Ben X

Yep, and I clarified that I was criticising the way we did that achievement, not the achievement itself. OMG NEW PAGE! HOW EMBARRASSING AND EXCITING AND UNUSUAL!

Yeah, I wouldn't have gone to the dog thing otherwise. I didn't need to find a way, you laid it out and paved it with gold!

I was counting fun as a reward, one which we didn't get. It was an example of someone getting an achievement for its own sake, without enjoying doing it or gaining any material benefit. As others have said, achievements can be fun, it's people doing them when they're not that I don't understand.

Yeah, agreed.

But... but there's only a joke if you have already referred to yourself as literally being a wolf!

I'm still waiting for opinions on Mel Gibson's Hamlet... Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe has started up again. First ep started off very strong but got bogged down in shitty contributors as usual - Philomena Clunk's sub-Ali G stuff is particularly dreadful.

I couldn't agree more with Jake/Sean about achievements popping up over narrative games (or however it was phrased). I actually emailed Gaben once to complain about it when Steam kept on destroying my Half Life 2 immersion. It's become easier to turn that all off now, but it's still not that obvious how to do. I don't understand the whole achievement/trophy chasing thing - it rarely if ever translates to free games or anything like that, right? I was playing Portal 2 co-op recently, and my mate insisted we spend 15 frustrating, dull minutes trying to get the achievement for jumping through all four portals in one go. Eventually he had to go find a youtube video and follow that. Mindlessly following external prompts for zero reward - it's like a rat in a maze without any cheese at the end. It's like with people trying to 100% games (ie collect all the things) - I've noticed people here criticising games before for that aspect not being fun - it's because the developers haven't designed the game around that; they just slap some stuff in because it's on the "things people want" list, whether it's good design or not. Similarly, the achievements in Grim Fandango Remastered, to pick a recent example, are completely meaningless because they're things that are either inevitable or very likely to in every playthrough. Of course, some games do try to integrate it into their design properly, but this can taint the main thrust of the game design. Rayman Origins, for example, is a beautifully presented, flowing platformer. But so much time, level design and screen space is given over to the collecting aspect of it that it really drags down the overall experience. So many rules and collectible variants and exchange rates and unskippable tottings-up and locked character rooms.

Is it only the ones who are literally canines?

Ha ha, yeah, EA's motivational guidelines:

He's done some classics but also a load of hack jobs where he just slings a load of characters and moments at the canvas at random. Unfortunately, it seems that the latter have influenced subsequent poster design a lot more than the former.

Yes! I just posted that on my girlfriend's Facebook because she hates that error! This should be, I'm pretty sure, "my wife's and my current project". Basically, if you take out one, the other should still work. "For my wife and me", "My wife and I did this".

Damn. Okay, it's not guaranteed that fans of TITE will like The Interview. Maybe those that prefer TITE to Neighbours (which I thought was weak) are guaranteed to like The Interview..!

Only a quarter of my Thumbs Forums twitter feed members have Manny Calavera avatars, I'm disappointed.

You're taking all the Christmas out of it, is what you're doing!

I also really enjoyed The Interview. If you liked This Is The End, you'll like this. I preferred it to ********* Express. I watched The Machine, Ex Machina and Big Hero 6 recently and didn't think much of any of them.

Fucking hell, Apple, that's sickening. Well done for surviving and writing about it.

That's good, because I'm not enjoying many of the lead performances very much so far.

Just watched S01e11 while my girlfriend pottered around in the background half paying attention, and at one point she exclaimed in reference to Claudia Black, "Ugh, she is the worst actress in the world!"

Also, I took that photo early in the morning on my phone.

Christmas is blue-tinted, everyone knows that.

Okay, okay, NOW it's properly snowing in Cambridge and hence Christmas 2015 has properly arrived:

It didn't come off the back of that fan project, Double Fine had been looking into doing this for years. They did ask the creator of that mod to consult with them so they could add the same functionality to their Remastered version. Here's an article about it. As far as I can tell, they started talking to Sony specifically about it in 2013. Judging from the making of vids, I'd say it was more than 4 people working on this, but I'm not sure...

Sigh, I guess I'll resign myself to finding the story out from the show rather than the books, which is a shame. I've slowed down on my re-read now, I'm about halfway through the third book. What I'd really like once I've read all the books is a site or set of Kindle notes or something that basically does a commentary through the whole thing, pointing out all the foreshadowing and hidden details, because I'm sure I'm missing so much. I just looked up THIRD BOOK SPOILERS Duskendale to see if I was missing stuff about why Glover and Tallhart make such a strategic error as to march on it (I guess the implication is that Bolton is sabotaging Robb for Tywin by ordering them to?), and happened to notice that there was a whole plot by Glover and Vargo Hoat to take over Harrenhal, and Arya wasted her last death from Jaqen by facilitating something that was going to happen anyway. This somehow went completely over my head.

Not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that there were no narrative feature films 100 years ago?

Ugh, tastes like teen spirit.