shammack

The theme music is my favorite part.

I always use subtitles in games if available, for these reasons: I can read better than I can hear, and I don't want to fail to hear something and miss it. Voice acting in games usually is not very good and/or adds nothing (the LucasArts games being an exception), so often I'd rather just spend half a second reading the line and click through than wait for the voice actor to muddle through it. In some games the mixing isn't done very well and the volume of dialogue varies widely, so sometimes lines get drowned out by background music/sound effects/ambient noise.

New contest idea! Chris provides the isolated tracks and we see who can come up with the best mix.

Can you cite an example of a podcast (or just a brief audio clip) that's mixed the way you have in mind? It's hard to argue one way or the other without knowing what it would actually sound like.

I'll acknowledge a possibility of it not being completely terrible if it were very subtle, but I'm skeptical. Every time I've heard a podcast that did stupid shit with stereo, it was annoying and made me want to listen to it less (and that's in the best-case scenario of having two functioning ears and speakers). It's possible that those podcast mixers just didn't know what they were doing, but even if it were done well I can't imagine it adding much.

I am. It's pretty great. I enjoyed the DS game but was pretty terrible at it. I thought that maybe this one would be easier since you just have to use buttons instead of flicking/dragging on the touch screen, but I'm finding that I'm pretty terrible at this one too. I'm currently stuck on the fishing minigame. Still having fun, though. My biggest gripe is the same as the DS one: I don't like that you can only get perfects at certain times.

Yeah, you'd think the forum for the podcast that originated the phrase "rape you through a hole" would keep it a little classier.

I'm on the fence about this one. I wish there were a demo. I'm not a big fan of tower defense, but I feel like if anybody could make a version of it that I enjoyed, it would be Nintendo. But I'm not sure enough of that to spend $10, so I too am waiting to hear someone else's impressions.

On a related note, there's this:

I'm pretty sure that was covered in the first few minutes of The Idle Thumbs Podcast Episode 3: "Your Buddy, Space Marine" or "The Capper." They started out by talking about how they weren't going to do a podcast that week, but then the most extreme two days of video game shit happened, and Jake said, "You mean like all the best games were released?" Scoops replied, "Sorry, no, it wasn't that." Jake then clarified that "Some things were released, but they were released from employment." Then they turned to Chris Remo, their resident video game journalist, to get the full scoop.

It sounds cool, but I hate that title so much.

Don't worry, I can always sell my plasma.

Frederick August Otto Thompson?

Apparently it was a deliberate choice: ... but he's gotten a lot of complaints about the controls, so he's making them configurable in the next version. I don't really see what he's worried about with jumping; I just use spacebar for that and it's fine. (Source: this blog post, which also has some details about how the voxel renderer works)

Apparently you're not even meant to use "twin-stick" aiming. The default is to just shoot in the direction you're facing, and by holding down the key you lock the aim in that direction and can strafe. That feels really weird to me, though. Using the numpad to shoot sounds reasonable, but I haven't tried it that way yet.

This game is the new thing to buy on Humble Bundle and I recommend doing so. I'm not a huge fan of this style of shooter in general, but this is really charming, includes some light platforming and puzzle elements, has a level editor, and looks gorgeous. And you can set your own price. Apparently you're buying an alpha and getting all future updates (the Minecraft model, basically), but what you get is already very playable and polished. My only complaint is that the aiming can feel kind of sluggish, although I suspect that may be related to my trying to use a trackball.

Same here. I played it in one of the pre-beta windows where they had it opened for a few days and quite enjoyed it, but then they closed it off again, and by the time it re-opened I found I had virtually no desire to play it again. It might be interesting if they keep adding enough new things to the world, but as it was I felt like the grinding was becoming pretty transparent and there wasn't really much else to it.

Just like how I went from the DS Phat to DSi, I'm probably going to be that guy who stubbornly keeps using the original model through the first hardware revision and suffers through until they release the revised revised version, the 3DS Max (if it survives that long). I don't think there's anything wrong with the current design, if they'd just release some goddamn games already.

This is not an unreasonable fear. Fairly early on, I saw two guards talking to each other at the end of a hallway, and I thought I would be clever by throwing a fire extinguisher down there to distract them and then sneak by while they couldn't see me through the cloud of carbon dioxide or whatever. So I tried that, but when the cloud dissipated, both guards were on the floor; one was unconscious and the other was dead. I don't know why. Maybe the fire extinguisher clobbered him on the head. At any rate, by the time I got over there the game had already auto-saved, and if I hadn't tried to search the body I would never have known that I involuntarily murdered a guy. In conclusion, fuck this game.

How about "The Be Sharps"?

I think it's a good idea to keep the name down to a couple of words that will easily fit into a sentence like "Yo, I was listenin' to the [podcast name here] podcast the other day." Also, a title that seems cute and clever at first is probably going to be less so fifty episodes in, so when that happens, it should at least not be embarrassing to say. I think it's better to err on the side of "not particularly funny, but concise and generally descriptive of what the podcast is about." I suggest something along the lines of "Emergent Narratives" but maybe a bit less pretentious.

I had a tranquilizer rifle, a pistol, a crossbow with one bolt, and a couple of grenades. First I tried taking cover, stunning him with a grenade, and shooting him in the face. That worked OK until I ran out of grenades, at which point I just tried to run around hiding behind columns and popping out to shoot him a couple of times before having to run away. If he hit me with one of his grenades or got close enough to pick me up and do his stupid animation, I was basically dead unless I was at full health (I had no health or armor upgrades whatsoever). After a few attempts that way, I tried using the crossbow because it was supposed to do a lot of damage. I don't know if it did because I only had the one bolt and after that I just went back to my other strategy that didn't work. I tried a few different combinations of types of grenades. By this time I was probably around 10 attempts and I gave up for a day or so and read what people were saying about it online. They recommended blowing him up with the explosive tanks, and I had a little bit of success with that, but it ended up being too risky because half the time he would shoot them while I was trying to throw them at him, killing me. I tried stunning him with a grenade, moving a tank while he was stunned, then shooting it, but by the time I positioned the tank he usually either had woken up and moved away or I hadn't put it close enough to him in the first place and nothing happened. Etc. etc. The only way I finally was able to beat him was by grenading him, running past him to the little corner room with the shotguns and stuff, picking that up while he didn't know where I was, then going back to the grenade-then-shoot-in-the-face method (but with the shotgun) while refilling my health with copious painkillers. Even this took several tries because sometimes he would just follow me to the corner room and throw a grenade in and that would be that. So yeah, that probably put me at around 20. I suck at games.

I think I'm at the point of ragequitting this game now. I was enjoying it for the first few missions, but then there was that horrible boss that took me at least twenty tries to get past, which kind of made me dread ever playing the game again. I pressed on, but it turned out that all the subsequent missions have been pretty much the same as the first few, except there might be some more enemies that are hard to get past if I didn't happen to guess the right combination of augments. Now I'm in what I assume is the last mission of the second hub, but I keep getting spotted and immediately killed and having to wait at a load screen for least 45 seconds each time that happens, and all of this is colored by the knowledge that another terrible boss is coming up. It's possible I should have just set it to "tell me a story" difficult because I'm a baby (I'm on the middle difficulty), but I don't care about the story, so if I'm not getting anything out of the mechanics, I don't know what would be the point of playing through the rest of it at all, other than spite. There's a larger disparity between the level of internet hype (even from sources I usually agree with) and my actual enjoyment of this game than for any other game in recent memory.

Nintendo said "pay us $250 and we'll give you a 3DS," and they held up their end of that bargain. Where does the cheating enter in? If you pay full price and then the price drops, sure it sucks, but you're not entitled to be compensated for every change that they make after you've already made your transaction. Otherwise I'm owed a lot of money from Steam sales.

I agree with this: ...but this: ...is going too far. But that happens out of necessity because the first update is full of critical bugs that should have been fixed before they released it in the first place. I guess crowd-sourcing your QA is an effective enough approach if you've got enough users with the patience to put up with it, but it does kind of make it look like you don't know what you're doing. Notch can get away with that because his whole operation is sort of based on looking like "just a dude makin' a game," but I certainly don't think it's something for the rest of the industry to aspire to. Minecraft is an unusual case; generally when people buy a game they expect to be getting a finished product that works.