivers for linux or is intentionally locked to windows/mac

That can partly be blamed on Microsoft and their support for EFI over ye olde BIOS.
Microsoft does offer Windows with EFI support, but only for 64bit systems, and prior to Windows Vista, it was only for server editions.
Linux and OS X can both use EFI (Apple uses EFI on all Intel Macs), but as Windows is still the biggest OS on desktop systems, it's unlikely that EFI will take over for some time yet.
The big advantage to Linux would be that if enough Windows systems used EFI, the issue over drivers wouldn't really exist as EFI provides a generic layer between the OS and hardware so that any OS that can use EFI can use EFI compliant hardware )it's like having an interpreter to help you in a meeting instead of you buying a book and looking like a dick as you stumble through the translation).

I have Windows 7 Ultimate and I have to say, I've had no real problems with it other than it apparently being hopeless at running Dawn of War 2 as well as Vista did O_o
Other than that, I have to say that Win 7 is impressive (what isn't after ME and Vista? I won't mention XP's ugliness as I might get lynched), which is odd as it reminds me of KDE and KDE annoys me.

If you're just after trying Linux, either a live disc or WUBI install would be a better option than just installing a distro outright as there's less chance of doing any damage.
Having used WUBI before, I would recommend it for trying Linux as it works almost as well as a proper install, but it's easy enough to remove.

Linux has advantages when it comes to system requirements and security, and it's more customizable.
I use a 1.66Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2Gib of DDR2 RAM and Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 Ultimate and although Win7 will happily run most non-gaming stuff (including Epic UDK with a little slow down), Ubuntu does seem somewhat faster.
Ubuntu is my main OS as I find it easier to use for day to day crap, and if I need a random app for something, I can use the software center instead of trawling Google and installing it myself.

Windows 7 is still a very good OS, so if you're comfortable with Windows, you might not have much reason to start using Linux.
My only gripe with Win7 is that Dawn of War 2 doesn't run as well as it did under Vista Home Premium, but Vista is still awful.

I'm playing New Vegas, and it's only crashed once because playing it for almost an entire day tends to make my 360 a little warm.
I have encountered bugs such as getting stuck in the environment, but all Gamebryo based games do that and it's not like Bethesda tech is the only stuff that does this (I've had it happen in Bad Company 2 online, but it didn't stop me from killing a fair number of enemies before being blown up).
There's some really lazy texturing early on in New Vegas where rocks on hills are only half textured and coyote's seem to have a big gash down their chests as the texture doesn't wrap properly, but the only really annoying bug for me thus far is one where NPC's don't show up from time to time unless you leave and re-enter an area (fuck you Snuffles the mole rat and your asthmatic wheezing despite not being anywhere to be seen).
Also, either radscorpions can burrow now, or they like falling through the floor a lot.

P.S.
Can anyone recommend anything decent to download off of Xbox LIVE for 800MSP as my copy of New Vegas came with some free points.

I'm definitely getting New Vegas on Friday, even if it means going out of my way to find a copy.
I've heard it has more Fallout style humor than Fallout 3, which can only be a good thing as Fallout 3 was closer to Oblivion.
At least if it doesn't have horses or whatever, they can't charge you silly prices for some damned horse armor >:[

Well, something has to replace Duke Nukem Forever in all those jokes about games not coming out.
It's kinda sad that in the time it's taken for GT5 to get close to coming out, Turn 10 has pumped out three very good racing games and Forza 4 is in development (I hope they don't spend too long on the Kinect driving bollocks).

Personally, I've never found the flaming gloves to be that useful.
The knife gloves are more useful, as are the tenderizers (MMA gloves + nails).
I've started using the defiler more now that I have it's combo card as it's too slow with just it's scratch card.
The defiler can take down looters and mercs with ease, making "Run for the Money" fairly easy.
The hacker is the most useless combo weapon I've seen thus far as you can burn though it's battery just to kill a couple of zombies.

The more powerful jump kick can be quite useful as it can take out any normal or fat zombie unlike the regular jump kick, which only kills female zombies (everyone knows vaginas are for pussies).
It can also kill mercs and looters in only two hits or so.

I'm about level 31 as I kind of got carried away and didn't give Katey her Zombrex at one point because killing zombies is more fun than drugging kids with annoyingly spelled names.
I also had a problem beating the twins, but I got past them using the beam sword combo weapon, which is pretty damned powerful, but breaks easily (I took two, and only ended up using one).

I'm thinking of buying Enslaved as I really enjoyed both Uncharted games and it seems similar.
The only thing putting me off is that a lot of reviews say there's some serious graphical issues, though most Unreal Engine based games have some graphical issues (texture issues and such).

Ok guys can anyone reccomend me a xbox 360 game (any genre) with a fun single player mode and a fun online mode?

Red Dead Redemption: Imagine GTA in a wild west setting where you don't have to be a dick... Or Crackdown with better graphics and cowboys instead of super heroes :/

Forza Motorsport 3: Forza 3 >>>>> Gran Tourismo (I haven't played GT5 though as I refuse to buy a demo).

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: Decent on-line play, but the generic "Russians trying to bomb America with nukes" bull crap solo campaign.

Battle-Field: Bad Company 2: Much like MW2, only with humor and destructible environments which work really well.
BC2 also lacks MW2's killstreaks, which I actually find to be a good thing as it stops nuke boosting and makes things fairer (anyone can jump in the tanks on the maps).
Also, the ability to strategically blow holes in buildings allows you to create your own vantage points, making things less predictable.

Halo 3: Pretty meh in terms of campaign play, but the online isn't bad if anyone is still not playing Reach.

Halo: ODST: Better solo play than Halo 3 and it comes with the entire Halo 3 on-line mode (including DLC) on a bonus disc.

Halo: Reach: Bungie's final Halo game, and one of their best.

Dead Rising 2 Zombies + lawnmowers, chainsaws, swords, light sabers, flame throwers, bombs, axes, sledgehammers, etc. = FUN!!!

Saints Row 2: > GTA IV.

Fallout 3: Basically, Oblivion in the Fallout universe, with VATS and the usual Bethesda humor in place of the usual Fallout humor.

Dead Rising 2: Pretty much the same as the original, only with more of almost everything.
Instead of the photography crap, you get combo weapons which range from crap (the Hacker) to awesome (turning a mower into a zombie blender is fun and the nail bat is great for taking out swarms of zombies).
Saving is less limited, but A.I. characters with guns have a nasty habit of shooting zombies near you, which can often lead to you getting shot by accident, which can kill you if your health is already low.
Also, you can get a motorbike with chainsaws, which kinda makes up for the still crappy guns.

Halo: Reach: OK, I admit it, I bought Reach.
In terms of the Halo franchise, Reach is tied with ODST for me.
The Halo online community is still rife with immature tards that think sending people dumb messages after winning by one kill are funny and the psyche profile options do NOTHING as far as I can tell.

I recently downloaded the demo of R.U.S.E. from Steam.

For a new 3D game, it runs fairly decently on my crappy laptop (1.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GiB DDR2 RAM, GeForce 8400M (128MiB dedicated with 128MiB shared), Windows 7).
It's a lot slower paced than, say, Command & Conquer, but it's more to do with the fact that you don't have virtually infinite funding for infinite units and base structures.
I tried playing it as normal, but tanks I sent to secure some areas were getting destroyed before they could get to their destination and be of any real use, but when I started using the ruse abilities to speed up my units and to send out dummy tanks, things started to go my way a little more.
R.U.S.E is based around World War 2, with the battles taking place on a table top planning map like you often see in old movies (you can zoom out to see it as counters on a map, or zoom in to see the action in more detail), but it also has some weapons in it which were being designed during WW2, but which weren't actually put to use, such as an artillery gun with nuclear shells (think Fallout Fat-Man, only bigger ​).
I thought about buying it for the PS3, so that I'd actually get some use out of it, but I'm waiting to see how it fares when teamed with Move before I but either (Move doesn't come with any games over here, which kinda sucks, but so do the release games as far as I've been made aware).
I probably shout hate the makers of R.U.S.E. for being French surrender monkeys, but they have made something playable and they use my personal preference in terms of programming languages, which is Object Pascal (Delphi).

Halo: Reach doesn't really interest me that much.
I'm not a big Halo fan despite playing every console game in the series other than the full version of Reach as well as the Halo 3 and Reach betas O_o
I probably enjoyed ODST the most as you didn't play as some super powered faceless cyborg death engine, meaning you couldn't just run at enemies with all guns blazing.
The Reach Beta for me was just 5 people going "Hey look, JETPACKS LOEL!!", me playing it using the new powers just to get to the action from time to time and one guy just sniping the 'tards too busy flying.
Also, if they had the whole super shield, jetpack crap at the Fall of Reach, then why didn't they make any of it available to any of the spartans or ODST seen in other games set later into the Halo history?

I've thought about it too as I prefer my 360 and don't really care about losing Blu-Ray functionality.
I've got over 30 games and Iron-Man on Blu-Ray.
If I traded in my 80GiB PS3 and games at Cex, I could get about £320, though I could probably get more elsewhere.
My main issue with the PS3 is that 90% of it's games are also on the 360, and I prefer Live for online stuff.
PSN seems pretty slow sometimes and whenever I've tried playing ModNation, it randomly disconnects... Not that there's ever enough people in a lobby to get a race going :[
Also some of the developers for Sony's exclusives are dicks... I mean, Valkyria Chronicles is on the PS3, but the sequel is on the PSP only... WTF Sega?

Currently, I'm playing Fallout 3 on the 360 again as my old (pre-ordered launch unit that's been fixed twice) 360 died and I bought a shiny new 360 S 250GiB, which gives me tons of space to install games, meaning I can play it without the sound of a freakin' jet engine blasting out of my console :/
I was trying to play through it being an ass this time, but somehow, my karma has gone to neutral because I'm just not evil enough or something >:[
I ][/
I]need[/b] Civilization V... NEED IT TO LIVE!!!

Invisible War is a decent FPS, though it will always be compared to the first Deus Ex, as will Human Revolution, even though Ion Storm doesn't even exist any more.
Invisible War, from what I've played of it, feels more like Oblivion or Fallout 3 in a Sci-Fi setting as you can sink a load of time into side missions and such before actually doing much of the story guff.
I can't say I've found it difficult thus far though as there's usually a sneaky air shaft or back door that'll let you get the drop on enemies, and you'll probably use the sneaky bollocks approach as it saves on ammo.
Also, buy a black market mod as soon as you can so that you can hack stuff (ATM's will get back the 1,000 or so it'll cost, plus you can get an Omar trader discount easily with it).

I have the same problem running the Steam version of Invisible War under Windows 7 Ultimate, and a few times, it has died altogether and (rarely) lost some of my save data (it doesn't nuke my save, it just thinks I was in a different area than I was when it last saved O_o).
From what I've read after searching on Google, turning Aero off can stop it from dropping to the desktop when loading a level and changing the in game resolution can cut load times... Invisible War is a bit buggy, but at least it's not Daikatana
John Romero was (at least partly) responsible for Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Heretic, Hexen and Deus Ex, so what the hell went wrong?

japanese high-resolution nipple technology

sometimes I feel like that is the ultimate goal of all this hi-tech television crap and once they accomplish that it'll all just be hardcore porno and like regular tv stuff will just end. movies will stop being made

well I basically once they make it like the feelies from brave new world or whatever that book is

This made me think of The Sixth Day with the holographic hookermatic 3000 or whatever it was.
It's kind of like watching Demolition Man and then finding out that Arnie made governor (he was president after the earthquake in the movie), only less scary, especially since we're all weird adult gamers evolved from angsty teens, meaning Virtua Sexfest probably would be bought by quite a few GWers.

Chances are that we won't see new consoles from Microsoft or Sony for a few years yet.
With this generation, so much money has been shovelled into developing hardware and online functionality that they seem to be incrementally adding new functionality via add-on kit such as PS Move and Kinect.
Both the 360 and PS3 are still solid systems in terms of graphics and functionality, and the only real reason for the new hardware is that Nintendo did so well with the Wii before releasing 900,000,000,000,000.5 cheap-ass shovelware titles to every 1 good game.
Sony has only recently started to profit from the PS3, so releasing a whole new console now would be a pretty silly move, and it'd pretty much be like saying that all the stuff they said about having movie grade graphics and the Cell being massively powerful was outright lying.
Having access to Blu-Ray means that the PS3 is also less likely to be hit by multi-disc games for now.

The 360 isn't likely to go away any time soon either as Microsoft has just released a new model which looks more like a high end PC than a 5 year old games console.
I may get one when it comes out over here as all my other gadgetry is glossy black (iPod Touch, Samsung HDTV, Samsung laptop, fat PS3... which isn't that big and which serves as my media player as it doesn't make my ears bleed) and my current 360 is one of the first 360's released in the UK, so despite being fixed a few times, it's been soldiering on since 2005.
If I get a new 360, I can then give my WiFi dongle to my dad or whoever as we have two 360's and so does my sister.

yeah this is pretty much how i feel on the matter. it's frustrating because they introduce slightly more complex themes into the games, but are way too obsessed with making it a FOR ALL AGES kind of game that you really can't take what they're doing seriously. it's like they want the game to appeal to ABSOLUTELY EVERYBODY, but ultimately make it so the game doesn't really specifically appeal to anyone.

considering how they have an irrational amount of pull with consumers, it's pretty irritating that they don't try to be at least slightly more ambitious. they legitimately have room to be more experimental with their games, but are clearly satisfied with just making safe games that only really young audiences could get excited by. not like this is anything new, though. this is exclusively how they've operated for a long time. i guess it's just annoying when you can really pinpoint how this strategy has completely ruined otherwise interesting games.

Sometimes, I wonder what happened to the old Squaresoft that effectively turned them into EA.
Square used to release games like Vagrant Story and Front Mission, but now their RPG's are pretty terrible and the next Front Mission sounds more like Armoured Core.
It's like they used to kick out a little gem every so often and even those not promoted much became popular.
The problem is that rather than learn from their success, they scrap what's popular and shit out some heartless tripe like The Bouncer or Driving Emotion Type S, which just shows that 80% of their effort goes on graphics rather than gameplay.

EA on the other hand, seems to be moving away from releasing truly awful drivel, though admittedly, this is mainly down to them buying new studios such as DICE, Criterion and Bioware to get their hands on titles like Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Battlefield.

I've just started playing Final Fantasy 9 as I never got to play it properly on the PS One as I only rented it and it was a fairly battered copy which crashed during the FMV with Black Walz 3 at the airship gate.
Now all we need is for Front Mission 4 to hit PSN and I'll stop hating Square so much (I've downloaded FF7, FF8, FF9 and Vagrant Story already as it's cheaper than getting them from ebay where VS goes for up to £80).

I think the problem with Final Fantasy is that Square is too scared to be serious and gritty.
They think about it, but not wanting to offend anyone, they switch to bright colours and annoying "gay aeroplane" characters like Vanille.
They could have done some brilliant side stories based on the conflict between Vanille and Sahz, but that would have made Sahz into the stereotypical angry black man, which might have made him less popular... But the fact that they made him a wise cracking, afro toting, chicken loving, gun user who pretty much shrugs off his son being used and turned to crystal makes him even less likeable.
In FF7, they didn't shy away from conflict so much and it's overall setting was more dystopian.
It had bright friendly guff, but you didn't really have to pay attention to most of it and the stuff you couldn't avoid was better done (shemale Cloud  ​)... Also, Cait Sith got crushed to death, which is nice

It probably wouldn't bother me so much that Vanille and Hope are so vomit inducingly sweet and innocent or that Snow and Sahz run around playing the big hero roles if it wasn't for the fact that FF13 isn't made to fit into the whimsical fairytale category, where such characters can work as they're not supposed to be so serious (in FF9 for example, your main character is a womaniser with a monkey tail and is sidekick is a clumsy black mage).

P.S.
I am now convinces that 3D Dot Game Heroes never got a U.K. release as you can't buy it anywhere.
For shame FROM Software and Sony, peddling tripe like Armoured Core: For Answer and then screwing us over on good games >:[