miffy495

Happy birthday, dude! Hope you're settling into the new city well!

TOBLIX COME OVER HERE! WE NEED YOU TO YELL!

So, I used to play guitar quite a lot back in the day, but since starting university in '05 my free time fell off enough that I just sort of stopped. I feel pretty shitty about that, all things considered, as I still have 3 guitars kicking around that I haven't touched for years. At least, hadn't. I started picking it up again about a month ago because I just couldn't get one fucking song out of my head and thought that maybe learning to play it would help. I did that, and discovered that I really fucking missed being able to play a thing. It was a relief to discover that upon seeing a chord progression my fingers automatically knew what to do to make the pretty noises happen, but even back when I was playing for reals, I knew next to no theory. Time permitting (school starting up again in three weeks, but it's my last year before done for good!) I'd really like to pick up some real knowledge about what the hell to do with these large instruments that for the longest time were just taking up space in my apartment. I don't have a schedule that would permit me to take actual lessons with an actual dude, so does anyone have any good online resources for those interested in teaching themselves some guitar things?

...and done. I quite enjoyed that game. As much as I love MP 1 and 2, I don't know if a straight-up re-hash of that would have really worked nowadays, so props to Rockstar for trying something new. Still undecided on whether that new direction was entirely successful, but it hit a lot of the notes I was looking for from a new Max Payne. It was a bit of a relief that for 8 of the 14 chapters, he wasn't the bald slob from the advertising as well. Do I think it worked out as a good game? Definitely. Do I think it's a great Max Payne game? I think I'll need to see where I stand on it in a few months. I enjoyed the ride through it, at the very least, and spent over 24 minutes killing people in mid-air according to the game's tracking, so that's a thing. Glad I picked it up on the Steam sale, but also glad that I've finished it and can free up the 30 gigs of hard drive space for other games now. I don't know what the hell they did to get the file size so huge, but holy hell.

Angry tomato is a Thumb institution! Don't you dare even think about removing it! :(

I have, but as I recall I discovered right after joining that it was mostly 360 people? How much good does my PC version do me there?

Been playing this a bit lately. Just finished up Chapter 7, the one where he shaves his head. It may just be because I watched season four of Breaking Bad last week, but when he pops out with his head shaved and his goofy shirt on, does it feel to anyone else like they're suddenly playing as Walter White? Aside from that weirdness, I'm liking the game more than I figured I would. Max Payne 1 and 2 still hold up as two of my favourite games of the early 2000s, and though this doesn't quite feel like them, I'm finding that (on Normal difficulty anyway), I'm able to mostly play it like I used to. I'm not using cover very much at all, a few specific setpieces excluded, and instead am shootdodging all over the fucking place. Good fun. Also, props to Rockstar for making a proper PC port. Not only can you tweak everything in the video settings, but it tells you how much of your video card's power said tweaking will use. I was able to optimize perfectly without once going into the game, thinking "oh shit, frame rate needs work", and popping back to the menu. Awesome. If GTAV has the same thing, I will be the happiest.

The inclusion of Gravity Bone means I just played it for the first time! I'd tried several times in the past, but for whatever reason it would always crash without fail (on 3 different computers!) when loading the second level. The version embedded in TFOL worked great though, and I was finally able to go through the whole thing. That was really rad! I know that GB was not the first Citizen Abel game, are there any plans to make the earlier things a bit easier to access for those of us who'd be interested to see them?

Yeah, seeing a Daptone records station in the quick look psyched me the hell up and moved this game a couple of spaces up my "want to play" list.

Yeah, I just saw people talking about the Day Z stuff and discovered that I didn't even know there was an FTL one as well. Some kind of notification would be nice.

Songs are easy to find, and skills just kind of come with practice. What I'm interested in skews towards the theory side of things. I like that I can pick up my guitar and fuck around a little and it sounds nice, but to be able to know why it does and be able to reproduce things with confidence is a goal, yeah.

Her hair is obviously just that awesome. Or perhaps it's a hat with a built-in armrest, which would explain the colour discrepancy.

I skipped the GBA ones, but am generally always just about ready for a new Pokemon game when they come out. I haven't played Black and White though, as I was wrapping up Heart Gold when it hit and decided it was skippable. I think the main problem Nintendo has with the series right now is that they've stepped up the rate of release in recent years (if this isn't actually true, it feels true to me, which is as good for my point) to the point where I can get fatigued. As far as I know, the dress up and battle train sort of things are always completely optional, yes? In all the games I've played, at any rate, I was able to completely ignore all of that and just play the game I wanted to play, which to me is a sign of a good RPG. It's also a great jumping off point for non-gamers. I've been able to get my partner into Dragon Quest because, despite not playing anything since the N64 days, she knew Pokemon Blue and Gold like the back of her hand and could get a handle on an old-school RPG by way of them. I picked up that crazy Pokemon Conquest game a couple of weeks ago too and (once I've had some time with it [it's pretty good]) hope to get her interested in a couple of strategy things as well. I think that it's a great start to what will hopefully be a splitting of genres for the franchise. The Pokemon series is great at creating "intro to genre x" games, and I would love to see more beyond RPG (main series), strategy (Conquest), and platformer (Pokepark, which fuck you I liked and spent 22 hours passing the wiimote back and forth with my partner over). On the other hand, I've only heard "meh" about the Mystery Dungeon spinoffs, so who knows. POKEMON!

Yeah, between the GB Quicklook and the RPS WIT, I'm sold. Just got Darksiders 2, so I'll wait for Sleeping Dogs to go on sale (the chances I'll have time to play it before this happens are practically zero with school starting in a few weeks), but I am now committed to giving this game a shot.

Apologies if a thread already exists for this game. I searched, I swear. So currently I'm staying with my parents the next province over for a week, and as my stepdad has no buddies his age who play video games, we always try to capitalize when I visit and get some serious co-op time in. Last night we beat half of Orcs Must Die 2 in a sitting, for example. When I visited at Christmas, it was Dead Island and Serious Sam 3. Today, we saw that Payday: The Heist was on sale on Steam for the mid-week thing, so we both picked it up and spent an hour and a half this afternoon giving it a spin. Hey guys, this game is pretty fun. I didn't really expect it to be. I thought it had an interesting premise but looked kinda shoddy and a bit too "Kane and Lynch"-y (despite the fact that I really did like the first K & L game) to really be a high quality product, but after trying out a few things and finally pulling off our first successful heist after about 5 totally failed attempts, I feel really good about dropping my $5 on it. For those who don't know, it's sort of Left 4 Dead-ish, but instead of running from zombies, the four players are working together to pull off bank robberies and escape from the police, with each scenario heavily inspired by various action films. We tried the basic bank one a few times, getting blasted repeatedly towards the end of it. Then we tried the "escape through the streets" bit pulled from Heat and also got blown to shit. The success came when we dropped an apartment complex's panic room down three floors using C4, then airlifted it out by helicopter and escaped through the sewers. It was really damn fun. Progression is level-based for your character, as pulling off certain things during play of the scenarios (as well as just completing them) results in cash that counts as experience and helps you level up by buying body armour or upgrading your guns, etc etc. The cap seems to be pretty damn high, and you choose which way your character progresses by selecting one of three upgrade tracks to put your cash into as you go, support, sharpshooter, and something else I forget the name of. I really like the way that it works, as it's not always just going to be "I hit level 5 so I get a shotgun", but it's also not randomized. It gives a bit of a sense of ownership over your character that I appreciate. Long story short, I think I may really like this game. Are there any other thumbs who play this? Now that I've got a taste, I kind of want to see what else the game has to offer. I've only made it to level 7 of their persistent progression thing, so there's a long way for me to go yet.

I just decided to fire this up again for the first time since Christmas break. Got my lizard-wizard to level 10, and an trying to find someone to teach me conjuration. I'm currently rocking fire in my right hand and lightning in my left, occasionally stopping to heal up, but would love a crazy spectral sword or some similar nonsense. Is there anyone in particular I need to talk to to work on that?

Also a bee. QED.

I'd be up for a round or two after work tonight. If you're on the East coast it may be a little late for you, but I'll add you on Origin anyway and we'll see what's up.

Awesome!

I've already played the hell out of Cargo, but it was probably my favourite game of 2011. Everybody play that fucking thing! It's a crime that noone has dibs-ed that yet.

Second on Fun Home and Shortcomings. I read the latter during a similar fight with my own girlfriend, and the fact that the main male character is a projectionist and so am I made the whole thing a bit much for me. I was pretty much totally gutted. Still, very glad I read it. Haven't read Persepolis myself, only seen the film, but the girlfriend loves the books and I've been meaning to swipe her copies of them and give them a read for forever now. I should probably get on that.

That's fair, it just hits so many personal notes for me (before moving out West, I grew up about a 3 hour drive from the Quebec border right in the middle of the Lucien Bouchard separatist days) and so much of the background history of the book has me thinking back on it and is putting me in the world so much more than I'd expected before picking up the book. It's not that I don't expect it to resonate, I was more asking how much that kind of thing was in your consciousness before and if a lack of that made the book even more difficult than it already is. As you said, you were driven to learn more about the conflict. Did you do that while reading the book or after? Did that make it more interesting in retrospect, or illuminate anything after the fact, or not impact your thoughts on the book at all? Having grown up immersed in that conflict, at least to the point that the book branches from real history, has been a huge part of making the early going accessible enough for me to get past the halfway point. Now I have the momentum and interest in the world to keep on going (at about page 550 right now) but the first couple of hundred pages may have been too obtuse for me without that to ground me. I'm more wondering what the experience of reading the book without having that would be than assuming that not having it would keep it from resonating. No one (I assume) would deny that this is a difficult book to read, at least at first, and I'm curious as to what it was that others latched on to to pull them through the early parts, because the Quebec separatist angle was what did it for me.

I just spent four days off the grid and dancing shoeless at the Calgary Folk Music Festival. Always a highlight of my summer. So much damn fun. I'm sunburned and my feet are fucking wrecked, but very happy. Don't want to go back to work tomorrow though, especially since my calves are already killing me after a particularly exuberant Senegalese hip-hop/Hungarian electro-folk/Cuban guitar collaboration thing yesterday that turned into a mid-afternoon dance party in 30 degree weather in a park. Good weekend.

You mean like all their Ratchet and Clank games? Or Spyro the Dragon?

Given the crazy amount of Canadian content that this book has, I'm really interested in why exactly it would resonate so well with American readers. It's weird, as I've been reading this over the last month-ish, I've been having flashbacks to the Quebec separatist heyday of the mid-90's and having a lot of the background story really hitting close to home for me (particularly the far-right Alberta separatist stuff, as I live with some people who actually are that) but am kinda baffled that it has so much of an impact on those who didn't grow up immersed in that. Also, how much does it impact your opinion of the book if you don't speak French? There's a lot of untranslated stuff in there. Any theories/thoughts from the US folks who love the book?