Vivi22

Yeah, I'm not sure what they were thinking. I guess they thought Pyro needed a burn nerf if airblast was getting a buff, but it really didn't need the damage nerf. I could maybe see the after burn rate reduction, but you'd have a much harder time burning the heavier classes to death doing 20% less damage. And I just started to enjoy playing pyro again. Guess that's the end of that for a while.

Are you just looking to up the number of situps you can do or are you looking for more to get you back in shape. Because if you just want more situps then just do them every other day, or even every day after a week or two. Your body can adapt to them pretty fast and before long you'll barely feel 50+. Awesome job. I'm fitting into jeans that are two inches smaller in the waist now with no trouble. Even better is that my conditioning is a hell of a lot better, and I'm a lot stronger now. I'm just 25lbs. away from squatting my bodyweight, and already 75bs. past my pre-CrossFit squat numbers.

There's no way to target fat loss to a specific area, but you can lose fat in the part of the body by changing some things about your diet and exercise to support fat loss. On the diet side, make sure you get plenty of protein with every meal (just about any kind will do, but things like lean meat would be ideal), and reduce your carb intake. That doesn't mean you can't have carbs but try to make eat the right kind more often than not (mostly vegetables, some fruit), and reduce your intake of breads and grains and starchy vegetables like potatoes. It's all right to indulge in that stuff every now and then, but I wouldn't eat them everyday. As for exercises you can do outside around home, interval sprints are one option. Pick some distance (you could measure out 100m, 400m, etc. or just pick some set of landmarks to sprint between) sprint it, then rest for a short period and sprint it again. Start off a little slow with this and build up to doing the sprints with less rest. You can also vary the distance regularly. Other options include biking, or finding a playground near by or even a decent tree that you can use for body weight exercises.

I've had it since release and play it a few evenings a week. My name on there is Vivi22, the same as everywhere else.

Glass houses and all that right. Though I actually like Waste and Junction. I'm not sure how anyone can like Hoodoo though. It's decent if you get past the first map section, but that's kind of the problem.

Why's that? I don't know about the entire FFVII team, but the main guys behind it are still with Square, with the exception of Sakaguchi and Uematsu of course, but I don't believe Sakaguchi was a driving force behind the final direction of the game, and Uematsu is freelance so no reason he couldn't work on a remake (unless he doesn't want to). Sadly the people behind FFVII are also the people who've been running the show for the whole compilation of FFVII and every bad sequel they've released since X. Frankly, I don't trust anyone at Square to be able to remake any game without butchering it.

Nintendo's come out with quite a few gimmicks in the last several years, but now they're going for one that doesn't even have a hope of offering new gameplay possibilities. I hope for their sake that it's more than a more powerful DS with 3D.

I was with you until you said 8. FFVIII was a bad game in almost every respect. A highly polished bad game to be sure, but it was still craptacular. Anyway, I agree with Level 99. There was a time when Square actually tried to explore new concepts and franchises. I miss those days, because a lot of awesome games were made before it became all FFVII spinoffs and sequels.

Perhaps they should work on making just playing the game rewarding enough that you don't have to idle to get anything. And it wouldn't be hard to cut off item drops, or reduce the rate to something absurdly low after a player racks up something like 2-3 hours in a day. I mean really, I'll grant that I only tend to play for an hour a day, maybe two or even three on really rare occasions, but even when it comes to crafting, I've only been able to craft the gunboats and a scottish resistance so far, with a couple of pieces of scrap metal on top of that, and that's only since they made crafting weapons easier. I understand that they want the item system to get people to play more, but they apparently want us to play 24 hours a day to stand a decent chance of getting an item drop we want, or even being able to craft something we want. To me, there seems to be a big disconnect between how long Valve makes you play to get anything and how long a player should be expected to play without either idling or giving up their life. And funny enough, I as reading Srilin's reports on some of the GDC presentations he went to, and both someone from Blizzard and Sid Meier discussed random systems similar to the drop system and how much players tend to hate them when they don't work the way they want even if they're perfectly fair, and how they dealt with them. I couldn't help but think of the item drop system while I was reading them.

True enough. But if it is a red herring they are trying their damnedest to sell it. Like I said, unless they give a more concrete clue than Jack's mysterious injury on the plane or confusion over his appendix scar that let's us actually speculate at another possibility, I'll assume that because I can't see where else they may be going with it yet if anywhere at all.

Unless the nuke seeming to be the trigger for the new timeline was a red herring then you'd kind of have to assume that's where things diverged, which would mean that Ben and teacher Ben were both shot by Sayid. I know I was simply assuming that unless they give some indication that something else caused the split between the time lines.

Indeed. I'm willing to apologize if I came off as a little over zealous in recommending CrossFit, as that wasn't my intention, and I'm more than happy to admit that the differences in our views of effective training and Gibbo's views could easily be based on how we define fitness and differing priorities and values in that regard. But I would like him to back his opinions a little more, and explain in more detail where his belief in "better" methods comes from and how they're supposedly better. I'm all for learning about anything that works because there's always more to learn and it's fun to see if there's something new out there to implement in your own training. I think this may come from some misunderstanding of paleo on his part. I'm not sure where eating rotting meat or eating three different things would come in to the conversation otherwise unless it was just hyperboly on his part. For what it's worth, I pretty much eat paleo zone with the exception of still drinking milk, and not going out of my way to buy grass fed meat. I actually haven't lost much weight since starting CrossFit, but eating a mostly paleo zone diet certainly improves my performance a lot more than before I started, and I notice if I don't eat paleo, even when balancing my macro nutrients. On top of that I've cut fat and built quite a bit of muscle so I can't recommend it enough. It might take some work to dial in the diet just right but weighing and measuring, at least early on, make it a lot easier. My one caveat for anyone who has a history of eating disorder though would be to probably just go paleo and not worry about quantity so much. As long as you eat protein, carbs and fat with every meal and eat until your full you should be fine. Even among CrossFitters there's some misunderstanding and controversy over the Zone diet. About the only decent argument I've seen is people saying that none of the top people at the games last year did the Zone and just ate Paleo, but just because they did well without Zoning doesn't mean they wouldn't have done better with it of course. Some people are thrown off by the fact that the Zone diet will tell you appropriate portion sizes of less than ideal food, ignoring that the ideal Zone diet is pretty close to Paleo, and those food quantities are only there because the goal of the Zone is controlling insulin levels. So if you're going to eat less than ideal food at least eat the right amount in combination with other foods. I'm probably preaching to the choir about this and you may even know it already, but I think it goes to show how much disagreement can rise up simply through misunderstanding, even when two people are saying pretty much the same thing. I'm pretty sure if anyone went to Dr. Sears saying a Zone diet that included a quarter pounder with cheese wasn't the best option for good health he'd agree with them. All that aside though, cool stuff with all of the biking and coming in second Gibbo. You're making me wish it was a little warmer here so I could take the old bike out. Funny enough though, we were put on notice at the gym that we should be prepared to be outside whenever we go from now on, so I expect some running in the WOD's soon. Figures the day after they tell us that I'm outside scraping frost off my windshield.

Yes to achievements. They're worth trying out at the very least.

Except that Blizzard games aren't on Steam.

The Valve stuff is obviously a given. I'd imagine anything that already has a Mac port might make it as well, but otherwise, it'd take a lot of Mac owners buying a ton of Valve games to make any other developer care any more than they already do. Maybe developer attitudes will change if Steam gets installed on enough Macs, but I don't see the big devs caring all that much, at least for now. Smaller companies on Steam may be another story.

I have to agree with you here actually. I only use four mind you, but I map voice chat and last weapon used to my mouse on top of primary and secondary fire. There are other games where I might map another action to my mouse, but I find all I need is the four in TF2. Still, this is good news for Mac owners, though I won't be surprised if the Mac version of every game will have huge issues on day one.

Pretty much this. They literally didn't change a thing about the old ending. They just showed what happens after the point where it used to fade to black and roll the credits.

Thank you. I've read enough comics to have seen plenty of actual retcons in my day. Adding a bit more onto the ending to lead into a sequel is anything but.

Am I one of the only people who never got the appeal of Hotel Dusk. I tried (oh how I tried) to get into it, but my god was it ever boring. Not that I'm happy to see a small dev go under though. I won't say that the Hotel Dusk concept didn't have potential, it was just so poorly executed that I couldn't keep playing. There's always the chance future iterations could have been polished and paced a lot better.

How so? I do go to an affiliate and although I pay more than I would for a regular membership to any other gym, I also get instruction and/or form correction from the trainers every time I go. On top of that, I get personalized strength training, not to even mention the motivation of doing CrossFit with other people and trainers who support and encourage you to improve. More expensive than another gym? Sure. Overpriced? I wouldn't say that. Even then, there's no reason a person can't follow the programming on the CrossFit main site on their own. All the information is out there, and plenty of people see tremendous results on their own just by following the WODs on crossfit.com. Even better would be to book some appointments with a trainer to learn the movements properly and the progressions and get some form correction, then go off on your own, but if that's not possible, you can figure it out on your own as long as you're smart about it. I don't see how it's over complicated to be honest. It's certainly no more complicated than any other program. The most complicated part is learning the movements properly so you don't hurt yourself but that's true of any program that actually lays it all out for you. CrossFit actually couldn't get much simpler since the programming is available on the site for free like I said. Now if your problem is with someone gaining weight when they have trouble with it, the only real solution is to eat enough to support weight gain and lift heavy. CrossFit will get you there eventually if you do that, even if it isn't quite as fast as a program that focuses solely on strength and weight gain. Unless of course you're just looking for extreme hypertrophy of the muscles, which is a pretty useless goal from a fitness perspective as far as I'm concerned. I won't knock the people who like to look like a body builder or actually be a body builder, but that kind of training has little value for most people. So what? Most people don't need training optimized for one purpose since most people don't make their living playing one sport, or power lifting, or any other instance where very specified training is necessary to reach an elite level. Regardless, your average person will reach a level of overall fitness far greater than they likely thought possible if they follow CrossFit. If someone's goal is just to be as strong as they possibly can be in powerlifting movements then they can follow a more structured powerlifting program, but most people don't care about that and wouldn't want to just be strong at the expense of being able to run five miles or last through a hockey game with the boys anyway. Saying CrossFit isn't optimized is only a valid criticism if someone's goals require optimization in one or two disciplines. Agreed sort of. You might be stronger and maybe a better runner, but you'll also be worse in a lot of other fitness areas that CrossFit trains on a regular basis. It depends on your goals. If all you want is to be able to squat heavy and run five miles then go ahead and just squat and run five miles. If you want to be able to lift heavy, and run or do just about anything without gassing though, you might want to give CrossFit a try. And just for the record on the running thing, there are people who have essentially run Ultra-marathons after doing nothing but CrossFit or CrossFit Endurance training. So maybe just training running will make you a better runner, but with some CrossFitters showing 80+ miles in a day is possible without ever running more than 5k in training, while maintaining the muscle mass to lift heavy, it's hard not to see value in the training.

A new update just downloaded for me: I look forward to seeing what other people find so I don't have to waste my time.

You mean a guy who's a pretty good Medic was on the same team as FROGG and decided to play as Medic and would even go so far as to support him when he's running into battle? The nerve of that guy actually playing smart! Also, I've seen Brush heal the whole team often enough, even with a really good player on his team, to pretty much be able to say drop it atmuh.

I liked much of the voice acting. Some of the performances can be a bit awkward at times, but it's still up there as some of the best I've seen in a game a lot of the time. But maybe my opinion is a little jaded because I vividly remember the days of the "Jill Sandwich" and think the voice acting in most games even now isn't that great.

You might have played differently on eight playthroughs, but I guarentee you had plenty of weapons and items in each of them that you wouldn't have used even with a different character build. A lot of the weapons you get just plain suck or are duplicates of others and thanks to the crappy inventory system are a bigger pain to get rid of than to just ignore. Toss in a skill interface in combat that's quicker and easier to use mid battle and you'd be closer to making ME1 playable. It'd still suffer from too many other problems that ME2 seems to have dealt with to make it worth it though as far as I'm concerned. Even if you do feel that the stat management is dumbed down and that it's somehow less of an RPG because of it there's no denying that they got rid of most of the things that slowed down the experience and let you get right into the action and enjoy the actual game without being pulled out every few minutes with tasks that most people do think are mundane. And I have to disagree with you in your thinking that RPG's even need in depth control over stat development. Some like Oblivion have it and thrive on it because that's what their fan base wants. Most RPG's don't feature any great amount of stat development or control though. Even ME1 was pretty basic in it's implementation, and the most customization it really had was choosing which abilities you wanted to pursue, or which of a handful of different weapon upgrades you'd use, with most options being pretty useless. I see no problem with streamlining this stuff, or even ditching it entirely in games that already had a pretty basic core system that was complicated by an over abundance of pointless options.

I like having access to the info and everything for games right there when you click on them. It's nice to have info on TF2 updates right in front of me every time they happen for example. But even with 38 games on my Steam account it's slow as fuck when you first load it. They really better work on that because 38 really isn't that many games.