Zeusthecat

I played some more last night and made a couple more key discoveries. First, I found that I could play the whack a mole game at the carnival which resulted in me winning a flashlight. The flashlight didn't have a bulb so I used my blacklight bulb on it to get it working. I figured the only place dark enough to necessitate a flashlight was the Tunnel of Love so I went back through there and discovered a few things hidden in the darker areas including an electrical panel. After a few more trips through the tunnel I discovered that I could use Max to short the panel which stopped the ride and enabled us to get off and walk around. I then got the door in the back to open after the executioner statue guy cut off the other statue's head. In the back room I found a weird greenish guy that looked just like Roger from the show "Doug". I talked to him and was able to give him the box of chocolates I had been hanging on to in exchange for information on Trixie and Bigfoot as well as the key to Trixie's trailer. This is the only progress I was able to make because I was stuck for awhile until I discovered that I could play the whack a mole game to win the flashlight. Hopefully I find something useful in Trixie's trailer because aside from that I'm not sure what I can do next. Also, is there any real purpose to playing that driving game on the main map? After winning the flashlight from the carnival game I'm not sure if there are other items that I can only obtain through winning other mini-games and I'd rather not waste time trying to beat that driving game if I don't get anything for it.

My daughter brought this home from preschool the other day. That is the teacher's handwriting. I guess it's the effort that counts.

Hey, I'm intoxicated! Unfortunately I have nothing interesting to share. Spongebob is on right now and that's a weird fucking show.

I made a bit more progress the other day. I went to the giant ball of string from where I left off previously and after taking the elevator up to the top, I discovered that I could pull the elevator's loose wires out and use them on the sightseeing binocular thingies. However, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do from here. I tried looking through the binoculars and moved them to various positions but it didn't seem to do anything. Sam said something worth remembering when I first hooked the wires up to the binoculars but now I can't remember what it was so I am just assuming it will rotate the elevator or something like that so I can access the room on the opposite side of where I went up in the elevator. Either way I'm stuck because moving the binoculars doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe I need a quarter to power the binoculars. Before leaving I also managed to get a bent wrench from the dude in the restaurant at the top of the string ball. After exploring the area with the giant ball of string I went back to the fish place and found that I could use the bent wrench on the giant fish in the water. When I jumped inside after using the wrench and asked Max to join me the fish fell off the post and I was able to trick the fisherman into thinking I was a giant fish. He then fished me into the net and drowned in the process (I guess?). Then the helicopter picked me up and carried me to the area that was previously inaccessible at the giant ball of string. The fish cook's door in this area was locked and I eventually discovered that I could use Max on the ball of string to help us get back down and obtain a big piece of the string. And that's about the extent of my progress. So I've explored every area open to me so far and need to go back through to figure out what I am missing. The tunnel of love is the most obvious place to start as well as the binoculars rigged up to the elevator wires and the ice cream guy at the gas stations. Also, I'm slightly intoxicated right now so I'm probably forgetting other stuff.

Fair point. But it is my job as a nerd baby to moan and complain about this kind of stuff. Also, I wouldn't worry about having more than 512 items in a playlist anyways since you are limited by their Unlimited music service (see what I did there?); that is, assuming they don't change course.

I guess I just don't get why they couldn't have gone with at least 1TB to begin with. It would have only been marginally more expensive than the 500GB they went with. I would rather not have to drop another $70 on top of the initial price of the console. Basically, I'm just a baby complaining.

Happy birthday Tegan!

I remember a few months back we were discussing the size of the game installs on the next gen systems and it was speculated that they wouldn't need to be nearly as big as what is contained on the disc since data is duplicated on the disc to reduce seek times or something like that. Well, it looks like the game installs are still going to be pretty fucking huge. 49 GB for COD Ghosts 45 GB for Killzone 37 GB for Knack Suddenly a 500GB hard drive seems very inadequate.

I punched a hole in my wall once when I got mad playing Worms 2. I also broke no less than 2 Gamecube controllers playing Smash Bros. Now I just handle this kind of stuff like a real man, with quiet squeals of frustration and exaggerated hand gestures. Also loudly whispering variations of "Come on!!", "Come the fuck on!", "Fucking come on!", and "Goddamn son of a bitch!". Edit: I also once started crying out of frustration while playing NBA Jam on my Game Gear during a family trip.

Shawshank Redemption. Gain favor with the guards and prisoners, build a relationship with the warden, build a library, help prisoners get their diplomas, and fight off Boggs' gang all while slowly planning and executing your escape. The pacing would be something like Harvest Moon and would slowly play out over 20 years. And Morgan Freeman would obviously narrate the whole thing. Also, I have no idea how any of this could make for compelling gameplay but I bet it could be done.

Canada has always sounded like a great place to live. If I were to ever find a job opportunity there I would totally take it. Thanks. It was always my understanding that doctors do get kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies especially considering all of the pamphlets and advertisements you see for various drugs when you go to the doctor's office. And that is the only explanation I can think of for why every pediatrician we've seen seems to push formula over breastfeeding.

Well done Tegan. I don't know if I want to know how long it took you to parse all those letters out. One other interesting thing about the alphabet is that everyone speeds up "LMNOP" when they recite it. It's amazing how deeply ingrained that nursery rhyme is.

$65 per month for the premium and then I put $85 per month into my HSA to get the maximum match from the company I work for. It can be a great plan and is super cheap if you don't actually use it for anything besides preventitive care.

Best optical illusion ever.

Random aside: I still read this thread as "The Business Side of Video (Space) Games". It's permanently been burned into my brain Henroid, change it back!!!

That sucks, I prefer to think my plan is just "less shitty". To think that one of these HDHP's is better than another is just depressing. I hope your company at least picks up the premium costs so you can just focus on putting your money into your HSA. For companies that are self insured (like the company I work for), switching to these kinds of plans are like a fucking goldmine. Especially if the workforce is young and healthy.

It all gets much more complicated when you have multiple people under the same plan. So my wife hits the $2400 deductible then the insurance kicks in to cover 90% of the costs after that up to the $5000 out of pocket max for her. However, if charges are incurred under anyone but my wife at this point, none of it is covered until we fork over another $1600 ($4000 family deductible = $2400 individual deductible + $1600 for other individuals). But where it gets super confusing is when my wife is getting bills where the insurance covered 90% after the $2400 but then we get bills where the insurance didn't cover anything for my son until the $4000 was met. Then I guess they are both covered 90% until I have paid $10000 (or she is covered 100% after her bills reach $5000 and he is covered 90%) at which point everything is 100% covered. But due to crazy high medical costs, 90% coverage still leaves us with huge bills and the whole thing resets in January for us to pay even more. The HSA is nice and the company I work for gives decent contributions to it. Unfortunately there is a federal limit of around $6000 per year you can contribute to these plans for the size of family we have so even if I dumped all my money into it I would be limited by this cap and still have to fork over an extra $4000 of my taxed income to cover the difference. But really, I'll just be making monthly payments for years to come so hopefully over the next few years we have $0 in medical costs so I can use the contributions each year to continue paying off these bills. Fuck this shit.

What was that a reference to? I had assumed it was maybe the Ernest movies but I think it went right over my head.

And then they eat all of the food in the pantry only to have more magically re-appear for the next meal.

Bioshock Infinite taught me to search dead people's bodies and eat whatever food I find on them. Because it's healthy.

I've been randomly thinking about the alphabet a lot lately. Specifically the first half versus the second half. I wonder why all the reject letters got stuck on the second half while the first half has all the awesome letters. It's like N, O, R, S, and T do all the heavy lifting while all the other letters just sit there, barely contributing. Meanwhile, the first half only has J and K as somewhat weak letters and a bunch of rockstar letters that get used all the time. Not only are they used more in words but musical notes are named after them, vitamins are named after them, and they are usually the only letters that show up if someone uses a lettered list over a numbered one. Despite all of this I am a big fan of the second half of the alphabet. I always root for the underdog.

For the record, I quite enjoy hearing about other people's adventure game exploits in this thread even if it's not a LucasArts game. I find it interesting to hear about different design decisions made in some of these other games since I have only been exposed to some of the best ones. It makes me appreciate the great design in these games even more. I also finally made a little bit more progress last night in Sam and Max. I had left off at the fair and had seemingly exhausted all possibilities at that point so I decided to move on. First, I went to each of the gas stations which seemed to all be identical except for the sculpture out front. I ended up getting the restroom key from Max by following him to the bathroom and I also got the severed hand out of the jar by having the clerk open it. I wasn't able to do anything else here at this point but I suspect that I will be able to interact with the ice cream eating guy eventually and maybe be able to interact with those animal sculptures out front. Next, I went to the fish place. After watching a helicopter swoop in and take the fish from the fisherman I went over and talked to him. He had some pretty hilarious stuff to say and explained to me that that helicopter regularly comes in to take his fish for some restaurant further north. After talking to him I picked up a nearby bucket of fish and found that I could climb into the giant fish thingy near the fisherman. It didn't seem like I could do anything else once inside besides ask Max to come in there with me. I figure at some point I will need to hide in there to thwart the fish thieves or something like that. There wasn't much else to do there so I continued on to the area on the map with a road which brought me to some weird mini-game. I went through nine levels of Max jumping over signs and swerving back and forth before finally losing and I still have no idea what the point of that game even was. After this I tried to save and spent like 15 minutes trying to figure out why F5 wouldn't work before realizing that F Lock was turned off on my keyboard. Then I finally went to bed. I'm starting to like this game a lot more now. My brain has become much more accustomed to the interface and the characters and locations have grown on me quite a bit. I especially liked that fisherman guy. He was hilarious.

Ouch man! And I thought mine was bad. It's crazy to think that these are considered good health care plans these days. And thanks for the encouragement guys.

Life has kind of sucked balls lately. Don't read this post if you don't want to hear me bitching about my problems. Our 3 month old came down with something 2 weeks ago and ended up having to go to the hospital last week because he was dehydrated from having so much diarrhea. We still haven't heard a definitive answer on what he had but after 3 days in the hospital they discharged him and he seems to be doing better as of today. Going through this whole ordeal has left us worried and frustrated. Since he is finally showing signs of improvement we aren't as worried now as we have been but still pretty goddamn frustrated over how all of this played out. So I'm going to vent for a bit and throw myself a pity party. Sorry if I come off as whiny. First, why does this type of shit have to happen over a holiday? I know that isn't what I should be concerned with but it's just sad that he had to be in the hospital on his first Halloween. My wife still wanted me to take my daughter trick or treating so she wouldn't miss out but it is hard to enjoy that type of thing under those circumstances. Second, fuck our healthcare system. This high deductible health plan (which is supposedly a good plan) is a load of shit. I hate that it discourages you from making good decisions out of fear of the exorbitant bills that come as a result of using the healthcare system. Before we were even admitted, they started hounding us to pay $2000 up front. I had to explain that we had already met certain deductibles from the birth of our child and that the bill needed to be sent to our insurance so that we don't overpay but they still insisted that I had to pay something before they would admit us. So rather than argue more, I just paid $100 so our son could be admitted. My head is still spinning from the flow of hospital bills that we are getting from the birth and now there will be a whole lot more coming in. Speaking of hospital bills, I foolishly thought we would just get one bill from the hospital after the birth of our child but holy shit was I wrong. Instead, we are getting separate bills from every single surgeon, doctor, and specialist and there seems to be a lot of the right hand not talking to the left hand going on. We are supposed to have a $2400 deductible for individual, $4000 for family after which the insurance kicks in and starts covering 90% of the costs. Then we have a $5000 out of pocket max for individual and $10000 for family. We paid $2500 up front for the birth but it all got super confusing when we kept getting bills for things that weren't covered because one random doctor was out of network or they just moved certain things we expected to be under my wife to my son since he was a new person. Then, even after hitting what we thought was the $4000 deductible for family we were getting full bills for other things because it didn't register that we met our deductible because we set up a payment plan to pay off the rest since we exhausted all the funds in our HSA. Then we realized that even with the insurance covering 90% after the deductible we would still be paying thousands more because the bills totaled over $30000. Why the fuck is a 45 minute surgery and 3 days in the hospital SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE?!?! And now with these 3 days that our son was in we get to go through it all again. At least now we know that we are hitting the $10000 out of pocket max so there won't be much point in fighting specifics as long as our total bills don't add up to more than that. Finally, I hate doctors. From what I can tell they aren't worth what they get paid and they are condescending assholes. We had one of the labs our pediatricians ordered come back positive for C Diff which prompted her to insist that we start antibiotics right away. Meanwhile, the pediatrician in the hospital told us that you never want to give antibiotics to a 3 month old and that C Diff occurs naturally in all infants so of course the results will come back positive. Who the fuck do we believe and why would we hear two polar opposite opinions coming from two different pediatricians. My gut is to go with the hospital doctor since I figure there is a chance our pediatrician gets some kind of kickback for prescribing certain things and might have ulterior motives. Or maybe I'm just paranoid and that kind of stuff doesn't happen. But who cares, when it's all said and done we will just be further in debt and these doctors will have done nothing more than talk to us for 5 minutes at a time, give him an IV, and take our money. On the bright side, at least our son is doing better and I finally got to play some Sam and Max last night.

I agree, that was a great read. I find it hard to stay focused on finding the collectibles in this game because the gorgeous scenery and music just compel me to continue moving forward on my journey.