JonCole

Zeus, you forgot - Being high is really fun All food tastes better while high

They brought it back? I basically decided to be done with it after they took out CTF the first time.

You hit it right on the head, I really do appreciate the minutiae of weapon customization in FPS games. The reason I mentioned the weapons specifically is because having those gradations of specs makes it possible for someone like me to be a sniper. I feel like I could never effectively snipe in Titanfall despite how much I tried because there was always a master-level sniper out there and I couldn't rely on a differentiated weapon to help me. The Longbow and Kraber just weren't what I wanted, they both had immense recoil that I could never overcome plus fire speed on both of them was really low (naturally for the bolt-action Kraber, oddly high for the semi-auto Longbow). In COD when I'm facing someone that's amazing with a sniper, I could potentially have a chance with a low-damage rifle that requires two or three shots to kill but has low recoil and fast fire rate. That weapon just didn't exist in Titanfall and it made that "class" unplayable for me. And not to be rude, but it did occur to me to try out strategies like cloaking and grenades against Titans but getting by six was nigh impossible for me without a coordinated effort from everyone one of my team members to attack and defend which almost literally never happens. I consider myself good at shooters and that scenario was a nightmare for me.

That's it, I'm moving to the UK.

I got like 90% through Persona 4 and didn't beat it. I wonder if I should even try going back or starting from scratch on easy. I also didn't much care for the actual combat, though on normal I didn't have too hard a time with it at any point. Easy might still let me breeze through it a little faster.

I just don't agree. Titanfall gave me some really great gameplay for a relatively short amount of time - playing a couple hours every day for about a month. Now, I'm not the kind of gamer who begrudges a low playtime count as an absolutely negative point against a game, but I don't think it's unfair to expect more from this kind of shooter. Out of the gate, I felt there were a handful of poor choices. The number of weapons felt low to me, especially the ones that actually felt effective against other competent players. Burn Cards felt mostly irrelevant, which Respawn must have agreed with since they fixed them by removing/adding cards and creating an economy for them. The Titans never felt properly balanced to me - early on, there were plenty of Hardpoint and CTF matches that I lost because the enemy team would capture the flag once and then put all 6 of their Titans on the flag with AoE weapons that didn't let you get close. From everything I've heard, there was a relatively abrupt inflection point where Titans instead became useless as their counters and player behavior were "figured out". Granted my long-term knowledge about this game is mostly anecdotal (I have played a few times in the past 6 months, but not many), it seems to me that Respawn hasn't gone to great lengths to reverse this. I think that giving too many accolades to a game for just working out of the gate is kinda silly. It's certainly a point in their favor, but a functional game shouldn't be a high standard. Plus, a lot of Titanfall's competitors like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Destiny launched with no technical/server issues to speak of so it seems a moot point. Both of those games have also seen a lot of post-launch content and balancing, while taking major strides to address issues with weapon balance and game design. I feel as though Titanfall was simply a case of confirmation bias. We knew that the people at Respawn were capable of making a great game and when they only gave us a good one we really just wanted to believe it was great. I think it bore out throughout the year as the game had almost no continuing buzz and very little attention in GOTY proceedings (this surely is partly to do with bias towards more recently released games, but I still find it relevant). Just because a game has quality doesn't mean its value is the same as every other similar quality competitor. There are a number of really good F2P shooters out right now that offer the same quality as the latest AAA shooter but clearly offer a different value due to black and white systemic differences such as needing to purchase weapons/upgrades/skins. It's a problem with the economics of games that there isn't a more expressed spectrum of value that can address multiplayer-only games of a certain scope and price them appropriately. I think that Titanfall would have held a much more prominent position in my mind if they debuted at a value price point and had a season pass or debuted at full price and offered all post-launch content free.

Yeah, it's telling that the effective retail price of the game only a few months after release was halved. I honestly think they took unfair advantage of the hype and released this as a full price game when it really shouldn't have been.

I totally agree, I like Regular Features but there is a lot of... body humor, so to speak. I really like Stop Podcasting Yourself for my comedy needs. The Dead Authors Podcast is also funny because I like Paul F. Tompkins but I stopped listening to it because my podcast backlog is so ridiculous.

Man you're playing with fire with this comment.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 for $9.99 for the next week, not bad at all.

Yeah, I got a handful of those USB cables to charge with so I can plug it directly into my 5-port USB charging hub thing.

Pretty sure I had to install a plugin when I used Audacity years ago, don't know if it's changed. Their official wiki should have plenty of plugin links and setup guides. I think Garageband has the feature natively.

If the recording software has a noise gate feature, you can try to hit the sweet spot so it automatically cuts out the feedback but still picks up voices. But yeah, ultimately I ended up buying closed headphones and turning down my headphones to the lowest tolerable levels.

I suggest that anyone interested do a price alert on Slickdeals for the limited edition, I'm sure retailers will either get more allocation or certain smaller retailers haven't opened up pre-orders yet. We're still too far out for all limited editions to be claimed, I have to imagine. Case in point, Best Buy had availability about 48 hours after the first window where I preordered mine from Amazon. It was available for a few hours, long enough to let a couple people who were disappointed to miss it first go-round another shot.

Bumping this thread to once again ask if anyone is coming to this. Now that we have that world map of Thumbs I see that many of you are northern US or coastal, so I'm guessing there won't be a flood of you.

I posted this link in another thread, but for context - http://sfy.co/e09B2 (granted this is what you're referencing this morning)

Nothing like waking up and seeing our good ol' pal TB raise Islamophobic "man of the common people" hell - http://sfy.co/e09B2 Why do reasonable people follow this guy any more?

Just finished the second book of Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, titled Words of Radiance. This series is my first read of Sanderson though I've heard of him from his continuation (conclusion?) of the Wheel of Time series. I really enjoyed both books out so far. I had burned through the first book and about 1/4 of the second book while I was traveling and then put it down for a while, only to pick it back up a few days ago and voraciously get right back into it. Sanderson's seemingly got a knack for world building, building up a relatively complex lore for a series he promises will be ten books deep at its end. Having finished book two, I'm confident that he can deliver while still revealing new, cohesive things along the way (unlike recent huge fantasy series reads, ASOIAF and Sword of Truth, that seem(ed) to be making things up as they go). I like how there are multiple perspective characters, but not so many that it's hard to follow what's going on and it really helps that almost all of the perspective characters (save some of the between-act one shot characters) are quite likable. Another thing I was impressed by was that the second book changed the primary perspective character and along with it some of the major themes of the book, but also dedicated a major chunk to the main character from the first book. As a result, it seems like I can depend on each book to delve into the history and motivations of a single character while not denying any of the other characters a full arc. This is reassuring, as there are definitely times in ASOIAF where its like one or two characters are the only ones being developed meaningfully. The only thing I can complain about is that the series is ongoing and like most book series, there is a major gap between each book in real time. I have to wait until Spring 2016 for the next one. I'll be an old man when the series is done.

I watched all three series. I had heard about the second and third being relatively poor as compared to the first so I went in kinda mentally prepared for being disappointed. I actually don't know what is so egregious about series three in particular, I enjoyed it quite a bit though I do think the limits of its believability were being poked and prodded. Despite the fact that some of the situations that brought them about were a bit contrived, it had some of the best emotional payoffs yet (thought series two was a bit emotionally flat).

Just finished all of Luther, which I previously mentioned. Goddamn that show is good. I love British crime drama, seems a lot more grounded than what we've got going here in the States but I guess it's possible that it's a grass is always greener thing. Idris Elba is just so good, I can see why he's a bigshot movie star now (although no movie I've seen him in has been as good as this series) but I'm glad that they actually got him back to do series 4 later this year. Looking forward to it very much!

I don't really understand why it's valuable to argue this journalist vs critic, big sites vs small sites thing. This is pretty deeply in the weeds. Isn't it a forgone conclusion that bigger publications are tied much closer to general, conservative business interests of the industry particularly since a lot of the advertising and such is endemic? As a result, I'm sure publications have a directive to discuss or not discuss hot button issues. Developers are actually more transparent in this - a lot of the developers who are bullish are also independent and thus have no great investment in not pissing off "potential customers" in the same way that a big corporation might be. The only big developers who have had people speak out on the issue have taken a stance as a company, like EA or Volition.

I'm glad that industry luminary and top 90's rapper Sisqo has weighed in on the recent IGN resignations -

GG has given rise to a surprising amount of my feed doing the every reply to a GGer is .@-reply so that everyone can see it. I have no idea why they think I need to see every part of their argument, but it basically defeats the purpose of blocking GGers because I still have to see half of the discussion and be reminded that the other person exists. So I've just been liberally muting anti-GGers and blocking GGers with intent to unmute in a couple months once everyone comes to the general conclusion that the very public aspect of this "fight" is over and it's more about supporting people who continue to be attacked without engaging the bad guys.

Tegan-approved Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is $15 on the 3DS eShop for a couple weeks. Might be time to pick it up!

In an opinion piece today, a Verge editor referred to GG as a "miserable online gang". I liked that.