I have played and beaten Mother twice. What I don't like in the game are the endless maze of paths with the same repetative battles every 15 seconds. These are places like the Itoi caves and that factory place. I also hate the PSI Powers. Like Paula casting PSI Fire OMEGA only deals about 10 HP damgae whereas a regular attack from Ness or Poo will deal about 50 HP damage. The start of the game is also pretty bad. With the house shaking becuase of some long word that started with a "P".

Oh well. Driving the tank was pretty cool. And also being able to go back to magicant was neat too. But come on! A BOOMERANG being the most powerfull weapon in the game?! sigh.

~Colin



Hey, didn't you play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES? If you got the boomerang in that game you were unbeatable. You only had to be careful when you used them and were jumping. Heck, you could throw three at a time, pause, and select another turtle so you could distribute them to each team-mate. Huh? We're talking about Mother here? Oops.

~diospadre



I agree, the random battles are incredibly annoying, which is why I like EarthBound soooo much. You know when you're getting into a battle and who you're up against. Of course, making the enemies visible makes it far less challenging, but I guess the speed of some of the enemies makes up for that.

So boomerangs AREN'T supposed to be used as instruments of death? And to think I had it wrong all this time...

~reidman

Umm... Salutations.

I was pleased to hear about the Earthbound 64 petition done a while back, but I have a question :

Why not have an Earthbound GBA petition?

I want to see sprites though, done much in the same style as Earthbound, (SNES), or better, so that the game can be very long instead of short because of 3d models wasting space.

(was that a run on sentence?)

~Don Incognito



Sorry, there isn't anyway to sign the petition. We might do a Mother on GBA petition this summer, I'm not sure.

~diospadre



I'm all petitioned-out for the moment, but if I'm around this summer and EB hasn't been released on GBA, you might expect to see a petition indeed. We're REALLY going to be shooting high for this one. If I'm going to do the petition, I'm going to aim for 20,000 signatures. Sound crazy? It is, it is. But it'll be another achievement we'll be able to proudly add to our 'Wall of Incredible and Impossible Accomplishments That Nintendo Has Completely Ignored', along with such other things as NP Siege II and the EB64 Petition.

~reidman

I have PK hack for earchbound..... ive created an IPS file for it but i dont know how to make it work. Ive renamed the file ebou.ips, as the instructions for PK hack said, but whenever i play earthbound, it remains the same. My emulator is Zsnes so i shouldnt need a patch right? What can i do to get my IPS files to work?

~Charles



I never used PK Hack, but did you put the EarthBound cartridge into the CD-ROM drive yet? That might fix it. Otherwise you'll need to get a new computer.

~diospadre



Beats the crap outta me. Ask on the PK Hack Message Forum.

~reidman

How come one day Blockbuster has the instructions and the next day it doesn't? They say they won't check it in without instructions, but they continue to lose them? Do little instruction book gnomes take them. (Instruction book gnomes are related to the Pizza Gnomes who steal the induvidual size pizzas at my work when it's busy, hiding behind the counter, running away laughing giddly with the stolen pizzas.)

People should return instruction books with their games to benefit all. And don't write in the notes section. But who actually uses the note section in instruction books anyway? Never have, never will.

~d`Jeu



They don't have manuals because the employees care as little as you. Everytime they open a box without a manual they have to go to the computer to see if theres supposed to be one, call the people and tell them to bring it back and fine them, blah blah blah. Its just too much work, and they could be spending their time better by staring at whatever movie is playing for the 10 millionth time in their store.

~diospadre



I write down the names of the staffers I will fire for not updating on Fridays like they're supposed to.

~reidman

I've never beaten it, because emulators annoy me. It goes so slow, and junk. Also...the beginning I found pretty hard. I mean, you have to do some serious leveling-up. I went back and meant to beat it once, but I got whacked by Wally within 5 minutes. Sad.

~Mr. Foppy



That's the same reason I've never finished Mother; the whole emulator busniess kind of devalues the experience. Actually, it's not so much the emulator as it is the fact that the game in on the computer and not a TV. That's why this summer I'm going to use the Dreamcast NES emulator to finally play EB0 on my tv. Yay!

~diospadre



Hahaha! All I can do is laugh at the shell of a man who can't beat a redneck farmer named Wally.

...I could only get as far as the faithful chicken dog.

~reidman

Beaten Mother? Why that's impossible to do unless you know Japanese (or have one of the few English Carts...)? What's that? Something called e-m-u-l-a-t-i-o-n? Ha! I think I am going to wait to play it on my gameboy... some day. Playing it on the computer and illegally would just ruin the experience!

~Bowser



And its illegal!

~diospadre



Illegality is your friend, just ask dios.

~reidman

I never beat Earthbound. I was @ the last level, and I could NOT beat Pokey. I think that my exp. was just very very low. Anyway, I took a break from the game for about a year. Very bad idea. I turned my game on to see, to my delight, that all my games were erased. I started over, got to Moonside, didn't play the game for two months, turned it on, and found that it was erased again! Now I play it every week, just to make sure that doesn't happen.

~Magnum232



You probably dropped the game or something. Sometimes cartridges erase saves when you drop them; something to do with...something. I'm not really sure, but it happens with Pokemon.

~diospadre



Tip: Get some Multi Bottle Rockets for the battle with Pokey. You'll thank me. At which time I will accept either check or cash.

~reidman

I played and beat EB when I was in 7th grade, and by far it was the first and best RPG I had and will ever play. And when everyone here played EB for the first time, and you know who you are, you got scared at the part when the the Departmen Store in Fourside goes dark and the stunkit squid guy comes across the screen and then the intercom goes... I was scared. But it was stuff like that, that I haven't seen done as well as I have in EB that made it so memorable for me. I tried playing Mother 1 but the emulators froze just like my nintendo does today.. they made that thing really true to life with it freezing up like that.

~attticus



Man everyone around here seems to just hate emulators. And to think I get ten emails a day demanding we post the ROM.

~diospadre



I was 13 when I played through EarthBound for the first time, and its true. When I got to the Dept. Store part, I was seriously freaked. Maybe because I was up at 10:00 PM, which was THE latest I had ever been up. Little did I (note from dios: reid seems to have gotten lazy in the middle of this sentence and stopped writing. I'll finish it up for him.) know that I was fat and ugly, and smell because I live on a farm. My best friend is my pig Claynard. I ate him fer breakfast yesterday. Hyuck.

~reidman

I played Mother. It's a pretty good game, but I wish you got characters with a little more experience... I also dislike the number of random encounters. ARGH Go away, you stupid Barbot! I'm trying to explore Duncan's Factory! Speaking of Duncan's, the mazes are too big. Oh, not enough inventory space either. In fact, the game is really good right until you leave Magicant. Oh well.

~SimonBob



Getting new characters in Mother was not something I ever looked forward to. When you're level 20 and you've got to work on a lvl 1 sidekick, it just sucks the fun out of the game. At least you dont have to walk around forever because of a low random battle frequency.

~diospadre



The solution is simple.

...

What are you looking at me for? I said it was simple, go figure it out yourself.

~reidman

Never beat Mother.

I got so dang far to that Ellay place, FINALLY found Jack, was about to have a little break with some dancing... And BAM!

I got that evil, evil, EVIL Nintendo message. It was like writer's block, only you couldn't just avoid it, or get over it. It was STUCK in my way.

I try playing it every now and then, but it's hard enough just to get that annoying Pippi girl. I don't know if I'll ever get to the same spot without my computer being fried.

~NickCaz



I didn't get further than Duncan. I was too low leveled, and Jeff was a dead weight. I started another game to play with, but it got deleted by my sister. Darn you Whitney!

~diospadre



I try playing it every now and then, but it's hard enough just to get that annoying Pippi girl. I don't know if I'll ever get to the same spot without my computer being fried.

You said you stopped for some break dancing? Maybe it was the spirit of Frodis that stopped you.

~reidman

{SLing-Fserv} FALCON LOVES MEN