TheMightyEthan

I like it a lot better on subsequent playthroughs. I got the original game for Gamecube when it first came out, was SO excited, and quit playing when I got to the triforce part, and didn't finish it for years afterward.

Honestly the only way I've found is to just be willing to write things off as "I'm never going to play this" and take them off the list, even if you never touched them.

Something I do if nothing jumps out at me as something I want to play, is find a fairly short/small game to play. That way I can get it out of the backlog fairly quickly without committing myself to 40 hours or whatever, it helps me feel like I'm making progress, and maybe when I'm done with it there'll be something I feel like I'm in the mood for. My only caution with this or Alex's tactic is if you're not feeling it fairly quickly you should put it down (but not necessarily out of your backlog). You don't want to force yourself to play a game you're just not in the mood for because it's not fun and it also means you're more likely to form an unjustified negative opinion of the game.

At least studios in the ID@Xbox program get two free devkits. That addresses the same concern, which was that smaller studios couldn't afford devkits.

My backlog right now is only two games (Sleeping Dogs and Tiny Brains), but that's because I remove games from my backlog once I decide I have no intention of ever playing them again, even if I've never even played it once yet. That includes removing games that I consider myself done with, even if I didn't finish them. Basically I decided there's no point keeping things in my backlog for years and years when I have no intention to ever play them, even if they're not done. According to Darkadia, of my 592 games (which includes every game I could remember having from NES era onward), there are 47 I've not even played once, another 311 that I've played but not completed (though this number counts stuff like Civ V, which I've played for 340 hours but which can never really be "finished"), and 234 that I've actually beat.

Yes, but at the same time access to guns significantly increases the risks of both homicides and suicides. Just like anything else, people are most likely to do those things when they're convenient and easy, and guns make it a lot more convenient and easy than other methods. Obviously having a gun isn't going to make a non-suicidal person kill themselves for no reason, but it does make a suicidal person a lot more likely to actually go through with it. Anyone who really wants to find a way to kill themselves or someone else is going to be able to find a way to do it with or without guns, sure, but having access to a gun makes people a lot more likely to kill themselves or others on an impulse.

I liked Revenge. Paradise was a sin against nature though.

The Captain Toad stuff was a neat little mini game, but I really hope they don't try to package it as a full retail release.

As far as home consoles I've still got everything since my Xbox, but nothing from before that. As far as mobile I've still got all of them but my PSP.

Gal Civ isn't part of the Civilization franchise. They're both 4X games, but otherwise unrelated.

I got an NES sometime before first grade (I was no older than 6, and it was no later than 1992), but I don't know exactly when. I didn't have many games for it, but I remember having SMB2 & 3, some Sesame Street game, and maybe one other one that I feel like I can vaguely remember, but can't get a good enough grasp on to even guess at what it was. Some time after that, at least after I had started first grade, and probably not while I was in first grade, but again I don't remember for sure, I got a Sega Genesis. It was awesome! I had all 4 Sonic games, and played the shit out of them even though they were hard as balls, and also a Batman brawler of some kind that I liked because it was Batman but am sure it was actually terrible. Around this time my cousins had a Game Gear, and I was SO jealous. I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas 1996 (when I was 10) with Mario 64, which was amazeballs. I remember that year at the local Walmart they had the display version that you could play, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever because it was 3D! I had more games for the 64, of particular note being Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, the first Zelda I ever played, and Goldeneye. Mario Kart and Goldeneye particularly my cousins and sisters all played together a lot, cause over the summer we'd stay at our grandma's house during the day. We also rented various incarnations of Mario Party incessantly, resulting in huge blisters on our palms from those stick-rotating games. Then around 6th grade or so I got a Playstation from my mom's boyfriend (originally we were just borrowing his but when they broke up he let us keep it) with Tales of Destiny, which I loved. Still do. I never really got much into Playstation gaming though, played Final Fantasy VII and VIII a little but they never hooked me. Also around that time I got a Gameboy Color (transparent purple, fuck yeah!) with Pokemon Yellow, because obviously. It was great, but I never really played much else on it. ALSO around that time I started to kind of get into PC gaming. Mostly Tribes and then strategy games, particularly Starcraft and Homeworld. One of my friends and I would play Starcraft online almost every night, and then when we'd hang out on the weekends we'd rent the 64 version (because who has two computers at their house?). We and a couple of our other friends would also often rent the 64 version of Quake 2 to play together. I got an Xbox at launch and fell in love with Halo. All throughout high school and college my friends and I would play LAN games of Halo any chance we could. We also all modded our Xboxes, which significantly broadened the scope of games we were able to play because money was no longer an issue. I also continued to grow in PC gaming, playing mostly strategy games there. I also got a Gamecube when I started college, pretty much exclusively for the Nintendo-developed games. The farther into the that generation the more I played on PC and the less on console. I got a 360 for Christmas 2006 and started playing more console games again because my computer couldn't keep up. By this point my tastes had gotten pretty broad, I'm not even going to attempt to catalog what all I played. Again, as the generation wore on I started to get more into PC gaming, though I did get a PS3 in I think 2010 or 11 for the exclusives. But other than exclusives by 2013 I was playing pretty much everything on PC. I got a Wii U and PS4 each at launch, and an Xbone in April this year. I'm back to playing mostly console games, but anticipate in a couple years I'll build a new PC and start the slide back to that side. There are also a few handhelds in there (I've owned a GBA, PSP, DS Lite, Vita), but they've never been a major part of my gaming since the GBC.

I tend to use RPGs, because they usually have a really rich world that I can sink myself into and block out the real one. That or something like a racing game or Mirror's Edge, where it's all about perfectly timed interaction with a course, and kind of repetitive, which really helps me to get into flow. But I don't have any one specific game I use.

Bill Nye and Carmen Sandiego were on PBS?! I loved those shows!

Yeah, that's like saying "of course famous people don't understand sports, they spend their time being productive!"

Well said.

Ooh, the last episode of The Wolf Among Us comes out tomorrow.

Get him something like Catan, that's outside the norm of what Americans think of when we hear "boardgame".

I watched all of those things, and they were all soul-crushing. Anyway, the spoiler bit is the mouse-over text from the actual comic page: http://xkcd.com/1348/

Does anyone actually think it was objectively better? I thought everybody knows it's just nostalgia. Nothing wrong with nostalgia.

Sesame Street is da fuckin bomb!

@FLD: No, I just started ignoring him. Any time I posted he would respond with personal attacks on me, no matter what I said, what the conversation was, or whether he had even been a part of it before I joined in. It was strange. Then after the Great Split I went over to their new forums and kind of poked around, said hi, just to see what was up, and he was like "Hey bro, the past is the past, I'm leaving all that stuff at the old forum [this forum]. Friends?". I told him I would be civil if he would, but that after the way he acted I didn't like him and that wasn't going to change. I never really posted much at that forum though, so I don't know if he really would have kept nice or not. *Edit* - What dean said. I like his version better.

What's a VCR? A device that could record all three networks. And PBS.

I think Bouchart had something probably legitimately diagnosable wrong with him. He would take everything super personally, completely turn into this hate monster toward individuals for no apparent reason, then decide no, we're cool, then be confused why you still didn't like him.

Actually looking at the actual text of the clause, it just says that the government can't grant titles and no one holding federal office shall accept a title from a foreign state without the consent of congress. It doesn't say anything about anyone who already has a title. Though obviously it would prevent him from accepting the title of king without congressional consent if he was already POTUS. But otherwise the plan looks solid to me. Anyone born in the US really is a US citizen, and being a natural born citizen, at least 35 years old, and having been a resident of the US for the previous 14 years are the only qualifications for being president. Besides actually getting elected, obviously. I really can't imagine congress approving it though. *Edit* - Also, is there something your friend thinks this would accomplish? At most it would unify the heads of state of the US and UK for 8 years (max time somebody can be president), and my understanding is the UK monarch is almost entirely ceremonial anyway. Not to mention that it's not like the US and UK are at each other's throats to begin with.