dium

Dunno if you're playing the PC version, but I remember reading about this mod for pacifist characters. Essentially, it's a bunch of minor tweaks that make more quests completable without killing anyone, usually by making NPCs pickpocket-able or turning some doors that required a key lock-pickable, etc. I haven't tried it myself, but I imagine it would do it's job well.

I can tell you actually DID stop the video because he then immediately went on to admit how overused an influence that is in film and video games, so at least he agrees with you. The sense I get was that he was actually inspired by Campbell, while 90% of genre fiction merely follows the outline he presents.

This game looks amazing. And I mean that very literally. Whatever else it does or doesn't do well (and Christian Donlan seems to like it at least), it's undeniably very pretty and I rarely want to play games just for that but in this case I think I do.

I was part of a discussion about possible settings for Assassins Creed 3 a while back, and when the American war of independence came up as a possibility it was regarded as unlikely for this very reason. But then we hypothesized that instead of large buildings the main character would scale .A spiritual successor to Shadow of the Colossus, if you will.

About half of the latest Progresscast (The Third One) is about this article, but also more generally the Zelda series. Now that I've listened to it, I'd be interested in finding out if the Thumbs have played Majoras Mask and what they thought of it. Chris argued (and I'd probably agree) that Zelda has become too systemic and entrenched in it's own conventions, and that Zelda 2 is an interesting case in that it seems to branch off in a direction that the rest of the series ignored. Majoras Mask didn't do anything of the sort mechanically (controls and weapons are more or less identical to Ocarina of Time) but the structure of the world, story, and overall flow of the game were very un-Zelda. Nobody in the cast mentioned playing it so I'm guessing at least Chris didn't, but I'd be interested in hearing what they thought of it if they did. I always imagined it as a game that the Thumbs would like, perhaps due to their love of The Last Express. But perhaps I just like to imagine that cool people like what I like.

I actually did a fair bit of rupee hunting in Skyward Sword. I had a limited amount of time with the game (I was borrowing a Wii to play it) and I wanted to buy and upgrade as much stuff as I could... and to do that quickly I actually did have to go out of my way to collect rupees. I have the feeling, though, that this would not have been the case if I were playing more leisurely. The fact that you can apparently hold up to 9900 rupees at once if you upgrade your wallet enough... yeah, you're probably expected to never really want for money.

I started out most three day cycles by picking up 300 rupees from the three places in Clock Town that always had silver rupees in them. I never needed that much money, it was just a routine I got into. It felt comfortable to have that much money on hand, but more importantly it felt comfortable to have a routine at the dawn of the first day.

I hope (but by no means expect) this is to tower defense what Pikmin was to real time strategy. That would be awesome.

How is that possible when it's the best one?! Life is so confusing sometimes. I have to admit, the reasons why I like Majoras Mask have absolutely no resemblance to the reasons I like any other Zelda game. I like the multitude of relatively fleshed-out npcs, all the scheduled stuff happening in tandem, the uncharactaristic creepiness, etc. For me, Clock Town is the closest thing I've experienced to the oft-talked-about-on-Thumbs 1-city-block game that Warren Spector used to talk about in interviews. The actual Zelda parts of the game are run of the mill.

Well. Also, allow me to join your enthusiasm for Majoras Mask. I used to be a bit of a Zelda fanboy in my youth, and while most of that has fallen away I still consider Majoras Mask one of my favorite games ever. It's a pity that a lot of what it tried never caught on. But I suppose one reason I regard it so fondly is that it remains so unique (for a Zelda game at least).

Has anyone checked out Catacomb Snatch, the game Mojang made over the weekend for the Humble Bundle Mojam charity thing? It's obviously not done, but it's also surprisingly great. It's an isometric(ish) shootemup set in steampunk ancient Egypt where you get money to build a train track and lay down turrets to protect it and vacuum devises to automatically pick up money for you, gradually turning the game from a shootemup into an economy based strategy tower defense... thing. It's awesome. The source code is open, so several different groups are currently trying to build upon it. EDIT: I wonder; considering how much momentum and capitol they have now, can we still consider Mojang "indie"? And if so, how long will we still be able to do that?

If you liked PH and ST because of the controls and you could overlook the handholding, you may actually like Skyward Sword a lot. Like Pirate Poo, says, it's not all bad... the controls in particular I found to be outstanding. My opinion of the game isn't that it's bad, just that it's disappointing. If Nintendo put just a bit more trust in the player, it could've been a great game.

The mechanics in Skyward Sword were surprisingly fun; it's the sort of game that, had it showed up towards the beginning of the Wii lifecycle rather than the end, would have single handedly made the case for hardcore gaming on the system. Yeah, yeah, I know that it wouldn't have been possible without the Wii Motion Plus... but I still find it cruelly ironic that the game that could have sold me on the Wii concept came five years too late. But you're right. It almost doesn't matter how good the controls and mechanics are, the game almost never stops walking you through things and it's a mediocre experience as a result.

HOLY SHIT This news was good enough to actually make me post a thing. I am so excited. EDIT: Oh man, I am so tempted to drop $200 for both prints and the second shirt... but I don't know if I can justify paying that much since I have no use for the record and that seems to be the main point of value at the $200 level (besides the prints). And $200 is a lot of money. I may do it anyway! It will be irresponsible of me but damn I like thumbs.

Anyone been trying user made maps, now that there are some? I've tried these three, and they were pretty fun, if basic... but more importantly, they hint at what kind of stuff people might be getting up to in the future. Sphere of Roundness Cassata Chamber 1 DaMaGepy's first Portal 2 map

Oh man, I love Pandemic. Also, I'm really glad that almost all the thumbs are part of some sort of pod thing now. I enjoyed this episode a lot. (You guys can totally say "seg". Go ahead.)

Unsure if you mean the humor he writes or how he performs. Neither seem to make sense, since he didn't write his lines for Portal and you can't claim that he's anything but a (perhaps annoying) ball of energy throughout. I'm always at a loss as to why people DON'T find Merchant funny, and the only reason I can come up with that isn't somehow contradictory is overexposure... which, to be honest, IS a good reason.

I can't argue with something as subjective as whether or not Portal 2 was funny or well written. I don't think, however, that the atmosphere of the original Portal could be recreated and be effective. Everything about that game felt so new; it was very conducive to the subtle, mysterious atmosphere that the sterile environment went further to establish. This time around, though, we already know how portals work and we already know where we are and that GLaDOS is bad, etc etc. To me, just more minimalism would've felt stagnant rather than restrained. If you like the direction they actually did take it in is a different matter, obviously. I love it to bits.

shitteru (shiru, to know) Hey, do you know about Midnight TV? (lit: Hey, know Midnight TV?) EDIT: Looking up kanji is a bitch and a half, especially when you're coming at it without any working knowledge. That said, the interfaces here can help a lot. The handwriting thing works best if you know something about typical stroke order, but even when that fails you the "multiradical" interfaces can usually help.

Once you start embedding verbs and questions into sentences thinking of it in terms of reverse polish notation will really start to mess you up.

Grammar isn't too hard to get a handle of, to be honest. It is very very different from what an English speaker would be used to, but it's also very very consistent, which is more than what you can say for most languages. I really like Japanese; I like how consistent and well structured it is, but also how (somewhat paradoxically) much it allows you to omit things and allow context to do the work for you. For example, very often you are allowed to completely omit the subject of a sentence. This occasionally creates situations where in casual conversation every sentence consists of just different conjugations of single words. Kanji is sort of the wrench in anyone's plans to learn Japanese, unfortunately. You have to learn them, it's part of basic literacy. But there is no really good way to approach it, to be honest. And looking up Kanji is such a huge pain compared to looking up words in any other alphabet... unless you have a dictionary that lets you draw it, which I do not. I can't speak to how quickly it will take to learn: I believe that it can be done quickly with the right amount of dedication, but it took me a very long time to know as much as I do. Also, living in Japan.

I don't actually have anything interesting to say and I'm sure this will just get drowned in a flood of similar sentiments but... ...I am way more sad than I should be about a podcast ending. It's embarrassing. I am likely to go back and listen through every episode now. It hasn't even been a year since the last time I've done that (the last time you ended).

My ability to be online has reduced to once every other day. Perhaps I shouldn't be admitting this in front of all of you, but it's getting harder to care when I know there's nothing I can do about it. In the future, when I find the strength to play another on of these games, I will have a better sense of how far in the future I need to take life into account. Its much longer than expected.

I'm traveling, and so it's getting harder and harder to check these games in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, I'm at a turning point in both games and if I can't at least log on daily, this doesn't look good. Gotta stay steadfast against the Remoid army.

Well shit. I'm halfway towards a degree in computer science, and how I'm petrified.