thl

harp away. I'm still quite active with this game. My gf loves the keyboard so we've played the 65 or so songs that i have with key support a bunch. I don't know how the rock band store works internationally but if it's available I heartily recommend the doors pack. Every song has a keyboard solo and it's very easy to hear the notes in the songs. With some of the songs on disc, the keyboard parts are not at the forefront so they can seem kind of random and with some songs there are rather long breaks that you have to sit through, but every doors song is a tour-de-force on the keys and very very fun to play.

and he's not even covered in blue paint!

this sucks. I've been playing the game non-stop and think it's superb.

awesome, thanks!

just curious since i'm thinking about running a small private server for my co-workers. is hmod the only thing you use as far as server mod/admin is concerned?

that lava mishap in the second video is hilarious

eh, i kinda wish it had voice over.

My girlfriend and I have played through both Deathspanks, the last couple LEGO games (they're much better co-op experiences now that they have split-screen), and viva pinata. I've also gotten her to play co-op through Doom and Doom 2.

yes, please.

David Foster Wallace wrote the gigantic tome Infinite Jest along with a bunch of short stories, articles, and other random stuff that won him a super devoted following. then he killed himself, thus cementing his place as tormented genius author forever. I had a roommate who read Infinite Jest though and he said he sometimes thought that the author was making fun of him for reading a book that long, yet he couldn't put it down and was losing sleep over it. Apparently, the writing is very smart, very ironic and somewhat post-modern. As far as I know his writing is very highly regarded. I put in a lovecraft fan fiction and got Lovecraft, then a short horror piece and got Wallace. I can live with that. Has anybody gotten Danielle Steele or Nora Roberts and has been afraid to mention it? ...not that I'm doing that. right now.

I have to say, I reached 100% last night (50 hrs), and have played about 3 hours of multiplayer and I personally haven't seen any bugs. I mean, i've seen them on youtube and whatnot, but not while playing.

When I hear emergent I immediately think back to Quake and rocket jumping. I think that's the first time I experienced a situation where a game allows for techniques that were not intended. Similarly, the quake done quick (and later speedruns in general) are good examples I think in that the game is exploited, but not cheated, to achieve something in a different manner than expected. I think team fortress also had this with grenade hopping or something... a lot of the early multiplayer shooters had emergent gameplay (or exploits) that people discovered in their quests to be the bests. Now, some of these were bugs, which i believe don't qualify. I think the issue gets complicated because people loved finding new ways to play these games so much that game creators started coding for it. Most of the sandbox games I believe include series of systems to encourage and reward the same behavior that players exhibited in discovering things like rocket jumping. The effect in Bioshock of lighting an oil pool on fire and having the fire make the splicer burn was completely intended as a reward for the player experimenting. I see Portal as the designed result of all that early emergence. With the portal gun (and to a lesser degree with the gravity gun in Half-Life 2), they were aware of the potential before the game shipped and therefore included the batshit insane challenges for fewest steps and whatever. With Red Dead Redemption, an example of emergent gameplay might be if you figured out a specific circumstance to make your dead-eye refill as fast as it gets spent and therefore you can go around in multiplayer in constant dead-eye. then matches would change where each player had non-stop dead eye and therefore the strategy of the game would change. Experiences in single player mentioned above are, to me, just the programmed systems working as intended. They are not scripted, but completely intended and probably acknowledged and even tested by the developers.

that silent film was great! I'm not 100% sure if i like the standard Rockstar lewd humor that saturated the GTA3 series but in the context of the movie I thought it was really amusing. I had a similar experience with the treasure map. I thought it was a waypoint thing at first where from the tree you could see the next rock formation so it took me a few minutes to get that it was but that just made me more impressed that the map itself was that rough and more like a puzzle than your typical follow-the-dot mission. the randomness of the the bounties kind of bummed me out. i would've liked if they were hard-coded but more difficult and multi-step following clues and tracking trails and whatnot but oh well. My tiny exposure to the Strangers' missions makes me think I may get a little bit of that there. the thunderstorm was also pretty awesome. I appreciate that the weather doesn't change every 30 seconds. I tried multiplayer but couldn't connect. hopefully things will even out in a bit.

I put a few hours into it last night as well. Had a bunch of fun (except when i got sucked into an hour of poker) and am very impressed with the amount of wildlife and getting-shot animations.

I'll second that. I remember my computer having troubles rendering the background so i just looked at the ground whenever i had framerate issues and it ran fine. Obviously not a problem these days but... If I remember, it had a decent enough atmosphere to keep me going (especially if you were ever into the White Wolf pen/paper RPG) and mikemariano's right in that the mutliplayer had a GM basically that could write quests. It couldn't have voice acting or anything but you could write out dialogue and re-use all the game maps to send players on missions and everything. i remember thinking it was pretty cool but none of my friends played it so i never really gave it much time. The sequel, Bloodlines, was also decent I thought. That game I believe was the first to license valve's Source engine so it ended up being a bit less Diablo-esque and a bit more Fable-y. I wouldn't call either game great, but if memory serves both were decent.

I'll second El Muerte by saying that Morrowind was much more fun for sheer exploration than oblivion or Fallout 3, but in general I think I'd say I liked that game more* so that fits. The only part that about Fallout 3 that got on my nerves was the first few times i tried the metro tunnels. After that I fast traveled until i was uber, then went back and cleared them all out rather quickly. The Ghoul mask really helped with that. I personally LOVED the lovecraftian aspect of that one creepy house near Tenpenny Tower, which was completely neglected unless you went looking for it (although I think they tied a Point Lookout quest to it, probably just to get more people to go there), and found a handful of other little oddities along the lines of the rube goldberg store, like the supply closet with all the plumbers helpers or the door that leads to a wall saying "FUCK YOU" or even the three missile defense radars. I remember back in Morrowind finding a shipwreck of pillows and later finding a guy from Balmora who owned a pillow shop and was looking for pillows because he had fallen on hard times... I'm a complete sucker for those minute throwaway stories that Bethesda loves to embed in their games. After a while I already have top tier gear so the only real reward for exploring every corner (other than to satisfy my OCD) is uncovering these little stories that help flesh out the world. To me, that'd be like the ultimate job... coming up with these little stories most players will never find. *I still loved and played the shit out of Oblivion and Fallout 3

Most of the characters on the show are based very closely on real people who are either notable in the community or actually hired on the show as consultants. (more details here: http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2010/04/meet_the_real_new_orleanians_w.html). Seeing pictures of their real-life counterparts, it's suddenly not so jarring for me to see Steve Zahn or John Goodman because they actually physically resemble their inspirations. I dunno. the show makes sense to me at this point. I can't deny comments on its music video nature and lack of driving plot, but to me those sound more like personal taste than criticism. Compared to Simon's work on The Corner, Treme fits very well with his style. He's always placed a premium on character (which is partially why The Wire is so well-regarded) but I'd say he's equally comfortable with just hanging out and having a really meticulous series of causes and effects. And for anyone who saw The Wire on first broadcast, try to think back to what it was like watching that first season week by week. It felt excruciatingly slow at first. It took them 6 episodes just to get the wire up! I think the later seasons only seemed faster because we had a trust that what we were seeing in the first episodes would pay off in the end. And HBO is pretty notable for recirculating their actors in different shows. Ron Livingston got his Sex and the City gig after enduring Band of Brothers, Herc has popped up on Entourage, and a whole bevvy of actors in The Wire appeared in The Corner and Oz. I personally like it, like little inside references to the network itself. Plus those guys are just good actors. I loved hearing Slim Charles actually have some lines and completely buy him as a hardened criminal. Ultimately, I respect what Simon's trying to do and find more than enough to enjoy in the quality of writing, character work, and music to keep me going. We'll see what develops!

If i remember correctly, Mafia was pretty fun. However that's been the only game where i had zero interest in doing any of that open world exploration stuff, thanks to the period cars' handling and gas mechanic and the fact that practically all missions start from the same spot. Mafia 2 looks pretty sweet though so i'd recommend at least trying it out to gear yourself up for the sequel.

Boar's Head Cajun Turkey FTW

i'm finally getting tired of this. will probably concentrate on finishing up the missions now and tracking down the last 10 vehicles... overall i'm amazed it held my interest for this long. ridiculous fun!

How many dudes in any given bar would a) start dicking around on a random phone just because it's there, fidget with it to the point of discerning its importance, and most importantly c) contact all the major tech blogs to sell it to the highest bidder. I can see myself doing B, maybe even A, but never C. Then again, I haven't been following this story too closely. Has any attention been paid to the dude who actually sold it to gizmodo?

I played Descent 1, 2 and 3 all on the PC and not only did i never use a stick, i didn't even use a mouse for descent 1 and 2! my left pinky still cramps up sometimes due to the complicated-as-shit control mapping i had to use to get full mobility. i loved those games though. the AI was phenomenal. the music for Descent 2 had something to do with Ogre from Skinny Puppy (who I was really into at the time) and Descent 3 had two separate engines for outside and inside. it was sweet ass. Is it just me or has the state of enemy AI (at least in shooters) really taken a back seat lately? I know in terms of other game genres (like strategy) it's advanced so maybe it's just not as explicit to my eyed but i still think that the squad behavior in Half-Life was the pinnacle, using grenades and flanking maneuvers to pressure. me. now dudes basically just pop up and shoot, throw a grenade randomly, and try to hide from your line of sight when you shoot back. i'm probably wrong about this; please educate me.

Hells yeah! I hope the trend continues, although on the back end, Ed Burns, Rafael Alvarez, and my boy George Pelecanos look to be absent from the writing and producing credits. I guess Simon traded his Baltimore crew for people more Nola-seasoned (with the exception of Eric Overmeyer and Nina K Noble). I wonder what Ed Burns is up to. He seemed to be the primary force with Generation Kill while Simon finished up The Wire. I hope there wasn't some acrimonious split like with Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan.

I'm 45 minutes into his 'life of starcraft' bit from boostremo's tweet. Not knowing anything about Starcraft, I'm mainly enthralled by how at ease he is for talking to a camera non-stop for 45 minutes (and the scrubber is less than halfway through). At least with a replay you have something to draw from but man... this is a long time to be sitting alone in a room talking to yourself. Not a criticism or anything, just weird to think about.

from HBO - http://www.hbo.com/#/treme/cast-and-crew/davis-mcalary/bio/davis-mcalary.html A part-time DJ, aspiring songwriter and music scenester, with family roots in Uptown, he now resides in the Treme. A fierce defender of the city's music and culture. I like him because his passion completely obliterates his self-preservation gene. I see him much like McNulty in that way where he is so concerned for what is right he has no time to realize he's completely ineffective.