JonCole

Yeah, I have heard of some situations where you can pay to remove ads or permanently unlock levels, but this Pokemon Rumble World seemed unique to me in that they actually modify the F2P mechanics to support a more paid-game attitude. I'm mildly curious to see if the allowance + discounts actually makes it feel more or less like a legit $30 game. Also, I finally cleared out my Club Nintendo rewards and decided on Animal Crossing instead of Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze. I know Tegan said she was still playing, is anyone else? I hardly have anyone friended/added/whatever on my 3DS to begin with.

He had it up for literally 15 minutes and then gave it to Lego for free. In this case, it ranges from a dumb prank to a dumb prank.

I really don't understand how it makes him look unprofessional, juvenile, dumb, or makes Polygon look bad. If you all actually think this is some kind of deal, not big and not small but a deal nonetheless, can you explain how it does any of that? I'm sure there is no policy at Polygon that forbids such a joke, funny to you or not, but I'm also sure that their HR probably wasn't super-duper happy about it. That said, if he "should be fired" why hasn't he been? Also, saying that he shouldn't do anything that "gives bait to GGers" is pretty trite, they will use literally anything as ammunition regardless of the real-world veracity of their claims. "Not giving bait to GGers" could also include talking about literally any socially progressive topics.

It was Mike McWhertor, news guy at Polygon. It was up for like 15 minutes then he turned it over to Lego. He didn't have any insider information or was under any kind of embargo, probably just word of mouth. I don't really know what the problem is. Lego was stupid to not buy a domain for a game that they were certainly going to announce. He was making light of it by making a joke.

If you were worried about Nintendo being total F2P scum going forward what with the Pokemon Shuffle thing and DeNA mobile stuff, some recent news about Pokemon Rumble World should be reassuring. Apparently the game has a hard cap on F2P spending stuff, $30. Once you spend that much, the game essentially reverts to a paid version by giving you a daily allowance of the game's currency and discounting everything that you can spend that currency on. I've honestly never heard of anything quite like that, but frankly it's an amazing idea. If I could just buy out the F2P features of games that I ended up really liking, like Puzzle & Dragons and Marvel Puzzle Quest, I'd totally do it.

Is it possible that port forwarding could help?

Does Twitch have different servers to which you can stream to? If so, can you try switching servers? My vague notion here is that if your upstream is good and your bitrate is reasonable, maybe the server is unresponsive because you're streaming to one far away or something? Total shot in the dark, otherwise I don't know what could be wrong.

On a separate note, Planet Money put out an episode about a 12-year old girl who wrote an op-ed that got published by Washington Post about how games often charge extra money for female characters. It hadn't shown up on my radar last month as a gamer, which is kinda unfortunate. Anyways, it's a pretty good episode of the podcast - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/04/03/397321383/episode-615-a-12-year-old-girl-takes-on-the-video-game-industry

I think it's important to recognize that there is a certain context for what women do that is shaped by patriarchy that we don't even realize in daily speech. The reason I say this is that describing "making the choice to be sexually attractive" in terms of how a woman dresses or acts is a complete construct of our society. When any person gets dressed, they're largely doing it for utility. Ideally, you'd want to also look good or be comfortable in addition to just being covered. The problem is that when we talk about women wearing a really nice dress that shows off their body, it's "dressing to look sexually attractive" or more bluntly "dressing like a slut" whereas when a guy puts on a well-fitted suit he just "looks good" or alternatively "looks very manly". Society has made it such that appearance for women is about sex and appearance for men is about identity and pride, which is just not fair. This is just one example, but there are a ton of things where we can have some discussion of how a woman acts or how we should approach a woman, but there is no world in which we'd have a discussion about a similar situation when it comes to a man. So when I think about how not to sexualize a woman, I try to think about things like that. It's the kind of thinking that when taken to the slippery slope results in "look at how she was dressed, she was asking for it."

You could also get a fan controller, which would enable more fine control and probably all the headers you need (even the cheap ones have 5+). Granted that'd require at least $20 or so, but you might spend that much on half-decent case fans as well.

How exactly does the co-op work for that stuff? I'd be willing to do it, although I haven't even dove into my first yet (though I obviously just got it last night).

Depending on what case you have, it might be a good idea to just upgrade the OEM fans. Also, some cases come with a 120mm case fan slot that comes equipped with a 100mm case fan in the slot (I imagine for cost purposes) that could be replaced for better performance. Probably you're fine if you spent some decent cash on the case (usually the $100+ Corsair, Coolermaster, etc cases are well-stocked) but it might be worth a look. I bought a 4-pack 120mm case fan set and upgraded the two OEM fans in my wife's budget case in addition to using the other two for the CPU cooler.

I'm hoping that the "Ammo Type" category suggests that you can use non-lethal rounds with guns. As much as I appreciated the stealth/non-lethal options in DXHR, I found it ultimately frustrating due to the lack of weapon variety and limited ammo for non-lethal or silent specific weapons. Also, if it does ultimately end up being Crysis (which is a distinct impression I'm getting from the screenshots) with a setting and themes much more interesting than Crysis, I'll be pretty happy.

I admittedly played very little of it, but I'm quitting Driveclub. It's not that it's explicitly bad by any means, but it just fits very comfortably into the Gran Turismo/Forza Motorsport driving feel without all the advancements that Forza has made that makes Forza playable to me. There's stuff like annoyingly penalizing you in terms of nebulous experience points if you collide with other cars or drive off-track, very obvious driving lines of opponent AI, no driving lines, really annoying brake squeal (might just be my speakers or the particular cars I was driving, to be fair), no rewind, etc. Also, I just tend to enjoy stuff like Forza Horizon and Need for Speed more, but I was just hoping for something to hold me over until the next NFS or my purchase of an Xbox One. That said, I had already heard middling things about it so it was just a rental so no big loss on my part.

So, totally beat Djura in Old Yharnam by INTENTIONALLY having him jump attack toward me right off of his stupid tower. I'm so tricky. Also beat BSB, but I did it like a baby because I summoned Alfred as I've honestly grown tired of dying and enjoying no progress over the last few days. Now I can at least bash my head against chalice dungeons. Edit: All of the sudden, progress is raining down around me. Got captured by the notorious bag guy, but after a few fatal attempts at taking them out now I've got their number. I've nearly cleared out the whole area there, but got killed while exploring one last corridor trying to open up another shortcut. That said, the area has a ton of good loot so even if I don't manage to reclaim the blood stain I'll still be pretty happy with what I got.

Basically there's no reason to not vote by mail, particularly if you're a civically-minded person because you can ask to get mailed every ballot that goes out. I know a lot of people who purport to care about politics but only vote every four years. Absentee/mail-in can work for every local election; I guarantee that I'd probably blow off voting in the runoff in my city because I already voted for the mayor once and damned if I'd do it again.

Maybe we should have a civics/politics thread, particularly with American presidential politics season just starting up. Where am I gonna complain about Rand Paul to fellow thumbs?!

KiA - "let's punish Ellen Pao for being a bad woman who hurts Reddit by boycotting Reddit Gold" Everyone else - "don't worry, here's some Reddit gold lololololol" KiA - "FUCK YOU DON'T BUY ME GOLD" http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/31n4si/proposal_stop_buying_reddit_gold_until_ellen_pao/

I was a little split on Ms. Marvel's power origins, I kinda thought the Inhumans/Terrigen Mists thing was pretty deep down the lore rabbit hole but it was also nice because the body transformation is a really interesting play on a teenage, out-group coming of age thing. Since I've subscribed to Marvel Unlimited I've been diving through a lot of the old Marvel stuff, but I did decide to recently catch up with some currently running series and have been enjoying Ms. Marvel, Black Widow, and Hawkeye very much. I'm also happy to report that Thor #1 just hit Marvel Unlimited, so I finally get to see what the fuss is about with that series.

Little Mac is the Punchout main character. I only own four amiibo and I'm pretty cool with it. I'm not really very happy with the integration into Smash, considering you constantly have to scan and rescan the things to record the progress of your bots. It seems like it just takes entirely too long.

I think it's important to note that last line was an edit. I basically had the same scenario as you, except I died the first time to the electric mace guy, came back and picked up my bloodstain, killed him, and then almost got wrecked by the rifle spear/blunderbuss guy. Also, that guy chases you FOREVER so keep that in mind if you feel like challenging him again.

What's a good way to counter another hunter that has a blunderbuss? He seems to hit me every time he fires despite my best dodging, and it does enough damage that even closing the distance takes out half of my health bar.

This is Arthur -

I imagine it's probably the technologies and patents that they're interested in most, the company is completely shutting down with no note about any staff carrying over or anything. I'd guess they'll just swap in whatever OnLive tech they can to make the Gaikai underpinnings that much better. It's definitely a market that demands even the smallest tech improvements to reduce the latency, increase the quality and promote stability even the slightest bit. That said, I don't know how much I'd characterize this as taking them off the board as they were kinda taken off the board when they had their bankruptcy a few years ago and they've been treading water since.

It's getting increasingly hard to follow all of these things, from what I understand the whole Randi Harper saga from yesterday is actually a lot longer and just terminated with doxxing stuff. This is my perceived timeline of the events - Sophia Banks, a trans lady, was calling out Chobitcoin, a cis (or maybe self-hating trans? I have no idea) female GGer, for being a rapist. Apparently Banks was told by a friend of hers that Chobitcoin had raped a trans person (this part is easily the hardest for me to understand, as I have no knowledge of any of these events and everything surrounding it is hearsay). Also, it's pretty clear to me that Chobitcoin is pretty transphobic which adds another dynamic to this thing. Randi subtweeted Banks, saying that it's bad to accuse someone of rape without evidence. Banks responded, saying that requiring evidence of rape plays into the rape culture that oppresses all women. Many feminists saw this as Randi supporting a transphobic person supporting rape culture, thus backlash. Randi doubled down, rebuffing pretty much any anti-GGer who had a problem with what she did. Somebody doxxed Randi, who the hell that would be is a mystery to me. It could just as easily be a crazy aGG, a spiteful GG, a false flag GG trying to shit on aGG, etc. Anyways, while I'm obviously against SWATing and doxxing, my perception is that Randi did some bad shit yesterday that is kinda being overshadowed by the clearly tragic, incredibly predictable other bad shit that happened to her. What significance this has is beyond me, but I feel it's worth knowing if you want to actually parse this whole thing.