Zeusthecat

Has anybody made a controller that ditches the dual sticks and instead gives you a stick for your left thumb and a trackball for your right thumb? I have to assume that exists and if it does it seems like that would be the best of both worlds.

Yeah, I feel the same way. After seeing everything that has been happening in Ferguson, I realize this issue is much more serious than I originally gave it credit for and I think the theme they are going with is irresponsible at best.

Today is one of those rare days where we are getting an insane amount of rain. Roads all over the city are flooded and some areas had multiple inches of rain fall in a 30 minute period. I can barely contain my excitement. It is just crazy to think that we only get an average of 7 inches of rain per year and over the span of the last couple days, some areas around the city have received around half that amount.

Never!! I will definitely see this through till the end. It's just been a bad combination of a lack of enthusiasm for this game and a bunch of shit going on in my personal life that has made these last couple months really tough.

After taking a few weeks off from playing this game, I booted it up again recently with renewed motivation to get through the next portion of the game without using a guide. We'll see how far I get with that but I think some time off was good because I actually had an enjoyable time coming back to it and racking my brain on the Melee Island puzzles. Before doing anything, I spent some time re-conversing with the voodoo lady so I could remember what my current objective was. After finishing the conversation and examining what items I had, I went to work trying to figure out how to find the location of the ultimate insult. First, I headed to the Scumm bar and found that it had been turned into the Lua bar. I messed around in there for a little while, talking to the various characters and examining the various items and at one point, I picked up some chopsticks and managed to break them by sticking them in the sushi conveyor belt thing. There didn't seem to be anything else I could do in that area so I continued on and made my way towards Meathook's place. This time, when I approached the door to Meathook's house, he let me inside and I talked to him for a bit about his latest endeavors. Apparently, he had taken up wax art and had a successful business selling his works. Also (and I may be misremembering this since I've been sitting on this post for awhile), he mentioned that he had painted over and sold the map showing the location of the ultimate insult. After I finished talking to him, I went around investigating all the shit in his house and picked up a paintbrush before heading back out. Next, I went back down to the docks. Once there, I was able to grab a quarter out of the grog machine and used it to get a can of grog. Then, I walked down to my ship and after fiddling around for a bit, I found that I could talk to the lady on the front of my ship and put the necklace, earrings, and pen that I had received earlier on her. After doing this, I poked around a little bit more before continuing on. At this point, my options were pretty limited. There was nothing else of interest at the mansion and the only place on Melee Island that I hadn't exhausted all possibilities was the Lua bar. So I headed back to the Lua bar and quickly noticed the painting on the wall behind the sushi conveyor belt thing. I wasn't sure how to get to it yet so after messing around a bit more, I ended up sitting down on one of the stools and found that I could order some kind of flaming dish from the waitress. As soon as I saw the dish coming down the conveyor belt, I figured I was supposed to try to stop it right in front of the wax painting to get the wax to melt and reveal the map underneath the painting. Apparently there were no more chopsticks available to jam in the conveyor belt so I resorted to using the paintbrush. Upon stopping the conveyor belt, the chef came out of the kitchen to see what was going on and I was able to sneak into the kitchen while he was distracted. I haven't been able to figure out what I need to do next but I've repeated this process a few times with no success. I've examined the kitchen pretty thoroughly at this point and tried to stop the flaming dish in various spots around the painting but the results have been the same each time. To make matters worse, there was also a super lame brass monkey reference when I examined the two monkeys in the kitchen. I'm not sure whether to hate the brass monkey reference or the Forrest Gump reference more at this point in the game.

Do what I did. Convince yourself that "selfie" is just a new euphemism for poop. In other news, Kim Kardashian is going to publish a book of her selfies. I guess Kanye West was so impressed by the quality of her selfies that she now wants to share them with the rest of the world. I'll stop now.

My buddy and I still play when we can but it's died down some now that I've surpassed level 100 and dumped almost 200 hours into the multiplayer. Feel free to add me anyways. My game time has been a bit more limited lately but I'm open to setting something up if schedules align. Also, is anyone planning on buying the PS4 version of this game when it comes out later this year? I get the sense that a lot of people around here may have been holding off on getting it until the PS4/XBONE/PC version of the game came out. Personally, I've really enjoyed this game and plan to purchase it again on PS4 so I can finally play it with a few other friends that decided to wait for the "next gen" version.

The voice in my head that reads words to me is not my own voice, nor is it the voice of the person who wrote the words my head voice is reading. It's more of a vague Keanu Reeves whisper. I'll see myself out now.

So my first day in San Francisco was pretty sweet. First, I got to see a car fully engulfed in flames on the side of the 101 as we were driving to San Mateo. Then, while we were having drinks at the hotel bar and bullshitting about video games, a guy next to us who was apparently a Square Enix employee joined in the conversation and joined my coworkers in convincing me that I really need to play The Last Of Us.

Damn synth, that was solid.

I just saw a political ad where one of our sheriffs is giving his endorsement to a specific gubernatorial candidate. Something about that just feels horribly wrong. I feel like law enforcement officers have no business trying to influence people to vote for one candidate or another and should instead just focus on enforcing the law in an impartial manner. Not sure if these types of endorsements are common practice or if it is just an Arizona thing but it irritates the shit out of me.

Really fucking bummed that I didn't hear "double dribble" after that Ganon laugh at the beginning of the episode. I won't feel complete until I hear it at least once in an upcoming cast. Edit: Actually, thinking about it more, a Chris Remo Ganon laugh/double dribble song arrangement would be pretty sweet too.

So I'm flying in to San Francisco next Monday and will be working in San Mateo all week going through acceptance tests with our client. Not sure if I'll have much free time but my hotel will be right by the SFO airport. Any recommendations on stuff to do in that area? Any free time I have will only be in the evening unfortunately.

Nice avatar Twig. That might be my favorite one yet.

So now that we have Tomb Raider Definitive Edition and The Last of Us Remastered, there must be a lot of increased pressure on developers/publishers to come up with their own creative term for their remakes. I just wonder how ridiculous it will get.

That is definitely true in a lot of cases. But I feel like the examples I outlined at least have well reasoned arguments on both sides (which I tried to clarify at the end of my post). I just think it is dumb for people to proclaim things like "Tablets will kill PCs!!" and "Digital media will kill physical media" when there are clearly good arguments for both things to exist. A more reasonable argument to make would be something like "Gee, most people don't seem to agree about which direction this thing should go in so maybe both will coexist for the foreseeable future.".

The days of owning games are coming to an end I am so tired of articles like this. Why do people have such a strong tendency to boil everything in the world down to an either/or situation. Tablets are going to kill off desktop PCs, digital distribution will kill off physical media, eBooks will kill off actual books, etc. It's amazing that we live in a world chock full of things that coexist in harmony and yet people still insist that humanity is so united in its tastes and preferences that thing B will inevitably lead to the end of thing A. It would be nice if articles like these could at least acknowledge the more likely possibility that both things will most likely continue to exist with one diminishing in popularity and one increasing in popularity. Especially in the case where there is a well reasoned argument for both things to exist.

I am suddenly very tempted to change this thread title to "The Thread of Horrifying Taxidermy".

Finished watching Mushi-shi and Baccano. Mushi-shi was very relaxing and I enjoyed the overall sense of serenity that seemed to be present throughout the show. I'm also glad to see that new episodes are airing and as of right now I'm all caught up with what is available on Hulu. Baccano was also quite awesome and it was really cool seeing how everything ended up coming together throughout the second half of the show. Isaac and Miria might be two of my favorite characters from any show ever. It looks like Berserk isn't available on Netflix or Hulu so I'm thinking I might go with Knights of Sidonia or FMA Brotherhood next. I'm also hoping to find another show similar to Steins;Gate because goddamn that show was good.

No. Unfortunately I only have myself to blame for that. On Monday, I promised a couple of deliverables by Tuesday but was never able to get to it because of this stuff. They asked if I could at least get it to them by Friday and I obliged.

A couple days later and I still haven't passed this goddamn kidney stone. CT scan showed that it's a 4mm stone and they ended up sending me home from the hospital after a couple hours with prescriptions for percocet and flomax. I've barely eaten 2 meals over the last 2 days and the blockage in my kidney is bad enough that if I drink too much water at one time, I end up puking it all up. I'm nauseous as hell and in constant pain and to make matters worse, I'm at work right now trying to get some stuff done that I can't put off any longer. This is one of those times where life really sucks balls.

As if life couldn't get any more stressful, I'm in the hospital with a nasty fucking kidney stone. Even with the morphine the pain is still kind of bad.

I think it's fair to say that I've been spoiled by all of the excellently designed games that preceded this one. I feel like I am being a bit unfair with some of my gripes about the puzzles. Based on some of the responses to the complaints I made in my last few posts, it seems pretty clear that a lot of these puzzles would have actually made more sense if I had paid closer attention to what various characters said and what observations Guybrush made. I just don't know how feasible that would have been because the quantity of the dialog is too high and the quality of the dialog is too low for anything but the most pertinent plot points to stand out. It would be really interesting to see how much this game could have been improved by simply having less dialog.

I feel very exhausted with life lately. I wish it was possible to just turn off for a couple weeks.

Sorry for my extremely slow progress on this. I keep meaning to get some more time in but to be honest, I'm having a hard time feeling enthusiastic about playing more of this game. I'm just not having very much fun when I play it and I keep dozing off as I go through countless lines of dialog. Despite how I feel about this game, I will finish it and even managed to play for a couple hours the other night. At this point, I am using a walkthrough to help me get through this at a steady pace and I don't plan to spend more than a few minutes trying to solve any of these puzzles on my own. As a result, I'm also not going to bother going into as much detail as I have in the past. Upon resuming the other night, I sprayed some perfume on a fucking platypus to make Ozzie Mandrill break his walking stick. Then, I went down to the walking stick shop and put termites on his stick so he would leave a trail of sawdust behind him wherever he went. After doing that, I met him back at the mansion, told him about how I saw him and Pegnose Pete conspiring, and then nonchalantly followed him to a secret hideout. Then I pressed a button on the table inside the hideout to reveal a window and was able to see that the bank loot was inside of an underwater cave on the other side of the window. From there, I headed back above ground, dove into the water, and used my scupperware with bait to lure a glowing fish thing so I could use it as a flashlight to see underwater. Then, I entered the cave, grabbed the loot and a screw for Pegnose Pete's nose, and headed back to the town. Once I was back in town, I went straight to the jail and cleared my name by showing all my cool new shit to the jailer. This finally convinced him that I was innocent and I was able to head back to Melee Island. There was a fairly lengthy cutscene around this time with lots of talking and a revelation that Ozzie Mandrill was really LeChuck. After all that talking, I headed over to the Voodoo place to do more talking and fell asleep for about 15 minutes when I tried to talk to the Voodoo lady. Then I woke up, selected another dialog line, and fell asleep for another five minutes. Then I turned the game off and went to bed. I was able to solve some of the stuff I mentioned above on my own and had some brief moments of fun while I was doing so but most of what I experienced struck me as pretty mediocre at best. And I'm still trying to figure out why I needed to spray perfume on a platypus to get a dude to break his walking stick.