Dewar

Man, that was a good game, but I'd never have a chance to play it again with my backlog.

People being artsy where they haven't felt comfortable doing it before? College is a time for trying new things, and sometimes those new things aren't just drinking all the time

Training standards for police vary wildly around the country. Here in Seattle, I'd call what we have fairly robust having talked to friends-of-friends about it, and we still have pretty stupid mistakes from time to time. I'd imagine that no level of training can really prepare you for when the shit hits the fan.

I own about half of them in a temporary state due to the aforementioned PS+ and XBL Gold, but yes, and I have them all downloaded too. Banjo was my most recent purchase since I got the Rare collection, and if the frame rate wasn't so lousy I'd play it a lot more. Shadow of the Colossus I played once back on PS2 and hated at the time, but I have a feeling I'd get on a bit better with it now. Left4Dead is fun, but also not exactly fun to get in a game with all the pros when I've only played about 5 hours of it. I'm actually playing Majesty 2 tonight, after running into a Quicklook of it as I've been going back through the GB archives.

A good portion of that is free games from Xbox Live Gold and PS+ I'm really not ever planning on beating it all. I mainly keep the list for my goal of beating more games than I buy. I do trim games that I've played that I've hated at the end of each year, or my list would be even longer. A lot of them I've never even touched.

Depending on what part of the drive is broken, you might be able to hook it up to USB and have it spin up and read even if it doesn't work hooked up to SATA. If it's an electronics problem, not a physical problem, and if you can find another drive that's exactly the same, down to firmware versions and everything, you could try and swap the controller board on the bottom of the drive. I have done that successfully twice.

I happen to be working from home today, so I thought I'd post my backlog again just to make you feel good Zeus. You're doing really well on yours PC XBOX 360 XB1 3DS iOS PS3

As someone who is fairly good at cooking and enjoys it some of the time, I've been really thankful when my wife is willing to try her best and cook something from a premade freezer bag or something. Maybe kicking her out of the kitchen so she doesn't have to worry about cooking would be worth the lack-luster results to her? Might be worth asking.

Winter in Seattle is very gloomy and rainy, but also typically not that cold compared to the horrors I've heard of New York(just below freezing at night, warming up too high 40s during the day most of the time.) I imagine Vancouver would be the same.

In general I keep all the static bags and such that come with the new parts and put the old parts in it, then try to fit it all in the motherboard box so it's collected together. I've routinely hooked up old parts in a new case when I need a server for Minecraft or something so I keep my parts around.

Hmm, ok, I guess I've never heard it called "earth" before, and I thought Mupp's quotes implied a language barrier thing. My bad.

I purchased Steamworld: Dig last night for just that reason.

I think you're aiming for the term "ground" or "ground wire" Mupp, which indeed sounds right if you're getting a significant shock.

I don't think I ever managed to beat FTL on anything but Easy. The end boss was just too much for me and it felt like the fun was spoiled by having to play toward a specific setup to be competitive against him. Obviously, you hit upon a build that you both enjoyed and worked well against the boss, while the builds I had fun with never really seemed to do well, so maybe that's part of our difference of opinion.

Out of curiosity, what are you considering "finished" for FTL? Just got tired of it, or reached a specific goal? Edit: Nevermind, just saw your post in the completed games thread.

Interesting. It's a shame that happens during hell week at work, but maybe I'll be able to tune in occasionally at least.

Oh hey, I forgot to post that I beat Deus Ex: Human Revolution: Director's Cut last night. Despite stopping and starting the game several times I really enjoyed myself. Decent stealth mechanics, good shooting, and really meaningful upgrades that allow you tons of multiple paths, secrets, and extra loot. I think it's still worth playing today, especially with the new sequel coming out soon. I'm actually excited for that now by the way, despite the pre-order stupidity going. The main faults were the wide open peaceful areas that should be fun but ended up dragging down the pacing. Each time I stopped it was during having to run all over an open city and find all the extra stuff. Sadly that extra stuff is kind of necessary the way I was playing, since I routinely ran out of power bars for my cloak and melee knock-out abilities. Oh, and I'm so done playing inventory Tetris.

So I heard that Valve was switching to 2 (or was it 4?) majors a year, each with a compendium and such. Is that going on right now, or have they announced which tournaments they've selected for that?

Holy crap, he had some good advice on the first question (couldn't watch any more,) or at least not unreasonable advice considering the starting viewpoint. Also, Holy Crap, 700 club is still on? i remember when my mom used to watch that all the time before she started to see through the BS.

Everything position I had was a local or county seat. There were a few bills in Washington but nothing all that exciting.

I did, but man it was discouraging to see all the awesomeness and upheaval going on in Canada, and then see what I had on my ballot.

Most every $60 game that I was looking forward to this year has either been delayed, ended up as a huge disappointment, or I simply lost interest in before it came out, so I'm pinning a lot of my hopes on Fallout 4. The crop of indie games this year has been incredible though.

I get something like 17 days of vacation a year, plus holidays, and am required to spend it (you can only carry over 10 days from year to year and I've had that extra 10 for a while now.) What makes it miserable isn't the amount of vacation I get, but the complete disaster I come back to since there really isn't anyone else who does my job so work just stacks up. Every time someone lower on my team is sick, my manager busts his ass to try and find people to take things over and cover (including me a lot of the time) but there just anyone else on my team that can really take stuff over for me. I rarely get to take sick time either. I pretty much just go to work unless I'm particularly contagious.

I noticed that too, not sure what changed exactly.

Once you start a mission, you pretty much have to complete it or else you'll lose progress. Where Black Flag suffers is that they don't always make it obvious when a mission has ended, versus just moving on to the next step. If you can get past the tutorial bits, it becomes a little clearer. And yes, that game ads new mechanics for way too long. The diving bell doesn't even show up until you're half way through the story. I liked it anyway, but I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game since the first one so I wasn't as tired of the Ubisoft mechanics as a lot of folks.