Badfinger

It's not strictly about tipping. Working in the service industry is a wildly important empathy muscle builder.

Having worked both back and front of house... being waitstaff fucking sucks. I would rather work for a known fee than work for tips at a dice roll chance to make more money. I've been straight stiffed, had people use coupons/groupons/whatever and then tipping on the value of the discounted check rather than the check (the time they used precisely the value and then left before I brought the check back was so "good"). I've left work after a 4 hour shift with $13 minus the $15 I owed for parking. Yeah, the whole you'll make minimum wage thing technically exists. Technically. The combination of people who (honestly) don't understand tipping, don't "believe" in tipping, or are just trying to get away with tipping as little as possible without being called out as fucking twats is such a notable percentage that the people who are great and generous gets washed away in the morass of micro-annoyances that the green beans are all touching. It's exhausting, thankless work. And this wasn't at a diner or a chain restaurant. It was a gastro pub that had some entrees over $20. I worked 6-7 days a week, and I had to dip into my savings account to make sure bills were covered on more than one occasion. I lived with my dad and my car was fully paid at that point. Miserable. With that said, a forced 3 months work in the service industry would do wonders for society. So many of those problems would disappear if everyone understood being on the receiving end.

I would like to watch a fire, but I believe my aggressive pre-purchase is going to need to wait until at least payday.

People with more knowledge than me have very confidently speculated that Ubi is going to be using FairFight as their anti-cheat solution. It's apparently really, REALLY cleaned up Battlefield 4 and been deployed successfully in Rainbow Six: Siege. From what I've read about it it's server side and the way it works is by setting values and game constraints and then checking against them, so the guys giving themselves a million health or 75 bullets per mag are literally giving the dev team data to set values against to wipe that stuff out before day 1.

This game is gorgeous, and the music so far has been very good. There may be another beta, otherwise I'm extremely excited for early March. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ-wl-DcGV0

One of the neat things about the game is with 3 factions and 12 difficulties you can nearly perfectly tailor the level of challenge and/or frustration you're interested in enduring with 2 people.

If you are purchasing it for the PC, the Ranger Pack is included. I did not purchase any of the DLC and got quite a lot out of the time I spent when I was playing intensely. Yes, what SAM said - 2 people local can still have a full 4 person group connecting online and it's completely seamless. Even on four separate machines you all share exactly the same screen real estate, so literally nothing is lost by playing same-screen and matching with other people (or staying a duo).

I hope my words didn't come off as accusatory, or I implied the podcast was fundamentally changed because there were edits. I have full confidence that any editing is an attempt to improve the flow. The podcast wouldn't suddenly become better if unexpected interruptions were left in, for example. I love the editing on Thumbs. I agree, I'm nearly certain that part of what I'm experiencing is exactly what you say, the remote nature of the conversation. The word "edit" just kept bubbling up when I was searching for vocabulary. Maybe the prescribed direction of the discussion makes it feel that way to me.

I didn't realize until after the voting was finished that there was a new "Vote For Rory" campaign going on. His honest writing about what happened basically confirms our suspicions in 2007 that the NHL doctored the online votes to not include Rory Fitzpatrick, and also that they were pressuring him to not attend (before rigging the vote) because they're tone deaf and hate fun. I'm so glad that Scott both attended the game and was public about what happened leading up. The way it ended was just fairytale.

I like Idle Weekend and I like both Rob and Danielle, so I don't want this to come off as being negative but there's something about Idle Weekend that doesn't quite hit for me. This is not an accusation or even a criticism really, but the best way I can put it into words is that it feels very edited. Hearing Danielle instantly reading a transition or outro after finishing a conversation is a very different experience from Idle Thumbs. Maybe it's skype, or different mics, or something? I don't know.

All of the places of interest are marked on the map. If you're looking to pick a fight, the best way to do it is to roll the bigger areas or camp the extraction points. There's a decent amount of real estate in the beta area, but an hour or two you get to know it pretty well.

managed to go from cautiously disinterested to definite preorder in the course of about 36 hours this weekend.

Finally got the beta and got to play a bit. If they manage to sidestep the Destiny problem and actually put a full game in this game, the division is gonna be fucking incredible. The combat isn't crazy and innovative, but it is excellently executed. I absolutely adore everything about the UI and the presentation. One preview I read leveraged the "surprise, not as good looking as the initial video" which 1) is just petty and 2) I don't know what the trailers look like it looks really fucking good to me. The mod system on the guns means it falls between Borderlands where all the guns are on a template but essentially random and Destiny where all the guns are essentially specific weapons but could have minor perk variations. The guns increase on power based on level, but they also have additional attributes that modify them further, plus they have 1-5 moddable slots that means two people using the same rolled guns with different mods makes them very divergent weapons potentially. e: yes, my understanding is that the Dark Zone is intended to be high level PvE with the risk of PvP as well. I have to say, between this and Rainbow Six Siege I didn't expect this Clance joint to be the one that would grab me so thoroughly.

I can see why you might say that, but the feeling the relatively small box the beta puts you in is the same one you feel when you find some gear worth keeping in DayZ .The monsters are people, and maybe we're those monsters.

I didn't know TCBY stood for anything other than The Country's Best Yogurt! We also had a frozen yogurt shop called "I Can't Believe It's Yogurt" near us when I was growing up. Apparently the yogurt cabal thought everyone was completely incredulous that yogurt could be frozen and then consumed.

Far Cry 2 plays very differently than 3 or 4, even though quite a lot of the seeds of those games are present in it. I also attempted to go back to it within the past 2 years or so, and came away feeling really queasy like I was playing it through a fisheye or something. That made me really sad, because I was in lockstep with Thumbs on it well before I knew Idle Thumbs existed. Love that game.

The debate for me would be between a 360 controller and an X1 controller, and that would be over how important the D-pad is to you. I'm halfway considering moving from a 360 to an X1 for that reason, even though everything else works basically well (the left analog stick drifts but is basically fine). I have a PS4, and that's a great controller but when I tried it for Elite: D instead of the 360 something really bugged my hands. In my case, being relatively controller agnostic, sticking with a Microsoft controller on a Windows machine for the Just Works aspect is good for me. The adapter thing sucks but isn't shady at all. The hardware and software are built into an Xbox and not into a PC.

We promise that,

I finally picked this up when it was on sale last weekend. I like it, but man do I not love it. I actually like Quiet as a concept an awful lot, but her characterization retains the same amount of suck I prescribed it before I got the game. I feel like I'm rushing through, and yet it says I'm 25% done. I can already see the grind to unlock new stuff on your base and new loadouts forming. I still intensely dislike all the actual overlay of Metal Gear story in the game, so that's really frustrating. The first encounter with the Metal Gear almost made me quit and not come back ever. It took me almost 2 hours to get Emmerich onto the chopper, because something in the AI makes it wander towards you even if it should have no idea where you are. Fultoning things seems like a necessity in a lot of cases rather than a joy? The skulls fucking blow. Basically anything that is not driving me towards an 80s-era tactical infiltration sim is Actively Bad. Quiet being a scout sniper, for example, is one of the best things in the game because even though it uses bullshit magic to give you scout information, the 2-person team aesthetic drives towards realism in a way that is so very not real but apes it wonderfully. I also am somewhat drawn away from doing the story missions because they A) grade you and I feel pressured to do things one kind of way and 2) every story mission means I get closer to more story drawing me out of the world I personally have built inside the game world. I'm 12 or 13 missions in and there are over 40? That's frustrating rather than exciting, even though I want to keep playing.

We had a hard time agreeing on a recipe for crepes that were specifically savory. We actually found the same recipe that Sucks2Bme used, but just couldn't get it together. The big weekend snowstorm when we would have gone out to make the recipe probably hindered as well. I'm confident we can find a recipe that uses beans. It's probably chili time!

That last post was so long, but I thought of a question for you Rob and Danielle that I want to ask since you are both reviewers. This would probably be an email if I was diligent enough to actually turn my podcast musings into emails- Do you talk with other people reviewing a game while in the review process? Do you do it always or often? If yes, have you ever purposefully sequestered yourself from talking about any games while you were reviewing? Do you think "comparing notes" drives people towards that critical consensus and is that actually negative, even if bouncing experiences off another person is probably a positive part of evaluating media in my mind? Reflecting on your conversation about Bioshock Infinite, I remembered I finished that game in a single day, if not specifically one basically continuous sitting. I hadn't intended to, I just got to a point where it made sense to keep going and finish it. Is it possible a significant percentage of people not reviewing games actually consume them in a manner closer to the review-style blitz than we (myself included before today) think? I don't think of myself as someone that does that, but I totally did for a game I didn't know I wanted to play that way until it happened.

Whenever I hear questions or comments about interesting views of death or death as a mechanic, Planescape Torment is the first thing that springs to mind to me as well. It was the quintessential "death" game and maybe still is. Yes! As soon as another MMO was mentioned, that sprung to mind as well. I like that they played with the "death run" mechanic, even if it only ever happened once or twice. In Vanilla WoW you had to be dead to get a quest from a ghost, and it was a questline that helped unlock one of the highest level instances in the game (Blackrock Downs) AND was a critical quest in getting your Onyxia Key, which was the iconic raid boss at game launch (shortly replaced by Ragnaros, but for that moment the pinnacle). How bold is it to put something in the game people could and would miss that's so critical to end game progression? Regarding your Kane and Lynch conversation, I think citing Jeff Gerstmann and then proceeding to talk about the critical consensus surrounding the game as a whole may have unintentionally tarred what his review actually was and said at the time. The damning thing about the controversy about his eventual firing was that he didn't hate the game. He gave it a 6/10, which is a "bad" review in 2007 sure, but isn't the death knell of giving the game a 4 for being playable but worthless (PLAYABILITY SCORE: 8, NO CRASHES) . While I'm not surprised now when he calls the game "garbage" (I mean, reviewing it indirectly got him fired I'd be mad too), the tag line for his review is "Kane & Lynch: Dead Men has a lot of promise, but nothing in this game works out nearly as well as you'd hope." and he cites characters and storytelling in the first paragraph of his review before he mentions "gameplay issues" as something hamstringing it. The metacritic critics scores are actually even stronger towards "mixed" than you found, quantum_leopold. Under XBox 360, which was the most reviewed platform, there are 10 positive/ 41 mixed / 6 negative. There are twice as many negative user reviews for 360 than positive and mixed combined.

It's $11.50 for tickets at the movie theater closest to me. I think being concerned just the solution to a puzzle as its own reward in a game with 700 line puzzles is a perfectly valid concern. Especially if the follow up to a 20 minute solve is a 30 minute solve. I also think it makes sense that solving it is enough for some people. It's perfectly reasonable to say "Hey, if you're coming to this for something beyond what you find in 60 hours of line puzzles reevaluate." The money/time proposition is daunting for me right at the moment, and I never played Braid, so we'll see how I feel about coming around to this down the road. I do like puzzles.

All of my problems with Windows 10 were not gaming related, and now that they're fixed I haven't had any issues in months and months.

Almost a quarter of the US population is about to be or in the process of being Blown Away by a gigantic snow and ice storm this weekend. Thumbs friends who are about to be snowed in, commiserate or appreciate the snow storm with me here! Everyone, share your fun snow stories, hot (OR COOL) winter facts, favorite snow activities, how to entertain yourself when you're cooped up with others, and your favorite Stuck Inside comfort food. Snow!