ariskany_evan

Only thing I'm tempted by in today's Steam Summer Sale is Witcher 2. Anyone know if they continued with the whole Geralt sleeps with a woman and gets her soft-core porn trading card thing from Witcher 1? That was the worst.

That's awesome! I got a shoutout on the bombcast once and it made my ears burn, but this is truly next level!!

After making a valiant attempt to unceremoniously blast through my backlog a few months back (let's just say I was quite active on the Quitter's Club), the timing of this sale doesn't seem terrible! Though for the life of me the only game I can think of off the top of my head that I want to pick up is Skyrim (PS3 died and I miss the world). Maybe Starbound? Otherwise I feel like I'm all caught up on games I want. Crazy!

My wife was just this weekend rediscovering a bunch of Raymond Scott. It's amazing how little Dilla had to do to Lightworks to make it one of his own. A head-nodding beat wayyyyyy ahead of its time. Also so easy to forget about Raymond Scott! Lonny Tunes adaptations, Sleeping Sounds for Babies, adverts. Love how all over the place his work is. Some great facts in his wiki: Used the pseudonym Raymond Scott because he was worried about charges of nepotism when his brother's orchestra started playing his compositions in the mid-1930s. Called a six-piece band a Quintette because he thought the word sextet would take the focus away from the music. He worked as director of Motown's electronic music and research department from 1971-77. No Motowen recordings using Scott's inventions inventions have been publicly identified. He classically fell into obscurity as he aged, ran out of money, had some strokes. Got some renewed interest a few years before he died. The end. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wDio3pjUr8 Same guy!!!

Seems everyone's running with the bad voice acting story today. Ben Kuchera wrote at the end of his op piece: "This is the alpha, so there's plenty of times for the lines to be re-recorded, or replaced or improved through some kind of post-processing effect, but for now they actively weaken a game the Polygon staff has been enjoying." JUST NEEDS MORE FLANGER. (I took a moment and thought about pulling the audio out, dropping it into Logic, adding flanger, exporting the file, uploading it to youtube, then posting it here, and got really tired just thinking about that whole process. So you'll have to use your imagination.)

Bummer! I tried last night after not playing for a solid 2 weeks, and when I chose "Attrition: Expedition", I couldn't find a game for a good 3 minutes. When I switched over to just plain old "Attrition", I was thrown immediately into a lobby with 8 seconds left before the game started. Of course, it was for one of the DLC maps, so if they're rotating DLC maps into the regular queues, that means that the player base is going to be even more split. I had figured that the DLC maps were going to be only in the completely separate queues. This means that buying the DLC gives you more of an opportunity to find a game. (This is the first COD-style online FPS I've played, so I don't know if this is par for the course) But yeah, we're only 3 months after release. Not a great sign that we're already facing long matchmaking times. According to Zampella: "On PC it started off really strong and it's starting to dip a little bit now more than we expected. We're looking at that. What are the reasons? Is it something we're doing wrong? Is it the matchmaking? So we'll pay attention to that and figure out what that is. We want to see it go up." And he also stated in the interview that once the next free patch comes out the team is going to take a break, so I can't imagine that if people aren't interested in playing now, they won't be given a new reason any time soon. I'm still enjoying my time. Inching my way up to level 50.

Origin is weird and doesn't like to automatically update Titanfall. The last time I had a ton of trouble finding games it was because I hadn't updated. Here's hoping it's that for your sake!

Well you've got 2.5 months to come up with the cash! Just stop eating meals. Regarding Dinklage's voiceover: I didn't mind it. Was never made clear who or what he was, but the story seems pretty silly so far. Better to have a purposefully detached/monotone narrator (opportunity for some dry humor?) than someone trying to wring out every last emotion from moon wizards. I recognized Lance Reddick giving some explore mode quests, so that's great! Anyone on the alpha get to try out the Crucible stuff? Is it just standard deathmatch/capture the point stuff?

Hit the level cap at level 8. The ambient "explore" mode is wonderful. You can choose to pick up little tasks one at time, or you can just explore. There are community events like having a giant tank-bug fall down and a 5 minute counter appears. I really like that the main quest is completely separate from the explore mode. It has so many hooks! You can only gain a limited number of arena-combat points a day, which means that kids who have all the time in the world can't just grind away in the first week and get all the cool stuff right away. Shops have counters letting you know how long it will be until inventory resets. Character upgrades tend to feel nicely substantial. There's a whole sub-class thing going on, but I think you have to get higher than level 8 to unlock that stuff. There's just a lot going on that makes you want to keep playing (just one more turn), but also good reasons to "check in" every day, which moves this game into the dangerous to purchase territory. It's just really pretty. I liked being in the world, though combat being the only way of interacting with the world will get tiresome sooner than in something like Skyrim, where you could at least count on odd NPC interactions/quests breaking up the gameplay loop of killing things. Curious to see how much more content is available in the beta, and to hear others' impressions of the alpha.

So far: It's pretty! The day/night cycles are beautiful. From my ship I can choose to go to Earth, where I can choose to either free-roam and look for "quest beacons" or play a story mission set in the same zone (Old Russia). There is what I think is a second story mission, but I can't access it as it requires Playsation Plus. I'm tempted to subscribe just to test out the rest of the content, but this is a short "alpha" and I've already played the available free games for June on PS3. There seems to be a lot to do with the free-roaming, though, so I'm not lacking for content. From my ship I can also go to The Crucible, which I'm guessing is deathmatch-style multiplayer arena combat? It's locked away by Playstation Plus as well. Then there's The Tower, which is a hub-like location. It's in 3rd person, and I can run around and talk to shop keepers, guild peeps, etc. Loading times are a bit much between The Tower and Earth, but nothing overly crazy. It's the first Bungie game I've playing since Marathon Infinity, so I'm not the one to say how much like Halo it feels. The aim-assist feels pretty heavy. Thankfully you don't have to click on items to pick them up like in Borderlands. Overall, though, I'm just running around shooting things, and it's fun. And shiny. The polish is pretty intense. There's got to be a lot of developers mad that Bungie is playing with the definition of "alpha"...

Downloading the alpha now thanks to joncole! I'll be on as BearRawrr tonight (in 8 hours or so...)

Anyone seen Pitch Perfect? I found the main male character to be characteristic of the "nice guy" mentality. He wore her down throughout the entire film until she finally "understood" how great he was. His final line of the movie to her after she and her group just gave their best performance of all time: "I told you so." Ugh. The whole movie was just terrible, but this stood out to me as notable.

Have so much fun! I hope it's so much fun!! Though I love to drink, I'll throw in a vote for not taking a drink beforehand. Something about being completely clear-headed (and a nervous wreck) was exactly what I wanted for our ceremony. But everyone responds to stress differently, so just listen to your body that day!!

This is fun, even if you're not a creepy dude and just want a quick inspirational quote! http://www.vox.com/2014/6/13/5807468/bell-hooks-will-text-creeps-for-you

Alpha is just a 3-day thing that required sign-ups. I signed up and didn't receive an email about it, though I should probably check my PS4 tonight just in case. They're doing a "pre-order the game and you get into the beta" which starts July 17. Maybe they'll also do another limited sign-up towards the end of it just to stress test it? The ads I've been seeing for Destiny look pretty terrible. All third-person shots with stiff animations. I guess it's the low bit rate of ads coupled with in-game footage that makes it look primitive, but geez it doesn't get me jazzed especially with the way everyone is talking about how Activision is putting their marketing muscle into it. Mington, let us know how it plays! Is it just a sleeker Borderlands?

Adzu looked exactly like an Underwater Journey, and then I find out it's being made by some ex-Journey people. I love the setting, but all of the little vignettes had such specific camera angles, makes me wonder how linear it's going to be. Also given Flower/Journey's heavy-handedness with themes, here's hoping they're crafting something a bit more understated. I loved how rough No Man's Guy looked. Maybe it was the quality of the video, but the animations were all a bit stiff, the textures on the outer space stuff we pretty blah, and you can see the mountains being drawn in the first time the ship leaves the planet. The graphical roughness of the demo actually made it all more believable. I got more excited for it because it felt like Hello Games were actually showing us what they've got. I don't love not knowing what we're actually going to do, though. Hopefully they talk more about that as the show goes on. Excited to have a reason to play through Grim Fandango! Not really psyched by much more than that, though. Was surprised (and personally disappointed) to see so much co-op.

I'm a shoes off person for my house. I ask people who come over to take their shoes off as well. Only people I don't ask to do that are people doing us services like landlord or plumber, etc. If I go to someone else's house, though, I just ask if they want my shoes off. If they're fine with shoes on then I leave them on. I don't get anxious about cleanliness, thankfully, but I just know that living in a city means I step in all kinds of stuff all day, and I like to sit on the floor of my apartment in my undies. I have a hair-catcher on the drain, so it would make the daily cleaning of that a bit more gross if it's got a bit of urine residue on it. I don't know of any health concerns, so I wouldn't have a problem with it otherwise.

DLC for MK8, featuring more stares and glares.

Spotify has just the beats for the full album....

After giving up on Don't Starve, I finally got around to playing Minecraft for the first time. Bought two accounts for my wife and I, and we loved it. We got lost a lot in the beginning, and spent a multi-day (irl) epic journey of trying to find each other again (she made the mistake of making a bed way away from home and we didn't realize that all she needed to do was destroy her bed and die to go back to the original spawn point). It was so exciting when we found each other, though I ended up accidentally killing her digging a shelter on the way back - a bit of an Orpheus situation!! Though that was fun, we also spent a lot of time wondering where the rest of the game was. We'd been keeping ourselves from reading wikis as much as possible and we wandered around a lot wondering what to do next. We'd find some crazy resources, but have no clue what to do with them. As soon as we opened the wiki floodgates, the game opened up immensely! Suddenly we had all sorts of things to do! We'd find a singular, new object and instead of hoarding it away hoping to unlock the mystery of the object through happenstance, we'd just look it up. And we're having fun still! So now I'm back at Don't Starve in windowed mode and I have the wiki up at all times. I had never been able to make to winter before, but now I'm through my first and have gotten to Day 55. And it's been a lot more fun! Hooray for knowledge. Beefalos poop in their sleep fyi There are brief moments of feeling like I'm on top of all my supplies, and those are actually the worst moments of the game for me. I have no idea what to do next. I keep building new machines to build new things, but I still find it hard to keep on top of why I should build certain objects. Or, for instance, getting a clear sense of a tech tree. I get a new, rare resource, so I look up its use. The wiki then goes on to describe, "You combine this with the object you get when you do this specific thing to this rare creature, which when combined makes a new tool that you use in this very specific instance." (If it seems unclear, that's exactly what my brain does when I read some of these item descriptions). But. Then I go, "oh shit!" I'm out of brush or twigs or logs or food. And then some dogs attack. And then one explodes on my fertilized crop of brush. And I completely forget all about finding some new thing to do.

Life is Good. ® On jeeps drives me batty!

I enjoyed the challenge rooms quite a bit! I was glad that they gated them, otherwise I would have completely paused the narrative in order to get through each of them all at once. They're all fun, too! Survive, beat the timer, change your build per round. A lot of games make the challenge rooms feel prescriptive (turning an action game into a mechanical puzzle game), but Transistor somehow made me learn new combos while still feeling like I had room to play around. Anyone do a build that didn't rely on Jaunt()? I loved attaching the Corruption function to it, so every time I dashed she'd shoot out little enemy-seeking bullets. Couldn't live without it.

btw, I liked Transistor.

I've been feeling equally down on GoT this season. Brienne and Pod in the episode before the most recent (haven't gotten to the most recent yet) reminded me of the levity and fun the show could have. I was also following this same trajectory with the books, though, finding 4 and 5 to be a steady descent into skimming, so I'm not surprised. I've decided not to continue with the books, but to finish out the show, especially now that the show is just starting to give us glimpses of things that haven't been written.