RubixsQube

So, I am being pretty slow with this, last night I completed a (very early, I'm assuming) hunt where I took down a Great Jaggi, which was pretty fun, as I'm now starting to understand the insect glaive's loop. It's still a little tedious to paint the target, send out the insect, and recall the insect, especially while I'm also trying to escape a monster and it's little underlings. It looks, though, like if I want to upgrade any of my weaponry, or get new weaponry, I'm going to have to do this again and again, am I right in thinking that this is going to be a thing where to upgrade anything you have to put a lot of grinding in? That's going to sour me on this experience, as I don't have an infinite amount of time to really farm the random bones and teeth. Maybe that's kind of The Thing With This Game, and maybe I should just shut up and keep playing, but I'm worried that if I keep playing, I won't be leveling up my weapons at the rate that I should to match the difficulty curve. I'm actually really liking it, even if I'm getting a little tired of the ancestral steppe area (but only a little). It's really fun when you get into a rhythm with a monster! I've really liked the monster behavior, it seems fairly natural. If you focus an attack on a leg, the monster falls over for a bit, which makes sense! Other games don't do that!

Kid Icarus: Uprising is like, a game I want to play so badly (it's, surprisingly, very similar to Jet Force Gemini, if you believe that), but dammit if the controls for the game really get in the way. There are on-rails sections which are fine, but you end up having to hold the gamepad entirely with your left hand, and then drawing with your right hand, and it's very, very hard to play for long stretches as a result. And because Nintendo sometimes hates you, it was never Circle Pad Pro compatible (well, it was, but only insofar as you could now play the same dumb way left-handed). So, really, I'd skip it.

It seems as if the "combat loop," as I see it now, requires: a) finding the monster, painting the monster, observing the monster's attack patterns setting yourself up to be the most productive hunter (collecting essences with the glaive, etc) c) attacking the monster, evading the monster when it attacks (or becomes frenzied) d) chasing the monster as it escapes to other areas on the map e) repeat ©, (d) until the monster shows visible signs of damage (limping, nesting) f) chase until the monster dies. This is presumably a very, very rough summary, especially given how important (a) is. Like, I feel as if, especially with the harder monsters, paying attention to the attack patterns, and behavior of the monsters is crucial.

Oh man, this is all so good. I think that eating before a mission is probably more important when you get harder guild quests. I'm in the fetch quest stage - collect this many things, kill this many things, bring them back, learn how to put things together. The problem with upgrading weapons is that I only sort of understand the relative value of the items, so I don't know if I should be upgrading something, or saving the items for later use. I suppose it doesn't hurt to just throw caution to the wind. I'd like to hunt with people here, but I need to maybe get myself to a point where I'm not completely useless.

Ok, not going to spend money on the guide, got it. I'm really interested in hearing about your experiences with the different weapons. I've been having an ok time with the glaive, but it's pretty complicated to use, and I'm only so-so understanding how to turn the (well-written) how-to's both in-game and here into actuality. I guess it's just practice. QUESTIONS, THOUGH: - It seems like I could spend a long time just getting resources, given that these easy quests are like, 50 minutes long. It also seems like I could just burden myself with a huge amount of stuff early in the game. How much should I just be getting into the quests and completing them, and how much should I be going for ore, and herbs, and mushrooms? - Should I be upgrading my current weapon with the items I have, or just hording them and hoping to forge a better version of the weapon? Or should I just not upgrade this weapon until I've kind of learned the ropes? - In one of the quests I was on, I think that I encountered a group of rogue Palicoes. The game hinted that you could recruit them to be part of your little band of helper cats. All these guys wanted to do was meow angrily and steal from me. Is there something I'm missing? Are these just assholes? - I'm assuming that better weapons, later in the game, don't require sharpening as often. Is this true? (thanks for walking me through this, like I am an idiot)

Giant Bomb and I have nothing in common. The timer makes the game more pressing, more dramatic, and significantly more exciting. If you're having an issue with it, you just slow time down, easy enough. This game is a departure from the norm in quite a few new ways, but I have to say, the thing that hardly gets talked about is the new travel methods that the game introduces. Like, being able to hover around in Deku Scrub mode is already neat (and used well throughout the early part of the game, I think), but the Zora Mask swimming feels fantastic, and the Goron Mask rolling allows for one of the great boss battles in Zelda history. I'm really loving this remake, even if I can also see all of the changes (you know, putting the rupee bank right out on the clock tower is a great idea, actually, considering how out of the way it was originally).

Oh man, Sno, Pepyri, this is great. Thank you, and hopefully you'll be able to answer the inevitable future questions that I'm going to have. In the demo, I had some fun with the dual swords, but that's because I'm one of those "don't have the patience for blocking" type of people. I think that I'll try to fumble around with multiple weapon types. Also, there are all kinds of guides to monster hunter out there, but I don't know how valuable they'd be with this updated version of the game. Do you recommend something like this? Or has so much changed that it'd be a hassle to try to sort out what is new and what's not?

I just bought a copy, although I'm pretty slow to play, and I heard you need to play 10-12 hours before you can be trusted in a multiplayer setting. There's so much to learn! But it's exciting! The game is gorgeous, and plays really well on the New 3DS. I think that right now I need to figure out what type of primary weapon I'd like to use. I kind of want to use the Insect Glaive, even if it has some weirdness with the little insect/"essence" stuff. Right now I just need to figure out the rhythm of how the game works, and the relative value of various items. (Side note that might be worth writing into the podcast about - in games with consumables, it's really tough to figure out whether or not something is valuable, and worth saving, or not. For instance, one of the key aspects of high-level Spelunky play is being able to understand the value of a rope versus a bomb versus a machete, etc etc. In MH4U, I'm already overwhelmed with things like whetstones and mini-whetstones and bug nets and pickaxes. Which are consumable? How much of everything should I take out on a quest?) I guess I just have a lot of questions that I assume the game will attempt to answer. How does one go about increasing their characters stamina and health bars permanently? Do things spoil, like meat? When I'm on a quest, should I just murder everything and plunder their corpses? Is it better to be a trapper or a killer? I am coming at this series completely, completely green, and I'm excited to potentially learn enough to go hunting with some veterans here on the boards!

I just felled the second monster in the MH4U demo, and it was pretty fun, even if it feels as if I'm kind of button mashing at the moment. I assume that this is kind of how it is early on. I think that I'm probably going to take the plunge, especially since I really like the New 3DS XL (thanks, by the way, dium, for that fantastic blog post about upgrading from a 3DS XL to a New 3DS XL, it was so insanely straightforward). I don't know if I like the camera nub right yet, but maybe I just need to adjust its sensitivity, if that's possible. Am I the only person who finds the plastic on the thumbpad to be overly slippery though? Majora's Mask is as weird and wonderful feeling as I remember it. It's a crazy shot of pure nostalgia from someone who played the game once right when it came out, declared it a masterpiece, horsed around with it off and on for a year afterwards (there were so many wonderful glitches in the original game, including my favorite, where you could use the Fierce Diety Link mask horsing around Termina field), and then put it aside, knowing that some day I'd be able to come back to it with fresh eyes. WELL THAT DAY HAS COME.

Ok, so, not to monopolize the thread, but I was just offered the 4-year position working on the James Webb Space Telescope's premier instrument, NIRCam, the near-infrared camera. This is a pretty big deal, and may make my career, potentially. Ffffuuuccck.

The most important thing about making chili: don't burn the chili. This is all dependent on how high you set your burner to and how thin your pot is. Low and slow, low and slow. (Also, negro modelo is great in a veggie chili) (as is a nice amount of seitan) (oh man I'm jealous of your veggie chili)

I generally say I'm an astronomer, but yes. I study supermassive black holes (there is another black hole astronomer thumb, too!), and I just spent the last few months applying for postdoctoral positions now that this one is ending.

That's exactly what I was hoping to hear. It seems like it takes quite a bit of your life away, though. I'm downloading the demo, and while I bet that the new camera controls will make it better, I'll take a look and see how it plays. I'd probably want to convince other people to play it with me, right? It's better with others?

Yeah, and I grew up in Southern California, so living up in NH has been real tough, Mexican-food-wise. Tucson has a very large astronomy community, and is better located for traveling, as well. But damn, Hawaii for three years does sound pretty nice.

Question. Let's say that I am a person who likes Zelda, and is picking up a New 3DS next week, an I'm enticed by the reviews for Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, but I'm not a huge classical RPG fan. But MH4U kind of seems like a 3D version of the types of games I do like, the Castlevanias, etc. How RPG-ey is the Monster Hunter series?

Well, there's a job working on one of the primary instruments being used on the James Webb Space Telescope, but I haven't heard back from the woman working on that, I'm expecting to hear in the next few days. That would be in Tucson, which is not nearly as exciting, but that's a very competitive job, and has high rewards (I mean, working on a space telescope is pretty awesome).

I was just offered a three-year science fellowship working with an 8-meter telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, which would mean I'd move from snow-covered New Hampshire to rainy/tropical Hilo, Hawaii. This is pretty exciting. And terrifying. But exciting. I'm still waiting to hear from a couple other places I've submitted applications to, but at least I have one possibility.

Actually, the story in the Japanese manual is pretty similar. Man, Legends of Localization is fucking great.

I am skeptical of Sean's comment about Mario 3D World being difficult to understand from the beginning due to the number of things thrown at the player. There are all kinds of things going on in this screenshot above. The extra item box, a star counter, a coin counter, a points counter, and things are thrown at you real fast throughout. Nintendo does like to ease people into things, and I don't think Mario 3D World is any exception. I have a feeling it was a LOT of people's first Mario game over this Christmas, and I think that perhaps modern gaming sensibility is actually a handicap for understanding current games, since there are so, so many more things an average game expects of its player. I think it has about as many weird things in the first world as, say, Mario 64 did. I donno, I just don't know if I agree with some of the early 'cast discussion.

I think that my life is one of those art projects where an artist creates a robot who's entire goal is to slowly destroy itself, or maybe, perhaps more accurately, it's this piece here, this beautiful piece of art. What happens, now? There is so much real suffering in the world, compared to my dumb stories. I am glad to read this forum, I read about how everyone is dealing, and caring, and that's so good, it confirms that you are all Real, Good, Human beings. And that's appreciated. Here is what I want, I want you to all know that the joy in human life is being able to share it with (any) other people, that the word "agony" is right there in the word protagonist, and that if you're just pure, and hopeful, you're doing what you can do.

So, this upcoming GG-themed episode of Law and Order: SVU...it will probably be very bad, right? oof.

You are right! I think that I mostly was referring to the exterior when I brought up the comparison, as the interiors are indeed very different. Hopefully the eagle-eyed viewers of your first image, Doug, will find themselves wondering why it's so eerily familiar.

I was at Sundance this weekend after going on an observing down in Arizona last week. My flight back to New Hampshire was set to be tonight and tomorrow, but now I'm stranded in Salt Lake City and then probably Charlotte until Boston opens up again. Stupid snowstorm. Stupid snow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEk-E5F1C0 I think that this video might be my standard response video whenever someone asks me how I'm doing

Old Bowser vs New Bowser Amiibo is weird: