shammack

Shattered Memories is great apart from the boring creature design. It doesn't play like a Silent Hill game at all (it's more of an adventure game with occasional "run away from monsters" segments), but I don't think that's a bad thing. It probably would have been better received if it just didn't have the Silent Hill branding on it.

Sounds like we might have just found our answer to the thread's titular question. (at least until next week)

Highly dubious!

Also, does this game have any concept of sneaking? I keep wanting to get all my dudes spread out into advantageous positions and then instigate combat by taking the first shot, but I don't have a good sense of how close I can get before the enemies notice me.

Is this a bug or just me not understanding what I'm supposed to do? I entered a house in Highpool and Jess-Belle asked me to get rid of the guys trying to break into her safe. So I went in there and in the dialog, I used hard-ass to make one of them run away. The other two just stand there and do nothing unless I attack them. I tried going back to Jess-Belle and she just continued asking for help, so I went back and killed them, then went back to her again, and she was still saying the same thing. I also tried reloading my save and letting the guys get into the safe, then taking its contents and going back to her, but whatever the case, she just keeps acting like the guys are still in there trying to open the safe. Is there some other condition I have to satisfy that I'm missing? Edit: After some more experimentation, it seems like the only way to make it work is to kill all three guys; if one of them runs away, she thinks they're still in there. That kind of sucks; I wanted to use my hard-ass.

I was going to be like "doesn't the movie end with a giant 'To Be Continued' graphic?" But then I looked it up and apparently that was only on the VHS release. Weird/gross. I agree that it's much better when taken on its own. The sequels feel pretty superfluous to me, though I do really enjoy all the rehashes of things that happened in the first movie with time period-appropriate twists. I think the Bill and Ted movies actually do a better job handling the time travel. The way that they can basically solve every problem by just deciding that at some point later on after they win, they'll go back in time and set things up to help themselves is pretty goofy, but makes more sense than the weird fading-out-of-photographs stuff.

I think that's more of a reflection of our personalities than anything else.

I think the characterization of Back to the Future as a white kid inventing rock and roll is a bit misleading. Marty was just playing a song he knew. In the original timeline before anybody started going back in time, "Johnny B. Goode" was still written by Chuck Berry. Then when Marty played it at the Fish Under the Sea dance, the timeline changed so that Chuck Berry plagiarized it from himself instead of writing it, creating a free lunch paradox. I can't remember the details of how the time travel rules work in Back to the Future, but I think you could make a case that either Chuck Berry still wrote it or that nobody wrote it, but either way, I don't think the movie ever implies that Marty has any claim to it.

I don't know why I make games anymore.

New problem: I have a Logitech G27 racing wheel that I use to play Euro Truck Simulator 2. But it seems to be interfering with using my Xbox 360 controller. Games seem to be considering the racing wheel to be the "joystick 1" input and either ignoring the 360 controller completely or combining it with constant input from the G27 pedals. I know I could probably solve this by unplugging the G27 when I'm not using it (if I want to crawl around under my desk like a fool), but is there a way to set which controller gets mapped to which input on the OS level, and/or temporarily disable one of them? (This is in Windows 8.1.)

Yep, this sucks. When I bought it and played the early access version it was barely playable and I felt like it probably shouldn't have been released in that state, but I assumed I could trust Double Fine to actually finish it eventually. Caveat emptor, I guess; I'll be more cynical next time.

Just like real death!

On one of the Futurama commentary tracks, David X. Cohen tells a story about how he went to a trilobite auction because he wanted to buy a trilobite, but Nicolas Cage outbid him and got the trilobite he wanted as well as every other trilobite in the trilobite auction.

That's an interesting theory. I haven't ever replaced it, and it does tell me to replace it when I click on the battery icon. Maybe I'll try that; I've been needing to do it anyway.

I've heard of Frozen because I have a coworker who's really into Disney, and I know that it has a song called "Let It Go" because I've seen a lot of dumb jokes about it on Twitter, but I've never seen any marketing for it and couldn't tell you what it's about, name a character, or identify a screenshot from it.

Something weird is going on with the trackpad on my 2009ish-era MacBook Pro. Sometimes when I click, it only sort of half-registers the click, and then doesn't complete the action until I click again. For example, the most common way I encounter this is when I try to switch tabs in Chrome. When I click on a different tab the first time, it doesn't switch tabs, but the tab I'm currently viewing sort of stops working -- I try to scroll up and down and nothing happens. Then if I click again, it sort of catches up -- the tab switches and whatever I tried to do in between clicks happens (so the page will scroll up and down, and if I hovered over any other tabs I'll see them highlight and un-highlight), as if it had all been getting queued up waiting for me to click to confirm. It happens intermittently and I don't know how to determine what part of the process is the problem. I don't think it's Chrome because I've occasionally seen it happen in the Finder or Steam. I would Google it but I don't even know how to describe the problem in a searchable way.

Until now I mostly found Dan mildly amusing, but the story on the latest podcast about how he got through a semester of college by not going to class for a semester and convincing the professor to give him 14 credit hours' worth of As for no reason really rubbed me the wrong way. Now I feel like the Frank Grimes to his Homer Simpson.

So, uh, any of you friends get any codes?

I always used to see the "Idle Thumbs has event starting: GTA IV" notification pop up on Steam in the middle of my work day and be made grumpy by it. But the realist in me knows that I probably wouldn't actually participate in these things very often regardless of when they took place (especially now that it's not GTA IV anymore).

downloadablecontempt.cool is still available

I guess I'll take one if anybody wants to get rid of 'em got one (OH NOOOOO a new page)

It's for fainting onto when your corset is too tight, or when you need to get a manual pelvic massage because of your hysteria.

Like everybody else, I couldn't tell you what the nadir is because I'm pretty sure it kept getting worse after I stopped watching, but I agree with Ben that "The Springfield Files" is a pretty good indicator of the beginning of the end. There were still a lot of good episodes in that season, but cracks were definitely starting to appear in the show's hilarious facade. Season 9 was the first time I was like "why am I even watching this anymore?" The Hank Hill cameo, the first appearance of Gil, the ending of "Lisa the Skeptic," Ralph's leprechaun... there was a lot of stuff in there that rubbed me the wrong way. I think "Trash of the Titans" was where I decided it wasn't worth watching consistently anymore (I still saw some episodes here and there for a season or two after that, but I stopped making an effort to do so). I think that in the early years, they were a lot better about incorporating pop culture references into jokes, but not making the reference itself the joke. "Homer Goes to College" works even if you've never seen any of the movies it's spoofing, because the episode itself gives you all the context you need, and because it's about parodying the conventions of those movies more than specific scenes. "The Springfield Files" just feels like "we found out we could get Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, so we threw together an X-Files parody."

I got into making games when I was in middle school through ZZT. Not sure how tolerant kids these days would be of its "graphics" and UI, but I still have yet to find any Fisher-Price game dev toolkits that are as easy to get into while also allowing you a decent amount of flexibility in what you can make. I think that with something like Unity, even though it's fairly easy to get some kind of simple set of game mechanics working, even as an adult with some programming experience it seems like a pretty daunting task to try to use it to create the structure of a full game with a beginning, middle, and end (which is what I always wanted to do as a kid).