Badfinger

Hell yeah double postin. When you guys said "fanon" and I realized you were making a portmanteau of "fan" and "canon" I recoiled in terror and literally yelled in my car. I'm very upset and I didn't like it at all. No thank you. I was anticipating an "I'll be back" for Arnold's Twitch stream.

To be precise, it's not necessarily prolonging the time spent fighting bosses, it's increasing the percentage of boss time vs other activities. This method may make the game take longer overall, but doesn't mean it has to. After listening to the podcast, Nick sounds like he has a point to me. If it's just work, especially work that's not in other similar games, that's not very fun. As another chemistry-deficient person, I totally understood what you meant when you were describing how the Periodic Table was arranged. it's set up so elements with similar properties are grouped up. The only ones I can remember are the Noble Gasses and Alkali(ne)?? metals.

gotta say, it looked really good on WiiU. I saw you hit a couple of choppy moments eronin, but every reviewer has confirmed some choppiness on Switch as well. Initial reports were that it's worse on the old console, but my impression is maybe that's not the case? WiiU being a good place to play the game is a very good thing.

Did the first Cauldron. This game's really, really good.

The Nintendo thread is literally this thing.

I watched Dan Ryckert roll a grenade down a hill in Zelda. That's good. This is my assessment on the near future, with other wildly anti-consumer stuff thrown in as well. That's bad.

I can guarantee with the certainty of time itself that they absolutely will not. I would be willing to make a friendly wager on this. I am very confident.

Sorry everyone, the noise you just heard is me making the heaviest sigh in the history of video games. It's so baffling that Nintendo refuses to acknowledge basic parts of understood and universal UI and UX.

I totally understand! I realize how silly it is to be cautionary in a thread where people who are Nintendo fans have already spent the money on this thing months ago, even if they agree it's too much. I'm sure people literally have shipping notifications on this thing right now, and on Friday as long as it works no one is going to care if there's only a single game or not. I also feel like I can be relatively objective on whether it's a reasonable proposition vs whether it is for me. I think it is very awesome that Shovel Knight and Axiom Verge are going to be available for the Switch. I played those games literal years ago, they are not a selling point to me. I was mortified when they spent so much announcement time on Skyrim. The Nintendo Direct with indie releases is how you sell this thing. I should also say that Zelda is one of those 5 games. I mean, I've bought 5 games since January. I even like most of them!

Eeh, that's not one game, right? That's a console life cycle. I was really jonesing to play Destiny, so I bought a PS4 Destiny Taken King bundle and said "I'll get a PS4 for Destiny, and then i can also play it for...?" After I stopped playing Destiny I didn't boot up the PS4 until last week when I was lent a copy of Nioh. Right now the only thing I know I would want to play on a Switch is Zelda. Maybe Mario in 8 months? If they go hard on totally exclusive Indies, if they put out multiple core Nintendo franchise games, maybe they convince me. I did a final tally and there were 5 games released on WiiU that I would want to play that I couldn't get anywhere else. I'm just not a day 1 hardware boy anymore, if I ever was.

See I thought it handled it great. When I didn't listen to Dad, Dad gets annoyed and starts over. it was perfect. I was saying things Aloy said through the entire night. I'm dug through every inch of that cave, but I'm not interested in breaking tutorials. I'm interested in finishing them to move on.

Don't buy a console for one game. I can speak to this with experience. It doesn't even matter how much you like that game, you will feel regret. It's my biggest game rule.

Some of these indies look really neat! Good on Nintendo for showing that someone is developing for their platform. How is Stardew going to work on a console? I tried it with a controller and it was a very unfun experience. I continue to be worried about the tack Nintendo is taking with this console, but it's a more interesting proposition to me than any of their systems since... N64? I'm still incensed at the absolute hubris to charge full price for pack in games, charge ludicrous amounts for every single accessory, and add cost to every game by passing the storage costs onto the consumer. It would be better for the public that they fail based on complete lack of respect for consumers, but 1) they won't, obviously and 2) there are genuinely compelling things that mask or salve that awful behavior for a lot of people.

I had the opposite experience, Korax. The time I failed a tutorial I wasn't listening. Rost shot what I was supposed to distract with a bow and yelled "Do it again you weren't listening!" So, he's got me dead to rights there I'll give him that. I think the game looks amazing, and the faces are really expressive. People on the stream were reporting desync with the dialogue and video, but I wasn't experiencing that. The faces do get a little Video Game Rigging during dialogue, but they're mostly good. The non-Matriarchs are all interesting characters! That one dude so thirsty for you. This game's awesome, and weirdly easy and hard right next to each other. I stayed up until 2 am and I finished all the "intro" bits to the story. When I woke up I realized I didn't explore every nook and cranny of that starter area, and became regretful. Hopefully I'll be able to go back and poke.

I do. I appreciate that Waypoint is taking the intersection of games and politics head on. It's helpful to me as a person. I also want to use video games to get away from the shitty, shitty world from time to time. Even when the games are full of political commentary and reality, I sometimes consciously choose to not engage with that portion of it if I don't want to at the time. I'll be blunt, that's a really poor way to interpret that statement. It's not insulting, and it's not an insinuation, it's just truthful. Games have been an avenue of escapism since there were games. There's nothing in the statement that says political thought is the only worthwhile pursuit. The exercise of examining the politics of a work has merit even if you ultimately choose not to be guided by it, or you don't do it all the time. A neutral political stance is still taking a stance. I am appreciative that Austin's direct influence, or the climate of change concurrent with his time at Giant Bomb, has allowed a little more color to work its way into the GB persona. Vinny and Alex directly call out shit behavior for the shit it is. The decision to go with Palmer Luckey's whole bullshit as Hottest Mess because Jeff could be convinced that it was a garbage thing that spilled outside of games and that category didn't have to be limited to some weird refractive Games Only lens was a big marker to me that GB, especially GB East, is willing to be political from time to time.

I'd love to drop the Democratic Party like a bad habit, but my perception is the US at large doesn't accept that more than two caucuses at once can function in the government. The history of parties in America is woolly and wild, but it feels calcified now.

It's a Zelda game. I don't want to be too dismissive of reviews and reviewers, but we both know that Zelda starts at a 9 and then reviewers see if it's a 10. It's been over a decade, but the Gamespot debacle over "travesty" of Gerstmann giving Twilight Princess an 8.8 still reminds me that bias is implicit in both reviewers and the public. It's also demonstrative that where you get your information informs your opinion. I checked the Metacritic list, and of the sites that reviewed Skyward Sword I probably would have checked out Eurogamer, Giant Bomb, and Gamespot at the time. That's a 10/10 and then an 80 and a 75, which is pretty low for Zelda standards. So my memory is discussion of a good game with notable flaws. The public metascore is a 7.9, which checks out to me. I'm not by any means suggesting that it's a bad game. And above all, this is purely my observation from perception and memory. I'm happy to have it corrected. I haven't played a Zelda game at the same time it was current on a console since the 90s. This FEELS important in a way that Skyward Sword did not feel like it had Nintendo's fortunes riding on it.

It'll be probably years, if ever, before I play Breath of the Wild, but I'm still excited for its release. It feels like a very long time since a Zelda release was a big deal. There have been great games - A Link Between Worlds is roundly praised, but its release was not the huge inhale, hold your breath here it comes, that this game appears to be. Skyward Sword was not universally acclaimed. I'd say this is the biggest since Wind Waker, and the last time since Twilight Princess since a release was such big news. The flip side is it's unavoidably a huge deal because this game has to literally carry an entire console. But we won't worry about that for right now if the game is great.

The sign off to this episode was really good. I don't know how to qualify that, I just know the thought "that was really good!" went through my brain. Important; True: Icy Hot is actually both cold, then hot. It's a mentholated liniment that uses the chemical compound found in wintergreen oil to create a small amount of heat when you put it on your skin. You feel the menthol first, which is the cooling sensation, and after 10-15 seconds you feel the heat on your skin from the oils. It's supposed to reduce pain through counteracting it with additional sensations. I cross referenced the part about wintergreen oil, but I can confirm through firsthand experience that Icy Hot does indeed create both a cool and a warm feeling, in titular order.

I checked because I hate myself, and someone's apparently done a really nice job scrubbing that thread up because all the comments are about Skittles and Vinny's giant hands and nary a shithead moment is to be seen.

Decided to go in for the game, it's on a truck somewhere out there. I did it after reviews came back extremely positive, and I've basically put myself on blackout besides podcast discussion. That doesn't usually happen for me, but I'm planning on streaming the entire game starting tonight. I'll let you know if I feel the same way after the first session.

Amazing quantity of quotes in the past week that make it clear the Democratic party literally does not understand how support gets built outside of their own action, and the result is they view it as a threat rather than embracing a movement.

The Tea Party showed pretty demonstrably that you can completely reshape a party without it losing its name.

The Democratic party doesn't actually serve any general constituency. They keep seeing the public make loud, clear requests and they keep saying no. It's time for a new party, please.

An even deeper dive...