Gwardinen

You're not wrong, they don't have any real way of teaching you. Perhaps I should have specified that it's more that it feels like I come to understand them. My actual understanding of them is probably still not great. That said, I haven't played them in a vacuum either - because of my enjoyment of them and the way they made me feel like I was acquiring competence, I have played them against a wider pool of people and even occasionally online against randomers. I certainly haven't participated in any open tournaments, and I have no doubt that I'm solidly in the unskilled amateur category with both games, but having played them against other people who play games regularly, I know that I am better than most of them and that is through practice and a little understanding. Neither of which I would have achieved without feeling like the game was giving me something to work with. In a sense, my actual competence is much less important than whether the game makes me feel like I'm competent, or at least not clumsy. Soul Calibur makes me feel clumsy, and so does Tekken, hence my lack of enjoyment with them. By contrast, Dead or Alive has somewhat similar mechanics to Tekken* and I only rarely felt clumsy in it. What the difference is I'm not totally sure, but maybe I'll go back and play more fighting games to try to figure it out. What's BBCS? I feel like there's a fighting game in the back of my head that is screaming at me that it had actual teaching mechanics, but I really can't remember it. *Based on shoddy memory and an incomplete understanding of fighting games.

Haha, Speedy, I laughed out loud at your post too. That was smooth, bro, real smooth. I don't have an awkward anecdote in mind right now, but I was doing a crossword with a girl recently and the clue was "religious official". Without a heartbeat's pause she shouts "Pope!" I simply turn and stare at her for a second as I try to come up with a response. She looks to me during the pause and explains, "He's as official as you get!"

I think this line might shed some light on things: I definitely question whether you'd enjoy Oblivion as much now. In fact, I would be outright surprised if you played Oblivion and Skyrim as side-by-side as you could and found you didn't consider Skyrim the better game. Perhaps you've just outgrown the Elder Scrolls in its current incarnation. After all, it is clumsy and unresponsive, particularly if you've been playing Dark Souls as I know you have. If TES worldbuilding doesn't do it for you anymore (and I suspect that's the issue as, much as Sno said, almost everyone seems to see Skyrim as being a more interesting and better realised world than Oblivion), and Dark Souls and the like have trained you to expect better action gameplay, you're not going to get much out of Skyrim.

Yeah I like Modern Family too. It really is just a generic sitcom, but the lack of laugh track and the commitment to the jokes really sells it to me. It seems much more willing to just let its humour stand on its own than most of its contemporaries. Definitely not something I'd ever shout at someone for not watching, and it's not really going to "enrich" you in any way, but it's half an hour during which you'll just be entertained and amused.

I dunno, there are two games that I've felt like have done the "just learn by playing" with occasionally looking at special moves stuff really well, and that's the recent Mortal Kombat and Guilty Gear XX. Nothing else I've played has ever entered my brain so organically. Also I think I'm biased against 3D (meaning with sidestepping) fighters now. I don't know if it's because of sidestepping, but I've never had as much fun with them as with 2D games. As I say, no idea if it's cause or just coincidence.

I know what you mean, TP, anxiety and worry and depression are kind of like gravity. They pull harder the heavier you are, so if you're already unhappy about some things, other things make you more unhappy. It's somewhat unfair that it all snowballs that way, but it genuinely does seem to be the case. It's so much easier to shrug existential worries (or whatever else is bothering you) off when other things in life are going well.

Not even. I know what a quick glance at the moves list for perhaps half a dozen of the characters has told me. There are some fighting games I've endeavoured to learn a little more, but I rarely exactly go deep into it. Soul Calibur has not made me want to learn at all. Is it a game that you have to know to love? I hate to sound spoiled but if it is then I actually don't care. Right now the only fighting games I'm interested in are those that I can pick up and play with some friends in a party atmosphere.

I literally never put points into Resistance, and from what I could tell I was no weaker than anyone else. Maybe in NG+ or ++ or later it becomes more important, but pre-patch (as I can only speak for pre-patch) it was entirely unnecessary for a first playthrough.

I played a bit. Didn't have the chance to try it out online, but I did play a bit of local with a friend. It's certainly immediately much better once you're playing against a human, but that much is true of every fighting game. My primary issue comes from not really having found an enjoyable flow to the combat. In a similar way to Tekken, I just don't really "get" how its combat works, and that makes the fighting seem pointless and luck-based, even if it isn't. Meanwhile, the story is obviously almost totally worthless and the characters don't really interest me enough to hold my attention beyond that. I feel like I've become much more critical of fighting games since the latest Mortal Kombat. Before that I was content for them to exist, to entertain me very briefly and then to forget about them completely. Mortal Kombat was the first in a long time that I really enjoyed as a game and an experience. I haven't played a fighting game so much since Dead or Alive 4 was one of the only games that existed on the 360.

Makes sense. A lot of traditional male behaviour seems like it can be traced back to appearances and serving the ego. Ultimately, this apparently mostly comes down to getting and keeping women. We try to look strong and capable and invulnerable both to attract women and to ward away other men who might be interested in them. Actually, you can apply this more broadly to people in general as well. There's a reason the most visceral and extreme reactions people exhibit are often towards those they're in a relationship with. We say and do things, both good and bad, we would rarely countenance towards others because of the special role a significant other plays in our own sense of self. Fear of loss also often drives actions that actually make one more likely to lose something viewed as important. I suppose narcissism in this case just changes the scope of these issues. The more narcissistic one is, the more one craves the gratification and fears the loss. So the more important it becomes to maintain the "image", particularly for men, and then the more likely one is to react aggressively to anyone who has the potential to upset that internal and external image of oneself.

I ended up being busy and wouldn't have been able to afford it anyway. Have fun, dudes who are there.

I've played the tutorial sections, seems pretty cool. It may end up falling into the same category as Phoenix Wright, though, in that I enjoy it but don't know if I'll remember to actually set time aside to play it.

Actually, yeah. I know someone who would definitely be into that.

If you've played any Call of Duty game or similar in recent times, you'll enjoy this: KyDHaKtROZo

Same for me. It'd be great and London's only about two and a half hours away by train but the actual train fare is pretty expensive, even before other considerations.

Well Valve is intending to have a "learn" section and because it's Valve it'll probably be pretty fleshed out. I think they intend to have a lot of infrastructure around the game that makes it easier to get into, maybe including player incentives for teaching. However, the game itself will probably be the least accessible of the games you mentioned since it's a straight rip of the (pretty esoteric) original mod. I suspect Blizzard DOTA will be the easiest to pick up and play from a mechanical perspective, but I don't know how much it will be supported since it's been unclear whether it's even going to be an actual "product" of Blizzard.

That was fantastic. Edit: I actually like this video from his account even more: Sw6-uJCfeiE

They don't, but theoretically if their profit margin stayed the same (ie. if they passed the cost of better standards for works on to the consumers rather than took it on themselves) there isn't a huge reason for companies not to do it. The issue then becomes what happens to them when another company brings out a similar product for cheaper because they are still using sweatshops. The idea is that we always buy things according to our principles, right? Then the free market sorts this out for us. But the real world is a bit more complicated, and that's why battery farmed chicken still gets sold alongside free range, and why Fairtrade coffee still gets sold alongside regular. There's a market for conspicuously ethical products, particularly over the past few decades, but it's not the whole market for sure.

Boycotting is the only thing I can see being genuinely impactful. This is, after all, an economic decision that companies are making. The reason they would change it is if it stopped being so cost effective. The unfortunate truth about boycotting, however, is that it really requires a critical mass of people to be disciplined enough to do it before it makes any difference at all. Since you mentioned the iPhone, can you conceive of the number of people that would have to boycott iDevices for it to make any realistic difference? Apple has sold, what, 250 million of the modern generation of iDevices? Not trying to be pessimistic here, just saying that although boycotting makes the most sense to me, there still might need to be a more effective solution. The only thing I can see making more of a difference right now is actually bringing more/stronger laws into effect to counteract this practice. However, making changes in a legal system is incredibly hard at the best of times, and in the middle of a worldwide economic recession is not the best of times when you're basically asking companies to cut their profit margins.

When he held up the... implement in the second video, I couldn't fully grasp the mixture of horror and hilarity in my brain.

Five episodes? That's what you call a backlog? I kid. I may actually listen to your voice while sweating, grunting and getting my heart pumping if that's what you were hoping for.

That sounds awesome. The best feeling I get about exercise is that it's good for me. As in, I am intellectually proud of myself for doing it even if I don't physically feel good about it. Most of the time exercise is just incredibly boring for me. It was only with the discovery of podcasts that I was able to make myself tolerate it for an hour at a time - and since Idle Thumbs ain't producin' no more, I'm kinda running out of podcasts to listen to.

While listening to the most recent PC Gamer UK podcast, I heard about an older game called Masq*. The guys described it as an "interactive comic" and that's pretty apt. The basic premise is that you are a fairly normal guy in a fairly normal situation, a fashion designer about to launch a new line and having trouble getting the money for it while worrying about your wife's overtime and boss. You then have to make time-limited decisions about how to react and what to say to various events, which cause the story to branch pretty heavily. It's that serious branching and the way it can spiral out of control from a pretty normal situation to a pretty extreme catastrophe that provides the interest. It runs in Macromedia Shockwave (!), and you have to be online to play it, even if you download the file. Episodes 1 and I think 2 can be played without registering, but 3-5 have to be registered for - though it is free, at least at the moment. The episodes aren't in any way self-contained so if you don't register you're literally just playing the first 40% of the story and not seeing how the vast majority of your choices work out. *Though they simply spoke the name, obviously making it sound like "mask" and never mentioning the q spelling as far as I noticed. Made for an entertaining set of Google searches.

No, PS3 piracy has existed for a while. My understanding is that it's difficult to hack the current PS3 firmware, but older firmware was vulnerable so PS3s that haven't been updated (or maybe at this point it's "were manufactured before a certain time") can be hacked and will run custom firmware in order to allow the execution of homebrew content or copied games. That information may be out of date, though, there may be a new way to exploit PS3s. Basically, it seems like it's always been a bit harder and more effort to engage in piracy for the PS3, but there are definitely plenty of people doing it successfully.

I don't think that link is right, unless IO are going SUPER abstract and artistic with their "trailers".