Korax

I tried ketamine once, and happened to be playing Singularity at the time. I stopped after about 15 minutes because everything seemed like it had slight input lag, and I couldn't react to enemies properly.

The code is provided via a fake phone card that's attached to the album jacket, so you won't have a code until you get the set itself.

Got the Collector's Edition in yesterday: Now I just need to find someone to borrow a turntable from...

The uncle in A Story About My Uncle does indeed have a crazy cyber-glove. He's an eccentric inventor, and he made the glove, some jet boots, and the portal machine that transports you to the planet/dimension/reality where the game takes place. I had fun with the game. My only real complaint is that although a decent number of the grapple paths seemed to be designed around a Bionic-Commando-style swinging ability, the actual grappling mechanics the game uses are "pull yourself directly to the grapple point, I sure hope you have enough momentum and air control to somehow mush your way around that thing you're about to hit, oh no, you hit it, now you fall into infinity and have to start over at the last checkpoint."

Yeah, it's coming with a Steam code, and I expect it to just not unlock until release day.

COLLECTOR'S EDITION SHIPPED ESTIMATED ARRIVAL DATE THUR 3/05/2015 HNNNNNNGG

This came out a few weeks ago, and I've seen it mentioned on a couple of sites, but I think it definitely needs more attention. It's a mod for Source (free, of course, but requires Source SDK 2007) that explores the idea of freedom in games. I don't want to say too much, but I will say that it needs to be played through multiple times. Link: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-stanley-parable

I assume that's what you'll be doing, then?

Also, ALL cephalopoda have beaks, Jake, not just squids.

Someone beat all the current missions using just a bomb and the starting block: I usually see these things as outliers. They're a good thing to consider when designing to encourage more creativity, but someone's going to figure out the dumbest, fastest way to complete it. Trying to hit or avoid a single target just means that bomb-lattice guy will spend a bit more time to figure out which bombs to leave out of the lattice and when he needs to hit the deploy button to get the rotation right. As an avid Goosebumps reader, I will say that they were never all that good. I mainly read them because they were a quick, fun read and sometimes had some interesting ideas. One of my favorites was Say Cheese and Die! It had a spooky camera that produced photos showing the subjects after an accident which would happen soon after. It didn't take long to realize how formulaic the books were. Each chapter ended with some sort of tense cliffhanger that turned out to be nothing at the beginning of the next chapter, and then the book would end with a bigger actual cliffhanger that was sometimes followed up on with a sequel book.

I'm still good to fill out a group if the party would be too small, but don't be hesitant to tell me to fuck off if there are enough other people willing to play.

I pre-ordered the physical Collector's Edition, despite the fact that I don't have any way to actually play a vinyl record. It just looks so cool. Also, there's another crossover with Payday 2! Owning the game gets you a grip of animal masks, and the special edition adds a couple more weapons and Jacket as a playable character!

ARGH WHY DOESN'T ANYONE PAY ATTENTION TO ME WHEN I TALK ABOUT LINK'S AWAKENING Here's the interview that the "suspicious types" quote was pulled from: http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/zelda/1/0 Link's Awakening is my favorite Zelda game. Because it was the first handheld game, the devs weren't quite sure what the game should be, and threw in some weird stuff. There's the aforementioned Twin Peaks inspiration, but there are other things like the occasional sidescrolling sub-room with goombas in it, or how one of the dungeons has a few Kirby enemies that inhale you and spit you out. The item trade sequence subquest begins by winning a Yoshi doll from a crane game, and you get the message "You got a Yoshi Doll! Recently, he seems to be showing up in many games!" when you pick it up. And my favorite thing: Zelda isn't even in the game. It was the first game I can remember having an emotional response other than "video games are sweet!" It also has the best version of the Zelda Overworld theme, found in the Tal Tal Heights:

I fully support using "jammer" instead of "gamer," and I demand that the switch is instituted immediately.

I try to be careful with my devices, but the inevitable marring is almost cathartic. It makes the thing irrevocably mine.

Whenever I hear people talk about Roberta Williams, I remember the Old Man Murray article from Erik Wolpaw: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/374.html

If you get moving fast enough from, say, the momentum gained from a steep slope, your feet can't keep up with your body and you start tumbling and rolling forward. It's great.

I suppose you could, but why would you do so knowing that you're wrong for some arbitrary reason? No. You must only ever have a single (probably incorrect) opinion, and if you ever change your mind, should be subject to even more scorn than before.

Some people who play games like achievements. Some people who play games do not like achievements. Some people who play games are indifferent to achievements. Some people who design games like achievements. Some people who design games do not like achievements. Some people who design games are indifferent to achievements. And anyone who disagrees with any of the above groups is somehow wrong and they deserve to be shunned/mocked/ignored/threatened/etc. There. Glad we got that all sorted out.

Blizzard did a pretty good job with console Diablo 3. The inventory/equipment menu is a bit unwieldy because they went with a radial layout and some of the organization isn't as clear as it could be, but overall, its' pretty good. At this point the console version would probably be my go-to if I want to play through again because I can just relax, slouch back with a controller, and play casually. I think the main complaint about ME from the Thumbs was how wobbly the scope view was for sniping, and it was speculated that it was really only there because it was supposed to represent low weapon skill, but with a mouse it was easy to overcome and just ended up being an unnecessary annoyance. I'd say that out of all 3 games, ME1 was the closest to being designed for the PC. Because it was more RPG-focused, you could end up with 8 or 9 powers to use, only 1 or 2 of which could be mapped to a controller button, leaving you to popping up a power menu if you wanted to do anything else. On PC, all your powers were just on a numbered hotbar, accessible at any time. As ME2 and ME3 shifted more towards the shooter side, you'd almost always have only 3 powers (with an extra or two depending on completion of optional stuff), and 3 buttons dedicated to them on the controller. The example that always comes to my mind of a game being designed for a console and then ported to PC was Deus Ex: Invisible War. It was fixed with a patch, but the initial version of the game on PC just didn't have support for menu navigation with the mouse. It was all WASD + Enter to do anything.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter:

Video archives are up on the Games Done Quick YouTube channel: Those are raw, unedited chunks of video. They're slowly cutting separate videos for each run, but if you're willing to do a bit of searching and skipping, the whole event's on that playlist.

That's one of the most tragic things I've ever seen.

At this point it seems like you're just ignoring things that have been said to justify your dislike of the game.

Most retro aesthetic isn't made to be accurate to what it's referencing. Almost any time someone claims something is in 8- or 16-bit style, it just means "I made pixel art!" By sticking as closely as they did to NES constraints, they made something much closer to something that actually could have been on an NES. That was their stated intent. I don't really have much nostalgia that they could be cashing in on. I didn't have a NES growing up, and even when I had the opportunity to play games on one, I wasn't great at platformers like Mega Man. I maybe played Mega Man 2 or 3 once. So while I can appreciate the deliberate NES style, calling back to it doesn't really matter to me. Sure, it's NES-style art, but it's still really good art! It's NES-style music, but it's still really good music! It easily became one of my favorite games of all time. They also incorporated more modern things, too. Those checkpoints probably wouldn't have been in a NES game. There is no extra lives system that makes you restart the game if you die more than 3 times, you can just keep at it until you beat a level. Even the fact that you can save and have multiple save slots is a slight modernization, because you just didn't have that in early NES. You either beat it in one go or had to write down a bunch of clumsy passwords. Why do they take a bunch of mechanics from NES-era games? Because they wanted to. It's the game they wanted to make, and it was their choice to use them.