Henroid

The rod is an illusion. What actually makes fishing easier is experience - both the mechanic and just you the player having time spent with it. It reminds me of the fishing in Breath of Fire 3 a lot, though the major difference is you can't manually manipulate the bar you need to keep over the fish icon. The fishing in BoF3 was boss as fuck, my favorite fishing mini-game ever. This game easily takes second place. But yeah. As you gain levels in the fishing skill, the bar you use during the mini-game to reel in the fish gets larger. Attaching bait is a big plus I would promote because the frequency of hits grows by a large margin. Using tackle is meant to be a difficulty slider. If you have a good handle on things you don't really need it. Unless you're using the treasure hunting tackle. By the way, for all the skills in the game, at level 5 you pick a branching path to specialize on, and at level 10 choose a final specialization based on that previous choice. So for the farming skill you can pick between more valuable crops or more valuable animal goods at level 5. At level 10 for the crops option you can choose faster growing crops or more money return on artisan goods (wine and such). The level 10 animal goods choice is befriending coop animals faster (chickens, ducks, etc) or befriending barn animals faster (cows, sheep, etc) (befriending being important to making animals happy; more happiness means more product / better product). I bring this up because I want to steer people away from one of the level 5 fishing options. The one that makes crab traps have a reduced cost to build. Crab traps are the most useless thing in this game and I'm mad at myself for picking it. Better to get the 25% fish sale price increase, and from there choose to make it 50% or have more treasures found. Crab traps usually trap garbage, but even when they catch things they're meant to the monetary return isn't worth a damn.

Frankly I think Molyneux leaving is why Microsoft is shutting the studio down. I'm not sure how clear their track record is with this, but I think they're playing to the rock band frontman type of thing. Like if you don't have an Axel Rose, is it really Guns & Roses. Which is the wrong kind of thinking - it's been mentioned before on the Idle Thumbs Podcast that the video game industry is bad at nurturing new talent and this screams to me of that problem.

So I have dumped an insane amount of time into this game already despite having only gotten it on Wednesday or Thursday. I adore this game. Unlike the SNES Harvest Moon, there's no time restraint on whatever goal you can achieve (and whether or not that "finishes" the game I have yet to see). The result is that you can play it at your own pace. As a result, the game also doesn't require you to adopt all forms of money making to make progress for the most part. As your character earns ranks in each of the skills, you eventually get to make some pretty defining choices. Like in the "Farming" skill you ultimately choose if you want to be better at growing crops or raising animals. Sticking to one or the other exclusively are pretty lucrative options (though crops, if you play video games hard mechanically, will super-outdo animal raising). I agree with the OP about gift-giving limitations. I played Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and oh my god, to see any sort of progress in making friends with people you had to dump so much time and effort (even to the extent of having an inefficient farm). I do wish there were better cues on who would like what gifts though. One thing I noticed is that marriage candidates are labeled as being single regardless of your character's gender, so I'm wondering how sexuality works out in the game. I hope it's open-ended because why not having it work that way? The combat is sadly a required aspect of this game. Luckily it's as shallow as I was hoping - swing weapon at things a few times until they die. Some screenshots of the game made it look like it was an action RPG with lightning magic and such and I was prepared to avoid spending money to play it. But anyway, yeah, combat is necessary because in the mine you have to protect yourself while you just roam around for minerals and other valuables. One of the main projects in the game you work on is the town Community Center. In a nutshell it's a fixed set of gathering quests to unlock functions or areas of the game. There's two ways to handle it. The first way, which lends to the rural-living aspect, is to gather "bundles" of items. It's stuff like having one of each of the main crops from spring, then summer, etc. Or bundles of the things you can forage in each season. The other option, which I call the "sell-out" option, is to help the Wal-Mart-like entity buy the community center and turn it into a warehouse. From there, rather than gather stuff, you just buy the unlocks with raw cash. As far as villagers go, the game pretty much has one of every fictional character archetype possible. As an example, among the teenagers there's the emo kid who stays in the basement 'til night time and he smokes away from his parents, and there's also the kid who skateboards and I think plays rock music.

Probably one of the more important news stories that any Idle Thumbs listener would care about, Microsoft not only decided to cancel Fable Legends, but they're shutting Lionhead Studios down. The game saw a big delay when it was decided to transition it to a Free-to-Play model while in development (why would you do that, make the transition AFTER). Apparently MS is also closing another studio, Press Play, in addition to this. I dunno them though. Poor Molyneux.

This happened just days after the guy in... I think it was Kentucky, went on a mass and random murder spree. He was taken in alive (he's white in case it wasn't clear). But this kid? Shot dead, no chances taken. Literally what the fuck.

Ollie you've quickly become one of my favorite people with those pieces.

Last night I wrapped up Ori and the Blind Forest, and my god that game was beautiful from top to bottom. It inspired me to write a Steam review: Aside from that I'll add here that it is tense as fuck when the game requires it to be. I really got more than I had hoped for with that game.

There was some confusion today about Splatfest being delayed for North America but it got underway just an hour later than usual. I have to say, from what I saw tonight, Team Blue is on its way. I had something goddamn incredible happen just now. In the skatepark level, I was by the enemy team's wooden ramps, where one of their snipers was perched. I managed to take out their buddy they were covering, and I just dropped into the ink sitting still, but also sort of behind a ledge. And for like 20 seconds that sniper was just watching for me to move. I guess I won the patience war there because the sniper CLEARLY lost their shit and just started firing rapidly, left and right, slowly closing a v-like wall of ink around me. The precision and speed was actually pretty scary. But the best part was their shot fired down the middle didn't break my cover because of the ledge. A couple seconds later though one of their teammates showed up and broke my cover, but I made a getaway thanks to one of my team members showing up. Usually sniper annoy me and I do my best to dunk on them with my ink roller, but this encounter will always be in my fondest of memories.

Ugh. So Quinn has dropped the charges and ended the long court battle against the guy that started this whole goddamn mess. Who will no doubt run around touting it as a victory. Zoe wrote about it, and it's more of a lament about the legal system and general ignorance people have about the internet and the things it provides / does. http://blog.unburntwitch.com/post/139084743809/why-i-just-dropped-the-harassment-charges-the-man#_=_

Bad news going around the video game industry. First up, if anyone missed it yesterday, Game Trailers has shut down. Their staff was notified hours before the info was made public. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/265419/Video_game_video_hub_GameTrailers_is_shutting_down_this_week.php Today, Mad Catz is laying off 37% of its staff in a restructuring plan. They say starting first quarter of 2017 it'll save them $5 million each year. It's all weird because their year-to-year sales were up over 100%, which is pretty huge for that sort of statistic. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/265502/Mad_Catz_lays_off_37_of_staff_in_restructuring_plan.php Lastly, Oculus-ready PCs are starting to hit the market, and they are expensive as fuck. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/265498/Oculus_Ready_PCs_debut_from_949_to_2549.php

Meanwhile, back in St. Louis, pro-police billboards are being fixed.

I just like running around with an ink roller.

I don't think anyone is going to say arbitrary diversity is a good thing. It's patronizing, and yeah, it'll put unqualified people in the wrong positions. But that's a lot of the language feminists are clear on; equally qualified women passed up on jobs because there's an equally qualified male. Hillary Clinton's campaign is an example of arbitrary diversity. It's all she's got and it's a shame because she's hurting women in the long run. All that said, for every bad woman in a leadership position you can name, there's thousands of men that can be named.

I'm not sure which thread is most appropriate for this, but given it's Planned Parenthood which is very much an issue feminism is concerned with. News is breaking out of Houston that the grand jury reviewing the video tapes in which Planned Parenthood supposedly sells fetal tissue has decided not to indict Planned Parenthood. That enough would be good, but there's more. It's so much better than that. The videographers of this 'evidence' are being indicted on charges of tampering with government record, and one of them is further being charged with trafficking human tissue (his attempts to get Planned Parenthood to buy/sell tissue). The whole thing is blowing up in the anti-abortion movement's face. I'm all for discussing moral issues, but if people can't do it honestly, they can't be a part of the discussion. Goddamn it this is so good. It reminds me of the Breitbart bullshit when they tried to frame up the ACLU (which sadly went under-reported).

Welp. Zenimax and Total Recall are each bringing lawsuits against Palmer Luckey, the guy heading the Facebook company handling the Oculus Rift. http://www.pcgamesn.com/zenimax-are-suing-oculus-vr-claiming-john-carmack-provided-their-research-to-palmer-luckey Zenimax is claiming that Luckey used trademarked and copyrighted material / info / data / technology to develop the Oculus Rift. Total Recall is a step ahead, gaining permission from a judge to pursue lawsuit over company information being passed off to Facebook as Luckey's personal information. Oculus / Luckey have said in response to all this that Zenimax did nothing to develop the Oculus Rift. Which is a huge fucking lie.

Well the sadder thing is that oversight and accountability need to be implemented, and even when they are, they are not enforced. It's weird that people always thought that "who watches the watchmen" had to do with the "big brother" government, and it turns out it is at a much smaller, easier to see level - local. But there's denial about the problems for some reason still. A lot of people don't see any of what's going on as a problem.

Over the last ten years I've been getting highly appreciative of video game music, to the point that I say crazy stuff like it's one of the most important backbones of video games and creating memorable moments (and it's the best way to recall those moments). I'd thought a lot about making remixed video game music (especially since that's where a lot of this started for me), but over the last couple years I thought, why aim low? I want to get into making music for video games. With the indie level getting much easier distribution these days than ever, and just the general networking (between people) I've managed to wrangle myself into thanks to the internet (yay communication!), it seems like a reasonable thing to do. Not to suggest it's easy. And frankly, I have no academic background in music, nor can I read sheets of music. The most experience I have is playing the drums, though I haven't done that in almost two decades. Don't know if that hurts me or not. I never jumped into at least practicing with tools though because my life has been in a very unfavorable, chaotic mess for the last several years. Right now, getting myself out, I feel like it's time to bite on. So I'm basically asking for help on how to get started. I don't know what tools are truly necessary at the amateur level, and I don't know what tools to expand into as I gain experience. I don't want to just pick one at random and run with it, because I'm afraid of picking a bad one and getting the wrong impression about capability. I certainly don't have infinite funds, but I have some, which is more than I can say for myself from the last few years. All I have, admittedly, are ideas. Again, so far, no experience, but I want to build that up. This isn't about "someone help me find work!" I'll handle that when the day comes. For now, I want to test myself to see if I have the talent. tl;dr - I wanna make video game music. What programs (free or paid) and equipment should I have?

Progress report: My new year resolution was to transition my income from working a typical hourly job to getting paid for my music stuffs by any means (Patreon or an actual paid gig making music for things). So I've been actually focusing on this a lot more. I've decided to stick with FL Studio for now, because there's a LOT of recommendations on it being a learning tool for music production. And there's just a lot more in the way of tutorials and people experienced in it. A friend of mine found out I was starting into this stuff and told me that he's been using FLS for 15 years so now I have a tutor. I decided to step things up and look up formal education in music resources as well. The OCRemix site has some sites linked to for that. I'm, at the moment, writing in my notebook (it helps me to remember everything) about sheet music and how to read it. I learned this stuff in 8th grade but because it was public education, and because I was however-old back in 1998, it didn't, uh, stick. STILL. It feels very useful. One thing I'm gonna have to work on is plugins for FLS, now that I understand what they are exactly.

There's a new sister site to Campaign Zero, Use of Force Project. http://useofforceproject.org/ It outlines data they're gathering on what police departments allow for in their use of force guidelines. There's things going on like Orlando allowing officers to hogtie citizens, Baltimore has guidelines for when it's OK to kill unarmed civilians, that sort of thing. One of the more interesting things to me is that the Houston PD sent their Use of Force Guidelines in with a TON of redactions across it. https://twitter.com/deray/status/689836936379248640

You son of a bitch.

I saw some of this via Steam Train (a Game Grumps show) and hot damn, it looks really neat. Spent a little too much lately to jump on this immediately but it's on the list of "nao plz."

Oh, I'd just come here to post that. Milo is a disgusting piece of shit and has done that shit TWICE in the same week, with two people who are way more substantial than him in so many ways.

Daniel Radcliffe seems to have nailed it as far as what anyone could say of Rickman:

I reserve "Favorites" for games I'm currently playing, tend to go back to often, or just actually think are the best games over. Then I have some categories. "A Good Game" - Games that I liked a lot but have finished and won't go back to often, and/or don't have installed anymore. "Bad Game" - Games that aren't installed anymore and will never be again. "Old Game" - Games that I likely won't go back to. Not out of dislike, but because they're probably out of date (ex; Torchlight is in here, TL2 surpasses all itches scratched) or don't have a community for them. The default "Games" list Steam has is full of games I haven't played yet. I have 28 items in there right now but some of them are test versions of games.

Milo continues to be a shit head. He's attributing Twitter's stock drop to his hate mob selling their stock as retaliation for his unverification (I doubt most of them have stock in it), because y'know, Twitter announcing bad ideas for their site or a competitor springing up have nothing to do with the stock. He's also using David Bowie's death to score cool points with his hate mob, even saying, "Why does David Bowie get to be verified? He's dead." I'm not exaggerating, he literally said that. Because he's a narcissistic piece of shit.