Ego

Pretty cool Hotline Miami analysis. (spoilers!)

I'm totally hooked on Far Cry 3 now I have all the takedown skills and the wingsuit + parachute. Taking out a few guys with chained and knife throw takedowns and jumping of a cliff never gets old. Some of the set pieces are pretty damn cool as well. Such a shame the story comes out so bland because the protagonist and his friends are such shitty characters.

1. Journey 2. The Walking Dead 3. Dragon's Dogma 4. Dishonored 5. Batman: Arkham City

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWd2wPnvMjI

The Intouchables - Very formulaic, cheap entertainment. Meh. Holy Motors - Thanks for reminding me this got released. This was extremely well made and very compelling. An unpredictable, kaleidoscopic ride which confuses but does open up with every scene. Will certainly give this another go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8svcNhBbWok

Steam linux beta client got "released". http://media.steampo...aller/steam.deb Ubuntu 12.04 is only supported distro for now but there's a working packagebuild for Arch already. Even if you haven't been selected for the beta yet you can avoid the access check by running steam with something like: steam steam://install/440 That will try to install TF2. Haven't been able to install for some reason. Either segfaults or tells me the servers are busy. Here's my system running Amnesia on Steam. Everything seems to be working, even the overlay. I'm on an unsupported platform so it was still a bit of a hassle to get everything working. The games I tried (Amnesia & World of Goo) installed fine, but the architecture and environment detection is a bit messy and there are always some dependencies missing. It will be interesting to see how they are going to handle the dependency problem. I'd assume they'd want to avoid using shared libraries to maximize OS compatibility. Hope I can install a Valve game soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdBU3ebWvF4&feature=plcp

Oh man Miami Hotline is pretty damn awesome. Amazing aesthetics, awesome music. Also, what is this unremovable Singstar icon doing in my PS3 game list? Wtf Sony...

Still enjoying Dishonored. Might do another playthrough to play like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eqOMI8_txw

Dishonored. Much better than I expected. Art is truly fantastic, worth it for that alone. The textures are a bit low res, but it doesn't really bother me with this artstyle. Plays smooth as silk, PC version runs extremely well. Very satisfying combat with a rather interesting pace. It takes some great game design from games like Bioshock and its predecessors. A rich environment inviting you to explore and gameplay that encourages experimentation.

Just finished Black Mesa. Apart from sticky ladders, some difficulty and level design issues this is pretty much the perfect love letter. It's unbelievable how much of the memorable stuff they got right or even improved upon without copying any of the source material. The enemy AI, the voice acting, the sound design, the level design, the scripted sequences... All so inspired by early and later Valve games yet never lazily copied over. I hope they get all the press praise they deserve next week.

Hitboxes were too large in CS:S. They made them smaller in CS:GO. Combine that with new recoil behaviour and people start whining because they can't hit shit. I think it's an improvement.

I was sort of preparing to be disappointed because proper quality control in a long running community project like this has to be very difficult. But it looks and sounds absolutely fantastic. I'm impressed!

No their distribution sucks. Site is down, mirrors are down, only "official" tracker is down... They should have just put it on PirateBay or something. I'm downloading now (at 130KB/s :() using this torrent file: http://www.mediafire...ba8kfb4xu4jjvna But the tracker in that file is down so add these trackers: udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80 udp://tracker.ccc.de:80 udp://tracker.istole.it:80 Edit: HTTP mirror that is up for now: http://www.shacknews.com/file/32999/black-mesa-source-10-windows-free-game

Tried Guild Wars 2 up untill level 15 or so. It has a nice flow with the world events and quests you don't have to request and track. But despite all the things it's trying, it's still too close to the WoW/same old MMORPG formula to grab my attention. Action is very standard, quests are the usual kill, click & collect. Exploration is OK, but never comes close to the immersive exploration I had with WoW in the early days. I have very fond memories of being totally immersed in the WoW universe. But this just doesn't do it for me because of the lacking art direction or immerson breakers like instant fast travel. The lore of some of the races seems pretty nice but the quest story lines are utterly boring to the point I'm avoiding them. Meh, maybe it's for the best. MMORPG's are a silly time sink after all. Others: FIFA 13 demo - getting more iterative every year PES 2013 demo - still far off, let's hope they can pressure EA again in a few years so they'll be less complacent To the Moon - very cheesy with gameplay that's so silly to the point it shouldn't be interactive at all. But I somewhat like the story and the music and am looking forward to see how it ends, which is more than most full priced titles can do.

My young mind loved Serial Experiments Lain when I first saw it. I'm thinking about watching it again. You like it? Just finished The Bridge. Crazy intense finale. LUDD knows what's up.

Yes, industry support seems to be great. Pretty much all the big names in PC gaming are on board for this. They're putting out a development kit first and a consumer version later with a possible resolution upgrade. High FOV, accurate headtracking, not too heavy... Looks like it might be the first succesful VR kit. I would pay a lot of money for this.

I think the effects can be very interesting but the whole culture surrounding psychedelics puts me off because of all the new age idiots that take themselves too seriously. I do love the spiritual sensations an otherworldly insights psychedelics bring me. But some people attach some really crazy truths to those experiences. I've gone to my limit with LSD to the point I had an uncontrollable psychotic meltdown in which the universe collapsed over and over again. It was a bit dangerous but an awesome experience in retrospect. Especially since I remember most of it. I'll probably try a large dose again in a more suitable environment like the middle of a large forest where I can't freak anybody out or hurt myself too bad. Still need to try DMT. I would say my trips have raised my appreciation for a lot of things, most importantly life itself. For a friend of mine, things didn't go well and it caused a period of psychological problems for 6 months. I've been hesitant to recommend psychedelics to anyone ever since, even though they've been so good to me.

The Tatami Galaxy, another great anime by the director of Mind Game and Kaiba. Too bad I'm having a bit of trouble to keep up with the subtitles during some of the extremely fast monologues.

I started watching Borgen. Not bad so far. Oh and Mad Men will be starting again next month. Looking forward to it.

I finished season 2 of Boardwalk Empire and have grown to hate pretty much every character. I don't think I'll bother with season 3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp_wBGPkBcg

Golden retrievers, labradors, german shepherds... That's what I grew up with. I also met a huge but super gentle St. Bernard on vacation once and kind of want one ever since. It's all just from random experiences though. I don't like jack russels because I've met some nasty territorial cunts. Not a fan of small dogs in general. I hate their barking and met too many with a bad temper.