Zeusthecat

I guess even conforming to the golden ratio isn't enough to make Sonic attractive.

I think your point is well taken. I would like to think there is a way to praise a piece of work without necessarily praising the author but I'm not sure that is truly possible. By doing so you are inherently praising the author that created it. But at the same time I agree with you that it is not practical to just automatically start disliking things whenever you find out they were created by a monster. I think this is just one of those super shitty things about life that there is no avoiding.

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.

Here's a couple more of my favorites. Major nostalgia listening to these:

Is he on drugs? I've known some people in the past that started exhibiting this kind of behavior and in almost every case I came to find out they had gotten hooked on meth or coke.

This is one of my favorites:

Yeah, thanks Obama.

Just to add my two cents, this pretty much sums up why I personally lost interest in pursuing this career path. For most of my life my dream was to one day have a career making video games. But as I've gotten older and become more aware of how the video game industry works, I've decided that it just isn't for me. Between all of the stories I've heard of crazy long hours worked during crunch time and video game studios starting up and shutting down left and right, I realized that the chance of me having a stable career with a good work-life balance would be pretty slim. Even if my perception is all wrong and these perceived negatives aren't really accurate, I'm still not sure it would be the right path for me due to the last point you made in your post. I'm worried that it would destroy the enjoyment I get out of my favorite hobby. On a related note, about a year and a half ago, I downloaded Visual Studio and Allegro and started trying to make my own game. It was going great for a few weeks until I realized that I'd rather be playing games than making them. Since then I've come to the conclusion that if my dreams came true and I could magically make money doing something video game related, it would fall more along the lines of writing about my experiences with video games. Considering I don't quite have the necessary writing skills to pursue that kind of thing and I am quite happy with my current job, that is not really anything I plan to pursue and I have just accepted that I will probably be happiest playing and enjoying games without having any commitments tied to it.

Then wouldn't we have a black hole just constantly shitting all over us?

Whenever I think of something I truly cherish, this is what comes to mind:

Fixed.

I finally achieved 100% completion in Grand Theft Auto 5. I loved just about everything about this game. The story is definitely the weakest part and the first 10 hours are pretty slow but beyond that everything is golden. The high level of polish on every little diversion in the game combined with all of the systemic elements at play made for a very entertaining experience. I also just started GTA Online and so far it is pretty damn fun too. When this comes out on PC I might just purchase it again and go through everything a second time.

Weed

I finally achieved 100% completion on single player and started GTA Online last night. I'm also on PSN and would love to have some good time with fellow thumbs. My PSN ID is xXZeusthecatXx And weirdly, when I played last night I got put into a session with two other Idle Thumbs crew members. I didn't recognize the handles but it's good to see there are some other Idle Thumber's still playing this.

If schedules work out I would totally go for this. A group building project would definitely be a cool thing. And I agree with Twig. A reboot would probably kill my interest.

So far I'm kind of surprised at the quality of the puzzles. I would have expected a mode with extra puzzles to just have a bunch of half-baked filler puzzles but so far most of them don't seem too unfair or unreasonable.

I'm still logging on a few times a week.

I played some more over the last couple days and got a bit further. Shortly after resuming play, I made my way back to the restaurant to double check everything there and see if there was anything I missed. It appeared that I had found all of the items I could pick up in that area so I decided to go back through my inventory and make absolute sure there was no potential item combination I was missing. As I was going through my items I happened to try using the maggots on the nasty chicken and was disgusted to see them gobble up the whole thing and run back into the biscuit barrel. This ended up being exactly what I was missing and upon looking at what remained of the nasty chicken, I found the Brimstone Beach Club membership card nestled inside. After picking the card up I headed straight over to the dickhead cabana boy. After showing him the card, I picked up a towel from the towel bin and headed to the beach. Unfortunately the sand was too hot so I had to figure out a way to get across without burning my feet. Luckily it didn't take me too long to figure out that I could grab multiple towels, dip them into the ice bucket back at the entrance, and lay them down on the sand to make a path. Once I finally got across I talked to the creepy guy at the end who kept calling me 'babe'. After talking to him, I learned that he had the map I needed tattooed onto his back and that I would need to wait for him to roll over to get a look at it. Once our conversation was over I was able to pick up the mug resting on his belly and from there I went to the most logical place I could think of: Gary Coleman's lemonade stand. Once I got to Gary Coleman's lemonade stand, I immediately switched out the bottomless mug with the mug I had picked up at the beach. I then asked for a glass of lemonade and was finally able to quench my thirst. Unfortunately, this put Gary Coleman out of business and he ran off, leaving his lemonade pitcher and the mug I had switched out. I then picked up the lemonade pitcher (apparently the mug was useless now since Guybrush didn't want it) and, since the dye vat was right next to me, I tried using the pitcher with the vat and was able to fill the pitcher up with dye. Once I saw that that was what the pitcher was for, I had a sneaking suspicion that I would need to somehow use the dye on the creepy 'babe' guy to trick him into thinking he had a tan or a sunburn so he would roll over to tan his back. So I headed back over to the beach to see what I could do. At this point, getting the 'babe' guy to roll over ended up being pretty simple. I just put the bottomless mug I had picked up from Gary Coleman onto his stomach and poured some red dye into it which then leaked all over the guy's chest. As expected, he was convinced that he was starting to burn and flipped over. Now I could finally look at the map, but upon further inspection I realized that I didn't have any way to copy it. So I spent some more time going through some of the various spaces before eventually discovering that I could snap a wet towel at the cabana boy to scare him away. With him finally gone, I was able to pick up the oil that was sitting next to the fryer. From there I headed straight back to the 'babe' guy to try to use the oil on his back map, thinking that it would somehow enable me to transfer the map. Thankfully, it ended up working, although not quite as I had expected. It turned out that using the oil on his back caused him to get an instant 2nd degree burn which enabled me to get the map by peeling it off his gross back. And this is about as far as I got. I've played at least another hour since getting the skin map and am once again stuck. I strongly suspect I will need to get the gold tooth from Captain Blondebeard and that I will need to use that to convince the third barber to join me. To do that, it looks like I will need to find something crunchy for him to eat since that is what he's craving (and now that I have access to the fryer I bet I will need to fry something in there to make it crunchy). Then either that will knock his tooth out or I will need to give him gum afterwards and the tooth will get pulled out by the gum. To add another interesting layer, I found that I can dip the pie pan in the mud outside the restaurant to pan for gold, but each attempt comes up dry. I'm wondering if Blondebeard's tooth will somehow end up going down the drain pipe and into the mud and I will need to "pan for gold" to get it out. Also, I found a secret button in the beach area with all the feral chickens. It makes one of the fort cannons fire but so far it doesn't seem like it really does anything useful.

I picture a 9 foot tall necromancer built like a freight train.

I don't think anyone here is saying Nintendo is a failure as a hardware company but I also wouldn't go so far as to say that they are fantastically successful on that front either. I'm not trying to pass down my opinion as some infallible truth, it's just where my mind is at right now. It seems like I struck some kind of nerve with you and I'm sorry if what I'm saying offends you. Getting back to the point, I think Nintendo could definitely still be successful if they ditched their non-handheld hardware and stuck to just making games. It would be interesting to see how much money a company like Sony might pay to get exclusive rights to Nintendo franchises. I'd say it is pretty much a given that Nintendo fans (i.e. those that typically purchase Nintendo consoles) would purchase whatever system Nintendo's games might end up on and in addition, Nintendo would probably see increased sales from people buying their games who might not have otherwise. I guess the real question is, would the money they get for licensing their games plus the additional software sales from people who wouldn't normally buy Nintendo games be greater than the profits they typically make on their own hardware.

You're missing the point. I'm saying it is their games that sell their hardware and as far as I can tell nothing you've said shows otherwise. The 3DS is only selling so well now because Nintendo put out a ton of great games on it and it is a justifiable purchase (which it wasn't for a while and sold terribly).

Alright, sure. I'll concede that the handheld side is one area where their innovative hardware has given them a leg up in the past. Although I would say that isn't the case any more considering the DS and 3DS only started selling well once they had built up a good catalog of games. But on the console side I still don't buy it. I really don't think Nintendo's innovation in hardware is what sold more Super Nintendo's than Sega Genesis's. It was their catalog of awesome games. That is what always sold their consoles, up until the Wii at least. I am just very skeptical of them continuing to find success by putting out consoles running on old specs, adding some peripheral in the hopes that it will be the next fad, and still charging over $300 for it when competitor's hardware is many times more powerful, isn't much more expensive, and has the horsepower to support games being made by people other than Nintendo. If they do find success doing that it will be because of their games, not their hardware.

I'm definitely starting to question whether it makes sense for Nintendo to continue making hardware at this point or if they should just focus on making games. The main argument against the notion that they should stop bothering with hardware seems to be that they tailor their games to take advantage of the unique things their hardware has to offer. The argument seems to imply that their hardware is just as important to their games as their games are to their hardware. I'm starting to question whether this is actually true. Before the Wii came out, I would argue that outside of putting a joystick on a controller and introducing the rumble pack, most of their innovations were on the software side of things. It seems to me that the video games they created have always been the primary thing that drew people to Nintendo and their hardware didn't really do anything that much differently than their competitors. Then, around the time the DS and Wii came out, the focus seemed to shift more to implementing various gimmicks and peripheral devices to change the way games were played while the games themselves started to stagnate (with a few exceptions obviously). Since they couldn't really compete graphically I think that made sense at the time but I feel like we've reached a point now where the mentality of "let's change the way we play games" has subsided and people generally just want to use a controller to play a game on a screen like we've been doing for decades. I imagine what people want most is to see a game do something new, not do something new to play a game. The motion controls and second screens are nice but I think it is clear that none of those extraneous things really amounted to anything significant. So I don't really see any compelling reason why they can't offer the same experience or better on a competitor's hardware. I can't think of any Nintendo games that I've played in recent memory that would somehow be lacking if they were made for Xbox or Playstation. Shaking a remote in Mario Galaxy doesn't make it any funner than pressing a button, swinging a remote in Zelda doesn't make it any funner than pressing a button, and having information on a second screen can still be done on competitor's consoles. I'm sure there is a good argument for why it is important that Nintendo keeps making hardware but I don't think I've seen one compelling enough to convince me that they can really only accomplish the things they want on their own hardware.

Wow, that was a fascinating exchange. I think it's especially funny that he thinks you should "Try to improve the world" and implies that you could do that by including enough detail to be truly objective. This is an amazing joke inside of a joke. That's like someone being offended over someone making a joke site about unicorns because they didn't include enough factual information about unicorns.

Yeah, good job to everyone involved. This is definitely one of the best things the internet has produced.