SomTervo

Very true. I've never seen so many young people mobilised about anything political like this, though. Even if they aren't showing their colours, they're still engaging with it. Commenting on Salmond/ Darling/ the debates. The fact that it's a binary choice with a really clear effect seems to be getting even young people on board. And the voting age is 16, so that'll increase numbers, even if not by much. Also by young people I am including people in their early 20s, who from what I've seen are incredibly political. I'm pretty sure turnout is going to be massive for the referendum. It's so easy to understand and relatively clear cut. Nothing like the unrepresentative clusterfuck nightmare that Westminster elections/ elections in general are. @Ethan: I had no idea that was even happening. Wuuuut. Welp, off to the US politics thread I go.

Man I couldn't give a shit about that shit

You're right Ethan. I'm just getting such digital cold feet every 20 minutes. Home in an hour and a half... Strange: Level 20 is the max for your subclass. Ie your class can be Warlock but your subclass is a further division of Warlock. After hitting 20 as Warlock you can technically go another 20-40 levels by choosing Firewalker (not the proper name) which is one of two more Warlock subclasses with their own bunch of skills and abilities. I think practically you're still level 20 but the level number still goes up. And what the heck is a shader.

I've been reading some worrying words floating around the internet. In various comment sections/ boards. A lot of people saying there's not enough content by half in the game. This is from folks who have been playing it for 12 hours or have been watching livestreams of it being played for many hours. (Not that this is in any way a good method to play a game without getting tired and frustrated with it.) Ohgod. Have I made a huge mistake with the digital purchase. Ohgod.

Yep, this is my worry too. As a Scot I'm sliiiightly worried about how much things are going to kick off post-independence if it's a really close result. Especially if No win. The Yes voters are gonna flip. They're insane. Although it's worth bearing in mind that the "Yes vote doing better in polls" line was actually spin. The original headline was, "poll shows Yes campaign did better in a debate", which doesn't mean anything. Because No voters can still think Yes did better in last Tuesday's debate, even if they'll still vote No. Anecdotally, having spoken to countless people between the ages of 17 and 60 or so in the last few months, I've noticed a few trends. The most interesting thing is that I've met barely any young people who are in the No camp. Every young person I speak to, out of probably nearly a hundred (all from widely various parts of Scotland) bar one or two, believe entirely in independence. It seems most of their friends feel the same, they all have an attitude that it's the right thing to do. And the best bit? They're not loud about it. They never bring it up. Just ask em and they'll quietly say, 'I'm voting yes.' This makes me wonder - polls are showing this and that the entire time. But, after my 6 years of working in Market Research, I can tell you categorically that 16-24 year olds are the absolute hardest people to reflect in polls and research. In almost every case you won't have enough of them, often by half or so of the next group. Could this be a possible hidden electorate who are going to make a massive, unprecedented Yes swing? Observations, observations, observations.

Yeah, I find that really tiresome. I wish they made the focus narrower but deeper, basically how Arkham Asylum was. Imho, and again it's a controversial opinion, Arkham Origins handled it better. It made a lot more sense to have a breadth of villains in Origins because Bats was new on the scene and all the villains were making themselves known to him. And the pacing of their introduction was better. The caveat to this is that Anarchy and Ninja-lady were totally bullshit filler.

Goddamn, you guys, making me want more BGs We converted a couple on Saturday night. They came over. Brought Risk. I scoffed. We seshed Parade, Coup, Betrayal at House on the Hill and Once Upon A Time (whilst hammered on rum) until 1.30am. Received a neighbour noise complaint after blasting Tom Waits and Talking Heads all night from the PS4. It was amazing.

I'll be online anywho bub!

What time will everybody be on tomorrow night? I might get a short session tonight at 0000GMT, which is probably around... 1900EST? And 1500PST? But I'll have work first thing in the morning tomorrow, so I'll most likely be on tomorrow night for a very long session. Tuesday night I should be on from 1800GMT through to 0100GMT. So that's 1300EST through to 2000EST; or 0900PST through 1600PST. At which time I assume nobody west-coast will be online. I'll be pretty busy the rest of the week in the evenings.

IIRC the change was much simpler than that, Ethan. Liiiike... the 'Doubt' option? That used to be 'Push'. As in, try to push them into saying more, through aggression or nagging or persistence. The writing and interrogating makes a lot more sense once you find this out. It was indeed near the end of development they changed 'Push' to say 'Doubt', and singlehandedly fucked most players' success and understanding of all interrogation/ interview encounters. Every time I pushed Doubt thinking he'd just be like "ii'mmm not sureee about thaaat' or 'you're not telling me something', he actually pushes them, going 'COME ONE, THERE'S MORE TO IT THAN THAT, CHRIST YOU IDIOT' And the gunfighting. You can't even compare it to GTAIV's gameplay man. Gunfighting in LA Noire just shouldn't have been there. It's terrible. It makes no sense. It's so goddamn dull. Most of the game is so goddamn dull. I love that they sunk who knows how many millions into the game making a fucking unbelievably amazing, giant, replica 1950s Los Angeles- then made us barely interact with it at all. Like you drive across it thirty times, to very specific places. That leaves, what, 90% of the city unused? Talk about uneconomical design. Atm I'm playing Minecraft on PS4 with my gf. It's amazing. Made a treehouse, a farm, some pasture. Found a mineshaft and a mushroom island. So great.

I feel the same- but then I think back to the beta, and while I can't remember why, it was definitely a joy to play the entire time. Until I ran out of stuff to do, which shouldn't be an issue in full-game. The 'I'm mainly an SP player' argument doesn't discount Destiny at all? Did you play the Beta? You can do the thing basically entirely as a singleplayer experience, and it's still really good (from what I did in the Beta). In story missions you go into the 'shadow' and no other players are around. The world is really good, creeping up on Fallout 3 quality in terms of exploration and little stories that happen (albeit obviously a fraction of Fallout's size.) And in the open world people randomly drop in and out, adding awesome emergent moments. I even think just the addition of experience points and damage points somehow makes the essentially Halo gameplay about 100x better. Like if Halo had XP from kills and properly upgradable gear, it would have been fixed- and we didn't know this until Destiny!

IIRC this was on Kotaku, god rest its soul, a couple of years back. It works really well until you get to massive numbers (becomes too cumbersome) or you try to do anything other than simple multiplication. Still cool tho.

The microwave thing! What the hell!

'... a man who goes by the name Kenshi_Ryden on an online gaming forum was found dead last night, the word "artic" scrawled over all the walls in his house...'

Since when the hell was that a thing?!

Always wanted to play SMT- from what ive read they're not necessarily hard but require a fair bit of front-end preparation and learning to survive till the end. Similar to Dark Souls in that process? Though obv not in actual mechanics. Also is Sims 4 good? Better than 2/3? My gf would probably like it, maybe i'll get it for her for xmas

Just for you crazy yanks, I took a late morning start on Wednesday 10th. So I'll be up extra late to Destiny wit'y'all.

On the PSN pre-order thing, it's nice that they don't charge you until the days around release date. That definitely alleviates the pressure. Also I chatted to an employee at GAME- turns out trade-in prices are based on how many copies of a game are currently owned by consumers. Considering how Destiny's going to sell like hotcakes, its trade-in value will never be too high to begin with.

Yeah naturally- being a tad facetious Aint they planning on supporting it for 10 years? Or is that franchise support again? Regardless, i paid a relatively small amount for a (hopefully) high quality barrier

So (re your status Ethan) I was super duper hyped for Destiny. Then I pre-ordered it on the PSN. I suddenly realised that if it's not as good as I hoped, I wouldn't be able to return it. It would just sit there on my PS4 sucking up £55. And I bought a £35 prepaid card to help along with it. So even if I cancel the preorder, I'll still have put £35 in for nothing. I'm having a serious digital-age non-refundable nightmare. At the time I was all like "the convenience of just choosing it on the dash and playing immediately is too great, especially in our unnecessarily massive living room", but now I'm all like "shit if I don't like it it'll sit on my PSN account forever and there's no way to get money back out of it." Edit: I guess my only consolation is that I decided to go in for the game immediately after the beta, because I felt utterly confident in it being a good purchase. Clearly it was fun enough to warrant a purchase. Not to mention I'm paying £55 for something which £500 million was sunk into. That's a pretty good value ratio.

My gf is a vegetarian. She's totally tolerant of people eating meat, but she's squeamish when it comes to graphic depictions of creature-flesh. That bit was a tough moment all round. You know they had to do like three takes of that scene? Because he's a vegetarian, that actor. He kept boking it back up. Check out the Making Of, you can watch it happen. Bloody horrific.

Is that the demo which is the same Afghanistan bit but played slightly differently? With cardboard box ladies and stuff? Also I don't get your spoilertag!

It's always the same for the first 2-3 years. Says the guy who bought a PS4 five months after release. (Don't regret it)

The gifs in the comment thread, though.

L4D is entirely about the 4 player co-op with best friends. With that, it's a masterpiece; without friends, it's decent; by yourself, it's terrible. It wasn't made to be played solo. Evolved will be the same, no doubt. Though the design, even at a basic level, is so much more interesting than L4D's ever was. L4D and Spec Ops aren't really comparable at all. That's like comparing Quake 3 Arena with Half Life: they're contemporaries, but one is a multiplayer classic and one's a singleplayer classic.