To anyone using a Scarftran, I have a favor to ask of you: take note of your HP when you fire off your first attack. That way we can get a pretty good reading of what we could expect from Eruption.

Part 26: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdyjuJVrtC4&fmt=18

After being hit by Stealth Rock from full health, Eruption will be at approx 131 BP. Marginally better than Fire Blast but it's worth noting you won't be dicked by accuracy, though without wishpassing or Rapid Spin it'll only get worse on subsequent switch-ins, and this of course assumes the opponent isn't hitting Heatran at all.

In the grand scheme of things I don't see this being very good, on top of which Eruption to someone like Typhlosion is viable because its movepool sucks so hard. Heatran is not held back by such a flaw and so it should go for reliability and versatility.

On the other hand, this is a welcome addition to doubles play and I forsee a great deal of usage there.

Especially in ubers. Lava Plume Groudon is going to be so incredible with that thing!

Anyway... a TMNT reference in FF5? Didn't expect that in a million years!

Edit: Oh, so Subspace Emissary is a straight ripoff of FF5's world 3, huh? I knew I'd seen that somewhere! Also, fun to see that just like in FF6, there's a large chunk of the last world that's entirely optional, yet highly recommended. I took some time to power up the Chicken Knife while watching the Olympics (on English channels mostly, the French coverage is pathetic), and holy crap, it doubles the Twin Lance in damage output, and quadruples everything else! Apparently there's an agility bonus in the damage calculation, so it's perfect on a Ninja. It's so fun to have the Twin Lance in the first hand and the Chicken Knife in the second one, and the Twin Lance overrides the fleeing effect. Awesome.

I used it with Rapid Fire and another weapon, which I'm guessing I had equipped second, as I never fled with it, either.

Rapid Fire bypasses the fleeing effect, but Aim and Mineuchi supposedly don't. Though I haven't really leveled up Ranger with anyone yet... I'm hoping to do something about it with the Magic Pots in Phoenix Tower, which I skipped for the time being because of how ridiculously hard the enemies are. I do have a few classes mastered, though - namely, Ninja and Samurai with Bartz, Summoner with Krile, and Ninja with Faris.

The only Phoenix Tower enemies I remember being hard were the ladies. The ones wearing skimpy evening gowns, I think their sprites were.

Actually I think there's another one, looks like a girl sitting in a bouquet of flowers, that's also a bitch.

Instant death flies like crazy in that place, along with crazy massive damage.

Anyway, I just picked up the first three optional classes. Oracle sucks balls, which makes it a shame that it has the highest magic bonus to pass on to Freelancers and Mimes... at least Summoner's a close second, and is the only caster class with a good mastery ability. Gladiator and Cannoneer, however, look really awesome on paper... feels like learning Combine is a must, and Finisher as a forced ability has to be much better than Throw or Zeninage.

Also, fuck Olympic coverage. Hard. Looking at what we've got airing now, there's a Canada-Switzerland slaughter in women's hockey, the same game IN FRENCH!!! And a video package on Jeremy Wotherspoon WHILE HIS EVENT HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR 20 MINUTES. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. Thank the stars for the official site, where you can see the results as they come if nothing else.

Edit: THERE! I thought we'd never get to it.

Several years ago a comedian was ranting about how Olympic coverage has gradually shifted more toward irrelevant bullshit surrounding the athletes' training and/or personal lives, struggles, etc, and not on the competitions themselves.

Know what? I'll just type it here, I'm sure you can relate:

The Crying Games

One of the guy networks like ESPN has to broadcast an old-school version of the Olympics that leaves out all the "Hallmark moments" and just shows sports.

Adolf Hitler once used the Olympics to demonstrate that Aryans were strong; NBC uses them to show the world that Americans like to cry a lot. Look, I understand that everything nowadays has to be rendered bloated, syrupy, dumbed-down, and sentimental- this is America, after all. But for those of you out there who may be too young to remember a time before Oprah ruined everything: In the old days when we watched the Olympics, it wasn't continuous sob-sister profiles interrupted by the occasional sporting event- it was just the events. There was none of this stuff about the heartbreak and pain it took to become the best damn kayaker a man can be. It was just enough to watch a man throw a long stick or a big iron ball. His mom's chemotherapy, his sister's glass eye, and his dog, a wounded combat vet- they never entered into it. We weren't told whose grandpa was paralyzed in a tractor accident or that the decathlon guy has a cleft palate and overcame a lifetime of bed-wetting to go for the gold, because if someone told us that, we would have said, "Hey, if I wanted to sit through hours of melodramatic personal backstory, I'd pay attention to my date."

Take Nancy Pitts of US Women's wrestling team. Two years ago, the unthinkable happened to Nancy- she was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Happily, it was caught in time, and she was able to go back to her usual training regimen: 3 hours of weight lifting, followed by an hour of shaving.

Somehow the press gives the Olympics the sort of coverage once reserved for a war, though actual wars are treated like sporting events. NBC aired 1400 hours of Olympics coverage, 400 times more than they gave the Democratic convention, but what the heck, that was just about war and peace in the nuclear age- the Olympics are about swimming. Oh, if only they were! If only we could get the swimming without the three-hankie immigrant parents, the latchkey kids, the single moms, and all the brave athletes who rose before dawn and traveled hours in the frosty silence of the Iowa winter just to meet their drug dealers.

The Olympic games are that rarest of events, a coalition of nations that come together for a purpose other than killing Iraqis. So please, media barons, just give us one channel where it's simply about the competition and the belief that how high a man can hop is also a measure of who has the best country.

And this way you can keep the focus-group-approved drivel disguised as in-depth analysis where it belongs: in the coverage of the presidential elections.

*claps*

Brilliant! If I had a dollar for every time they talked about Alexandre Bilodeau's brother being mentally challenged, I'd have enough of them to make my own pool, Scrooge McDuck-style. Appealing to the female demographic that goes gaga for sob-stories is nice, but... wait, no, it's not. We all know these athletes work 15-hour days every day of their lives, we don't need to see endless athlete profiles to drive the point home.

Completely random thought: While flipping between channels, I saw an ad on CTV about an old man obsessed with strolling, but lost that obsession after trying Viagra.

Wind Waker Anton, The Later Years, anyone?

Outrageously ridiculous moment: During yesterday's speed skating competitions, the zamboni broke down in the middle of the competition, and today the second zamboni broke down as well, delaying the competition for a long, long time. C'mon, there are TWO zambonis and neither of them work? What are the odds?

Those zambonis must have been shipped from Hong Kong.

And when zambonis aren't the problem, it's rain or fog. Come on, we're in Canada, we shouldn't have that kind of problem!

I managed to go through the Phoenix Tower and its armies of status-inducing, instant-kill dancers in the end... Odin proved to be very useful; I had Bartz and Faris as Summoners with white magic, and Lenna and Krile as summoning White Mages since they had Summoner mastered. I took care of the Magic Pots on the way down, but I had to master Time Mage with someone so that I could have a Ranger capable of wielding the Wonder Wand. I chose Faris since she needed just under 200 ABP to do that, and the rest were Rangers the whole time. Only the Void left!

Wow, I didn't know you took care of all the other sidequests already.

You'll be heading back to a few of those places anyway once you get Necromancer, as some of the rarer/nastier enemies in them have the spells you want. Off the top of my head, Tonberry in that waterfall cave with Leviathan gets you Dark Flare.

Have you tried getting ABP off of Stingrays? I seem to recall those things being a coveted encounter on the world map for some reason. A little on the nasty side, but they gave something worthwhile. They were encountered within a little inlet, I believe.

Yeah, I fought one, and it took forever. Objets d'Art give you a lot more ABP per minute, which isn't a lot if you want to master lots of classes. At that point I'll wait until the end of the Void.

Guys, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is out. That is all.

I'm still deliberating on whether I'd get the WiiWare ones, and with MegaMan 10 arriving in less than two weeks, that's a no (since I'm not finished with Blaster Master Overdrive yet, which I bought last week.)

Part 27 of Emerald: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7uB0bKerDo&fmt=18

Make sure you're ready to ajust the volume at any time for this one...

Until you screamed, I was going to make a comment asking how you got Thunderbolt on Kirlia, heh.

Much like the chain mail thing, when you point out really stupid things like that you only encourage people like me to do the exact same thing =P

[QUOTE USER="slowflake" TIME="1266548986"][/QUOTE]

Good lord, that picture is amazing.

If the games were actually like that, I would buy them in a heartbeat.

I approve. Did you make that Slow, or find it?

I've only got my two measly motivational posters from over a year ago =P