JonCole

I think the term is e-vite. My wife and I got married at the courthouse on our lunch break at work, because we didn't want to make a big deal out of it. Two or three weeks later, we drove to Orlando where my parents held a reception for us with a bunch of people we really didn't care much about. They bought a lot of stuff from my Amazon registry, which was pretty cool. Some of the less cool members of my family bought things like the things on my registry but worse. My parents hired a friend of my teenage sister to do photographs because it is his hobby. They weren't very good, I think I liked one or two of them.

Hahaha, I didn't even consider that. How weird of a launch-ish choice. I guess it's kinda like the 3DS launching with Ocarina.

you should invite olly

Knowing this forum, the meeting place would be in some unpronounceable city in northern Europe, so I'm out.

My recent methodology has been to play the game I most recently purchased. Once I beat one, I go to the one before that or one I bought between the one I last played and now. It's a method of trying to 1) actually get my money's worth out of games that I pay full retail or close to retail for 2) either justify buying lots of games on sale or prove to myself that I'm buying too many games just because they're on sale.

I also left my life to live with my long distance girlfriend, now wife. We also work together, so we see each other pretty much ALL THE TIME. Due to that, I've been really encouraging her to spend time with a friend of hers even though she is reticent to do so. I can't imagine it's good for the long-term health of our relationship to see each other at almost all hours of the day and then be each others only friend. For me, I'm so ridiculously introverted that I really don't feel a compulsion to make friends but it's still something I think about now and then if only because it seems like a good idea. I really don't know what I'd do with friends that I actually want to do - I had some coworker friends that I often went out with for coffee or after dinner drinks, but I don't really care to do much more than that. Maybe board games? I dunno.

Yeah, that was exactly what I was getting at, Twig. The original 3DS purportedly didn't have enough horsepower to do software emulation, but with a chunkier CPU it may be possible.

They're still unofficial drivers, so I believe that pretty much none of the extraneous features of the controller are accessible. Namely, gyro, accelerometer, rumble (not 100% on rumble). I think the touchpad can be mapped as a mouse-type thing. I haven't seen anyone try to plug headphones into the controller, as it seems an edge case.

I added the Twitter handles, the original image both had a hateful statement instead of Sean's and had no Twitter handles. I added them because I was trying to find and add them all anyways, so I figured others might want to do the same.

Given their gamer-appeal aesthetic choice with the buttons, I really have no idea why they didn't call it the Super 3DS + Super 3DS XL/LL.

Ugh, for as "friendly" as Nintendo claims to be, this kind of mid-generation, half-supported update stuff always sucks. Of course I want it, but I'm a big goddamned idiot who wants any new piece of tech. My only hope is that the more powerful CPU will raise the ceiling enough that GBA/SNES emulation will be possible. Given the claims that the regular 3DS didn't quite have the horsepower to do it correctly, I'd like that nipped right in the bud. Also, I think there's going to be problem with their cap of 5 system transfers for the 3DS. I know people who have bought at least 3-4 at this point and they'll be using their last one for these updates. I don't really see the point of keeping that limitation intact, particularly given their propensity to release special editions and minor updates.

For the sake of convenience:

While I would throw a recommendation to a Blue microphone, you did ask for a little mic to clip onto the wire and I used to use this one with my trusty pair of Sennheisers I had to retire about a year ago - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00029MTMQ/ Me, though, I don't like having an extra wire whenever I can help it. I toyed with any number of microphone + headphone setups including a Blue Snowball + Sennheiser and I wasn't very happy with all of them. I recently switched to a Astro gaming headset with a built-in microphone and I'm loving it, though they are slightly uncomfortable because they're on-ear which doesn't work great for someone with glasses such as myself. After spending way too much money on audio setups, I think I will move the Astro headset to the living room for dedicated use with my PS4 (the Astro A30 and A40 both come with three-pole, mobile-style plugs that work great with phones and the PS4 controller) and pick up this really well reviewed headset with circumaural/over-ear cans and a retractable mic - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003N636VI/

Upon performing some research, I'm ready to revise my premise. The research yielded this study that acknowledges a higher value placed on objects created (or in this case partially funded). It's a cognitive bias called the IKEA effect. So, I concede that reviewers will probably have greater investment in a game they help fund, but also I don't feel any less confident that other forms of unavoidable consumerism that exist in the gaming space have some effect. I was giving this more thought last night - I know for a fact that lots of reviewers of course own their own consoles and PCs to play games on. I don't believe it's required by any particular outlet, but obviously the practical considerations of being able to play a game for review at home in addition to at work can make reviewing a lengthy game more bearable. So, if you believe that sunk costs can contribute to a cognitive bias yielding higher value for something created, isn't it then possible that if someone owns for instance a Wii U and a PS4 that they'd place a higher value on reviewed games on those consoles rather than Xbox One and PC games that they can only play at work? There are any number of examples that are congruent to that one, whether it's the sequel factor where the sunk cost is time or the actual price of a game where the sunk cost varies due to pricing. These are all issues not always directly disclosed or mentioned organically in reviews, but they could potentially have a bias effect that would presumably affect the outcome much like a Patreon contribution might.

There's a difference between mentioning it for practical purposes versus requiring disclosure of it for ethical reasons.

Fuuuuuuuuu I just learned that I might be flying into Copenhagen to take a train to Gothenburg, I have to get on locating some carcasses.

Thanks for saying it better (and kinder) than I was planning on saying it.

If you believe that playing games can affect your investment in reviewing a sequel and that disclosure is the answer, do you think that reviewers should thusly disclose if they played the previous games in a review of a sequel?

I feel like you're literally 100% missing the point of what I'm saying. Is it not unreasonable to expect ask of someone to meet violence with love when they are met with violence by thousands of people? 24 hours a day? 7 days a week? Effectively forever? Not every popular feminist is harassed to that extent, but a lot of them actually truly are.

I've been a bit annoyed at the people who are saying stuff like, "I'm on the SJW side, but I'm still disappointed that some feminists are getting petty and making fun of the appearance of these MRAs". Frankly, if I was being harassed by as many people as these people are, I don't think I could keep it together 100% of the time. Making fun of what baldy and erotic fictionman look like feels good and I don't particularly blame anyone who is under fire for chomping at that low hanging fruit.

I've really enjoyed the convenience of being able to pipe all game sound through my PS4 controller + headphones, but I can see why it wouldn't be an ideal experience for someone invested in a sound system. I just have a $200 receiver, two bookshelf speakers, and a center channel so I'm not missing all that much when I have to go quiet at night.

I see what you're saying, but what is her hit:miss ratio? I mean, let's say the Hitman example is a miss. She also makes between what, 50 and 75?, other examples. By your 7:30 being an unconvincing ratio, 12 to 18 of her examples would have to be misses. I don't detect even close to that many bad examples, but I'm also not going out of my way to find things wrong with what she's presenting. Also, I don't even think Hitman is all that convincing - let's say she did place the whore or whatever, it still is an act that the player can perform and it enables the very phenomenon she's highlighting even if it isn't setup as neatly as she purportedly suggests. Also, I don't think something has to be total to be a trend. Or in other words, the quantity of her examples over the last two videos is pretty damn high and even if some significant percentage of them are not completely on point I'd still argue it suggests a trend. Shit, most people consider zombie movies to be a trend and there have been what, 10 popular ones?

Titanfall is adding a new mode where it's basically just Call of Duty - no Titans, no AI. I think it's an odd decision, even if it may end up being a popular mode. I mean, it strips out the identifying aspects of the game which I find potentially unsettling. Also, are they going to adapt the maps at all? I imagine it'll be a lot easier to camp with a sniper rifle on an edge of the map that is generally designated for Titan traversal. There are huge fields of fire meaning that even a bad sniper could have an easy time picking off someone trying to close the gap and kill them.

I guess this is what I meant by it being strange, because gamer doesn't actually just refer to someone who someone having a "certain level of familiarity with the breadth or history of the medium". Gamer is a hard to define term because it encapsulates something else that isn't just a lot of game knowledge/experience, it's kind of self-referential because being a gamer means that you're also into gamer culture. I don't think you necessarily need that connection to the larger "culture" of those media to be considered a cineaste, movie buff, bibliophile, etc, but it seems almost required when you're a "gamer". I don't know if I'm really capturing my argument correctly, but I hope you get what I'm saying.

Not right. Reviews are a subjective exercise, so the opinions of someone "invested" are just as valuable as someone who comes to a sequel cold. Also, I think your understanding of patronage is backwards. Patrons often funded art that espoused the same socio-political/religious views as the patron, so in effect the art was the champion for the patron. That's why I don't think this is a big deal - of course people involved in games media would have a preference for what direction they'd want the art form to go. That doesn't make them any less equipped to make an analysis of the final product. Basically, I see no value in banning Patreon. If Kotaku did it because they saw funding of someone's Patreon as an implicit endorsement, then they could have banned non-anonymous Patreon contributions. But they don't claim to make that argument or seek to make that distinction in the restriction, so it seems incredibly misguided.