miffy495

When Giant Bomb played it for a Thursday Night Throwdown, they turned off every song except for that one. For 2 hours, it was nothing but Lavigne. It was pretty great, especially when Vinny started fucking with the levels. Justified my premium subscription right there.

So on Twitter, Toblix, Nachimir, Wrestlevania, n0wak, Patters, and I started to get a mite nostalgic for the Grand Thumb Auto happenings of yore. For those who weren't around at the time, for 60-ish weeks straight starting in the fall of 2008, a few of us played a weekly game of GTA IV on the 360 in which all manner of shit quickly became fucked up. The standard was racing fire trucks around the airport, but there were also days where we did things like spend the entire time trying (and failing spectacularly in my case) to teach ourselves to rocket jump. It was pretty fun. Wrestlevania, or bamblesquatch, or whatever he calls himself now on here (damn you people changing your names) suggested we do a Monday night game. As he's British, Monday night means Monday afternoon for those of us in North America. I just happen to be opening the coffee shop on Monday, which means I'm done work at 1:30pm Mountain Time, or about 8:30pm GMT if my calculations are correct. As such, I'm in. We're going on PC this time, and the IT steam group already has an event created. I don't know about the others, but I've got both GTAIV and Episodes installed, so I'm up for whatever. How much of the old gang can we rally for this one?

In fairness though, it sounds like when things work out that could be one of the most rewarding jobs on the planet. Kudos, man.

I've been playing it a little bit at a time for a year now. I'm on the road to the last gym. At this rate, I'll beat it RIGHT about when Sapphire/Ruby come out. Don't know if I'll want to jump into another so soon after. I guess we'll see.

As I said, credits is where I (by default) say I've "beaten" a game. Badfinger, you're saying I haven't "finished" a game, and I agree with you. You can beat a game without finishing it. That is exactly what I've done. I've beaten a game when I've seen the narrative through to its conclusion. I've finished a game when I've exhausted the gameplay content. Some games have no narrative and thus cannot be beaten. Some games are ONLY narrative and are therefor finished the second that you beat them. You take issue with me saying that I've finished Diablo 3. I never said I finished it. In fact, I believe that game to be un-finish-able. Randomly generated content means you cannot exhaust it, so the best you can hope to do is beat it. Twmac, I do allow for some exceptions in my definition of "beat" as "seen the credits" (I mentioned Red Dead Redemption not being beaten until you do that post-credits epilogue) and that could conceivably stretch to include Nier, Eternal Sonata, and Dark Souls, but I am not actually sure as I haven't played any of those. From what I understand of Nier, it would fit because the narrative adjusts itself on a second playthrough and it actually takes multiple playthroughs to see the whole story. From what I understand of Dark Souls, it wouldn't fit because while you see new enemies and such, the narrative is unchanged. I may be wrong about Dark Souls; again, I haven't played it. Eternal Sonata I have no idea about, even anecdotally, and so won't speak to it. If the narrative is different and dependent on multiple plays, then it would not be beaten until you've seen that. That said, I generally don't make time for that kind of game just because I'm busy and want to play more things, not the same thing twice (kind of that "a game" vs "THE game" distinction. I don't want a THE game). I hope that makes sense.

Sweet! I can now play Tingle's Rosy Rupee Land! ...yeah, I know. Fuck it, I wanna see it with my own eyes.

I saw the credits of Diablo 3 twice. I have beaten that game twice. I will never complete that game, as it contains randomly generated elements and is therefor un-complete-able. If a game has credits and I've seen them, that game is beaten (barring an epilogue chapter or something, see: Red Dead Redemption). Requiring more than that for someone to say they've beaten a game strikes me as saying that unless someone has watched every special feature and the director's cut and found all of the bonus online content, they haven't REALLY seen a movie. That line of thinking is bullshit elitism to me. If that's how you like to enjoy content, that's fine, but don't require it of me. I saw the credits, enjoyed the journey, and now I've got other shit to do. I beat that game, and I'm moving on. I enjoy that I can (and do!) go back to Diablo 3 for a quick bit of monster-killing every now and then, but that's bonus content, just like going back to complete more areas in Just Cause 2 is bonus content after all the missions and side-quests have been done, or going back to Assassin's Creed to find the last few collectibles. Game is beaten.

Everything I've heard from people that watch it is that it spun its wheels until Winter Soldier came out, and then when shit went down in that movie they were free to start doing cool shit in the show. The problem was that the show started months before a movie that had a big revelation that the show had to wait for before it could get going. My intention is to marathon it once DVDs come out and try and get a big-picture view of the show.

Does anyone know if the 3DS is region locked for DS games? Since the DS wasn't region locked, I don't know if the DS part of the system will still play anything.

Clearing my calendar, getting up early every morning, etc etc for the new school year. Log in to the substitute teacher placement website: "Your personnel record contains an expiration date that prevents you from being assigned to jobs" What? Is there any information on this? Nope. That's it. Have fun. What the hell? So now I get to spend my day on the phone with HR. Good times.

I also recently picked up Xenoblade apropos of nothing. Completed the ebay transaction (North America, gamestop exclusive, used copies on Amazon for $150, etc. Ebay had one for $60) about 36 hours before the remake news dropped. Oh well. Gonna play it on the WiiU and enjoy it there.

Subbes! How's it going?

I already have all of these things, except the bluetooth dongle. How tough was this to set up?

My girlfriend of seven years, to this point quite anti-marriage, recently started talking about it after we attended her aunt's ceremony. She and her now-husband did it on their 10th anniversary in a little forest clearing out in Kananaskis, which was nice. We started talking about what we'd do. We're both atheists, don't want families involved, and are not exactly gender-normative (she's self-described "butch" bisexual, I look like a quarterback due to genetics and having to be clean-cut for work, but am a punk at heart who loves being gender-subversive) so we have a similar problem. I have suggested taking a plane some place tropical, throwing an effigy of something into a volcano, and calling that a ceremony. I think volcano sacrifice is something that more couples should really be looking into these days. Let's have a return to the old ways. Monotheism has really eroded at humanity's traditional values.

I'll drop by next time I'm driving through to Victoria to visit my folks. For serious, how come Canada's gotta be so big? I know there are a bunch of Canadian thumbs, and most of you seem pretty cool, but I'm only vaguely aware that any other Albertans exist on here at all, and if a meetup were to try to be arranged it would be logistically impossible. Bullshit. As for friends, against all odds I've maintained a board game night with roughly the same group of dudes since tenth grade (now 11 years ago). This group has stuck through all of high school, bachelor's degrees, and a couple of master's degrees for the group, and has moved from a dude's mom's basement to a bunch of rental places to a nice condo recently purchased by a member of the group who is now a successful engineer. I've made other friends since, but this board game group has stuck. Hell, one of us lives in Alaska now but he still stops by the board game night unannounced if he happens to be in town, just because he knows it's going on (as happened two weeks ago). These however are people I've known for about 15 years, since moving to Calgary. As for making new friends, I have no damn idea. Aside from coworkers, I've barely met anyone new in years. The person who would most likely qualify as my newest friend is a guy who I met at a coworker's birthday party who I had taken a bunch of classes with in our bachelor's program four years ago and started talking about life-after-school with. I invited him to game night, and he's found his way into the group now. I guess that's a new friend, but it's also a classmate and buddy-of-a-coworker first, so it's not like this was a sudden "HEY WE SHOULD HANG OUT" thing. Hell, we hung out one-on-one for the first time about 5 years after meeting each other. New friends are scary, y'all.

My absolute favourite thing from the whole set. I love it so much. Way more clever than I was expecting out of all of that, and in among all the others it almost feels like it's taking the piss out of the whole thing.

I did this same playthrough before MGS4 came out. I'm not interested in doing it again right now, but it's fun to watch others do this. I have the HD collection on Vita. Should really get into it.

Have you played LBW yet? You should. I liked Skyward Sword a lot, but played it in small chunks over a period of a year. LBW shakes it up juuuuust enough to still feel like traditional Zelda but have something new and cool, and as a result I blasted through it in a week. It's great.

Photoshop can give ANYONE solid dick.

I feel like Dan is trying REALLY hard right now to bring the wackiness that Vinny makes look so effortless. Vinny has been the silly soul of GB for a long time, and with him out East now and Dan being hired right as he left, I think Dan wants to step up and fill that role. I oscillate between liking him and being really irritated by him. I loved the Mario Party stream they did recently, and actually find that when they have a bit of "real talk" Dan and I like a lot of the same things for a lot of the same reasons, but then he feels the need to kick up the wacky and he loses me again. I'm withholding judgement until he settles in and hopefully mellows a bit. Right now I just don't know how to feel about the guy. He just needs to chill a bit and he could be pretty cool. (although I will say, his complete ignorance of a lot of basic scientific concepts is frustrating to me. There was a recent quick look of some space survival game with Dan and Drew and I could practically see the look of "Did you really just fucking ask that?" on Drew's face when Dan started asking about some basic, common-knowledge space stuff)

Huh. Good thing I watched all the IT streams when summer started. I had a good 3 months of catching up to do, which would not exist by the time I got around to watching them under twitch's new policies.

I would never camp without a guitar. Night-time fire music is an essential part of the camping experience as far as I'm concerned. In fact, I have a shitty little beat-up one that I pretty much only keep around because it's in such condition that I don't mind taking it into the woods. Even during my long lapse of playing seriously, I kept up with the basics of folk songs just so I could be ready to go if I needed to. Just spent my anniversary with my girlfriend in the woods at Banff national park near here and it was a great time. Elevation change from mountains to prairies on the way home gave me a killer migraine, but otherwise it was rad. Honestly, bringing along a board game may have been fun. I may pack one next time. I see no problem with it.

Goddamn, I kind of want to have kids just so that I can share Pingu with them. That fucking show. ...and I don't think I've laughed as hard at a video as I did at Mr. Ando in a long time.

Deadpool annoys the hell out of me. He just feels like he's trying too hard to be "random" (in the obnoxious teenager use of the term) at all times. I worked with a guy who thought that Deadpool was the height of comedy and just couldn't for the life of me see what was appealing about it. Breaking the fourth wall is not a joke in and of itself, goddamn it. There needs to be a point to it. Get off my lawn.