thecrzyguy : The like/dislike options are at the bottom left of the post.  I didn't know that myself until recently, when someone in that 'what do you eat for dinner' thread commented that they wished they could like someone's response... he did know about the buttons, but apparently they don't work for him.  I'm not sure if it's the same with you, but just in case you hadn't seen them, now you know.

I've never used the liking system so far, but I may now that I do know how to.  If so, it will only be when I see something I really, really like or dislike.

If I can do whatever I want for dinner, I like to get some fried chicken and eat that with some vegetables like corn or peas, and maybe have some sort of bread to go with it. Pizza is a good meal all by itself, because I usually get the supreme/specialty variety that has vegetables on it as well as meat.
More often I have a sandwich, generally peanut butter, or ramen for dinner. At least I put some frozen peas in with the cooking ramen so it isn't entirely unhealthy.

First of all, and this is very important before you start the game, the manual informs you of the relative difficulty of each nation.  Since nobody here has the manual, I wanted to share that so hopefully people won't start off in hard mode and decide the game is terrible.
Easy - Caerlon
Medium - New Almekia, Leonia
Hard - Norgard, Iscalio

After you start a game, one of the first things you'll probably want to do is look at your units.  For the most part the stats are nothing unusual, but a few may be confusing at first.  For one thing, the little colored dots underneath the unit.  These are the unit's element, and everything will have one to three dots.  Red opposes blue, green opposes yellow and white opposes black.  If I recall correctly, a unit with red and blue just has them cancel each other out.  If a unit with two red attacks a unit with blue, the bonus to damage dealt and penalty to damage taken is doubled - if both units have blue but no red, they deal reduced damage to each other.

Your leader units (the humans) have two stats that will be extremely important to you:  Rune Power and Rune Area.  Rune Power is the total value of monstrous units they can command, each unit will have its own cost and those costs added together cannot be greater than the commander's rune power.  Rune area is the hexagonal radius inside which the troops under their command get stat bonuses.

Another important point to remember is that all units have attacks with varying effectiveness against sky and ground targets.  If you look at an attack and see a circle, then it's at 100% effect against the stated target.  A triangle means... 80%, I think it was.  Nothing new but something to bear in mind anyway, not all attacks have the same range - keep an eye on how far away an attack will hit before you move a unit into position.  And if there's an 'A' next to the attack, it will hit everything within that range. A 'B' means that it will hit a line between the user and the range specified.

Some monsters will look worthless.  Don't be fooled, some of those become useful as they advance.  Remember also that everyone on the surviving side of a fight gains 200 experience, even if they didn't do anything.  All units can advance once they hit level 10, and most can advance again at 20, sometimes requiring an item to do so.  You can always recruit new ones (if you have the mana) to replace losses by choosing 'summon' at a city.  Different cities have different summons available, even within a nation's starting boundaries.

A final point that I think is important to make for new players who may otherwise have trouble - questing is a very good idea.  You can get new leaders, new units, new abilities for the leader that went questing... you can also get them injured, but if so they'll just have to rest for a turn or two and then will be usable again.  So don't leave all of your leaders sitting on your borders waiting for attack (and definitely don't leave them sitting elsewhere), send those you don't think you need right now out into the world.

Quick edit because I forgot something important.  If a leader gets killed in battle, they are sent, badly injured, back to the city to recover.  But since the leader isn't there anymore, all of their units will either leave or sit around being confused and aimless, and will not fight except to counter attack.  These abandoned monsters can then be captured and used in your own army if you win the fight.  If all enemy leaders are removed from the battlefield, the fight is over.

I like... the fill tool.  I can't draw with traditional media to save my life, but sometimes I like to doodle with digital - you can sketch on one layer, clean it up on another and then totally erase the sketch so you can use that layer to put in color.  Just 'magic wand' the area you want to color on the line art layer, manually select any little narrow bits that the wand missed, then switch layers and fill the area with the proper color.  It's relatively easy to shade digitally too!

Plus of course you can fix mistakes instantly instead of working forever to erase them and still being able to see where you made the mistake anyway.

A friend of mine mentioned the site.  I came over here to look at it and since it was free, created an account so I could play Mother 3.  I'd always been a big fan of Earthbound, and thought it was a shame that its sequel was never released over here... especially after playing the latest Smash Bros and seeing all these references to it!

pacman1755 : Thanks.  Mostly I wrote it because, judging by the featured review, the game's kind of hard to understand without the manual - I didn't want people to just ditch it immediately over confusion... though I have to admit that the random stat growth that the other reviewer mentioned is a bit of a problem!

Mostly, I signed up for Mother 3.  It seems like Nintendo loves to reference the game - Smash Bros Brawl, for instance - and I didn't know anything about it.  Heck, I thought that Lucas had some sort of weird tentacle thing until I got his character trophy!

I was also happy to see Final Fantasy V, since I've never come across that in a game store and didn't want to buy it off of Ebay.

I only hate time zones when some idiot can't figure out that there's a difference - I had a woman call where I work at 7:30 one day, I happened to be in early getting some work straightened up or nobody would have been there to answer the phone at all.  When I explained that we weren't open yet, she got mad about how we were so lazy that we didn't open until 9:00... and when she called back later she had to complain about the rude person who had obviously been lying to her and just didn't want to transfer the call!

Most games I don't use FAQs or walkthroughs, though thanks to that fact, I did miss a unique materia in Final Fantasy 7 when I assumed Red XIII knew what he was talking about when he told me 'not this way' and ran off.

I will confess that when I was playing Disgaea I resorted to GameFAQs.  It seems like half of the game is grinding, and if you don't know what you're doing it could well be more like 80%!  I had to restart when I did look at a guide because it turns out that there's a part of the story you're completely locked out of unless you find and activate two switches before going out on your first mission...

Singelli :   Thanks, I looked around the 'click here to earn Viz' page and couldn't find anything.  I guess I missed the obvious place to check for something like that!

I received 125 Viz today instead of the normal 100, and also 1.3 Contribution Points instead of 1.  Has this happened for everyone else?  Is it an increase in daily Viz, or maybe just an anniversary type bonus?

Unless it's a game that I really, really want, I wait for the price to go down.  As fun as a new game can be, the $50-60 price tag on a lot of them makes it just not worth buying - I'd rather be several months behind the curve and pick them up cheaper, even if it does mean that some friends will try to tell me all about the fabulous game I'm missing... somehow they never seem to learn that people don't want the experience spoiled.

I do have a radio in my car.  Given my local choices of stations, the 'golden oldies' is the least dire.

I also have one radio aside from that, but I don't listen to it on a regular basis.  It's one of those emergency radios, with a hand crank for in case the power goes out for an extended period - it's more intended for listening for weather or emergency announcements than music, and it has a flashlight and a lamp attached.  Pretty fancy, considering it's mostly used as a paper weight!

Congratulations on a billion views!  I hope you get to keep things running for another billion, it's nice getting to play things like Mother 3 - it's really a shame that it was never officially translated and released, but thanks to you Americans can get access without learning Japanese and looking for a ROM!

tgags123 : Don't worry, I won't ignore the forums!  I just don't check them every day in case there's something to reply to.  I have a hard time saying something if I don't really have anything to say.

I'm new here, I've played a lot of retro games but the cartridges still work - so I'm mostly here for the ones I've missed or weren't translated into English!  If anyone wants to talk about a specific game there's a fair chance I've played it before, so feel free to poke me if you want to.