yeah, but it's still a god link.

And then Blow said, "let there be Indie." And he saw the indie, and that it was good. And then he divided the indie from the mainstream.

I love the humor in the trailer, this looks really interesting. I'm not personally a huge fan of rpgmaker type games but the characters and story could elevate this for me, will have to check it out

Great talk! There have been a lot of Blow interviews lately but they have all been kind of samey, everyone asking the same questions about The Witness and his design style.

FF6 had a pretty good intro, but FF8 is where Square poured like millions just into the intro. You get introduced to the characters on a sudden mission, there were huge cinematics that integrated into what you were playing / the big mechanical spider boss thing. They perfectly crafted it so if you played just the intro as a demo you would think it was the greatest game ever. Kind of the turning point for them though as every subsequent game sucked more than the previous one. Maybe indicative that their heart was in the wrong place?

It's kind of hard to pinpoint games that have especially good intros, because most good games are good right from the start. The class of games that have bad intros but end up being good would probably better demonstrate your point, but FF6, Zelda, and Metroid don't really apply because they have good intros

Peoria, IL, you'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

This sounds interesting. I actually grew up in Galesburg IL which is only an hour away

I'd like to chime in with some empiric evidence, when I went and visited my brother I played New Super Mario Brothers Wii with my niece and it was awesome. I wasn't sure young kids would be able to kick ass in that style of game, I thought maybe having a Wii and being a girl she wouldn't take to that type of platforming but she rocked. When my brother played, if she called dibs on a power up and he stole it she would school him, knocking him into holes and tearing him a new one. We grew up on SMB3 but his kid was handing his ass to him . Anyway, when they came to visit me we played some SMB3 and a lot of her skills translated well, in general she was pretty fearless and would try awesome balls to the wall stuff and pull off amazing things. But when we got to the later levels they got real difficult and she had to let someone else get past some of the tough ones. And I gave her like 30 back to back tries on Bowser's castle but she couldn't do it. She beat NSMB Wii no problem.

If that was too long didn't read, NSMBW delivers plenty of hardcore platforming and is a shit ton of fun in multiplayer, but going by just memories you might be glossing over some of the challenge in SMB3. Granted, you can find the secret whistles and skip straight to the end, or P-wing over a tough level or whatever if you are a pussy, but if you play them 'pure' there is a whole lot of challenge in that game. Also, it's intensified when you play with 2 players because you have to sit through someone else's turn in the shame of defeat if you eat it, and you are less likely to skip the hard levels if there is a bit of a competitive nature in the air.

One last thing that is actually way more important than it might seem, you have to beat SMB3 in one sitting. It really saps the challenge and the pressure that you can restart at the same place from a save state, even in Super Mario World the game is a lot staler since you can just pick up where you left off, and levels don't get unbeat if you have to continue.

Paul I don't think you've used your mac very much. The programs that are running have a white dot next to them in the dock, and the force quit menu also shows everything running. The terminal is way more usable and integrated into the OS, you can drag and drop files, file names, and links and stuff in to a command you are typing. I don't use Terminal that much unless something requires it but the netops guy who made my last company strictly mac lived in it, it's very usable. The unnecessary graphics / transition animations that make PCs without a ton of ram slow don't make even the entry level macbooks flinch whatsoever. I'm assuming you like saying you have a mac because you are so neutral and the warrior-poet internet philosopher paul eres, but it doesn't appear that you've ever really had to use it for much so probably haven't really plumbed its depths. I was made to use it at the last place I worked because the macbooks were standard issue and the IT guys refused to allow people to use PCs because they didn't want to spend half their day and half their budget fixing PC issues, as a consequence I ended up growing so used to exposé / spaces / shit working smoothly and no hitches all the time that I can't see myself ever putting up with a PC laptop again, except when emulating xp in parallels to play some games (which isn't really ideal but it works).

eliss because it's free on the iphone right now, simple but uses the interface well

There once was a man from bantucket

tried a few flash games, Small Worlds, tried Sketch Quest for a smidge but got bored, bunch of other random crap, then fired up the emulator and played Power Blade 2.

Chinese is kind of crazy because every word is only 1 syllable and they only use a handful of sounds to make up their words, so you end up with a ridiculous number of homophones. Like 40 pronounced 'shi' or whatever. And some of the handful of sounds they are using are only slightly different, xi sounds like shi but with the tongue at the tip of the mouth (shi is more like Sean Connery is saying it) and the same with ji/zhi, qi/chi. That's why they try and use tones to further separate the words but they still end up with a bunch of words with the same spelling and tone. Japanese inherits this because they give each kanji both japanese readings and an old chinese reading so you get a ton of the chinese homophones but with no tones to help keep them apart.

i haven't played chrono cross but i'm assuming the regular enemies don't have any direct relation to the narrative and are just filler (according to gilbert's definition). the problem isn't so much grinding to kill a boss it's that most of the game is just a distraction from the story, which is the main focus.

Dude, have you played Chrono Trigger? All the non-boss enemies enemies are guys walking around and you can avoid most of them if you don't want to fight. It has one of the best stories and is one of the best games I have ever played.

chrono cross is a bag of poops.

Voltaire is king shit in my book, but the early works of Jean-Pierre Jeunet are amazing. City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, and Amelie are all great. Amelie is definitely lighter and more accessible but I wouldn't dismiss it. Go watch the City of Lost Children and submit yourself to one of greatest movies of all time.

Also, for french literature don't forget Sartre.

guys, he's not a psychiatrist.

Today I learned that when eres drops a wall of text on a fool it's actually a string of jrpg-like Powerful Concept attacks, and when his opponent is vanquished (whenever they stop replying) he writes down their concepts in his spellbooks and calculates how much xp he earned in the battle.

Finished my last crop: A Confederacy of Dunces and Knut Hamsun's Hunger, so I went picked up some new stuff: Anthony Burgess's Any Old Iron, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and Jean Genet's The Miracle of the Rose. All were used copies and only four dollars each, it's awesome having an awesome bookstore to trek to

Final Fantasy VIII

nice, FF8 doesn't get a whole lot of love

the guy with the bike is an athlete or a skater or a gangster (he also has tattoos and a baseball cap), not a hipster (hipsters don't ride bikes)

the bow tie guy is either amish or a member of the tea party, or from 1890, none of which can be hipsters

Then it's regional, because in San Francisco both these guys fit in and have massive hipster cred.

This webcomic makes no sense. Only the guy in the flannel shirt and Kyp From TV On The Radio(tm&r) are hipsters. Hipsters aren't "impossible to define." They exist.

wait, you don't see the fixed gear bike guy and the twirly mustachioed / bow-tie guy as hipsters? It does seem impossible to define in any way that is meaningful to more than very small groups of people at a time.

Also in probability there is the birthday 'paradox', that even in relatively low groups of people the chance that some pair have the same birthday is unintuitively high. On the wikipedia page it uses the example that in a group of 23 people (similar to a small classroom) the chances are 50% that two have the same birthday, which throws people off because by just gut instinct it feels like the probability should be based on numbers like 23/365, but if it's any pair matching you have to go by the number of pairings which is a lot higher (23 * 22)/2 = 253 pairs to check for a match.

wow. so nice, and warm