JonCole

I get the convenience argument because it's pretty subjective. Someone could make as convincing an argument about convenience framed by watching TV a lot, having already invested in a nice TV set and sound system, and preferring the simplified controls of a controller. To each his own. I don't really get the value argument, because I frankly think that any kind of gaming is as value-oriented as you endeavor for it to be. There are tons of "console gamers" that just bought a PS3, are buying used copies of Uncharted 2 and Batman Arkham Asylum and are having a blast. There are similarly tons of PC gamers that have a hobbled together $400 budget PC with a overclocked Pentium processor, they regularly play Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 to their heart's content and they occasionally splurge on a Humble Bundle to play some solid indie games and the rare old AAA games from big publishers. These are extreme examples, but I feel like every person modulates how much they spend through compromising on how soon you need to play games after they're released, how soon you buy updated components, how soon you choose to buy your second console, whether you buy new or used, etc. In the end, I imagine PC gaming is generally cheaper on average due to the overall higher barrier to entry but I still feel the difference is negligible. Personally, I upgrade my PC and focus on PC gaming at the end of console generations then I flip my focus to consoles at the beginning of generations. That way my upgrade cycle on my PC isn't so painful and I get to play everything. That's my choice and I frankly don't mind investing a good percentage of my income into gaming as it's my hobby of choice and I'm not paying off student loans or an expensive car.

It's so weird when we talk about console vs PC stuff on these forums. I have stuff to say on the topic, but it's been talked to death in so much media that I feel it's not worth adding to. Sucks for those of you unwilling to buy a PS4, I am fortunately not in that position. I'm thinking about picking up Bloodborne the closer we get to its release. I know almost nothing about it and my only experience with the "series" so to speak is 10-ish hours with Dark Souls I. That said, I really do envy the zeitgeist when everyone first picks up these kinds of games and are discovering all the oblique challenges and secrets within. I wasn't able to experience it with the last few games or even anything like Fez. I still have my old 3DS XL that I never traded in, might make my yearly pilgrimage to hell Gamestop to trade it in for a copy of Bloodborne. That said, I'm wondering if I should just buy some PSN cards to pick it up digitally and if that would have any effect on the load times.

whatdidtotalbiscuitdonow.tumblr.com

The Mayflash adapter is fairly available, there are several available with Prime shipping on Amazon and you can import them from Play-Asia if you don't mind a little extra shipping cost. Everything I've heard says the Mayflash is just as good as the OEM (our dear forum member Miffy has it and recommends it, if memory serves).

Ugh, Greg Miller is going to be on TB's podcast. I really like Greg and have defended him when people gave him shit before because I really think he loves games and he's just trying to have a good time, but lending any credibility to TB is pretty indefensible to me. There are some people I like that have been on TB's podcast since his meltdown that I've given more of a benefit of the doubt to because they are on the Polaris Media thing so they have a business obligation to participate, but as far as I know Greg has no such arrangement with Polaris so this is all him. Edit: Also, a cursory (and always regrettable) scan of TB's recent tweets reveals him shitting on the author of the new Thor series (that he says has bad writing) for a GG jab then being corrected by someone because the panel isn't even from the main Thor comic. Of course he doubled down on his comment, it just so happened that he intently shit on the author of a comic with a female leader character instead of doing the minimal amount of research first. On an even less relevant note, I recently read that the latest lady-Thor series has sold way better than Thor: God of Thunder, the last Thor Odinson series.

lol

Also, "KojiPro" is no longer a thing according to today's news. I think they've just rebranded the LA studio to be "Konami Los Angeles Studio" and such.

YEAH WHY DON'T YOU JUST MOVE TO AMERICA

I rented SSB and I've had it sitting on my shelf for like a month because it's not generally my thing but zeitgeist got me interested. Finally decided to take a crack at it yesterday and I was actually really impressed. I don't know what it was this time around but I think it feels better than ever. Right now I'm leaning towards Samus/Marth/Ness, but I've really enjoyed almost all of the guys I've tried. I played with my wife, which is generally a tedious experience because I'm way more competitive than her and it's hard for me to suppress my instincts to taunt and be a sore loser/winner. SSB just has a quality of fun that makes it much more tolerable to win/lose, plus the classic mode with co-op makes it a really fun way for us both to experience the game regardless of how well either of us are doing respectively. I think I might actually buy this one, which is pretty incredible considering I thought that I couldn't give a crap about SSB. It also helps that I have a bunch of Gamecube controllers laying around and I can get a $20 adapter to make them all work which is pretty sweet. Also also, I guess it helps that I have shamefully bought amiibos that I thought would just be for show but now I can use.

I don't even know how non-US people find deals. Do you guys have your own deal sites like we do?

Honestly, if he's not going to make Metal Gear Acid 3 then I could care less about Kojima leaving. Kinda joking but mostly serious.

This thread is really about ethics in book criticism.

Nintendo has trouble releasing old games for Virtual Console (a move that would only seem to make them boatloads of money for effectively zero work, by all accounts). What indication is there that they'd go against what they explicitly stated and seek a challenge presumably even more mounting than releasing an old ROM on a platform they own with a controller with all the same buttons as the original?

Dan has a general philosophy that hard work = good results, ignoring most arguments about race or gender despite the fact that he's in the most privileged combination of those two categories. That said, I don't have enough information to feel one way or the other about this book. I don't know who writes the copy on the Amazon page describing the book and even if it was Dan, I don't know how representative it is of what he actually wrote because I know I'd have a hard time putting up a blurb about anything I did. I think Dan is well within his rights to talk about his experience with anxiety and how he overcame it, unless he explicitly says that his solution is the best solution for everyone (which I doubt he does). The way that he's talked about it with Danny does make me optimistic about the book - he undoubtedly takes the topic seriously and did have genuine challenges with it growing up.

I think that the only thing that has stopped Pokemon from being a cultural force of nature on the level of Minecraft or CoC is the limited availability re: platforms. It's still wildly popular, just not nearly as exposed as Notch being on the front cover of business magazines or CoC getting Super Bowl ads.

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate it. You all are the best.

My grandma died today. We knew it was coming, but it was difficult to say when. My parents and sister were out of town on vacation, so they have to cut it short and fly back tonight. I live a couple hours from where she was, I imagine I'll be heading down there sometime soon. I feel like a mess, left work early but couldn't drive particularly well. At home, my hand-eye coordination is lacking and I'm knocking into things. I haven't had a close family member die in my adult life, it's really something... different. I see now why people need to take time off to deal with these things.

It's basically a subscription list of people to block. BlockTogether was the first iteration of this kind of thing, where you could basically subscribe to any person's (well, anyone who participates in the service) list of people they block. The Block Bot is kinda an evolution of that idea, where it's a list curated by a number of people who recommend people to the list or take people off based on feedback from people who use it. It's a collaborative, democratized version of the idea of a single person's block list.

The GG Illuminati.

I dunno man, I've been trying to find a shooter to get addicted to ever since BLOPS2 and it still hasn't happened yet. Don't really know if Hardline is going to do it for me if 4 didn't.

As someone with a great personal appreciation for free-to-play games like Puzzle and Dragons and Marvel Puzzle Quest, I predictably find myself a lot more interested and optimistic about this than seemingly anyone else on the internet. Sure Pokemon Shuffle was offensive, but it seemed like Nintendo trying to map F2P mechanics on one of their normal puzzle games. Mario P&D seems a little bit more smartly designed, with the Nintendo characters fitting in a good F2P formula rather than the other way around. I'm hoping that by basically bringing in a mobile developer, Nintendo is admitting that they're not experts on this but I trust them to be a guiding hand to make tasteful decisions and quality games.

I really want to talk about #altgames, which was came up in the general conversation with this article by Zoe Quinn. The problem is, I don't really know how to start a conversation about it, where I should do it (it's kind of a social issue, beyond the gaming aspect of it), or even if I have any insight on the matter. Things of importance - The #altgames hashtag was originally (as far as I can tell) adopted by Soha Kareem (@sokareemie) and TJ Thomas (@TRONMAXIMUM) in the creation of a bot that would retweet #altgames tweets. The idea was to basically signal boost non-mainstream work created mostly by POC developers because the lack of exposure for POC in gaming is notable. Zoe wrote what I believe to be a decent article promoting "punk games" that she labels as altgames, sort of but not really separate from the hashtag because she used the hashtag in a tweet to share her article. It feels weird for Zoe to write this article more or less defining altgames while two POC creators more or less created it. That said, this is super murky. Zoe claims/implies that she wrote the article with the consent of people who "were already doing work in the [altgames] sphere", but TJ is subtweeting her with his ideas about what altgames means and Soha is essentially rejecting Zoe's characterization of the term as labeling when it was something far simpler with a broader focus. That said, they don't really claim ownership of the term but this strikes me as a situation where Zoe would have done well to actually include them in the article at the very least (aside from her quoting TJ's twitter in a little blurb). I have no idea how to square all of this. I don't think it's horrible to identify and appreciate the punk/jazz/hip-hop of gaming, but I also think it's counterproductive for a relatively privileged person to be writing the narrative on how that process is done. Basically, I don't think that hip-hop would have particularly benefitted from Queen or Elton John putting in their two cents and saying "really, Grandmaster Flash is a little too mainstream, I think that Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation are really paving the way to real hip-hop". (note: I changed the comparison from punk to hip-hop because I have at least a cursory understanding of the origin of hip-hop, my understanding is that they follow a similar arc though aren't equivalent. If I'm not detecting something more nuanced about the use of the term "punk", let me know)

There are some Nintendo first-party games that can be purchased on the Nintendo website, but it's so rare that I barely ever do it. It is almost equivalent to Xbox/PS online stores in that if you log-in with your NNID it can actually redeem straight to your console, but the availability is a bummer.

How do you have more meat and not feel full after eating a few spoonfuls? I really like making chili, but I feel like if I eat more than a cup or two of it I feel super bloated. If anything, I was thinking about adding sweet potatoes or squash to mine to stretch the heartiness out even more.