Zeusthecat

I swear if I get one more SIM card error!!!!

I think it is likely that if emoticons become a standard part of written language, then punctuation will probably become a thing of the past and everything will exist as giant run-on sentences.

This statement of fact seems a little contradictory to your previous statements regarding how facts work. I totally agree with what you've said previously regarding argument by assertion but you're not exactly practicing what you preach.

I got a little bit further this weekend. When I resumed playing, I was in the underground hideout area with Sal and Eva. After talking to them and learning a bit about who they were and what they were doing, I set out to retrieve the pigeon eggs that Sal needed to raise carrier pigeons. Surprisingly, the next few steps ended up being pretty straightforward and I was able to blast through them with ease. After leaving the underground area, I immediately climbed back up to the ledge near the top of the building. I saw that I was able to pick up the other end of the rope and tried throwing it over to the nearby ladder but was unable to without some kind of anchor. After finding that none of my items could be used with the rope, I gave that up and decided to see what else I could do. So I walked down the ledge a little ways to see if any of the windows were open and discovered that I could sneak into Domino's office since he was still out talking to Don. Once inside, I was able to grab a piece of coral and Domino's mouthpiece (after hitting the punching bag a few times). Then I headed back out, attached the piece of coral to the end of the rope, and successfully anchored the rope to the ladder. Once I was on the roof, I immediately noticed a roof vent thingy nearby and tried using one of my bread loaves with it to see if it would lure the pigeons away. It distracted a few of them for a few seconds but didn't leave me any kind of opening to grab the eggs. So I went through my other items to see if I could use any of them with the vent and discovered that I was able to place one of my balloon animals in the vent. With this in place I tried another bread loaf. This time when they tried eating the bread crumbs the balloon popped, scaring them all away and leaving the eggs open for the taking. After bringing the eggs to Sal, I found that they still couldn't let me go since they needed my teeth imprints to access the DOD. I remembered seeing the fil-o-dent in the room I was locked up in so I went back to the garage, dispensed some of it into the mouthpiece, and used it to create an imprint of my teeth. Then I brought my imprints back to Eva and was finally free to move on. From here, Sal brought me through a long underground path to the Petrified Forest and as I made my way into the forest I found Glottis weeping next to his car-bike. He was so distressed that he ended up ripping his own heart out and subsequently passed out. Shortly after, some weird spider-bats came and took the heart back into their lair. I followed after them and found Glottis' heart strung up on a big spider web. I tried cutting it with my scythe but as soon as I did another spider-bat came and repaired the web. Luckily I noticed a pile of bones nearby and quickly discovered that I could put a bone on the web and then use that as leverage with my scythe to launch the heart out of the spider-bat lair. Then I picked the heart up and stuffed it back into Glottis' chest. As soon as I did so, he woke up and I was able to convince him to drive me wherever I needed to go. I drove around for a little while after this and found an area with many different paths that all seem to take me right back to the same spot. I noticed that I was able to pick up a sign that pointed to Rubacava and carry it around so I brought it back into that area hoping it would point to the path I needed to take. This proved pointless however, as It seemed to not always point to the same path when I put it back down. I tried putting it in several different spots and following where it pointed each time but never got anywhere. I even tried going through one of the paths, picking it up, and placing it again hoping it would then change direction and guide me to the next path but still didn't get anywhere. After trying this for awhile, I decided to move on to a different area. From there, I went to the only other area available to me. This area had a big tree with a wheel on it and a switch that turned the wheel on and off. Glottis also ended up finding a wheelbarrow nearby and brought it into the area to try to turn it into a go kart. After talking to Glottis I tried turning the switch off and as soon as I did, he jumped up on the tree to try to re-balance the weights in an effort to make the tree fall down or something. Once he finished I turned it back on but unfortunately, there wasn't enough weight to accomplish our goal. So I tried again and this time I turned the switch back on while Glottis was still up there balancing the weights. Surprisingly, even with Glottis up there swinging around on the tree-wheel, it still didn't seem to be enough weight and I had no choice but to turn it back off to let him down. I repeated this process several times trying various items in various ways and moving the wheelbarrow to different positions each time. I noticed that there was a 'thwump' sound every time I pushed the wheelbarrow over one of the 4 conduits leading to the tree but even with it resting on each conduit I was never able to make anything happen. And this is about where I stopped playing. I have probably spent close to an hour trying to figure out what to do in these two areas at this point. The possibility space is pretty small so I'm hoping the solution reveals itself before too long but at this point I am completely stumped.

I scoured through my video game collection and some boxes to try to find my Pokemon Blue and Yellow games and realized that I lent them to a friend 10 years ago and never got them back. THIS IS WHY I DON'T LEND GAMES TO PEOPLE AND I NEVER TRADE THEM IN AND I KEEP THEM FOREVER BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN A 15 YEAR OLD CARTOON WILL APPEAR ON NETFLIX AND RECAPTURE YOUR IMAGINATION AND MAKE YOU WANT TO RELIVE ALL OF THOSE AWESOME MOMENTS!!! I guess I could just play Pokemon Gold but for me it never quite lived up to the magic of those original 150. Plus, I wanted to start with a Squirtle.

Good thing I have a Charmander around here somewhere...

I agree. I feel like the Pixar-ness was completely absent from this movie and it came across to me as a lackluster Revenge of the Nerds knockoff. On another note, I noticed yesterday that the Pokemon cartoons that I used to watch (and tape) regularly in the late 90's are on Netflix, so I decided to throw it on to see if my daughter would have any interest. We both sat there and watched 8 straight episodes. Now I suddenly feel like I kind of have Pokefever again and I have a strong urge to pick up those games again and watch all the cartoons.

A lot of them are yes. But there are still plenty that don't necessarily deal with something specific to that moment in time. For instance, I've been saying "I thought this was America" since 2008. But it may very well be a geographical/generational thing.

That's why I was careful to mention that it may just be specific to my social circles. The Simpsons didn't really do much for me after the late 90s and most of us stopped watching around that time.

Personally, I feel like South Park has had a bigger cultural influence over the last 20 years (or I guess 18 years) than The Simpsons, but that may just be specific to the social circles I've been in throughout my life. I watched both shows growing up and feel like I've heard far more people quoting South Park and referencing their characters and plot lines than I have for The Simpsons.

Don't worry guys, I always appreciate a good game and I don't think this will be an exception. When I play a game, I prefer to focus on the things it does well and derive my enjoyment from that rather than get caught up on the negative aspects. That's why bad controls usually don't bother me, I can ignore a bad story if the gameplay is good, and I can ignore bad gameplay if the story is good. I just really fucking like video games... ...except Super Adventure Island. That game can go fuck itself and I would pay money to have every single copy launched directly into the sun. (Oh yeah, and I have had that song that plays in the street fair area with the balloon guy stuck in my head for two days now. The atmosphere in that area is excellent.)

This was an excellent podcast, congrats guys! Fuck Nick! The Jerky Boys discussion reminded me of some dumb shit I did as a kid. My dad used to work for a window cleaning business and whenever we stayed with him he would drag us to various jobs where we just had to sit there and wait for him to finish. One day I had a friend with me and we were stuck in the office of the company he worked for bored off our asses. So we found a phone that wasn't being used and we decided to start trying to call random 1-900 numbers to see if we would get lucky and reach an adult hotline. We hit the jackpot when we tried 1-900-FUCKING and the lady on the other end went on and on about how she was watching us through her telescope and then proceeded to say a number of other things that kids our age had no business hearing. We thought it was pretty hilarious and eventually hung up and went on with our lives, thinking nothing of the potential consequences. About a month later, my dad approached us asking if we knew anything about these exorbitant phone bills that had been racked up the day we were there and, being kids, we tried to deny it but failed miserably because we were horrible liars. Needless to say I got in a lot of trouble and I never tried that shit again. Plus, I think we had heard all there was to hear from the telescope lady. As far as the whole Jerky Boys tape being passed around, I had a similar experience with Adam Sandler's "Their All Gonna Laugh At You" tape. Somehow we obtained a copy of that tape when we were like 9 years old and our parents overheard us listening to a song about sticking a shampoo bottle in your ass (I think the song was called "At a medium pace" or something like that). So that tape was promptly destroyed, only to live on in our memories until I managed to purchase it again years later.

Yeah, punching a hole in one of those cards is one of the first things I did. With that in my inventory that puzzle definitely had one of the more logical solutions.

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for my constant usage of stupid descriptions for characters like that. I'm horrible with names so it usually takes me a little while to be able to remember them consistently. I gathered that those demons were some kind of entities who were summoned to that world based on Manny's conversation with the red demon guy that was fixing the machine. But it was said in sort of a joking matter so I wasn't sure if I was supposed to take it seriously.

Ah, I see. Doesn't he have enough of an advantage over me though with all the good clients he gets? Two-faced bastard. I played some more last night and managed to make another good chunk of progress. I was stuck for a bit at first but after re-examining several of the areas I discovered I could fill up my "dead worm" balloon with the foam packing chemicals that were used earlier for that Bruno(?) guy. I carried that around with me for a little while and then eventually discovered that I could shove the balloon into my message tube, forcing the chemical contents to be splattered all over the machine downstairs. It was obvious what I needed to do next so I went straight to the balloon guy to get another balloon, filled it up with the other chemical, and forced that into my message tube causing a big foam buildup that brought down the whole message tube system. I went downstairs to investigate the damage I had caused to the messaging system and found a weird monster dude inside trying to fix the machine. I talked to him for a little bit and then locked the deadbolt on the open door which seemed like a good thing to do, especially considering Manny's comment about that being some kind of symbolic action. After realizing that there was nothing else I could do at this point, I left the room and right afterwards, the monster dude finished fixing the machine and took off without noticing that the door to the machine hadn't closed all the way because of the locked deadbolt. So I re-entered the room, opened the door to the machine, and went inside to try to figure out what I was supposed to do with the messaging tubes. From here it didn't take long for me to figure out that I could use my hole punched card in Domino's message tube to stop his next assignment from going through just long enough for me to read all the details and snag his client before he could get to her. After obtaining this information, I witnessed a lengthy sequence where my big dog friend drove me to the client in my newly modded car and I was able to bring her back to my office to try to sell her a nice travel package. There ended up being some issue with her paperwork and she ended up taking off on her own as soon as I left the room to find out what was going on. At this point, Don had learned about what happened and pulled me into his office to bitch me out in front of Domino before locking me up in a cage while we waited for the police to come question me. Luckily, there was some dude outside of the cage that I was able to talk to and after a brief conversation, he let me out and brought me to some underground area so he could try to recruit me into his resistance group. As soon as we entered this area I stopped playing for the evening. At this point I've managed to solve a couple puzzles and so far I am finding them to be pretty excellent. I'm sure there will be some bad ones to come but I'm pretty happy with that aspect of the game right now. Also, I am finding that the controls are becoming much more manageable as I've played more and they aren't really bothering me much at all any more. I can even get into most elevators on my first try now!

I finally started Grim Fandango After the opening sequence, I went to work familiarizing myself with the controls and the environment. I examined a bunch of stuff, picked up a deck of cards in Manny's office, and talked to the receptionist up front (and punched a hole in one of my cards) before heading into a big garage area. Once in the garage, I made my way to the back where I met a giant talking dog creature. While exploring this area and talking to the dog dude, I learned that I am apparently not allowed to drive in this world and must have a driver take me to the land of the living to sell travel packages to newly deceased people. Unfortunately my boss gave my driver the day off, leaving me no way to fulfill my quota, so I tried to convince the dog dude to drive me to my destination. He was hesitant at first but agreed to do it if I could get my boss to sign off on it. With this new goal in mind, I made my way outside to continue exploring. Once I made my way outside, I walked to the end of the street where there were some tents and a dude making balloon animals with a big Day of the Dead celebration going on in the background (also worth mentioning I found the music and ambient sounds in this area to be quite amazing). I talked to the balloon animal guy and got him to make me several balloon animals before heading over to an adjacent tent to pick up a few bread loaves. From there, I made my way back up the street a little ways and into an alley where there was a makeshift rope hanging down from a window that was several stories up. I climbed up the rope and was able to climb into my boss's office through an open window. I snooped around a little bit and found the solution to my first puzzle when I tried using his computer. Apparently he had it rigged up to automatically give a certain reply whenever the receptionist bothered him with something; so I simply set it to give the "just sign the document for me" reply and headed back down to talk to the receptionist. After making my way back downstairs, I gave the form I needed signed to the receptionist and she signed it per the automatic response I set up. With the paper signed, I went back to my big dog friend and we took off to the land of the living. After arriving at our destination, I was completely taken aback by the way the living world was represented. There was something about this segment that was just creepy, amazing, and thought provoking. I investigated all of the real world objects and people in the area and gathered that my presence there was limited to the instant in time that the dude died (from food poisoning apparently?). My favorite thing about this segment though, was the way I could say some weird and disturbing things to the people and see their faces briefly contort as they seemed to subconsciously comprehend the things I was saying. Finally, after I finished poking around at stuff, I used my scythe to rip open the sack that the dead dude was in (I assume the game is establishing that that is what the grim reaper uses that scythe for) and proceeded to fail miserably at selling him a good travel package. Since he was adamant about wanting the cheapest package, I obliged and stuffed him in a coffin before filling it with some kind of foam so he could be shipped off or something like that. I explored a little bit more after packing up the douchebag guy and was finally able to go into the office that was adjacent to mine (my former office) and talk to the dude in there. He seemed nice enough and let me have a few drinks but despite that, Manny still seemed to have a bit of a grudge against the guy. After I was finished looking around in his office, I went back through the other areas and found that the dog guy wasn't in the garage any more and my boss's window was now closed. I tried using a few items here and there but didn't manage to make any more progress and, after a short while, I stopped playing for the evening. So far my thoughts on the game are very positive overall. You guys weren't joking about the controls though, they are pretty damn terrible. At this point I'm at least able to get them to work well enough to do what I want but I'm still struggling a bit with Manny suddenly veering left or right when I expect him to go straight due to the invisible wall near the edge of each area that seems to automatically divert his trajectory when you touch it. I tried both control methods and I think I'll be sticking with the player relative controls just because I prefer to not have him suddenly change directions when I transition to a new area. After a couple of hours, I found that I was having a much easier time controlling him so I expect my frustrations with the controls to taper off pretty quickly. Aside from that minor annoyance, I am loving this game. The atmosphere is just so unique and amazing and I can't wait to see where this game takes me. And damn that living world segment was so good, I can't stop thinking about it!

Whenever I hear the word "Fandango" I always think of those talking paper bag puppets from movie theaters in the late 90's.

Again, I'm not too worried about sub par controls or a few bad puzzles ruining my enjoyment of this game. Between the discussions on the podcast and the things people have said here, the hype has been pretty high for most of these games and every single one of them still exceeded my expectations. Plus, I've gone back to N64 era games many times and have never been bothered by the more primitive 3d controls or blocky graphics that they typically have.

I briefly loaded it up in ResidualVM last night and it seemed to run just fine so hopefully that is an indicator that the rest of the game will run smoothly. So back to Curse of Monkey Island for a minute. Can anyone confirm that the whole theme park thing and Guybrush being turned into a child explained what was meant by the ending to Monkey Island 2? I'm sure what to think since at the end of that game it shows him there with his parents and his brother and it seems to indicate that the whole Monkey Island 2 series of events was just them playing pretend. Whereas in this game Guybrush is fully aware that he was turned into a child and is still very much embroiled in his adventure. If I had to guess I would say that at the end of the second game, Guybrush is put under some weird spell that makes him think he is just a kid in a theme park with his family. Then, in Curse, LeChuck puts the same spell on him but Guybrush is able to retain enough sanity to know what is going on (hence needing to drink the hangover cure to clear his mind). Or maybe I just shouldn't read into it too much.

Alright, I've got ResidualVM and the game all ready to go. It looks like there is also a patch available that fixes some bug so I'll make sure to grab that too. Does that about cover everything or is there anything else I need before I get started? Also, not sure if there are difficulty modes or if I can/should tweak the default controls so if anyone has any advice it would be much appreciated!

I'm not too worried about the controls. I've played a ton of games with bad controls and have never really been too bothered by them after initially getting accustomed to them. Even Resident Evil worked just fine for me.

I finished The Curse of Monkey Island. My total play time was about 26 hours and the jawbreaker/gold tooth puzzle was the only one I ended up using a hint on. It ended up not taking me too much longer to figure out how to prove to Stan that I was dead. I toiled for a little bit at first but as soon as I ended up going into the room in the hotel with the big wheel of cheese I noticed the death certificate sitting in the file cabinet. So I picked that up, went straight back to Stan so I could get "a lot of money" and then headed back to Skull Island. Now that I finally had my buy in, I was able to join the two pirates in a game of poker. As I suspected, I was able to switch out my weak hand with the Tarot cards and beat both of their hands with my five of a kind. They weren't about to let me off that easily and just as they were about to do horrible pirate things to me, LaFoot opened the door and let in a breeze that caused the lights to blow out. In the ensuing chaos, I grabbed the diamond and made my way back outside to escape back to Blood Island. And, in one of the funniest scenes I've witnessed in a video game, Guybrush ran back up to the top of the cliff and threw LaFoot over the edge before finally departing. Back on Blood Island, I went straight over to Elaine to switch out the rings and found that I couldn't get the cursed ring off her finger. The slippery, greasy lotion seemed like the most obvious thing to use to get the ring off and after I applied some, I was able to pull the cursed ring off and replace it with the non-cursed one. With the curse finally lifted, Elaine returned to normal and punched me square in the face. However, the reunion was short lived as we were immediately captured by a bunch of LeChuck's minions. After being captured, we were brought to Monkey Island and LeChuck told me all about his plans surrounding his theme park. Lots of story threads were explained and I gathered that his whole theme park scheme also somewhat explained the end of Monkey Island 2. After we talked for awhile, he took off with Elaine and transformed me into a kid, at which point I regained control and exited the roller coaster cart to head into the next area. I entered the next area to find 3 different carnival booths: a pie cannon booth manned by a dude in a rat costume, a guessing game booth manned by Dinghy Dog, and a snow cone booth manned by a gross dude. The first part was pretty easy as I just had to get Dinghy Dog to incorrectly guess my age. After making his guess, I showed him some proof of my true age and was able to get an anchor as a prize (I wanted Murray but I guess Guybrush didn't). As soon as I got the anchor, I tried using it with each of my items and found that I could combine it with my shaving cream pie. Then I did the next most obvious thing and added it to the stack of pies at the pie cannon booth. After some goading, I convinced the rat dude to fire the pie out of the cannon which ended up killing, or at least severely injuring the poor clown who was sticking his head through the display. With him gone, I took his place and antagonized the rat guy a little bit more until he fired a lemon meringue pie at me which I was then able to add to my inventory. Next, I went over to the snow cone guy and ordered a plain snowcone. I quickly discovered that I could combine the snowcone with the meringue to make a meringue snowcone but nothing seemed to happen when I ate it and I was unable to walk more than a couple steps without it melting. So I looked around some more and after a few minutes I noticed a pepper grinder sitting on the snowcone cart that I was able to pick up. After repeating the snowcone sequence again I found that I was also able to add the pepper to the snowcone in addition to the meringue but still had the same results when I ate it. So I toiled again for a few minutes and after talking to the rat guy a little bit more and hearing him tell me I should hit Dinghy Dog, I decided I should probably try to beat the shit out of him to see if anything would happen. After about half a dozen punches (which he responded differently to each time, indicating to me that I should keep hitting him), he got fed up and "bit" me. I was able to grab some of his fur as he did this and right after doing so I realized what the whole purpose of the snowcone thing was. With this last item, I was finally able to make my "hangover cure" snowcone and transform Guybrush back into an adult. Now that Guybrush was back to normal, I headed onto the roller coaster and the final segment of the game. This part ended up being pretty straightforward and I was able to grab a rope in one area and a barrel of rum in another area. Then, I struggled for a little bit on the lantern in one of the other areas but was finally able to get the flask of oil from it after I discovered that I needed to blow out the flame. Also, as I was going through this process and running from LeChuck, I discovered that I could use the pepper to make him sneeze which I figured would somehow come into play with the barrel of rum, rope, and oil flask. Once I had all of these pieces, I was able to coat the rope in oil and put it in the barrel as a fuse to make some kind of makeshift bomb. I tried to throw the bomb directly at LeChuck and when I saw that wasn't an option, I recalled a big frozen animatronic ape in one of the areas who had an interactable arm. So I went back over there, put the bomb under his arm, and used the pepper to make LeChuck sneeze fire onto the fuse. Thanks to my (Guybrush's) clever thinking, the place exploded, LeChuck was defeated, and Guybrush and Elaine lived happily ever after. I can't really think of anything this game did wrong. It was nearly perfect in almost every way. The puzzles were hands down the best puzzles in any of the games I have played so far, the voice acting was impeccable, the story was incredibly clever, and the game was funny as hell. It's weird to think that I was slightly apprehensive at first because this game ended up hitting all the perfect notes for me. I'll stop short of saying it is my favorite LucasArts game so far just because Monkey Island 1 was such a revelatory moment for me (being my introduction to adventure games and having so many laugh out loud moments) but goddamn this game was a great experience.

Behold, my true self.

Sometimes I wonder why the fuck I chose Urkel as my avatar.

May he live forever on these forums.