My favorite Mario subway moment happened shortly after New SMB came out for the DS. I was riding either a D or an N train over the Manhattan Bridge playing NSMB, when a little Asian kid sat down next to me, leaned over and started watching. He couldn't have been more than 4 or 5. After a while I handed him the DS so he could take a turn, and his face lit up. We took turns on levels until we got to Chinatown and he and his mom got off the train. I don't think he spoke a word of English, but Mario is truly a universal language.
Oh, I like Advance too, but I like Tactics more. It feels like...a purer tactical RPG experience, somehow.
Or a true sequel to FF Tactics!
Did they intentionally use the wrong version of "you're" in the first paragraph to seem all "internet proletariat" and shit? Because it just makes them sound like idiot kids in their parents' basement.
Wow, racist comment much?
Not buying Apple products changes nothing, unless you also aren't buying products from Samsung, HTC, Dell, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, and basically any other consumer electronics company. If you buy any electronic device at all, you're complicit in the system. This is much bigger than just not buying Apple products.
Agreed. There are no words to express the monumental wrongness of a spaghetti Western remix of Chopin.
Minesweeper with zombies and a shotgun? For 99 cents? OMG SO WORTH IT.
@FJSpoof
So...since gay people are normal and don't deserve special treatment, Kotaku should never feature "homosexual content"? Because the only way to not give gay people special treatment is to never mention them at all? By this measure, anytime straight people are mentioned they're also getting special treatment, so I guess Kotaku should never mention anything, ever.
Also: there are plenty of "soccer moms" out there who are avid gamers/WoW players. Today's soccer moms grew up in the Nintendo/SNES/Genesis generation, and you'd better believe that many are still gaming.
Me, I don't have kids yet, but when I do I look forward to both bringing my kids to soccer practice (or whatever sport they want to play) *and* gaming with them.
And how awesome is it that a blind person who loved WoW before he lost his sight can still play? If all you take away from this story is another tired round of "omg the casuals are ruining my MMO" then maybe it's time to get outside more and interact with some real people.
Although I'll continue reading the "full" version of Kotaku, this sounds like a great feature for people who really are just interested in the video game news.
As for all the rest of the content, am I the only one who misses Bashcraft's Night Notes and their really interesting slice-of-life-in-Japan descriptions? How are mini- and micro-Bash doing, anyway?
Still gotta finish Skyrim and Skyward Sword, but right now SWTOR and Final Fantasy Tactics on my iPhone are eating up all of my time! Halp!
Oops, sorry, missed your comment. A staggered subscription is very different than free to play. With free to play, the players who pay money have access to better and different items/content/etc than the non-paying players. That is, they have an advantage that the free players don't when they play the game. With a staggered subscription, you're either playing or you aren't - everyone currently paying to play the game has access to the same stuff, and the only difference is the amount of effort/time you have to put in to get things. So someone who spends 12 hours a week raiding will likely have nicer gear than a more casual player. In a free to play game, that casual player could spend money to get similar gear instead of putting the time in.
It's funny, there are also a lot of people who say that WotLK was the peak of WoW and Cataclysm was a disaster. Just goes to show you can't please everyone.
But...you can always stop subscribing, and then re-subscribe if you feel like playing the game again. It's not like you have to pay for every single month for the rest of your life once you start playing the game. People do this with WoW all the time.
Not trying to say that you should play the game if you aren't feeling it, but there's always the option of unsubscribing if you know you're going to stop playing for months at a time.
Why would Blizzard try to "counter" SWTOR on launch day, when everyone's attention is going to be focused on the newly-launched game? I think Blizzard knew exactly what it was doing when it included guaranteed beta access to the next expansion in its 12-month subscription plan. They know better than to take on SWTOR when the hype around it is peaking - they'll wait 4-6 months until things die down and then strike back by launching the beta. It's also no coincidence that BioWare chose to launch SWTOR near the tail end of a WoW expansion, when people are getting bored of that WoW content. Both companies know that players are more likely to switch when their competitor's content has grown stale.
If you're going to say the game is bad, explain why you think it's bad. Otherwise you just sound like a troll.
I'm a long-time WoW player, and I loved SWTOR in beta. Pre-ordered in August, and bought a three-month subscription to give me plenty of time to try out the game and see if I want to make a longer commitment. With four classes in each faction that each have their own engaging KOTOR-style story (a total of eight separate stories), there's easily 3+ months of content there for me to play if I want to see the full story of each class up to level 50. For me, that's worth the $45 for three months of game time. And after that I can choose to keep subscribing if it seems like the end-game content will be fun and engaging, or end my subscription if I think I've gotten all I want out of the game. Plus I get to group with many of my friends from WoW who are in my SWTOR guild.
TL;DR: It may not be the game for all of you, but I know I'm gonna have a blast with this game for the three months of time I've bought so far.
Can someone please cornfield this horrible comment?
GotY, in my opinion. Some amazing games have been released this year, but none have blown me away like Skyrim. It's astonishingly good.
