Ninety-Three

I also tend to regret participation, but that's because I usually disagree with the popular consensus, and never seem to make any progress arguing against it. I'm not sure why I keep trying, probably because I'm bad at pattern recognition.

You can no longer just slam directly into Kerbin at escape velocity, but I've found that you can still get away with some pretty high-speed entries through nothing but good aim. The trick is to aim for the very edge of the planet, that way you lose a lot of your speed going horizontally through the thin high atmosphere.

EA Sports is already what they call their sports games division (they even have a logo they plaster all over things), so it's hard to pick a clever name without colliding there. Wait. Has anyone ever seen them in the same room together?

Have you seen the internet? A lot of people make a lot of absurd arguments.

That is true, but not inherently a good or valid thing. I mean, people getting angry about an identity being done wrong describes a large portion of Gamergate. I'm still not sure what the article's point was. Is it just a comedy article, or is it trying to say "White people are incapable of making good collard greens"?

I haven't bought Fallout 4 yet, not out of reluctance but because I assume it'll take two months for Bethesda to fix the crashes and save corruption, four to fix the other major glitches, and six for modders to fix the UI. So I'm probably the only person in this thread who doesn't yet own Fallout 4. And... Ick. That is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to hear. "Hoover up all the junk and break it into crafting materials! More inventory management! Build settlements to crank out more resources! Character customization really doesn't matter past level ten, it's all about your inventory! Quests and dialogue don't really matter!" It's like they found everything I liked about Fallout and cut it. And the resulting not-Fallout game doesn't even sound good on its own merits, it sounds like an unbalanced mess with no room for player expression (unless you like customizing your settlement's aesthetics). After seeing that video, I don't think I want to get Fallout 4 any more. Am I overreacting, is there still a core of goodness for fans of New Vegas?

It looks like we're going to be doing one movie every two weeks (I like this plan), should we have discussion open for the whole two weeks, or should we go "For the next two weeks the topic is ~~~, you'll have the first week to watch it and form opinions, discussion starts in the second week"?

Oh boy, I am looking forward to inflicting Cars 2 on the rest of you.

I feel like that article largely skips over the economic impact part, which is the major objection a lot of people have to the idea. It cites a few guaranteed income studies in which hours worked didn't substantially decrease, but there's a flaw in assuming that trend would remain when moving from experiment to law. All the experiments analyzed were three-year affairs (no data on the Canadian experiment): everyone involved knew it wasn't permanent. If you tell someone "You have guaranteed income for life" they will feel more comfortable in quitting their job than if you tell them "You have guaranteed income for three years". Of course the only way to fix that problem is to make a very long-term experiment, and protect it from having its funding cut in a decade when someone is elected who dislikes the program. I know nothing about US budget law, is it even possible to set up a program such that its funding can't be cut at a later date?

You at least think Cars 2 is garbage right?

I keep dying to the 5-3 boss, and I have no idea what to do. Every time I get to 5-3 I spawn into a large open area full of enemies, at which point I begin the hectic process of trying to kill an open room without dying horribly, the boss spawns with tons of enemies still alive and things turn into a bullet hell for about ten seconds, then I go splat. Am I just supposed to take Hammerhead or an explosive weapon so that I can dig into the wall and fight the boss somewhere away from all the enemies? Unrelated, I've noticed a strange thing about the grenade launchers. The sticky grenade launcher is just worse than the regular one, since not exploding on contact means the enemy has seconds to either shoot or kamikaze you. Despite that, I find the sticky launcher way more satisfying to use, and I couldn't say why that is. Does anyone else feel this way, and have any idea why? Edit: Also, I've unlocked skins and golden weapons, but from the character select screen it looks like you can somehow unlock crowns too. Despite having gotten crowns, I haven't unlocked them for this screen, does anyone know how that works?

Is Amazon paid stuff region-locked, or can we count on everyone being able to access it? I live outside the US, where Netflix and co. region-lock off most of their content.

Does it even matter? Death threats have become the new hatemail. Where a certain type of person would have made an angry "You suck and your content sucks" post a decade ago, now they make an angry "You suck and I'm going to kill you" tweet. At this point it would be more remarkable if an internet personality with a six-digit audience didn't get death threats.

Ooh, that could be a problem. I don't have Netflix, so I tried to check their catalogue, but I got contradictory information from a few sites, can anyone with direct access to some of the streaming sites check if the Pixar movies are available?

I think one a week (or one every N weeks, lots of people are busy and one week is probably too short) makes sense so we can get that book club thing going where we discuss things one at a time, while they're still fresh. Does anyone else have an opinion on it?

Fun fact: If you switch to the cockpit view, you get an altimeter that accurately reports distance to ground, instead of the useless "distance to sea level" you get in the normal view.

I am actually liking this game a lot. The weird hidden systems are not a deal-breaker (especially since there's few enough of them that a quick trip to the wiki can commit them to memory) and as much as I hate the sucky portals, it doesn't happen that often.

You don't think that was about the cash? I'm sure Double Fine is happy more people are playing their game, but I really doubt their motivation was "This will make people happy" and not "This will make a net profit".

I too am convinced that this is a cash-grab. My immediate thought was "I bet the sum of the episode prices is greater than a AAA pricetag". Now I haven't been following the modern Final Fantasys too closely, but my secondhand impression is that they haven't gotten much better in the plot department. Am I mistaken, or would a rewrite just make it into different garbage?

Oh god it would. God damnit Merus, you've crushed my dreams more thoroughly than any lack of news about the game.

All of the secrets I mentioned are systems I managed to activate accidentally, without understanding them. Without any idea what was happening, I had no appreciation for it. The first time I accidentally opened a crown portal, I didn't go in the scary green vortex, and the second time I only did because I couldn't find the regular portal and assumed the green portal replaced it. I managed to unlock Horror without even realizing I had done something special (I thought it was just a "Get to level X-Y" affair). I assumed Large chests were completely random until the wiki told me otherwise, at which point it felt like the game had been withholding the information for no reason.

Wait what? Did someone finally announce that it was or wasn't canceled?

To be pedantic, you didn't answer my question (except insofar as any possible statement can be considered answering any possible question). "People don't expect others to be pedants" isn't why people do it any more than "I don't expect to get hit by a car" is why I cross the road.

Sigh. Why doesn't this game explain its systems better? If it weren't for the wiki, I wouldn't know about how to spawn large chests, I wouldn't understand the radiation-charged portal, and I'd still think the IDPD were a force like the Spelunky Ghost that spawn to punish you for taking too long. Any other hidden systems I should know about? Edit: That is the worst audio cue. Knowing that it's there, even knowing when it's going to trigger, I cannot hear it. I had to Google it just to make sure it really existed.

They mention in the pitch video that a chunk of their funding is coming from an investor (singular, unnamed), I wouldn't be surprised if that was Notch. If you're talking about the original "Notch funds Psychonauts" thing a year or two ago, he backed off when he realized it was more of $20 million investment than $2 million one.