prettyunsmart

I haven't done any MvM before, but I'd like to give it a try (along with regular TF2) if anyone is bored and doesn't mind playing with a rather clumsy soldier.

OK, that's pretty rough. I get why it happens (mostly that they're all really good films for teaching some basic film theory stuff), but you'd hope you'd get some variation in five different classes, even if it is a different Kurosawa film.

Well, they may be over-done, but all four of those are really fantastic.

So, any thoughts on when to get started, and what film to start with?

If you have the horn, you can activate it just as the blue shell would hit you, you can defend against it.

I kind of like the unlocking aspect. Collecting coins to get more car parts has been an attainable goal keeping me invested in the game, even as I've convinced myself I'm never going to 3 star all the 150CC courses.

The Sean vs. Obama saga could make for a pretty good animation, though it spanned a whole bunch of episodes, so it's hard to say where to start. The only episode title that sticks in my head is , but there are so many more than that.

I'm in. I'd probably get DVDs from the library rather than Hulu plus, but film club generally sounds fun.

I just think of a depressing Feist song. http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=kp&v=Ob1CdTLDj10

I ended up grabbing a copy of the first game and the cable as it was going for as much as the cable was by itself. I'm really enjoying it so far. I played guitar pretty regularly about 5 years or so ago, but have been steadily falling off since. This seems like a good semi-structured way to get back into it now that I'm not 17 and in a shitty punk band anymore. About the 2014 edition, how much better is it? I'm thinking I'll grab it if it goes on a Steam sale, but I'm just wondering how much it would be worth since I'm just getting started with the original.

This version of a Mario 2 song is pretty good.

GOG is having a summer sale, including Kentucky Route Zero, Shadowrun, Papers, Please and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Killing soldiers without a thought is one of the more troubling parts of gaming culture at the moment, but I think the reason most people accept it is that the most common image we get of soldiers in the media is fighting in these kinds of constant battles (even if a significant number of soldiers actually work in the motor pool, sit behind a computer, or fly a drone from a strip mall in Nevada). That said, I'm more unsettled by the player in the role of a police officer shooting a perpetrator on sight. I know this is basically re-skinned Battlefield game, so it ultimately just plays like Battlefield, but the police being portrayed as a military force and anyone who breaks the law as an enemy combatant seems extra disturbing. So, I guess shooting soldiers should feel wrong, shooting cops feels wrong, shooting criminals (without following proper procedure) feels wrong, and maybe Battlefield: Hardline just feels wrong.

I played through A Story About My Uncle today, which sounds like a very personal, emotional, narrative-driven game. In fact, it's a game about swinging around in caves with a grappling hook and rocket boots. The story is framed a lot like The Princess Bride with a father telling a bedtime story to his daughter about his explorer uncle and the one time he tried to follow him on his adventures. The premise and some of the execution are pretty charming (the times when it becomes clearest that you are hearing a father tell his daughter a tall tale are the strongest), but the game suffers, at least in the English translation, from some awkward phrasing and uneven voice acting. The character animations aren't too great either, with one particular set of NPCs looking far more unsettling than they probably should (I'll edit this post with a screenshot later if I remember). In spite of that, the game feels really good to play. Jumping and swinging generally work really well and give a real sense of speed. While other first person platformers weren't my thing (looking at you Mirror's Edge), I really ended up enjoying this one. My only mechanical hang-up is that toward the end of the game, some of the platforming segments got a bit long, so failing them several times was a bit frustrating. Overall, .

Sean brought Rocksmith up on the podcast yesterday, so I remembered that I was kind of interested in this game. I used to play guitar pretty frequently a few years ago, but then grad school and other things made me put it aside for a while. Rocksmith seems like a good enough way to get back into it. I was wondering if anyone had thoughts on the best way to get the game at the moment. I was originally looking to just buy the cable on its own and then order it on Steam, but the cable is $30 on its own, and the game on Steam is still $60. Amazon sells the game and cable for $40, which seems alright, but it's on a disc, so that's unfortunate (my PC doesn't have an optical drive, but I could probably borrow a USB DVD drive from somewhere). Am I missing a smarter way to get a hold of the game?

It seems like some people in this thread know a fair amount about lifting, so I thought I'd throw a question out to everyone. I've tried just googling information about lifting, but there are so many different options and they're all geared toward people way more serious about this than I am, so I thought I'd ask other Thumbs for assistance. I've been doing cardio pretty consistently about 5 days a week for the last 6 months or so, but recently I've been becoming more convinced that I should work in some strength training for more effective weight loss/my general well-being. The last couple of weeks, I've been running 3 days a week and doing a relatively random full-body circuit thing at my university's gym. I feel like I'm getting a decent enough workout, but I was wondering if anyone know some good programs to help me get a bit more structure. Ideally, I'm looking for something 2-3 days a week with an emphasis on burning fat more than body building. Thanks in advance!

So, currently you can only do the dog fighting module with three ships. One is the entry level one which costs around $35, one is the mid-tier ship which runs around $60, and the "best dog fighting ship" costs around $125. The crazy star destroyer-like things are the ones that cost about $2000 each, but I have no idea when people would even be able to fly one of those. I think they would only go online with the persistent universe module which is a year or two away still.

The Disney executive rock star experience reminded me of a Sarah Vowell story about attending a "rock and roll fantasy camp," which I guess is where aging musicians try to let rich old people live out their musical fantasies while slowly dying inside. I don't remember which book it's in, but she read a version of it on This American Life. It's totally worth listening to.

Hard to say. It gets really messy since in addition to the always wonderful multiple currency things that free-to-play games tend to do, all the resources have multiple levels of refinement which left me feeling like I had more resources on me than I did. For example, I had about 5000 dirt. Just to lay out the outline of my house, I thought that would be enough. The problem was, it takes 27 dirt to make each small cube of dirt, so the 5000 dirt I had ran out far more quickly than I expected (I didn't even get to outline two sides of the house). For wood, you take your axe to a tree, and it spits out raw wood, which you then have to refine into planks (which can only be done at a central hub, which is probably really far from your claim, since spots near it tend to go first). Those planks then have the same 27/cube ratio, and they get used up really quickly too. As far as how much money it would cost to actually do the things I want to do, I have no idea. It seems like a game designed to allow for spending unlimited money if you are short on time, or none at all if you have unlimited time. For me, the fact that the cash shop is there as an option will just make me suspicious of the game's whole economy. The cynic in me assumes the resource system is tuned to be tedious to encourage purchases, even if that isn't the case. Other stupid things: Your claim expires if you don't pay an upkeep fee of 300 copper a day. It actually doesn't take too long to gather that much, but it just feels like the sort of thing meant to inconvenience players further (and likely will be a thing you can pay to turn off). Ultimately, the game's economy has robbed the resource gathering part of the game, which I sometimes enjoy in a meditative/mindless way in games like Minecraft or Starbound, from any fun it might have had. Video games, I guess.

I played about an hour of Landmark (better known as Minecraft: Everquest Edition)last night before realizing how gross it is. I came by a temporary beta pass, and I initially liked the look of the game. Little things about it bothered me from the start, like how you have to click every time you swing your pick, or how the game reverts to windowed mode every time you alt-tab out of it. Still, I was kind of enjoying it for a little while. I found a plot of land on top of a cliff to claim as my own, and I started sketching out plans for a House on the Rock sort of thing. Then, I realized how many materials I was going to need to make even a small version of the house I was planning (it was a lot). Since this is a free-to-play game, you can buy materials: a big bundle of wood will set you back some amount of real money, or some of the rarer gemstones (which you need to make all of the better tools for some reason) will cost a considerably larger amount of real money. I was really hoping they would make their money off of cosmetics or other similar things, but the idea of a Minecraft-like that seems tuned to make you pay for materials is just more than I can handle.

I was wondering if there were any games starting soon. I've always meant to try the game, but everyone I talk to about it thinks it sounds dumb and/or scary.

Wait, I wasn't paying attention. The name of the Tomb Raider sequel is apparently "Rise of the Tomb Raider." That sounds more like an Idle Thumbs episode title than the name of an actual game. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/09/e3-2014-tomb-raider-rise-sequel-trailer/

I wish it was Space Egypt. From what I understand so far, the second-class citizen stuff matters mostly at this point since people who pay more have access to the nicer ships now. Eventually in the single player and persistent universe parts, you can buy everything with in-game money. It all will come down to how easy it is to just play the game and work up to having a bigger ship. If I can enjoy my time earning enough money to buy the in-game equivalent of a Firefly, I'll be happy.

All the bigger Sleeping Dogs DLC packs are really weird, but in a pretty good way. There's the zombie/ghost/demon one, one that's basically the plot of Enter the Dragon, and another that gives you a talking police car. It takes the game from the semi-grounded crime story into Saint's Row territory, but DLC is the right place to get that wacky usually (like Red Dead's zombie stuff).

From what I understand, Star Citizen will eventually be a lot like Freelancer, though right now, it is just a mini-space-flight-sim/AI-fighting hoard mode thing. I'm actually with Dewar in that the combat isn't what I'm excited for. I'm much more interested in the free-roam part of Star Citizen, but that is a long way out. X-Rebirth and Elite Dangerous might both have their merits, but the reviews on X and the current price tag on ED are keeping me away for now.