JonCole

This NNID thing isn't incredibly clear to me; does this replace the friend code? Does it just provide a name to stamp on your Miiverse posts?

Well, I started playing this yesterday on a whim. It's just one of those games that's hard to ignore, as much as I wanted to, because of the perpetual zeitgeist surrounding it. I played maybe an hour of Demon's Souls and didn't dig it due to it's lack of instruction and difficulty. So, after about an hour and a half of Dark Souls, I'm totally hooked in. I don't really know what the difference was between this and Demon's, other than the more appealing aesthetics of the opening sections of Dark and the fact that I'm playing this one on PC. Nonetheless, I started as a warrior and burned through the Undead Asylum in about a half hour, taking out the Asylum Demon in one attempt. I've leveled up five times, I think, focusing on vitality, strength, and endurance. I'm still trying to get a grasp on what each of the attributes means, but I figure being a melee dude means that those three attributes are probably important to me. Also, increasing DEF as much as possible seems like a good idea. I've lost a fair amount of souls being overly confident, but it seems like the difficulty curve is just slightly more gracious than in Demon's Souls. The level design seems to give me a lot more room to strategize, whether that means taking on one dude at a time or deciding to haul ass in the other direction. I still don't have a hang of the controls, entirely, so I find myself dying mostly because I can't figure out how to reliably dodge and kick. I did manage to pull of a very minor jumping puzzle, though. The only thing that I feel really debilitated by not understanding is the economy of the game. I found my first merchant, and I bought the bottomless box. I figured that inventory management was going to be important especially since encumbrance is in play, so that seemed an obvious investment. Beyond that, I don't really know what to prioritize, leveling or buying items. Do I need to buy a "residence key" for Undead Burg? Is chain mail armor something worth buying? Do I need to change my weapon? Is my heater shield worth hanging onto because it does 100% melee damage resistance, any why should I consider any wooden shield with less than 100% resistance?

I'm a sucker for that stuff and it really makes me love Assassin's Creed and Tomb Raider, so it reads so much less as a criticism for me than something to be aware of to determine if this is your kind of game.

I didn't think you could play it without a controller.

The Tomb Raider bit was very embarassing, so blatantly marketing BS that I could barely watch it. @clyde - I don't personally need an "award show that people actually take seriously", I just want one that's honest, valuable, and mildly entertaining.

This is pretty much the essence of #VGX In hindsight, McHale wasn't really the worst thing about that "show". In fact, he was probably just 50:50 in terms of it being entertaining, mostly because he was the only outsider there and pointed out a lot of dumb shit that was happening. Probably those guys screaming about potatoes and the foul things they did in GTA5 were the worst part. Or the fact that almost every "world exclusive" trailer was basically just a 30-second recut of E3 demo footage with some semi-interesting voiceover or a subsequent interview that didn't reveal anything meaningful about anything. I wish that there was someone who could make an entertaining, watchable celebration of video games that was honest and didn't try to be "cool". There doesn't need to be "viral" shit or "world exclusive" trailers, just genuine appreciation for games and maybe some cool interviews with devs.

Joe Danger was lead PS3, year later 360, year later PC/Mobile, so I imagine it'll be a situation of them selecting one platform to develop for and potentially porting thereafter once again.

I can't imagine it'll make much of a difference. These franchise-based games are incredibly peripheral to the main storyline of the franchise which they are based, so it'll probably be distant from any details that differentiate the books and the show.

I'm really, really going to have to be convinced that Borderlands is backdrop worthy of an adventure game, because I frankly think it's just barely interesting enough to keep me interested in playing the shooter part of that franchise. I'm already convinced that Game of Thrones is a franchise perfect for an adventure game, Telltale just has to execute.

Game of Thrones Telltale game. Yeah, just wipe that earlier announcement from your memory and soak this one in instead.

TOMB RAIDER DEFINITIVE EDITION COMING TO PS4 AND XBOX ONE TRESSFX ON CONSOLES, GRASS MOVES WITH PHYSICS, YOU GET ALL THE SUPER-MEANINGFUL DLC, THIS IS FUCKING DEFINITIVE I TELL YOU Even Joel McHale didn't buy that bullshit.

So, I've been spending the last few days working on my HTPC library. I've got XBMC totally running with a great skin and a handful of nice addons, plus I'm ripping my entire DVD and Blu-Ray collection from scratch to support subtitles and maximum resolution and acceptable bitrate for any available content. I've been using MakeMKV, which turns out to be an amazing piece of software for dumping the files from physical media and stripping it of copy protection. Best of all, MakeMKV is free in the beta period, which is awesome. Next step is encoding it using Handbrake so each movie doesn't take 30GB/6GB a pop (Blu-Ray/DVD), which is sure to take forever. Even still, I've already enjoyed the benefits of a fully digital library. Most importantly, I can neatly put away all my stuff on a shelf and have it be a big display piece, while my HTPC does all the lifting. My HTPC acts as a server, so I can watch my stuff from anywhere in the house (which is great, because my girlfriend hasn't watched much of my really good stuff so now it's all readily available). Anyways, that's my only "building a home theater" thing lately. Can't afford a nice new receiver or projector, so I'm making the most out of what I already have.

Ugh, I'm probably going to end up watching this stupid thing.

XCOM: Enemy Within is $16 and Metro: Last Light is $11 on Gamefly Digital (Steam code) with coupon code GFDDEC20. Other games on this list are also on sale and eligible for that 20% off code, but those seemed most relevant to Thumbs interests - http://digital.gamefly.com/#!/promotion/551

It's a windowsbox. A PC machine. A directxbox.

I'd probably replay Tomb Raider, considering it was my favorite game of last year. But I'd probably only replay it for $20 in a year from now, when I'm sure to have PS4.

Sale going on for games nominated for Spike's new dumb VGAs - http://store.steampowered.com/promotion/vgx Highlights include Kentucky Route Zero, Stanley Parable, Papers Please, Gone Home, and Brothers. A bunch of other good stuff, naturally, but I just mentioned those that I think particularly appeal to Thumbs.

Since we're talking about Ouya here and I don't want to revive the month's dead Ouya thread, I'd just like to throw this out there: http://ouyaforum.com/showthread.php?8264-The-OUYA-Tweet-a-thon-Part-3-Let-s-all-Participate Yeah, this is just pitiful.

I was actually interested in buying Rayman Legends on PC or PS3 lately, but I have heard so many opinions saying that the Wii U gamepad is essential that I'm saving it for when I eventually buy that console. So, you're not alone out here. I think it was Griffin McElroy (or maybe Chris Plante?) saying that about Legends on a recent episodes of the Besties podcast.

I feel like price has sunken in terms of reasons not to buy a Wii U when pitted against current-generation consoles. Deprecating features to hammer the price down just seems like a desperate diversion, they should really work on getting third-party devs to really take advantage of the hardware rather than produce sub-par ports and reviving important franchises in notable ways that could get some hype built around the console.

Just make them available in the Club Nintendo store. Buy 10 first-party 3DS games, get a free Wii U (Basic)!

I'd be quite okay with 3 Mario games per year between 3DS and Wii U. Alternate years for platformers, sidescrolling and 3D (Bros. vs Land/Galaxy). Alternate years for RPGs, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi. Alternate platforms so that each year, one platform gets a platformer and the other gets and RPG. Third slot goes to one-off/once-per-gen franchises. Add in first-party reboots/sequels and this would be my dreamworld lineup: 2014: Paper Mario for Wii U, sidescrolling platformer for 3DS, SSB for Wii U, Golden Sun reboot on 3DS, F-Zero for Wii U 2015: Mario and Luigi for 3DS, Galaxy 3 for Wii U, Mario Kart 9 for 3DS, Star Fox for Wii U, Metroid sidescroller for 3DS 2016: Paper Mario for 3DS, sidescrolling platformer for Wii U, Mario Party for Wii U, Kirby for 3DS, Fire Emblem for Wii U etc. This holiday season seems to prove that all Nintendo needs is one killer app per platform to be considered relevant and get some mindshare (Link Between Worlds, 3D World). Throw in two more in the Spring to keep up momentum, and one in the fall to get things started again. Man, my brain just went into Nintendo nirvana thinking about getting all that stuff. If Nintendo could deliver consistent quality with that kind of diversity, I'd be a Nintendo fanboy once again.

Pontwitficater. That's certainly the worst portmanteau I've thought up today.

Now that Twitter has the weird new format for flowing reply chains via the dreaded blue line, I don't really know why there's not a less opaque way to manually identify that a certain Tweet is part of a certain chain. There's obvious technical stuff you'd have to figure out, like it shouldn't allow me to insert my voice into a conversation between two people I don't know unless they include me in the conversation. Also, I'm still not really sure why usernames are included in the character limit. Seems to naturally limit how wide a conversation can get, for no discernable positive reason other than sticking to 140 characters no matter what. Twitlonger kinda resolves this problem, I wish that they'd finally integrate this feature directly into Twitter (especially since Twitter seems happy to... "steal" the best features from third-party apps/plugins that tap its API). The only upside of this thing is that it's actually encouraged me and a small group of close internet friends to carry on longer conversations via email. I don't really use email for anything but semi-permanent text messages nowadays, so it's nice to actually have a real conversation via this "old" email tech.