Zeusthecat

You're right, I do need to turn it up a notch.

The biggest ho of them all.

It's an evil ploy to increase hot dog sales. By doing this they ensure that we will buy 2 packs of hot dogs and 3 packs of hot dog buns to put our brains at ease. I think the real question we should be asking is why are they called "hot dogs"? I believe it is so whenever we hear "BigDog" we think "hot dog" and start thinking about the mismatch between packs of hot dogs and hot dog buns. Then, when BigDog becomes self aware we will be too distracted to notice.

I just learned today that a coconut is a tree nut. That is one big ass nut.

Don't worry too much Sean, when your leg is fully healed the bone will be much stronger than it was before. And at least you know your bones are already stronger than Obama's old ass bones. Also, thanks for backing me up on my nosebleed theory. I've definitely had cases in the past where I've gotten a massive nosebleed and not noticed until someone pointed it out. Something about the warmth and viscosity of blood makes it easy to sneak by if there isn't any pain associated with the bleeding.

I think they should do a stream where they all watch Jurassic Park. Between Jeff Goldblum and Samuel Jackson's arm I think it might be the best thing ever.

I still haven't seen that movie. I was more picturing a certain scene in The Departed but with a big trampoline on the ground.

Any idea what your total playtime is at this point? Maybe there are some fun ways to extend the life of this game by exploring more of the multiplayer aspects. I've sent a ton of letters to all of my townsfolk in the hope that some of them eventually move away to my friend's town and show him the letters. That and trying to give them weird catch phrases that will maybe catch on in other towns. Also, I think you can use the stopwatch to set up little competitions when multiple people are in town since it tracks the total bugs and fish caught for each player. Throw in some pitfall seeds for each player and it could be pretty fun.

I might just buy this game twice. Once on 360 and possibly once on PC or next gen if the graphical/performance improvements are noticeable enough. I figure by the time it comes out for other platforms it will have been long enough that I'll be ready to give the game a second play. Having achieved 100% on all of the GTA's since GTA 3 and still wanting more I think it will be worth it.

Day of the Tentacle. And I'm really excited for it. This is the game I've been looking forward to most besides Grim Fandango just because of all the things I've heard about it from the cast and people here. I already obtained the game and loaded it into Scummvm so I'll be starting it by Friday most likely (hopefully sooner).

Everything else you said was really interesting but the imagery of this part is quite awesome. I just imagine a bunch of scientists in lab coats convincing a random guy on the street to come up to the roof of a nearby building. He sees a giant trampoline on the side of the building and asks what it's for and they just tell him not to worry about it. Then, when he gets to the roof they tell him to put on this really cool watch and as soon as he does, three of the scientists pick him up and toss him off the building. Couldn't they have just done the test with a dude riding a rollercoaster or something? All joking aside, that is some really cool stuff. It is amazing how finely tuned our brains are and how slight changes in our brain chemistry can wildly alter our perceptions.

Thanks Udvarnoky, that's some really interesting stuff. A part of me is sad that none of that stuff came to fruition but in the end maybe it was for the best that they ended on such a high note with FOA.

As far as work goes, I have a pretty decent schedule. Monday - Thursday 830ish AM to 630ish PM and Fridays 830ish AM to Noonish (I can come in earlier or later and leave earlier or later and nobody really minds as long as the work gets done). Work also stays at work and nobody pushes us too hard since we kind of set our own deadlines with clients and push them when necessary. We're lucky to be a small software development group doing the kind of work we do. However, I am still at a point where I have very little free time because I have to take over with the kids when I get home so my wife can get a break. Having a crying baby and a 4 year old that insists on testing every boundary there is can be quite taxing after awhile. But still, it's all good. Even though it's not free time, it is still time well spent and is rewarding in its own way.

This is something I've thought a lot about as well and it always seemed to make sense that we perceive time differently depending on our age (especially since almost anyone you talk to will say that time seems to go faster as you get older). So rather than one second being perceived as a constant time interval, we perceive it differently as we age. For instance, when you are 2 seconds old that last second you lived was 50% of your life. Whereas when you are much older, one second is a tiny fraction of your life. So maybe as you get older you really do perceive time going faster because the brain processes time relative to how long it has been in existence. I've heard other people talk about this idea before and I think Sean even mentioned it on the cast once so I'm sure there is some school of thought behind it.

When I see the letters "cl" my brain sometimes makes me think I'm seeing a "d". It's not really too big of a deal but when I'm writing test cases or doing help documentation I often write the word "click". So I pretty much see dicks everywhere.

On top of the great atmosphere, they did such a good job of capturing all of the small little details of Indiana Jones' personality. I think that is one of the things that impressed me the most about this game. From beginning to end everything he said and did was just so consistent and true to character. This was especially noticeable at the end for me. I just absolutely loved that he continued to be snarky and sarcastic through the romance scenes, the segment with Sophia being possessed, and right up until he was about to be turned into a "god". I'm so used to most games turning the main character into some kind of cheeseball during these kinds of sequences and getting super self serious but in this game they just nailed it. And I really liked the voice actor for Indy. He was the perfect complement to the excellent writing in this game.

Did they ever specify when the PC version would be coming out?

THANK YOU!!! That was one of my favorite forum exchanges ever.

So are you telling me that bullets only exist in my head? And that a bullet would only make me dead because my mind makes it real? (Big setup here) Does that mean that I could dodge bullets?

I'm sorry to hear man. I can somewhat relate as I was completely miserable in my entry level job after college. I saw a dark and depressing road ahead of me and over the course of a year I slowly put all the pieces together to make a clean transition into something I love doing (and within the same company). It sounds like things are a lot more complicated for you right now though so that might not be an option. I hope you can find some way to make some meaningful change but I would at least say you have accomplished a lot in your life by just getting where you are now. It may not be as exciting as what other people around here are doing (and honestly, working on traffic management software isn't exactly exciting either) but I'm sure what you do has some sort of positive impact on people even if they aren't aware of it. And remember, you can always blackmail your boss for a yearly salary and then get a carefree job at a fast food place. It worked for Kevin Spacey.

I wasn't allowed to have soda growing up but this:

I do remember them talking about this game at one point and making me really want to play it. Maybe I subconsciously remembered them talking about that specific part and that made it easier for me to figure it out. I'm also curious, what puzzles were considered really difficult in this game? Is the path I took considered much easier than the wits path and that is where the real difficulty is? I honestly struggled for much longer periods on MI1 and MI2 and never felt like the puzzles got quite as crazy in the path I took in this game. Then again, this is the 7th LucasArts game I've finished at this point and since I've been playing them all back to back the vocabulary of these games is becoming pretty ingrained.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis It was a really good game.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis completed! Not counting all the time I sat idle, my total playtime was right around 20 hours. And I never used any hints (unless you count the mini hint from toblix earlier on my rib cage comment) making this the second LucasArts game I got through without resorting to hints. After freeing Sophia, I continued on through the door I had busted down earlier. The next area was a circular hallway with a few rooms coming off of it. As soon as we made it to the second screen Sophia told me to follow her into an adjacent room where she started to act really Nur Ab Sal-y. I spent some time talking to her/him and was quite entertained by all the various lines of dialog. I also happened to look at Sophia's necklace and found that putting orichalcum in the mouth caused her to take the necklace off. After that I looked around the room, picked up a scepter, and continued on through the other rooms adjacent to the hallway. Two of the rooms had nothing in them but the last room had a big tractor-like machine with a mouth for receiving orichalcum and three slots to the left of the mouth. I found that I could put the scepter I had picked up into each of the slots and use it as a lever but I couldn't get anything to happen after activating the machine so I figured I'd need something else to serve as an additional lever (or 2). As I left that room I noticed some designs on the ground and then some more designs on the wall back in the hallway. It looked like they represented different lever positions and from each picture it seemed like I would only need 2 levers to make one of the valid configurations. I wasn't sure what else I could use as a second lever so I decided to go back to Sophia to figure out what I was supposed to do when she took her necklace off. Once I got back to her I made a few more attempts at making her take the necklace off and tried using various items unsuccessfully. Then I remembered how she put the necklace in the gold box in the labyrinth so we could use the orichalcum detector without interference. So I made her take it off one more time and was finally able to snatch it up with the gold box and throw it in the lava. With Nur Ab Sal's influence gone Sophia was finally free and she was able to re-join me. Unfortunately I still didn't have the second lever I needed. At this point the only thing I could think was that maybe there was some way I could get that door hinge back that I had used to prop up the cell door. I had tried picking it back up after freeing her but it was wedged in there so I assumed it wasn't something I couldn't retrieve. I figured it was worth another attempt anyways and thought maybe I could just lift the cell door again to free the hinge since Indy was obviously capable of doing so. Luckily, the game was kind to me and did a good job following my logic. When I lifted the door the hinge fell down and I was able to pick it up. With my second lever in hand I headed back to the tractor. Before starting the Atlantis tractor I went back and looked at the two designs I had observed earlier. One of the configurations appeared to make the tractor go straight and the other indicated some kind of swirly left turn-y motion. With that knowledge I started up the tractor and put it into the "straight" configuration. As soon as I did so Sophia hopped on and the tractor started careening down the halls. The view switched to a sort of over-the-shoulder view and everything was going by really fast. I wasn't sure if there was some timing I was supposed to follow so I just flipped the levers over to the "swirly left turn-y" position and careened right through the inner wall. After smashing through the wall the tractor plunged into a lake of lava and I was sure that I had fucked up. To my surprise though, Indy and Sophia had jumped off at the last moment and now had a new path to follow. The final destination was near. After following a short path from where the tractor crashed, I found myself in a big central lava area with lots of rooms and paths. I trial and error-ed my way through until I finally made it to the end. Luckily, by this point in my LucasArts adventure I had become trained to carefully observe all environments and made a mental note of a big mural on the wall that had three rings with a single symbol shown in each ring. I wasn't sure what it was for but figured there was a good chance it had some purpose because these games have trained me to be ultra paranoid and consider every possibility. Sure enough, the very next area had another spindle and I had already exhausted all of the configurations from the Lost Dialog. So once I saw this I went right back to the previous area and took a screenshot of the mural. It looked like the noon sun was shown at one position, the full moon in another, and the volcano in the last position. Once I had that screenshot I went back and solved the last puzzle of the game. At this point I was ambushed by Nazi bastards that took advantage of my smarts to gain control of the "god machine" I had just activated. Kerner insisted on dying first and I used my cunning to have him try the machine with only one bead which turned him into some weird fucked up goat creature that jumped into the lava out of shame. The mad scientist dude decided I should be the next candidate and I went through a whole bunch of dialog options to try to get him to change his mind. I had saved the game during the conversation and got to see Indy turned into a god a few times and kill everyone before reloading my save and trying again. Eventually, I was able to trick the bastard into trying the machine on himself which resulted in him turning into Cinder from Killer Instinct and bringing everything down. Indy and Sophia were barely able to escape as the floors and walls crumbled around them and they made it to the submarine just in time. Then they had one last embrace as a new volcano emerged from the ocean and then retreated and the credits rolled. So, yeah, this game was really fucking good. The writing was excellent, I loved the voicework throughout the whole game, and it was the perfect Indiana Jones experience. One of the things that impressed me the most was the difficulty curve. It started pretty easy at the beginning and ramped up at a steady rate until it got pretty difficult at the end (but not overly difficult). In my opinion, this has game has had the best puzzle design so far and I feel like every puzzle ended up having a nice logical solution (at least for the path I took). Thank you Idle Thumbs for making me aware of this game! It was definitely a stand out experience.

Yesss! The door is open now and Sophia is freed! After finding that statue piece I went right back to the robot/statue guarding the door and everything just clicked. I used the cabinet diagram as a guide and figured out how to make each arm move forward and back and then found that I could attach the chain to each ring (one end on the ring stuck to the door and the other on the ring that was attached to the functioning arm) so that the arm that was still intact could pull the door down. Then the door pin fell out and I was able to give that to Sophia so she could prop the cell door open and escape. That was definitely one of my favorite puzzles! I have to say the "exchange" between Indy and Sophia after I freed her was one of my favorite exchanges in the game. Man, the writing in this game is so good. I'm totally pumped after solving that.