JonCole

I think that if I actually remember to come this time, I'd definitely be in for vanilla. I'm eventually going to get those Liberty City stories, but I'm gonna wait for a Black Friday deal, I imagine.

Okay, good. I'm not the only one who got a couple hours into Hotel Dusk and couldn't play it anymore - it got such universal praise that I felt bad about not liking it that much. Now I can finally trade away that useless cart.

Oh no you didn't.

On last week's Filmspotting podcast, the guys said that the emotional impact and devastation was nearly equal to that of Antichrist. Take that as you will, but my reading was that the uplifting element of it was certainly existent though not nearly consistent.

With Chris and Nick upgrading their PCs, it seems as though PC upgrade season has sneaked up on us. Personally, I'm just on the precipice of upgrading a handful of components (new WD Caviar Black HDD, Radeon 5770, Windows 7) and I know that there's going to be one thing I'll want to do as soon as I've got everything up and running: play a sweet video game. I've heard of some people going back to age-old favorites like Half-Life 2 to flex their machine's gaming muscles, but I'm torn among some sharper looking games. Just picked up Mass Effect on Steam, which may be a good test, but the classic Far Cry 2 also has some great graphical effects with the fire and whatnot that are enticing as well. So, any recommendations on what I try out first (For what it's worth, here's my list of Steam games)? How about you guys, do you have some classic games that you like to slap on the new HDDs in your new machines and test out?

As if Valve heard my video card's cry, Crysis Maximum Edition is the weekend deal on Steam. Once I'm done downloading, I'm curious to see how it'll run.

Torchlight is a definite 'yes' for me. And I see Dragon Age being yet another one, when it goes on sale on Steam eventually.

I wonder why dudes like Whedon don't just go to other, much smaller broadcasting houses to try to get a bite, when they have such clear artistic goals? Mainstream broadcast television is completely at the mercy of ratings, which totally hinders any powerful vision that doesn't pander to the stupid/isn't Lost.

Cold turkey sucks. I'm on episode 19 right now.

Just saw Point Break for the first time... that movie is insane. For hilarious Keanu Reeves and completely illogical/badass Patrick Swayze, there's no better film.

Yeah, Smodcast is like Idle Thumbs but with movie talk instead of video game talk and several orders of magnitude more poop and dick jokes.

I (and a couple of my comrades) over at CastMedium started up a new podcast a few months back and I feel like we're starting to get pretty decent... if anyone gives it a shot and could give some feedback, it'd be much appreciated: http://www.castmedium.com/tag/castmedium-podcast/ For what it's worth, our podcast sorta covers other video game, tech, and movie podcasts (CASTIN' META PODS IN YOUR FACE), tries to aggregate some of the bigger topics from those podcasts, and expands on their conversation a little with our own experiences.

B-but... Tony Hawk Ride is just about to revolutionize the video game skateboarding industry! And DJ Hero just inspired the rebirth of the rhythm music genre! And Band Hero has the latest Taylor Swift hits! What're you doing to yourself, man!

Am I the only one horrified by really busy desktops? I love Windows 7's minimalist setup, but Rawru's setup is a little... messy.

Not only that, but it's sort of a fundamental gameplay factor, as far as I'm concerned. Control is in the essence of video games, so taking it away from the player can really be totally jarring. It's a core tenet of the survival horror genre, which goes back and forth between whether or not the user should have control in order to inspire fear (a la the idea that the pitiful control scheme of Resident Evil 5 is actually a tactic to support the horror aspects of the series).

I listened to it at 25% speed in order to really savor it.

If you're just looking to buy a prebuilt computer, you don't need to know a whole lot. If you're looking to build your own, you indeed need to do a bit of research, but things like barebone kits and the ubiquitous tech support forums make the process far less painless than it used to be.

Has anyone heard about whether or not MEPC's saves will affect ME2PC's saves, similarly to how your character will carry over on the 360 version? Not to say that I've heard anything to the counter, I guess I just don't remember reading if that's going to work out on both platforms.

I read that as "Where is the picture of Jake covered in socks?"

I think that I'm sort of accidentally boycotting Activision, considering I'm not interested in any of their titles (as far as I know).

I will no doubt be playing both Torchlight and Borderlands right after I upgrade to continue feeding my addiction. As a side note, is there any way to transfer Torchlight saves to my new HDD/do you know where to find the Torchlight save data folder? You might have overlooked it, but I said I'm getting a Radeon 5770... I thought nVidia owned PhysX? As for the rest of the suggestions, they all sound great. Left 4 Dead 2 is a definite purchase for me, so that's a good call.

I'll blow you away so much that it'll reach right into goty.cx and automatically be every single Idle Thumbs reader/listener pick for 2009.

MW2 PC Player Cap 9v9 - http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3176773

This is pretty "entertaining", nothing like homophobic undertones to pump you up for this holiday season's biggest smash hit: http://www.gameshadow.com/gamepedia/11335b/call_of_duty_modern_warfare_2/trailers/call_of_duty_modern_warfare_2_fags_video/

I'm totally with you guys on this, and I actually just recently wrote up a (front page!) article for Bitmob on this very topic, so you can check that out there if you're interested: http://bitmob.com/index.php/mobfeed/twisting-the-knife-infinity-ward-leaves-pc-behind.html