JonCole

It's back. Valve has apparently made no comment on why it is. I was happy to vote a no on it.

Loading up a lot of games on my laptop to play with the family over Christmas, so far I've got in mind - Nidhogg, Towerfall Ascension, Mount Your Friends, Samurai Gunn, and Sportsfriends. Any other couch PC games worth grabbing that I'm forgetting about?

So thus far I got - Nidhogg - 10,200 gems (gems cost about $1/sack at the time) Heavy Bullets - 5,100 gems Hatoful Boyfriend - 5,560 gems Towerfall Ascension - 5,430 gems So, all in all I got roughly sale price or better on everything I went for. Between Nidhogg, Towerfall and the forthcoming Sportsfriends PC release, I'll have plenty of stuff to load up on the laptop for holiday family gaming.

I didn't see anything on their min requirements list about that. It did say that the 2013 Nexus 7 was compatible, nothing about wifi vs wifi+cellular models.

I don't think the Nexus 6 counts, I believe it is technically 5.96" or something like that.

Crossy Road is available on Android via the Amazon Appstore - US - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QW8TYWO/ UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hipster-Whale-Crossy-Road/dp/B00QW8TYWO/

I beat Metro 2033 Redux this past weekend. I got Metro Redux hoping to play both 2033 and Last Light, but frankly I don't think I was prepared for a marathon so I decided to return the game and come to LL later. I had already played 2033 before on my PC, but I figured that it would be a good idea to play it again to re-familiarize myself with the world, see the Redux upgrade firsthand, and experience any DLC stuff they added in (I'm not sure if they did, my memory of the game isn't good enough to know if something is new or something I missed). Man, I loved my time with this game. I figure that the first time I zipped through it as fast as possible - there were tons of side easter eggs and weapons caches to find along the way. Sometimes they were generous enough to give you a dim light in the corner of a huge room that might give you some indication to explore that direction, but other times you just have to scour the environment to find a little room off to the side where a corpse slaughtered by a nearby (also dead) mutated creature is holding a key to a nearby safe. Finding the safe, you see this poor dude's safehouse - mostly small things, a bed, a couple post cards, a teddy bear perhaps owned by a lost child. A short distance outside a major metro stop, there's a ladder descending slightly deeper into the sewers that eventually leads to what used to be a shop. Shop-owner blew his brains out, leaving his stock for the taking but also revealing how little hope there is in those tunnels. For some reason, the bleak, spartan aspect of Metro's storytelling made these little things that earned you a handful of military-grade rounds and shotgun ammo feel a lot more important. The only unfortunate thing is that I apparently didn't do enough good things during the path of the story to earn me access to the "good" ending. I'm not a big fan of the "bad" ending, mostly because it doesn't follow the attitude that Artyom develops through the game in his journal entries.

I kinda assumed that this thread would be for New Year's Resolutions and such. I'm doing a resolution that is going to be very hard to keep but will at least get my year started right - no non-essential purchases for myself over $50 until I've paid off at least 2/3 of my credit card debt. I was told recently that clearing debt is hard if there's no secondary goal in reach - it's easy to say "debt is bad and I should fix that", but it's easier and more motivational to say "debt is bad and I should fix that because it also gets me..."

At this point, prices on gems + auction rates are low enough that you actually can get some good deals if you're looking for them. A couple of games on my wishlist are ~2,000 gems, effectively $2.40, that have never gone below $5 in my recollection. I'm starting to buy gems to try at a few things, might get lucky and even do better than in regular Steam sales.

Got Nidhogg for 10,200 gems, not an amazing grab but I'm not going to complain. Plus I got a badge out of it!

Battlestar Galactica (2004)

I have to imagine this'll be some kind of bell curve though, right? There is no reason for the price to climb now that supply is relatively high, but bids will get more aggressive as supply dwindles and there's a chance people won't get what they want with lowballs.

This game is $30 on Amazon today on all platforms. Lol?

I kinda feel like it might be valuable if every person could only nominate a single TV show/series, if we're actually interested in reaching some kind of "must-see" consensus-ish list. Frankly, it doesn't matter how much a thing is must-see if there are literally tens of thousands of hours of television that I also "must see".

Well, auctions end every 45 minutes so I guess that weird start time is such that after 100 rounds of auction it ends at a normal Steam event end time of 10:00 PST.

On a recent podcast, Dan said that Danny going to his house for Thanksgiving was part of a "cultural exchange", meaning that in a year's time he and perhaps his dad will be going home to Ireland with Danny. When asked, "Does your dad even have a passport?" Dan of course responded "probably not". I can't wait. If you... enjoy the horror show, Dan bet his sisters one Thanksgiving over a game of bowling where the loser had to do the milk gallon challenge. It is disgusting glorious disgusting -

I couldn't get over the audio quality of Not a Game Podcast. It didn't really help when I tweeted Tom about the quality and he basically said point blank to me that they're not interested in improving it.

I find value in Dan Savage because I don't really know what I don't know and the internet as a fat pipe isn't an efficient way to parse a broad swath of information. For instance, I wouldn't know much of anything about polygamy/monogamy, kink (shame), asexuality, bisexuality, etc if I didn't listen to his podcast where he generally talks intelligently about those topics. I might not even think to find out anything about those topics independently. As a consumer of information, this is why I follow and listen to his podcast as well as follow many feminists on Twitter that decry the things he says. Because for me, I'd like that curated approach to learning about these unfamiliar topics plus the accountability where he gets called out on his crap and I can seek a better voice on the particular topic that he didn't get quite right. I also appreciate that Dan gives time on his podcast to callers who directly disagree with his advice. Honestly, I follow a lot of feminists on Twitter that don't agree with each other on everything (or sometimes anything). I find it a worthwhile challenge to nuance my own opinions on various topics when for instance a PoC feminist has a unique take on an issue that "white feminism" may have trouble parsing or a queer feminist feels a certain way (not better or worse) while CIS feminists may feel another way.

I just read it. I know he's not popular with feminists; with him at least, being pro- too many things without seeming anti- something else is difficult. What exactly are you asking about, the gender fluidity stuff?

There was actually a Planet Money podcast about Monoprice - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/28/366793693/episode-586-how-stuff-gets-cheaper

I want to amend my shortlist with Marvel: Puzzle Quest. Easily my favorite PQ game, even with the microtransactions. I play it literally all day seemingly every day.

Well, you can recruit followers but they aren't nearly as interesting as in Bioware games. People did have an unnatural connection with Lydia. Fallout companions are a bit closer in scope to DA party members. I still don't know what to think about having a lot of smaller zones instead of one big one. Inquisition certainly does this a lot better than the other Dragon Age games, but I still feel like I have absolutely no sense of geography in the zones and the map is pretty poor at conveying what direction I should be going. Elder Scrolls games manage to much more clearly convey the linking roads between areas and the kinda flow of the map. I'm sure that part of that is because the zones aren't all that big so there aren't many "natural landmarks".

I dunno. I think it matters to the point of reasonable complaint for games that require intense precision like FPS and racing games, but third-person shooters or action/adventure games certainly don't NEED it. I mean, I think 60fps would probably improve most games because reducing input lag is almost universally valuable, but I can't imagine that I'd really feel much of a difference in Uncharted.