TheLastBaron

Wow this looks awesome, I don't know that I'll have time to play it much in the near future as I'm trying to work through my considerable backlog, but that won't stop me from picking it up.

Ditto, the religion episode is really great.

Had to do some family stuff yesterday so I couldn't make it, but glad to hear it was a success.

Have you seen this: http://ifanboy.com/articles/thieves-to-steal-nicolas-cages-prized-possession-in-new-lionsgate-film-action-no-1/

I don't understand that just happened.

It's remembered them for a while, but is weird sometimes. I has always remembered them on my PC but still doesn't remember them on my laptop.

Yeah when I saw that I feel in love with the man even more.

No, but I've heard a lot about it and I know someone who played it and he really liked it. It's definitely one of the games on my list of games that I need to buy when I don't have 0 money.

I liked the 3D in Hugo a lot, it didn't do any of the annoying stuff that happens in every movie where they constantly have stuff jumping out at you. I thought it made the movie a lot better to watch, but without being super obvious that it was there all the time.

Here's the question I've always had about long games like TI: So I can see like games being fun and how a game that lasted a whole day or took multiple sessions would feel more rewarding than something that takes an hour to play, but do you feel like you would have a better time if you spent those 12 hours either playing multiple rounds of a shorter game or even playing a couple of different games?

I just saw Hunger Games and aside from the shakey-cam, I didn't care for it at all, with the shakey cam it was even worse. To be fair I was sort of near the front, maybe 10 rows back or so, but one of my friends had to leave the theater for a few minutes because it made him sick. As for the movie, eh, I knew a lot of what was going to happen because my friend (the same one who got nauseous) told me about the books as he was reading them a while back. I didn't like the story at all because it felt like there were so many cop-outs and she didn't want to have to make any hard decisions with the writing in terms of characters. I wouldn't call the movie bad, I'd just say that I'm not the person that this movie would appeal to, so I don't have any disagreements with people who thought it was really good.

I'd heard of Wiz War, but hadn't actually seen it at all, but I just looked at a video of it on Youtube and need to buy it asap.

Three Moves Ahead is how I first heard of Idle Thumbs, when Chris was on the pod to talk about Starcraft 2. It's an excellent podcast with many incredibly smart people.

Why has Thunderstone not been mentioned in this thread? I had seen it when Quinns reviewed it on Rock Paper Shotgun, but I hadn't actually played it until during GDC when I played with the Desktop Dungeons team who were staying at my friends house. It's a deck building game like Dominion, but mixed with a dungeon crawler vibe. As someone who owns dominion, I always felt it was really passive, though I'll admit I haven't played with any of the expansions so they might address this, but Thunderstone always feels like you're actually doing something. You can go to the village to recruit heroes and buy things like weapons and spells or you can spend your turn going into the dungeons and attempting to kill one of the monsters, who then grant experience that you can spend to level up your heroes. There's a lot of expansions for it, though I think what I played with was only the Dragonspire set, and just a week or two ago they came out with the new edition called Thunderstone Advance which acts as a new expansion for previous players, a new starter set for those who haven't played yet, and it also revamps the rules into Thunderstone 2.0 from what I've read. I plan on picking this up as from what I've seen it's the best of the Thunderstone sets to date, and while as such I haven't actually bought my own copy of the game yet, there is also an officially licensed facebook game which is well done, although they want you to buy more cards with real money which I haven't done so playing with the same cards gets stale quickly.

So I just listened to this episode and within minutes I was furious. CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE!? WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TO COMPARE CALIFORNIA'S GREAT AMERICA (formerly Paramount's Great America) TO THAT PIECE OF TRASH THEME PARK? Since I was a kid 4 people have died at Great America, NONE HAVE DIED AT THE PUSSY ASS DISNEY PARK. We had the James Bond ride, Licence to Thrill, with the moving chairs and stuff, until they turned it into Sponge Bob, which for the record had real 3D all the way back in 2003. We had Stealth, the first roller coaster to make you feel like you might be flying, until they took it out because it kept breaking with people hanging in awkward and uncomfortable positions. When I went to the park on a field trip in high school with my AP physics class, sure I ended up just leaving to go to the AMC down the street, but not before I swooped these puppies at the gift shop. Lets's see you get these at California DUMBventure. I don't really get it, but you can only get them at Great America, or as I call it, GREATEST America. P.S. you were right about Santa Clara though, I hate those guys.

This is awesome as I found out about Idle Thumbs from TMA when Chris was on to talk about Starcraft 2.

I feel bad for his desk.

Wait, do you get invites when you get invited?

As someone who is into music and sound design for the past couple weeks I've been listening to two podcasts a lot. Game Audio Podcast is a podcast on exactly what it sounds like. It's hosted by Anton Woldhek from Guerrilla Games and Damian Kastbauer who has done freelance work on a lot of big games like Uncharted 3 and Infamous 2. They usually get a few guests each week from other companies like Media Molecule, DICE, and Valve. They've had my two favorite audio people in the industry on the podcast, Darren Korb and Emily Ridgway. On one episode of the podcast Damian mentioned that he had moved to Minnesota and that Minnesota Public Radio had a station on classical music which hosted the next podcast. Top Score with Emily Reese is a super cool podcast where Emily Reese gets the composers of music for games to come one and talk about such things. I've only listened to the first few episodes but they were all super cool. The first one was the guy who did the music for Dragon Age and Fallout New Vegas, the next one was with the guys who did the audio and music for Stacking, then she did a cool talk with the guy who did the music from Dead Space, and the last one I've listened to was the guy who did the music in Bioshock 1 & 2 (and more importantly Dante's Inferno.)

Yeah, there's a reason I left it in the bag after seeing people walking around wearing it.

I don't think the problem is Metacritic, rather than what people/publishers are doing based solely off of Metacritic. It's not like Metacritic themselves care whether the Obsidian team gets bonuses or not.

Yeah, there was an episode of the Jumping the Shark podcast where they discussed Metacritic and basically how it sucks for them. Game Shark uses the A-F letter scale and they don't get to decide what that correlates to on the 0-100 scale, Metacritic has their own scale. If they give a game a B, which I think most people would agree is a decent score it gets a 75, and a B- is a 67. This means they end up getting complaints from publishers who are mad that their game got a score of 67 when it didn't get a score a 67, it got a B-. Also, a 67 is a yellow score as opposed to green, which apparently is another huge thing for publishers, having their game be in the green.

I've heard good things about Finch and want to check out either that or another Jeff VanderMeer book. Has anyone here read anything by him?

Got this at PAX, going to wear it the entire time I play the game. http://imgur.com/y8Ix0

I recently picked up a book on game audio implementation "The Game Audio Tutorial: A Practical Guide to Sound and Music for Interactive Games",and it has a website with videos and a UDK map and stuff to download, and the downloads have the best DRM to make sure you bought the book. "Videos Unlock Code README We've gone for some old-skool copy protection. Take the first letter of each of these words and they form a word. The first word of the title of Chapter 08 The second word of the heading on page 104 The first word of the heading on page 386 This is the password for the Videos Zip file. Have fun !"