Salacious Snake

If you read the spoilers out of context you'll be bewildered and not know what to think. Judging by your reactions to BSG and Lost, I'd say avoid ME3 altogether. Personally, I found it worth playing aside from that tacked on, ridiculous ending, but I tend not to feel that a series is retroactively ruined for me by a new, bad thing. If you mean Human Revolution, then I'm right with you. It seemed pretty clear that they intended something that would have a more organic buildup and some consequence, but weren't able to deliver. They're actually very similar… you're asked to pick between options on a philosophical basis when the game hasn't particularly encouraged you to develop a position on the issue at hand. It seems totally divorced from the rest of the experience. The original Deus Ex was pretty ham-fisted, but at least the question was more relatable, as most of us probably have a real-life position on things like personal liberty and security and wanting to merge with an artificial intelligence to become a digital god. OK, the last one was a little esoteric, but also fucking awesome.

The ending of the game gives three choices, but you're not given enough information to have any particular reason to lean one way or another, and the results of each choice appear to be nearly identical. The only noticeable difference between the three is an explosion which will be either red, green or blue. So, the cupcakes are A/B/C and have red/green/blue icing but all taste like vanilla. There's a certain logic to it, at least.

According to this, 96 people raised around a thousand dollars US. http://retakeme3cupcakes.chipin.com/retakeme3-cupcake-campaign That would suggest that they aren't sticking Bioware with the bill, but that doesn't make it any less passive-aggressive or immature. At least it wasn't a ton of lunatics… 96 weirdos isn't that many.

I'm glad that's the policy, at least. I often question the value of game ratings, but I do enjoy perusing the ESRB blurbs. Re: Kid Icarus: Uprising: I wasn't going to buy Uprising, but now I just might. edit to be slightly more relevant: I sometimes flub the date entry, and have locked myself out of websites for extended periods of time. Sometimes I put in my month and date of birth, and then just put this year, like "it's my birthday!" rather than putting in the year of my actual birth.

I expected to smugly brush off the Internet response and not give a damn about the game's ending, but holy shit, it really is dumb. It's super dumb. I thought the story in Mass Effect 2 was poor, but I held out hope that the payoff in 3 would make everything ok. Unfortunately, it doesn't. It still has effective moments throughout, and for someone who is somewhat invested in the characters, it is absolutely worth playing through to see them. The broad arc is awful, but the incidental stuff is still good. It seems like the people in charge of the franchise don't understand why people like the first game so much. The best drama comes from the characters, not from the threat of the explodotrons from beyond space, nor from half-baked philosophical rumination on the relationship between organic and synthetic life and all that other claptrap. The end of the game leans pretty hard on elements of the fiction which haven't been properly developed. It tries to cash in a bunch of gravity that hasn't been earned. It's weird. [ending spoiler]

Congrats, guys.

Based on my prior Kickstarting experience, you'll be asked for a shipping address when the funding is complete, assuming you're asking in regard to the receipt of physical items. If you mean that you want to change your billing info, You can click "Manage my Pledge," and then select the option to change your billing method. As of this moment, you haven't been asked for a shipping address.

Great interviews. I feel like I went to all the wrong stuff at GDC this year. It looks so easy when examining the schedule beforehand, but when you're shambling around the Moscone center, it's a different story.

The part that stumped me was the beavers. What got me was that it involved a bit of timing. You had to do a thing, and then do the next thing quickly, which hadn't been part of the game's vocabulary prior to that.

Your best bet is Gamasutra, since they run the show.

Yeah, I've skipped every single one. From what I've seen in videos online, it's all awful stuff.

I thought that was too improbable, but this is Assassin's Creed we're talking about. "Nothing is true; everything is preposterous."

Isn't he most likely a descendent of Ezio? That would kind of rule out him being a Native American. He does clearly carry some nativy trappings, so he likely has some kind of contact with them. I do hope that any such characters are treated respectfully. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that at some formative point he stays with them for a while and they train him in the arts of whatever. To clarify for anyone who isn't familiar with AC, the central conceit of Assassin's Creed involves genetic memory (which is an idiotic concept, but let's not linger on that), and the protagonists have to be in a direct ancestral lineage for it to work. They could potentially break from that, but it would go against everything they've set up so far.

That was mortifying.

This is more general, but whenever I see games with idiotic names like "Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning," I think of Idle Thumbs. Also, every time a mind is blown, a baboo gets its wings. http://media.rockstargames.com/broadcast/20120301/en_US_web.html

I've been playing the heck out of this. (gamertag: XButts 360) It's a bit inconsistent. Some of the survival events (the "deadly descents") are terrible and unfun. In fact, the whole World Tour mode is a bunch of garbage. The difficulty curve is all over the place, and the items are pointless, and the story, hah, well… On the other hand, doing random crap in Explore and Global Events is fantastic. It's a terrific game, but it's front loaded with some badly designed content (which can be ignored).

Jonathan Silverman's father presided at my Bar Mitzvah, or whatever it is the rabbi does. Emceed it? He Rabbied the shit out of it.

And furthermore, Merry Dissmas

I'm happy that they're doing another setting that's not often explored in games (aside from grognardy strategy). Aside from the kinda half-assed continuing adventures of Ezio, that's been one of the major strengths of the series.

A little bit of stereo separation in this type of recording creates a huge improvement in the listening experience, and all it takes is panning each channel a tiny smidgen on the mixer or in the DAW. You can do this once and never have to adjust it again (unless you have a guest on or something). edit to explain further: a benefit of doing this is that when people talk over each other, you have each of their voices somewhat preserved. You can hear them both at once, without the audio information getting all muddled up. Using some separation will reduce the amount that the signals step on each other. It's all very technical.

The Skyward upgrade system is good in theory, but the game is so easy (at least up until wherever I lost interest) that you don't really need to bother with it.

Funding has gone over 300% of the target. This had damn well better get us at least 3 episodes of Idle Thumbs.

what is book?

Far Cry 3: Tropical Shit Blaster

He's not advocating a return to that design, but lamenting the loss of the sense of discovery that went along with it. It would be great for the smarty-pants designers to find away to recapture that. I agree wholeheartedly.