SecretAsianMan

I completely agree. I rented it back when I was a Gamefly user. I had zero expectations when I got it but I ended up completing it and then some.

I fucking love Terranigma. It has one of my favorite soundtracks, I really like the setting, story, and concept, and I think it's just fun. It and another Quintet game, Illusion of Gaia, are among my favorite SNES games.

I saw Deadpool over the weekend. It's pretty much exactly what you expect if you know anything about the character. Lots of low brow potty humor, tons of fourth wall breaks (including a fourth wall break within a fourth wall break, a sixteenth wall break as he puts it), gratuitous violence, pointless action, nudity, pop culture jokes, etc. If you're at all amused by the antics of Deadpool you'll probably get a kick out of the movie. If not, then I'd stay away.

Clearly you've not played Spelunky

You'd be surprised how many "advancements" are actually just clever new applications of existing tech. The achievement isn't necessarily in creating some crazy new tech, it can also be realizing how to use existing stuff in a different way. What solving GO really boils down to is learning how to navigate an insanely large possibility space in a reasonable amount of time. With some tweaks, the same method could probably be used to solve a myriad of other problems in the same manner.

Jane mentioned on Twitter that there are small easter eggs for about 5 other video games and they're all pretty subtle.

Regarding "first person tank controls", I would refer that reader to the reader from last week that described their mom playing The Witness. Her instinct was to walk to a spot, stop, look around, pick a direction, then proceed forward. All I could think of while hearing that reader mail was "she's playing with first person tank controls".

I was actually planning to save fire watching for the weekend but after the Steam servers went down for their usual weekly maintenance I changed my mind. I've only finished Day One and if the rest of the game is broken into segments like that I'm probably going to keep to one a day. Normally I'm the kind of person who would blow through a game right away but with this one I want to take my time. I'm purposely avoiding running unless I feel that the situation calls for it. Instead I'm marveling at the amazing art and looking at everything. My radio is constantly being clicked. I also love little touches in games and this one is full of it. I probably spent about 5 minutes rearranging the books on the shelf inside the tower.

Gears of War is what made me get a 360. I have a very distinct memory of going to a gaming club open console night during college. They had GoW up on the projector screen. The cover system hadn't yet been copied a billion times so it was new and exciting. The setting was so gritty and visceral. The co-op campaign looked fun as hell. But the part that really won me over was watching two people evade a giant blind monster, lure it outside, then use a satellite laser beam to reduce it to ashes. I never got a chance that night to give it a try. Instead I skipped class the next day, went to Best Buy, grabbed a 360 and GoW, then spent the rest of the week chainsawing underground creatures. Luckily it was the start of the semester so I didn't miss much. In a slightly different sense, Halo 3 is what made me get a second 360. I went to a midnight launch of the game, got home, put in the disc, and got the dreaded red rings. I was so angry that I immediately went back to the store where I got the game. They were just finishing up the last sale and were about to close when I ran in and purchased a Core 360 (the one without the hard drive). I sent my dead one off to be fixed the next day, then later sold it to a friend.

Steam's got a Lunar New Year sale going on right now. I believe the format is the same as the last two sales (as in no flash sales). There's a choose your own adventure meta game where you pick from two options which gives you a list of games that share a theme. Then you can pick two more options to get more lists.

I've had fun playing with only one other person so I'd say it's worth it. There's only two things in the game that can accommodate 4 people and they're both vehicles (they're pretty much the same vehicle too). One thing to keep in mind is the game supports simultaneous local and online play so you don't have to sacrifice a partner to mix it up with others. As for the DLC, almost all of them provide at least one thing that can be useful. None of them are strictly necessary or provide you with a significant advantage, but there is some helpful stuff. Recommended: Vehicles Pack (the tank and mech are useful, the bike isn't) Demolitionist Pack (a machine gun primary, a useful explosive weapon, and some cosmetic stuff) Terrain Specialist Pack (the boots perk is quite useful, the missile barrage is fun, and some more cosmetic stuff) Useful but skippable: Support Pack (good primary weapon, a support item some people like, more costumes) Ranger Pack (really the only thing good here is the UAV which will help speed up leveling your gear) There are a handful of other items I like using in the remaining packs but I'd say none of them are really worth getting.

I was playing Helldivers the other day when I had the best troll encounter. Some guy joined the game and when we got to the next objective he tried to be an asshole by dropping four nukes (shredder missiles) on top of us. Except as soon as he did that he got swarmed by bugs and downed. We all ran away and the only thing the nukes killed were him and all the bugs around him. He was promptly kicked, but not before we got a good laugh at his expense.

Make it Goldfish and Chris will stop for sure.

Cordeos, I think you're looking for more out of AlphaGo than it was designed for. It was made to solve a specific problem and it will likely lead to other advances but no one is touting this as a human-level intelligence. Like dium said, progress is made in steps and this is a significant one. For an AI to do what you want it to requires the ability to explore a possibility space like that of Go. Finding a way to do that in a reasonable amount of time is hard. It's a piece of the puzzle, more is yet to come.

I personally find the 360 layout to be more comfortable. Reaching into the middle of the controller feels like I'm stretching my thumbs even though I have large hands. The 360 placement felt more neutral and relaxing to me, at least outside of shooters where you mainly use the right stick. It's actually one of my nitpicks with the Steam controller since it places the left analog stick and face buttons in the same locations as the Playstation analog sticks, meaning that the majority of the time my thumbs have that stretched out feeling. I do however prefer the rounded feel of the stick on the Playstation over the harder cap on the Xbox. My main beef with most controllers is the d-pad, something the Steam controller only partially works at. The 360 d-pad is just awful and I never really liked the Playstation one. Obviously Nintendo's are the best but that's not really a viable option on the PC.

I've had my current wired 360 controller since I've owned an Xbox and it still works fine for the most part (the back button sticks and the triggers squeak but I can deal with that). I've heard good things about the Xbox One Elite controller but $150 is probably more than you're looking to spend. The Steam controller has a lot of flexibility but there's a time investment required, both in configuring it the way you want and just getting used to it in general. The configuration part is largely mitigated by the ability to import community configs for games but getting used to it is a bit of a hurdle. I had to force myself to use it for a while before I hit the point where I was comfortable, and even then there are games I prefer to use the 360 controller. I've not used a Playstation controller with a PC.

It's the complexity involved in solving this problem that makes it an advance towards intelligence. You make it sound as if Go is a simple problem to be solved when in reality it's much more than that. Being able to explore the immense possibility space and come up with a winning strategy is far from trivial. The things you describe probably require an intelligence capable of doing things similar to what AlphaGo is doing.

But the point of AlphaGo wasn't to create a human like AI. The point was to create an AI capable of beating an expert human player in one of the most complex games ever created. An expert level player isn't expected to make mistakes or commit to failing strategies. If anything, a human player should be expected to play like a machine.

Yesterday Google announced that it had achieved a milestone step in AI research. It has developed the first AI, named AlphaGo, capable of beating an expert level human player at Go beating three-time European champion Fan Hui 5-0 in a closed match. That may not sound like much, but Go is many, MANY times more complex that Chess. As an example, after the first round of turns in Chess there are 400 possible board positions. In Go, after the first round of turns there are 129,960 possible board positions and it grows at an insane rate from there. There are more total Go positions than there are atoms in the universe. In March the AI will take on the world champion Lee Sedol in Seoul.

Quick bump to say that Downwell is now on Android

Downwell is now available on Google Play

Here's the Voyager list I made earlier. Gormongous' DS9 list is right after.

What exactly is so bad about The Ladykillers? I'm not a film person so I haven't seen the majority of the Coen Brothers films but I saw The Ladykillers once or twice and I don't remember finding it that terrible. Maybe I just have little to compare it to.

I don't you should be eligible for this, unless you cut off said hair and mail it to him.

Embedding using youtu.be links works. I use them all the time.