Zeusthecat

Since I completely cleared my backlog on all other systems I own (not counting some of the older systems from a few gens ago), I finally decided to start getting serious about my Steam backlog. I am fortunate that I stopped myself from buying anything else once I reached a certain point so with the two games below completed, I am down to 17 games left to complete. And I forget, do we have a thread related to backlog discussions on this forum? I can't seem to find one. First, I finally played through The Walking Dead Season One. It was a really good game with a really good story. This was my first time experiencing a game with a timer on dialog choices and I thought it was really effective in encouraging me to make more natural gut decisions. I found each episode thoroughly entertaining and I really think the fairly limited interaction made for a much more engaging experience. I'm kind of tempted to play through again and make different choices to see what happens but at the same time I feel like I had "my" experience and I might just want to keep it that way. We shall see. I also just finished Hotline Miami. Man, it takes a bit to really get the hang of it but once everything clicks, it feels really good to harness the chaos and effortlessly string together a bunch of kills. I remember a distinct point where in a matter of a few minutes, the game went from "fairly difficult and slightly frustrating" to "I know how all this shit works now and I know exactly what I need to do to wreck these dudes". After finishing the bonus missions and whatnot, I played through the first few levels again and was amazed at how much better I had gotten. I think originally it took me about 2 hours to get through the first five missions but going through them a second time, I probably knocked them all out in about 20-30 minutes and got a much better score on each one. Also, it probably helped that I switched to using a 360 controller at one point. Now on to Cart Life...

I beat a bunch of games over the last few months. Watch Dogs (PS4) - I enjoyed this game when I played it the right way. I initially tried going as non-lethal as possible and found it to be a fairly frustrating experience. Once I ditched my self imposed restrictions and started using all of the systems that the game gave me, it became much more enjoyable (having the silenced pistol at my disposable made infiltrating bases so much more fun). The whole hacking system was a cool new layer to the familiar gameplay and it kept things fairly interesting throughout the game. I'm excited to see how they end up expanding on that. And I really enjoyed the profiler and all the random conversations you can listen in on. Those things went a long way towards giving some life to the random NPCs wandering about and made them feel just a little more real. So, not a great game but I still had a good amount of fun with it. Tomb Raider Definitive Edition (PS4) - This game was awesome. The gameplay was very fluid and felt great and I really enjoyed all the combat and traversal. The story wasn't great but was interesting enough. The graphics, however, were amazing. This game looked so damn good. The only complaint I would level against this game is that they went a little overboard with beating the shit out of Lara and her constantly jumping from crumbling structures right as they give way beneath her. It got to a point where it was just kind of absurd. But that didn't really bother me much and I'm definitely excited to play the next one whenever it comes out. The Last of Us Remastered (PS4) - I absolutely loved this game. The story was one of the best I've seen in a video game in a long time and that ending was really good. And surprisingly, even though I've heard a lot of complaints leveled against it, I really enjoyed the combat in this game and felt like it fit really well with the tone of the game. Definitely gonna run through this again on New Game + to experience it again and get some sweet cheevos. I also need to check out the multiplayer which sounds pretty fun. Oh yeah, and the photo mode was a lot of fun and I hope to use it a lot more on my next playthrough. Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls (PS4) - Dude, this game is hard to stop playing. Everything is tuned to perfection from the sound design to the art style and lighting, to how effective each build plays based on what skills and runes are mapped. I just feel like I'm in a state of zen whenever I play and the steady stream of upgrades and skill levels makes me want to keep pushing on. I've been playing adventure mode for about a week now and I'm thinking about rolling another character or two to see how other classes play. I'll probably continue playing this for awhile, especially since a bunch of co-workers got it and we've been pretty successful in getting a group of us together most nights of the week. I would also love to play this with some fellow thumbs if anyone is playing this on PS4. But I think there would need to be a strict wizard-only rule (of course I'm the motherfucking wizard). Super Mario World - Played through this with my daughter and beat the game along with every level. Tubular still sucks and is the most annoying level in that game but everything else is awesome. This was the first game I ever beat back in 1992 and it's one I keep coming back to every now and then. Pokemon Leaf Green/Fire Red - I figured I'd start at the beginning and start the long journey of collecting all of these little bastards. So far I have everything I need from both of these versions and am doing the post elite four stuff. Eventually, when I have everything traded over I'll move on to HG/SS. Super Mario Galaxy - I've owned this game since 2008 and at some point I stopped at around 50 stars. It turns out my kids love watching me play this so I went ahead and finished the game and have about 95 stars now. This game was freaking awesome and I'm glad I finally started playing it again. My only complaint is that the camera can be a real pain in the ass. I'll probably be slowly churning through those last 25 stars for awhile and I might eventually pick up Galaxy 2. Escape From Monkey Island - This game was okay. Not shit but not great either. GTA V - Finally got the platinum trophy on this one. It says only 0.1% of people have this trophy so I feel special. Also, I'm a loser.

I don't think I'm ready for that jelly.

Thanks for the recommendations. I already started Walking Dead last night and will play through Psychonauts soon too since I already own it. I am definitely interested in playing Telltale's other games so after I clear a few things off my backlog that I've been meaning to play I'll probably start going through those. Maybe I will go ahead and post about that stuff here but probably not in the same detailed way. Do the Telltale games have any fairly difficult puzzles like what I've experienced with LucasArts or are they mostly all straightforward?

And The Big LucasArts Playthrough is officially concluded! This was a truly awesome experience getting to play through so many amazing games while sharing my experience with the excellent people on this forum. I know it dragged on for a few months longer than it probably should have at the end but I think taking the last game in shorter doses over a longer period of time helped me enjoy the game a bit more and keep a more level head while going through. And seriously thank you to everyone for encouraging me to do this and helping me along as I went through this experience. I have remained a little apprehensive about whether or not I've come across as arrogant for making this kind of thread detailing all of this, but you guys have been super positive about this whole thing and have made it probably the best video game adventure I've ever had. So thank you all a million times. Now that I've played through all 14 of the LucasArts graphic adventure games, one of the games stands out as my clear favorite. And that game is Secret of Monkey Island. Being my first adventure game (and my first Tim Schafer game for that matter), I was completely blown away by how clever the dialog was, how ingenious a lot of the puzzles and ideas were, and just how fucking hilarious the whole thing was. The comedic timing was just brilliant through and through and I laughed more than I had for any other video game up to that point. From the timing of the shopkeeper popping his head back into the store whenever you tried to take something, to the segment where Stan was talking up the boat he had just sold to you and had a nice long pause right as the mast broke off, to the situation with Guybrush's crew who refused to do anything but relax on the deck of the boat and take a nice caribbean vacation. But most of all, the most hilarious thing about this game was stuff like this: I don't know why I find it so funny but when I see such dweeby artwork for the character cutscenes accompanying a game that is just dripping with sarcasm and humor, I can't help but think that when they were making this game, they thought it would be hilarious to make the characters look as douchy as possible in the cutscenes. I could be totally wrong but I laughed every time I saw scenes like those. So from here on out, I hope others will take up the torch and use this thread to catalog their experiences with the LucasArts games. I'm sure there are plenty of other people who have never played these games and I would love to see others post about their progress and how they go about solving the puzzles in these games. I might continue to post in here from time to time and I intend to eventually play some of these games again so if I do I will probably post about it here. Specifically, I still need to play through the special editions of MI 1 and 2 and try one of the other paths in Fate of Atlantis. But for now, I am moving on to some other games(Walking Dead from Telltale is next on my list).

I finally completed Escape From Monkey Island! I ended up getting through rest of the game using only a couple hints along the way and quite enjoyed the last act of the game. When I resumed from where I had left off, I first continued exploring all of the areas available to me. From the rock tunnel area, I moved on to the church of LeChuck and talked to father Rasputin for a little while before testing out his matrimonial lava log ride. Once I was done there, I briefly checked out the lava fields and didn't see anything of significance that I could interact with. Finally, I checked out the canyon/mine shaft area and found Herman's banana picker by a cactus. There wasn't anything I could do in the mine shaft itself yet but I did make note of a big door at the end of the shaft with a closable vent and another open slot at the top of the door. Since I now had the banana picker, I decided to head back to the beach and grab some bananas. After using the banana picker multiple times, I was able to nab the whole bunch of bananas and found that when I fed one to Timmy, he followed me around to whatever area I walked to. So I walked around with him for a little while and we eventually made our way back over to the mine shaft area. Once we were both in the shaft, I thought that I might be able to get Timmy to go through that vent in the door and open it from the inside or something like that. So I tried using a banana with the open vent and was able to lure him inside where he just stood there doing nothing. When I saw that he was just sitting there, I tried closing the bottom door and then used another banana with the top opening. This caused Timmy to jump up to the banana which resulted in some kind of lever getting pulled and the door being opened. There was a giant pipe behind the door that I followed until I found myself in some kind of room with a bunch of gears. I picked up a weed whipper that was lying in the gears (I think I had to use the banana grabber for this), and poked around at the various gears and gauges before heading back out. At this point, it didn't seem like there was anything else I could do on this side of the island aside from messing around with the rocks and rock tunnels some more. So I went back over there and started tossing rocks down each of the tunnels. I did this for several minutes and noticed that despite there being three tunnels I could throw the rocks down, they always got launched out of either the farthest left or farthest right ramp. So I mixed it up a little bit and started trying to see if I could throw multiple rocks with the right timing to try to get them to knock into each other and change course towards the middle tunnel. As I kept attempting this, I eventually got two of them to hit but still didn't end up getting one of them to go down the middle ramp. However, I did happen to notice that when I got them to successfully hit, it just happened to coincide with me throwing the second rock right as the first rock was going past one of those twig things on the track. This ended up being the big hint I needed and it wasn't long before I was able to throw rocks in the correct sequence and with the correct timing to finally get one of them to go down the middle ramp. With this ramp, the rock ended up landing in the lava field and I immediately headed back to the church of LeChuck to take another log ride. After jumping in the log for another go and exiting into the lava fields, I tried steering my log towards where the boulder had landed. I ended up successfully making my way towards the boulder and bumping into it which got me to come to a stop in a small lava pool. I disembarked and immediately noticed some weeds growing by the pool. So I pulled out my weed whipper and got rid of them, causing the ground beneath the lava pool to give way and send lava pouring down the mine shaft and into the gear system where I had found the weed whipper. Once I had done that, I continued on to check out the new areas available to me. First, I went over to the monkey village and chatted with Jojo the talking monkey. After learning a number of things from him, he introduced me to Monkey Kombat. His instructions on how to go about beating other contestants at monkey kombat were quite confusing and I only really got a vague idea of what I needed to do but I at least learned that Jojo would give me his hat if I could defeat him. Once I was finished talking with Jojo, I checked out the rest of the monkey village and spent a little bit of time trying to figure out how to get the accordion from an accordion playing monkey in one of the huts. Since there wasn't anything I could do yet to get it, I continued on to check out the next area. Next, I went over to the area with the giant monkey head. I messed around a little bit and ended up discovering that I could use the banana picker with the nose to open its mouth. Then I went through a passage inside the mouth and ended up in a control room with all kinds of levers and gauges. Nothing seemed to be working so after some poking around, I left the area and decided to start fighting some monkeys. Also, at some point in this process, Guybrush made a comment indicating that I could use the giant monkey head to make another ultimate insult. Seeing as how I already had the monkey head and the gold banana picker (shaped like a man), it looked like I would be good to go once I got Jojo's bronze hat. After leaving the monkey head area, I approached a monkey and started my first session of monkey kombat. It didn't go so well and I didn't quite understand what was going on so I decided to look at a guide to get me through this session (plus I had seen it mentioned multiple times how irritating this part was). After reading through the guide, I had a solid understanding of how monkey kombat was supposed to work and grabbed a pen and paper to start recording what defeated what and what combinations were used to switch between the various stances. Surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed going through this process and I thought it was pretty neat if a little unnecessarily complicated (although if I hadn't looked at a guide I could see how it would have been frustrating trying to figure out how it worked based on Jojo's description). It took me a good chunk of time to battle each monkey and learn most of the moves but once I had done so, I made quick work of Jojo and his lesser monkeys. I even managed to take a sweet screenshot of my monkey kombat note sheet! Once I had emerged victorious, I was given Jojo's bronze hat which I immediately took over to the giant monkey head to complete the ultimate insult. Unfortunately, I couldn't get anything to happen after doing so, so I spent the next 15 minutes or so luring monkey after monkey over to the giant monkey head to see if that would cause the 'monkey meter' inside the giant monkey head to fill up. After I had lured about ten monkeys over and gotten no results I moved on to see if I could figure out what I was missing. After some wandering, I eventually ended up back at the church of LeChuck and noticed a couple tiny shields I had missed earlier. I couldn't reach them so I went back to grab the banana picker from the monkey head and was able to get the shields using that. Once they were in my inventory, I saw that they looked exactly like tiny symbols and immediately ran back to the monkey village to find that I could exchange them for the accordion. Unfortunately, this still left me stuck and I spent quite a bit of time searching around the island and throwing the accordion and other objects at Herman Toothrot's head before finally deciding to look at a guide again. After reading through the section I was on, I was surprised to see that I had missed a milk bottle in the lava field area that was supposed to be one of the objects I needed to throw at Herman to restore his memory. So I went back to the lava field and noticed a little unrecognizable blob on one of the rocks that I assumed was the bottle I needed. From there, I went back to the church, jumped back in the log and rode around until the lava logs had been knocked into the right spots, giving me a path to reach the milk bottle. As I floated by, I was able to grab it with the banana picker and finally had the last item I needed to restore Herman's memory and finish off this section of the game. With all the objects in hand, I went back over to Herman and started tossing the three necessary items at his head. Despite trying over a dozen times and trying to talk to him in between, I got no responses even though I verified that I was using the correct objects in the correct order. So I did a quick Google search and found that I had encountered a potentially game breaking bug. Most of what I read indicated that I would need to restore a save from before Herman got in that state (which I had overwritten at that point) but a couple people said that it could be fixed by just throwing the coconut at him multiple times until he started giving the correct responses. Luckily, that ended up working for me and I was able to restore his memory and learn that he was actually Elaine's grandfather and was responsible for Ozzie Mandrill's bullshit. He eventually gave me the gubernatorial seal which was the last item I needed and I ran straight back to the monkey head and inserted it into the control panel slot, kicking off the last section of the game. A bunch of cutscenes proceeded after wrapping up the Monkey Island segment followed by a brief part where I had to use a board with a short tower to be able to navigate to the top of a larger tower (the ultimate insult amplification device) and flip a switch to turn it off. Then I saw some more cutscenes and finally ended up in the last segment of the game where I had to battle a giant statue of LeChuck with my robot monkey. I started battling like normal but after several minutes, I realized I was getting nowhere and both of our health bars were pretty much where they started. So I looked back at the walkthrough again and saw that I needed to just copy whatever stance he went to three times in a row to win the fight. After doing that I finally defeated LeChuck and watched the closing cutscene and credits. My overall feelings on this game are mixed. I think the music and voice acting was generally pretty great but a lot of other things were really hit or miss. First, the humor was dry at best and downright pathetic at worst. I think this was the worst part of the game and actually made the overall experience worse by being so lame. On the puzzle side, I feel like there were more good puzzles than bad puzzles. Some of my favorite puzzles were the rock tunnel puzzle on Monkey Island, the diving competition puzzle on Jambalaya island (and most of the other puzzles on that island for that matter), and a few of the random lesser Melee island puzzles. Lucre Island, however, was a fucking abomination and had enough lame puzzles and humor going on to make it hard to focus entirely on the positive aspects. The story was decent enough but with it being so closely tied to the humor aspect of the game, I ended up feeling indifferent about it, if slightly negative. Finally, I kind of liked the polygonal graphics at first but ended up hating it by the end. These games just look and feel so much better with the 2d graphics from the first three games. Despite all of this, I think my opinion of this game is very slightly on the positive side. There was enough that I liked that I'm glad I stuck with it.

It's been awhile but I got a couple more hours in last weekend and had quite a good time. I'm definitely finding that this game can be pretty fun if I take it in smaller doses and spread out my play time a bit. Since I previously lost a chunk of progress when the game got stuck, I first had to spend some time getting back to where I was. After redoing what I had done before and getting the dunce cap again, I made another attempt to pull the fire alarm and run into the classroom while the teacher was out. Once inside the room, I was able to grab an item out of the chest of random pirate shit, after which, the teacher came back in and booted me out. So I repeated the process a few times until I got all the items I could from the chest (I think I got a parrot whistle, a magazine, a toy boat, and some kind of collectors card) and then moved on. Next, I headed down to the beach where two pirates were talking and as soon as I showed up, the cannon asshole fired a cannon ball at us causing one of the pirates to run off. Apparently, if more than two pirates are ever conversing at the same time, cannon fire will rain down upon them. I chatted to the remaining pirate for a bit and talked to his two parrots (one that always tells the truth and one that always lies) and learned that the bronze hat I needed for the ultimate insult was buried under a rock along the beach. I walked around for a little bit and couldn't seem to find the area he mentioned so instead I decided to head back to Jambalaya and try to finish off the diving competition. Now that I had the dunce cap, I gave the diving competition another go and got perfect scores from all the judges. However, this still wasn't enough and on the tie breaker round, Marco Pollo somehow pulled off an 11 from one of the judges and beat me. But luckily, before the rematch, the game showed a brief segment where Marco Pollo went into the changing room and oiled himself up with the baby seal oil. After seeing that, I figured I would somehow have to sabotage the baby seal oil to get Marco Pollo to fuck up. So I went through my items and eventually found that I was able to distract Marco Pollo and put the chewed up bagel thing into the oil. Then I retried the diving competition and was finally able to defeat him when a bunch of seagulls attacked him as he was doing his dive. With the diving trophy in hand, I went back to Knuttin Atoll to try to get the last piece I needed. When I got back to Knuttin Atoll, I headed straight back to the pirate with the two parrots and continued trying to find the area he was referring to where the bronze hat was buried. Before long, I found that it was just off the right edge of that screen. I saw that there were a ton of rocks along the beach and separate screens for each rock so I immediately used the parrot whistle to call the parrots over. Unfortunately, each time I talked to them they flew up and then landed again in a random spot so there was no way to tell which one was the truth telling parrot when I asked which direction I needed to go. So after some experimenting, I found that I was able to give the coffee I had to one of the parrots, causing him to get all tweaked out and fidgety. Now that I could distinguish between the two, I followed the truth telling parrot's directions until I got to the rock that had the hat under it. I immediately found that the rock was too big to lift and the only obvious solution was to somehow get the cannon bastard to fire a cannon ball at the rock. Knowing that he would only fire if three or more pirates were conversing, and knowing that the only thing left in that area that I hadn't really done anything with was the puppet show booth, I figured I had to somehow get those two puppets and bring them down to the rock so I could somehow trick him into fire at us. So I went back over to the puppets and after talking to them a few times and trying a bunch of items with the dude and each of his puppets, I was eventually able to scare him off by showing him my map to the ultimate insult. Then, I picked up the puppets, headed back to the rock, and put on a little puppet show which tricked the dude into firing at us and got me the hat I needed. After doing all that, we headed back to Melee Island and some cutscenes ensued. Basically, LeChuck got elected governor, I got all my shit taken from me, and I ended up getting stranded on Monkey Island. I started exploring the beach area and gathered a few notes before making it into a clearing where Herman Toothrot had his camp set up. After talking to him for a little bit and picking up a coconut, I moved on to an area where I could drop rocks into a series of tunnels/tubes and saw that it launched the rock onto the beach. And this is about where I stopped playing. For the record, I think the whole Jambalaya Island segment was really well done and was a step above anything else I've seen in the game. The puzzles all made a decent amount of sense and most of the characters were fairly interesting and not too stupid. The fact that I also didn't need or want to use a guide at any point in this section was also a testament to how well it all came together.

Super Mario World.

Oh yeah, well fuck you! Enjoy that last month of sleep while you can because the next year will be a sleep deprived hell!

Watching my daughter play Super Mario Bros has continued to be a treat. She played some this weekend after not having played for a couple weeks and she has gotten remarkably better. For a while, she was having a hard time understanding how to use the run button but as I watched her play the other day, I noticed that she had not only figured out how to use it, but she was even able to use it properly on that small area of real estate on the pillar/stair at the end of the level to consistently get 2000 points on the end level flag. Then, I left the room for a bit and a few minutes later, I heard the victory music from 1-4 indicating that she had just gotten past King Koopa. She had been struggling with that a lot and could never get past the spinning fire rod things so she was absolutely elated and I ran back into the room to celebrate with her on her first big video game accomplishment. After that, she proceeded to beat 2-1 and 2-2 (the first water level) without issue and ended up stopping after failing at 2-3 a few times. She's already gotten close to beating it a few times but at this point I think she's still learning how the flying fish work and how to avoid them.

I'm finally making some decent progress on Jambalaya Island and enjoying it quite a bit more than the last couple sections of the game. When I resumed the other night, I continued going through each of the shops and areas on the island. Starting with the Starbuccaneer's coffee shop, I picked up some kind of nasty bagel snack and ate it, leaving a chewed up bagel thing in my inventory. I then got a hint on the ultimate insult from an old lady inside (and I think I got some kind of souvenir mug here as well but I may have picked that up somewhere else) and tried to order some coffee from the barista which I ended up not having enough money for. From there, I went back to Planet Threepwood, talked to all of the people inside, and got a caricature done by a caricature artist. I also tried to order a meal but didn't have any money so I was forced to move on. Next, I went back over to the micro-groggery and tried riding the mechanical manatee after talking to the bartender again (I think I had also previously gotten a glass of weak grog from this area). I ended up just getting thrown off a couple times and figured that I probably didn't have the means to defeat the manatee just yet and decided to leave the town and head for the next area on the island. After leaving the town, I continued on and found myself in an area with a diving competition and a competition trophy which looked to be one of the pieces of the ultimate insult. I talked to the champion diver for a bit and challenged him to a dive-off, but was rejected because I didn't have the required diving certificate. So I went over to the judges and after they looked me over, they gave their approval and handed me the diving certificate I needed. Then I re-challenged the diver guy and lost horribly. After chatting with the judges some more and making a few more failed attempts, I started to get a good idea of what I needed to do to win. First, I needed to mimic the moves of the other diver to get a perfect score from the hippie judge. Then, I needed to produce the smallest splash possible to get a perfect score from the wise judge. Finally, I had to somehow bribe or otherwise convince the third judge to stop giving me such shitty scores. I was able to at least get a perfect score from the hippie judge at this point by meeting his criteria but couldn't get anywhere with the other two and had to move on. Next, I made my way over to Stan's time share place. After picking up a bottle of glue and a time share pamphlet, I listened to Stan's pitch and fell asleep during his three hour rant. Apparently, if I made it through the whole thing he would give me a coupon for a free meal at Planet Threepwood so I made a mental note that I would probably need to find a way to get some coffee from Starbuccaneer's so I could stay awake for the whole pitch. Before leaving Stan's place, I examined the pamphlet and glue I had picked up and saw that one of the pictures in the pamphlet was of the shitty diving judge with some lady. So I went straight back to the diving place and was able to use the pamphlet as blackmail to get him to give me better scores. At this point, I wasn't quite sure what to do so I meandered around for a little while and eventually made my way back to the town. I ended up going back inside the micro-groggery and quickly realized that I could apply glue to the mechanical manatee. After doing that, I gave it another go and managed to hang on all the way through the highest setting. That netted me a coupon for a free meal from Planet Threepwood which I immediately went to redeem. After ordering my meal and receiving the monkey mug (one of the three pieces of the ultimate insult), I tried to take off with the mug but wasn't able to since it belonged to the establishment. I went through my limited options to try to figure out how to snatch the mug and ended up talking to the caricature artist again to get another picture done. This caricature ended up being a picture of me with the monkey mug so after receiving it, it didn't take long for me to figure out that I could use the glue with the picture to paste the monkey mug portion onto the mug I had received earlier. Then, I switched out my fake monkey mug with the real one and took off with my prize. Next, I headed back over to Starbuccaneer's to see if I could figure out how to get some coffee. This time, as I approached I got lucky and noticed a mug sitting on the other side of the window that I hadn't seen before. So I went inside, grabbed the mug from behind a planter that had been obstructing it from the inside, and handed it to the barista to get my cup of coffee. Once I had that, I went back to Stan's, drank the coffee, and listened to his pitch. Thanks to the coffee, I made it through the whole thing and then realized it was pointless because I had already received the same coupon from the micro-groggery. I had pretty much exhausted all my options on the main island at this point and after eventually making my way back down to the docks, I found that I could take a canoe over to Knuttin Atoll. On the way there, I ran into some asshole who was firing a cannon at me and learned that Knuttin Atoll was where all the pirates were being sent off to. After I finished talking to him, I continued on through and started exploring the island. The first thing I noticed was some guy doing a puppet show so I went right over to him and talked to him and his puppets for a bit. That ended up being pretty pointless so next, I went over to a school house and enrolled in a pirate rehabilitation program. On my first go through, I passed easily and got my certificate. However, I couldn't help but notice a dunce cap in the classroom and based on previous comments about my flat head, I figured that would be the perfect hat to wear during the diving competition to make my splash as small as possible. So I re-enrolled, gave the worst possible answers, and got the dunce cap as a "reward". After doing that, I went back outside and pulled the fire alarm on the building which caused the teacher lady to run out. As soon as I saw that happen, I ran inside and ended up running into a really annoying bug that's happened to me a few times throughout this game. Basically, I was standing in the doorway when the teacher tried to walk back in and the game got stuck with her in a walking animation and me blocking her way with no way for me to move or interact with anything. So I had to revert to an earlier save and lost a small chunk of progress. And that's about where I stopped playing. It shouldn't take me too long to redo that last portion and get back to where I was and once I do, I'll finish exploring Knuttin Atoll and see if I can finish off the diving competition and get that trophy.

Thanks to all of you who have responded and shared your challenges with the whole friend thing. I've been pretty embarrassed to share this with other people and there is some comfort in knowing that I'm not the only one struggling with this issue. It really is unfortunate that we are spread out all over the globe because I think Idle Forums has fostered a great community of like-minded individuals and I have no doubt that many lasting friendships would be forged if there wasn't so much distance between most of us. Also, Nachimir, I think that is some pretty solid advice you provided and I'm really going to try to make an effort to be more social and force myself to meet new people and do more stuff.

Sorry to hear that you guys are going through the same thing. I really miss the days when I could just call up a friend and we would hang out and play video games for hours on end. With those friends gone it seems like everyone else my age has totally different priorities in life and I have a hard time finding people I can really relate to.

I've somehow reached a point in my life where I'm down to about zero friends. It's something that's really been bothering me a lot lately and making me feel increasingly isolated and insecure. I've tried to get together with some coworkers that I get along with and share similar interests but it just never gels for some reason. Everyone else my age seems to have their own thing going on with their established group of friends and since moving to Phoenix 5 years ago, my established group of friends has pretty much faded away. Why is making friends so goddamn hard at this stage in life? Maybe there needs to be a "finding new friends" equivalent of an online dating site (or maybe there already is) to make this shit easier. I'm just getting tired of being a loner.

Yeah, fortunately my home is my own. But unfortunately, it has the whole "open floor plan" setup. So my living room bleeds into the entry way with an open stairwell to the second floor and literally no walls to block the sound from making its way to the second floor. Our bedroom is right at the top of the stairwell and to make matters worse, we have to leave the door open when we sleep or else Zeus will just sit there meowing to get in if he is out and meowing to get out if he is in. Fucking cats and open floor plans. Edit: And yeah Twig, I've definitely resorted to the headphone thing in some cases but I just don't like using headphones if I don't have to.

Then what good is my 7.1 surround sound? Fuck headphones. 7 speakers and a subwoofer blasting sound waves throughout my living room are my "headphones".

I really wish games had separate volume settings for gunfire/explosions and all other sound effects. I tend to do most of my gaming when everyone else is sleeping and am constantly struggling to find a volume level that is loud enough for me to hear all of the music, dialog, and sound effects while also being low enough that my wife doesn't come out of the room asking me to turn it down. Because of the fact that gunfire and explosions are always so much louder than any other sound effect in games, I usually have to lower the volume so much that the only thing left for me to hear is gunfire and explosions. This has been especially annoying in The Last Of Us because decent segments of the game don't involve any loud shit like gunfire and I want to be able to enjoy the background music and chatter between characters. So I turn the volume up enough for all of this lovely shit to reach my ears only to get caught off guard by an unexpected battle sequence and have gunshots ringing through every corner of our house because I reacted hastily and forgot to pause the game and turn the volume back down.

Yay! Glad to hear there is someone else like me.

I just found out my Grandma is on Facebook. I am now literally the only human being I am aware of who is not on Facebook (not including my children). I feel like maybe I should give in and just sign up but I kind of want to do my part to preserve this endangered species I belong to.

Wow. That was the best.

I'm kind of bummed that they didn't add Epona as a vehicle. How awesome would that be to ride Epona off of a big jump and have a fucking hang glider sprout from her back.

For me, I think Goldeneye 007 was the main reason I ended up playing the way I do now. That game was a weird case though because the up and down C buttons looked down and up respectively while the left and right C buttons strafed left and right, and the control stick handled movement on the y axis and looking on the x axis with no inversion. I guess having your x and y look axes split between the control stick and C buttons made the whole inverted y, not inverted x scheme feel a little more natural. Then when Halo came around and put all the strafing on one stick and all the looking on the other, my brain just married them together into a clusterfuck of nonsense. Basically, what I'm trying to say is fuck Goldeneye and fuck Rare. Perfect Dark was awesome.

So I'm one of those freaks that plays video games with inverted look controls. I've always justified it to others by explaining that I envision my control stick being attached to the back of the head of the character I am controlling. I think that is an easy way to give people perspective on why it feels natural for some people to pull the control stick down to look up and up to look down. However, I recently realized that that explanation is total bullshit in my case because my brain only applies that logic to the y axis for some reason. I used to think other people were jackasses for constantly picking on people who use inverted control schemes but now I realize I'm the jackass for having a broken brain.

I agree. As much as I hate a lot of the writing, the voice acting itself is pretty solid. I also got a little further the other night, but not much. After spinning my wheels for a little while longer, I finally discovered that I could pour my can of grog into the furnace thingy to make the brass monkeys stop the conveyor belt. As soon as I did that, the flaming dish that I had stopped in front of the wax painting melted off all of the wax revealing the map underneath. Since the painting/map was of no use to him any more, the chef handed it over to me and I headed back to the dock. After giving the map to the ship figurehead lady, we learned that the ultimate insult was located on Jambalaya Island and immediately set sail for our new destination. Since arriving on Jambalaya Island, most of my time has been spent just going through each of the new locations, talking to the new characters, and picking up a few items here and there. So far I've checked out Planet Threepwood, a micro-groggery, and a Starbuccaneers coffee shop and gone through all the dialog options for each of the characters in those areas. I see that there are still a few more areas to visit on the island aside from the main village area I've explored so far so hopefully those don't drag on for too long so I can get back to solving the next series of puzzles.

Glad I'm not the only one that feels that way. And also, the way Guybrush keeps using that stupid Billy Dee Williams 'sexy' voice when he talks to various female characters is really grating on my nerves. It wasn't funny the first time and it was downright infuriating the third time.