N +

This is a tale of three RPG games, Xenoblade, The Last Story, and Pandora's Tower. I've been a huge RPG gamer for a long time. My favorite game of all time is Final Fantasy 6, even. Each of the games listed above aren't little rinky-dinky titles. They're games that are highly rated by Famitsu. Each of the games received a 36, 38, and 31 out of 40 respectively from the Japanese magazine. The Last Story was composed by famed composer Nobuo Uematsu, so these are big production games that deserve to make their way to North America. RPG fans have established a website where people can go to petition called Operation Rainfall. They're utilizing a mail-in strategy, one game at a time. Go there to find out how you can participate to get three brilliant third party games released in North America.

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I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who and 16-bit gaming. This is just some brilliant work by someone who does have a lot of time on his hands. At least it's productive!

The video is of the current Doctor Who opening sequence realized in SNES-like 16-bit goodness. The music is even SPC-like! The SNES would have been capable of producing closer sounds to the current theme and could have been realized by using SNES instruments (a whole lot of them existed back when I was doing hobby game making) instead of an assembled soundfont. Technicalities aside, every aspect of it is indeed cool.

One of the illustrious My Opera community managers, Aleksander, completely flipped his lid today, shouting on Twitter that he's going to ban N+. Wha?

Originally posted by Aleksander:

You have no idea how close I was to ban @Nplus right now. TOS Violations #FAIL

Did he forget who we are? Did he forget there's quite a few embarrassing images of his face online? I think he did.



We have Star Fox. What you got?

This month the artistic visual theme for N+ is 3DS and Friends (some of the moderators being the friends), because by the end of this month, anyone with enough cash and a decent video game shop nearby should be able to get one almost anywhere in the world.

The theme for N+ reflects us as our video game counterparts - as the artist Justin Vigil sees us anyway. He drew himself as Snake, .Ed as Travis Touchdown, myself as a Red Pikmin, and Dustin Wilson as... Tingle. You can also find in this wacky rendition our love of Opera, Tacos, and the necessary "paper work" needed for saving games, after enjoying tacos of course.

If you would like a desktop wallpaper version of this, or any other months artistic styling please visit the N+ Design gallery. Its also filled with screenshots of how the site looked at each of it's designed stages. And as a shameless plug for myself, I drew the 3DS system in this piece as well as the taco, Opera flag, and roll of TP. And because we know how much you all LOVED the Cho Aniki artwork of last month, we decided to force let you all enjoy it for another month by placing it in the bottom screen of the 3DS. Just watch out for the combined Mens Beam four of us mods can create... scary stuff!

MEN'S BEAM!

February header GET!

It's no secret that the 3DS looks as if it's going to be big. Now mainstream media is all over it. The worst and best thing about the 3DS is that the only way to experience what it's like is to see it for yourself like the mods here have said after their trip to E3 last year. This video is semi-interesting. The interviewer asks a few interesting questions, and Reggie answers them by kicking ass and taking names as usual. It's definitely worth a watch if you're as chuffed about the impending 3DS launch as we all are.

You might have noticed that for a while now N+ has gotten a bit dusty in places, some things haven't looked quite in order. It's mainly my fault, and I think I have the solution for this today.

This new N+ redesign was originally slated to go live on the 1st to start off a new year on solid footing, but our fearless leader suggested to me to make this live in time for Christmas as a sort of Christmas present to our loyal members. I realize that our membership covers a multitude of cultures, and probably quite a few of our readers don't celebrate Christmas. In any case this is simply a gift of gratitude to our loyal readers. There's nothing wrong with a big gift!

This new design takes quite a different approach to what we've normally gone for here where the entire background color scheme will change from month to month, not just the header image. For our inaugural design it's one by myself, predominantly orange in hue with one glaring exception. This month's header image has quite a funny story behind it. Back when Pokémon White and Pokémon Black were released in Japan a few of the mods decided to import the game here. Jayvee was one of them, and like many times before his game didn't arrive on time. As a result he became quite choleric toward the United States Postal Service. The Captain's copy most certainly did arrive. This only added fuel to the fire, and I jokingly drew a connection between his state of mind and the Incredible Hulk. This header is a representation of his mood during that contentious period of time when he was bereft of his crack pokémon. The man to whom he's causing excruciating pain to is the Captain himself, dressed in a United States postman's uniform!

Feel free to look around, everything should be fresh in appearance. There might be some bugs here and there despite our efforts to destroy them prior to release, but we're working on it. One of the biggest complaints we've had for some time now was over the difficulties some people were having joining the group; it should be easily recognizable now where to join as it's in the sidebar now as a sign reminiscent of Animal Crossing.

As usual a desktop background image of this month's header can be downloaded in our photos section.