BadHat

I dreamt I was a lady and I took mushrooms and posted nude photos of myself on the internet. Now I don't know what to think.

These videos really capture Jeff's essence.

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/89707/whos-to-blame-for-jaden-smith-2-0-and-his-amazing-twitter-account

This was the game that made me re-re-evaluate my stance on difficulty. After playing through Dead Space on normal mode and finding that the wealth of ammo and health killed all the tension in the game, I decided that I'd endeavour to play games on hard mode wherever possible, to ensure that I was fully engaged with the atmosphere they were trying to create. Then I played through about 3/4 of this on hard mode and decided, fuck that, some games are not enhanced by challenge, some games are just made more tedious. Serious question: who really thought it was a cool idea to give enemies bigger health pools in hard mode, in a first person shooter, in the year 2013? Making ammo scarcer is a valid tactic for creating tenser combat where decisions are weighed more heavily. Making me pour more bullets onto enemies before they finally expire is not, it just makes the combat more frustrating and less satisfying. I wish I'd realised this sooner instead of stubbornly sticking to my guns (heh!), but I doubt that would've saved the game for me. After finally switching down to normal mode my frustration was only replaced with boredom. (And then more frustration when I got to the stupid ghost fight.) Still, Pretty Good™ story!

Whoa, man. This sounds way more philosophical than was probably intended. Like, "the territory is not the map."

I've never played this game in my life but this song came up on Salty Bet and got stuck in my head for like a solid week, so I guess that means it's good.

I guess his message rings kind of hollow if you don't have a clear idea of who he's addressing it to, which I don't. It also strikes me as condescending that he goes to lengths to let it be known that he doesn't look down on the Hughes of the world, that they're not worse or lower but "different," and then doesn't think twice about dictating what kind of emotional reaction they're worthy of. Edit: Posted before seeing the above post. I don't see how any of those quotes fall in line with how you described the praise above, and I don't see how the comparison to books or movies is entirely apt, except to highlight the relative lack of diversity in the subject matter of games.

Ever since I put this wallpaper in my rotation it makes my day every time I see it come up. http://i.imgur.com/WFE3WDm.jpg (Based on a real Jaden Tweet.)

I'd forgotten too until I unearthed my VHS of the first volume of the OVA a couple of weeks ago. Speaking of old things, I watched Wicked City to satisfy some left-over curiosity from seeing it in a video store when I was 14 and thinking it looked super edgy or whatever. Boy is that a bad movie. Maybe I'll do myself a favour and skip Urotsukidoji.

Love the shit out of Ayreon but haven't been able to crack into the new album yet. Whenever I try it just sounds way too familiar. I'm sure I'll get past that once I've played it through a few times, but god only knows how many times I've spun Electric Castle and Human Equation. Did you check out his side project Guilt Machine? Love the vibe on this album. It's a bit like Binary but more subdued.

Finally got back to my SL1 run after ignoring it for a while. Spent way too much time running around trying to figure out what I'd already done. I'm on Nito right now and the stone armor is not a tremendous help when a couple of his screamy undergroundy sword attacks will still kill me. Did they patch this fight to be harder? I don't recall there being any big skeleton dudes in there. Edit: Just remembered I got invaded at the back end of Tomb of Giants as I was making my way to Nito. On an SL1 character. I've been restoring to human without giving it any thought because I assumed no one would be patient enough to invade at low level anywhere outside of areas like Undead Parish. Guess I was wrong. I wonder if I made that guy's day.

I wanted to say Hexen but I guess they brought that to other stuff. I got a 360 near launch with a few games and spent my first week or two mostly just playing that instead. Geometry Wars 2 was great too, some really creative modes, especially fun if you were constantly edging friends out of their top score.

Didn't say they should be, just that those were the games I was thinking of.

True, I tend to think in terms of mainstream (ie - stuff that shows up on Steam) games when it comes to these sorts of discussions. I'm vaguely aware of those games but I should probably make more of an effort to try some.

The non-cliche version is the version where Lonnie was a ghost the whole time. I think discussing the writing in terms of what ground has been covered in other literature is fine, but the people writing those criticisms need to realise that this is still extremely unfertile ground in video games. What might have been a relatively cliched and sappy, if still pretty engrossing novel, is almost utterly unique in the gaming space. The punk/queer aesthetic moreso than the romance, but even the romance itself stands out as pretty unique. What's it up against really, visual novels? Not that there aren't some good examples of writing in those, but they're pretty uniform about being "you are this character, fuck/romance one of these characters," which is a pretty different angle than watching it unfold from an uninvolved but caring third party. Even if you were to write this story as a book, the angle of having her sister be the narrator, analysing things through the lens of the "straight" child instead of just painting a sappy teen romance from an invisible narrator's perspective would be at least a little unique (sidenote: are there any books like this?). Also possibly a bit weirder with the voyeurism since you'd have to write in dozens of lines about "and then Kaitlin dug around in her sister's closet" or "and then Kaitlin pulled open her mother's underwear drawer."

Holding off until phase 2. I've burned out on too many games in early alpha before they'd hit their stride (cough Cubeworld). Also the prospect of potentially losing characters is none too appealing, beta or not. For anyone who doesn't have any idea what I'm talking about: http://playstarbound.com/how-the-beta-is-going-to-work/

It is a lilithle familiar. Haha, sorry if puns get on anyone's NERVs.

Hey that's cool I'll just use proxmate to unbl... oh right it uses a US proxy. Hm.

I've played 37 and still haven't beat reached him. :|

Which reminds me that I really wanted to get around to reading the manga. Um, excuse me but I think you meant to say Samurai X.

Oh. Oooooooooooooohh.

Neat shelf.

I enjoyed Charlie growing more and more exasperated as his "the problem with games" point got continually interrupted throughout.

Ehh, I'm in two minds about the Tom Chick piece. I think his tone is a bit weird, his satire is all over the place, and many of the examples he cites are by no means the best examples of well written female characters. On the other hand, it's not the worst thing in the world to have a sense of optimism for how far we've come, or at least how far we're coming. I just question whether railing against the very people fighting to further that change is going to send the right message to anyone on either side of the fence. Judging by the comments, the people getting the biggest kick out of it are the "I'm so sick of those lefties and their phony controversies!" types.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm kind of going in with the assumption that I'll be utterly overwhelmed with content as it is, so I'll see how I go.