Top Gun

I don't see any problem with the system as-is, but then again I'm the type who's willing to play pretty much any of the stock maps at any given time. (DeGroot 4 lyfe!) The thing is, the reason why certain maps come up almost every night the server is active is because those are the maps that the majority of the regulars enjoy playing. And I don't see anything wrong with that...if almost everyone has fun with those, why shouldn't they be seeing the most playtime? I've played in servers with regular map rotations before, and it honestly gets pretty boring knowing exactly which map is coming up next all the time. The nomination method allows for much more immediate flexibility, and even if random stuff like Egypt or 2Fort gets thrown up there as a troll choice, I don't see anything wrong with playing them every once in a long while. The only choices I'd honestly like to see removed from the server are the backwards/rainy/night variants of maps, since those are just clones that take up vote choices from legitimately different maps. I guess my thing is that I don't really understand having a deep pathological hatred for certain maps, to the point where you'd leave the server for the night if one of them got chosen. If it's a map you don't like, why not just go Demoknight or Battle Medic or Punching Hoovy or Lucksman or Fungineer and just derp around for 20 minutes? I promise you, engaging in random shenanigans is guaranteed to not cause physical harm.

Yeah, in normal trade servers, the most any normal weapon would run is two weapons or a scrap, but most people in normal games are willing to trade 1-to-1, or even give you a freebie.

...level five? Dude, and I thought just crafting it once would be enough of a challenge.

I won't even ask what happened after I left.

Wow...they're, like, going all-in on this. Maybe Robin convinced a few random employees who were bored with DOTA2 to jump in or something.

Somewhere Gamemaster is breaking down in tears.

Happy 5th burpday server, and thanks to Baha for being such an awesome and generous host! (Heh, so much for possibly getting something by not opening a crate. )

My earlier stuff wasn't really implying that the very existence of additional features was a bad thing in and of itself, more that people using said features when better alternatives already exist didn't make sense to me. More to the point, the fact that Microsoft just spent so much effort pushing unnecessary features that already have plenty of people raising their eyebrows (and that's even assuming said features manage to work properly) suggests that they don't really know what their doing in terms of this hardware's actual purpose. This column has a great take on it.

Oh, I know I'm in the minority, but that just makes me all the more upset. (I was reading an article the other day about people using their iPads of all things to hold up in front of their faces and take pictures, and I was like...do you realize what massive idiots you look like right now?) The average user has little to no appreciation for the actual quality of the individual features they're using; they're willing to give up functionality for the sake of convenience. I, on the other hand, am not. And yes, I'm sure the PS3 is by far the most popular Blu-ray player out there, but a big part of that is because it served the same role that the PS2's DVD-playing capabilities did at its release: it offered a feature that the majority of people didn't have access to at that time, which was one of its big selling points. By the year 2013, this no longer applies, since most people either have their PS3 already, or just a normal stand-alone Blu-ray player. As for Netflix, even if you put the enabled TVs aside, you still have the whole current gen of consoles, plus the aforementioned stand-alone Blu-ray players, plus many DVRs, plus your usual array of smartphones and tablets. Using Netflix access as a selling point of a new console is kind of meaningless now. Here's a fun fact I just came across: the One apparently dedicates 3 GB of RAM out of its 8 total for its OS...because it's actually running three OSes simultaneously. Oh Microsoft, never change.

I'm with you. This whole philosophy of "let's cram everything into one device!" has led to a market saturated with identical-looking, touchscreen-only smartphones that are jacks of all trades but masters of none, and I want absolutely nothing to do with them. My ancient candy-bar dumb phone makes calls and sends texts, and that's all I need it to do. If I want a camera, I'll buy a quality DSLR (or hell, even a small pocket camera) that's designed from the ground up to take quality pictures, not use a built-in one with a pinhole-sized aperture. If I want to play games, I'll buy an actual gaming system with actual games on it that don't involve slicing up fruit. If I want to do some Web-browsing, I'll use my actual desktop, where I can middle-click open new tabs and utilize downloads right away and generally not have to smear the hell out of the screen in order to scroll. It's all lowest-common-denominator nonsense, and all of these "features" on the One (welcome to 2001 with that name?) are in the same vein. If you have a TV subscription, you probably already have a cable box or the like, so why would you need another device doing the same things, most likely not as well? I'd assume pretty much everyone who wants one has a Blu-ray player by this point, and both those and more recent TVs have Hulu Plus and Netflix and the like built in already. I mean, I probably wasn't going to get this new thing anyway, since the only machine of the previous gen I invested any time into was the Wii, but this presentation just turned Microsoft into a laughingstock.

Works for me! And on top of all this, backpack expanders are on crazy sale for only 99 cents right now. I grabbed the one I needed, plus an extra to boot, because hell, you can't even buy a candy bar for that much.

Hee, this is a riot.

I understand what you mean, but part of the problem there is that English dubs generally try to match the lip-flaps of the original animation, which are at least nominally set up to match the Japanese voices. (In reality, the original Japanese dubs don't tend to be extremely strict about matching the animation, at least not when compared to what we're used to with Western animation.) As a result, there can be certain situations where you wind up with a big gap in lip movements that winds up not working too well with the English translation. The best dubs can mostly work around this, but even then you'll get the occasional slightly-awkward moment that there's no real way to avoid. For more average dubs, they come up much more frequently.

Well I will agree with that, and there are plenty of times that it shows. I think part of my problem is that a lot of the anti-dub arguments out there (I'm not saying yours at all) are founded in this idea that English versions haven't evolved since some of the cringe-inducing jobs of the mid-90s (the wonderfully cheesy dubs like Charlemagne mentions aside), and that's just not true. And as someone who generally prefers listening to stuff in English, those start to grate on you.

Well, I'll keep any other thoughts to myself, but I will say that there are a few dozen series where I'll never so much as touch the Japanese, because I feel the English cast did a superb job with the material. There are a few other series that I'd likewise never imagine watching in English, but I think that English anime dubbing as a whole is far better than you're giving it credit for. I can't speak for the technical production side of things, but I'd like to think that I can at least differentiate good acting from bad.

...huh? The dub of Stand-Alone Complex is fantastic.

If you want to incur the wrath of Frost, sure, go ahead.

From what I've heard from people in the know, SSDs don't do a whole lot for most games, since you're generally loading data from the hard drive fairly linearly for them anyway. It might be worth a test, but I wouldn't expect any huge gains. Speaking of space, I found that the game was taking up an extra 10 GB or so after the upgrade, but then I figured out that the process hadn't deleted the old .gcf files in the SteamApps folder. I ditched those, and TF2 seemed to run fine without them, so my total install size is about the same as it was before.

I'm currently plodding my way through the conversion, so we'll see how long this takes. Also, someone managed to . Everyone can pack it in and go home.

Not sure if it's "weird," per se, but using any controller thumbstick without having the Y-axis inverted is an abomination to me. I largely started out my gaming career playing Descent using a joystick, so the flight-style stick setup was ingrained into my brain from a young age. Even with a mouse, though I keep the Y-axis normal for FPSes and the like, any time I'm controlling something that's flying, it needs to be inverted, or else my brain breaks.

My brother got me a third-party replacement controller one Christmas, but the problem with it is that its stick's range of motion doesn't have nearly as much precision as the original first-party controller. It'd be fine for more broad-motion stuff, but I found it just about unusuable for GoldenEye or Jet Force Gemini. So for now, I'm stuck with the original used first-party controller which has a massive deadzone. *sigh* Speaking of, one of these years I really need to dust out my old fatty PS2...

The Build Tool tracks sentry kills, healing on allies by your dispensers, and I think maybe teleports too, and it ranks based on kills.

I don't really watch many LPs regularly, not because I don't enjoy quite a few of them, but mainly because most of them are just too damn long: I'd rather spend that time playing myself than watching someone else do it. He was mentioned before, but I do enjoy watching Critikal's stuff, mainly because he finds the most obscure godawful games on the planet and then lays that wonderful monotone over them. I like KurtJmac's stuff, especially his Minecraft series Far Lands or Bust: he's traveling what amounts to 12 million meters from his spawn point, without using mods, and using it as a fundraiser for Child's Play. He doesn't do anything particularly special gameplay-wise, but he winds up talking about all sorts of interesting random topics, and I just find it something relaxing to sit back and listen to. My favorite LP series I've found has to be from a couple of Aussies called Two Awesome Gamers. Their main claim to fame is a series based on the Minecraft map Skyblock, which as the name suggests is a little cube in the sky that you have to live on somehow. The reason I love these two so much is that they pretty much fail at everything they attempt, and/or have horrific luck, so the entire thing turns into a comedy of errors. They're also doing a series on the indie game Crashtastic, which they're about as successful at as Skyblock.

How long were you guys on that MvM map, anyway? I woke up from an impromptu nap too late to join the server crowd, but I happened to glance at my friends list a few times, and it seemed like it was a long slog.

I'm not sure if you can get much more unusual than a Zelda mix using a beer bottle for all of the instruments.