Dewar

My wife wanted us to go out and see it but, for various reasons, I was a party pooper so she went out on her own. It ended up that with all the trees and clouds around here, you could barely see it anyway, so I guess I made the right decision? Also, I'm an ass.

My wife is currently studying for her JLPT level 1 test in December. I'll see if I can get her to come on and give some advice.

I (mostly) finished Uplink over the weekend. The release of HackNet reminded me that I'd taken a couple of shots at playing Uplink, but never got very far, so I decided to go back to it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I'd recommend it. There are a few moments in the game that really make you feel like a badass hacker, but there's also a ton of repeating the same boring thing over and over for cash. There are also a lot of mechanics that aren't explained particularly well (thankfully Introversion has a pretty good FAQ webpage up that helps with a lot of it) and, if you fail to understand them and get caught, your save is deleted. Cheating and using save backups, I got all the way to the end of game on the evil side, only to find out that I physically can't hack fast enough to beat the game as things are now, and I'll have to go back to the start an accept certain missions that aren't marked in order to weaken the opposing company enough to be able to win. So, I watched the end on Youtube.

In the US at least, they've been expanding into other markets such as buying used phones/mp3 players and such, as well as starting to buy up classic games again. I like the Gamestops around here, when I go buy a game on day of release, I definitely go there over a Best Buy or something. I wish some of the local game shops around here had more reliable supply on release day, but I can forgive them for only getting a copy or two in when they're running on a shoestring budget.

I started this game last night. I got frustrated in the first mission with the tank, so I imagine this is going to be fun. It got easier once I realized that enemy movements are scripted, so I just need to be out of the way and save CP until the tank gets there.

I still have not managed a quiet extraction in that fort. Something always goes wrong.

Wait, listening to the Beastcast and they want 3k extra for a game that sells 8 million copies? That's like a drop in the bucket.

Yes, you just have to highlight the a part of the stream (or the whole thing) you want to keep.

I'm a bit disappointed that they're adding the player avatar stuff. Hopefully the new system they're putting in place that requires them will be worth it. The crafting sounds interesting, but I wonder about the difficulty of balancing it to be useful and interesting, without it being "required." Still, most of it looks neat. I need to get my joystick out again. A brief trist with EVE Online got me off the Elite train for a while.

Oh yeah, not disputing that, also not disputing that everyone in games should unionize, but unfortunately I doubt that game companies are going to make cuts where they probably should. They're probably going to either just hire non-union, or meddle with sales numbers and such to try and get out of it.

Hmm, will this discourage large developers from putting things on sale, since they could reach the 2 million mark with significantly less gross revenue?

I always bring my passport to the airport, but I didn't even have one until I got married and we wanted to take our honeymoon in Canada.

In my opinion, the difference is between telling the facts of an event, and trying to get the reader to feel the impact of an event. It's akin to the difference between a photo and a painting really. One could take a picture of a person standing on a bridge and screaming, but that doesn't necessarily convey emotions as well as "The Scream" does. Also, there's a certain level of accessibility in fiction. If you have something important to say, it would probably touch more people as a fiction piece than a non-fiction piece. Finally, if you're writing about something traumatic, or something that you only have third hand accounts of, I'd imagine it's easier to write it as a fiction piece than try to confront the events head-on and fact-check all your sources.

Places in the heartland adopted that silly thing a lot more than on the coasts. I believe a few places here and there stuck to it more as a patriotic thing than an anti-France thing.

Games with Gold doesn't have quite as good of games as PS+, but it's been all right. Backwards compatibility might make the difference for you? I know that's what I was holding out for (until I got one for Christmas at least.) Personally, it hurts, but I've got to speak with my wallet on this one. I have an Ion drumkit and I'm not going back to the crappy default RB4 one. I'm not buying until they can provide a solution for me, even if I have to pay extra for a wireless box or something.

As everyone before me has mentioned, it's a mix of legal and nationalistic issues. When there's a hostage situation or a bombing, the news is always quick to note the number of Americans involved, as if the rest of the victims don't count. "Plane crash in France, hundreds dead, including five Americans." The only (very flimsy) justification I can think of for that is letting people know the chances that someone they know is involved? But that's still like a one in a million chance.

I shudder to think how long the article would be for the USA.

Are they involved in that Youtube Nintendo deal?

Hmm, maybe this will be the next game I play on my Steam backlog.

So, second hand information by way of a friend of my wife's, but apparently if you get a bad enough ending you ruin the world and it won't let you start a new game anymore? And then if you eventually find your save file and delete it, steam cloud re-downloads the bad save and you're stuck again?

Waiting room? I kick them off the platform and hope they can swim.

The benefits in cheap crew space and resource gathering you get is worth any invasions you might get hit by. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to get up to the higher research ranks without an FOB. If you have no interest in engaging in the mode at all, you should just max out your security ratings for all platforms and try to never build just one level of a certain type of platform. With so many targets out there, all you have to do is look a little less juicy than the next guy on the block. Kinda like putting an ADT sticker in your window. Seriously though, your resource gathering goes way up with the FOB, so the only thing you're really risking are staff, and they run like water later.

Even as a PC building pro, I'm debating between building my own from scratch, or just buying a Dell and putting in a better graphics card. It's only when you get to the high-end gaming stuff that prices for pre-built start getting a bit silly.

Considering the cost of a new apple device and the somewhat lack-luster improvements to the Pro line as of late, I think it might be worth it, provided that MacBook will still be getting new versions of OSX. *note, this advice is strictly due to impressions from listening to the Tested Podcast, I don't own an apple device myself.

Agreed to that at least. I'd also love Subsistence, Extreme, and Total Stealth versions of every single mission in the game under there.