Psych

They were idle for so long, should we be surprised they atrophied?

That is a horror film, the alien was using it's powers to make all those people dance... to death.

Well you wouldn't go to this because you think you're going to like Plan 9, you go because you want to hear three hilarious guys make fun of it.

I've heard about people starting over this game with all their levels and experience from the first game, anyone know how to do that? If you mean stats like things you level up then no, but there is equipment for that. Although there's only one spot I can think of where you have to flood a room to get a power up, and you can pull it off without having any special equipment.

Anyone else planning on seeing the RiffTrax live show of Plan 9 from Outer Space? It's the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (sans robots) giving the MST3K treatment to the worst movie of all time, and beaming it to theaters all across America. It should be pretty darn funny.

I love the game, but 4 hours in I was surprised to find that I'd beaten it. Last time I tried a Castlevania game I could swear it took at least twice as long. Over the course of the game I was never stuck on what to do, and it felt like I hardly backtracked at all. While these are certainly good things it made the experience shorter than I would have liked. Now I'm stuck with a conundrum. I want to play more, but I don't want to have to start over without all of my abilities, and getting all the items seems like a hollow gesture, since I already have so much ammo for every weapon that I never need to worry about running out. I wish there were more proving grounds missions.

The leader boards for the game seem to indicate that yes, it is sequence breakable.

The demo is free, why don't you just try it and then you'll know how different it is.

Before I got a chance to play 'Splosion Man, I saw my brother play through much of the single player campaign, he got stuck on that boss too, and eventually used the way of the coward to get past him. Later when I got to that boss I thought I'd be screwed until I had died enough times to choose the way of the coward myself. However then I found that I could wall jump on top of those moving platforms, thus making the laser dodging not all that difficult at all. The bosses in this game are difficult but mostly because they fail to clearly communicate essential information. Also the camera is pulled too far out, which happens to be a problem throughout the game. Also that boss is speaking in english, he just has a ton of filters on his speech that makes him difficult to understand.

I'm an illustrator. So I do a lot of drawing/painting. I want to get a job doing concept art for games, so I have both a portfolio and a blog to showcase my art. In addition to that I write and draw an online comic series. It's called 70-Seas, it's about a band of animal privateer people who have adventures and get into fights. I'd really appreciate it if you'd all try giving it a read. You can't let that stuff get you down. Sure your projects aren't going to turn out how you expect, but making those early mistakes is the only way to learn. In comics we have a saying; everyone has 1000 crappy pages in them, and before they make any good pages they have to get all those crappy ones out. Now I can understand that you still might have a bit of trepidation about throwing a bunch of your time away on a project that ultimately won't work out. So you should try giving yourself a time limit, a lot of the comics I've made have been 24 hour comics* (24 page comics made in one straight 24 hour go), they're not master pieces of anything, but they were great learning experiences and it didn't even take a whole weekend to pull them off. *If anyone is interested in seeing these comics they're here, here, here, here, and here.

I've suffered through about four episodes of that, and it never seemed to elevate itself beyond interminable stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of horrific sexual violence.

So the people here do read comics. I was wondering when I got on this forum and didn't find a comics thread. syntheticgerbil, if you're looking for something good and foreign please allow me to recommend the Dungeon series by French comics superstars Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar*. It's a sword and sorcery parody about a duck and a dragon that work for a dungeon that makes money by attracting heroes with the promise of treasure only to slaughter them and take their loot. *Most of Trondheim and Sfar's work is on solo projects, those that I have read I have found to be excellent.

Avatar is a great show, Like those guys said. Now while we're recommending anime that doesn't have all the stuff that makes anime horrible, I'd like to suggest Mushi-shi. The story follows Ginko a traveling doctor of sorts who specializes in dealing with mushi, an oft-misunderstood species of bacteria/spirits, on his travels through a slightly fantastic feudal Japan. Each of the episodes plays as an independent fable in which Ginko tries to understand and then cure the strange curses the mushi bring. There's some human introspection, but the show lets viewers draw their own conclusions instead of getting preachy. I guarantee it has none of the annoying anime tropes mentioned in this thread, and it's all available for free in english on Hulu.

I got this, went through the online tutorial step by step over a dozen different maps, and for the life of me I cannot construct a profitable supply line. Is there a way to get ahead in this game?

But thanks the vitality sensor your Wii will be able to detect your injury and contact emergency services.

Oh I know, they can make a sh'mup where your ship fires every time your heart beats. Maintain maximum pulse for maximum multiplier!

This totally clinches it for everyone who says Nintendo ignoring hardcore gamers. Most of whom would pop that thing if they tried to sit on it.

I think Meat Circus may be frustrating less because of its inherent difficulty and more because its such a jarring change of pace from the rest of the game. In every previous part of the game you're able to explore each level at your leisure, to lose this freedom right at the end is already fairly unpleasant, tacking all these deaths on top of it just turns things over to full aggravation.

I was in a game store in Australia where I asked the clerk about finding a used copy of Panzer Dragoon Orta, and to put a preorder on Odin Sphere, he had never heard of either. Although in his defense I later found out that Odin Sphere was never localized for Australia... those poor bastards.

Every week Gamasutra has an article collecting about a half dozen of the best indie games, most of which are usually free. Here's the latest one

"It's like there's a party in my mouth mand it'f maffing mit miffikult mo meak..." -IGN.com

That problem seems absolutely endemic throughout almost all anime (the only counter example I can think of is Kaiba, which managed to naval gaze in two dimensions). It leads me to wonder if the very nature of Japanese philosophy is somehow inherently incompatible with western sensibilities. Although more likely, I think, is that the creators of western entertainment are just as philosophically dense as their Japanese counterparts, but they more often have the good sense to shut up where the Japanese tend to pontificate.

It is unfortunate that there is no earlier data that could shed more light on the Columbine hypothesis. The theory seems plausible, but I would have thought that the after shocks of that incident would diminish more rapidly. I tried running some Insight searches for various Video game franchises that tend to get brought up in the violent Video game debate (mortal kombat, doom, grand theft auto, etc.) and was surprised to find that they by no means account for the peaks in the "violent video games" search. I don't know what is actually causing the cyclical appearance of that term, but based on the strong consistency of this graph I bet there are an untold number of issues that pop in and out of the media's favor with extreme regularity.

Well they're not magic or anything. It's just like the last Summer of Arcade a handful of high profile XBLA games released in quick succession. What more were you expecting?

If you guys didn't spend half the podcast talking about how lewd you were being I doubt I would have noticed.