syntheticgerbil

I read through this yesterday, but it stopped being funny about halfway through. For some reason only the newer responses were more fun.

I guess I don't see them as asking for Amnesia Fortnight money as necessarily a bad thing. If I recall you had to only give at least $1 to vote, and even though you could have given all of your money either to charity or Humble Bundle dudes. Plus either I saw a video or read an interview explaining that the reasoning for charging was partly to get serious votes only. I suppose you could argue against it, but in a way, I don't think I will mind any of my favorite developers doing things like this in the future. Maybe because I work in games now I see things from the other side and how hard it is to gather money from fans, even directly, so this kind of upfront support makes me excited for future business models. To be completely honest though I wouldn't have bothered voting if I weren't getting their prototypes as an incentive since I trust some good games will come out of it no matter what. Besides I probably owe a little bit for buying Psychonauts used long ago and waiting until a Black Friday sale to buy Brutal Legend. I am a rude gamer.

Try Kemonozume, Kaiba, or Tatami Galaxy for TV shows maybe if you want a trippier and artsy mixed flavor? I don't know if they are great but I love the director's other works, but I should probably get around to watching all of the shows myself.

Burn like a fire in Cairo burn like a (fire) (fire)

I enjoy the Spongebob and Hello Kitty marketing tie ins. I want a cereal!

Here's a shameless thread: Anyone have any ideas where to find these amazing deals on a year of Xbox Live Gold accounts? I want to save bucks. Apparently these deals exist. These deals.

Why am I allowed to vote for everything? I don't understand.

I really want Bad Golf to exist, even though I'm pretty sure it will not get enough votes. There's zero concept shown in the 30 second video but I can imagine greatness in assholery.

Cloud Atlas was interesting. I mostly went because I'm a fan of Tom Tykwer and not so much the Wachowskis. I thought I was going to see a movie with six parts played chronologically but instead they were all intercut according to emotion and situation at hand between the stories. It really got on my nerves at first, but after about 20 minutes I was constantly amazed on how the technique does not allow you to have a reset point as you would if the movie played out as a short film anthology. In that way a 3 hour long movie tends to be constantly exciting as your mind juggles each storyline hoping to know what happens next. The actual plots were enjoyable enough, some more successful than others. Lots of typical Matrix style stuff on one segment that ebbs and flows between cool and idiotically out of place.

Well I already completed Gunstringer way earlier this year, but I moved and have a bigger Kinect living room so I took advantage of that to get all the gold medals and the Strings of Steel achievement. So dumb the game requires such precision to get the achievements when Kinect has no such precision. There was a lot of restarting levels involved on all accounts. Not being able to skip cutscenes just made it the more painful. Strings of Steel requires you to beat the game straight through on hard without dying or quitting. This took about four hours with numerous level restarts (which are luckily allowed as long as you don't die), and my legs were fucking aching after standing for so long. I guess it's been a long time since I've had a job where I've had to stand for 8 hours. Luckily since I have a friend at Twisted Pixel, he was able to relay all of my hateful frustrations to the designer responsible for the achievements. A fun fact is that this guy is also responsible for the Rock Band Bladder of Steel achievement requiring you to play 8 hours nonstop. Anyway, while I'm relieved I've finally completed this game to 100%, I would not recommend anyone else do this unless they want to end up hating The Gunstringer.

I finished Folklore a few weeks ago. It's an early PS3 game that no one seems to have played. I really enjoyed the art, setting, story, and ridiculous amount of creatures modeled and created, but there's a lot of tedium thrown around in terms of having me do the same thing over and over for side quests. There's also a lot of grinding to level up your characters which of course I had to do 100%. I imagine if you didn't do that the game would be just fine, so I'm not a good judge of it. I would have enjoyed the narrative more if not for some weird loose end at the end which was just nonsense plus the way Japanese narratives tend to turn into an introspective mess during the final act. Otherwise it was a nice small storyline within a city block with lots of reveals I feel were done very well. I really wish the game had more cutscenes because they looked great when they appeared. Most scenes were played out in this shoddy mock comic book format that just looked awkward.

I helped fund it too, but I can't imagine that comic will ever be fit for American theatres. It's good, but it's continuously violent and wacky.

Nah, it was South of the Cypress area. Apparently it's the Satsuma area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satsuma,_Texas) but I think that was only on my dad's driver's license in 1980 when the area was barely developed. But it would mirror the Woodlands and Spring I would guess.

I love that hat!

Not sure if those two directly correlate. I've always lived in Texas. Houston is where I grew up. My dad is selfish, angry, ill informed, staunchly Republican, and sometimes racist (or does that mean all the time?). I don't get him at all. He thinks all of his black and Mexican neighbors are welfare queens that are taking his hard earned money through taxes even though he lives comfortably enough. Maybe where I grew up in Houston had too many minorities for me to understand while my Dad moved here from Canadian Michigan, I don't know. My highschool was very strangely divided between lower middle class to upper middle class based on the districting going over a large separating road which made for some very strange differences. My elementary and middle school was mostly students with Mexican parents or of Mexican descent. By the time my sister made it to high school, she and everyone else on the other side of this road didn't make it to mine because I think they did not want the poorer (but not poor, just lower middle class) students making the school underperform, so she was redistricted to a high school with very easy and wacky projects compared to mine. While I was writing report after report on Huckleberry Finn, she made a board game. But I feel very different in Austin where I seem to be exposed to a bunch of apathetic hippies and people where their politics stop at whether weed is illegal or not. OH AND THE REPTILIANS. Apparently reptiles from space control our government according to some I've talked to or worked with. No joke. Maybe the reptiles come from underground though... Maybe it's more likely they are a super race that evolved from the Kimodo Dragon?

Oklahoma voted for the Android phone robot?

Tweak my pooter, plug your shit.

Nevermind it's back, it was unavailable for a bit there, some kind generic message from Twitch TV I suppose.

Noooooooooooo it disappeared! I had like 3 hours left to go!

Where can I see the original image?

I think the last two I had were pretty fucking annoying. The first is no fault of the game developers, but right after I beat Kirby's Dreamcourse to the fullest and unlocked the special multiplayer levels, the battery back up died. I guess it's my fault for playing old games with batteries, but I am usually sure to change them ahead of time with a fresh battery these days. This is mainly annoying because Kirby's Dreamcourse is a super difficult game if you want to unlock everything. I have tried to use some saves for emulators I found on the internet so that I could just skip straight to multiplayer unlocked, but they seem directly tied to a certain version of the emulator or the ROM and I can't figure out which is which. I had finally gotten around to playing Escape from Monkey Island on PS2 earlier this year and apparently there's a known bug in the act before you land on Monkey Island where the game "freezes" when talking to Otis the second time. I had finished almost all tasks on the island and was about to wrap up the chapter until I ruined my game and had to start over. When you talk to Otis the second time, the game still operates and you can use the menus as usual, but the controls in game don't work even though characters are still moving and walking around. I made the mistake of quitting and saying "Yes" to saving my game when it prompted me, finding that when I reloaded, the freeze of the controls was still intact. Still took me about 4 hours to get back to the point I was at.

Ahhh, I think they added this with the Google Plus stuff. Thank you!

Can someone tell me how to increase the width of the posts on Blogger/Blogspot?! I hate this about it. If I'm trying to show art it squeezes the pictures too much and my text looks like a weird prose poem all the time.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, I know! I hate it! Also just to throw this out there about the deals, but not exactly referring to the charity aspect: http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/10/31/now-disney-gets-nice-tax-break http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2012/10/disney-lucas-fiscal-cliff-taxes-medicare.html Still makes me raise eyebrows, but I don't know enough (or anything really) about getting the most out of your money by predicting tax rates and timeliness of deals and shares. But I guess in Lucas's defense, I've read Ricky Gervais dickish comment on how he gives a lot of money to charities since it would be taxed away anyway, so I mean if you don't want to give it to the government that's a nice way to do it.

So I just took the time to watch the Prince of Persia movie and I'm actually quite pleased outside of a couple of unnecessary added plot points and some stupid visual flairs. If anything my main issue was that there was not enough dorky wall jumping and curtain riding like the game. My girlfriend said all of the video game reference parts made the movie cheesy so more would have been bad, but eh. Even though the woman who is not named Farah but is Farah may not play out the exact same role, I feel like the banter I loved was achieved very well. Now I'm just going to be wondering if any line of dialogue at all written by Mechner himself made it in. He also doesn't seem to like the movie that much, but Mechner comes off as very humble and quiet, so I wonder his true thoughts. I do have that self published making of PoP book he put out last year, maybe I should read that soon and see if it touches upon the movie at all... I'm also a little bit curious if the garb that Dastan and Tamina wear about a third of the way through was a reference to PoP2008 with prodigy Prince and not-Natalie-Portman? If so, that's kind of neat nod, as I don't usually expect anyone making a video game movie to be that familiar with anything beyond the one game.