JonCole

SOLIDARITY: In other news, I got OBS working. Maybe next time I'll find my good recording mic and give that a try. Who knows, I may go wild and find my webcam and work that in. But for now, watch a few minutes of poor Spelunky play. I'm so out of practice.

Call of Duty Ghosts More of the same as far as COD campaigns go. Unique stuff - underwater and space combat, which both prove to be somewhat clunky but short sequences that break up the monotony of the regular combat. Vehicular sequences were also not unnecessarily long (double negative, but I'm trying to point out that it's unlike previous COD games where vehicle missions are long and repeated) and fairly easy to beat. The story was about as boilerplate stupid explosion-y as it gets, despite being removed from the MW timeline. I liked that the enemy was not just some unnamed country in the Middle East or China, it was rather a federation of South American, resource-rich states. Unfortunately, their actions were not any different due to the cultural shift away from other games - it really just meant that you were in the jungles outside Caracas rather than the desert outside Kandahar, and the enemy soldiers spoke Spanish instead of Arabic. Nonetheless, I found the story inoffensive which is a step up for an Infinity Ward COD game. Of course, the ending was a big cliffhanger thing and left room in the next game for (endgame and Ghosts 2 spoilers): So yeah, totally middling as I expected. Bought the game mostly for the multiplayer, so I don't particularly feel disappointed. Just too bad that I wasn't impressed especially after BLOPS2, which integrated some degree of choice and managed to mix up the COD formula (if only a little).

Yeah, I think achievements are fine and even helpful on a per-game basis, but hindsight tells me that gamerscore was a garbage idea. I mean, it was nice to reach milestones as far as score was concerned but it doesn't scale very well - case in point, I don't know at this point what is considered a "good" or "impressive" total gamerscore. The Steam approach of just a total number of achievements per game or the Sony approach of trophies of a limited number of gradients of difficulty or skill better translate what individual achievements per game (which you are praising, for the sake of completion or progress tracking) represent cumulatively. When I see that someone has a high number of gold trophies, I have a good idea that person has a lot of skill or dedication to get those as opposed to a hard achievement being worth 50 GS, which looks the same as ten 5 GS achievements when lumped together. I don't know if there's really a lot of value to be had here, but I wish there was a little more creativity this generation to make meaningful metrics for achievements. As it is, Microsoft is giving 1000 points to all games now regardless of size or scope, which further muddies what that total score is actually worth or represents. Regardless, I do appreciate achievements in general - hitting 50k gamerscore felt really good, and getting all of the achievements for Oblivion and Fallout 3 felt like a great representation of my love for those games.

I think there are enough mega-successes on mobile that while it's not a "revolution", it's certainly still a thing. I mean, Puzzle & Dragons is the biggest game in Japan by leaps and bounds. Candy Crush Saga has been downloaded 500 million times or some dumb crap like that. PvZ2 hit 16 million on iOS alone. Squeenix has said that their focus will be on online and mobile going forward.

I feel like one of the big arcs of the latter half of this generation (that's still ongoing) is how to monetize "regular" games in the face of behemoth franchises like League of Legends, mobile games and (less so) World of Warcraft. You see companies like Square Enix pour tons of cash into Deus Ex, Hitman, and Tomb Raider and supposedly not have much to show for it despite selling through around 5 million copies of each. You have Call of Duty sinking in relevance from its peak at the beginning of this generation with COD: MW and MW2, trying out microtransactions and hitching their fortunes ever more on season passes and eSports. Look at PvZ2, compromising its vision by launching exclusively for iOS purportedly due to payment from Apple (I doubt this, but it's still a weird concept) and aggressively pushing microtransactions through every step of gameplay (some may dispute this, though it's hard to dispute that there's a big difference between the vision of the original and the sequel). Of course, this all sounds bad but there were also good parts to this whole revolution in how to monetize games more creatively. While season passes in general may not be the most consumer-friendly idea, promising future support for a game through notable expansion content is something we couldn't really hope for very often early in this generation (remember how Oblivion's expansions seemed kinda wild on Xbox 360?). You also have Telltale's Walking Dead series and now the Wolf Among Us, showing that episodic games may actually have a place not only on PC, but also on consoles and mobile devices, and the episodic nature of them can actually develop a TV-like zeitgeist. Crazy. And Steam... wow. Steam has opened up a whole new range of product scope and price, with games regularly releasing in the $20-30 range and gaining a ton of traction. Indie developers actually had a chance to make an impact, so much so that they became a big talking point for next-gen. Steam was really the big x-factor in terms of monetization this generation, because it allowed both indie devs and big publishers a lot of wiggle room on price, schedule and post-release support where they didn't have it before.

I think they did do a lot of research, but I also think that their research is dumb. A couple days ago Arthur Gies at Polygon said that many of the units they got to review games were already over half full with only launch games. That sucks ass.

Figured out what the lightbar was good for in the DS4. Seeing fire inside the controller when the PS4 is being microwaved -

Super shitty bug, may be exclusive to Windows 8.1 from my light research, Spelunky is crashing any time it is windowed for any reason. So, if I want to change the resolution or make it not-fullscreen, it crashes. Meh.

Maybe I worded it wrong; I don't necessarily want choice in my FPS games. I just either want real choices or no choices rather than a single cheap, fake choice. Especially coming off of CODBLOPS2 last year, which actually managed to do some moderately interesting narrative stuff via choices (some overt, some not). Also yes, it's a buggy mess and I didn't mention that. How many times did I blow up a helicopter and a big chunk of its mechanical corpse suspend in mid-air after a grand explosion? Every time.

I didn't consider the prohibitive cost. That said, I wasn't suggesting buying an eReader and trying to use it overseas to procure books. I was suggesting buying an eReader, making a US account of some kind to buy ebooks with, and then bringing the ereader to where you are where you can use the already purchased ebooks at a later date. I know a few expats who do that - they come back to the US on holiday and buy like 20 books so they have a queue when they get back home.

The entire backlog of GFW Radio? >.> I downloaded the torrent of them all and listen to them sometimes for no reason. They hold up.

All of that said, I can't help but boomerang back to my original overarching sentiment - who cares what these things look like? The only reason I am feeling slightly down on the Xbox is that power brick because I've never found those dumb things fit very well in my admittedly cheap, tiny entertainment center.

Man, you guys finish a lot of games. Maybe I should be doing more of that myself. Battlefield 4 (Campaign) Man, how do I even talk about this one? I actually kinda liked Battlefield 3's campaign; now take that with the knowledge that I also enjoyed for instance Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's campaign, so I'm more a FPS nut than a narrative aficionado. Battlefield 3's campaign was slammed for not really promoting Battlefield gameplay - it was wildly linear and didn't even feature large arenas or vehicle combat that BF is known for. Now, that's the one place where BF4's campaign improves, adding a few more open areas where you're supplied with anti-tank mines or C4 and have to dispatch a couple roaming tanks on foot, or offering a small city with plenty of buildings to enter, an apartment complex with a sniper overwatch position, and another building with a rocket launcher emplacement. You also have vehicular combat - a scene where you're driving a tank through a city, following mostly a linear path but also entering small parks or urban plazas where traversing the streets in certain patterns can give you the advantage over enemy RPG-wielding foot soldiers or other enemy tanks. You also have the opportunity to drive one of the newly ubiquitous gunboats, which is quite enjoyable. All of that is great, but the story itself is actually noticeably worse than the one in BF3. It involves some degree of globetrotting, which is par for the course, and the major enemy is the Chinese, which is also par for the course. It brings back a character from BF3 (surprise!) who they unceremoniously kill off after not even discussing his origin or properly contextualizing his presence in this new game (surprise horseshit!) You also have the awesome Michael Williams from The Wire fame, who is completely wasted and only serves to be a chaotic force in the narrative who makes all the dumb shit happen. Worst of all, you make absolutely no narrative choices throughout the game, which wouldn't be a big deal until you're actually given a time-limited choice in literally the last moment of the game that decides the final message of the story. There's nothing more annoying to me, narratively, than giving a choice when one wasn't warranted, expected, or most importantly effective. That campaign was a huge pile of shit. Stick to the multiplayer if you can, although beating the campaign unlocks certain guns. So, I guess play the campaign on the lowest difficulty and breeze through it in 3 hours of D+ gameplay.

What makes it even more silly is that the Xbox One has a power brick while the PS4's power converter is internal. So not only is it that big comparatively, but the power cord adds a nice chunk of volume as well.

Will do, I'll try out the tutorials this weekend if I get a chance.

Jeff Green was essentially saying that Black Mesa is a good HD remake in that you'd play it and feel like, "hey, this is exactly how I remember HL1 playing like" until you in fact go back and see how comparatively shit the graphics are and how it's missing polish here and there. He went on to say that it might be good for Half-Life virgins who care about good graphics at all. That's a high enough recommendation for me to play BMS over HL1 for the first time (yeah, list of shame stuff here).

I don't know if this will help or if this product is available in your region, but The Wirecutter's recommendation of a wireless HDMI transmitter sounded pretty solid and inexpensive - http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-wireless-hdmi-video-transmitter/ Of course, that still doesn't solve the problem of input devices that you had but may be useful in a projector home theater setup.

Would anyone want to do that coaching thing with me? I've been wanting to try and learn DOTA 2 forever, but the intimidating nature of every single story I hear re: learning DOTA has put me off.

Ah, I should have seen that but I normally breeze over spoiler boxes.

I meant their general scoring method/standards, not this particular review. In regards to the PS4 in particular, I imagine that the endpoint of giving them reviews is that you see like Wii U - 6.5/10 PS4 - 7.5/10 Xbox One - 8.5/10 Well, I guess the best console right now is the Xbox One. I have numerical proof! Gotta go buy one right now, BRB.

I generally think that Polygon's scoring is poor and not very helpful. I suppose that the PS4's score means it's about 10% better than a Wii U, scored 6.5/10 and yet to be updated. That makes sense, right? I felt a similar degree of "huh?" reading the updated review of Call of Duty Ghosts, which included next-gen scores. The XBONE version got a full .5 higher than the other platforms. The text said that the next-gen platforms really offer very little more than the current-gen outside of resolution and some particle effects, which they deemed to be insignificant. Otherwise, they said the PS4 has inconsistent framerate so the One version is superior. But if you say that next-gen visual upgrades are negligible, why is the One getting +0.5 rather than the PS4 getting -0.5? I don't really get it, and I don't see how scores like these can actually be helpful to anybody but Metacritic.

Their servers get destroyed on every free game, plus they only stock a handful. Still worth a try if you can have the window open in the corner of your screen. For some reason this flash sale format really destroys my impulse control. Also got Baldur's Gate Original Saga for $2 and Two Worlds 2 Epic Edition for $4.

I've been using Calibre more and more for my own eBooks. It's a really solid bit of library management software. You can get a plugin for it that strips away DRM, at which point you can convert it to any number of formats, add metadata/cover art, etc. It even has an automated feature to email to Kindle, so if you buy an epub at one online store it'll one-click convert to Kindle-friendly format and email to your @kindle email address for upload. Of course, it's a bit of a hassle if you're satisfied with one ecosystem, but if you want to get the most out of your library, don't want to be locked into an ecosystem, and don't mind losing special Kindle-specific features like Whispersync, it's pretty good stuff. Edit: Realized I didn't actually state my opinion on ereaders. I love them! I had a Kindle Keyboard and upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite this year. It's way more convenient for me than regular books mostly because the books I'm most interested in are generally huge tomes of hard sci-fi/fantasy stuff that would weigh three or four pounds and barely fit in my tiny man purse. Plus, backlit epaper screens means better reading at night beside my girlfriend in bed, since it doesn't bother her even with all the lights off. Only disadvantage is the ability to develop a backlog as with other digital formats like a Netflix queue or Steam catalog. With physical books, I just feel ashamed seeing a voluminous stack of books sitting on my physical nightstand, a sensation not really felt with my Kindle. As a result, I just buy anything of marginal interest on sale on the Kindle Store and my backlog is enormous.

Can she get you only two books because of weight restrictions or something? Can she not just buy you an ereader and load it up with a handful of books you want? Is this suggestion dumb?

Thanks! I'll see if I can get it running this afternoon. I'm super-rusty after not playing so long, though, so I'm sure my first few videos will be five minutes or something.