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The owls are not what they seem.

Read Facing Unpleasant Facts, a collection of essays by George Orwell last month. Fascinating stuff. It goes from Orwell purposefully getting arrested for public drunkenness in order to investigate the terrible conditions in public prisons, to a 1940s war diary commenting on the distance between what the British media reported on and the actual war conditions and how he was surprised to find himself getting accustomed to the sounds of war during the Blitz, to a puff piece on the perfect pub, to a memoir of boarding school tyranny. Then I read Kafka on the Shore. Murakami hasn't disappointed me yet. The were a bit much, but the characters and writing style kept me interested until the end. I also just finished Tom Bissel's Extra Lives, which was rather disappointing. Now, I'm not that poorly-read, but I found his diction unnecessarily overwhelming. Sentences like keep popping up, breaking the flow of each piece with the use of words that really aren't necessary to convey his meaning. He also occasionally breaks flow with odd asides like or The book is at its best when he's getting designers like Clint Hocking or Jon Blow to open up about their creative process, and parts of the New Games Journalism-style pieces on playing Resident Evil 1 in historical context, or playing GTA IV while nursing a coke addiction are interesting to read. But I walked away disappointed, having heard better analysis and recollections from Idle Thumbs, RPS, and others that were simultaneously more insightful and not laborious to read.

I will laugh heartily if it's a text-based MUD.

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Definitely not 7 Days. The one I'm thinking of was squarely a comedy game. It's been ages since I've played the Rob Blanc series, so it could be one of them? I'll give them another shot. Update on the Lemon Demon end, Neil tweeted back with links to his games: https://twitter.com/#!/neilyourself/status/82159028888801281 Neither of them is what I remembered, but amusing nonetheless.

This one's really obscure and has been bugging me for ages. Late 90s early 00s freeware point-and-click adventure game. Might have been made in AGS. Purported to be the first part in a multi-part series. Plot involved you dying on a spaceship, being turned into a ghost, and trying to find your way to an earth-like planet. The only specific thing I remember about it was there was a really cheesy joke about a camera pan that turned the screen upside down. My memory tells me it was made by a developer called Trapezoid (same as Neil Cicerega/Lemon Demon?), although I'm not sure I entirely trust it. Edit: Whoa. Lemon Demon was a member of BigBlueCup back in the day. I guess I should trust my mind more. Not sure the name or where I can actually find any of his old games nowadays. Definitely not geocities.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/16/tim-langdell-loses-in-future-edge-trial/

What's the story behind this?

Especially since Minecraft's development strategy seems completely at odds with Microsoft's aversion towards agile development, what with long QA delays for patches and a history of pressuring devs to charge for substantial updates.

Not too hard to find it with some cybersleuthing. I'll respect your wishes and not say the name here. FWIW, the game doesn't look terrible. Could use a much more streamlined UI and a more cohesive art direction. The latter part must be killing you, since it's not your fault if there wasn't enough communication to ensure coherency or if your art was just downright misused. At the very least, you'll have some kick-ass individual drawings for your portfolio. On the other hand, the game's not even alpha. It's possible the game was just shown off too early, before any one area had a fully polished vertical slice. Still time for these issues to potentially be resolved.

HD updates for Silent Hill 2+3, too. The Xbox 1 version of SH2 was so buggy when played on a 360.

I just realized that I can still use my original DS to play GBA games on the top screen even if the bottom screen dies entirely, since the main menu can be controlled with the buttons. DSi it is, I guess, though I would have thought the DSi would be cheaper after the release of the 3DS.

I started noticing dead spots on my original DS touch screen when starting Picross 3D at the beginning of the year, and just as I finished the game tonight, the screen started displaying colored lines and developed an intermittent jitter. Way past warranty, so it'd cost $75 to fix the lines alone according to Nintendo customer support. That's significant enough for me to consider a replacement. Looks like it's hard to find new units of the original run. I'm looking at DS lites, since I still make use of the GBA port and the DSi doesn't have one, but I seem to remember hearing they had some easily broken shoulder buttons. Is this still the case?

I really wish it didn't take me until Hard Level 10 before I realized (spoilered since it is a useful feature that can nevertheless be easily exploited) Would have saved a lot of time and hassle for all the times when I swore I deleted the right block, but the game thought I wanted to delete a block in the background with just a few pixels showing. Still enjoying it, but a number of these later puzzles have really insane time limits. Edit: This game also made me realize there were dead spots on my original DS screen. Probably from one too many rounds of Elite Beat Agents back in the day.

"More 'holy shit' moments than there are elements of the periodic table." -- IGN.com

Just finished reading that last month. I totally agree about the undefined terms. confused the hell out of me until he actually explained it. And I got really sick of how many times he used "mirror world" by the end. I appreciated a few of the things he was trying to do in the book, like show some of the negative effects of saturating the public in brands and advertising, making a cyber thriller that acknowledges the presence of apophenia in the world, and the whole F:F:F subplot rings very true with modern Alternate Reality Game culture and general nerd fandom. And I really like how he handles Boone Chu, The book tends to get into spurts where it narrates solely in sentence fragments, particularly when the protagonist is jetlagged, which is a neat effect, but not entirely smooth to read. Never really felt the stakes were that high until almost towards the end, which made the middle drag on a bit. All-in-all I found it interesting. Not a classic, but I enjoyed it by the end.

https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/68693850062995456

Blendo Games (developer of Gravity Bone, Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher, etc.) did a blog post recently about replaying Half-Life: http://blendogames.com/news/?p=81

Random googling found this advice. Hope it works on your setup. That's such an absurd default behavior. http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19267017.aspx

Krabappel'd

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Morse coded.

Shame the comments section isn't any less idiotic than any other site. Actually, does any gaming site besides RPS actually have intelligent discussion in the comments?

BSG is something you "love?" Are you sure it's not "neat," person who totally isn't a spammer trying to reach the post limit to create a new topic?