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Jake

Idle Thumbs 83: Free Macintosh Warez

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Idle Thumbs 83: Free Macintosh Warez

Day four and you're almost there. Coins pile up, infrastructure is laid down. You miss your friends, even if you never knew their names. You wanted to kill everyone on earth, but the person you killed was yourself. Welcome to real life.

Games Discussed: Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube, The Kill Everyone Project, Real Lives 2010, Frog Fractions, The Visit, Mark of the Ninja, Dishonored, Glider, Imperial 2030

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Internet communities are a weird thing. I often resent the uninformed position older people take, where the position is that internet communities are some vile thing full of lazy, sloppy nerds or full of criminals who want to skin you and turn you into a lamp shade. And now I'm also old enough where people grew up and the internet was just present since day 1 for them. I wonder what that perspective is like. Really, people younger than me are lucky in a sense because the internet becomes a tool to find people where you do fit in, because your possible social circles aren't limited to the school yard or scouts or community sports teams, that sorta thing. The realm is huge and awesome.

This upcoming March is going to mark the 10th year I've been at one community. Ten. Years. In the past I used to scoff at such an idea and think that I'd be a loser for reaching such a benchmark, but now that I'm coming up on it and actually have all these relationships built with people it feels legit. The community has been through a lot too, despite it being some 10 or 15 thousand people strong. Plenty of them are lurkers, and most of them fraction off into their given sub-forum of choice, but it's tight-knit. There's real pain when a community member dies, but there's also a strange thought of how remarkable it is that such information gets to us in some way or another. Then there's moments where couples who met via the community get married, or have kids together. Hell, even for me my last two relationships started as meeting someone online and bridging the physical gap after.

I dunno, my two cents. I love the internet and the people I've gotten to know through it and I can't imagine myself living in any other era.

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Agreed. Idle Thumbs exists because of a tight-knit group of Internet friends. I was in three or so really close feeling communities of probably 50-100 people max last decade, and it's all largely responsible for every professional opportunity I've had post-high school.

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Oh man, shout out for the Glider discussion - it came with a pretty robust level editor; it was my very first experience with level design (I think I was in 3rd grade).  Those are some good memories.

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The experiences that Sean and Jake described with stealth games are pretty much exactly what happened to me with Deus Ex. I really wanted to actually be stealthy because I felt like that was the whole point, but I would always fuck it up in some way where it wasn't clear to me what I had done wrong. Then I had a choice between reloading in the hopes that whatever it was wouldn't happen the next time, or just giving up and grudgingly blasting my way through (although even that was difficult because I'd been focusing on non-lethal upgrades). It's really weird that even in games that allow you not to kill anyone, murdering everyone on sight is still almost always the path of least resistance.

Also, I grew up in Mississippi and I definitely knew kids who called levels "boards," but it always confused me too. Everyone's moms called controllers "paddles," and NES Game PaksTM were "Nintendo tapes."

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I felt the opposite way about the darkness mechanics in Amnesia, and it's one of the reasons I never got too into that game. The fact that there is something inherently scary about darkness means that putting an arbitrary mechanic over it feels to me like the game is telling me when I should be scared. It took me out of the game when my character was freaking out while I was just chillin'. It was also unclear to me how dark it had to be before you started losing sanity. Maybe I was just playing the game wrong or something.

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Jake! I actually have played The Fool's Errand! Well, I played it collaboratively with a couple friends, about a year ago. That game is pretty neat. I don't really have anything meaningful to say. Just wanted to express that you're not alone, I guess?

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Jake mentioned Cliff Johnson's 3 in Three, it brought back so many memories of playing the shareware of it over and over and over again. I don't think I ever actually bought the game, just played the demo.. It sort of blew my mind back then. Here's his website, if you want to check it out. You need an emulator to play it on Mac, though..

EDIT: Actually, it looks like I played something very similar, about a number/letter growing up in a computer world in a VERY similar style.. WHAT GAME IS THIS?!

EDIT2: It is called System's Twilight, and it is awesome.

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Oh man.. weird little internet community's...

I'm still running one :) the Magicball Network, about the Little Big Adventure games. It evolved from a free forum on the internet I found around 1997 to a fan website I created a few months later till the MBN community that I founded in late 2000 and is still there. There have even been a few meetups in the Netherlands and UK.

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I'd just like to say that I prefer to think "Mark of the Ninja" is really titled "Mark the Ninja," where you play as Mark, the Ninja

I'm down.. let's make this happen. Mark is a white upper middle class lawyer that doubles as a Ninja.

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Oh and by the way Jake the coop in Halo isn't the same as the single player storyline. It's kind of a bummer.

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Oh and by the way Jake the coop in Halo isn't the same as the single player storyline. It's kind of a bummer.

It's not?? So it works different to all the other Halos?

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Dishonored is another FPS (First person stabber) where all the shooting you do is with your left hand.

I had a lot of thoughts on internet communities I might write later. That discussion evoked some really powerful memories for me.

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Oh I was misinformed. I think the person that told me was talking about the Spartan Ops episodic series. You should be able to play through with another person without it being different.

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Funny, all the men on my mother's side of the family have vanity license tags. My grandfather has the word peace in classical Greek (transliterated, of course). My eldest uncle decided to be cheeky; since his name is Charles III, he got CPP 111 for his tag, so it looks like an ordinary tag, but it's secretly a vanity tag.

My youngest uncle, now his is interesting. His tag says MICHAEL, because his name is Michael. How did he get that tag you ask? Well, he's a cop. He took advantage of his insider database access to check the date that the MICHAEL tag expired, and ran out and snatched it before the other guy could get it renewed.

Also for some reason everyone in my immediate family has a specialty tag: Two Hunley commemorative tags, and one Eagle Scout tag.

I guess there is something to that whole people with vanity tags knowing each other thing. I don't know LAWYER, though.

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Related to the control schemes discussion:

http://i.imgur.com/JgKda.jpg

Also, I still struggle with QTEs (and similar) with the Xbox360 controller I bought over a year ago. My brain simply refuses to make a distinction between RT and RB or acknowledge that "x" is on the left and not on the bottom.

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