Bjorn

I did the exact same thing! The specific option is "Glass him." Which, for a moment I thought it might be violent, but then it seemed completely reasonable that the option would be to clink glasses with him. I reloaded immediately, so I didn't see how that played out. I should have just went with it.

That would make a lot of sense. But then I think about the Usurpers essay just linked, and content, and that just kind of bums me out. It's like the razor blade model of video games. Here, have this free 'content', so that you buy more 'content' for it, even though you didn't value the original 'content' enough to buy it in the first place.

The problem with any gaming subscription service tends to be that it is exceedingly difficult to make the numbers work, where both sides perceive the deal to have enough value to make it worth it. It continues to amaze me that PS+ exists in its current incarnation, as it is a pretty incredible deal for consumers. I can only speculate that Sony subsidizes PS+ in order to add value to their overall platform. But I have no idea how the revenue sharing works with the non-Sony games that are free.

Add away, my profile name is bjorndadwarf. I'd be up for doing some co-op with it, though you may be far outleveling us. I think our characters are only level 11 (we just played for a couple of hours). I did make another character to mess around with, but don't know how much I'll play without my wife. On past games, I've ended up burning myself out on a game before we finished it together because I wanted to play more often than she did.

Dammit, just saw that reviews are popping up for Oddworld: New N Tasty, got all excited, and then discovered that it's a Playstation "exclusive" for an ambiguous amount of time.

Finally got around to finishing off my NG+ run in Defender's Quest last night, after having stopped just a few missions away from the end many months ago. I only remembered to go back to it because I saw something about them announcing Defender's Quest 2. Great little tower defense/RPG game. It's one of the better NG+ modes I've ever played. It adds a bunch of stuff. New weapons, new armor, the ability to upgrade unique weapons/armor, new quests that explain the backstory and the protagonist writes a journal giving her thoughts about the quest and her companions throughout the game. I liked DQ a bunch in part because it didn't start feeling like a puzzle game like some tower defense games do. Some of those games have just a single tower layout in order to get a perfect on the hardest difficulty. DQ never felt like that to me, that I had a lot more freedom for placement and strategy.

LA Noire was the kind of game that IGN-blew-me-away for the first couple of hours, and then the whole experience just steadily degraded for me until I was so disenchanted with it that I couldn't even bother to finish the final chapter. It was more than just the interview/dialogue mechanic, but that certainly played a role in how I felt about it. This is the thing that ends up bugging me the most. That illusion breaks for me in a lot of games, and it all feels artificial and hollow, much more so than when there is just well crafted dialogue that I have limited to no control over. One exception to this is actually XCOM: The Bureau. Dialogue has, I think, no impact on the game. It's pure flavor. So I ended up enjoying the (very limited) dialogue trees in it, because I was never thinking about stuff like: Oh, is this going to fuck up a quest? Will I get an item if I pick the red answer? Will a companion level up if I follow just the right path? I was simply defining how my character interacted with other characters, and was able to role play that character without worrying about RPG aspects.

How funny, the wife and I just started playing this over the weekend. I had thought I might be done with ARPGs after completely bouncing off Diablo 3, but so far I'm loving T2. Punching things with the Berserker is soooo good. We need to turn the difficulty up though, not enough stuff to kill on Normal.

That sentence just spawned an entire Monty Python sketch in my head. Man: Winter is coming.. Wife: Like, coming over, for dinner? Man: No, like, coming, you know... Wife: Like, cumming, sexually. Man: No, no, no, you know, winter, the season, is coming. The inevitability of the change and all that. Wife: Well of course winter is coming, it's always coming, unless it's here. Unless you mean it's coming next week. Oh dear, if it's coming next week, I need to bring some things in from the garden. Man: NO! It's about the inevitability of death, about.... And so on.

In LA Noir, Doubt was originally called Force, and was a very aggressive questioning style. But partway through the game, they changed their mind and made it doubt, but couldn't be bothered to go back and re-write and re-record the dialogue for some scenes.

I'm not much of a cook, but I do make a variety of pretty good bbq. I do pork loins in a crock pot, which is probably pure heresy in the bbq world. I cook it half submerged in apple juice, with the top covered in ********* slices. Loins tend to be on the lean side, and are easy to accidentally dry out. The juice and ********* keeps that from happening, plus gets a bit of fruity flavor in (which I like in certain meats). The day I cook it, I'll just cut it into slices like filet mignon. Then for leftovers I'll usually tear it up into a kind of pulled pork for sandwiches and wraps. An excellent side are baked beans with apples chopped up into them. I fry some apples up in butter and brown sugar to soften them up some, then toss them into some honey flavored baked beans and let them finish cooking in there. Simple, tasty and usually a surprise treat as it's rare for people to have had that before (at least not in my neck of the woods). I do have a bit of an obsession with trying to mix fruit into my cooking when I make anything.

I just learned a new word: obamanation. It's clever, as it has several meanings. What will the right think of next.

I don't feel like there is any singular idea in there that I haven't bee previously exposed to, but the synthesis and connections are intriguing. Of course it meshes with the current level of discontent I have with a lot of things online, so I'm probably less likely to be able to critically parse it since it's reinforcing how I already feel. Actually, scratch that, there was one totally new idea to me, and that was the Spelunky/newspaper comparison, with newspapers as the originator of procedurally generated content. My brain is still a little melty with how accurate that is.

A bizarre Russian RPG where three healers arrive in a mysterious and surreal village right as a plague strikes. In order to fully understand what's going on, you have to play through as each healer separately. The game is in realtime, and does not care whether you attempt to "win" or not. Events will continue to play out even if you miss, ignore or fail quests. The atrocious translation makes it close to impenetrable for most non-Russian speakers (though I've only experienced the first hour or so, so I can't swear to that). It also includes survival elements, like needing to feed yourself or you'll starve to death. The review scores all seem to be tied to how impenetrable it was. It was Deadly Premonition before there was a Deadly Premonition. On paper, it's everything I want from a game. But it is really, really hard to get into. I need to sit down with it again some night when I have the house to myself and just dig into it with no distractions around.

That interview is amazing:

Hey, I forgot pictures! Behold, Sid Whiskers!

Catching up on On The Media, their short podcast version TL:DR interviewed a black woman (Mikki Kendall) who presented as a white man for awhile on Twitter to see what would happen, and convinced some other people from a variety of races and genders to try switching for awhile. Here's a transcript if you can't listen to it. Along with that experience, she talks about actually moving to a more urban neighborhood after getting threatened by a stalker who was harassing her about her abortion views. She thought a white stalker would be less likely to come after her if she was in a black neighborhood.

I'm captivated by this piece, but I really need to get back to work and stop reading it. Going to have to finish it this evening.

Oh god, I didn't think that Simpson's/FG crossover could really be that bad. But then I watched it. It looks like a disaster.

Honestly, if I could trade a few of my "setting shit on fire" stories for the ability to play the violin, I'd do that in a heartbeat. That still sounds awesome to me. The single dumbest thing we probably ever did as kids didn't even involve fire. We decided to weld together our own grappling hooks out of rebar to climb shit around the farm (like the rickety old windmill). Dad had only shown us the most rudimentary stuff about welding at this point. My older brother had his Boy Scout knot tying badge, so he was pretty sure he could make a knot that would hold our full weight. It's a fucking miracle neither of us managed to make a Bran Stark impersonation. Some people never get tired of seeing the world burn though. My 70-year-old father-in-law is still obsessed with blowing shit up. A few years ago, he had a guy licensed in explosives bring out a bunch of detcord to blow some tree stumps out of a pasture (because that seemed like it would be a lot more fun than using the tractor to pull them out like normal). He kept a bit of detcord for the next family bbq, and that night wrapped it around a gallon of gas suspended from a pole a few hundred feet from the house. It sent a 30+ foot diameter fireball screaming straight up into the sky, lighting up the yard like it was noon. That was awesome. I have to admit, blowing up tree stumps is more entertaining than just pulling them though. A couple of years ago, he discovered anvil shooting and he's been trying to talk his wife into letting him do it ever since. His wife is unrelenting in her stance that this is an unacceptable hobby that may be grounds for divorce. All three of his sons-in-law keep egging him on to try it anyways. Although we probably shouldn't have let her see this video: Gay Wilkinson may well be the coolest fucking dude in Missouri.

Reminiscing about setting things on fire as a kid in the random thoughts thread reminded me about Sean's opening lamentation about having no good anecdotes. I feel personally defined, in part, by a whole litany of crazy ass stories I've experienced over the years. It bums me out that Sean doesn't feel like he has that (assuming he was being serious).

Ha! Yeah, dead pine trees are way more flammable than gas (to tie that back into the other conversation). I grew up on a farm, and my brother and I had access to our dad's fuel tanks for the farm equipment. This was a bad idea that eventually resulted in him hiding the key for the padlocks to the tanks. It's possible that a failed attempt to create a Hollywood style explosion with an ant hill might have influenced his decision. I tend to think that breaking rules and making dumb decisions are an important part of growing up. So even when our kid fucked up, we'd have to punish her (particularly if it was about being safe in some way), but if she did it in an interesting way, we'd be kinda proud too.

If my kid had ever tried that, I'd pissed, proud and terrified simultaneously.

I had a dream that I was a spy in Soviet Russia back in the 50s, but I didn't speak Russian. So the entire dream was a series of wacky hijinks as I kept explaining why I wasn't speaking Russian in increasingly improbably ways.

This is my favorite (spoilered as may be mildly NSFW): I actually own a disturbing cat-dog taxidermied thing. I'll take a picture of it later. We call it Sid Whiskers. A friend of mine found it in a pawn shop out in Virginia. But then his girlfriend was so creeped out by it that she wouldn't let him keep it, so he gave it to me.