syntheticgerbil

I meant to thank you for that amazing gif the other day. Thank you Mr. Bucket for the smiles.

Thank you dibs I appreciate it

Haha, I'm glad that a premade sign that says that already exists.

I am a member of the Double Fine forums but I think I only posted once to get someone to help with survivor modes in Iron Brigades. Otherwise, while many Tim Schafer games mean a lot to me, there's not a ton for me to discuss there that I haven't already back in the lucasforums/mixnmojo/adventuregamers days.

Hmm, I have two cats and two dogs and they get along okay, in that they don't really like eachother but they also don't kill eachother upon hashing out their differences. One of the dogs is smaller than either cats and one is slightly bigger. The dogs were both introduced to the cats when they were young. The general fear is the dog could kill the cat, but some cats get very aggressive about dogs as well. You can somewhat go by dog breed on whether or not they will want to kill cats, like a dachsund is supposed to be a surefire cat killer, but also my wife has had two of her parent's dachsunds over for short stays for vet trips (she's a vet tech) and they had no issues with our cats. The third one however wanted to kill them and had to stay in a kennel the whole time. So even then the breed is not a surefire thing. Some people say big dogs are nicer with cats too but maybe not always? To me, everything I've seen just depends so much on personality and the amount of socialization, like Bjorn was saying. I think there's even a case to be made that your dog wants you to tell them what is okay to kill. We also have two rats and while you probably could not train a cat to not want to kill a rat if it wanted, we have made it clear to the dogs to sit or stand down when we are handling the rats. I think they might want to eat them since one shook that possum in the backyard once, but won't do it because it's our environment and they are "instructed" to not kill these rats. I don't know seems sound maybe? But as far as cat and dog integration, what we actually did was just request of the rescue shelter for each dog to allow us to take the cat over and see how the dog reacts. They just put them both in a room with us supervising and no issues every time. Actually we did this with our second rescue cat, bringing the first dog to check, since some cats will flip out and hiss when a dog is near their cage, and still no issues. I suppose this doesn't really clear up any possible territorial issues you might have at home with either cat and dog, but it does check for any knee jerk aggression. Then just make sure to supervise the dog when you are home and they are around the cats and put the dog back into the kennel when you are away, at least until you can trust it with cats (or not tearing up your stuff and eating things it shouldn't be eating as well).

Christ that's tough... He sounds like a nice dude otherwise so I'm guessing that's partly why it's so hard to walk away?

I can't figure out whether or not Mega Drive or Genesis is a more ridiculous title for a console.

"Woods1701 I first saw this about 2 years ago when a friend linked to it from a forum I'm signed up to. It was by far the most disturbing thing I had ever seen... And whaddya know... It still is the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. Doesn't stop it from being somehow awesome though. Inexplicably, amazingly, but really fucked up awesome. This would make a great conversation piece over a christmas dinner."

Sex cells, toblix.

I assumed they were accurate I suppose, however I do know a real mosin nagant can't shoot tranquilizer darts, and that's not really a long range thing that could happen without killing someone anyway. I am extremely amused that there is an Internet Movie Firearms Database. I do actually get somewhat into them just talking about the technology behind them and which era the guns belong to. It's kind of how bothering Paramedic for eating tips and movie references is a bunch of hilarious fun and in general most of the codec conversations you have with the person playing the "information about x" role in whatever game.

Can definitely see the rift there. Although in gameplay terms I would say Sons of Liberty and Guns of the Patriots are completely night and day. If anything the strong gameplay and stealth in MGS2 is what kept me going through almost all of the overt nonsense. I played them all in order from release date, starting with both the MSX/NES version of Metal Gear to all the spin off portables, if anything what I appreciate about MGS4 is it introduced a lot of better controls that the series desperately needed even if they weren't utilized much. They were then simplified in Peacewalker but made fun in an arcade style way. I definitely appreciate MGS4 finally introducing a close range non lethal gun to the series instead of just the hand gun and and later the mosin nagant. That rubber bullet shotgun is an amazing thing to earn for certain sections of both MGS4 and Peacewalker. But, I do not understand the reasoning for having so many god damn lethal guns to choose from in MGS4 and Peacewalker. They aren't very useful in game in terms of the minor change in variables, so maybe they are just there as a wacky thing for gun fetishists who like to look at 3D models and read short gun history summaries. Actually that's probably the case knowing the excess of the series.

I finished Flower, Sun, and Rain three weeks ago. At first I felt like, "What is this shit? Why would you make this?" I suppose I still wonder the first question. This game is just a constant exercise in tedium, I almost regretted starting it, but I wanted to play this Suda game I have been putting off. It plays like a broken ass Professor Layton with tons of walking, open space, and other nonsense. Every single puzzle consists of randomly choosing the right wire to tap into a human, a radio, or piano or whatever the hell and then slowly turning a dial to put in a series of numbers. All of the puzzles come from a guide book or often vague hints that you can only view in your main hotel room. You are supposed to take notes, much like Layton, but there is no eraser, there is only delete the whole page. So don't fuck up your notes. The puzzles range from incredibly simple to obscure nonsense where you need to read a guide. Often the issue is you have the answer but you have no clue what order you are supposed to enter the numbers into the basic answer system. The game sometimes starts making fun of this system by just telling you that you could just guess at some points instead of bothering to figure it out. Lots of games break the fourth wall to poke fun at itself, but FSR does it in a very oddly brutal way. It's like Goichi Suda has very well accepted this game is a piece of shit and makes fun of everything from the blocky graphics, the nonsense way you solve puzzles, the amount of walking, the stagnant plot, and the disconnect with the nice portrait art and the ugliness of everything else. It waits until halfway through to do this and I felt a certain kinship with a poorly designed game that also understood all of my frustration with their poor design. Wat? Also, this leads to the main character Anyway, you can actually have fun with this game. The narrative is a lot of fun and the dialogue is fucking bonkers. I love it. People say bizarre things and the plot is strange but also somewhat grounded. Maids in the hotel hide under your bed "to think" and the main character is so passive with all of these looney things that he calmly accepts that she is indeed under his bed thinking, even if it's creepy. The main character (who is named Sumio Mondo) also likes to shout the same catchphrase before every puzzle in a somewhat long Team Rocketesque manner. This is unskippable every time you start a puzzle. At some point a luchador barges into your room while you are solving a puzzle and shouts a new catchphrase which Sumio the decides to adopt the rest of the game. They don't really discuss it, it just happens. That's probably where I stopped hating this catchphrase and simultaneously fell in love with the game. The story gets a little bit more heavy as it goes on, but still not really in a sensical way. It's very similar to Twin Peaks but much more stylish with a lot of characters who are incredibly passive towards each other and their motivations instead of melodramatic soap opera stuff. The only issue I have with the narrative is that some of it apparently requires some knowledge of of the Silver Case series, which Flower, Sun, and Rain is a spin off of. Apparently many of these characters are reoccurring and the story will often assume you just know what is going on. For whatever reason not one Silver Case game has an English translation but FSR does and the wikis on the narrative links are pretty sparse. So that sort of sucks. Maybe one day I will be able to play Silver Case and it will shine some light on some of the bizarre plot points, but I will go ahead and guess probably not. Also to make this game the most enjoyable do not play past the first hallway in which you are allowed to run at the very beginning. You have to leave your DS on for a long period of time with the d-pad/analog stick pushing the character against the wall in an endless run. The game has a step counter as a "gameplay element" and the step counter unlocks things like finding where the puzzles are in the room or most importantly a fast run. So try to accumulate 100,000 steps before embarking, because the basic run is painfully slow. I don't think I've ever played such an enjoyable piece of shit game.

Haha, but Noyb, there's no way I could have made it without cheating the step counter. The amount of running does have a comic pay off with that bike thief stuff though! That's another thing, it takes more than half of the game to just leave the hotel. When I realized that, I also started loving it more. Just being so fallible is hilarious to me. Perhaps this would have been a great game had it been designed well as an actual adventure game and not some number inserting thing. Also do you understand any of what's going on with Toriko and her pink alligator?

I feel like the gameplay in 4 is rather elusive, but I probably ranted about it earlier in this thread. But the disguises mean you can pretty much ignore lots of stuff in the first three acts, I don't particularly find the maze after the cabin very inventive and and then there's uninspired invisible soldiers, the rest can be done with chaff in Shadow Moses, and then there's all these on the rails and wasting time littering turret sequences littering the whole game which was never a thing in MGS before. Besides the very first part of the game before the disguise or the very last part on the ship, there's little to be done with stealth or Octocamo. I had to beat it 8 times for the trophies and by the second playthrough it really shows how parts are either laughably broken or way too tedious concerning the bosses. I suppose you can choose to skip disguises but the game is so heavily pushing you towards using them when it really should have been pushing Octocamo. Then if they wanted the Octocamo to work they would have had to stop pushing the constant respawns in the first three acts. MGS is about clearing out rooms and hiding bodies, not new guards running on screen just because. They are supposed to appear when something is up. It really should appeal to me as a fanservice experience but it's just kind of meh. It's like the last season of Parks and Recreation. I almost wish MGS4 didn't exist.

There's really not that many Zelda games for a nearly 30 year period, so I never get burned out on them. I'll probably try to start them after I finally get to Twilight Princess HD when it comes out. I also had no idea they were actually 2D just with 3D graphics. I've had them sitting on my shelf for years now, and my wife asked about them since she's started playing Zelda games this year and I told her I heard Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks were that good and worried about the difficulty for her playing a 3D game meant for the old DS d-pad instead of on the 3DS analog stick, which she played Ocarina 3DS smoothly on. But if it is actually a 2.5D thing, I would guess it wouldn't actually be a control downgrade.

Oh geez man I don't even know how you start with 4 without having played any others storywise at least. I can barely keep track of anything going on in MGS4's story myself in terms of character motivation, changing goal posts, and retcons as it is and I have played every entry in the series up to Revengeance (and skipped the N-Gage one). Sometimes you check a wiki on Metal Gear Solid thinking you misunderstood something from a previous game and the wiki will just say, "well these two games conflict," and now I just shrug. The separate database install that comes with MGS4 also has conflicting info. I imagine 5 is even worse but I haven't played it yet. If you want more trophies, games less heavy on cutscenes (or at least evenly distributed), and more gameplay overall, I'd recommend trying the HD collection on PS3 for MGS3 and Peacewalker. MGS4 ranks pretty low for me in the series, above Portable Ops, but I'd say playing the spin off Acid series (Well Acid 2 at least) is even more fun than 4.

I am so ready!

That last photo is intense.

Strange, I feel like everyone has something negative to say about those two games. I haven't played them yet, really behind on my Zelda, so that kind of helps me look more forward to them.

The teenagers are actually BOB.

Ooh, that's not too far off, thanks for the info!

Will we see the main character wearing a Zodiac watch then? Hopefully he can at least write better than that dummy.

I was considering starting a thread after I finished it but I am probably only 5/6ths there still. I have good and bad thoughts but I don't want to speak too soon. You could start one critical Griddlelol, I don't mind.

Thank you. So far things are going better between my wife and I and we can't even start counseling until mid January with who we chose. :/ She's still on major guard but we also played some Never Alone and saw Bad Santa in the theatre the other day so I'm trying to just do things we love together in the mean time. I've done a lot of thinking this past week about my faults and my "inner demons" and read some books and articles and I have been having long talks with her about what I or we can do better. I think there's a lot of this I can possibly figure out by myself on how to be better for my wife but also just not negative and pessimistic about my whole life and thinking I'm an utter failure which contributes to a lot of bad vibes. I also don't want to think about divorce still being a possible thing still right now so that could be part of it. I guess I am now realizing there's a big part of me that feels the default and safe way in life is to be pessimistic and humble, to think the worst of yourself and your situation to better be prepared. That to not think like this is to be arrogant and lack any humility which is bad. Also I have such a superstitious nature about counting the chickens before they hatch, etc. And I'm thinking even though I have encountered a shitload of failure in the last three years, there's no point on focusing on that. I am starting to understand it's not really "safe" to be pessimistic and it can be just as delusional as being blindly optimistic. I have to find that balance, I have to stop kicking myself when I'm down. I can't even accept praise anymore. My classmates at school are now telling me when I present my projects during critiques I'm pointing out negative things I messed up before even starting even though they don't see them and think my work is great. If they ask me how I did something cool in whatever program or animation I just start off with how I screwed it up. I don't know how I got like this but I kind of fucking hate it now. I don't have to constantly admit my shortcomings to people. I guess I feel like I've become such a burden on my family and friends and wife that I feel like I need to apologize to existing in some way to everyone. This has got to change even just for me.