syntheticgerbil

This is not my beautiful house. I kind of wish someone would release a final FINAL retail version of these headsets before everyone jumps on board making their own, but I guess that's the tech world.

Hah, well I was just commenting on the quality of the search function. I like it and I get irrationally defensive when people call it broken, but this time it really was broken. ANYWAY ALL THAT BACKSTORY.

Rumor is that Robert Rodriguez is bald under that hat that is glued to his head.

I have the blu-rays but I haven't turned it on yet. I got the Amazon one with the artbooks, so that was kind of neat. I would guess the Bebop on Hulu is the blu-ray version because it premiered on the service around the same time of the rerelease.

Not a gif but someone brought this owl into my wife's vet today. He has a broken femur. They are going to put a pin in he leg and hopefully he should be okay in a few weeks.

She didn't make them but reposted a bunch, that's fine it's still a bunch of stuff. I can't figure out if she deleted tweets on that day because there's a bunch of stuff missing between October 9th and 11th. If I recall right there was some retweets where the /gg/ moderator at 8chan was deleting her info from the board. Either way, I am not saying she brought anything on herself, people can say whatever they want, but it certainly doesn't make me like her in anyway whatsoever. To me it's just more Twitter noise from the people who post like 20 opinionated bites a day on Twitter steeped in conflict. She still does every day. Anyway, I'm really not saying she engineered her own harassment. I guess I can put it in the way I feel about Phil Fish. The guy made continuous abrasive and incendiary remarks. Everyone continued to bully Phil Fish. I didn't think that was funny and I wanted people to leave Phil Fish alone. However I don't like Phil Fish because of the things he says and he seems like a major asshole. It's a problem for me because so much of this constant Twitter banter is gaming news we are supposed to all pay attention to in terms of harassment and such, but you can't ever read anyone's tweets because searching is so tedious. It just ends up being people's personal chatroom but with dozens of other people publicly chiming in in between. Like this for instance: https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/517840096066691072 It's so hard to follow (besides how inane Total Biscuit is) because there's like a billion @username and you have to check the username because it never matches up with the name they use and then there's so many people just trying really hard to get in on a fight and blab even more than the original posters. For someone that doesn't use Twitter but likes to have a grasp of what's going on, it's a very poor platform to do it yourself. So then people have to make all this storify stuff to subvert it, but even that is a headache because I am not sure if everything is completely pasted there. I just can't stand Twitter and I don't understand why people like to just participate in this public free for all. It's also just a big unmoderated mess where GGers can make a ton of fake accounts and just do whatever they feel like. This is why it's old persona of being used as a news platform (and what celebrities eat) long ago was so much easier for me to understand. Like, if people put all of their personal asides on Facebook you wouldn't have any Joe chiming in and just keep it to your friends list. It also would never have to be public either if you didn't want it to be.

Well to be clear, I specifically mean that day she made that image meme and was constantly posting it plus lurking 8chan and then posting screenshots of the conversations. Seems more involved than just talking about what's going on. I don't really know anything about Joss Whedon's twitter and generally dislike him and his body of work, so I can't speak to whatever is going on there, but Tim Schafer doesn't post anywhere as often as a lot of people mired in this forever Twitter drama. Brianna makes dozens of tweets a day usually on stuff like this for months on end while Schafer posts maybe once a day and usually Double Fine news. That's why I specifically name dropped Leigh Alexander for a comparison. She's always great. Anyway if you guys think I have inherent sexism about Wu's abrasiveness or game, I suppose claiming I just don't like her personality or game regardless of gender won't help much. I don't feel like this is a gut reaction considering I've had a couple of years of Brianna Wu exposure to go off of.

Works great now hooray!

Hah, brilliant!

So I started chipping away at this because I was initially very interested in Remember Me and was put off by all the negative opinions concerning the gameplay, but I figured I would just play it anyway and see for myself since I will be playing Life Is Strange at some point. I've only just finished Episode 3. For all of the good things about it, Remember Me seems to have some sort of glaring negative to balance it out. One thing to note is I am playing the game on hard for the trophy so maybe this has a lot to do with my frustration concerning combat. I guess coming off playing DmC more recently, this game feels like a sluggish weak mess when it comes to fighting. The combat animations seem so slow but enemies constantly seem to be fucking hitting me. You have to do the same timing for ever god damn combat since there's no quick or slow moves and usually there's not enough time to press the button on time and evade so I don't get hit, breaking the combo. Fighting is often just such a chore and I end up having to redo certain parts like 20 times over because of some bullshit thing going on. I'm especially talking about the first floodlight fight and the first brute guy in Episode 3. God those were such bullshit and I hadn't unlocked enough abilities yet to easily get through them. In many ways this game is majorly fucking punishing. Not because it's THAT hard despite me having to replay some sequences over and over, but because of poor design in terms of usability. If I fuck a part up, I have to usually wait for a 20 second reload then I may have to watch some cutscene over and over. The brute guy in particular in Episode 3 had a tutorial part on the spammer and using it against guys on the walls, EVERY GOD DAMN TIME. And you can't even hit X past the text, each piece of text that I've already fucking read makes me wait 3 seconds before I can press X again. Yes I am counting my time between all of the bullshit from when I die and have to restart a sequence. And then on the other hand the checkpoints in this game are too frequent, causing the game to be punishing in terms of collectables. if I miss some hidden thing, I often can't go back. Often a door or some kind of blockage just suddenly appears should you ever try to go back. Usually the game has saved itself after this random blockage has appeared. So you fucking have to replay the whole episode to get the items you are missing. And these episodes are not short and sweet chunks like Uncharted, there are eight episodes in the game which have taken me over an hour to finish on average. Also to compound the problem with replaying an episode is that NOT ONE CUTSCENE IS FUCKING SKIPPABLE. None. There is no cutscene skipping function in this game, only pause. Maybe if they were going to be this inept to make cutscenes unskippable they should have just not had collectables altogether since this discourages ever going back to explore and clean up like any other game of this type released now. Like seriously all of these little complaints are game design 101 and are not hard in terms of programming. If you are going to have a story game with lengthy cutscenes there is no reason to overlook this kind of function. There is no reason to constantly bar off going back on every little room you go through. This is not Super Mario Bros. 1! Anyway, besides the weird combat and godawful lack of basic function, I am actually generally enjoying this game. I am amazed first at all of the environmental modeling. There seems to be so much original set pieces that I am in awe of how these assets were crammed into the game without killing the whole art team. Like I don't even think I see the graffiti repeat. That means there was some artist out there just creating a bunch of original graffiti just for eye candy. I often just stop and look at stuff and read all of the little pop up signs and look at all of the ridiculous amounts of detail. I would rather not just run quickly through these levels because I feel like I am missing a city that feels very real in terms of live atmosphere and sense of scale. I love the little remnants of old Paris still hanging around and it makes me really appreciate it since I can often identify that stuff first hand having spent 10 days in Paris 6 years ago. The only thing really bringing the graphics down are a lot of the characters are ugly or badly modeled. Nilin is great, most of the main characters are great but like Kid X-mas looks like something an amateur would have made. His arms are too short, he can't even cup his balls, which is one thing I hate most when it comes to bad 3D models as being able to touch your nether regions is a basic part of being a functioning human being. It's not just him though a lot of the enemies and people on the street are just these awkward blobby models. It doesn't help that most of the mocap in this game is pretty floaty and useless. This is not really just a problem with Remember Me though, I feel like mocap is such a trend for any game that approaches some sort of realism, but it's not that easy to get a good "realistic" performance. Most of the time people are just kind of jittering around and acting awkward. Brothers was a pretty awful example of just throwing in mocap for the sake of mocap. Maybe one day this trend will wear off, I don't know. Nilin's mocap is great though but I would guess many animators spent that time smoothing her out. Also Nilin is just really cool. I like playing as her and hearing her speak. She's tough but not in an obnoxious feisty way. One thing I'm not sure of and could not find an answer to is if the game's original language is French or English. It's a game developed in France but the lip sync seems really broken when you turn on the French language dub. The English seems to be what it was animated to, but I also can't tell since the game seems a little out of sync with the lips matching the voices as well. Maybe that's just the Unreal engine being the Unreal engine? Anyway I'm just playing with voices in English since it is less distracting, odd that that would be the original language of the game though. Also the climbing parts are really good, love this stuff. Not easy like Enslaved but not as punishing as a typical Prince of Persia (which isn't that punishing when you can rewind, but you know what I mean). I love jumping around in the cinematic environments, it's my favorite. Also those memory scenes with the rewind and manipulating things is pretty novel and just has me more psyched to use the same function in Life Is Strange.

Oh wow, this time the search function truly is broken.

Man, this is going to be a lot of jerk things to say, but I figure I should just say them. Brianna Wu has always seemed like a huge butthole to me. Even before Gamergate I feel like she was constantly looking for attention from either creating conflict or drawing attention to her harassment. Any time I hear her talk outloud she just seems like she wants to steamroll everyone and be the center of attention and the voice of all that is right. Not that Gamergate people should be harassing her, but she purposefully made incendiary gamergate tweets trying hard to draw their attention. She was successful and then found herself embroiled in all the the harassment and death threats that Anita and Zoe has suffered from it. Yet she seemed to always be the loudest about it. It's weird, but it's almost like she loves this stuff. To me, she's just another loud person on Twitter, the place where drama drama drama happens. Also I feel like everyone is supporting her game due to shitty treatment and the lack of diversity from developers, but seriously the game looks of extremely poor quality in terms of both graphics and design. I remember couple or few years ago seeing some preview articles of her game and thinking that is probably not how the final build is going to look, but oh boy is it. I don't even have an opinion over who she has coffee with. It's dumb people get mad at it, she can talk to whoever she likes. I'd like to stop hearing about Brianna Wu drama already unless it has something to do with her game. I suppose I wish she'd just handle stuff professionally the way Leigh Alexander does (even during that shitty Giant Bomb fanatic garbage in the past) but then Brianna Wu wouldn't be Brianna Wu. On another note, I wish we could go back to the days where devs weren't constantly rattling off their knee jerk opinions on Twitter and making all of this game industry "news" a bunch of impossible to follow drama.It's like everyone is forever watching intentionaly watching this off the cuff public chat room every person of note now uses it for. Originally Twitter just seemed like a nice place for news announcements for game companies and for celebrities to talk about what they ate for lunch. I miss when the same type of people would save this stuff for more thought out blogposts, interviews, and articles. Not that those have disappeared, but it's all just noise on Twitter. I suppose this whole post has nothing to do with feminism.

Are we only referring to stuff on Youtube or mentioning commentary that is actually within the game? I can name a bunch if that's the case. Anyway, as far as web videos here's some from devs: This one is pretty fun. The people who worked on Conker's Bad Fur Day play through the game and give their experiences on making it. It's a pretty sleazy commentary at times, but what would you expect? There's a lot of mean jabs at Rare and other coworkers plus some insight on the Microsoft takeover as well as a lot of hate for certain design choices within Bad Fur Day itself. It's also fun to watch these people play terribly at their own game after all these years. Unfortunately the video series abruptly stops at episode 21, the game not being finished whatsoever, but it's hours of content already, so that's fine. (EDIT: I see this was just mentioned as I typed this message. Oops) If you have love for the Space Quest games, these promotional playthroughs were done for the Spaceventure Kickstarter (When will that game be finished?) with Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe commenting through the whole series. Sometimes it's hard to follow because it was done over Twitch and they respond to people in the chat and I have no idea what they were saying, but I loved the commentary the whole way through. There is an edge of sadness to it because Scott Murphy seems like a dude who has come out of a rough time, not having an industry job after being fired from Sierra and pretty much becoming irrelevant. It was revealed by Paul Trowe being a jerk somewhere on an internet forum that he had a major drinking problem, but whatever I feel for the guy. His dorky scifi writing was a major part of my childhood. Space Quest will forever be my favorite Sierra games.

I've been basically waiting for this game to run into some shit since I first heard about its payment scheme. Doesn't seem like it may happen yet. Not saying I want it to, but things can start to get pretty ugly when thousands of dollars may have felt wasted. Or it could be great! I don't know.

I think you won? Seems way easier than the original Wrecking Crew.

Yes, I agree! Somebody please recover this!

Hey S.A.M. hang in there, I don't know solutions, but I think it's noble you are helping out your parents even if it's not working out so well for you on top of everything else.

Did he turn into Spike? I don't understand.

Oh lord, I can't do this.

Just get the Mario Advance version, then you can fully experience the mess that is Mario 3.

The episode with the static TVs and the blank faces of Are You Afraid really creeped me out. Pinball was pretty creepy too just because it filled you with the dread of a bad ending where you are stuck in some kind of pinball hell. I remember being upset that later episodes always had a good ending where everything was okay again. That's not creepy at all. I wonder if there was some sort of pressure to not have any episodes end so bleak.

RATCHET and CLANK Nuts and Bolts?!

Ahahahaha, THAT'S WHERE THAT TOP THAT RAP IS FROM! Amazing!!!! Can we all just watch Teen Witch instead of finishing the final episodes of Twin Peaks? I'm starting to just want to listen to the podcast and not actually wanting to watch the show anymore.

Hey so... why are they not already melting?

Meh, they don't have much going for 'em anyway. The ones that are of note tend to be made internationally and... those never win anyway because the judges don't see them. Their kids only drag them to what has coloring books and action figures and that's animation. Don't know, didn't see it. I most likely never will. Was it actually hell like All Dogs Go to Heaven hell or just like the furnace from Home Alone?