Iosef Stalin

Never finished Fallout 3, got a decent way through it and got stuck wallowing in sidequests etc, plus it was way too easy with the mutant companion with the gatling laser. Put it down for a while, played some other stuff and then restarted doing an "evil" playthrough. Steam somehow managed to lose the saves for that and I guess i'd overwritten the saves for the previous playthrough? I dunno, maybe i'll give it another go sometime, but it's not so gripping as it was a few years ago. Majora's Mask is another one i've never completed, but not through lack of trying. My N64 and games got stolen a couple months after Christmas 2000, and I bought a Dreamcast instead with the insurance money. Then I bought the collectors edition of it on Gamecube and played through 3/4 of it, but the game kept freezing, which is pretty unheard of for Gamecube games. I took it back to the shop and got a different copy and that froze too. That was maybe five years ago. Then, a year ago or so I bought it on Wii Virtual Console, I was like fuck I want to complete this game, i've never even got to the Stone Temple. And my Wii locked up a couple of times while playing it. I dunno if it's just a bad port or something, but jeez. Maybe I should buy a cheap N64 on ebay lol. It's pretty aggravating cos the way the game works is the saving system is kind of the way you end a play session before you power off, there's no quicksaves or autosaves or anything. You could play for two or three hours, do a temple and some related sidequests and get a crash and all that progress is lost. Some other games i've given up on via my own accord and not technical difficulties are Dawn of War II, got stuck on some annoying Tyranid mission, and I was just finding the game kind of annoying. I didn't like how if you failed a mission you couldn't just restart it and do better, but you lost potential advantage as the day counter moved on one and the other planets got more infested. I guess that's a cool feature if you're doing well, but if you're struggling like I was, it just seems like a kick in the teeth. More recently Guild Wars 2 I don't really see what the fuss is about. It looks and plays just like every other WoW clone like LOTRO, WAR etc. I bought it and played a few hours and was like "whatever, can't be bothered" and went back to playing World of Tanks. I'm sure there's a bunch more that I can't think of right away. That's not even going into the tens of games i've bought in Steam sales and never played once. We could probably have a thread for that if you guys are anything like me.

I used to read Kotaku a lot after I got tired of how silly Destructoid was getting. The java redesign of Kotaku and the rest of the Gawker stuff just completely soured me on it though, it's so dicey if it actually works or not. There's all those links to stories in the sidebar, but the flashy implementation means they don't link half the time, or pages don't load and you have to refresh to get the links to line up with the images after some scrolling. Added to the fact that i've found myself caring less and less about game news or upcoming games and I only read it very occasionally. I find personal experiences of games way more interesting than bland press release style reporting or reviews. It's like regular news, you can get way more depth and interesting detail on a subject from a blog or detailed account from a single knowledgeable person than you do from the bland shit they put out on the BBC News site or whatever. You don't even really have to dig all that hard to find these pieces any more with twitter and blogger/google etc.

Been listening to the Insert Credit podcast recently, they've only got a few episodes but they're pretty cool. I mean they're nothing particularly groundbreaking, but Tim Rodgers always has interesting anecdotes. http://insertcredit.com/

Well they are calling it a console are they not? It seems just destined from the outset to become another 3DO or CD-i.

Final tally: $8,596,475. It's the second-most successful Kickstarter campaign after those ipod touch watch things. I guess we have to wait and see what happens, but I don't have a good feeling about it. $8 million does not seem like enough money to launch a new console, how much did Microsoft spend on getting the Xbox off the ground, a billion dollars? It's definitely enough to sink Kickstarter with negative press if it all goes tits-up though.

Imagine the Banjo-Kazooie theme played on a Baboo Kazoo. Banjo Babooey Kazooie.

Al Murray: "The American Dream. What is that? There's no British Dream, is there. You know why? Because we're AWAKE!"

The issues with dairy farming are mainly prevalent in the US, where they do inject them with bovine growth hormone and things like that to improve the quantity of milk output. I think that's banned in most of Europe though. Unrestricted factory farming is pretty horrendous.

It became a boondoggle and a disaster for me once I heard that they were putting batteries of SAM missiles on tower blocks to shoot down any potential terrorist airliners. What a ridiculous paranoid security state we now live in.

This is awesome, good luck to them. Whales and dolphins are smart as fuck. They can be trained to understand sign language, can transfer the idea of a body part on a human corresponding to their body part i.e your hand is the same thing as my flipper etc. And whale song, come on. What beautiful creatures.

I thought this was kind of funny, though YMMV.

I I I...I...Um...Ah? The Goldblum mode is certainly exuberant! Also by the way in the second bit you're pushing the trolley, you can jump up on the yellow sofas and over the turnstiles and get stuck there.

I was picturing one of those finger trap things which are like a little weaved tube thing that you get your finger stuck in.

Good article. I don't understand the mindset of these people backing this. "Oh man, $99 for an indie game console in a year or so, a steal!" Meanwhile over on Steam, you could probably get 50 indie games for that money with the sale.

I think it's probably somewhat hard to compare them, but they are approaching that kind of capability. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5762/nvidia-plots-mobile-soc-gpu-performance-surpassing-xbox-360-by-2014 Modern PC hardware is absolutely light years ahead of the 360 though, an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU is like a rocket ship compared to the Xenon in the 360. 22nm process with 1.4 billion transistors vs 90nm process with 165 million. Obviously that's a very rough indication of performance, but it gives you an idea how much things have moved on since 2005.

Ian Fisch did a good piece on this at Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra...ete_at_work.php I don't see the advantage of this thing over just browsing the 'Indie' section on Steam. The PC is already the perfect open-source platform. And overall it just seems really confused as a device. It's got current tablet specs, but in a box that you have to plug in to your tv. What? The whole point of tablets is that they are mobile and super easy to use. There's no wires or controllers, and you're not fixed to any one place. A Tegra 3 is a good tablet processor now, but in a couple of years? Not so much. That's not such an issue with tablets or smartphones since people tend to ditch their old models for the latest ones every couple of years at least. But a console has a longer time frame. And when the next gen of consoles come out over the next year or so, the thing will just get lost in the crowd. I think it'll end up as one of those things like the Wonderswan Color or the GP2X that has a devoted hardcore following, but does nothing market share-wise.

Yeah, Amazon MP3 is pretty good. It has a little downloader thing which is really fast. And it's fairly cheap. I honestly don't buy music from a lot of big name bands, or if i'm low on funds that month, but I do buy things from independent artists or smaller bands I like.

How do racist posters from 70 years ago make you really offended by someone being racist in their speech today? It's like secondhand outrage, you're offended because you're told you should be offended. A word is really just a word. Sure they have meaning attached to them, and sure some of those meanings have deeper history than others, but I think you have to have a thicker skin about these things. Maybe it's just having grown up on the internet and shitty message boards, but I don't really get offended by words.

Yeah, that's probably it. Thanks

Which episode is the one where they start talking about SWAT Ford Force Four? That was the best. Also someone needs to make a compilation of every time Chris does his 'nerd voice', that cracks me up every time. "What are you playing, Risk?" -"Ngooooh, excuse me it's [some boardgame I forget the name of]."

I like Sean better than Nick tbh. Nick could never finish a story properly. Yeah Simpsons, haven't watched it for maybe ten years. I don't really understand how it's still on tv. Have you guys seen the new Futurama episodes? I think they suck compared to the original four seasons. Like that Eyepod episode, was just so bad I had to stop watching. I dunno, I mean they always did pop-culture references, but it was cheesy stuff that no-one watched like Ally McBeal (Single Female Lawyer). Whereas to spend an episode going on about iPhones and Twitter just seemed really lame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sDNuqievqQ Tbh.

Somewhat random aside, but I was at my dad's this weekend. On the fridge they have a magnet that says "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until you put her in hot water." Kind of made me rage a bit, why is it only a woman that's like that?

I'm also trying to stop saying "like" in every sentence, because it's demeaning to stereotypical valley girls. It's so hard being PC @ OP, I really wouldn't worry about things like that. If someone's going to get offended by a tweet like that then it's not your problem. I did have a dumb friend when I was a teenager who called everything he didn't like gay. "That's so gay". Which I guess he wasn't using it in the sense of saying gay people are bad, but it was a stupid turn of phrase. I had to stop myself a few times after I realised i'd picked up that habit.

Alright, well I don't disagree on any particular point.