Frenetic Pony

Bah, lies by the over zealous diet industry! The same industry that will feed you low carb, high meat diets and then not care as you die of a heat attack. As someone who loves reading actual medical research, I'd worry more about eating red meat, or just a lot of calories ALTOGETHER (it honestly doesn't matter much where they come from), than going by all those fad things. Try a Jones soda once in a while if you can find one, the Berry Lemonade stuff is delicious! Or something like Kombutcha if you can ever afford it (that stuff can get expensive!) But low sugar great tasting soda is basically what it is. Also, I hang around a bunch of people that love to drink, one of my best friends drinks all the time just after work or even sometimes during work (he's the assistant manager, and the regional manager is often the one buying the beer). But I don't get judged or anything for mostly keeping away from it.

Especially when it seems she's tried the same tactic again and again. But don't worry too much about not drinking, I say it's overrated anyway. Not that I can drink really, a genetic mutation causes me to get a hangover upon drinking nigh any alcohol almost immediately. Which gives me a good perspective on the whole thing, which seems mainly to be about getting drunk most of the time. Now candy, candy though is worth its weight in gold.

So my initial impression of River of Stars has gone down quite a bit. The author is getting bogged down in literally saying the same thing over and over again from different characters perspectives. And the problems is, these perspectives are almost no different from each other at all. It's like he'd much rather spend forever building up to his great events than actually having them happen, to the point where two hundred and fifty eight pages in he's still building up to having one of the main characters actually embark on the quest that character began deciding to undertake at the very beginning of the book. It's the equivalent of following Frodo around with the ring for a hundred pages, before he ever even leaves the Shire, deciding whether he should actually go, and then deciding to go, and then deciding what he should pack, and then telling people he's leaving, and then having the perspective of those people hes telling witnessing him coming to tell them he's leaving and... AGH! "Get on with it!" seems to a be a phrase not in Guy Kay's vocabulary. Not to mention the amount of times he's skipped years and decades ahead to give us a small glimpse of what will happen, only to skip all the way back again just to make the entire process of getting there feel even more like drudgery. I'm on the verge of giving up on it altogether. The man just likes writing words down far more than he likes writing an actual story. Time to look for another book I think.

Finally played this game, it's decent fun (playing split screen co-op). I can appreciate the simplistic controls and game design trying to build a deeper game without fudging about with a thousand numbers or systems or etc. And while I'll have fun completing it over time, the random coins being the "loot" and the relative ease of the game has so far completely negated the feeling of needing a complicated worked out plan that I was hoping for when I thought of an "Ocean's 11 like heist game." It's still fun going in as a mole/cleaner duo or mole/pickpocket. Smash and grab everything in sight, with wall and guards/loot just needing a rush and a quick pop! And it's obviousy partially because the person I'm playing co-op with is less interested in a total ghost through the levels than just running around like a madman. But it's still simultaneously fun, enjoyable, and yet somewhat less than I was hoping for from the concept and all the indie game hype that was built around it. I do think it does the whole "being seen in a stealth game doesn't mean you automatically lose" thing a lot better than Mark of the Ninja. And I think it's a valid concept for stealth games going forward. Just like being shot once in a shooter doesn't mean game over, I can see the need, and even the benefit for more forgiving mechanics in a stealth game. But I don't think this really works it out to any kind of new gold like standard that other games will all follow along with either. To my mind it's still stuck on the extremely restrictive level design that so many stealth games have, and that causes so much of the problem to begin with. If you're caught, the enemy has to search for you right? If you only have so little room in which to run and hide, then either they find you because they aren't artificial idiots, or they don't find you because they are and you don't feel that great for outwitting what amounts to a bunch of idiots. Still, overall a small, enjoyable game in and of itself; if not the hit indie darling like Braid it was being hyped up as.

Steve Ballmer to you, suddenly just appearing on your computer screen with no way to get rid of it "Suck my box, bitch!"

My screen name on Steam is Frenetic Pony, and there's a good chance I'll be trying this game one way or another tonight. Maybe with my brother over LAN, but if he's not there then over internets.

You tried, which makes you the better person, it's still good to have optimism, no matter how many times it doesn't work. At least you got to see 3d Goldblum. Did you recognize this pose?

Yep, pretty sure Kojima for one doesn't give a flying CRAP about how well his games sell if he can't do what he wants. This is the guy that will fuck your progression unless you read a tiny note in the manual, or will pull a fast one over on every single customer about what the main character of game even is just because he can. That Metal Gear continues to sell well is certainly because other people enjoy his craziness as much as he does, and not because of any direct commercial aspirations.

So when's the new Smash Bros coming out, and the Windwaker remake? And Pokemon Snap 2 using the tablet thing as an alternate reality camera? Those are the things that will make me buy this. Until then

I hate proofreading, also "most every" is still correct grammar, even if it's a bit archaic, ha! Edit- Also, Elderscrolls can and occasionally is contracted to one word as a commonly accepted slang, and downhill is just a contraction of down hill, and so if the contraction is correct then the non contraction is also correct. 3/4 victory is mine!

A new blog post: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JohnathonSwift/20130422/190995/Games_are_getting_Worse.php Tl;Dr Games today are worse than they were a decade ago. They suck, and haven't gotten any more fun, and have gotten worse, and that's why there's a continuous decline in sales, and all the new consoles and business models in the world aren't going to help unless games that are actually fun are made again. Not all games of course. I'm mainly comparing big name series over the last decade EG: Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, Crysis, Assassin's Creed. They've all gotten remarkably worse as the series has gone on. It's really quite amazing that no one in the games industry seems to have connected the dots, but you can just take a look at the Metacritic score on all these to see what's happening.

I playtested your guys first game! Ok, I don't know if you were actually at Telltale at the time, but the first Sam and Max episode after Jake put out (on a different website) that playtesters were needed. Considering it was an incredibly short game near the end of production, the playtesting only consisted of a single playthrough. It wasn't bad at all Obviously all such playtesting needs to be so. Other than that all I can think of is a few betas, none of the them particularly memorable. I once showed up to a multiplayer playthrough of Spec Ops (over a year before it was released) for which I got paid to do nothing because they already had enough people. I guess I keep getting lucky in terms of what I've been asked to playtest so far. Nothing bad at all has happened.

I'm just being neurotic about whether it's even worth it. But as for you.... yeah just have her meet you at her friends house, if she really want to she will, if something else is up she wont. Oh, and Jurassic Park in 3d is totally worth the entry price. The T-Rex entrance alone is worth it. Not too mention shirtless Jeff Goldblum! (It's hilarious for a reason you might suddenly recognize and go "oohhhh"). Hope it works out alright either way.

Not really, I'm not scared of rejection at all. I'm actually worried about it, at least some stupidly neurotic part of my brain is.

I don't want to fall in love! At least part of my brain doesn't. I've heard what's it's like, retroactively it sounds horrible. Like a fucking heroin addiction, literally I've heard a heroin addiction described in the exact same way. It probably activates some of the same damned regions in the brain. But I like her, and smile at her, and... Is it weird to be neurotic about it? Am I over reacting? Maybe not, I watched my brother go through it, and a breakup. Listening to him incidentally was like listening to a fucking gibbering moron drool over himself. It's probably an evolutionary compensation for increased brain size and efficiency in humans. I'm going to like her as a friend damn it, I've got other things to do with my life, potentially very important things! I need to make everyone biologically immortal, that company isn't going to start itself, let alone my novel finishing itself, that paper I want to do on post human work economics, those meandering thoughts about a quantum physics revolution, heck I've not even worked on my video game in I don't know how long. I've got too many things to do and too much procrastination to overcome for this shit brain! Then again, coming here reminds me that some of my problems aren't as immediately stressful as others. Hope the whole... thing, works out Tegan. Hope your friend goes with you and it's all going to be fine. Stressing out never helps,. I should know, I've gotten myself into stupid, fairly important problems before, and have always managed to make it work out, sometimes very last minute, by just shrugging and keeping my head on straight. So don't stress if that's what you're doing!

Stargazing in Yosemite? I've done that! Been up to the right spot and everything, love it. I just wish I had a proper camera to nail that. I've got a decent one and a tripod, but I've yet to be able to nail night photography. Having a $10,000 f 0.95 lens would be a big help, but first I'd need to get into a position in life where I can spend $10,000 a friggen camera lens.

After trying, and failing, to read "River of Gods" a sci-fier that starts out sort of interesting, but quickly gets out of hand with a mishmash of ideas that seem to have come from nowhere, many of which don't seem relevant to the story, and only add to the fact that there's also a giant mishmash of perspective characters that are being tied together in increasingly preposterous ways. And then, or rather before, trying to read "Dragon Wing" because, well I'd read someone liked it years ago and had it saved on Amazon as something to buy, and so I bought it. Most of the characters therein got fairly boring rather quickly. But now I've hit on the right book, River of Stars. It's just over the borderline of a historical fiction novel of ancient China, to the point of having most of it directly inspired by 12th century China, but instead of actual China is placed in a separate world so the author doesn't have to be as accurate or adhere to history as much, and so can just let the story do it's own thing. Never the less it feels like reading a nicely researched, perspectivist historical fiction novel, which is what counts I think. And so far I'm really enjoying it. The author does a great job of showing how deluded people can be come in their own views of the world and yet remain in power, how a country can be ruined by people that think they're doing the right thing in their own minds, there's plenty of jumps in time and characters and etc. and yet it all manages to feel extremely cohesive, you never feel like you're jumping halfway across a continent to a completely different character that may or may not at some point do something that matters to the other characters (Ala Game of Thrones or etc.). Instead it all feels like one solid, cohesive story all throughout. I hope it continues this strongly, but in the beginning it's quite promising.

Ahah! Figuring out how to get to the Mun, and now I see the map mode. I was wondering how much they did for orbit and the Mun moving around. I'm still trying to experiment to see how large a ship I can get into orbit is. Orbit was easy enough once I learned the controls and found the solid rocket boosters (hoorasy ISP versus drag, rocket science is fun to learn, and this game has made it moreso!) But so far my initial attempts at "fuck it, put ALL the booster on!" has been a miserable failure of exploding on launch. Guess I'll actually have to be careful I've also got to check out air breathing engines and etc. I've only been using solid fuel boosters and what I assume is liquid oxygen/hydrogen mains. Maybe I can get a better disposable initial mass boost from something like a throw away jet engine.

I doubt any such game exists, the most detailed economics system around is Eve online, which is a purely laizess faire approach, though you could infer some interesting things from ISK.

Screw the game, I just want an entire movie of this!

I can confirm this of Crysis 3. Very pretty to look at, but the gameplay so far has be "stealth, walk past every enemy in the level, get the next level, stealth..." and so on. And now they've given you a bow that doesn't de-cloak you just to make it easier! At least the enemy barks are funny, if you shoot at a guy who's behind cover he'll yell "Help I'm being repressed!" At least Crytek has a bunch of other studios now, I'm interested to see a game of theirs without Cevat directly involved

Snake? SNAAAAAAAAAAKE! But yeah I think I already saw a trailers saying "you have to get her out of the city!" and such so... : /

I just hope this is the start of an 80's throwback thing. I'd love to see the next Bioshock as a retro future Alien/s like 80's thing with a city in space. Or Fallout like take but on the 80's future stuff, wandering around on an alien world in 80's style dystopian future, using your skills to "hack the central computer" and blow torch to open doors. Robocop, The Thing, dystopian shit future worlds like Escape from New York, The Running Man, and Blade Runner. It was the last time when visions of the future were immediately relatable to the world you knew today. As you got into the nineties you had more and more nanotechnology robots and virtual reality worlds and wormholes through spacetime, and even if you understand all those things they feel more distant than not. I'm also going to buy this too, because duh.

Just came up with a better ending: Anyway, that's my take on all that.

Since I derailed this entire thread so effectively, here to make up for it is RPS actually seeing a demo of Thief in action! http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/04/first-look-thief/ Sounds good so far! Not perfectly oldschool, but Deus Ex 3 turned out fine so benefit of the doubt here.