Gwardinen

I'm certainly not trying to be a prick and I rarely want to discourage empathy, but I don't think someone having emotions is the same as being a good and stand-up person. He's the head of a company that's failing, I'd be surprised if he wasn't upset. It doesn't mean that he has ever given a crap about his customers. Just because you have empathy doesn't mean he does.

Oh god not again. I had no idea what was going on with this last year or the year before and I still don't, but it is super creepy.

Yeah I don't want to get on the hype train too hard but I really did enjoy that trailer. Had a lot of the weird characters doing silly dialogue thing that is my favourite part of GTA games.

Yep, it is. All of the inventory spaces are probably bound to the numpad right now (but can be rebound, I have them on the numbers on the left of the keyboard myself), and you can press a button and then click or just double press if you want to use it on yourself. Levelling up is obviously good - you get experience not just from player and minion kills you actually make, but also any that happen near enough to you. So just being in lane as much as possible near enemy creeps (the small NPCs that spawn continuously in lanes) dying is helpful. By the JUGGERNAUT attack I presume you mean Blade Fury, Juggernaut's Q in which he spins around and shouts his own name because he's a cool guy. It is pretty good, but until later on in the game you probably don't want to use it on creeps as you will run out of mana very quickly - save it for when you're having a fight with another player. Those are probably the creeps I was mentioning. As you likely noticed, there are three main "lanes" with forested areas in between them (generally referred to as the jungle). Creeps will spawn for both sides in those lanes, and will just run along them until they contact an enemy. Getting the killing blow on those creeps (those of the opposing team, anyway) will net you gold (the last hits you saw listed at the end of the game - getting lots of them is a good thing as it means you have more gold) and as I said, just being nearby when they die will grant experience. As mentioned, last hits are actually good. Your low gold and xp per minute were probably due to having died quite a lot - you're obviously not really gaining either when you're not even on the field. Dota is a game that rewards caution, particularly when you're new, so just playing more conservatively is probably one of the best initial tips I can give you. Until you are experienced enough to know whether you can fight a given other player and win, it may be best to presume that you can't, and only join in fights when other members of your team are already doing so.

I still haven't played Journey. I kept meaning to but now I feel like the only people left playing that will be lunatics.

Unless Hitman, Far Cry 3 or Assassin's Creed 3 (haven't played it yet as I'm waiting on the PC version) particularly surprise me, or the last episode suddenly takes a downturn in quality, I suspect my GOTY.cx will be the Walking Dead. I adored XCOM and it easily makes it into second place, I think, but there simply is nothing else like the Walking Dead around that I can think of. It really gives me an experience I can't get anywhere else. Third place probably will be FTL, for a somewhat similar reason.

No. Slightly spoilery but no real story stuff:

I rarely fully get on the hype train of a game these days but I am longing for Rome 2.

Not necessarily expressing an opinion one way or another, but something I have thought about recently is whether the idea of closure or resolution in the form of one specific "goodbye" event is actually kind of a narrative trap. It might be something we think makes sense logically, and certainly often makes for better stories, but the slow drifting apart without a deliberate break might actually be the more human way to "end" non-romantic relationships.

Yeah, I think I'm with you on that. I also played through the game in more or less one sitting with a friend who needed distraction, and I can scarcely remember any individual chapter apart from the first. It definitely felt like a Halo game, and I don't think anyone who is a fan of Halo and wants more Halo will be disappointed. As you said, the encounter design is just as good, and I think the Prometheans and their weapons slot in neatly. But that's really it, it's just neat. None of the newly introduced content changes or adds very much to the formula, either story-wise or in terms of the feel of the game, it just slots into the existing setup. Overall I think this is fine for the first Halo game made by another company, and I think their success in recreating the experience of Halo is a success and is enough for now. However, I truly hope there are more risks taken with the second and third games in this trilogy, because I think the basic framework of a Halo game and a Halo story could still play host to something more than it has so far.

I think about replaying that game almost once a month. I'm just too afraid that it will have lost the magic in the meantime. Broadly speaking, I agree entirely. In practice I wonder whether it's better to just wait for Rome 2 next year.

Man, I am so with you on that. Good luck.

I'm generally not really in the giving advice game, because it's hard to do sensibly while knowing only a sliver of someone's life and most people aren't necessarily looking for it to begin with. That said, I think something impartial outsiders can be useful for is asking questions with clear eyes. So the first question that occurs to me is; is she even interested in you anymore? You said you waited six months, and she didn't get back together with you. Now she's started something with another guy. You seem to be coming at this from the perspective that you need to decide whether to end your current relationship to re-pursue the first girl, but has she actually given you any reason to believe that's what she wants? It takes two to tango, and while your feelings for her might be absolutely real, that doesn't mean she feels the same - and you didn't mention anything about her perspective. If there is some possibility for a rekindling of the relationship, then yes I guess you have to try to figure out which risk to take. Stick with your girlfriend and risk that these feelings never go away and you always feel kind of unresolved (and I think we as people often carry around a lot of unresolved feelings, so this is not an entirely nuts idea), or try again with the first girl and risk that it doesn't work out, or that you realise that you were actually happier with what you've given up. That question is damn hard, but without the first question it's also pretty meaningless.

I wish I lived in LA so I could buy that bike. I don't even really want a bike, but I am totally sold on that ad.

I still find the in-game voice chat a bit hit and miss simply from a technical standpoint (and the way the volume controls work in the game leaves a lot to be desired as well), but when playing with other Thumbs or people I know we always use Mumble or Skype. The play experience improves greatly.

The Sandman?! Was Silicon Knights developing a game based on Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics or was it another dumb Marvel thing?

Anyone played a Game of Dwarves? I'm sort of tempted by it since I've been waiting for a spiritual sequel to Dungeon Keeper that's worthy of the title, but the coverage I've seen has been mixed. Help me, Thumbs, you're my only hope!

I believe it's on GoG. I haven't tried that version myself, but my understanding is one of the things that's required before a game goes up on GoG is that it runs on Windows 7.

I haven't been playing much recently so I'm a little behind on balance changes and didn't realised Alchemist had been significantly buffed. That's a big deal. Just not giving away kills to the enemy team is one of the best things you can do for your team.

I was an hour or two from the end of the Darkness when my Xbox 360 was stolen. I never bothered to replay it. More recently I was roughly half way through Assassin's Creed Revelations when Uplay decided to fuck up my save after a patch. This was actually sort of a relief because I had burned through the end of Brotherhood to prepare for Revelations and I was kind of preparing to do the same with Revelations prior to AC3, but wasn't enjoying it nearly as much. So I ended up reading some of the plot on Wikipedia and watching the rest of the meta-narrative (Desmond and Subject 16) stuff on YouTube. I feel pretty ok with it.

At about 9:40 of this Giant Bomb Mailbag, there is a Walking Dead-related item sent by the people at Telltale.

Yeah, don't do that. He's widely considered one of the worst heroes in the game. If you need to practice basic UI and shop stuff, the bots games can be used for that. Just don't play them too much because the bots are incredibly stupid in some ways but bizarrely dangerous in others, so it completely screws up your sense of what a real game is.

Can't remember whether he went to Mars within the bounds of the story, but the whole "we tried to put memories of you being a cool guy on Mars in but you already had memories of being a cool guy on Mars!" thing was in the original. So Mars was involved at some point before the narrative began, at least.

Oh wow. Yeah, that's bizarre. Which way is it meant to be?

My response to toblix's current search was just a nod of the head, like "naturally". I'm not sure I actually see a difference in the picture, but I'm not on my usual computer right now. What about the colours has changed?