Bjorn

You kill the S shaped one. It's the only rational choice, for the good of the rest.

Oh man, Serious Sam talk. Serious Sam 3 is only a few years old (came out in 2011), and Serious Sam 4 is rumored to be coming next year. I still play 3. It's my daughter and I's Sunday afternoon game. When it's a lazy Sunday, and there isn't anything that we particularly want to do, we'll boot up 3 and spend an hour or two just going crazy in it. It's also the rare PC shooter that has split screen. Also, you guys sold me on the Talos Principle. On the praise of its UI, Serious Sam 3 has an absolutely fantastic interface, and really robust options for all sorts of things (like way above and beyond what's typically expected from a PC game). It's probably my favorite UI in any shooter ever.

Yeah, I'd play that. Instead of conversation choices, you'd have to pick a new orientation to try and fit into the social dynamic that you currently find yourself in. Edited to add: Actually, on reflection, I might be more interested in this than any of their other current works. I don't really care about a Game of Thrones adventure game. Wolf Among Us was a let down to me. The other established properties they are working with, I already have expectations for what those stories/characters will be. A Minecraft adventure game might just be wacky/weird enough to get me re-interested in Telltale's style of game.

Guys, you have to look back to the golden era of arcades to answer this question. For all their fancy graphics and procedural generations, do any of the modern classics have the soul and meaning of Pac-Man or a Donkey Kong? Are they easy to play, hard to master, and challenge our very understanding of the world around us? Do they welcome the intellectual curiosity of both the uneducated masses and the most enlightened academics? Can mastery of them bring about an existential crisis, a questioning of the very fabric of reality: Forced to pick between the two, obviously Donkey Kong is the best game ever.

??? has no advantages, but there's a terrific reason to play him. One of the best items in the game is unlocked through one of his victories. If you find you just cannot play him, there is a workaround. The Ankh will turn you into ???, and any bosses you beat after that will count as ???. So on any run where you find the Ankh, you can just plan on leaving any soul hearts laying on the ground during a level, let yourself die before the boss, go vacuum up those soul hearts and then fight the boss. I find playing him in Rebirth is much, much, much easier than playing him in original though. Each tick represents 2 points (so items have to raise a stat 2 points before it's visible on your stat screen). Lazarus actually starts with a -1 luck, but it still shows one hash mark! Which is why you have terrible luck. Several characters start with zero luck, and it goes up from there. However Lazarus gets a +1 to all stats when he's reborn, so his luck equals most other characters after death. On average, he starts weaker than most other characters until he dies, and then he's slightly stronger than all other characters after resurrection.

All Bioshock Games - On sale All Bioshock Infinite DLC - On sale Bioshock 2: Minerva's Den DLC - Not on sale Fuckers.

I'd give you some gems Jon, Steam id is BjornDaDwarf. Edited to add: Oh hey, one of the votes today is for Neverending Nightmares, which you should totally vote for. It's an interesting game. I'm not entirely sure I like it, but then, I'm not sure it's supposed to be liked. It's weird. But I'd like to see that guy get some more exposure, do well and continue making games.

On Dark Souls 2, I don't think it's been clarified yet whether there is going to be an upgrade path on PC, or if it will be a new SKU entirely. On the sale, looks like they backed off on trying to get people to go to the store 3-4 times a day. The community vote is now once a day, instead of 3 times a day and the Flash sales are once every 12 hours instead of every 8 hours. Dammit, and yet again Obscure 1 and 2 are not on sale. They've never been on sale since I put them on my wishlist.

Minecraft: Telltale edition. Weird.

I feel like this thread might be a slippery slope in the making...

Okay, I was totally wrong, you can trade/gift any amount of gems. You just have to do it from the trade screen. I just misread the description in my inventory.

Steam Curators is close to that, I suppose, but it can't automatically suggest things to you. I really, really wish you could filter curators though. I get tired of seeing TB's Top Hat on half the games I look at. And it would be awesome if you could correlate between curators you follow. Like have a report that spits out "10 of the curators you follow recommend this game."

I would, but it has to be a thousand, and I've only got 200 left. Nevermind, I was wrong!

Penny Arcade had the Decide-O-Tron app for awhile, that let you put in a bunch of games you like, and it would compare that with other users and spit out a list of games you should play. It was really too simple though, and I never felt like it particularly worked well.

Costs for crafting booster packs are figured by the total cards in a set. The more cards in a set, the cheaper the pack. So for a game with 5 cards, I think it's 1200, and goes down from there. I think 400 is the cheapest. You can also determine how many gems a background or emoticon is worth if you know the value of one of the cards for a set. Backgrounds/emoticons are worth half of the gem value of a full set. So if a set has 8 cards, valued at 20 gems each, the set is worth 160. Each background/emoticon will be worth 80. It means that you don't lose any gems for crafting a set, since you always get one background and one emoticon for crafting. I would assume that for awhile, crafting boosters will be the only purpose of gems. Once the gem prices crash though, I'm tempted to stock up on some over time. Like if they drop below 30 cents per 1000, I might buy a bunch and just see if there ends up being another event like this for the summer sale.

I didn't read through the whole Smoking Gun piece, but this Slate article says that her testimony was questioned and undermined by prosecutors during the Grand Jury. Slate acts like that makes it case closed, nothing-to-see-here, move along. But wait, why the fuck would a prosecutor ever put her in front of a grand jury at all then? To confuse and overwhelm them with too much information, too many viewpoints, to make the entire thing muddled.

I just put Dominique Pamplemousse on my wishlist, had never heard of it before, but that looks fascinating.

Bought it, but haven't started playing it yet. We've got a couple of other games we want to get through in co-op first, and if Together is as good as we hope, it will probably kill our interest in playing anything else for awhile.

If this turns out to be Turner and Hooch, but with a velociraptor, it'll just be the best.

That was a great little 'cast, a lot of fun. Listen to the episode, and it will all make sense.

Divekick?

Remember Me seemed to have been overhyped, and then failed to meet expectations. Reading people's thoughts on it quite a few months after release, it seemed like a lot of people spoke much more positively about it then. I got it for free through PS+, but then never got around to playing it before my plus subscription ended.

And I'm finally out of gems. Ended up buying some gem sacks this morning to ensure that I got the last two games I really wanted, and then didn't actually need 2,000 of them. So picked up Bleed, as it was one of the cheapest games with co-op on my list. BlueToad Murder Files 865 Space Ace 1,663 LocoCycle 1,006 Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime 1,326 Vertiginous Golf 2,654 Dungeon of the Endless 9,901 A Walk in the Dark 1,104 Hatoful Boyfriend 5,605 Deadnaut 5,300 Ghost Control 4,100 Masterplan 6,600 Bleed 1,800 Total gems spent: 41,924 Total money spent on gems: $24.92 Average price per 1K gems: $0.59 I'd have saved a few thousand on Ghost Control and Masterplan if I would have bid more aggressively last night, they each went up 2K+ each today. Overall I probably burned entirely too much time paying attention to this silly thing, but it was fun and different. Seems like some people always complain about these Valve stunts, but for some of us it is actually something that's fun and engaging to mess with. The page does specifically say that devs donated their games, which continues to bug me, as there's no doubt this was a move that was financially in Valve's best interest. I did end up putting several games on my Wishlist I had either forgot about, or never heard of though, so it did provide some advertising for some of the devs who participated. I noticed that Dungeon of the Endless went on sale today, which is probably a smart move for devs who are on the auction. The sale price is currently below the going rate for gems, so they might pick up some sales from people who notice that.

That sounds fucking amazing, and I may need to find some episodes of that to watch. Listening to people criticize/analyze journalists is one of my favorite things. I'd say that's why it can travel, there are sadly not many consistent options for that kind of content in the US. On The Media is good, but they aren't always talking about journalists. I used to listen to a regional show out of Boston similar to the one you described, but I ultimately found one of the hosts to be entirely too infuriating to listen to.

Quite frankly I'd rather see sexually explicit games on Steam than Hatred. The dissonance between our fear of sex but love of violence is something that constantly pisses me off.