Bartimaeus

Okay, I think it's once per install or something - when it went first down, it wanted me to hit "OK" on something, which I rapidly did because I was in the middle of a game, because now I'm actually properly testing it, and that prompt no longer appears. That's not nearly as bad, but still kind of dumb.

Steam Friends will minimize your game if it goes down while you're online. No problem, I'll just set myself to...oh, wait, no, offline status doesn't exist anymore. Thanks, Valve, .

It doesn't help that Chancellor retired(?) and Earl Thomas seems to be pretty adamant about not playing for the Seahawks as well and the offensive line is almost certainly going to be bad again.

In Eastern Europe we didn't got access to consoles you are used to. We are PC master race all the way While I'm not Barti I doubt that is what he meant by that comment. He wondered which Zelda title would actually resemble a Soulsborne game and came up with Zelda II, the red headed step child of the series (and the most difficult of them). Yep. It's super easy to die because of tiny mistakes, it can be arcane, unreasonably difficult, and the combat is pretty difficult to master (and there are parts that will still be nightmarish even when you do). Seems like the most fitting title...and I would know, having played through it.

"I've never actually played a Zelda game so I can't really speak for myself, but according to a whole bunch of people, Nintendo has already done that a long time before Dark Souls existed." ...What, Zelda II?

Ah, I see. Yes, since there is no offline mode anymore, that is true.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. Trump: What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.

That last part - getting notifications for anyone starting a game - was always standard (and annoying) behavior, though. At least you still have the option to disable it. @Sonic: Yeah, that's how offline/invisible mode works. I'd been asking for invisible mode for like a decade, but not at the expense of not being able to go offline...

Steams Friends had a big revamp. It has some problems, and there are some things I like about it, and some things I don't. Hope they fix the stuff that I don't (e.g. auto-rendering on images, videos, gifs - that should definitely be an option...and no offline mode for friends is a big oversight - there's invisible mode, but you can't stop people from messaging you short of exiting out of Steam, blocking people, or going into the *real* offline mode...which prevents you from playing any online games).

Umihara Kawase (SNES). Shoot me in the face. No, really: this game is a 2D platformer-puzzler a la Solomon's Key, but the controls are just slightly off enough that it makes me want to die. You use an insane grappling hook that almost works well but not quite to navigate around kind of abstract levels that are constantly throwing stuff at you. And I really do mean "throwing stuff" - snakes (or something) that throw acorns at you, water barrels that shoot out flying fish, little trees that shoot out electricity...all stuff that's intent on knocking you out of the sky as you're flying through the level with your just slightly too uncontrollable grappling hook. I want to like it, but it's just too brutal and the controls are just that tiny bit off - enough to make it way too frustrating.

the character still looks like CGI uncanny valley central, but now we can also see that probably most of the rest of the movie relies on about as much CGI and looks about the same, so I guess it's fitting

Yeah, Lost Izalith was made as they were running out of development time, so it was super rushed and pretty garbage.

That was a game that I thought looked like it could be alright when I had only seen screenshots. And then I played it and realized it was just an extremely wonky and bland survival game with only slight traces of anything approaching horror - it was just too janky to be atmospheric. I quit after about half an hour.

Yeah...wasn't he pushing for invasion of Venezuela not that long ago?

why i never

I did not like Ori and the Blind Forest very much at all. I thought the movement was just...really bad for a platformer? Very sticky and floaty. Couldn't get used to it, so I had to drop it. Looked very nice, though. I guess it's like universally loved, but I'm more used to the Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario Bros style of platforming, where precise movement is actually incredibly important as opposed to simply a pretty afterthought, so it just wasn't for me.

...also the absolute worst search system, with so many duplicated pages and completely unrelated results.

That's weird. I would've figured you'd take the lowest amount of damage if you just don't get hit at all. @Ring of Fog & Nito: Yeah, you have to stay on the half of the map opposite to the additional skeletons if you want to avoid aggroing them. It can be a little difficult when Nito does his big mega blast spell and you get caught in a bad position, though.

Wouldn't that be because those jobs have typically paid a living wage, and their disappearance have left a dearth of jobs that do (especially in places that used to be heavily revolving around it)? But that's really just a symptom of a host of other problems - crazy inflation vs. wages not keeping up with it vs. an asinine housing market vs. globalism, outsourcing, and immigrants/imported workers, etc.

I wouldn't go to those lengths for a game I don't very much like, but I've played through all of Shadow of Chernobyl using only the knife and a Makarov. Masochistic gimmicks can sometimes be fun if you like the game enough. (e): And I played through Metro 2033 using only throwing knives. I discovered after many hours of testing that the safest and most consistent way to kill somebody with a throwing knife is hitting them square in their backpacks. The backpack must be holding their spine together or something.

The Special Counsel has indicted an additional twelve Russian intelligence agents for hacking into the DNC (great timing just days before Trump's meeting with Putin). An interesting tidbit sent between Guccifer 2.0 (the persona the Russians were using as a front for leaking what they'd found via the hack) and Wikileaks (referred to as Organization 1 here):

Yeah, aren't warning labels largely there to avoid liability because of the people who did something dumb/ignorant yet were smart enough to get a lawyer good enough to convince other people that it was somebody else's fault? Obviously, that's a huge generalization, but warning labels are probably more used by reasonably cautious people who may be initially ignorant (as we all tend to be at some point) but who are likely not stupid if they're spending the time to make sure they don't do something dumb. A lot of warning labels are pretty ridiculous, I understand (WARNING: do not turn on power drill inside of your mouth), but not every single one is necessarily totally obvious for someone not familiar with the object.

I never much liked co-op in Soulsborne games. It's like the AI wasn't designed for it at all, since it'll just constantly keep switching targets depending on who hit them last (or over a certain threshold of damage rather than simply one hit, I think, in DS2), which with the exception of Abhorrent Beast in Bloodborne (who's such a gosh-danged ridiculous monster that you really need 3 or 4 people to comfortably handle him - beating him solo is so ridiculously hard, but boy was it great when I finally did), almost always makes them rather trivial. I guess it's just a way for people who really cannot hack it solo to keep progressing, at least.

I can see that for joint pain. If it's bad enough (which it often is in my case), it feels utterly debilitating, which is super frustrating and sometimes agonizing when you simply cannot do what you feel you need to.

If you don't need them, don't take them. I got a big bottle of vicodin for my surgery last summer, and I just didn't take any since it wasn't so bad that I felt I truly needed them. The bottle's still sitting in my safe. Also, good to hear you made it.