Merus

Basically it's got a better processor, more buttons and a little analog nub for Monster Hunter, and they improved the 3D screen to do head tracking so the 3D doesn't go wobbly.

It definitely carries over to alcohol for me - I greatly dislike anything that fucks with your brain's perception in unexpected ways. I'll have a drink, because I'm Australian, but I'll only have at most two drinks because any more and I stop having fun. Alcohol does take the edge off anxieties, which is probably dangerous but as we became increasingly safer our anxieties became more and more out of whack so I guess that's helpful. I spent a few years at university watching others drink without drinking myself, because I was obviously underage and everyone knew it, and what I saw from the outside were people being oblivious dicks and regretting getting drunk afterwards. My mum's told the story of how she had to find new friends after her existing friends got into pot, went to parties, and sat around doing and saying nothing except what a good time they were having. Obviously a different scenario there, but it does make sense that having your perception altered would drive you inward a little bit.

Mallory Ortberg is going to go far, I think. With the quality and range of the material she's been contributing to The Toast, I wouldn't be surprised if she was acknowledged a few years from now as one of the world's finest living satirists. Edit: it's a distraction to my point here to note that she is the editor of The Toast and probably has a stake in it, which is nice and all but I'm saying she deserves to be a colossus bestriding the world. I guess that's unlikely because that would involve the establishment saying that a woman is funnier than most men.

For the same reason that Sony can't release a client that allows people to play PlayStation games on their computer. Unless they do streaming, which is basically what this Xbox announcement is.

STOP THE CLOCK TESO goes buy-to-play in March 2015.

Shanley Kane strikes me as a prick, but there's no such thing as a perfect victim and the Linux community has a long history of being unable to comprehend anyone else's experiences, judging by their going like a decade deciding that this year would finally be the year where ordinary people would prefer to use Linux instead of an operating system that doesn't require a hobbyist to run it.

Idle Thumbs listener

Congrats, man. Biased man. Super biased man. Congrats!

Oh, it's in there. Some of the invasion levels are nasty, and if you go for full awesomeness, some of the later sections of the challenge levels are downright cruel (as they should be: they sort the wheat from the chaff)

Can you elaborate on what you mean in regards to UMVC3?

Nickolodeon has this problem where they give their most popular shows tons of rope and support and anything else can go hang. Spongebob has been there for a while, so I understand it's gotten a little... strange.

You have to hand it to Hasbro, they could have handled Friendship is Magic much, much worse than they did.

I'm still partial to the Super Adventure Box trailer, but I understand that this is a thread for admiring a trailer that goes dark because they were running out of jokes

Did you play Rayman Legends? Because thus far I'm putting Legends up over Tropical Freeze, but I haven't done any of the time trials yet.

I realised a while back that sign language interpreters are the one accessibility aid that, just by doing their job accurately, can make funny things funnier. There's action and reaction, and they're usually trying to keep up with the wordplay and bawdy language of the speaker. Adam Hills has a bit on his favourite sign language:

Aren't they dangerous? They have assassins in them!

a million troglodytes we've only got a thousand, tops

Oh no, it's not about good plot, but then I think if they spend their series finale doing plot-plot-plot, it'll be out of character for the show.

Nope, made by Mattel. They did distribute the NES in some territories, and it was heavily featured in The Wizard as being a good idea, which is probably part of the confusion. So I had the budget for a new 3DS game, and was choosing between Fantasy Life or Pokemon. Tegan's adventures in insanity pushed me towards Fantasy Life. It's okay so far, a bit chatty but it makes up for it by basically being a gathering RPG. I'm not very far in, but it feels like every profession has its own quirks, although I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the gathering professions are just reskins of each other. I like that the advancement system is goal-based, and that you can complete goals before they're given to you if you're getting bored and want to level skip a bit.

You heard wrong. 999/VLR are thriller novels with interstitial puzzle bits.

. Given how rock-solid Gravity Falls has been about using the mystery plot as a way to examine characters and relationships, I imagine that when The Mystery Is Finally Revealed it will turn out to be relevant to the show's main themes.

Well, I think that, but I'm more confident that displaying choices that players will never be able to take in order to communicate the protagonist's actions are more limited than the world supports isn't something that's been done before - some IF has played with actions that the player can take that the character wouldn't, Spider and Web being the most famous example, and plenty of games have shown potential choices to communicate options to the player, but not, to my recollection, for story purposes. See, I feel like being fairly inclusive on what is game, because I think it's a weird enough medium that defining boundaries mostly serves to exclude work that has something to offer. I go by Sid Meier's definition of a game as a series of interesting decisions, and so Dear Esther and walking simulators definitely qualify because 'where to go next' and 'what to look at next' qualifies as an interesting decision. Mountain has no interactivity, as far as I'm aware, so it can't contain decisions, but then the point of Mountain is that it defies the definition of a game in some key aspects while still being interesting. It has story, and graphics, and random generation, and a premise and theming, and it's sold on the Steam store. If you can make a compelling experience that feels like a game without interactivity, how crucial is it, really? When people say that they want choice, is that actually what they want, or do they just want the designers to have not already made the choice for them? Could you make a linear game that was entirely generated, down to the level sequence, and have people be satisfied that, while they don't have control over where it's going, no-one does? If you exclude games like Mountain from being games, you don't have to ask those questions.

The Depression Quest model is a really interesting one for just that reason, and it's why I get particularly stroppy when dipsticks accuse it of not being a real game. It is a game about a mental illness that has a model to make it relevant to gameplay! It's not only a game, it has an innovative mechanic you dropkicks I'm really pleased that we managed to get back on topic here

Isn't that just a function of attempting to model Lovecraft-style insanity, though? It makes sense that very tropey insanity would be pretty goofy when modelled because mental health doesn't work like that.