shammack

Here's a somewhat critical review for a change.

I backed it, but I'm kind of disappointed Chris Kohler isn't involved.

Is there a way to get a Steam key if you already own it?

I think I might have encountered Nick Breckon at work the other day, but I'm not sure. I was walking into the kitchen and a guy was on his way out as I came in, and he said "hi" as we passed each other and I reflexively said "hi" back without really paying attention to who it was. But then a few seconds later I was like, "wait... was that Nick Breckon?" I couldn't really tell because he just looked like John Q. Video Games and I don't have a lot of visual reference to draw from where he's not wearing crazy VR goggles or whatever. But by the time that thought process had finished, he was already gone. It's really awkward to have listened to people talk for hundreds of hours and feel like you know them, but then you start working with them and realize, "oh wait, actually they have no idea who I am." It makes me a complete squirmy weirdo. Social interactions... they're hard sometimes.

I've watched that amusing duck video at least a dozen times today. That duck, that music... I couldn't stop!

Ever wish you could rewind time?

"Bespoke" is the Tesla of words lately.

The streetpass stuff is actually just about right for me. There's a small group of people at work who bring their 3DSes, and some of them stop by every day to collect streetpasses. I'm progressing through puzzles and Find Mii hats at a pretty good pace now. The pink puzzle pieces are tough, but recently one guy went to an anime convention or something and got all the pink Fire Emblem pieces in one go, so now those are slowly propagating around the office. It's cool because it sort of forces those of us with 3DSes to interact socially for a few minutes every day while we wait for the streets to pass. Then again, I work at a video game company. Before that happened, I'd got approximately one streetpass tag ever apart from the time I went to a Zelda symphony.

It was episode 43, "Jeff 'Gone' Goldblum."

Yep, I ended up buying this when it got greenlit on Steam and have put about 20 hours into it so far. I haven't even tried any of the management-type stuff yet. I just have the one purple and green Man truck and am working on customizing it just right. It's really easy to put on Hot Mix Radio and start driving around and zone out until you realize you've wasted an entire afternoon delivering imaginary sugar.

This is happening to me also and none of the rich text stuff works.

I found the and the but gave up before noticing the . But together we have solved it.

Yeah, that's the way to go. I just picked up a cheap 32 GB card during an Amazon sale, and I've barely made a dent in the free space after downloading New Super Mario Bros. 2, Paper Mario Sticker Star, and Fire Emblem in addition to all the ambassador virtual console games and the various eShop games I've been accumulating since the DSi. As for Fire Emblem, I'm enjoying it a lot so far, but I do slightly wish I had a manual for it -- I feel like there are a lot of systems that I don't fully understand (for example, sometimes when I have two units adjacent to each other, they'll attack together, but other times it's just a stat boost... and I don't really know what "pairing up" my dudes does for me). I've been trying to let my stronger guys soften up the enemies so the weaker ones can get some experience, but it's proving to be pretty difficult to pull off. The weak guys are starting off so weak that I basically can't use them if there's any chance they'll take damage from anybody, and the strong guys can usually deal about 3/4 of the enemies' HP worth of damage, but not quite enough to let the weak guys finish them off in one hit.

I haven't read Mother Night, but if you're looking for non-zany, I seem to recall God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Bluebeard, and Hocus Pocus as being more on the "grounded" side of things.

I would like to go, but unfortunately I'm not one of the five richest kings of Europe, so I can't afford it.

Drat, I think all that stuff was included when I bought the game anyway. But on the plus side, I just played the game again and found out that the milk bottle bug has apparently been fixed in an update.

My favorite thing about that demo is the way it starts with a fully voiced cutscene and the first couple of lines of dialogue you press B through are voiced as well, but after that, every line of text just has a voice sample of the character going "hmm..." or "huh?" or sighing, so it sounds like they just reached an awkward point in the conversation when nobody could think of what to say. That amused me more than it should have.

Which DLC? I already have Trains vs. Zombies 1 and the Thanksgiving Special Pack, but I'd take anything else, especially if there's DLC that fixes the milk bottle issue. I don't have anything to trade except Portal and Cogs, though.

I bought You Need a Budget 4 when it was on sale on Steam a few weeks ago, after a lifetime of just sort of trying to keep track of my finances in my head and occasionally checking my bank balance. I haven't been using it long enough to say definitively whether it's improved my life, but it's certainly made me more conscious of my financial situation, which is probably a good thing. Like any budgeting software, it's essentially a glorified Excel spreadsheet, but it's got a nice interface and syncs over Dropbox, and there's a companion mobile app so I can immediately record my transactions while I'm out and about (which gives me a perverse sense of satisfaction akin to checking in on Foursquare or something, except it has an actual purpose). It took me an evening of watching tutorials to understand how to use it effectively, and I'm still not entirely certain what's going to happen when everything rolls over to the next month. But this is the first time I've been able to sustain an attempt at a budget for more than a week, so in that respect I already consider it a success. I also recently bought Downcast. It seems great except I don't like that podcasts downloaded through iTunes and podcasts downloaded through Downcast are apparently completely separate.

It's not a bad idea even if you don't share a computer, just so you don't end up with gross cookies all over the place. I hate this so much.

The only game that immediately comes to mind as something I'm looking forward to is Gone Home. But good grief, this is a huge list. I don't have much interest in buying more consoles unless there's a good reason. I would honestly be a lot more excited about the rumored Steam console, if that happened and was good. I've gotten a lot more interested in PC games over the last year or so, and I've thought that I should probably get an actual gaming PC instead of just trying to run this stuff on my laptop (with its mobility graphics card that blows my asshole), but I'm so out of the loop as to what a gaming PC needs to have these days that I'd be pretty much the perfect target audience for a small, affordable PC that just had standardized specs that developers would try to make sure their games ran acceptably well on. That was an atrocious sentence.

Having played Nintendo Land, this is decidedly not the case. It doesn't involve as much physical activity as Wii Sports, but it's every bit as social, if not more. The games are extremely focused on encouraging the players to communicate outside of the game. Look at something like Mario Chase -- all it is is four players chasing one other player around. That doesn't sound very interesting on paper, but it's actually one of the most fun minigames because of the way you get everybody shouting at each other about where Mario is going, trying to coordinate strategies to surround him, etc. Pretty much all of the multiplayer games are designed around that kind of communication to some extent. The philosophy of the Wii U tablet, I think, is that it allows for asymmetrical gameplay where one player is seeing different information than everyone else, but with everybody in the same room. There's potential for that to be used in all sorts of interesting ways that are not hunching over a screen and not speaking to anyone. I just hope that the Wii U actually makes use of that potential more effectively than the Wii ended up making use of motion control.