MrHoatzin

I don't think there is such a thing. One of the first dates with my wife, we hijacked a random amphitheater at the university in the middle of the night and watched Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde. Don't think of it as entertainment to pass the time, so much as a vetting process.

Man, you got a bunch of random strangers invested into solving a weird puzzle, the reward of which is knowing the identity of your future employer. That is a pretty impressive power you wield there, Remo.

Is there some place on the internet where these commands are written, or do I have to try out the whole keyboard for myself?

Ok, wtf, how do I make the downloaded client go full screen, short of maximizing the window?

We are all so cute!

Man, this is what I would have expected from Ebert, alas.

You know how Monopoly was supposedly made by some socialists who wanted to illustrate the stupidity and inherent unfairness of the free market system? Well, this game looks like it's been made by bums or guerrillas and the takeaway is supposed to be that life as a productive member of society is unfulfilling bullshit.

Oh, man, I am way behind on the podcasts and then I accidentally stumbled into this thread with its numerous Fuck You Chrises (Fucks You Chris? Fuck Yous Chris?)... Idle Thumbs seem fated never to be constant for any length of time. It is a miracle this site has held up for any time at all, actually. But, hey, whatever! Congrats on your vague new job!

What a bizarre, incomprehensible monstrosity!

Every time I travel I buy the next Zelda game and wear out my DS Disgaea. I come to the very end of the final level, and that is where I completely lose my interest. The only Zelda games I have finished were Link to the Past (since that was my first Zelda game ever to play) and Link's Awakening (because it was so weird and demanded resolution). Both of the newer DS games I have abandoned at the exact crest of the experience where the final boss battle becomes obnoxious. In Twilight Princes I didn't even get to the boss battle proper. I realized that I had opened most of the locations that I could open and was done with the whole thing at the staircase towards the final battle.

Murdoc, dude, you should apply for all kinds of financial aids even those you think you may not qualify for. When I was starting college, I didn't think someone with my visa status could qualify as a permanent resident for the purposes of student aid and in-state tuition, however my father made me apply anyway for all the standard governmental grants and loans and it turned out I did, in fact, qualify. Shit could still turn out just fine with the family cosigners. And even then, I doubt all avenues are really depleted.

You remember how Manny Calavera doesn't really know much about the backstory? He says something like, "I want to punch you in the mouth." And Domino replies, "Oh no, not the Christmas party all over again." And then the player can click, "What happened at the Christmas party?" to which Domino replies, "Still blanked out on the whole thing are you?" This kind of dealio establishes quite nicely a bit of backstory that is really not all that complicated but it fills you in on quite a lot of vague things with not that many words. Plus, as the player is looking for information in the world, clicking on random things, the game gives them an option of asking a question that is really asked through the fourth wall; Manny ought to have learned by then about what happened at the Christmas party, and maybe have gotten bitter about it all, what with the party needing to have happened more than ten months previously. The game then refuses to allow the fourth wall to be messed with, by attributing Manny's amnesia to a big night of drinking. Granted, Grim Fandango is more about atmosphere than plot. The Witcher, I would imagine, is the opposite. And Manny fills the player in a lot of the time too. Just saying that characters can happen to not remember. It can be done less conspicuously than pulling out a full-on amnesia plot point which allows the creators to use every single NPC to funnel tomes and tomes of encyclopedic backstory upon the player at the slightest provocation. As far as the weakness of the starting character as a necessary evil, the starting enemies don't always have to be rats and dogs and grunt-level troops. All the enemies could be portrayed as badasses from the getgo, why not? Or the player character could be suffering from malaria or some physical ailment like that that they have to overcome. Amnesia is always unnecessary, always too convenient and tidy.

Fit or not, it's lazy.

elmuerte! A present for your birthday!

What gets me is the utter absence of self-awareness, irony.

Garth Marenghi's Dark Place is pretty fn rad. Did these dudes do anything similarly awesome recently?

Man, I forget that this nook of the internet is, well, nice. I spend a fair bit of time with my wife who is a goon, and her kind does things like this. Actually, I don't think I'll link to the thread, it will just make things worse. Low down: Some poor lady who thought liarpedia.org contained an actual article about her (after searching the site for her own name apparently), flipped out and started screaming libel, ruined reputation, weeping children, stress upon her marriage, etc... Anyway, they are making her life even more miserable now by posting all kinds of crazy things about her allegedly doing, and the Something Awful forums have quite a bit of instant Google juice... If you're interested in the whole dealio, the thread's name is “Don't use my name illegally!” and it is in the E/N Bullshit subforum. To be fair, my wife (whom I've just, I guess, blamed wholesale for my own insensitivity), is one of the people trying to calm things down in that thread. But still, goon is a norm for internet interactions. And "aspergy goon" is an archetype I've heard her invoke relatively often. So it is her fault I'm largely desensitized to such offhanded and crass damnation of a whole group of people.

tm_drummer, regarding Alice falling off to her death: If I remember correctly, there was a check box somewhere in the settings that would create an glowy arabesque in the game world, as an aid in aiming Alice's jumps. A very after-the-fact kind of fix, but it does its job.

I liked what Rodi liked, but I wouldn't use any of the words he used. I don't think it is necessarily a smart movie, par se, but that it is a very smartly put together conceit. The dream logic is way too complex and reliable and tight and the dreams never get as insane as they could've, considering they're dreams. But, I really did enjoy the complexity of the invention. He set out to invent this dream machine, then put limits on how it can be used and never seemed to invoke it as a deus ex machina, which could've been done by a less competent director.

There is a certain kind of dorkiness in his presentation that annoys me.

I hate the dude's aspergy demeanor. I would like to see that keyboard used for something other than demos of said keyboard.

The only other time they released a half-finished game was with the last W&G game and that property was obviously abandoned as the company shifted focus to Monkey Island. The game wasn't buggy, it just didn't have as much polish as the earlier ones. I hope this doesn't mean that the last S&M game of season three will be as broken if not moreso, as the teams move over to making stuff for Universal.

Yes and yes. The elevator can be used to go back to the area with the kitchenette, but then it would disappear, apparently going back to the platform. I did try reinstalling, but it didn't do anything. And another bonus annoyance: some of the animation cycles were pretty jaggy, as if there wasn't any smooth transition between different cycles. This was particularly egregious while . A fair bit of the other instances of jumpiness were the product of getting all the actors back into the positions they were supposed to be in before a vision moved them into a different place, pose and animation cycle; just a fraction of a second of a model sliding across the floor and settling in the expected place. I wonder if all of these were issues where the processor cycle rate is off sync with some internal timers or something like that. My PC is getting old, other people don't seem to be noticing these crazy glitches, it could be that my setup just fell through some sort of hardware testing gap. ALSO: I didn't have any similar issues with the other episodes so far, except for a few lost hotspots here and there and one time one of the characters, I don't remember who exactly or where, standing around in the default modeling pose, with arms outstretched.

Am I the only one for whom this game is as buggy as shit? WTF??! ARRRGHHH. :( Pardon the ridiculous run-on, tense/person shifting nature of this list, I am a bit exasperated by the bugginess. So far I've encountered: Random disappearing hotspots, Characters teleporting all over the place mid sentence, with the game thinking that they're still elsewhere: , Invariably, when I go into Max mode and come out, I may be in the other zone of a room, with something broken in the interface, S&M will keep holding props in real life that they held a second earlier in a vision, Rhinoplasty gets embedded in Charlie Ho-Tep's gut when taking him out and putting him back away, The inventory button box gets stuck at 30° angle in some rooms, Sam falls through the floor after taking the elevator from the clone control room, The first time I tried to take And if I've somehow managed to get off the elevator successfully and buglessly, S&M walk off the frame to the right, the camera pans/jitters to the left and catches the two of them as they seem to fall into place off-frame to the left, as if they walked behind the camera and entered the shot on the stupid side. There is no reason for it and it feels super weird and glitchy. The post-it notes Sam puts on the funky machine in the Bosco Tech lab while one played with it didn't actually end up on the machine most of the time, they would levitate somewhere in front of Sam's chest while in the medium shot of the machine. The seance mechanics were so badly outlined, This is the most infuriating Telltale game yet. And the season was peerless so far. Did other PC-playing people have any of these issues too?

Can I live without this t-shirt? :buyme: