Zeusthecat

I'm pretty sure Twig has some Valium.

I started The Dig So far I am finding this game really amazing, although I'm not much more than an hour in so I don't have much to go off of. The setting and music are outstanding and I really like the premise of the story. And, as I've come to expect, the voice acting is once again stellar. Considering I came into this game with lower expectations, it is really IGN.com'ing me so far. And it's also worth mentioning that I really like the UI, although I kind of miss all the verb commands. What I've played so far has been pretty straightforward stuff. I spent a lot of time talking to each character and getting familiar with the UI and my inventory before getting started on my mission. After a little bit, I sent The Pig to the Asteroid, picked up all the tools from said Pig, and placed the nuclear charges on the asteroid (after using my zero-g digger in one spot and my shovel in the other spot). Then we went back to the shuttle and exploded the nukes which altered the course of the asteroid as planned. After the explosions, we went back to the asteroid and discovered a metal plate and some projections in a tunnel just under the surface. I pushed the metal plate down, revealing a shaft, and then proceeded to dig out the remaining plates using the zero-g digger before pushing them in as well. After the plates had been pushed, we then went down one of the tunnels and found ourselves in a large room with a pedestal in the middle. The plates I had pushed down were scattered around the pedestal so I picked them up and placed them on the pedestal in the proper configuration which resulted in us getting blasted off at warp speed. It turns out that asteroid was a motherfucking spaceship! After a short trip, we found ourselves on the surface of an alien planet. Luckily, the air was breathable so we were able to take our spacesuits off. After a brief power struggle between captain Low and Brink we headed off to see what we could find. The first place we went to was an area with an old, derelict spaceship. We went inside and I was able to pick up some weird alien disc thing from a chest as Brink looked around. Then I attempted to pull down a loose wire and in the process set off some alien projection. The projection vanished after a few seconds and left behind a strange alien rod. So I picked up the rod and the wire I had pulled down and then stopped playing. This game has definitely started on a high note for me. Can't wait to play some more and find out what happens next.

I think this thread has officially been Waluigi'd.

Thanks! And no worries, I'll eventually have another secret path to the city. And I have a hidden tree farm if you'd like to use it (just make sure to always replant what you cut down). Just go into my cabin, flip the the secret switch, and see if you can figure out how to find the tree farm.

I also managed to kill one of the zombie pigmen that have been terrorizing us. I went to enchant something and one of them had come through the portal so I was able to easily take him out.

I see there's been quite a bit of deforestation on the outside of the south wall which exposes my cabin that was hidden in the forest. I'm going to go through and replant the trees again if nobody objects.

The actual playable size of a Minecraft world on PC is 30,000,000 blocks in each direction from the starting point. That is 30,000 km. I think I remember reading somewhere that if you tried to run from the starting point to the edge of the playable area, it would take over 800 hours of continuous running. Also, your computer would probably explode long before you could ever manage to uncover the entirety of a Minecraft map. Jake, you should totally get back into Minecraft. So much has changed since you last played. Edit: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Far_Lands

So what's the plan for when new patches come out that introduce new biomes or naturally spawning blocks (like the next patch which will introduce granite)? Is the server reset at that point so it is easy to obtain new items and find new biomes or will the server continue on and we would just have to travel to unexplored places to find that stuff? I personally strongly prefer the latter as I would hate to lose progress and wouldn't mind being encouraged to travel to distant lands. Edit: I guess it hasn't been confirmed whether or not granite will spawn naturally so that might be a poor example.

Oh yeah, Full Throttle. It is game.

Did this whole shitstorm surrounding PA stem entirely from comments that have been made from that Mike dude or is there some systemic issue within PA that is at the root of all of this? I am way out of the loop on the history of this whole thing and I don't know a whole lot about Penny Arcade to begin with.

Wow, thanks for that link! That looks like some excellent reading material in addition to the comics.

Nice! That's some pretty good stuff. Are they all available online?

Yeah. I think I recall SecretAsianMan saying he enjoyed this game a while back but I think that's pretty much the only mention of this game that I've seen. From what you're saying it sounds like this one is on the lower end of the spectrum?

My car contains the souls of at least 13 dolphins.

I recently got a new 2013 Toyota Prius (now I'm officially full hippy) and I've been really impressed by the technology built into the car. The most surprising thing was when I got a text message and I was able to tell the car to read it to me which it did flawlessly and in a sweet robot voice. So this weekend we were driving to Trader Joe's and I wanted to show this feature to my wife. So I told her to send me a text message so my robot car could read it to us and she forwarded a recent message from my mom which is shown below. I'm not sure if this will provide any entertainment without the context of the situation but hearing a robot read this to us was one of the most hilarious things ever. And note that this was in response to a one line text message from my wife.

Thanks for the recommend! Sounds like my kind of game.

Not just one bunny, ALL of my bunnies. They served their purpose and I figured I should send them off the proper way. I also like that when I "used" the box of bunnies on the truck fan (I still had a box of them and a whole bunch of individual bunnies) Ben threw each one in individually and I just had to sit there and watch as he slowly cleaned out the whole box. I still really enjoy dumb, goofy humor, as I've made painfully obvious on these forums. So for me the LucasArts games are hitting all the right notes with most of them being dumb and goofy while also providing very challenging puzzles and interesting stories. And yeah there are some bad jokes but even those don't get to me because I just admire what they were trying to do and how often they got it right. Thinking back on the LucasArts games I've played so far, Secret of Monkey Island really stands out as having the absolute best delivery of humor. None of the other games quite hit the comedic timing and sarcastic delivery of lines that I witnessed in that game. Some of the funny scenes that really hit perfectly and stuck with me from that game are the interactions with the shopkeeper, the part where the mast breaks off of the ship right after the salesman finishes telling you how amazing the ship is, and the whole segment where you are on your ship and the crew refuses to help because they'd rather just sail around the Caribbean. I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make with any of this, just reflecting on how awesome that game was.

I crashed into that gorge many times as I was going through the trial and error of those last couple puzzles. I think I tried every single option for each menu puzzle and for some weird reason the last option I tried was the correct one for both. So I "died" a lot during this sequence. As for the escape, I did ride the bike out of the exploding plane the first time. I just happened to walk to the left as soon as I had control, saw the bike, got on it, and made my glorious escape. For some reason, as tough as it was, the gas tower puzzle didn't really bother me too much in retrospect. It took me quite awhile to find that little hiding spot but once I had solved it it seemed reasonably fair.

Full Throttle completed! My total play time was about 9 hours and I did not use any hints except for the couple posts here encouraging me to keep kicking that wall (which I would have probably given up on at some point if it weren't for those posts). After finding the secret door and making my way into the factory, I went down the hall and found two locked doors and another room with a crazy old lady that called security every time I entered the room. Since there was nothing I could really do I went back to the main office area and noticed the safe on the floor. I had previously written down all of the codes from the bike parts so I quickly got the safe open by using the only code that had 6 numbers with no letters or dashes. After I retrieved the key card and film reel from the safe, I went back into the hallway and unlocked the door that had the card reader. Inside that room I found a movie projector with two levers and another locked door. It was at this point that I hit another wall and was stuck for about 45 minutes. I tried over and over to shut down the projector and sneak into the next room thinking the purpose of this puzzle was to distract the old lady so I could access the room she was in. On the bright side, I got to see a lot of funny dialog with the security guard she kept sending after me and some more good dialog between her and Ripburger each time I shut the projector off. After much toiling I eventually happened to try using one of the levers twice in a row and saw that the lever had a third position I could put it in. That was the big breakthrough I needed and from there I quickly found the necessary position for each lever to cause the film to get burned up. This finally distracted the old lady long enough for me to go into the next room, project the evidence onto the screen behind Ripburger, and play Corley's will. Then Ripburger ran off, Mo assumed leadership of the company, and Ben and Mo rode off into the sunset. As Ben and Mo were riding off into the sunset I expected to see the credits roll but instead I saw Ripburger ride up and smash into them, sticking them both to the grill of his tank vehicle. Then I was presented with a few fast paced, mini puzzles as we rocketed down the road. First, I had to open the grill to expose the fan. Then after finding that none of my items could be used to stop the fan, I discovered that I could grab Ripburger's cane when he reached out to close the other compartment after I opened it. Once I had his cane I was able to stop the fan, climb through the engine to the back of the cab, and then use the crowbar to loosen the nut on one of the fuel lines before ripping it out. Then somewhere in the midst of this chaos some of the Vultures driving a wingless plane zoomed up behind us and forced the tank into cargo bay of the plane. At this point we were heading right for the gorge I had jumped earlier and there was limited time to stop the plane. So i went up to the controls and after much trial and error eventually found that I needed to raise the landing gear to stop the plane. After doing this, Ben jumped down to stop Ripburger from shooting Mo and in the midst of this, the plane came to a screeching stop at the edge of the gorge. This caused the tank that Ben and Ripburger were fighting on to launch back out of the cargo bay and left it dangling over the gorge. Ripburger was left hanging on the edge of the gun turret and shot at me each time I tried to climb back down to safety. Unfortunately I couldn't reach him so I was forced to climb into the cab of the truck and go through another trial and error sequence with the truck's controls before finally finding that I needed to turn off the gun controls to send Ripburger straight to hell. Then I made my way back to the cargo bay of the plane and rode my bike out of the plane is it exploded around me. Then the explosion reflected in Ben's sunglasses as he rode away in slow motion saying "burn baby burn" (turns out Ben was really David Caruso in disguise). So this was a really good game. The voice acting and story telling were probably the best I've experienced so far. The whole "gritty motorcycle gang heavy metal badass" setting isn't something that really appeals to me but this game did it so goddamn well that I found myself completely absorbed by the story. It was also a nice change of pace to play a game with a little bit more of a serious setting although I think I generally prefer the goofier adventure games. As far as the puzzles go, these were definitely some of the toughest yet. Most of them seemed pretty fair despite their difficulty and generally left me feeling smart and satisfied after solving them. I'd say the main exceptions to this were that stupid fucking wall kicking puzzle (I want that hour and a half of my life back) and the two trial and error menu puzzles at the end. For me, the most difficult puzzles aside from the wall kicking one were the junkyard puzzle and the gas tower alarm puzzle near the beginning. If I hadn't played 9 LucasArts games back-to-back before this one I wouldn't have stood a fucking chance with a lot of these puzzles as they really seemed geared towards people that are very familiar with their previous puzzle tactics. Even then I'm surprised at how many unexpected things they threw at me.

My god I found it! After another half an hour of kicking the wall I found a spot that made a very faint clicking noise when I kicked it. So I kicked again after the meters stopped and the hatch door opened. That was a lot of wall kicking. Tim Schafer has a sick sense of humor.

God, if I have to translate the meter ticks into Morse code and then map that to one of the codes from the bike then I quit video games.

Well at least there is only a small, finite amount of items and areas that I have access to so hopefully I can brute force it. Although i'm kind of concerned about how the codes on the bike parts come into play. If they represent some kind of pattern for some thing then shit's about to get real (shitty). Now that I'm hearing that this is a notoriously bad puzzle I am pretty damned determined to solve it without hints. We'll see how that goes.

I think that might be Scipio's work.

I got a little bit further last night. After exploring some more I discovered the Vulture's hideout on the other side of a big ass minefield. I ended up using my rabbit on the minefield and it got blown up, leaving only it's battery behind. I was then able to use the battery with the RC car back at the souvenir stand and found that I could drive the RC car under the rotating door thing in the next area to distract the shopkeeper. Once he was distracted I was able to steal an entire box of rabbits which I immediately brought out to the minefield, hoping that they would clear a path through the minefield for me. Unfortunately, they all went in random directions and didn't make it far enough in for me to get through so I went back to the shop and grabbed another box of rabbits to try again. As I was attempting this again I happened to try picking up one of the rabbits and after I saw that I could do so, I continued picking them up until I had them all and then went and grabbed another box. Before long I reached the maximum allowable amount of bunnies in my inventory and started letting them loose one by one into the minefield. As the first one exploded I walked to the end of the trail it blazed and set off the next one. Then I just kept repeating the same sequence, walking to the end of the trail each time and letting another rabbit loose, until I made my way to the Vulture's hideout. It turns out that Mo wasn't very happy to see me and the Vultures promptly tied me to some bikes so they could slowly rip my limbs off. After going through a few dialog options, however, I was able to convince Mo that I didn't kill her father and informed her of the pictures that had been taken of the murder. She then developed the pictures to see the proof and a plan was devised to fake our own deaths and sneak into the shareholder's meeting to expose Ripburger. This put me behind the wheel of a car in a demolition derby and, after a little bit of figuring out what I was supposed to do, I was able to get past the henchmen's car by taking a ramp and landing on their roof. Then I collided with Mo's car and burst into flames as planned. Now that I was on fire, I ran around the stadium like a madman and was able to draw the henchmen into a chunk of fire which exploded them. Then everyone fled the stadium as the fire started to spread and I was able to escape and meet up with Mo again. It was around this point that I got stuck again. She told me about the secret entrance to the factory and mentioned how she was looking for a key hidden somewhere in the bike she had taken apart. So after talking to her I inspected the bike parts and found three different things that I could open, each revealing a different code. I also went back through all the Corley factory areas and spent a shitload of time kicking that stupid wall in the area with the meters but never got any further. I thought I remembered her saying something about needing to kick the wall in the right spot when the meters were all showing black or something like that but I went up and down the wall kicking each spot multiple times with the meter running and while it was stopped and never got anywhere. I'm pretty sure I'll need one of the codes I found to open something in the factory once I get in so right now it seems like the only way forward is through that fucking wall. So there will be a lot of wall kicking in my future and I suppose I'll go back through each area another couple times as I get more desperate.

So I finally got the last two items that I needed. As I suspected, I had previously missed a secret entrance to the cave fish's hideout while using the goggles. This time around I spotted it fairly quickly and was able to get the ramp a little ways into the cave. After taking off with the ramp, however, a bunch of cave fish tried to chase after me and it took me a few attempts to discover that I needed to pick up the ramp in the final area in order to use it to chip off the bumps in the road that the cave fish used to navigate. That caused them to crash and enabled me to escape with the ramp. Then after a few more rounds of biker fighting, I discovered that I could yank the dude with the booster off of his bike as he took off. Once I did this I was able to appropriate his booster and finally used all of my items to jump the gorge in epic fashion. After driving a little further, I came to the Corley motors factory. I explored a little bit and found a dude running a souvenir shop. I tried out the RC car and ended up using up all the batteries so I assume I'll need to somehow find a way to recharge or replace them for some unforeseen reason. I also discovered that I could steal the little rabbit toy (I think that's what it was but my memory is already hazy) after pointing at some other items to distract the shopkeeper. And that's about as far as I got last night. I went through each area after obtaining the rabbit and so far I haven't figured out what I need to do next. I don't really have any ideas or plans for what I should do next but I also haven't spent more than 10 minutes in this area so I'll need to just thoroughly explore each area and hopefully the path will reveal itself.