Erkki

So I decided to get Sleeping Dogs since I had let myself get rather psyched about it during the last 24h. I'm now 3 hours in and its everything I expected and more. The combat is really great, and even when it gets really bloody, it doesn't really focus on the gory details as much as I feared. The driving I can get used to, I guess, but so far it seems a little odd. I really liked how the vehicles in GTA IV handled. But as for style and story, this is way better than the tired old GTA GangsTer's American Dream thing. I don't know whom that was in response to, but I love Far Cry 2... I don't consider it in the same genre, though. A simple way to eliminate it is that it's first person, but the more complicated way is harder to think about. It's not necessarily about cities... or RDR wouldn't qualify either (maybe it shouldn't). Whoa! What are those?

Heh, what do you know. I actually have finished Gay Tony (at 67% and the save game says TBOGT Complete or something). Was a really forgettable one for me I guess. I also have Just Cause 2 which I bought for a couple of bucks from a sale, so now I'm torn between playing that or Saints Row The Third, or getting Sleeping Dogs. I might do the latter actually -- seems I like more buying games than playing them. I did play Bully on the PS2, at least for a few hours. Don't remember if I finished it, but I remember having trouble with the controls at that time. But I had trouble playing GTA III on the PS2 as well. Nowadays I play many PC games with the PS3 controller, though.

Yeah, that's a good one. But the other Bacardis are kind of meh.

I guess what I meant with "GTA clone" is 3rd person open world/sandbox game with lots of driving and probably some amount of combat.

I recently started drinking rum (cocktails), while previously been sticking with beer and wine. I'm not really good with strong alcohol, sipping is out of the question usually, and shots make me cough every time. I was trying out various rums in the 15-20€ range (I realize alcohol prices are very relative, that's the price range for e.g. the Bacardi or Captain Morgan rums here) and ended up buying about 10 rums from local shops over a month or so (most were on sale). My favourite so far is this, Santiago de Cuba Ron Añejo: It seems to go especially well with coke, but I haven't tried it in other cocktails. I'm rather new to the world of cocktails actually, so I've only made cuba libres (or some variation), mojitos and piña coladas. I tried dark rum + Dr. Pepper but didn't like that much, even though I love Dr. Pepper. Maybe I should try again as I just mixed it rather randomly once and it might have been the wrong kind of Dr. Pepper. Anyway, this rum is really smooth with coke, there is no unpleasant side taste. Almost every other rum I've tried has some unwanted side taste it seems (Captain Morgan Jamaica Rum being the worst so far). I've also tried it neat, and while it's slightly better than others, drinking neat isn't really for me, but on the rocks with a bit of carbonated water and a drop of lime juice added it's pretty good. IMHO, there is no point in ever buying Bacardi or Captain Morgan again when you can get this for about the same price. Except when you want white rum maybe... But then there is also Santiago De Cuba Ron Carta Blanca, in a similar bottle as the Añejo. That isn't as good as this, but I like it as well.

Well, despite my doubts about whether I'll like the style of humor, I decided to go ahead and buy some kind of ultimate Saints Row pack since it was so cheap on Steam right now. I now have SR2, 3 and 4 and I think all of the DLC.

Actually I haven't finished it. I started, but didn't get very far before I quit for a reason I don't remember.

This Sleeping Dogs quick look makes it look interesting -- especially the environmental hand-to-hand combat. I love that kind of stuff. I guess it will get pretty gross later in the game, though. The vehicle physics seem kind of low-quality, but I could probably ignore that.

Congrats!

I was also kind of set into the mode of scouring each accessible corner of the world by the first traps puzzle and the . It was a bit irritating, but I feel like it was more my own fault than the game's. I didn't have to backtrack, though, as I found everything in the right order (except at first, which I may have posted about here earlier) including all the secrets. One time I almost got stuck (failing to see the valve) and took the elevator near the dam back up. I almost turned to reading a FAQ, but figured that it was highly unlikely the game really wanted me to go back up there. Like elmuerte, it took me a while to find where to proceed, though. I also agree that the horror bit was awful. . Also the only part of the game that I didn't fully complete, I think. It was just too annoying to simultaneously stay out of that guy's way and find the secrets. Like I think there was probably a second piece of that note in the big cave underneath the portal? And I only found 5 dead men (maybe that was intentional, as the sixth was still roaming around? I liked the house puzzle a lot! At the end I wish there would have been a quicker way back to the first train scene (it seems obvious to want to re-watch that after the ending unless you have perfect memory or at least played through in one sitting).

Actually another explanation might be that since my K400 or the USB ports have been acting up, a mouse event was caused without a physical button press. Anyway, if there were ethics in game journalism, this wouldn't happen!

Does the Idle Thumbs website pages for Twin Peaks podcast play a sound after some time has passed? From the source it doesn't seem so, but I was listening to Episode 1 and went to sleep, leaving the page and computer open. More than an hour later, I heard this sound that was similar to the opening theme of the podcast... Really creeped me out and for a second I thought someone was remotely controlling my computer (I have a fever so my thoughts tend to be crazier than normal). It could have been that the computer went to sleep, but came out of it since I had uTorrent running and that somehow caused a browser event to play the episode for 10 seconds...

And so even though we face the SWJs of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day these gamers will rise up and live out the true meaning of the Assassin's Creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all game reviews are created objective and ethical."

So it went up on youtube before the countdown ended? How anti-climatic

I am willing to donate 100$ towards getting that guy disbarred

Page 500! Time to celebrate with rum! I kind of became a rum *purchasing* addict in a few weeks of not drinking beer/wine due to an inflammation. A friend of mine who also likes rum suggested to check out the specials and indeed there are specials in almost every store on relatively good rums. And now I have to somehow consume all that rum I bought. I can only drink it in cocktails though, been having a cuba libre or two per evening.

I tried to engage a gamergater-friendly game developer on Twitter a couple of days ago, expecting someone with some intelligence, but he responded like any gamergater, using talking points that are repeated to death. Then another one started to talk to respond. Both linked to a video interview with 3 gamergater girls, who were also just repeating the talking points, and one said that "feminism [etc] is just irrelevant [in games (writing?)]). Both of the gamergaters were like and As if everything were somehow obvious from that video... and as if that gave legitimacy to everything. What the fuck are these people smoking. To be honest I wasn't very nice in my tweets either, being rather sad that an game that seemed really interesting at first was being made by a gamergater... [edit]"it's about journalistic integrity and this is what's important. Women are not important in this discussion about ethics... [something about black people] ... all that matters is your game... [why do you think misogyny keeps coming up?]..." AARGHHHH!!!! "The real issue is that we have a terrible problem of nepotism and cronyism..." ... "A review needs to be objective" ... "we just want to know if the game is good" AARRRRGH!!! Link to time where this starts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qtzrUsi6Y1s#t=468

[edit] removed stupid post

What would it mean for GG to be right? It doesn't even have a coherent stand on ethics in game journalism. Journalists who have tried to find out what it is have been led in circles. (see links in the last few pages). How can it be right when it doesn't have a viewpoint beyond "lets harass woman while pretenting to be anti-harassment".

I wonder if the fact that halloweensafety.gov doesn't exist is another layer in the joke?

I finished 100% and got all achievements. Steam tells me I played for 46 hours, but I think it was more like 38 as I left it in sleep mode one night and steam seemed to think I was playing all this time. Really awesome game, although the story is dumb and the portrayal of women is... not the best.

Looks interesting, although I haven't played Banner Saga yet. What is Moebius?

we demand video evidence next time it happens!

Wow, I hadn't been following this shit lately, especially as I don't use Twitter that much any more, but I caught up with the last two weeks of posts in this thread over the weekend and holy shit, this gamergate movement is so absurd that it hurts my brain to even try to come up some rational explanation for it. To read the 8chan threads linked by waxy.org for example, they seem as convinced that they are the good guys here as we here know that the truth is the opposite. I have to admit, though, that when I started reading this thread yesterday, being unaware of any actual recent developments, I was kind of bothered by some people here taking single tweets or posts by one person and equating that to "gamergate says this", but I've now come to understand that if we were to not do that, it would appear as somehow giving legitimacy to some part of the movement, which should really be condemned entirely. There is no single thing worth saving about it. Their ethics concerns still haven't progressed much further from the Zoe Quinn "conspiracy". There really is no point here to consider separately the gamergate movement and some extreme people in it that are probably making the death threats and carrying out the harassment, because not many in the gamergate movement seem to want to distance themselves from that, even as a PR move, which a few smarter people in the movement seem to be suggesting.

Holy shit. I grew up with a lot of this anti-disco sentiment (many of the boys I played with in my neighborhood were into metal, and had older brothers/fathers whom I guess this came from). I even used to draw some anti-disco comics with my best friend in the first grade. And I think some residue of all of that is still with me influencing my music taste today, more than 20 years later. I hadn't realized the roots of all of this before now.