miffy495

Can I point out how genius one decision in this game is? The ammo management is SO WELL IMPLEMENTED. Here's what they do: Obviously, you're going to have a favourite gun. Being Insomniac, they have put a huge amount of effort into developing a big range of fun weapons to use. The usual thing that happens in a game like this (for me, anyway) is that I find a favourite gun and play almost exclusively with it. All the cool guns I will give a quick look to, think "oh, neat" and then switch right back to my favourite. In this game, they have a system in which enemies drop TONS of ammo, but not for the gun that you're using. If you get any drops at all, it's not enough to make a difference. You're going to be running out of ammo for the gun that you're using within minutes, if not less. However, ammo for every other weapon has been dropping constantly over that time, so you have at least a couple of weapons that are completely full up and ready to go. The way that this subtly encourages you to play outside your comfort zone is dramatic. I'm usually a single-shot, mid-distance kind of player, but this ammo system has me messing with charge weapons and deployables and really enjoying them. Even beyond that, every weapon does different amounts of damage to different enemy types. Something that's great against the zombies will sometimes be useless against humans enemies. Very cool.

So, putting more and more time into this game, I think I'm really starting to love it. I'm barely touching the story, but think I'm going to power through a bunch of it just to see what unlocks. I made that mistake in Skyrim too. Played 12 hours and never unlocked shouts. I hit a story mission that gave me a super jump move and realized "oh shit, I've been doing all of these things and I'm still not able to even more around the world the way they intend yet", so now I need to get all the movement stuff before I go back to just fucking around all the time. That said, fucking around in this game is GREAT. Out of curiosity (and with diminished hope because of how few Xbone-owning [Xbowning?] Thumbs there are), is anyone playing this online? I'd like to give it a spin sometime and would love to try it out with some people that have already been somewhat vetted for quality. Never had a bad online experience with a Thumbs group. JamesM, if you're reading this (and probably not because I haven't seen you around here in a few months), you up for a spin some time? Anyone else?

DA:O is amazing and should be played by all. Still never played 2, despite owning it. I'm thinking I should give it a go before thinking about DA:I. Opinions on 2 are so mixed I feel like I should at least figure out where I stand on it just to know.

Downloading now! Yaaaaaaaay!

PC is fantastic. It's cheap on steam regularly, so all you have to do is find a cable for sale somewhere. Do it.

I never played the original, but since getting this on Vita with PS+ I gave it a go. It's pretty fun for a pure beginner, though I watched a bunch of Patrick Klepek's playthroughs earlier this year, so I was familiar with a lot of the concepts and mechanics despite not having actually played it before. Still, it felt good.

YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES!!!! JC2 remains one of my favourite games ever. So ready for this.

I figure that I try to play enough things that I will end up with each console. I did last generation, and don't regret any of my purchases (though the percentage changed a lot. Heavy 360 at the beginning, but by the end nearly exclusively PS3) so given that in the back of my mind "One day I will own this" was already there it didn't take a lot to push me. It was financially not a problem and there are now 3 games that I quite wanted to play that I could not get anywhere else. Tack on that there was a bundle with a much more aesthetically appealing console and one of said games thrown in as a bonus and I was ready to bite. Honestly, the console itself is pretty clunky. The UI feels really laggy, and whenever I pop up the home menu it shows the last thing I had open for a bit before loading what I want to actually see (kind of like a crappy phone web browser). That's nothing to do with the game, but is worth saying I guess. Another hour in today (putting me at about 3 now) and I'm enjoying the side stuff. I'm unlocking some new weapons as I go and discovering just how much STUFF there is in this game. Character mods, weapon mods, "Overdrives" (which you earn for doing things in the world well and then enhance your abilities to do those things. I was grinding on a lot of rails, so now earned an overdrive whereby grinding increases my combo multiplier faster), and the items scattered around the world that let you craft them. I think there are 5 kinds of currency (3 for creating "amps" and then another two for buying things) and at least another two kinds of collectible on top of that. Movement still feels amazing and I'm getting better at it. I'm at a point where if I'm NOT in a combo it feels completely wrong. The missions and story are, so far at least, totally forgettable. I'm finding the game really good for short bursts (my hour today was played in three sittings) as nothing is compelling enough to keep me fixated for an extended time but it's still fun enough doing it to keep me coming back. That's a little worrying for the long term, but for now I'm having a good time. It was great today to have a half hour before I had to go pick up my girlfriend and actually just be able to sit and play a thing for that time without worrying about being able to drop it when I needed to. Most recently, I'd been playing Wonderful 101 on my WiiU, and I had been afraid to start playing it unless I knew I had 2 hours because those missions could go on and on. Not having to worry about that has been kind of liberating, honestly.

I just saw The Skeleton Twins. That movie is fucking fantastic. It is perfectly cast, heartbreaking, and so funny in some parts that I was crying. Without saying any more, that movie may be one of the best things I've seen this year. Check it out.

Pushmo is fantastic. Also, if you want to drop $5 on some puzzles, there is a selection of Picross games that may meet your needs. They're all pretty solid (disclaimer, I love Picross so much. SO MUCH.).

This is why I included the aside about his politics. There is a difference between being ignorant of actual issues and problems that need addressing (not good) and enjoying dumb shit because dumb shit is fun. Ryckert is both, but he is SO GOOD at dumb shit, and at least not an asshole about not knowing problems (ie: He seems far more likely to wonder "Why doesn't that guy have a job?" than to ever be the guy yelling "GET A JOB!") that I like him. I wish he'd get informed about some things, but he is massively entertaining.

I choose to interpret this literally.

The more I see of Ryckert, the more my opinion of him shifts to the positive. This man is a goddamned hero. His stupid shit is amazing. Although, like Twig, I hope one day he realizes how stupid some of the political-ish things he says are, his amazing ability to follow through on dumb ideas and make them fun astounds me. I don't think a pre-Ryckert GB would have done the Mario 3 Rollercoaster challenge, for example. I really don't know if he's an idiot or a genius. He's probably both. Fantastically entertaining though.

That's a very pretty guitar. I love cherry Gibsons. I have an SG in the same colour myself, along with my white Ibanez Roadstar II and olive Gretsch Electromatic. Basically, since I got a grown-up job and the income that comes with it, I've built teenage me's dream guitar rack. It is nice to have. It's interesting you find going back to old songs after a long break drops your ability to play them, actually. I've found that if I ignore a song for a long time, going back after playing everything else for so long blows my old score away because of the new things my fingers have figured out how to do. I'm still finding myself in a weird place, guitar-wise. It's officially been about 15 years since my first lesson, but it's really only been the past two that I've taken it seriously and done any more than basic strumming. I'm finally starting to feel confident enough to play in front of others (recently, jammed a bit at a halloween party), but it's taken me SO LONG to get there. Still, it feels great. About to hit my 200th hour in Rocksmith 2014 (I'm at 199 right now...) and am always stoked for whatever news is coming down the pipe about the series. Stoked as hell for Hendrix!

Cine, glad you're with us, man. As a note on the "academia with depression" thing, my girlfriend has been dealing with it for a long time. She found that taking a semester off actually did more harm than good as it contributed to a sense of purposelessness. What she has settled on is a very reduced course-load as the Student Disability Resource Centre at her school considers 2 courses per semester full time with a mental illness. It's taken her an extra couple of years compared to the 5 courses per semester she had been taking, but she'll be finishing her degree this year and has been much more content feeling like she's still doing something than she did when she took time off.

Yeah, I've been happy to pay the $1 or $1.50 to upgrade, depending on system. It's great. As for accessing your Wii games, I believe that if you go into the Wii submenu on the WiiU and access the shop from THERE, it's the old Wii shop, and you can re-download any Wii games and even purchase new ones if you really want to. If you go into "Shop" from the WiiU menu, it'll only take you to the new eShop. Also, I thought that there was a way to play Wii stuff on the tablet? Not sure, honestly, as I've never tried, but I remember hearing last year about a firmware update that let you play Wii games on the tablet with a remote...

Oddly, body count is the only thing that Americans measure by the metric system. Hectares are the preferred unit.

Even more fitting, where I'm from we just call them "baby-gates".

I barely have time to play games that explain themselves well. I don't have time to do background reading. I'm playing to relax, not to study. If a game frustrates me in a way that seems unfair or that I need a guide to get through, I'm out.

Man, so I bought Wonderful 101 back when it came out but didn't really have a chance to get into it. I found the controls kind of frustrating and just couldn't go for it. In my anticipation for Bayonetta last week, I decided to give it another whirl. This time, I broke a rule that I try to stick by. The rule? If you have to look up video tutorials for how to play a game to enjoy playing it, it's probably not a good game. I looked up some stuff about blocking and tried to figure out why I couldn't interact with certain prompts (turns out I had to be in the proper "unite" form to interact. Red prompts can only interact with Unite Hand, Yellow with Hammer, etc) and since then I've finished a third of the game. I've had Bayonetta sitting on my coffee table for 4 days now, but fuck it I want to finish 101 now. This game is BONKERS. In all the right ways. I still am psyched for Bayonetta, but the appeal of that game for me is mostly in how fucking crazy it gets, and Wonderful 101 is also fucking crazy but doesn't skeeze me out the way that Bayonetta does. I would play this game in front of my girlfriend. I would not play Bayonetta in front of her. And Wonderful 101 scratches the same itch. I'm starting to wonder a bit now if I'll end up liking this more than Bayonetta just because of the skeeze factor. Dunno. The important thing is, if you have not played Wonderful 101, you probably should.

I don't know about you guys, but I only feel comfortable these days when I'm wearing the pants that I had custom made out of interwoven thumb drives.

Hey, I'm IN Canada and she's still too far away to chill. So tomorrow is a PD day, meaning that while I'm going in to work the kids will not be there. This left today as the day for all of the Halloween festivities (including costumes) at school. It is also the day that I happened to be teaching a chemistry lesson. I taught the lesson in character (as much as I could) and a student hung back a little bit at the mid-morning break to help me film the following. You can hear her giggling a bit. Very unprofessional in a camera operator, but in her defence, she's 9. ...I went to university for 7 years to do this.

Caught the end of the game while out tonight. Don't really care at all about baseball. As a Canadian, your game seems weird and arcane to me. Still, it was an exciting end. Dat triple. I was casually having a beer with three friends and I looked up just as it was being hit. There was a moment where these three Canadian dudes and one lady just stared at the screen and simultaneously said "OH SHIT." and then had to watch the rest. I believe the sentence I said at the time was "I don't fully understand what is happening right now guys, but I know enough to know that I will be paying attention to this instead of you for about the next five minutes. Please don't take offense." Congrats SF, condolences to Kansas. That was a hell of a tense finish.

SO GOOD.

Apropos of nothing, I've been reading Paulo Freire for work and this quote jumped out at me as particularly appropriate to the "good" gators. This was written about educating low-income children in the early 1970s. These things just keep on coming up.