JonCole

How are you guys recording this stuff? I just installed Spelunky on my HTPC so I'm going to start up playing it again, so I'll add you all on Steam. Just don't know how to record junk.

You really wish for unified wallet all the time? I don't really buy eShop gift cards or anything, so maybe the benefits are not apparent to me.

GOG is having a limited stock flash sale type thing (think Wootoff! if you're familiar with Woot.com) - http://www.gog.com/news/special_promo_fall_insomnia_promo Seen some good deals already, picked up Neverwinter Nights 2: Complete for $4 already. Saw Rogue Legacy briefly for $5.

Unified wallet is literally the least desired element of a unified account. Licenses are the most important thing. So yeah, diverting power from the hope reactors to the bullshit sensors.

I don't think anyone pointed it out, so I will. The reason he was whipping the money out of his way is because he was farming via the ghost (ghosting, colloquially). Whenever the ghost passes over a gem (emerald, sapphire, ruby) the gem is converted to a diamond which is worth $5000. So, he invests bombs and ropes to craft a path up through the level, he whips away gems to have a clear path around them, and then when the ghost arrives he leads the ghost over the gems and collects the diamonds afterwards. Ghosting the mines is the easiest way to get >$50000 for the ankh (preferably >$100000, so you can afford a couple bomb bags and the jetpack as well) by the black market, not to mention extra spending money per level to buy back bombs and ropes. Ghosting is nearly essential to a reliably successful hell run, because you are essentially beating the odds by way of money. Normally, you'd have to rely on luck to get really good items or take big risks like fighting the big alien in the Ice Caves to get an essential item like a jetpack. By frontloading all the risk in the mines by playing around the ghost and getting all kinds of money, you can simply buy all the items you need and any excess of bombs/ropes to handle whatever comes your way.

Ars wrote up a good article on MS/Elop thing: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/microsoft-shouldnt-hire-any-ceo-who-wants-to-kill-bing-and-xbox/ I just think that unless Microsoft wants to be IBM, they can't kill Bing and Xbox. And if they want to be IBM/obsolete, I want nothing to do with them as a consumer-level customer.

I imagine you get a code that you redeem in the SEN Store/on your PS3/PSV/PS4's storefront, just like the download code for wallet funds. I haven't used it myself yet, maybe I'll try it out on AC4 later this year.

I'm not saying that Prison Architect is attempting to be whimsical, I'm just suggesting that maybe the visual impact is exacerbated by the relative abstraction of the art style. I suggest this not having played the game and only having watched LPs (three or four hours of them, for what it's worth), so I could be totally off base. I just want to differentiate what I'm saying from "it's a cartoon, murder and rape are lol topics when treated in a specific goooooofy way!"

Amazon actually used to sell both XBLA codes and PSN game codes, but they stopped in 2010 if memory serves. Good to see it come back, I much more regularly have Amazon credit that PSN Wallet credit.

Does the cartoonish nature of the simulation not suspend disbelief/discomfort? I mean, obviously not a direct comparison but Rollercoaster Tycoon always had a disproportionate number of people throwing up from literally every single ride as a visual means to communicate that a ride may not be engineered just right. Obviously prisons are a more sensitive subject of simulation than theme parks, but killing is an overextended example of violence, which is probably a lot more prevalent in prisons but far less easily tracked than homicide and a lot more difficult to convey in art/animation of the spartan/stylized style of this game.

My most niche thing isn't really a podcast, it's rather internet radio that I listened to pertaining to a specific niche. I feel it's apropos to bring it up considering Zack was just on the podcast, but I listened to KoL Radio for a quite a while during my tenure playing Kingdom of Loathing (5 years or so). A lot of it was just music that appealed to KoL players, but there was some conversation and some interviews that were quite niche that pertained specifically to the game.

The solution is that everyone waves their iPads at concerts. Very few things are more irritating to me than people taking pictures with their iPads at important functions (my favorites are like baptisms or weddings), so holding them up like lighters at concerts seems to be the natural progression of irritation and uncool. On another note, Puzzles & Dragons also tells you to take breaks at random intervals. It's just one of their tooltips that seems to be in regular rotation, more so than other tooltips. Finally, this episode felt hella GFW Radio. Chris fit Shawn Elliott's role perfectly in the conversation about Steam trading and virtual goods economy, it was really quite weird.

I was looking at the Dell Venue 11 Pro for myself, which has a digitizer-laden screen for pressure-sensitive stylus support and a tablet keyboard option that effectively makes it a laptop. Sure, it only has 2GB of memory and a mobile-friendly, somewhat underpowered CPU, but it seems a fair exchange for the price ($500 vs $1200) and extra battery life.

I found this video about the "meaning" behind Majora's Mask super interesting, maybe some of you who pine for an HD version would enjoy it: Sure as heck makes me want to play again.

The XBL fees and platform license fees wouldn't be counted separately from Xbox as a total unit. I'm sure they somewhat balance out unprofitability of actual hardware, which is what I think you're referring to, but it's still a wash overall. Glad you're enjoying the Surface 2 Pro, looks like a sharp piece of hardware. Could never convince myself to buy one over a Bay Trail equipped ~$500 convertible tablet from Asus or Dell, though. I just don't need a ton of horsepower from a tablet, though I use devices like that almost solely for consumption and not creation.

I honestly think that Nintendo is crazy for not basically making old games advertisements for new games. If they ran a special for the Super Mario Kart VC at $2 in the month ahead of Mario Kart U, how could the increased sales of Mario Kart U not make up for whatever losses they perceive by selling Super Mario Kart cheaper? For some reason, NIntendo still thinks of their old games as some massive commodity rather than their current platform or current software offerings. Sure, VC games have value and people are willing to buy them at big cost, but maybe Nintendo should fuel interests in products of the day by cashing in on the nostalgia of the past.

Well, the categories where they are taking a bath don't have licensing inherent to them - with Surface, they don't license Windows to themselves; with Xbox, they don't license... Xbox OS to themselves; with Windows RT Tablets, Office is given away for free. They make a ton of profit on OEM Licensing (Windows/Office licenses sold to manufacturers) and business licensing, but that's separate from consumer products. One of my points, however, is that these categories are more or less in the same bucket due to the restructure so while licensing isn't making up for losses on a per unit or per product level, the profits of OEM licensing division will be blended together with the losses of the Xbox division in their financial statements.

Many of Microsoft's consumer-facing initiatives are either financial failures or financial break-evens, whether you're talking about Bing, Windows Phone 8, Surface, or Xbox. MS makes most of their money off of Microsoft Office, server technology, and Windows 8 (more or less in that order, if I'm not mistaken). Xbox may run at a loss, but it's still relatively peanuts compared to their other businesses. Xbox was part of MS's Entertainment and Devices division, which pulled about $10 billion in revenue a year. They essentially make no significant profit (something less than $1 billion), so the break even there is Windows Phone (by a small margin) and Skype (by a bigger margin). Of course, Microsoft recently experienced a reorg that groups Xbox with all licensing and all hardware, meaning losses will be even less obvious when considered by division (due to huge OEM licensing of Windows and consumer licensing of Office). All of that said, candidate for MS CEO and former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop did say something about selling off the Xbox business if he was to become CEO, so it's clearly a topic and a piece on the table that can be moved or removed. I still think it's not likely for Microsoft to back away from Xbox, because they don't have a ton of consumer-facing initiatives and Xbox has the most mindshare of them all. Put another way, Microsoft is a factor in people's day to day life because of the Xbox, I just don't see them carrying over that cultural relevance to something like Surface or Windows Phone.

No, they fixed the problem because now you can have UNLIMITED MUSIC YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

I recently brought up on Twitter the dumb idea of buying a 1TB SSD and throwing it in a PS4. It really didn't make a whole lot of sense to throw an SSD into a PS3 due to the SATA 1.5GBps port that limited access speed (plus, only games like RAGE and Elder Scrolls/Fallout saw noticeable benefits from faster access to cache), but I assume the PS4 has either SATA 3.0GBps or SATA 6.0GBps, which would make an SSD a less ridiculous choice. Of course, a 1TB drive would effectively make the cost of a PS4 $1000, but if you're going all-digital the benefits might actually be worth the initial price long-term.

I know a lot of people who are buying 1TB drives for $70 or something and upgrading day 1. I'll probably end up doing that myself, I imagine. I recently threw a 1TB 7200RPM drive into my PS3 and it's made a lot of difference. I also have pretty much every single PS+ game installed since the program started with plenty of space to spare.

That's basically the same exact computer I have planned to build for my girlfriend for her birthday early next year. I went with a more expensive case and 80 Plus Gold PSU because I know she'll hang onto them for a long time. The only thing I'd point out is that the FX-6300 supports up to DDR3-1866 memory, so I went with an ASRock mobo and 1600MHz memory instead to take advantage of that ceiling. The NZXT Source 210 was on my shortlist for cases for my HTPC, I only went with something more expensive because of USB 3.0 Ports. I'd discourage buying a case with blue LED case fans, only because I consider them fairly ugly and not very appealing at night if it's the only piece of hardware on in the house.

Fractal cases are available here, but $100 is a quite a lot for a light budget. There are plenty of cases around the $50 price point that should be more than sufficient and that money would be better spent on going from a dual-core to a quad-core or from a 1GB GPU to a 2GB GPU.

I always thought Dragonball Z games would be cool, but not really the fighting game thing that they are now but rather something like Asura's Wrath. Imagine using a Kamehameha and jamming on a button a hundred times in 5 seconds so you could have the same strained expression on your face as Gohan kicking Cell's green butt.

Sony did an exclusive teardown of the PS4 prior to release with Wired, kind of unprecedented but very cool - http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/playstation4-teardown-video/