JonCole

I used to have a Chrome extension that did that, I'm sure such a thing still exists though I don't use it because I forgot about it until just now.

As it turns out, the exchange rate for Jake's 2 cents is like 1000 Idle Thumbs bucks. Also, didn't notice the alt-text thing until I was looking in the comments of RPS's Sunday Papers thing. Very brilliant, subtle touch.

My guess is that some of these boxes will just get low-end variants for that purpose. Looking at some of these that have a mobile Haswell i7 for Intel Iris Pro, they could easily just swap in a mobile i5 or i3 chip with Intel HD 4400 GPUs at probably half the cost and swap the HDD for a cheap 32GB or 64GB SSD to cut that cost as well. Similarly, any of the $500 boxes with a FM2 A6 will drop the dedicated Radeon R270 and just use the APU to shave almost $200 off the price.

I'd like to tentatively put dibs on Puzzle and Dragons (iOS and Android) and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (PC), if you all please. I'll write them when 1) I'm done with The Witcher and 2) it's not so cold in my house that I can bear to write more than forum posts.

I guess that's how I read the article, after being linked to it by himself on Twitter in those very words: Also, is there really awareness of Steam outside the informed? That was more or less my assertion; the only people that I know that I haven't met/talked to directly from gaming circles like Idle Thumbs and know about Steam are in fact people who did decide to build a PC and went through the process of becoming informed and knowledgeable about specs, platforms, and whatnot. Granted, that's only two people and I can only speak from my own experience, but I have to imagine it's somewhat indicative of the greater audience.

Yeah, I just read Ben Kuchera's piece on Polygon that purports Steam Machines are bad for gamers somehow because the $500 aren't PS4s and you can't play non-Linux games on them. Let me just say, if there is a single person in the world who legitimately buys a $500 Steam machine and is surprised they can't play the Origin-exclusive, PC-exclusive BF4 on it, I'd eat something unpleasant.

Gamefly Digital running a lot of good deals on Steam games: Use code GFDJAN20 at checkout for 20% off 75% off games: $9.99-20% off $7.99 Bioshock Infinite (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $7.49-20% off $5.99 Dead Island Riptide (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $7.49-20% off $5.99 Batman Arkham City GOTY Edition (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $4.99-20% off $3.99 Torchlight 2 (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $3.75-20% off $3.00 Metro Last Light Season Pass (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] 66% off games: $13.59-20% off $10.87 Metro Last Light (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $13.59-20% off $10.87 Shadow Warrior (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $13.59-20% off $10.87 Company of Heroes (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] 60% off games: $19.99-20% off $15.99 Batman Arkham Origins (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $19.99-20% off $15.99 Saints Row IV (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] $3.99-20% off $3.19 Saints Row IV Season Pass (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] 50% off games: $5.99-20% off $4.79 Final Fantasy VII (PC Digital Download) [gamefly.com] Source: Slickdeals

Given the format of the reviews, namely short and to the point probably as an result of the "objective" vocabulary, it wouldn't be much skin off my back to work on a review for an hour or two, receive some constructive criticism, and perhaps not actually be "up to the standards/vision of the site". I'd be willing to give it a shot particularly if at this moment, you're not really worried about timely reviews (which I imagine to be the case, granted your reviews of ME3, Syndicate, and such) and wouldn't mind publishing reviews for somewhat older games. I'm currently playing The Witcher and would love to figure out how to talk about the weird sexual content in an "objective" prose.

I've been using Comixology on my new tablet and it got me back into Marvel comics. As a result, I've been trying out the Marvel Unlimited service to access a huge percentage of Marvel's back catalog (something like 13,000 issues). As you'd guess, the selection is great when you haven't read a lot of comics but the user experience is just generally terrible. Of course, there's no way to download anything because it's a walled garden DRM situation so you're stuck using all of their proprietary readers and software to get things going. As far as I can tell, the Marvel comics app is developed by Comixology so there's a base level software experience that's pretty good. Unfortunately, the Marvel Unlimited app is developed in-house by Marvel and thus sucks ass. Also, it's only available on iOS and Android, so my Windows 8 tablet is a no-go (this isn't a big surprise to me, though I'm still not happy about it). I've been using it on my Galaxy S4, which is obviously a less ideal experience than a tablet in general, but the app itself is a nightmare. There's a 15-issue limit on "offline viewing", which seems to just be a fancy word for caching. I've heard reports of cached issues not actually being available offline at all, but my phone is always connected to data so I haven't had an issue with this so far. Sometimes, however, I open a new comic and just nothing appears on the screen. The single-page view doesn't scale to meet the size of my screen and double-page view is completely useless on a phone. Instead, I use the "smart panels" view that scrolls panel by panel, detracting a bit from the comic reading experience. The app also overrides the screen rotation setting in the OS, allowing rotation at all times. Great for reading in bed. The browser-based app isn't much of an improvement. It's a flash-based thing and thus (again) sucks ass. I may or may not actually use the app because at the very least it allows me to look at full pages on my 1080p display, but I'm not loving it. I was hoping to use it on my tablet, but I don't anticipate it being very good based on how poorly it controls using a mouse and keyboard on a real PC. Nonetheless, I might slog through it for a couple months to get "caught up". Comixology tends to have prices at parity with actual comic book prices, which honestly is a little high for my current budget. $10 a month lets me read a ton of comics, albeit in a far less than ideal capacity, and maybe get myself to a place where I'd want to read issues as they're released. All of that said, any recommendations on what Marvel of the last 5 or 6 years I should read? I'm probably going to read all the available Marvel Now!, but I'd like to pick and choose the best of anything before that.

A podcast joking about the potential Idle Thumbs multiverse podcast names: Idle Puns

Not that I'm aware of.

Due to the point in time in while Infinite takes place, I thought it would have been a really cool idea to have traveled to a parallel universe where the floating city in the sky was not Columbia, but St. Petersberg. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party could have built the city to distance themselves from the Civil War of Russia and used it as a display of Soviet willpower and fortitude. I wish that they had taken a more creative approach to stopping the Vox like completely subverting them like you said. It paints a super-bleak picture of the multiverse that the major prevailing theme of Bioshock is "everyone is bad, granted enough power", resulting in a situation where "oh no, it turns out the oppressed minorities can be just as horrible as the wicked white racists". I suppose that part of the reason they didn't get too wild about universe hopping is that they'd have to develop art assets and equivalent weapons/powers/themes/whatever for whatever universe they create, but it doesn't really excuse disjointed, borderline offensive plot devices.

https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/418946294665605120 METACRITIC, HERE WE COME

Umm, hilarious. Hilarious because you got news blog slammed, but also because the Kotaku commenters actually seem to think the site is a serious thing. I think that's the highest praise you can get.

I'm getting an error now and then on your site, Tycho:

You are a wildman, finishing all that shit. I wish I had any kind of self-control and could buy and beat games with as little time between as this.

The Besties (Polygon) talked about Infinite in their GOTY podcasts and Chris Plante brought up a great point about it that I hadn't given much thought. Really, so much of what makes the game exciting in the first half (the World's Fair stuff, all of the class/race stuff, etc) is completely diluted by both events in the middle part of the game and the metaphysical elements of the latter game. I liked both how the weird American jingoism created this society and how the metaphysical elements played into the Bioshock universe as a whole, but the way they meshed together was really quite poor and resulted in a disjointed total experience.

He uses a complex formula (math) to determine the number. Math is objective.

It sure as shit is catching on with me.

Thing that caught my ear because of this conversation: Watching Part 1 of Polygon's Besties GOTY, heard Justin McElroy say that Link to the Past is the best game of all time and Oblivion is his favorite game of all time. A man after my own heart.

The US Congress will pass exactly one large bill this year, posturing for elections, and then proceed to be the same flaccid, useless entity for the rest of the year.

I failed both of my resolutions. I've determined that all of my resolutions for the past handful of years have been too ambitious. So, I'm instead trying to think of a short list of easily attainable goals instead of one or two goals that are quite difficult. So far I have: Read at least one book a month (tried two books per month a couple years ago, failed by April) Watch at least one of the AFI Top 100 per month (tried to watch all of the AFI Top 100 in a year, got through about 40 of them before I gave up) Try out one positive lifestyle change per month (rather than say "go on a diet and lose 30 lbs", I'm aiming for "try out a diet for a month and see how it goes", "cut x food from your diet and see if you can live with it" or "revisit the whole yoga thing")

Other off-topic thing: Please nobody create other "what was that game called" threads as a joke.

Now that I've seen that technique is a thing, I'm going to do it every time that I'm going for a hell run so I can get sufficient practice for faster, non-cheesy hell runs.