prawks

Finished The Fall after hearing people getting hyped for the new one. It wasn't bad, and would serve as a nice gentle intro into adventure-y games, but the story didn't really wow me and the combat could definitely have been left out. Overall dialogue writing was good and the world-building too. Going to wait for reviews on the sequel I think.

I'm surprised to see this advice. From what I've read, putting any pressure on your carpal tunnel sounds like it's not a great idea, and my experience plays that out. Last time I tried using one it not only pressured my wrist but made it less mobile: I did a lot more wrist turning rather than using my forearm to move my mouse which absolutely killed my wrist. But everyone's different, I guess just tread carefully and figure out what works for your specific case. I second trackballs, specifcally finger ones rather than thumb ones. They're becoming more popular, but aside from the premium CST ones I don't have any specific recommendations.

Nice! Need to do my own research before I jump to such conclusions

On the topic of lacking control over all interactive systems and they're designed to give the illusion of control, some auditory examples of fooling consumers in other ways: ATMs do not actually make any noise when they dispense money. The sound is played from a speaker. Silence of a mechanical system is percieved by consumers as a sign that it's not working. Similarly, many car doors are actually filled with sound dampening to give the illusion of "quality" to consumers, who look for rigidity and heft as a sign of quality. Without it, they would jangle around as hollow pieces of metal and fiberglass with some janky electronic door controls.

I've likewise been playing with the Survival mode lately and am finding it a pretty fresh experience. I've gotten bored fairly easily in the standard mode, but Survival seems to be keeping things interesting, at least at the outset (though I'm a total sucker for early-game experiences in open-world games like this). Starting the game a 10-minute walk from your damaged ship with only enough environmental protection for a 2-minute walk makes for some interesting strategies. You end up engaging with the more obscure mechanics like life support draining faster when sprinting or jet-packing, seeking out overhangs for shelter, and scavenging many small bits of resources. Requiring 100% launch fuel to take off also makes for some interesting experiences when you have no plutonium around your landing site and the planet you landed on happens to have "aggressive" Sentinels. The extra-lengthy cooldown on the scanner I could definitely do without, though. Now that I've made it to the second planet and started accumulating some resources (I now have enough plutonium to land *and* take off after), it might slow a bit as is usually the case with those early-game experiences I love so much. I wonder if playing Survival as more of a roguelike would fit my interests more?

I'm pretty excited for Mr. Shifty, might be the first game I pick up aside from BOTW. Looks like a good game to sleep/resume often on.

Screen side looks flat though? Saw some discussion on reddit suggesting it's not a bend as much as the back bulging a bit, either by design or due to some other flaw.

I... I... I swear I tried that... wow how silly. Yup, works.

Ditto, sans the joycon issue, mine's been fine. A little tight in the dock but I put a tempered glass screen protector on it so it doesn't worry me. One thing I can't quite figure out: if it's sleeping in the dock, how can you wake it with the joycons? I haven't figured out a quick way to do it, but if I just keep pushing different buttons eventually the console turns on. Takes some time though. Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason, and I don't have any joycon reception issues when I'm playing so I don't think that's it?

Honestly this is one of my top episodes in general, I think. Ever since Idle Thumbs stopped, Idle Thumbs has been excellent! Thanks Nick! (fuck Chris)

There's a pretty great 35mm -> 1080p scan of Jurassic Park up on myspleen.org (home of the Harmy Despecialized trilogy). Highly recommended for some truly choice grain and dust specks. It's a really cool little community, actually, full of gems. I also snatched a restored Matrix with the original colors before everything went Kermit. EDIT: Oh I forgot, a fan edit of Episode 1, where basically a ton of things the general fan community doesn't like were trimmed, as well as what I think is a super cool use of editing to color young Anakin:

Sounds like quite a bit, http://www.dailydot.com/esports/quake-champions-esports-bethesda/

If it turns out to be good, I'm hoping it can sustain an audience. Quake Live suffered from never garnering a critical mass of players, though I can't recall what the PR was like for it. I always got the sense that they pushed it as a toy example/experiment of browser plugin games and only recently attempted to make it more of a traditional format (and removing cross-platform support...) by shifting to a binary on Steam. I also wonder how aggressively they're planning to push it as an eSport. That seems to be increasingly common and Q3 is in my opinion one of the most enjoyable FPS games to see played at a high level. id seems to have done right by Doom, so I'm quite hopeful they retain the classic feel and speed of Quake movement and satisfying weapons.

I have a feeling the competitive mode will be much different in regards to choosing and switching characters. I think pick/ban might be nice to try out, though it would probably need to function differently somehow from DotA because of changing sides on the map.

Indeed: http://www.amazon.com/Actiontec-Ethernet-Existing-ECB2500C-Connected/dp/B001XUQOHE It's quite silly sounding but has been working surprisingly well so far.

I've been dealing with a similar setup for a few years. Hard wires for everything is far and away the best solution, if at all possible. 30ft USB, HDMI, and audio cabling is quite inexpensive from Monoprice and gives you latency-free connections. In lieu of wires, Steam streaming has worked well for most things as long as a) the PCs are on a hardwired network and you're not playing a game that demands fine reflexes. Wireless streaming may vary depending on your setup, but for me it wasn't enough (connection would hang and then pick up a second later here and there). I try to play all of my twitchy games on my host PC. Powerline ethernet might get you wired Internet depending on your proximity to large appliances which can cause interference. I'm currently setup with ethernet over coax which works very well if you are fortunate enough to have an apartment wired with coax all over the place.

Oh wow, yes please. I've been hoping for so long that an arena shooter game would gain some steam and become popular. Quake Live seems to be kind of languishing and the Doom 4 beta was a pretty big disappointment. Hopefully this or UT4 can expand the playerbase a bit, and I much prefer Quake to UT Definitrly going to be sinking some time into this this weekend.

Picked this up over the weekend; I've never been much of a fan of "builder" games, but have always dreamed of playing Harvest Moon.. for whatever reason it always seemed like such a great game that I never had the time for. Currently at the first week in Summer of my first year and it's absolutely consumed me. I've gotta say, this has one of the best core loops I've experienced in a long time. I love the sense of schedule the limited time each day affords, it forces you to be very conscious of how you are spending your time. It also allows you to create some awesome short/medium/long-term goals and work towards them. I'm not sure how novel this game is in that respect, but as someone new to the genre I really find it an impressive way to design an "open world" game. Being new I'm not sure if more tutorialization and UI hints might have been nice or I've just been overly naive -- it took me way too long to figure out how to get rid of items in your inventory without the assistance of a shop/the bin at your house. I've also been straddling pretty hard between looking things up on wikis or trying to discover everything myself. Like whether or not I am missing fish from the season I'm in, but that's sort of minor. I think other aspects of the game are a bit too obtuse to handle without some external information currently, like the radius of a scarecrow's effect, how much space a tree needs to grow, or what the benefits of upgrading a tool are. Trial and error on those things would be very painful if I needed to discover them myself, but I'm trying to leave as much up to discovery as possible. I've been staying far, far away from min/maxing too much or looking up any tips on "do this to make a ton of money!" I have a very organically-developing farm layout and I'm hoping to continue that. Lots of screenshots I've seen online of people farms are so incredibly geometric and use every square inch of the plot you're given. I've got a nice lazy path through my grove of maples and plenty of wild area, and I'm hoping I don't need to change all of that too drastically as the game continues along. One thing that has always kept me away from builder games is the temptation to plan too much up-front, for example creating a huge highway loop around your plot in Cities: Skylines before you build anything. I like that this game doesn't have too much a of a feeling of permanence in where you place your crops and things early on. Patches of dirt fill back in, trees and grass grow over cleared areas, etc. On another note, the economy (experience, money, and availability) in this game feels very wonky at times. I think that might be the grindy JRPG nature of it, but a basket of flowers costing 1000 gold at the flower festival seems a little crazy. But for whatever reason it still seems to work. I really value that little basket of flowers sitting outside of my door, because for better or worse I spent my entire reserve of cash on them. Same goes for the expensive outdoor light recipe I purchased but which I apparently won't be able to construct until something like Farming level 8. Some of those tough lessons I think add to the feeling of difficulty in starting a farm from the ground-up, and add a bit to the sense of accomplishment once they all come together.

Just keep in mind you're spending to save, but other than that it's a great way to amass a nice queue.

I too started playing 2033 Redux this week, but was not patient enough to play past the first area on Ranger. Restarted on Normal and have been enjoying smooth sailing. It was too frustrating not having a clue how anything worked and then getting destroyed by every monster. Sure I could have stuck with it, but I just wasn't in that kind of mood. I think I'll do Ranger mode in Last Light once I have a better sense of how everything works.

Been playing a fair bit of Eidolon lately and it sounds like it has some interesting parallels to this game based on the RPS preview. Has me tentatively very excited. Little disappointed that they seem to be discouraging putting down roots on one planet. I was interested in the idea of making a home base planet to return to repeatedly after farther and farther explorations out from it. But the nomad lifestyle works well in Eidolon, so we'll see.

Duh. Always surprised by some of the things I miss. Think I may pass on the Challenge, I have other games I need to move on to. May come back and do some more +'s here and there though. I finally went through the credits sequence too, think it's one of my favorites in recent memory:

"Aghagahahghghaghagahhahagahha" very accurately describes the feeling I'm getting trying to solve The Challenge: I still have one nagging puzzle out in the world though, no matter how many times I look at it I just can't see it:

Tried this last night for the free weekend. I'm not much of a city-building guy but I can imagine getting into them for sure. My first attempt I created my roads, zoned them, got electricity running no problem. Reading the tutorial for water lines, it said "you do not need to loop them". I took this to mean, well I lay one down from the pump out across town, and one from the drain all across town, and I'm up and running. My town is then hemmorhaging money, citizens are complaining that they don't have running water, and I don't have enough money to fix it, so my town just keeps... growing?! I let myself get pretty far into the negative before restarting after I figured out the lines need to connect the pump and drain. I think I need some YouTube tutorials before I get much further. With so many features in the game I was expecting a more thorough in-game tutorial.