toblix

What? There was one on the Xbox ... Also, you have to fire that one shot.

Though I haven't throughout my life consistently never supported artists with political views I disagree with, I cancelled my pledge after reading this: http://gaygamer.net/2011/05/on_ratfist_doug_tennapel_and_w.html. Looks like a great game, but knowing I'd backed him made me uncomfortable. Not that it matters – they're not going to raise the remaining 40% in 9 days.

I promised someone I'd find them a peacock butterfly and I tried I really did but I couldn't find one anywhere!!!

Ah, thanks, those hotkeys are sweet! I wonder if they planned to tell me about them. They told me how to do it the hard way (though not about clicking the character to unequip.) Did I miss anything? But yes, sure, all that cool stuff is what led me to buy it in the first place. With the hotkeys, my biggest complaint has been rendered invalid, but I'm still flabbergasted that they released the game with all the rest of the weird interface stuff. That stuff doesn't automatically stack is seriously mind-blowing to me, and such a huge issue that my trust in Nintendo as a high-quality game developer is shaken to its very core and full of cracks, etc. I've played a lot of Mario games, and I'm always pleased at how polished everything is, and this is like a completely opposite thing. Anyway, now that I'll be able to fish and net and shake at will like some ninja, I'll definitely keep visiting once a day.

No, I definitely see the appeal, and it was very satisfying to able to hand Nook the first ten grand, and finding a rare butterfly is totally sweet. There's just so much annoying stuff that I now associate the game with terrible inventory management and tedious dialogue instead of what I'm supposed to be having fun doing. I'm walking around and see a sweet fish or whatever – oh shit, now I have to spend a million years in my inventory screen to switch to my fishing rod. Want to shake that tree? Enter the inventory screen and hit the character, and then the option for unequipping whatever I'm holding. The fucking arbitrary cursor that makes everything exist somewhere between pure button and stylus-based navigation. Why am I moving a mouse cursor around with my a joystick? What is this, North & South for the Amiga?! Want to visit the museum to get something checked out and maybe donate it? Hey, do a million conversations and weird dialogue that branches differently based on whether you selected one item or more than one. This game is tiny – why are there loading screens between everything (the game is probably not to blame, since the 3DS is pathetically slow in everything it does.) My impression is that they either developed this game in a terrible way, so that they made last minute changes that turned out unfortunate (adding the joystick cursor as a last-minute replacement for the stylus,) or that they're intentionally adding time-consuming bullshit everywhere to make the player feel more satisfied when they finally get something done. I should mention that I've only played this game for maybe an hour or two, and that I have no knowledge of any legacy stuff they're bringing with them from the sequels that makes perfect sense for super-fans. Also, there's a bunch of stuff I love about the game, so the reason I don't understand why people love it so, is that I don't get how they put up with everything being so damn tedious.

Yes. This game is the biggest collection of terrible, terrible design decisions I've come across in a while. There's just so much wrong with the user interface, I don't see why everyone is so jazzed about the game – the stuff that does work has to become fucking amazing at some point.

Your code is actually 1478-3817-4878.

Okay, I've jacked into this thing. What do I do? I sold some flowers and bought a shovel, which I used to dig up a bunch of fossils. Hopefully my house is done tomorrow. edit: And of course I donated them to the museum; I'm not some piece of shit.

That's what you get for starting before me.

Hey now, that's not fair. They're not that expensive, considering they're supposed to provide 5+ years of non-stop entertainment. During those years there are bound to be fantastic platform exclusives. They won't go down much in price either, if the Xbox 360 and PS3 is anything to go by. I don't think it's that ridiculous.

No. I was sitting at my desk at work and I noticed that it was available for pre-ordering on the Microsoft store, which I thought was interesting since I hadn't considered that Microsoft would sell and ship physical products and before I knew it I had bought one. I also pre-ordered a PS4, but not from Microsoft. My reasoning for just going ahead and getting these is that I know myself well enough that I'm too interested in the technology to be able to ignore a new console (except the Wii U of course,) and there are always those platform exclusives that tear and claw at me, so I'll end up getting them at some point – so why not just get it over and done with?

I've gotten to the Madam fight, and though it's generous with the checkpoints, I really can't be bothered to try more. I'm probably about halfway and feel like I'm playing the most generic video game ever made. This boss fight that relies on luck (picking the right one out of a group of boss copies, getting punished for trying the wrong ones) made me realise I'd rather be doing anything else. I think the best part of this game may have been the music.

The whole deal with holding doors for people is so problematic in general, I wonder why there isn't more focus on eliminating manual doors entirely.

Today I set a new record in transitioning from «not really interested, I'll wait» to having pre-ordered one. Aside: Someone mentioned that the term «pre-ordering» meant the same as just «ordering,» which I guess is technically true. I guess these days «ordering» carries the connotation that the thing is available for delivery.

Utrecht? I hardly know her!

And so it begins.

Sure, a Mirror's Edge MMO might be sweet, but no matter what is revealed about this game until its release, people will freak out about EA not "getting" it. Obviously they'll be interested in making it appeal to fans of the first game, but also to cool bro gamers. Trailers will be combat-heavy and there will be combos and sweet takedowns. They might start talking about DLC and season passes, and how you will be able to upgrade or customize your runatar to show-off to your bro friends on Runlog. Everyone will explode in rage a million times before this thing is out. But it'll probably be good.

EXCUSE ME for making a separate thread for this – just want to make sure people get the message. We'll be doing another one of the at this point traditional Steam chats during all the big keynotes of next week's E3. To get in on the fun, you have to be a member of the Idle Thumbs Steam group, and then enter the group chat. I thought maybe I could do the thing where I update this post as things develop. WHAT IS SCHEDULE Konami - Thursday, June 6 @ 10:30 AM PDT / 1:30 PM EDT / 5:30 PM GMT Microsoft - Monday, June 10 @ 9:30 AM PDT / 12:30 PM EDT / 4:30 PM GMT Electronic Arts - Monday, June 10 @ 1:00 PM PDT / 4:00 PM EDT / 9:00 PM GMT Ubisoft - Monday, June 10 @ 3:00 PM PDT / 6:00 PM EDT / 11:00 PM GMT Sony - Monday, June 10 @ 6:00 PM PDT / 9:00 PM EDT / 2:00 AM GMT Nintendo - Tuesday, June 11 @ 7:00 AM PDT / 10:00 AM EDT / 3:00 PM GMT (ON NINTENDO DIRECT) HOW IS JOIN THE GROUP CHAT Join the Idle Thumbs Group on Steam, Open the Friends window, Open the Groups tab, Click the little drop-down next to Idle Thumbs Select Join group chat room. WHERE IS STREAMING Konami: Who knows?Microsoft: Xbox Live Xbox.com SpikeTV Electronic Arts: Maybe here?Ubisoft: Ubi.com YouTube UPlay Sony: Playstation Blog (US/EU) Playstation.com Ustream Virtual E3 booth in Playstation Home! Facebook Google Plus Nintendo: Nintendo Direct MORE QUESTION Is there a hyperlink to a web page that makes it possible for international thumbs to make sense of E3 time? Where will the things be streamed? What's the URL for Nintendo Direct? Greetingz to: I_smell shinobi602

Yeah, that was right before the end. Hardest fight in the game by far, and not fun. The rest was fun, though. Boom!

Never mind. It was the creature in the park and after a pause and a couple more tries, I figured it out. Also, I'm just assuming I'm close to the end, because if not, holy fuck.

Ah, so in the end, fuck this game. Some fantastic sequences throughout, great graphics, nice stealth sequences, and then, suddenly a frustrating boss battle that highlights the very worst this game has to offer – hectic combat with lots of enemies. So close to the end, too.

This is great. It'll obviously keep the important aspects of the original, like a strict first-person view, focus on traversal and ability to play non-killingly, and it will probably get a bit too much of the EA triple-A treatment, and there will be headlines about it that will get people up in arms because it's this wonderful, precious treasure of a game that EA's too evil and greedy to treat with the proper care and respect, and it shouldn't be about massive multiplayer or playing on all your tablets or whatever, but it will probably still be great, at least much better than TITANFALL.

It's much more likely they're just happy Microsoft went ahead and did it first, so they don't get that much shit when they announce practically the same thing tonight. These deals were probably made long ago – if they're having second thoughts, there's nothing they can do at this point. That's my guess, anyway.

Chris (topher Remo) got me into the NY Times Crosswords app by mentioning it somewhere, and for the last months I've given every new daily puzzle a go, though I never actually complete any of them. Has anyone else tried that app? How well do you usually do, and what's your process? Mine is: Go over each row and fill in the ones I'm certain about («ACTOR PESCI») in black, and those I'm pretty sure of in grey. Do the same for each colum. Repeat until I'm not making any progress. I never do the thing where I switch between words to figure out multiple ones at the same time, since the UI makes that clunky. Also I never look anything up, because I consider it cheating – how about you? US sports stuff is usually the bane of my crossword solving efforts. Crosswords!

Sweet! I'm not the only one having weird calendar problems with the NY Times app!