syntheticgerbil

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    6651

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by syntheticgerbil

  1. Posted

    Perhaps you can get your dad to spill the beans though? It's kind of a "neat" mystery even though you say it's boring. I wish I could dig up my parent's past but they are really bad at either remembering or talking about it.

     

    Also I like all the mentions of 7-Eleven. I am a junkie for the terrible food at those convenience stores. I never had them growing up in Houston despite it being a Texas company. Apparently something happened where they went out of business there in the late 80s and never really recovered. They are all over Austin and Dallas though.

  2. Posted

    I am not quite sure if there's a point to showering, as I would figure it ruins your camo index, but that doesn't seem to be displayed at any point in this game like previous games. Easy way to "shower" is just change your outfit and change back on the sortie start screen. Does anything actually happen when you boost morale by punching soldiers on motherbase as well?

     

    The animal conservation deck is kind of neat though. Also is there any way I am supposed to know how and where to catch the wild animals without checking a guide? I try to remember to place cages  somewhere before a mission ends but almost all of my rarer animal captures were just because I came across them during missions. I don't have a clue on the best spots to place cages.

  3. Posted

    I'm also just starting this now, but I'm not going to say anything about my likes or dislikes until I'm finished, but I also have this problem. There's a lot of grinding, but I also haven't unlocked FOB shit yet, I'm on mission 21. I'm also ignoring most assault rifle and shotgun and handgun upgrades because I'm imagining this will follow the flow of Peacewalker where the only thing worth developing that is lethal is just rocket launchers. So far I've been right.

     

    But try fultoning lots of mortars, vehicles, and gun emplacements, Bjorn. I have so many of these things and I just sell a little here and there when I need cash. I think this may screw me a bit with FOBs but from what I'm reading almost no one invades bases anymore. I also tend to jump out of my car to grab plants as tedious as that is, but I have about 5,000 of most plants and those can also be sold for a good amount in bulk. I don't think (or I hope) selling plants too much will screw me over because it only seems like some of those egregiously expensive online only weapons will take a lot of plants. Then you need guns and mortars for FOB but I keep maybe 25 or so at all times of each type for FOB whenever I get there, but I might be playing it too safe and could maybe sell more. Don't sell elements or materials. You need vehicles for some dispatch missions but I would gather you only need a couple of each, and even then there's like 10 different tanks with tons of opportunities to keep fultoning. Plus those pointlessly slow big trucks are good to sell, I don't even think those are needed in dispatch missions ever.

     

    I could be totally wrong though. I'm on mission 20 and 140 hours in. I'm kind of addicted to the gameplay loop, but I'm also a crazy person who has to S Rank and do all the mission tasks the second I beat the mission plus make sure to finish each new side op that unlocks until I move on. I imagine even if you aren't an insane person, you will still need to spend a lot of time reraiding the same outposts many times to be super stronk before the end of the game.

  4. Posted

    I think if you remove your account the other accounts can no longer access it.

     

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/PS4-PLAYSTATION-4-CONSOLE-ONLY-LOCKED-P-T-DEMO-INSTALLED-2-/222534798995?hash=item33d01b8e93:g:TEMAAOSw4CFY18gN You could sell it on Ebay as a $200 paperweight (but a paperweight that plays non PT games) like this guy unless you want to sell your account along with the system.


    I'm pretty sure that trick to download P.T. continues to work to this day if you have an account that has it "purchased" so really what is rare here is having an account with access to play P.T.

     

    It looks like more honest Ebay listings actually always include an account: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Playstation-4-with-UNLOCKED-P-T-installed-500GB-/222536582103?hash=item33d036c3d7:g:eKkAAOSwPh5ZNj1x

  6. Posted

    I wish they hadn't gotten so popular because I will never see them live. The Austin show sold out within 20 minutes. I missed their show at the end of 2011 because I was two months behind on the podcasts. I doubt their venue was full back then.

     

    On 5/16/2017 at 10:45 AM, Gormongous said:

     

    To piggyback off of that fundamental truth, Travis' new podcast The Kind Rewind is four episodes in and it's really good. It's just Travis and his wife Teresa watching old TV shows and movies, then talking about what they liked and didn't like, especially compared to what they thought as kids. They just finished going through the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and now they're going to do ET: The Extraterrestrial and then the first season of Cheers. It's really warm and genuine, and Travis' passion for talking about media shines through even as he says some pretty dopey things and defends Xander waaaay more than Xander deserves to be defended. I'm rewatching Buffy right now and that made the past few episodes really enjoyable, but I like the vibe enough to follow them into stuff that I'm not rewatching and don't really care about.

    That's funny that there's some people that like Travis the most. I didn't have much of an opinion on him until trying out his other podcasts Bunker Buddies and Interrobang. Besides that Andi was the worst most obnoxious not funny person I've heard in podcasts for a while, Travis spent a ton of his time on both shows explaining his preferences and likes and dislikes. It just seemed like a weird narcissistic need to put who he was out there without ever truly having an engaging subject more than himself. He just became so boring to me. I gave Shmanners a try and while I liked hearing Teresa discuss all the minutia of the manners subjects, I had to quit still because Travis was doing the same thing and spending a ton of the episodes just talking about his preferences in life.

     

    I see a lot of criticism here over TAZ, but I have no fucking clue what is happening in those episodes and often find myself zoning out and never remembering story points. I also have never played Dungeons and Dragons and don't really know what the nitty gritty involves. Griffin's stories are too straightforward and it just sounds like the typical fantasy gobbledygook (which I know some people are a big fan of though, my wife included!) where I can't parse much original that is happening in the story that can't just be cured with more magic and make believe to get to the next bit. So I only find myself engaged when something funny happens which generally comes from Papa McElroy and Justin. I also tried an episode of the bachelor podcast, but reality TV has always been disgusting to me and I have no clue what they are discussing. Also I contribute the shitty Trump fucking guy's rise to presidency as a product of the United State's decade long fixation with reality television.

     

    My main love of Griffin stuff just comes with his jokes on MBMBAM and pairing with Nick at Polygon. The two work so great together. Whenever it's a solo Griffin video series there it's very boring. I don't know why I wasted my time with half of his Nuzlocke run.

     

    I guess Justin isn't always that funny to me, but I've probably followed almost all of his content and listened to maybe all of the podcasts he has been on to date. The first 60 or so episodes of the Joystiq podcast he is awful. He calls everything stupid and eats food and takes shits while they are recording and he releases these unedited messes. But then something happens after that and he's the reason you want to hear the show and all of his bad behavior is gone. But then I had to stop for a while with 80 episodes of Joystiq to go because Chris Grant is grating and is such an arrogant piece of shit. He literally spends 15 minutes almost every show yelling about how every game company, console developer, and Nintendo doesn't know business the way he does and they all fail because they don't copy Valve. The later episodes where he is gone and it's just Griffin, Ludwig, and Justin are gold though.

     

    Then the Satellite Dish pre-Sawbones with Sydnee and Justin is great (Which evolved from the season finale of Two and a Half Men podcast). When they get to this three part finale of the series where they go over Tyra Banks' novel it was just comedy gold. I feel glad that stupid book exists just so they eventually can make an hour and a half of good radio.

     

    I also for some reason listen to Still Buffering first thing every week even though I barely have interest in what teens do today and the show isn't really funny at all. I just really like how the dialogue between the three sisters goes and Sydnee's explanation of how things worked early/pre internet. I kind of miss those days honestly.

  7. Posted

    Well okay, after doing my playthrough with commentary, I switched back and forth a lot and I'm actually pretty annoyed how sloppy a lot of the backgrounds and drawings tend to be. Besides the three puzzles ruined by graphical errors, I started noticing stuff beyond bad drawings like things overlapping slightly wrong and shadows that were either missing or just solid opacity or just too many backgrounds obviously processed through a filter with very little human touch. There's also points where they could have taken the time to make stuff better instead of processing it. Like what the fuck happened to the font? It's no longer pixelated but it's fucking vector art trash. Why? Could no one purchase a cool font? Why not make the end credits look great?

     

    There's the fucking video screen puzzles are all just distracting and awful because the text is falling outside of the bounds of the screen. How do you not catch that shit before release? And even then if you switch back they used a skinnier font in the original game so it fit. Even then, if they change the font for the HD version, why not add an extra touch of having the font curve with the CRT screen? Now it looks more fucked up and out of place. Same with Ben's jacket. I guess they were completely against having the Polecats logo or the "Full Throttle" text ever fit the curvature of his jacket even though that literally takes a minute to do in Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever they were using to redraw. Clouds don't move and even then they are never really facing the way the action is staged in the original, someone just drew flat horizontal clouds for almost every part and called it a day.

     

    I think maybe this release is a bit of a let down because while the new 3D looks impeccable, the good drawings didn't age the way zoomed out non cartoony sprites like the SCUMM games before did. So you just find yourself switching to the older screen and seeing how much someone had a better grasp of what they were animating or making their characters look consistent. There's too many cartoony sausage fingers in a game that is stylized but not like that. That Cave Fish animation where the dude blows himself up after he loses the drawings and animation are just wretched. The part where Ripburger is talking from the back of his head looking down at the demolition derby looks good until it's animated and becomes a blob of shapes kind of moving around in a bunch of ways that do not indicate a human is speaking dialogue from the back of their head.

     

    And fuck, why are the new splash screens at the beginning so atrocious? All of the characters have such bad looks and it so amatuerish. The first one of course has the three bikers with the Double Fine and outsourcing company logos not wrapped around their jackets and looks just as messy.

     

    I don't know, I am confused why this has happened? Time and money I'm sure. I guess when the Monkey Island remasters at LucasArts were trash I understood because it was a bunch of people at a company who had no connection to the original games and were just quickly outsourcing it on the cheap to get it done. Meanwhile Telltale is making Tales which is brilliant and shows their knack for doing it on the cheap and still having an atmospheric and engaging game.

     

    So with Double Fine, considering the previous remasters, I would have thought Tim would have cared more about this game since it seems to be more personal than Day of the Tentacle at least. I guess it is more work, they made it widescreen, there's way more cutscene animation and closeups. So I can understand if it ended up being a way larger undertaking than necessary. But then it makes this remaster feel unnecessary. Perhaps it's just whatever companies they were outsourcing too were just not skilled enough. Or whoever at Double Fine doing the 2D art is not skilled enough? I don't know much about the animators there or if any of this is even done in house at DF at this point. It could really just be it's fucking Peter Chan, Larry Ahern, Anson Jew, and Peter Tsackel and they are all fucking brilliant and it shows even through 320x240 resolution and it's hard to ask a bunch of new blood to top a happenstance of those creatives in a group? I don't know.

     

    But hey the original game is still in there, also remastered music and sound is very well done.

  8. Posted

    Maybe I'm reading too into it but since the commentary is listened to in the bridge area, I imagined some kind of black and white flashback to Ricky Myron jumping the bridge.


    Also thought they could have just been saying Ben would have got there and Ricky Myron was hanging out jumping the bridge first, but nahhhhhhhhhhh I'm not putting my lips on that.

  9. Posted

    I wish everyone on all these McElroy shows would stop saying "uh" to mean "one." Like you want to say, "I only have one banana" but these people all say, "You know like A banana" but pronounce the a like UHHH with a bunch of emphasis.

     

    Gahhh pet peeve. That said if I didn't listen to like 8 McElroy things a week I wouldn't notice.

  11. Posted

    On 4/25/2017 at 1:00 PM, Mike Danger said:

    I finished Life is Strange and I only cried a little a lot. One question I had: during the art gallery segment, you can go back through Max's phone and read a totally different set of texts for each character reflecting the altered timeline. Is this a thing throughout the entire game, and I just never noticed, or is it just for that part of the game?

    The texts are generally different when you make different choices, but I don't think alternate texts start happening until the last episode. They also change during the (incredibly long) dream sequences as well in ep. 5.

     

    neHlvDK.jpg?1

     

     

  12. Posted

    I played some of this at my friend's house last weekend and it was so fucking beautiful. However I don't like the game much at all. Seems like the big problem is the new amazing drawings are put on top of really finicky tile based hitboxes from the 80s. Not sure why it needed to switch between new and old on the fly.

     

    However maybe I'll give it another shot at one point just to see the rest of the characters. The animation is just so good.

  13. Posted

    I played this and man I really enjoyed the nostalgia trip. I still love this story and characters and I like how the puzzles are just all pretty much brute force. There's more than a few sloppy art errors though, which really sucks and I wish it wasn't so. Three of them fucking ruin puzzles, which probably explains why Mike did not finish the final scene without a hint. Hopefully those are patched because that kind of shit makes me not want to recommend the new version to anyone.

     

    Also it seems like there was a really bad animator on the team because about a fourth of the character drawings tend to be straight trash, but luckily they aren't the most important cutscenes, which are superbly well drawn (or redrawn). This person must have drawn that new shockingly bad main menu. I also wish many of the backgrounds were better as sometimes they look like someone sloppily passed them through image trace in Illustrator and did a minor amount of redrawing. I guess they ran out of time. There's some cutscene backgrounds near the end that are just a bunch of messy desert color splotches.

     

    Compared to the 2D art, I'm extremely surprised at how well they pulled off redoing all of the 3D vehicles and rerendering them to all fit the cutscenes just right. They looked bad in the trailers but now they look awesome and I'm super impressed. Also the 3D moving backgrounds, Christ it's great.

     

    But I did feel like tonally the cutscenes felt weirdly abrupt, but it seems checking the Double Fine forums that someone boned up the music and between scenes it just cuts out when that shouldn't be the case. I knew something was off. I really hope they fix it, as it felt kind of cheap.

     

    I haven't gone through more than the intro with commentary, but I hope it's as engaging as the Grim and DoTT stuff.

     

    On 4/24/2017 at 11:46 AM, jennegatron said:

    Alright! Below contains story & puzzle spoilers, so if someone hasn't played it, don't open this up

    I don't agree with much of this. But yeah, I've always hated the demolition derby minigame. I was kind of hoping they would revamp it so it wouldn't play like mush and that they would fix the silly visual distance issue for the puzzle in it. I think some of the issues in things like that were because DF felt the need to be able to switch back and forth to the original game on the fly, but I'm not sure that's really that necessary if it holds back control revisions.

     

    Also I always liked the weapon juggling, but I agree the weapon you have to use on the Cavefish is clumsy and nonsensical. It was the one that stumped me on the whole game when I was young even though I always found the rest to be very easy on the adventure game scale (well until Telltale introduced pressing dialogue and you win). After you complete that section though, they do remove all Mine Road weapons from your inventory for the rest of the game.

     

    Also you can skip all cutscenes and dialogue rather quickly! You can even skip through every section of the Mine Road and main highway to the next exit or skip fights you don't want to fight that particular person. You can also double click exits between locations to instantly warp to the next and not wait on walk animations. It should take only seconds to get back to where you need to be.

     

    Also the part where you couldn't go back to the ramp is a new bug. It is curious you were able to get past that bug though. I ran into that one just messing around and I was never able to get back to the ramp without reloading a previous save even after driving back and forth (although I did skip it all). It seemed gamestopping. Someone else ran into this bug on the Double Fine forums so perhaps I should tell them to give a full run through of the Mine Road unskipped a try.

     

    On 4/25/2017 at 1:22 PM, Simon said:

    As far as I remember, Full Throttle has little or no object combination, just a couple of dialogue puzzles like at the Vultures hideout (Ben is pretty laconic), and very little back and forth between locations to progress (he's not that patient either).

    Yeah there isn't any inventory combination. I sort of always wanted to insert the hose in the gas can ahead of time but now that I say that out loud it sounds rather silly.

  16. Posted

    On 3/24/2017 at 9:59 PM, Jake said:

    Strongly recommend joining the Sam & Max Funhouse on Facebook. No full comics but Steve posts a lot. 

    Fucking shit, thanks for the refresher. I apparently had already liked that page but I think I only added it after the unreleased Max gets shot strip was posted. I have other pages of this strip but not the ones posted there.

  17. Posted

    I think I played that demo many times, It's where you first figure out that stupid ramp puzzle right? It came in handy so I didn't waste time in the main game for sure.

     

    Also the only remaster I really want is just fucking Sam and Max. It would look so good with crisp graphics. I don't think anyone at Double Fine worked on that though. They all moved on to Telltale and Steve Purcell is at Pixar.

    On 3/15/2017 at 2:08 PM, Simon said:

    I can't picture a faithful remaster of The Secret of Monkey Island or Loom in the same sense as DoTT or Full Throttle. There's a different visual language to the earlier games, whereas once the games started to resemble cartoon animation (like the latter two, and Sam & Max), you can see the technical room for improvement. It's okay to tidy up the large character sprites with jagged outlines and make DoTT feel more like a Tex Avery cartoon, because that's what it was aiming for in the first place.

    I agree, it seems like it was kind of pointless to remaster the first two Monkey Islands, although I do really like their repaints of the backgrounds in the second one. The scanned backgrounds of 2 were really the only thing that felt like it could easily be higher res. There was too much left for interpretation and I guess there's always a push to make everything have elements of CMI now, even though I sort of like that one the second least in terms of character design and some art direction.


    I do worry about some of the cleanup I have seen so far in the Full Throttle remaster stuff, concerned line widths on the screen and the off color 3D of the bike, but hopefully that is all fixed. I loved the DoTT remaster so fucking much. It's exactly how it should be now in my opinion.

  21. Posted

    I can't believe anyone likes A Serious Man. It's so bad. For someone who would call himself a fan, I actually think the Coens actually have a good handful of bad unwatchable movies.

     

    But I haven't seen recent output so I'll go over from best to worst on what I have seen/own. I'll throw in undirected movies with scripts by either just because I can't follow the rules:

     

    Raising Arizona

    Miller's Crossing

    No Country for Old Men

    Fargo

    The Hudsucker Proxy

    The Big Lebowski

    Bad Santa (If this at all counts!)

    True Grit

    O Brother, Where Art Thou?

    The Ladykillers

    The Man Who Wasn't There

    Barton Fink

    Paris, je t'aime short

    Unbroken

    Gambit

    Burn After Reading

    Inside Llewyn Davis

    Intolerable Cruelty

    Blood Simple

    Crimewave

    A Serious Man

     

    I actually didn't realize I liked Miller's Crossing that much until ranking these. Raising Arizona is what got me into the Coen Brothers movies in the first place so maybe it's just the nostalgia pushing it up.

     

  24. Posted

    So is anyone else glad that Imdb is shutting down their forums?

     

    As much as I liked some of the forums where lesser known movies were talked about the whole place became a real garbage hellhole of hate. You couldn't really go to any newer show or movie without it becoming some right wing hate fest. Either that or on a much lesser offense, every forum had a "worst movie ever" troll thread.

     

    I guess it sucks that they aren't preserving the archives for when there was some more civil and interesting discussion but man, the place is owned by Amazon and even though they are the biggest retailer in the world they couldn't afford a sufficient amount of moderators? Real shame they couldn't just let their money do that instead so we could continue to have a place to talk about specific movies that may not be cool enough to have their own Reddit. I think I posted 30 times there in the last 14 years and half of them were about Little Nemo but I would report people and they would never disappear. The Sense8 boards were just atrocious, you could look up these people's accounts and see they were just finding some reason to hate on every show that had a "gay agenda." How could these people never be banned? What on earth?

     

    I heard Letterboxd will fill the gap with those serious about movies though so maybe I should look into an account there.