Fwiss

A Kickstarter was recently started by Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune's game company, Comcept for the development of "Mighty No. 9." From the description, it surprisingly like the other Blue B, the Blue Bomber, which recently began a crossover into the Sonic comics. The player, as Beck (Mighty No. 9), must eliminate other robots, the malfunctioning Mighty Nos., to stop them from causing further harm to the world. It plans to combine the best of both recent and classic eras of gaming into one great gaming experience. Backers are able to preorder digital copies (distributed by explosively-popular Humble Bundle, Inc.) of the game by pledging $20 or more and can get in- and out-of- game exclusives for larger pledges. Not only will it be crowdfunded by Kickstarter, but we will see a return of the interesting, controversial, fan-assisted development model from the scrapped Mega Man Legends 3. The game's estimated release date is April 2015 for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, with higher stretch goals which, if reached, will make it available also for the PS3, 360, and Wii U consoles.

Oops, looking at the wiki it isn't immediately available. You need to get far enough in the mission "Advance! Attack!" Anyway, since you just defeated the first archfiend, does this mean you just got it?

I loved Patapon 3 (and I still have my copy). It was very different from its predecessors, in ways both good and bad. Spent upward of 120 hours on it, and boy was it a blast. I never dabbled much in its online play because a firmware update came out a few months after, and I didn't want to install it for fear of not being able to install custom firmware later on, but the bit I did play was fun (but very flawed). I actually enjoyed Patapon 2's (ad-hoc only) multiplayer more. Now that I think about it, it shouldn't be impossible to forward raw ad-hoc WiFi frames through the Internet and out another wifi card, almost like a layer 2 VPN setup (PSN has a service called adhocParty, so it shouldn't be infeasible to create a similar system yourself). I actually have a fun story a few years back: My friends and I went to MLG, and I had Patapon 3 on me, trying to grind. But I wanted to watch the games playing, and it was super loud in there. I ended up playing Patapon 3 deaf, glancing at the screen every 5 turns because the enemies were so predictable. I was pretty proud of myself, but it's actually surprisingly easy for anyone to keep tempo. (By the way, how long did it take you to notice the pause chant in Patapon 3?)

I always enjoyed all the Tails Doll creepypasta that were floating around, especially this old archive. Other than that, I don't read much creepypasta. I know one that was popular a few years ago was a series of posts called Penpal. There were a lot of creepy Sonic stories and Pokemon stories about cursed games and Lavendar Town and the like. Anybody remember those?

Exactly. Nobody ever asked for him to be in Smash Bros. But think about it: do you really want to have the characters you asked for in the game? Where's the surprise, the suspense, and the thrill? That's what makes characters like Megaman and Palutena boring: everybody knows they'd be in there sooner or later. But, let me ask you: who saw Pac-man and Villager coming? I know I didn't. Joking aside, it's always interesting to see how the Smash developers implement the characters.

How could you dislike Pac-Man? He's like the most hyped character of Smash Bros. 4, right behind Animal Crossing Villager and Wii Fit Trainer. Then you have a few other characters, such as Mega Man and Palutena, but Villager, Wii Fit Trainer, and Pac-Man are where it's at.

So, some malware tried to redirect Google in the hosts file... but did it wrong? I kind of want to know how this happened. Does Chrome do some additional sanity checking or something?

That new Nintendo paint/FPS game, Splatoon, looks pretty cool. Obviously, also revved up for Super Smash Bros. 4.

Last time I played Melee on Dolphin, it had some minor graphical glitches, but it was very playable. Especially if you hook up a controller to it. It's likely improved since then; Melee is such a popular game, and while we're not at the point where Gamecubes, Wiis, or Melee discs are becoming rare, such a situation is probably inevitable. There's a fair amount of interest in preserving it for the future, which is reasonable. Imagine a future where your favorite sport is just gone! By the way, has anyone tried to use a Dreamcast or Saturn emulator?

Hmm, I saw it so many years ago, so I can't really specify the details. Culturally, it was interesting because it was one of the better glimpses of the early Sonic in Japan. Before the Sonic Adventure era, the Sonic series in Japan was vastly different from the American Sonic. Sonic CD had one of the strangest discrepancies. In the American Sonic CD manuals, Amy Rose was given the name Princess Sally, an awkward, unusual, and transparently erroneous attempt at integrating the American Sonic stories of SatAM and the comics into the games. The OVA was a different Sonic in a way. It more closely resembled the games, and while Sonic's attitude was still spunky, it was different. Since I don't remember it well, I don't have a lot to say. It's kind of funny that years before Sonic '06, there was a lesser-known Sonic storyline involving a human princess. I like how there are a lot of story elements in the OVAs that were simply not explained or taken for granted, like the old owl, the princess Sara, or Knuckles' awesome hat. From the Wikipedia article's list of censored scenes in the US VHS release: Metal Sonic accidentally looking up Sara's dress when he crashes through the bottom of Eggman's ship, resulting in Sara repeatedly kicking his head, calling him a pervert. In the same sequence, Sonic also appears to injure himself after falling onto the ship, landing on his crotch. Also, Sonic is synched with Metal Sonic and essentially feels what he feels; he even blushes. During the second fight against Metal Sonic, Tails, after the Tornado is shot out of the sky, falls down a hill and starts to roll into a snowball and crashes into Sara and Knuckles. When the snowball clears, Tails is revealed to be holding on to Sara's breasts. Knuckles notices this, and thinks Tails did it on purpose. Wow, the OVAs really are anime. You definitely wouldn't see that in a western-written work. To sum up this disorganized post, it was interesting to see how different Sonic was in Japan.

I'd probably put the new Chrome above IE just because of Microsoft's tendency toward shortsighted fads. You yourself should decide which browser has the best user experience for you - it is generally the most controversial part of the browser, so choose what you like. Chrom{e,ium} have the best security models among the major browsers, but all browsers are dangerously vulnerable. There are many steps you can take, but if you don't have much to hide, and don't want to switch to Firefox, I'd say at least consider switching to Chromium and/or ensuring you have as few plugins and extensions as possible (ideally, none). There are a few privacy-preserving plugins, but if you're not worried about the general surveillance and general profiling, you won't need them. Switching to Chromium removes the unnecessary risks of Chrome's proprietary add-ins.

Hmm, not really sure. I'd personally recommend Firefox, but Chromium, the Open-source version of Chrome might be worth a try. I've heard differing opinions regarding it, so I'm not entirely sure about it. On one hand, at least a few Google trackers have been removed from it. However, it is possible that it still has certain Google services in it by default, such as it making it the default search in the omnibar. If auto-complete is enabled in the omni bar, you may be sending searches and URLs you type to Google without ever pressing enter. It may also send every URL you access to Google through some setting under the guise of virus protection ("Google, is http://sensitivehealthcare.gov/ihaveaids safe?" messages). To my knowledge, vanilla Firefox also has this setting enabled by default. It appears that the safe browsing protocol downloads a list of reported attack sites regularly and only sends info when an attack site is encountered. It's possible for someone with Google access to do some kind of targeted attack using websites it suspects you visit (by telling you alqueda.com is an attack site, your browser would contact Google), but an adversary who could do that kind of thing (a nation-state or some large companies) has better ways to track you, and it's an active attack; you don't have to worry about it. I've also heard that because Chromium is developed largely by Google employees, some Google things that simply wouldn't fly in Firefox are kept. Really, at this point I'd recommend using Tor Browser (a free Firefox fork with many, many configuration changes and privacy patches). Even if you don't use Tor, you can just disable Tor and browse through the clearnet like normal. Independant of browser, Google can track you. The fact is, many pages on the web have Google trackers built into them through Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google+ buttons, and the like. If you have cookies enabled, Google can track you around the web because those kind of buttons send info. They can also get your IP address, but IP addresses are unreliable identifiers, and I'd actually be surprised if they still used them for anything other than geolocation. Unfortunately, anonymity becomes tougher and tougher the more you look into it, and I've just said the most obvious things. Simply switching to Firefox or Chromium will reduce the quality and quantity of information you send to Google. Using Tor Browser goes even further to reduce your digital footprint. As this happens, trackers like Google will get less information about you, and the "digital picture" of your life loses resolution. The physical metaphor would be the difference between knowing your location and velocity every 3 minutes and knowing your location every day. Both are intrusive, but one is far less so. In other words, use Chromium or Firefox; if you're willing to deal with a little less convenience, such as not saving your passwords in the browser, give the Tor Browser Bundle a try.

Danganronpa is a great mystery; I would complain that there are massive bits of foreshadowing at the beginning of each arc, and the mysteries are relatively easy to solve. Some of the tricks are obvious just because they hadn't been used yet, like , so you're likely to solve half of the murders more or less before they occur. In the anime, you probably won't solve the murders until the trial because you can't look around the room or analyze the evidence. You'll also miss the awesome gameplay of the trial, so I'd recommend the PSP/Vita game above the anime if possible. The mysteries may not be too challenging (especially since each mystery is relatively simple due to each murder generally being confined to one short arc), but they are really fun to solve. If you want a truly difficult and clever mystery, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and Umineko no Naku Koro ni is the way to go. As a bonus, the Higurashi anime is actually great and generally doesn't abridge important information, and it has dubs if you're into that (The second time I watched Higurashi, I watched the English dub. It's not terrible, though Keiichi sounds like Sonic the Hedgehog). To fully experience Umineko, the sound novels are the way to go, though. You won't regret it.

Waterslides!

Tesseract, I hate to be a buzzkill, but SRWare Iron does have its problems. Mainly, it is proprietary software like Opera, IE, and Google Chrome. Additionally, it still connects to Google without the user's consent in certain edge cases. That's acceptable if you hold it to the standards of IE and Chrome, but it is not acceptable as a privacy browser. It does not have Chrome's proprietary Flash player or PDF viewer, but you should be used to that anyway because SRWare Iron doesn't either. Maybe try blocking Google domains in your hosts file, if you can stand to avoid Youtube. The likely case with Iron is that they removed Google bits (albeit sloppily and incompletely), but added in something worse that doesn't make such obvious requests. The fact it's proprietary and sloppily edited like this leads me to believe that, if Iron is not actually malicious, the devs are at least incompetent.

Ah, Net Neutrality. There are a lot of things I can say about this, but the main thing is that it harms those who aren't big companies. Common rhetoric would say that it hurts small business, but there are other important things on the Internet besides businesses. We are one of the groups that would be severely damaged by lack of net neutrality. SCANF and most other Sonic sites obviously couldn't pay. Of course, the fandom wouldn't die so easily. The most likely scenarios don't have the most obvious impact to the average user. It's possible that discrimination would not affect us because we serve relatively low-throughput content (compared to image, video, or software hosting sites). More likely is that either the cloud hosting provider would pay for all sites it hosts to be prioritized. Possibly, that cost could be passed onto the person paying the hosting provider. People hosting sites out of their basement would be out of luck, though that is also becoming less common. That possibility is scary because it would centralize the network infrastructure -- only large web hosts would be able to pay for a fast lane, and naturally the smaller hosts would go out of business because of the insurmountable competition from larger hosts (think Amazon Web Services). An even worse possibility is that hosting providers would not be able or allowed to blanket-pay for all websites they host -- this would lead to centralization on the web not only by host, but also by site. Instead of SCANF, Retro, and SAGE being hosted at the same provider, they would simply cease to exist. Sonic fans would move to reddit.com/r/sonic and similar. Choice of community would go out the window with site design diversity and competition, both for better and for worse. Of course, privacy1 would be further damaged. With discussion forcefully centralized, all kinds of abuses could happen: both the surveillance and censorship. 1 A broad term which we might want to abolish in order to focus on the finer details of it. Perhaps split it up Fahrenheit-style into quality of information, time to think, and ability to act upon the first two.

You could look through the or the thread. It all really depends on what Anime you like and have watched, though. Do you mind telling us more?

DeSmuME is an awesome emulator; the only emulator I know that even tries to do good emulation other than it is No$GBA, but it's proprietary. If you all somehow haven't heard of Dolphin, give it a try. Even on a moderate computer, it emulates Gamecube and Wii games. The nice thing about Dolphin is that most of the games are 3D. The Wii and Gamecube hardware only support 480p video, but the Dolphin emulator can output HD video (and it works well). This goes far beyond the usual graphics filters that 2D emulators use. The result is that you can play the Sonic Adventures in full 1080p (although now that a version for the PC has come out on Steam, it is a bit superfluous; I still maintain that SA:DX actually performs better in Dolphin than in the official PC port). Funny story: Back when GerbilSoft announced Gens/GS Sonic 2 HD Edition, I somehow did not pick up on the fact that he was joking around. I was legitimately excited by the idea. Here's a good Ars article about emulators, focusing on the importance of accuracy.

From what I've seen, IE has improved since IE9. IE10 and IE11 are nice in some ways. I would attribute its problems to being proprietary, but perhaps its more important defect is that it is prone to Microsoft's massive design mood swings, so it often has Microsoft's latest fads tactlessly shoved in. If you're using IE, I recommend you at least use the latest version.

Not that a new, flashy UI would actually do anything to change someone's browser choice, but check out Firefox 29; it's got the much-hyped Australis interface. In terms of UI, I've always liked Personas more than Chrome Themes, although that's kinda because Chrome's UI doesn't take up much space in the first place.

Let's go, guys! To 300! 71

Well, a new season begins again. Any shows you guys are looking forward to (For the record, you can check out anichart.net/spring or neregate.com/blog/2014/01/15/spring-2014-anime/) ?

Moe tilde moe tilde, that's cute. The arms are a bit schwoopy. The head reminds me of the artist for Hidamari Sketch and the Puella Magi Madoka Magica anime.