SOVANJEDI'S PROFILE

If there's anything that needs changing in order to make it work in the level editor (or general changes to the sprite), please let me know.

I was supremely disappointed with Metroid: Other M. There were glimmers of hope and excitement awaiting a long time Metroid fan such as myself, like the 2.5D environments, speedy gameplay and LOTS of eye-popping fanservice. But for me, the game was a travesty because of the reasons why it exists, which was to push the Metroid series forward as a strengthened narrative experience.

Now I'm not so much of a stickler that a poor story will dissuade me from enjoying an extremely fun game. The reason why I was so excited for Other M in the first place was Team Ninja's ability to supply awesome gameplay and set pieces despite their iffy storytelling capabilities. It's easy to ignore the story of Ryu Hayabusa (or whoever)'s plight to slay the next new demon king with his swanky new Dragon Sword if it lead to spiffy bossfights and bleeding edge gameplay. There was every opportunity to completely ignore the story in order to have fun with the game.

Metroid: Other M's narrative, characters, plot, everything - it has to take every opportunity to break you away from any decent gameplay in order to force a badly voiced monologue or irritating character trait upon you. So many points in the game where you are forced to find a tiny dot in the first person view in order to progress ahead in the game (I remember two of these in particular, and neither of the hidden objects you needed to focus on were particularly obvious.) So many times where you are forced into a slow, over-the-shoulder exploration scene with very little interactivity, and very little happens - they are meant to be tense, but they are the very opposite of that. And of course the more infamous complaint about Samus's huge arsenal of power-ups and suits and other hazardous navigational equipment that you're not allowed to use because Uncle Adam doesn't let you yet, so you have to go through multiple sections of energy-sapping heated areas before you can turn the Varia Suit on, or defend yourself against nearly invincible enemies until you're given permission to use Ice Missiles or whatever. There is a section against the final boss where you are allowed access to a new power-up without ANY NOTIFICATION THAT YOU COULD USE IT, and you need to use it to save yourself from an incredibly quick death, which goes completely against everything that you'd been lead up to do at that point. It's really fucking horrible and I hope they don't go and make it a habit.

My problems with the game's story don't end there. Considering her canonical past with Ridley (which is only fully explained in the manga), her introduction to him during the game is a little confusing to anybody except major fans of the series, not to mention really embarrassing and inconsistent. The various bits of fanservice is admittedly pretty freaking awesome; without spoiling it, there are a few bosses here and there that I, as a Metroid fan, had never imagined I would see again, let alone in 3D, and being reintroduced to them again was a joy for a while. However for a game that claims to be so big on narrative they go out of their way to bring an old boss back rather than introduce something that actually makes sense to what's going on around you. Not since fucking Fable 2 did I come across a final villainous confrontation as limp and pathetic as this one: all through the ending I was expecting them - no, shouting at the screen - for them to go back and have a proper final fight, or supply me with a conclusion to all the plot points that made some fucking sense. Adam's poignant departure left a sense of disappointment in the character of Samus' Adam's motivations and, once again, being robbed of a potentially interesting place to explore in terms of gameplay.

It's annoying to keep pointing to an old game as the pinnacle of the series for so many years, but Super Metroid managed so many of these attempted emotional pulls with almost no dialogue or text. Fusion did it with almost as much text, but much more tension and without a hit on the game design (unless you're a hardcore sequence breaker infuriated with the inability to skip cutscenes). The Prime series may have opened the series up to a disheartening pull away from solitary space exploration with Corruption, but the series has produced richer environments, extremely slick graphics and gameplay with stories that stood up on their own merits, even if the games were radical departures from the norm for more than their change of viewer's perspective. All of these are prime (no pun intended) examples to compare the debacle of Other M to and to feel ashamed that such a thing was allowed to exist. Before reading this thread I was content to leave the game at the back of my mind (and at the back of my DVD stack) as merely disappointing, but with the opportunity to re-evaluate and re-compare, it truly is one of the worst things to happen to a cherished game franchise since Sonic 2006.

I've actually finally gotten around to starting Assassin's Creed 2. I've not played the first one, though I have a vague idea of what it's about.

It's pretty fun, but part of me wants to rebel against the game because it feels like it's trying to educate me on real history.

BUMP!

So, I drew this. I'm going to be printing this and two other (as of yet started) pictures of my parents' pet dogs on canvas roughly 12" x 16" as Christmas presents. Is there anything I should do to change it? I'm kind of umm-ing and ahhh-ing about the background colour, so opinions on that would be most grateful. Should I worry too much about the base of his chest or is it fine the way it is?

http://powerlisting.wikia.com/wiki/Ice_Manipulation

I'll link you to a photo of me when I get to the PC.