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Nine Inch Nails - Empty Shell Burning flesh inside this hell! Now I'm but an empty shell! Drowning in a pool of lies! Ears are ringing from my cries! You are someone that is gone! You left me here I was your pawn! How could I be so dumb inside! I could not tell that you had lied! EMPTY SHELL! EMPTY SHELL! EMPTY SHELL! BURN IN HELL!!!!! You hurt me really ****in bad! My soul is dripping tears of sad! Now I'm really ****in mad! Cant remember feeling glad! This is ****in unlucky ****! Once again I'm in a pit! [screaming] ****! I'm all alone and feeling stuck! EMPTY SHELL! EMPTY SHELL! EMPTY SHELL! BURN IN HELLLLL!!!!! One day I will shake the hand of whoever wrote this.

I got to the Nihilus (or whatever the giant floating baby thing is) and killed it, and it just sat there looping a death animation forever. Thus I got 99% of the game done before it bugged out <_< I didn't get to the ending until several years later. Actually, they kind of did remake it. Turned all the sprites into Quake 2-esque polygons. I didn't think it was very good.

What. Seriously though, there was more suspense in the Blast Pit than in all of FEAR put together. That having been said, a lot of people regard BGtutu as being a step up from the original game (especially when one further modifies it) what's the difference here, really? We could get the same effect.

O rly? Also, this this and this. And this and this.

Oh yeah, my mom (I've already mentioned she's a nurse by trade) had to deal with those things all the time, especially since she went through her residency in a mental institution, where apparently such things are very common. To this day, she forbids me to describe anything powerful as "having an impact", because it reminds her of the impacted bowels she had to treat.

I had 4 within 12. 6 cans of coke a day will do that to you. Good times. I've got a story for it, too. Actually, the aftermath of the surgery was much, much worse than the actual malady itself. Kidney stones cause the most excruciating pain you'll ever experience (if you never bear children without painkillers, but then I hear that those who have experienced both find the childbirth less painful) but it only hurts for about a half an hour (that's still pretty bad, mind you) before it goes away completely. See, there's this little tube that goes from your kidneys to your bladder that the stone goes through. Even if a stone is the size of a grain of sand (normal) passing it is akin to forcing a whole lemon through a straw. It eventually gets through, but when it's going through, it's like you're being stabbed from the inside out. Actually peeing it out is no trouble. You have to strain your urine lest you unwittingly lose the stone (if you need your stones to be analyzed) It's easy to tell when a stone gets passed because you start getting blood and some clots in your urine, because that stone went through your ureter like a razor blade. Pity the man with jack stones. I can't even begin to comprehend it. I got the smooth ones. But at some point, I stopped passing the stones and they got "stuck" somewhere, and they had to take me into surgery. I went in believing it to be pretty minor and ready to bear some pain in order to prevent greater pain. But when I got out of the OR, I felt much worse pain than I ever did with my kidney stones. I can't even remember most of it, but it was just as bad as the kidney stone pain, but drawn out pretty consistently for over 12 hours. By the end of it I was delirious. But oh, that wasn't the worst part (and this is where it gets interesting!) See, when they perform kidney stone surgery they knock you out and then use this snake-claw thing that goes up your urethra. This is a pretty delicate process (thank God), but with the anesthesia and the fact that it's going up your ****ing urethra, the urethra and the bladder are in danger of swelling shut. So they put a stint in. It's a long, flexible plastic tube that goes from the meatus to the bladder, to keep it open and running. I remember it being the width of a coffee stirrer, but it seemed a lot bigger in me. I mean, yeah, you pissed blood when you passed your stones, but it doesn't prepare you for the sheer terror of this. Oh no. You go to the bathroom in PAIN, standing for hours, fist clenched on whatever is near, and wait for the plumbing to kick in. Cause the stint forces open that opening to the bladder, so any time it attempts to close or flex it starts to spasm, and holy christ, you would not believe how much it KILLS. You feel like pissing 14 hours a day, and when you manage it, it hurts like a sonofabitch, and what comes out is not urine. It's thick, red, clotted blood, which will stop up the urethra, and cause your bladder to spasm more, and you wish God would just up and kill you, or at least castrate you, because Holy God the pain. You cry, hard, because it feels like somebody's taking a scalpel to your insides and your outsides, and the local anesthetic they use for the surgery makes you start to furiously itch from the inside, from the urethra to the bladder to the kidneys, and it ****s up your digestive system as well. You're in your own bed in your own house and you feel like you've stepped on a landmine. I was pretty lucky, too, since my mom was a nurse and she had a stash of powerful narcotics that she put me on, heavily, for days. It didn't help much, though. That kind of pain gets you when you're unconscious. BUT that wasn't the best part. After a few weeks had past and I had aged a few years I went into the doctor to get the stint removed. My doctor's a funny guy. I'm sitting there with my pants down and he's checking out the situation and he asks me how I'm feeling, and I say "Alr-" and he pulls on the stint string like I'm a lawnmower. Feeling that, and seeing it, was just about the most unpleasant thing I've ever experienced. See, to keep the thing from slipping out during the waterworks or sleep or whatever, the ends curl up like a pig's tail, and that's why he pulled so hard, to straighten out the thing so it would slip out. This, of course, causes my bladder to have a grand mal seizure, and the stint comes out along with a lot of blood. And then it was over, and I went home a man. And that's my story! :D Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sedate myself after having to recall all that.

Actually, edible eggs are not fertilized, they were at no point considered "alive". All the fertilized eggs with fetuses in them are thrown out (hopefully). Really, if the momma chickens are treated well, a benthamite vegan wouldn't have much grounds to object to the consumption of eggs. But they do anyway, so I don't take them seriously.

In the long run, we're all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to the phone. "Hear that?" you say. "That's dynamite, buddy." -- Jack Handey So in conclusion, gentlemen, **** you. -- NY State Senator Allan K. Race (D), in a written response to a racist group's letter. I wish I were less awkward around strangers. I never know what to say when someone asks me who I am and what the hell I'm doing in their house. -- Andy Ihnatko I had a fortune cookie the other day and it said, "Outlook not so good." I said, "Sure, but Microsoft ships it anyway." -- Tom Singer

*Heads over to Wikipedia* Ooh, that looks interesting. Interesting characters, involving storyline, criticised by reviewers as slow-paced - these are all ticks in my book. Does Shenmue 2 have an unsatisfying, Kotor2-style 'cliffhanger' ending, or is it reasonably satisfying while leaving some unanswered questions for game three? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, it is a ridiculously slow game. I know many people that swear by it. I really didn't see the appeal. Plus, oh ****, what horrible, terrible voice acting. But the thing about Shenmue, and the reason I (sarcastically) suggested it to you was that the main "plotline" is draaaaawn out during the games. The games themselves don't have the usual "part of a set" game format, in which every game has its own focused plot that contributes to a whole. There are fifteen chapters in the whole Shenmue saga. The first game was the prologue. The second game was the first 5 chapters of the story. The third game... never happened. So it had roughly the same effect as if, say, Bloodlines had ended right after investigating the Asylum. It's hilarious, because there are now many, many brokenhearted Shenmue fans who want the story to be resolved, but it never will be. The first game is in the Guinness Book as the most expensive single game ever made ($10 million production costs) The second game was a complete financial disaster (they lost something like $30 million) so I'd encourage you not to play the game, lest you grow fond of it and become a saddo. But hey, there have been some highly dubious claims by Sega that they'll develop a Shenmue MMORPG (only in Taiwan!). That doesn't sound familiar at all. Nope.

That's fortunate, because I already skipped over it.

She's a young girl on a Japanese animated television show. She could be a theoretical physicist and you wouldn't be able to tell. BLADE RUNNAR. It's the version with Deckard's VO. I don't remember if that's the good version or the bad version. DAMNIT BROWSER STOP POINTING OUT MY ERRORS.

But the lulz of the situation would be lessened when she angrily explains what transfiguration is. "So you don't swallow?" is a much better retort, as she is much less likely to continue the conversation after that.

Have I got the Tee for you!

You lost me.

You always, always start off fighting rats, as in all great RPGs. the first game had a fairly intuitive and balanced first few levels. Start off with a pistol, graduate to SMG, to shotty, to rifle, etc. etc. Fallout 2 only really worked if you killed the right guys at the beginning, and most players not familiar with the sometimes nonexistent law of Fallout will assume that killing people and taking their stuff always results in negative consequences. So it didn't work as well as far as progressive combat balance went. My first time through F2, I made it to Vault City with nothing other than what I had left Arroyo with. What they had planned to implement in Van Buren, that I've shied away from to better help myself, was a Road Warrior-esque scarcity of actual guns and ammo. Early on I had planned on making most of the beginning part of the game crossbow-only, but... never did work for me. But in my PnP experience, it hasn't been particularly better or worse than other PnP games as far as the quality of the combat goes. Sequences, rolling to hit, rolling damage, subtracting resistances (something I need to work on), etc. I'm eager to try this SIMPLE combat, since Josh seems to think it vastly improves on the somewhat byzantine AP system. There are a few things I'm confuzzled over, but I'll figure them out in due time. Aside from the rival salvs / slavers / vault question, I'm also dreading that this next little excursion will mimick the last FedEx excursion we had, which is to say, I'm dreading that it will suck. But that's normal. Even the best designed CRPG scenarios can fall flat on the tabletop, and as long as I don't trip myself up, I could very well make the flimsiest few paragraphs into a riveting nightlong adventure. But you can't really do that when the game is planned out (albeit kind of loosely) in the way VB is.

O RLY. Well, that puts a damper on my whole other thing in the PnP forum about Lolth's death. But really, the whole "she's back bigger and badder than evar" thing seems like something they'd do. If it works for Bane, surely it works for Lolth. Hell, maybe I'll have to start reading these things. Tried to get into the Salvatore Drizzt books... Are these of better or worse quality?

It's already in my sig, but there's a nifty little site devoted to hilarious analogies and metaphors from high school essays. "The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work." -Malcolm Fleschner, Arlington "He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up. -Susan Reese, Arlington" -Brian Broadus, Charlottesville Also, I often go to the Joe's Cafe quote database when I need a quick internets humor fix. The site also has a fake song/band name database (they're practically identical) that intermittently will produce titles of middling to outstanding quality. I highly recommend it. "I used to be the self-proclaimed "King of Sodomy." Then I got a dictionary." -- Yobaval "When I asked my doctor why it hurt when I urinate, he pointed out that my **** was on fire. I guess that's why he's the doctor." -- Kevin Bonnay "Whenever I'm driving through the desert, and I see a roadrunner, I run it over and say, "That's for the coyote!" I don't really like the coyote, but it's a good excuse to run over things." -- Craig Stacey Also, anything by TEH MASTAR. "If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason." - Jack Handey

I remember the few awful RL Stein choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps. Remember Goosebumps? Remember RL Stein? He was the JK Rowling of the 90's! Somebody had the bright idea of making him the narrator of the (also awful) Goosebumps TV series, but if you've ever seen or heard the guy, he's a Ben Stein-esque melancholic. Not fun. That's the extent of my experience with the choose-your-own-adventure genre.

Ooh, I hate that! Syberia was like that - it didn't have the words 'to be continued', but it did stop right in the middle of the adventure. Shan't be buying that, then. Until part three comes out, at least. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You know what you'd love, is Shenmue.

DENVER LOOSES. On top of that, our cornerback got killed in a driveby. Happy new year Broncos!

AJ and Githgrrl have unchangable armor appearance. You can dress them up in breastplates or mail and they'll look like they're wearing nuttin'. That doesn't necessarily bother me as much as the fact that they nobody wears their helmets, except for the PC.

I've got no problem with his enjoyment of Oblivion, obviously he enjoys it, that's not what I take issue with. The list isn't "The Games that Scott Tobias most enjoyed in '06", it was "The Best Games of '06", which to me aren't the same things, although some would make the Klosterman-esque argument that all such things are, being subjective POV kinds of things. But he is a professional reviewer, and he isn't posting it in the blog section, but the "games" section. The AV Club hasn't ever really been a CHUD style, prominently editorial site. When they make a statement of quality, it's done so objectively. When they give Children of Men an A, they're not saying "reviewer X thinks Children of Men is an A movie", they're saying "It is the case that Children of Men is an A quality movie". With this, he's not saying "Oblivion is the best game I've played this year" he's saying "Oblivion is the best game of the year", and the official stance of the site itself is split up between these 2 reviewers (I've no doubt that if they were to make a gestalt list, Oblivion would be on top). But that's all really beside the point. The point was that Scott Tobias gave a glowing review, which he could have done and I would be fine with, if he actually had good reasons. But he doesn't. His breathless mention of "personal relations" and RPG Strategy (?) casts doubt on his review, simply because I've yet to see any of these things that are apparently significant and awe-inspiring from the game, let alone hear them described by anyone other than Mr. Tobias. Thus, I disparage the quality of his article, and his choice of Oblivion as "Best of the Year". *edit - It was "RPG Strategy" instead of "RPG Tactics". As for Tobias being "retarded", nonsense. I said the list he made (with its references to "avid gamers") was lightweight and easily dismissable. Furthermore, I said he might just be "ignorant", which is far from "retarded".

Yeah yeah. I just took some lorazepam. I don't even know if that's spelled right, but **** if I care! They say what you're doing when the ball drops determines what you'll be doing for the rest of the year. That's why people try their damnedest to have so much relations tonight. Me, I'm sitting at a cold desk, typing up **** on a message board. Looks like what they say is true. LEVEL 5 BY THE END OF THE NEW YEAR OR I EAT MY HAT.

Perhaps it's just a result of writing something and not implementing it in a timely manner, but all of a sudden I'm having second thoughts about that which I've set up. The whole vault / CODE thing does seem to be rather contrived, and the whole thing seems to be coming out rather Resident Evil survival horror-y (MCA mentioned a vault in his timeline that was made crazy with psychotropic drugs, which I was considering making the Denver Vault, and while I'll have to stretch to make it even halfway plausible, I think I can do it), and while that kind of gameplay has worked incredibly in the past with other games I've played, especially when put in contrast to FedEx and "save the prominent NPC" plots, I don't know how I could make it work with other, less intense parts of the game. I mean, is it really wise to depart radically from the tone and mechanics of a game, even just for a short while? Can I make this part of the game an intense room-by-room combatfest and expect my players to bite just at hard at the "save NCR from infighting and discredit the evil caravan house at the town hall meeting" bit? There's a less "wtf?"-intensive part of the locale that is included more or less wholly in the design docs. It involved a rival (evil) group of salvagers who were living in another part of abandoned Denver, who had infiltrated the first ("good") salvager group that the PCs are currently working for. The PCs would root out the traitors, prevent them from "opening a Pandora's Box", and save the good salvs. I was planning on somehow implementing those parts of the story later on, perhaps when the PCs return to the city later for different reasons. What I could do instead of the whole Vault deal is implement those plots immediately. The problem is, I'll have to write out that part of the game more (I have less time now) since the design docs make clear who the bad salvs are and their intentions, but it doesn't provide much of a narrative as far as how they get discovered, or dealt with. It's a labour of love, figuring all this crap out I've stuck with it this long, I've got to keep at it.