slatz_grobnik

It may change, but my current level of hostility towards Elemental is pretty damn high.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation Some lab in the Netherlands did it to a frog.

Single player. I like video games for the envelopment of narrative. I don't play video games in order to listen to six men on three continents argue in colorful yet predictable language over the size of their respective members.

I have heard much more criticism directed towards Mirror's Edge, generally in the "novel game mechanic ruined by FPS and weak level design" vein. Beyond Good & Evil failed for a number of reasons, beginning with the title (Nietzsche should just be avoided at all costs by games). I think the box design wasn't great either - as I recall, it put an odd emphasis on the photojournalism, doubly so with Jade shown with camera. And - let's be brutal - designing Jade not to appeal to the prurient interest could not help sales. The other thing I seem to remember in hearing about it early on was the discussion of stealth, and there really aren't a lot of good stealth games out there. Also, I have a suspicion that it was too Euro for general U.S. tastes. Psychonauts I generally think didn't succeed because people are idiots, and gamers don't deserve the self-congradulation they provide themselves. It makes me want to scream this is why we can't have nice things!!! The only thing I can guess is that people who started it saw a platformer with a really slow burn to the start.

Proper response: then rent a movie.

If an un-starring rampage is two people who made dick comments at the beginning, then our skin is just as thin as we accuse theirs of being. EDIT: Not, mind you, that I find the comment worth the attention to begin with.

A biography of Joseph Campbell, a memoir by the FBI's former lead art crime agent, and a history of sushi.

Having read a huge number of his novels close together I can definitely see changes in his style. I mean, the early wizards novels are kinda painful after reading all the Death and Watch books. I've heard the last few Discworld books he's written aren't that great, either. I'm excited, though, to start in on the witches series in a week or so. The thing to remember about Discworld is how much volume there is. Discworld starts off as parody, turns into Troperiffic straight comedy writing that becomes increasingly character driven, then slides increasingly purely satirical. Depending on what your taste in comedy is, how well you understand the underlying material for the parody, and how you feel about the topic or topics being satirized, you are bound to like one or another time to a different degree. I almost hesitate to call it stylistic development on his part, because of how many books there are and how widely things have ranged. This can make it confusing to talk about quality, because his writing becomes a victim of its own success. I think that his last (main Discworld) book was one of the weaker ones (it feels like an attempt to rewrite the main concept of two or three of the earlier books), and people seem to be strongly divided as it comes to Moist. However, the Tiffany Aching series, of equal recent vintage (and shelved in the YA section to try and capture that market) is amazing, and functionally a continuation of the Witches series, (which I think he may have put off there because of how poorly received the last few of the Witches books were).

What he was complaining about was not necessarily the communities, but that bans of one form or another are more common, implying that those who oversee the communities are less tolerant. I think you really have to distinguish between the two. Trolling? Whatever. Until it reaches the line of hate speech, learn to tune it out. Griefing is pointless, annoying, and can really harm the quality of the game.

While everyone complains about the opacity of video card numeration, I find that PSUs are about 3 times as opaque. You can't even always trust some of the major brands, if it's one of their sub-brands that they only label, and the stats take a lot more interpretation. Add to this that problems are hard to spot until they become disastrous, and getting a straight answer for how much power has got a fair bit of play to it at any decent level of sophistication, and it's something of a mess.

Most annoying part is never being able to guess what the most annoying part will be, such as in my most recent mobo upgrade not realizing that the SATA ports had a bend that ran them dab smack into my drive housing, or being unable to get past boot until the realization that they sent you the wrong voltage RAM. Good times all.

I care because I know there are games, Catherine off the top of my head, that I know I would like to be localized, and localized well. While it's clearly an exaggeration to say that any specific bad localization harms any other, I do know how markets are skittish, and executives prone to sweeping generalizations. And if, for instance, it's a game I like, I want to spread that joy of the game the same as I might give a positive recommendation of it in reality. To find out people hate it because it's been mistreated by some third party is...unfair, in that sense of not sporting.

Everblue 2. I'm lead to believe that this game is more popular than that, but it's pretty much number one on the list whenever friends want to make fun of my taste in games. Fallout: Tactics. It's overambitious (it's funny seeing something like a multi-currency system used in FO:NV and thinking "yep, still didn't make it work right"), they clearly ran out of time at the end, and it gets some of the canon wrong (then again, so did 3). But it's a good game with some neat ideas in its gameplay. And come on, it's R. Lee Emery fighting a politician hive mind. Startopia. Red Dwarf inspired starport micromangement.

Red Dead Redemption. Awful gap between narrative and gameplay, just awful. This extends to much of R*'s product line, and to sandbox games in general. Final Fantasy series. I came to try it late, and, as far as I can tell, it's been running off of nostalgia for many episodes. The Longest Journey. It's a movie with irrational point-and-click segments between the reels.

Got an older Das Keyboard. It's a beauty to type on. Had to switch out with a cheapy from the office because I needed one with a PS2 connector to fix bios stuff. Will switch back when I clean up.

The latter's been out for a while, but I'm still waiting for a release I can make it to.

And that's just the way it should be.

While I've had some entertainment at times putting together e-z-chair oriented PC setups, (and to live up to the title), PC games tend to demand the sort of attention, thoughtfulness, and care that flopping about on the couch is not conducive to, unlike your typical console game that primarily requires twitchy reflexes and ability to use ones thumbs.

Yep, I eagerly await it. Looks suitably mindscrewish.

FLCL is what got me into anime. I saw an episode in a bar one night, and just had to know. My favorite is probably Patlabor. That show defies classification.

But the moon is just a rock. Not much to be found there. Or are you talking about making the moon a pitstop on the way to Mars? The sort of argument I tend to see for colonizing - or setting up permanent facilities - on the Moon, is that we could do it tomorrow. If 24 hours from now the industrialized world was gripped in a general "hey, let's do something!", we could see it done in far less than a lifetime. Furthermore, we really haven't gotten the kinks out of this whole process of moving stuff to space. It might not really be possible. As the article gets at, it's not unreasonable to think that yes, maybe we're more or less stuck on the Pale Blue because the problems are to great for too few rewards. If we're serious about doing it, we need to experiment more. Mars isn't terribly suited for that. If, $deity forbid, something goes wrong with a jaunt to Mars, that's it. Not that the Moon's a cakewalk, but your window of failure is a lot bigger...probably more catastrophic for political will to do so as well. And, callously, with a faster turnaround to rectify failures, we can learn What Not To Do in order to survive out there a lot faster. As such, the point isn't the resources to be gained (though, as often with space exploration and science in general, it's pretty hard to predict those sorts of gains), but that the Moon is the celestial kiddie pool. Sure, it's not really swimming, but it's probably worth splashing around a bit just to find out if the water's going to come up and kill us dead.

So, one night, I was at a Brew n' View showing of "Them!" hosted by the Field Museum's entomology department, and as people were hanging out and drinking afterwards, my SO at the time brought up the aforementioned bug - I don't remember the context, we'd all had a few - and one of the department directors launched into something approaching a tirade about how people should be thankful to have them around, because they were top predators for their class of insect and killed off a lot of stuff that posed potential health risks, whereas they didn't.

Specifically putting aside questions of morality/legality, pirating games is like drinking cough syrup to get high. If you're, say, 12, or live in a dry county in Backwater, GA, fine. You don't need to condone it to understand it. But if you're otherwise a normal adult, there's a certain lack of maturity, or more specifically a lack of willingness to go accept the social placements of the remainder of society. And the worst part are the rationalizations.

Space Invaders. On the Atari.