Ben X

Ooh, I've got 86% so far saying yes to originally playing with mouselook: https://twitter.com/TimeGentleman/status/665633161037131776 EDIT: for playing with the music but avoiding new engines that cover it with ugly new effects, seems the best way is to download this .cue image: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=996272 and burn it onto CD with Imgburn. Sound reasonable? Apparently there are still issues with it not looping or allowing volume adjustments, so I might just burn a CD and manually set a track to loop each time I start a new level...

Well, Episode 3 of Duke does go back to LA, but I immediately got stuck on a) the insane difficulty and sunglasses) the fact that they hide essential keys and switches in utterly camouflaged secret areas. Plus it seemed to be pretty much more of the same. For anyone who fancies playing it, I'd recommend picking it up super-cheap and just playing the first episode on easy mode.

Okay, I struggled through as much of Episode 2 as I could, but I had to give up. The balancing is awful - none of the kooky weapons is actually safe to use and all of the new enemies are ridiculously tough/irritating (face-huggers, turrets, kamikaze flying things etc). The setting was pretty dull and there are a fair few gotcha deaths which are impossible to avoid. Plus the space station environment just isn't as interesting. I skipped ahead to the next episodes but nothing held my interest, so I'm giving up on this one. I was surprised to see how much stuff which I'd assumed Half Life was the first to do was in here - air-ducts, looping transit systems, interactive environments, explosive set-pieces, scenic transport shuttles that feel like a miniature predecessor of HL's tram intro. Surprisingly, though, Half-Life didn't feature gross misogynistic stuff like Anyway, it's now onto Quake! Full 3D, wooo! Two things I need to figure out first, though: how to play with the Trent Reznor score, and whether the average player at time of release played this with mouse-look or not (which I now remember aoania says they did)...

Timely, as Klei are having a free weekend and sale on Steam this weekend...

I assumed that when people talked about backlog they were referring to games they owned and hadn't played yet, not just games they wanted to play...

lol

The live babes, yes. Not the alien-gooped "kill me" ones. EDIT: by which I mean, I was aware of the former, but yeah seems the same is true of the latter. Not that I'm sure it makes any difference...

Sorry to get pedantic, but isn't it more accurate to say DigiBeta (DigitalBetcam) was an HD variant of the Betacam SP standard if we're talking about the professional realm? Betacam was derived from Betamax, but they're not the same thing, and despite VHS beating Betamax in the home video wars, Betacam continued to be used in broadcast for another decade or two (and I assume is still being used today though I haven't been in a post-production house in a few years).

I haven't listened to the 'cast, but perhaps Samantha's suggestion was her recommendation out of the implied alternatives? a) step outside your comfort zone, see if it's something you can get used to and enjoy sunglasses) have a non-sexual romantic relationship c) break up with your partner and don't get into any more relationships with pre-op trans women without clarifying that it would be non-sexual (Although yeah, sounds like she didn't actually answer how the discussion of any of these should actually be approached.)

I finally finished Episode 1 - that boss was TOUGH. I'm going to play it on easy from this episode forward. I enjoyed the San Andreas Fault level (apart from the fucking platforming) - huge rockscapes collapsing to reveal underground alien caverns which have a weird kind of Satanic vibe to them, then getting into the trippy alien spaceship. I'm now on an orbiting spaceship, Duke apparently fuelled by his anger at the aliens kidnapping the "babes" whom so far he's been mercy-killing in order to collect power-ups. I've already encountered a new enemy type, which is cool. I'd be very interested to see a comparison of various FPSes' amount of enemy types and at what pace throughout the game they introduce them, how many of each occur etc.

Hello Paul! Paul is ace, but is almost always wrong about films (so you lot will consistently agree with him).

Played a few more levels. Still lots of fun stuff going on and interesting level settings. There was a really nice moment where I found a little secret area by blowing up a manhole cover and heading down into a little alien nest in the sewer. After exclusively urban environments, I suddenly found myself in a little pocket of utterly alien surroundings with a load of new stuff thrown at me all at once. It was really effective. They pulled the old "you lose all your weapons" trick really early on and also have been doing some ride-the-conveyor-belt/get-picked-up-and-carried-by-a-crane-arm-claw-thingy, which reminded me of the Half Life games. The "babe" stuff is getting gradually more heinous, though, with the strippers you can pay money to for a quick flash, and the naked women stuck to the wall with alien goo begging you to kill them. The former can be taken as part of Duke's ridiculously exaggerated 80s action hero machismo, continually throwing out lame catchphrases and detonating entire skyscrapers to make a path to an access card, but the latter feels a bit gross. It's actually pretty hard, you have to be really good with strafing and even on Normal, it's very easy to lose most of your health after a couple of hits from relatively low-level enemies like the pig-cops. It's nice to be back to levels where I don't get lost a lot of the time, which is really helped by each room having a different motif (for example in the previous level, there was the electric chair chamber, the prayer room, the jail cells, the outside area and the alien hologram head room). Having said that though, I have just got stuck for the first time, which is exacerbated by the fact that I've used up my scuba gear, so if the route out is underwater it's going to take me a lot of deaths to find it.

Just watched John Wick and wasn't bowled over as everyone else seemed to be. A few cool action moves aside, I felt like I'd seen everything in this film many times before, plus it had a fair few plot-holes. Not as good as, say, Universal Soldier: Regeneration. EDIT:

Same way you spoil anything - you say what's going to happen so the reader won't get to experience it properly themselves.

That would be Betacam rather than Betamax, though, right?

:'(

Speaking of which, a popular modern version of "save the cat" seems to be "punish the child pornographer".

See also X-Files ("Oh Mulder, I got an alien mark on me, let me strip down to my underwear so you can see!").

Well, it might have fewer 'decontamination' lube wrestling sessions.

Ah, okay, thanks (and thanks ewokskick)!

http://www.avclub.com/article/theres-new-star-trek-tv-series-works-227792 I think it will be alt-universe, but you won't really be able to tell. I suspect they'll take the opportunity to shake off the weight of established lore and do what they want. It'll be a non-Enterprise, nu-Kirk era ship, flying about on missions but with the TOS mix of action and philosophy. It'll be like Enterprise but without the suffocating prequelitis and embarrassingly desperate attempts to be edgy and sexy. Could be great, could be abominable.

I might grudgingly agree to this making sense if it weren't for the fact that (if my brief and superficial googling bears out) Massachusetts allows concealed carry permits. So, (black) kids holding fake guns in a playground = dangerous, (white male) adults swaggering around with hand-cannons in their pockets = no problem!

Yeah, this definitely blows those infuriating Kevin Bacon UK ads out of the water.

Interesting! Do you happen to know (or were you able to flip between modes to see) if the mouths move more than in the original?

iirc, a lot of them were songs that the graphic novel quoted, put in there without worrying that they didn't actually fit. Also, the use of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah over the sex scene made it sound like Rorschach was crooning to Night Owl and Silk Spectre while they banged. The one bit of music use I liked iirc was when the guitar on All Along The Watchtower briefly went quite well with Archie crashing into the snow.