Garple

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About Garple

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    Everything is horrible
  1. The Walking Dead

    I bet someone has already said this in this thread but the Walking Dead game(s) is really good.
  2. Life

    If you know what I mean...
  3. Life

    Sounds awful...but I'm glad you enjoyed it.
  4. 2012

    You got your Heavy Rain in my Silent Hill. No you got your Silent Hill in my...wait a minute!
  5. Goty.cx 2011

    At this point...Idle Thumbs GOTY is a tie between Dark Souls and Skyrim. Anyone want to break the tie? Maybe a Giant Bomb style roundtable discussion is in order?
  6. 2012

    NextBox?
  7. Life

    I recommend picking one large goal that has a lot of components to it to which you can devote most of your free time. When you know what you want to accomplish...even if it's kind of vague, your motivation will shoot through the roof. I have clinical depression and I'm on meds, but eventually I realized that the drugs on their own weren't enough and I had to take matters into my own hands and take actions that would supplement them. I made my main goal for the foreseeable future to learn as much as I could about coping strategies for depression...I read about ten books in the first month and filled a notebook with everything I learned, trying to tie it all together, add my own insights and lessons learned from practical application and create a reference I could always go back to and get the most valuable material with a few minutes rereading. While I was doing this I developed a seemingly bottomless supply of energy and was never bored or without purpose for more than 5 minutes. Two books I'd recommend that I stumbled on through this experience are Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. These are just general books self-improvement through psychology, not specifically depression related, so anyone stands to benefit hugely from reading them, and they're not cheesy Self-Help, they're presentations of the results of years of intense research written by people who are pioneers in their fields (Dweck is a Clinical Psychology professor and researcher at Columbia University). Also: in regard to wanking/excercise...the latter will greatly improve the experience of the former (particularly cardio) because...you know...stronger heart, better circulation...(Also: Omega 3s).
  8. Recently completed video games

    "You wouldn't give Citizen Kane a 7."
  9. Life

    Well, of course. The former is portable, and no prep necessary.
  10. V The Elder Scrolls

    One weird thing about Skyrim is that now that I've been playing video games for a while, I can tell when a random item is going to be relevant to some quest in the future, so I've had a couple scenarios where someone said, "Could you venture forth into such-and-such cave and retrieve the stone of..." And I say "You Mean this?"
  11. Making the Game Your Own

    That's a good example, Miffy
  12. Making the Game Your Own

    In order to bump the thread here's another moment from Skyrim. I got killed by a bunch of imperial soldiers who tried to extort me on a road outside of Whiterun, so as I was making my way down that road again, expecting to encounter the same soldiers, I imagined my character turning to his traveling companion (Lydia: the housecarl from Dragonreach) and saying "This is a rough area...I've had bad experiences here before. Be Careful." This was made even better by the fact that the second time we went down the road, we didn't encounter the soldiers. So either my character was paranoid, or it was like a real life situation, where often you walk through a neighborhood with a bad reputation and nothing actually happens. Edit: Also, I never steal in the Elder Scrolls games, although I feel perfectly fine stealing in the Bethesda Fallout games since I'm in a wasteland desperately trying to survive. In Skyrim, I feel like civilization is more or less completely intact in spite of various large-scale crises, so I try to obey what I percieve to be the social contract.
  13. Making the Game Your Own

    I accidentally committed a couple of crimes in Skyrim by accidentally clicking on things (I clicked on the ledger in an inn just to see what would happen) so I decided that I'd been falsely accused since it was accidental. With all the turmoil and strife in the land, the people of Skyrim are jumpy, so I'm building up a reputation as some kind of sneak-thief and any time I touch a chest to admire the woodwork or glance toward a ledger I'm convicted. I used a preset for my character and the guy who runs the Hall of the Dead in Whiterun looks exactly like me, so I've decided that we're actually brothers, but the two characters don't know it even though I (the player) have discovered it. The Jarl of Whiterun sits in that awkward slouchy way with his arms all askew and he doesn't wear sleeves which looks fine on a warrior, but I've never seen a guy sitting on a throne who didn't have some kind of sleeves. I've decided he's a product of the incest that supports the longevity of titled families.
  14. Recently completed video games

    Best Legendaries is the name of my brewing company .
  15. Making the Game Your Own

    I've been re-listening to old Idle Thumbs episodes lately and I'm struck by Chris' ability to almost always find some weird wrinkle to augment or change a game's fiction based on a quirk of the mechanics or presentation. His imagination seems to stretch the limitations of the system. The only example that comes immediately to mind is Alpha Protocol. Chris talked about how the character he choose looked like a South American dictator, so he imagined he was a Latin American military leader who'd been recruited by the CIA. Also...the stuff he talked about with Assassin's Creed 2...the pickpocketing mechanic that was also the fast-walk button...walking around town with a coterie of prostitutes and stealing from every single person he passed etc... So...my point is...share some stories about your own experiences with this kind of thing. How have you used your imagination to make a game "your own"? Obviously...this will be more natural in open world/sandbox games...so this thread could also branch off into discussion of how this can happen within the strictures of a more focused and/or linear game (in which case it's probably mostly about how one perceives what is happening). I'll try to dredge up some examples of my own too. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of video games because it's where the player's interaction really comes to a head.