Henroid

GG is currently jumping through hoops to justify doxxing people who gave money to Randi Harper via Patreon despite their 'official' stance on doxxing being bad and nobody deserving it. So far they're at, "but she's a bad person."

I bought a Wii U today and had it hooked up and updated just in time for Splatfest to start. Mind you, never played Splatoon before, had NO idea what Splatfest was. But whatever, I prefer car travel so that was as good a reason as any to spend my opening levels in the game getting WRECKT. But it's fun. The controls were really weird to adjust to. I hated the motion control for up and down, then hated the right-stick for looking even more because its sensitivity is unwieldy (even when adjusting it) so I went back to motion. Then the servers went down, I guess. Which is fine, I have work in the morning and there's no way I'm gonna be like "oh whoops it's 2am" again in my life.

So, goddamn it, I just dropped $500 to buy a Wii U, this, and a couple other things. I have to experience this game and won't be held by any longer.

I've played Mario 64 via its port to the DS, which as I understand it is pretty faithful to the original. It is far from my favorite Mario game, that's for sure. It feels like the level design was more ambitious than their grasp of making Mario controllable in the game would actually allow for.

You don't even have to TRY to nail Garrus, I think. He's pretty open right away talking in innuendos and aaaaaa it was weird.

Oh man that reminds me. So Mass Effect 2 also scored points because it didn't brute-force me into a relationship with any of my team members, unlike ME1 (where, if you're nice to Liara at all, she wins out; so you have to be a dick to her about at least two things). On top of that, at what I suppose would be THE sex scene, my Shepard instead just looked at the photo of Kaiden on her desk for a bit, then went on to do what Shepard does best; blow shit up. So yeah, I'm very pleased with Bioware about that.

And now for a new game I've beaten; Mass Effect 2. Hooray! So I can say for sure that Mass Effect 2 is superior to Mass Effect in every respect, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not that hung up on the combat aspects of each game. While ME2 certainly cleaned things up and made it better, a non-compelling combat system being made better is still non-compelling. Most of my praise for the series so far has to do with its writing. While "save the universe!" plots are really tired, the things happening along the way make the journey worth it. ME2 did a better job at humanizing (hurr) the characters on your team. Subject Zero ended up surprising me the most. From the way Chris talked about her on Idle Thumbs years ago I had some biases formed up. And those biases were met until I went on her loyalty mission and generally got to know her better. I was playing a female Shepard so I couldn't see the romance stuff, but I read about how there's a split path with Jack; a quickie, or an actual involved relationship. And her way of talking to get into the latter seemed more real, I guess, than what I would've expected. There's definitely a lot to talk about when it comes to this game and the series as a whole but I'm not gonna get into it all right now. Last thing I will note though is that the big reveal at the end of part 2 was no more or less cheesy than anything else that was happening in the games at that point.

Is that seriously where the manual is hosted? Because I am NOT going to that URL at all, what with my country's crazy Patriot Act bullshit. "No no this is for a video game!" isn't going to fly and will just cause more problems.

I found myself playing Super Mario Bros 3 today in an effort to calm down and entertain my roomies' two year old as neither of them could get him to smile (it worked!). Thing is, I've beaten the game before when I was a child, but today was the first time I actually had an honest run at the game since. I've certainly poked at SMB3 a few times via the SNES port in All-Stars, but never saw past world 3 in those times. Today was like a refresher course, but a lot also felt new as there were a few things I just outright didn't remember. It felt new and familiar all at the same time. Most of the levels in the game were fairly easy to remember after all these years, especially since the game was built to have a lot of one-off themes for levels. They didn't rely on making levels longer as the means of making them difficult; in the last 3rd of the game there were plenty of levels that took a minute to beat, but required a lot of intimate know-how with the mechanics by that point in the game (most of these stages featured very cruelly used Lakitus hurrying you along). SMB3 is just so damn fascinating as a game. While not TRULY unique, every stage is more or less as close to unique as you can get while using the same framework of mechanics. I'm sleep deprived at the moment and having a hard time putting it succinctly, but hopefully other people that played it know what I mean and can describe it better. It was also interesting getting reminded that some of the over-used tricks from those impossible Mario Maker / Kaizo levels were used once or twice in a more fair manner in SMB3. Like jumping out of a situation only to hit a row of invisible coin blocks, that sort of thing. Nintendo definitely knew how to pull punches with that stuff, not crossing the line of RNG / unfair territory and giving people a chance to adjust to those surprises. Maybe it's nostalgia for the most part talking but hot damn, what a great game. I missed it. Edit - Oh and I ran through every stage, 100% and resorted to the P-wing two times only and only after having honest runs at those particular levels.

Whoa, I'd forgotten they talked about this. Awesome!

I've never been that concerned about digital goods disappearing. I mean not to say it doesn't suck, afterall I'm still whining my ass off about City of Heroes' closure (fuck you NCSoft). But I'm 30 years old which is old enough I guess to remember a time before instant gratification and the insane - yes, insane - assumption that all consumer activity must be protected. Video game enthusiasts in general, from what I observe, have the hardest time with buyer's remorse. Yes, it is a terrible feeling, but it happens, nobody owes you shit. I dunno the timetable as far as Ghost Trick going from available to taken away from everyone, but if it's measured in years that lessens the blow. Not by much though because the App Store is still functional so, truly, this is a moment where I shake my finger at Capcom. They have weird views on how to treat their fans over the last couple years. --- In other news the Star Wars Battlefront beta must be underway or something because people are flipping out about the game's recommended system requirements. And I'm right there with them; for some reason EA recommends 16GB of RAM for Battlefront.

Ghost Trick has been pulled from the iOS store. Oh, and also people's purchase history. http://www.destructoid.com/ghost-trick-s-been-pulled-from-ios-completely-even-for-those-who-bought-it-314081.phtml?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

I wouldn't count on that. You'd be surprised how stupid people can get. My prediction is that over the next year we'll be getting news about court documents being filed to take this to a lawsuit trial, and the Escapist will boast about their confidence at first, but the longer it goes on they'll get increasingly silent. Then, one day, we'll hear about an out of court settlement, the article will be taken down, apologies made, and then... that's it.

Oh god I forgot to do that. Okay, now I know the true nature of that post.

When people post like this it must mean that every word is so important.

That's true. The stakes are higher than enthusiast opinion; there's accusations that threaten government agencies from acting. I mean from that much alone it warrants a lawsuit in my opinion, as much as I hate invoking those as an option.

It doesn't have the same circumstances surrounding this article's creation though. That Kotaku article came out of nowhere, not sparked by any ongoing controversy. Nobody was in a hurry to get some negative thing out there. On top of that, Silicon Knights and its leads never made any statement (as far as I remember) about the article or any of its claims. Sure, that may not mean anything necessarily, but silence is an option taken (see my post RE: "No comment at this time").

The game will get to a point where you have to start making real choices on where to spend your money. The weapons branch out to three paths, and aside from that, the income doesn't support making one choice for each weapon type even.

Ugh, save-scumming is so detestable to me. It's a slower form of save-state abuse some LPers do. And it removes one of the intended aspects of the gameplay. As far as hidden potentials goes... I dunno, it's neat. It gives each character more... character. It's why you level characters by the whole class rather than individuals. Except for engineers, I would suggest people just level your classes at equal paces. With the exception of maybe giving your shock troopers a rank ahead once in a while - don't underestimate their run speed (not to be confused with distance they can run via AP) and ability to soak up damage. Plus, shock troopers are great for positioning to have them idly shoot at passing / approaching enemies.

There's a difference between news and other kinds of published writings. GG's talking point extends to all forms of writing, which is absurd.

Furthermore news, as in actual "here's what is happening," should be decoupled from bias anyway. Just facts should be reported. Opinion pieces on that news are to be kept separate. Deadpan, you're essentially giving Fox News (the organization, I'm not recognizing them as a news source) the A-OK on how they operate.

There's bias and then there's pursuing an agenda. The latter is what the accusation is.

Holy moly that response letter. I can tell you all something for damn sure; you read any professional news and actual publication, if shit like that article gets written it doesn't go to press until the accused or someone representing the accused (like an agent in the case of celebrities) is contacted for their say. The argument about having to "go to print" is something that died off with the internet; "going to print" is a term that exists to explain how a newspaper or magazine has to actually be printed in great quantity physically. Once printed there's no going back. Internet 'publications' are not constrained by that at all; you can post your article whenever you fucking want. But yeah. The response does a good job of laying out how it was all a smear campaign. I'm glad no mention of lawsuit was made, because that would possibly actually hurt the process of a lawsuit. Reasonable demands were made and if not met, they can go from there.

Any omission or distortion of that info is a wild breach of eth OH MY GOD WHAT AM I SAYING.

I can't remember the name of that service that was based on playing the latest PC games via video and input stream only, but I think people saw that in action and realized it wasn't practical at all. Still it operated well-enough to leave me impressed. But yeah. I guess the take-away from that was to offload non-critical processes to remote systems. I'm not exactly sure how that works out on the financial side though.