JonCole

I'd say that Broken Steel is practically required, if only because it raises the level cap and introduces a lot of different enemies throughout the game. Besides that, I finished Operation Anchorage and I'm about halfway through Mothership Zeta. I'm not really a great judge of these things, considering I practically enjoy any piece of Fallout 3 content... but I would say that everything I have played through at this point are well worth the cash.

Does Amazon not ship to Canada? They currently have it going for $30 here.

Get ready for a mini-wall of text. Eh, I beg to differ. I think someone calculated it, and to accumulate the amount of watts you need to unlock every route, you need to walk over 10,000 steps for 200 days. Sorry, but I'm fairly convinced that I won't be carrying my Pokewalker 200 days from now, especially considering that I'm not using my watts ONLY for the sake of unlocking routes. I honestly think that you should give it a shot if the primary thing you're worried about is tainting your nostalgia. HGSS makes it so you essentially only have the initial 350 available to you with the typical amount of effort you'd want to exercise in a game you're not investing your life into. Before the third wave of games, I would say that the Pokemon were almost all memorable, though I don't think I could memorize Poke-raps for every single one. The best part of the game at this point, for me, is just finding the Pokemon that I've always taken a shine to and using them. With practically everything available in this game (unlike most previous games), you can take your pick of some of the coolest creatures out there. I've got to say, one of the best updates they made to the franchise for HGSS is the ability to lock the running function. There is almost literally no time where I don't want to run and I like how they allow me to indulge in that.

Depends on your definition of obsolete. I'm honestly not even going to consider getting the 3DS for quite a damn while considering the DS catalog is robust enough for now, so a device with bigger screens in this generation still serves some purpose. It remains to be seen that the 3DS will do anything worthwhile until developers really dig into what it's offering. Since Nintendo is stressing that the 3DS will be backwards compatible right from the start, I predict a slow adoption rate by devs.

Anyone else have this? Want to play a game? I heard that this is much better with friends, even though it's hard to believe because I'm having a pretty damn good time as it is. Jonac13 on XBL.

The DLC is for people like me, who will probably buy everything Mass Effect 2-related that exists. I don't mind DLC that offers something at cost to the real enthusiasts - nobody can really make the argument that missing out on $2 costumes will really reduce your enjoyment of the game.

Okay, you fuckers convinced me. I'm gonna buy it now.

Wrote up a little blog blast on 1UP's new game music podcast, The Sound Test. I enjoyed it a lot, and I love Ray Barnholt. http://www.joncole.info/journal/2010/3/18/podcast-spotlight-the-sound-test.html

I don't know if it's appropriate or not to post this here, but here it goes. Apparently there have been a lot of layoffs at News Corp/IGN, according to a leaked memo over at Joystiq. Among the casualties are Podcast Beyond host and Former Executive Editor at IGN, Chris Roper, industry veteran Andy Eddy of Team Xbox, and founder of Team Xbox Brent "Shockwave" Soboleski. This fucking sucks. And the forum responses to this have been total rubbish, ranging from people saying these people deserved to get fired to recommending other IGN employees get fired for reasons as petty as multiplayer game etiquette. On a totally selfish note, I just hope that Podcast Beyond doesn't get totally decimated in all this. It won't be the same without Roper, but I still enjoy it from week to week and would hate to see one of the better podcasts out there wiped off the face of the internet. Also, a link to CastMedium's post on the issue, including links to the respective IGN and TeamXbox forum threads: http://www.castmedium.com/2010/03/16/layoffs-strike-ign-and-team-xbox/

After the first break, I was laughing so hard that was rendered completely unable to breathe for at least thirty seconds. I love Thumbs.

Hindsight is 20/20, so I find more and more things to complain about ME2 as time goes on since I last played. However, I still feel like this game has better execution than almost any game I've ever played. I do think that maybe they went a little too actiony, too fast. A case in point is the friendly AI at harder difficulties; while the AI in Gears of War 2 isn't mindblowing, it's comforting to know that Dom can take cover and draw some fire without dying in five seconds.

At least he was sorta on-topic.

It's a little bit pedantic to say that "depleted" doesn't really mean "depleted" considering it's a complete waste of time mining the planet at that point. Since resources cost money (probes), resources are practically unlimited (or at least exponentially more ubiquitous than money), and money is limited, you're just going to end up screwing yourself in the end. The Mass Effect 2 quest structure is just that, very structured. It's limited in such a way that there really is no "endgame"; you won't hit the level cap until you've done practically every quest. The currency, in concert, is limited due to the fact that quests are the primary vehicle for monetary rewards. If you want to collect everything, collect all of the upgrades and stuff. Otherwise, you'll be like me, unable to buy all of the upgrades from various shops around the galaxy and possessing so much palladium that I could build a second Normandy.

Just listened to the audiobook of Mars by Ben Bova. Excellent book, you would barely know that it was written in the nineties even though it's steeped in technology references. The fact that Bova was writing about satellite controlled aircraft similar to the US's Predator planes is damned cool. If you're interested in the audiobook, by the way, the reader is brilliant. Does foreign accents fairly well, although it does feel slightly hokey at times. About sixteen hours though, which is pretty damn chunky.

Umm... can't you just make a list of those people who don't want constant updates from? And if you're like me, you're not so ridiculously popular that using the "mentions" feature of Twitter is sufficient to see the responses of people who you don't follow. As for syncing settings and junk, Tweetdeck is pretty damn nice, from my experience. I've also heard great things about Seesmic, though I haven't had the motivation to try it out.

I have a feeling that this whole thing could be a massive success if executed perfectly. I'm not exactly sure how the royalties of a purchase are paid out by Valve in Steam, but I was thinking the other day that it might be possible for them to offer a sort of... subsidy to indie developers who make Mac versions of their software. Similar to how Amazon offers a 70% royalty rather than their usual 30% if you build certain features into e-books sold over the Kindle store, they could spur a groundswell of smaller games to fill out what I'd imagine would be a pretty limited Mac games catalog. Since the competition in the space is practically just World of Warcraft, Valve could take this "new" market by storm if they play their cards right.

The only difference I can pick out is that Assassin's Creed 2's DRM is supposed to be the be all, end all for Ubisoft DRM. There was no other indication that the C&C4 DRM scheme was going to be EA universal, so that might be part of it. Then again, I haven't listened to episode 35 in a while (though it's coming up quickly in my Idle Thumbs backlog quest), so I don't know the exact attitude of the conversation.

I guess that for me, it's trying to bring order to a seemingly ridiculous situation. Sure, the idea of people scapegoating shareholders of publicly traded companies as reasons to implement draconian policies like stringent DRM is a little bit played out, but I can't help but think of a possible kernel of truth there considering how big of a disaster this seems to be. I have no problem deferring to your judgment on this one since I presume you have more clear window into some of these motivations, it's just such a huge disappointment to see great games like Assassin's Creed 2 and potentially great future games get saddled with such nonsense.

Ubisoft: OMGZ IT WUZ HACKERZ Public: Oh, fuck you, Ubisoft. http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/08/ubisofts-pc-drm-verification-was-out-because-servers-were-atta/

I suspect the former. Such horrendous DRM just makes me think that they're fishing for a reason to duck out of the PC gaming space, and when the whole debacle results in low PC sales they'll just tell their shareholders and go console-only.

Secret DS-blowing blackmail attempt, it seems.

Piriform is generally a pretty legit brand, I use CCleaner and Defraggler all the time. Clearly superior to their built-in Windows counterparts.

Did I miss why you're not just getting a new mouse? It's not particularly expensive to get a solid 5 button or more mouse nowadays, and it sounds like that driver nonsense isn't worth messing with.

It's actually eight days, but one of those days was pretty much dominated by a lot of school work. From the boxes, it's about 64 hours long... so that's like 8 hours a day, yeah.

Well, I finished Battlestar Galactica essentially within the span of a week, that's how much I enjoyed the damn thing. All of these things appear to be part of a conundrum that critics (of cinema in particular, at least) face quite often, and that's whether a piece of art should be praised because it accomplishes the artist's vision or because it speaks to the person who observes the art. Rambling sorta, yes, but thoughts?