Horticulture Tycoon

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Everything posted by Horticulture Tycoon

  1. Idle Thumbs 39

    It took about 15 seconds of staring at this picture for me to figure out that's a microphone shield I'm looking at, and not a big black handlebar moustache.
  2. Tales of Monkey Island

    Yes, but also Larry the Cable Guy... I'm a few hours in, still in the part of the game where I'm collecting a bunch of junk and talking to people, and not really solving puzzles yet. It does seem a little samey compared to Chapter 1. But then this is my first non-Half-Life experience with Episodic gaming, so I guess that's to be expected. is adorable, incidentally.
  3. Heavy Rain

    I just realized I called it "Hard Rain". As far as I know, Christian Slater and/or Bob Dylan are not involved in this game. Also:
  4. Heavy Rain

    Yes, exactly. It's the failure-and-restart of the QTEs that is most frustrating in Indigo Prophecy, but based on what we've seen in the previews (the junkyard specifically), if you mess something up in Hard Rain the game keeps on going. I think this could strangely add a lot of replay value to a game like this, where you're trying to do better at a QTE because you want to see a different branch of the story. But like I said before, if the differences between the various story branches are negligible, then the whole thing becomes more than a little bit pointless.
  5. Movie/TV recommendations

    Oh man, now you guys are speaking my language. I love bad movies. Troll 2 is definitely near the top of my list, but let me add the following to my own personal list of must-see bad movies: Gymkata: GHdRcvZVmDk Mac and Me: NdvO0tmNjGo Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon: --N1Q8D6dqE Cyborg Cop 2 aka Cyborg Soldier: zJN_7jXItiY C.H.U.D.: OR-ddHPcqYo Also Last Action Hero and Wicker Man 2006, but I'm sure you're all aware of those two movies so I'm not going to bother tracking down clips... EDIT: Damn, my favorite clip from Gymkata doesn't seem to work, I'll have to settle for this not-quite-as-hilarious clip instead EDIT#2: Hooray, it works again! lswv-Z-qge0
  6. Beatles: Rock Band

    I'm strictly a Rock Band guy, but my understanding is that you can count on Guitar Hero peripherals to work with Rock Band games, but not necessarily the other way around. I might have that mixed up though.
  7. Do you do anything creative in your free time?

    I'm an aspiring screenwriter, but fuck do I write slowly. I hate myself for it, I really do. I've been working on the same script for almost two years now. Every time I get to page 80 or so, I look back at the first ten pages and think, "I can write that so much better now." And so I start another draft and the whole horrible cycle starts over. Behold, I am Sisyphus the Screenwriter. Although on the one hand, I should probably take any sign of improvement in writing skill (read: less amateurish, I've still got a long way to go) as a plus, but man do I just want to finish this thing. Oh yeah, I've also been thinking a lot about game design lately, though it's not anything I've ever attempted before. I know fuck all about programming, but in the last month or two I've thought up a game idea that I'm seriously considering learning how to program in Flash just so I could take a crack at it. I'll probably just get lazy and not do it though.
  8. Heavy Rain

    Just wait until the secret last hour of the game where everyone's flying through the air and doing kung fu. I think the success or failure of this game really depends on how much it allows the player to push the story into directions that is off the A to B path. If you truly are able to make decisions that can change the story in significant ways like David Cage says you are, then count me in. But if it's more Indigo Prophecy stuff where you're only changing window-dressing and tangential B-stories... Eh, I'd rather stay optimistic for now. I just wish they'd reveal more about how it's all going to work.
  9. Idle Thumbs 38: Up On This Boss

    Are you guys aware your Wizard voicemail number also spells 559-HYA-REMO? "Hya Remo!"
  10. Xbox Live Summer Update

    Netflix will supposedly be much improved, which is all I really care about. It'll be nice to actually know whether or not a movie is in HD before I select it, as much as I enjoyed playing Netflix Resolution Roulette...
  11. Beatles: Rock Band

    I've completed every track on Expert drums except for Visions, does that count? I mean I don't really consider that a song, it's more like the sound of a bear trapped in a music store.
  12. WTFFF!!!!

    You found that picture awfully fast, OssK...
  13. Life

  14. Idle Thumbs 37: You Gotta Have Spice

    X-Wing and TIE Fighter were great games, but as a kid I remember really wishing they had between-mission cinematics like the Wing Commander games did. Wing Commander really gave you a great sense of who you were within the greater context of the war, and gave you a chance to get to know your squadmates, as opposed to X-Wing and TIE fighter where you were a nameless drone flying alongside other nameless drones. X-Wing Alliance did this a little bit, but not enough. If there's a new X-Wing/TIE Fighter game, I hope they take a page from Wing Commander in that respect. Also, the occasional would be nice.
  15. Life

    I know this is trivial compared to depression and divorce but fuck me, I have a nest of yellow jacket wasps in my attic that will not go away. I had an exterminator out once already but apparently that guy is terrible at his job because they're still here, between the loud cell-phone-on-vibrate style buzzing of the queen milling around in my ceiling and the general stratching and grawing sounds of the wasps chewing through my drywall, I feel like I'm living in a goddamn Edgar Allen Poe story. I haven't gotten a good night's sleep in two weeks. Fuck you nature, with your stupid ecosystem!
  16. Movie/TV recommendations

    Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Because I actually work at the Walgreens corporate office, I can try to pull some strings if you want. Fortunately there are no loudspeakers in my office. Well actually there are, but we don't get cool Huey Lewis music, we just get notices when someone's headlights are on.
  17. Awesome MI2 2D/3D Projection thingie

    Boy, if that's the case, a Monkey 2 SE should be a snap. All your hi-def backgrounds are already finished, you just need some new character sprites to match and boom, you're done. No need for any of this 3D mumbo-jumbo.
  18. Movie/TV recommendations

    Do you like Huey Lewis and the News, Dan?
  19. MechWarrior 4 re-released for free

    The Chicago location was strictly BattleTech for a long time, so I only played Red Planet once or twice. It seemed pretty fun, but I preferred the more leisurely pace of BattleTech, since I've never been a very good twitch gamer. Nah, I'm a south sider and a suburbanite on top of that. But I have a friend who lives sort of near there, I'll have to swing by and see if it's still there.
  20. MechWarrior 4 re-released for free

    See, I can't play these games at all because I spent a good deal of my childhood at the old BattleTech Center in Chicago. Every Mechwarrior game ever made is a letdown compared to this: Alas, it went out of business, but my memories of blowing the shit out of my friends lives on...
  21. Summer of Arcade 2009! Are you ready to party?

    Summer, or Arcade 2009? Hmmm, I choose summer. Actually aside from the Turtles in Time remake, there's nothing coming this summer that really excites me, and even that is kind of a meh. Last year there was Braid, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Street Fighter 2 Super Duper Mega Turbo Hyper Quantum HD Remix, and Mega Man 9. This summer doesn't even come close to competing.
  22. Idle Thumbs 35: A Great Way to Have Fun

    Were you guys simply overlooking sports games in your discussion of genres that are played competatively, or do you not count them since they're just approximations of a real-life sport? Because there's an entire television show on ESPN all about competative Madden players, to name the most obvious sports game that would fall under this discussion.
  23. Movie/TV recommendations

    My suggestion is to stop right now. T3 is just a pale imitation of T2. It's a passable action movie but not nearly in the league of the first two (though unlike you, I like the first movie almost as much as the second). Terminator Salvation is garbage. It's a beautiful looking movie, but other than that it's a complete waste.
  24. New "old-school" LucasArts game announced tomorrow

    Having the inventory on a secondary screen is the same system that Sam and Max, CMI, and Full Throttle all had. I thought that was a significant improvement over having the inventory take up half the screen. I think part of the problem with the art style is that they (almost literally) painted themselves into a corner by insisting that the new artwork be pasted over the old. Sure it's cool to switch back and forth and see everything line up with itself, but those backgrounds were laid out with a specific resolution and art style in mind, and here they were trying to paint an art style over animations and backgrounds that they weren't really designed for. Backgrounds that seemed perfectly acceptable in 320x200 now look crazy, with all kinds of scale and perspective problems. Low-framecount animations that looked fine on a 40-pixel-tall sprite now look jarring and incongruous. It seems to me that the art problems might not be a lack of talent or poor taste on the part of the Special Edition team, but instead it might've actually been due in part to their slavish faithfulness to the original game. It goes to show that maybe when approaching a remake, being faithful to the spirit of the game is more important that recreating it down to every quirky detail.
  25. New people: Read this, say hi.

    I can distinctly remember the moment I got into PC gaming, and that was when I saw the X-Wing box in a store somewhere. I was just walking past and I had to stop and say "Whoa, what is THAT?" All I knew was that it wasn't available on console, and that I wanted it. I can also distinctly remember the moment I got officially fed up with PC gaming. It was about an hour later, when X-Wing wouldn't work and I had to blindly fiddle with the autoexec and config.sys in a vain attempt to get the thing to work. My 13-year-old computer-illiterate mind basically had no understanding of what I was doing, I was just randomly following suggestions given to me by the manual's troubleshooting page. Unfortunately I had no conception of what a bootdisk was, so by the end of the afternoon I had permanently altered the family computer's autoexec file, rendering it unusable. I was not popular in my house that day. Anyway, after formatting the drive and some more fiddling, I finally got it to work, and it was a blast. And X-Wing came with an issue of LucasArts Adventurer (remember that?), which was what got me interested in LucasArts' adventure catalog. But man, what a pain in the ass. From then on, unless I was really dying to play a PC game, I would invariably skip it because of the hassle it would inevitably bring. I did get into PC gaming again in college, partially because at that point playing video games online was still a novelty that the consoles couldn't offer. Also because I was mooching off of my roommate's computer, and he was the one who had to deal with the hassle of installing the games. That definitely helped.