miffy495

Sweet! Happy birthday, Wrestle. Enjoy the family time!

Hell, it took me a long time. Pretty sure that's just a geek thing. Even with my current girlfriend, it was more just luck at first than anything else. My advice is, be lucky. A big pitfall I've noticed is that lots of guys fall for girls in their circle of friends, which in my experience (both my own and observed) rarely if ever works out. What worked for me is the "friend of a friend" thing, which never had a chance to become a friendship between the two of us without being a relationship. Friendship and relationship went together, not one at a time. Trying to go from one to the other doesn't go nearly as smoothly, as the emotional impact is so goddamn different. The moral? Don't fall for your friends, but knowing the same people certainly helps. Anyway, that's a lot of bullshit considering it was prompted by one sentence. Whatever your situation, Pat, good luck with it.

Fixed.

I was wondering who the fuck "My Little Pony" was when I accepted the friend request. Glad I did now. Cheers, monkey.

It's actually that sort of thing that turns me off of games like this. Things that were awesome in isolation ("Holy sht I just blew through a wall at the last second to prevent a bomb detonation! This is amazing!") become tactics ("make sure you blow a hole in that wall so you can watch the place they need to plant a bomb") which just sucks all the fun and spontaneity out of it. I don't like when a game gets so formalized as to remove the improvisation from it. As a result, most multiplayer games quickly become dull for me in proportion to people's familiarity with the maps and mechanics increasing. For whatever reason, Battlefield has always been a particularly egregious example of this.

I got it the day it came out. We still cool?

No worries. I was actually pretty surprised that I didn't already have you on my friends list.

My profs have used it from time to time, but never for anything that is actually useful for the class. They'll occasionally say "like pop culture reference x" when giving an example of something and then show a youtube clip of it the next class. I can see how youtube could be a real learning tool, but it's never been used as such for me.

I got halfway through the Wii one, then got back into Mass Effect. It's not a bad game at all, although the voice actors are very obviously EA's "B" team and I can't quite get the calibration to work properly on my TV. Low-to-midrange production values, but very solid gameplay and a nice filling in of the Dead Space story make it worth it. Also, some really tense and well done setpieces. I don't think it's all that fantastic, especially compared to how good House of the Dead was for rail shooting last year, but it's certainly worth playing and quite fun. Gets a tentative recommendation, perhaps becoming stronger if it has a great end when I go back to finish it. Definitely play it if you're a decent fan of the 360/PS3/PC game and have any love for rail shooters.

I still think that any gamer interested in wonderfully realized game worlds should play Mass Effect. I also can't imagine enjoying 2 nearly as much as I have without having the background from the first game. So yes, play Mass Effect. I actually am really starting to want to go back and replay it (AGAIN) after finishing ME2, then taking a new character through both games. It's simply so fucking good. DPP, you don't think you're being a bit harsh on Jack there? The trailer was horrible, and I can certainly see how that could colour your opinion of the character, but in the game world she's a bit stereotypical but actually has some nuance and a decent (if contrived) backstory. She's certainly not a deal-breaker in any sense of the term. I can see her at worst being a minor temporary distraction from the best parts of the game. I play strict boyscout Paragon, so maybe if you're Renegade she becomes more obnoxious to fit you, but I've had no problems with anything related to her that wasn't her stupid debut trailer and curious choice of attire. Now that I've done her loyalty mission, she at least wears a tank top. Eljay: ok, I'll buy that the Batarians may have introduced Varren to different worlds in a "Bart Simpson brings a frog to Australia" kind of way, but how do you explain those anteater/monkey things that are common pests freaking everywhere? I want more things like those giant crabs walking around the beaches of Virmire in ME1 that didn't appear anywhere else.

I did a bunch of loyalty missions last night, and goddamn this game just keeps getting better. After the set on Tuchanka, (heh, the spelling suggestion for "Tuchanka" is "Buchanan") I now have so much love for Mordin. What a fantastically realized character. I even like Jack quite a bit more than I thought I would. She's still a bit grating, but now that her loyalty mission is done, she doesn't even seem to be yelling dumb shit as often in the middle of a fight. Archangel's was great too. The only one I wasn't all that interested in was Grunt, which was too bad as he has some potential as a character. Fighting a few waves of Tuchankan wildlife just didn't interest me that much. Especially since it's the same wildlife that happens to be on every damn planet. Seriously, with so much attention to detail everywhere else, why is it that so many planets in the ME universe just happened to evolve the exact same fauna. I'm thinking here of the Varren, Thresher Maws, and those monkey things I can't remember the name of. In ME1 the only place that had Varren was Feros and I thought they were native. Sure, Thresher Maws were anywhere you could land the Mako, but whatever. That's fine. All the planets are height maps anyway, I didn't expect they'd bother to create individual wildlife for a height map. Now it's just beginning to feel really artificial and kinda lame. Oh well.

Crud. It's looking unlikely I'll be able to make today's game. We'll see.

Despite the signature disclaimer, I can't tell if you're kidding here. As such, allow me to say: no offense intended. All joking, not meant as any kind of actual burn. I have great love for you, 'blix. Would not mean to actually offend you in any way.

I have no specific issues with pain or anything, but will back Patters up on the Sony controller design being by far the most uncomfortable to use of the available options. They symmetry of the controller is just short-sighted when you try to think about how often you'll actually be using say, the left stick compared to the right. My left thumb will start to cramp up after any extended PS3 gameplay sessions, simply from having to hold it at such an awkward angle. The only game in which I've found the Sony design to be a benefit was Katamari, where it actually made sense given the symmetry of the use of the gamepad.

BOO! Just do what I do and set up a separate board game night with your friends. Last week we decided that the time was right to expand upon Space Trucker (which is awesome, PS) and added in all five expansions at once, having never seen one of them before. The chaos was all-consuming. The very first turn of our first flight, my entire ship was destroyed. Somehow through the remaining two flights I managed to scrape enough spacebucks to come in second overall. Bizzare, but wholly enjoyable. Then we played a bunch of Kill Doctor Lucky, which I'd always wanted to try but have never had the opportunity. For those not in the know, it's basically Clue (or Cluedo to you Euro folks) but backwards. All the players secretly hate this doctor, but for some reason are gathered at his house for a party. The power goes out and everyone simultaneously decides this is their chance to off the guy. The goal then becomes to intercept the doctor as he wanders from room to room of his manor and kill him without his dog or any of the other guests (players) noticing you. You use cards with certain numbers of "murder points" to try to kill him any time you're alone in a room with him and noone has a line of sight to you, but of course the other players can play distraction cards of equal point value to throw a wrench in your plans right before you succeed. Whoever finally actually kills the old bastard wins. The game was typically over in about 45 minutes when we were playing, so we got about 3 games in before calling it a night. Great fun for a quick diversion.

I'm in, but I may be a bit late as I want to send off a homework assignment before getting started.

I've been going to the University's Cinemania thing on Monday nights this year. Basically it's a free screening of a movie that has left theaters but isn't on DVD yet for students. The Road is coming up in a couple of weeks and I'm pretty damn excited for it. My theater was doing some Cohen Brothers double features the last couple of weeks (A Serious Man paired with, in order, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men, and next week The Big Lebowski) and I just saw No Country again on Sunday, so now I'm psyched for some more McCarthy.

AKA: Your life.

Yeah, the whole transition is so jarring. It's not just the "LOADING" bit, but the whole thing. In the first game, it was obvious when the Mako dropped onto a planet over the course of a fairly lengthy FMV seqence that what was really happening was a load, but I didn't care because it was still in-world and kept me in the experience. Now they still have all the transitional stuff, but it's done in a wireframe mode that doesn't click at all with the rest of the art design and seems completely artificial and gamey copared to the rest of the universe. Really, all of the downsides of the game come from it feeling too artificial and gamey in spots. The obviously meticulously placed pieces of cover when you enter a combat area, for example, also feel way too contrived. Pretty much any negative thing I have to say about this game comes from unnecessary immersion-breaking elements. Everything else is amazing, and being pulled out of it so abruptly is infuriating. Goddamn I want to play more of this game. Why isn't it Wednesday yet?

Actually, I've found another one of those quests already, which branches around a lot and takes you to a load of different planets. I didn't get to put any more time in this weekend, so now I'm really looking forward to Wednesday night when I'll get my next crack at it. Those loading screens piss me off to no end. Really break the immersion. I don't really remember being irritated by the elevators in the 360 version of ME1, and in my recent playthrough on PC they were completely innocuous. The loading screens are way damn worse. You're doing a wireframe animation of my lander going down to the planet or docking or whatever while the loading screen happens anyway, why not just turn that into a bink video or something and let the game load behind it without showing the giant flashing LOADING over it. I don't need that, especially when I'm really into the world right up until that moment, thank you.

Logic was great fun. I don't know how it's divided up over there, but here we have Logic I, Logic II, and Logic III at the undergrad level, with more available later. Logic I is all about teaching you the foundations of predicate logic, which is fun but bewilderingly simple. It really gets awesome later, when they introduce the crazy shit. Logic II spends a lot of time constructing methods for counting different kinds of infinity and then moves on to a historical thing on the Hilbert program and the Church-Turing thesis, with lots and lots of examples thereof. Logic III walks you through a reconstruction of Goedel and then takes you up to present day. Ridiculously fun, although my friends always give me weird looks when I say that. Be forewarned though, although I love Logic, that doesn't make it easy. Predicate logic, sure, so the intro course shouldn't be too bad. The bitch is when they tell you at the start of the second course "Hey, remember all that stuff you learned last year? Here's why it's complete crap." And then they do it again the next year. I'd be doing a lot more logic now if I wasn't doing honours and having to worry about my GPA. As it is, I'm enjoying a course based on the work of Rudolph Carnap which, while not technically a logic course, may as well be. That said, my life is kind of burning me out right now. I'm working four days a week, at school 5, not getting a day off anywhere in there, and still finding time to spend with the girl. I'm just kind of not sleeping. Mass Effect coming out last week has lead to me spending way too much time at the laptop not working as well. Blugh.

I've only encountered one bug. While scanning a planet for minerals, my escape key somehow became disabled. This meant that I could choose to close the game from the task manager or continue to mine this planet until the end of time. Whee!

Ahaha. I got this game for Christmas the year I got my 360. Gift receipt in hand it went back into Future Shop a couple of days after. I think I got Burnout 4 with the credit or something. May I ask, what possessed you to get this game in the first place?

THE MEMORIES! The painful, painful memories...

Please don't actually buy into calling them SyFy. It hurts my brain to see that.