Vivi22

It's an excellent article and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's noticed this over the years. I've been arguing the case for FFXII in particular in recent years, and after playing Heavy Rain, I have a feeling I'll be doing the same for it. Somehow people thought that FFXII letting you automate mundane tasks like mashing the attack command was somehow worse than sitting there mashing the attack button everytime you hit a random battle. People complain that Heavy Rain might not even be a game, yet it gives the player a tremendous amount of control in how you play it. Somehow, because that control comes from quick time events and button press options, it's less of a game. Odd that it's pretty much the most immersive and enjoyable "role play" experience I've ever had in a game, and I really don't think it would work as well as it does if you added on more gameplay layers. I guess the point I'm getting at is that it's nice I'm not the only one that realizes that trying something new and stream lining the more mundane aspects of a game doesn't mean that the game goes away. There are a lot of genres that benefit from it since you can cut away the things that lead to confusion or get in the way of good pacing. Now if only more people would keep an open mind about games that do things differently in the interests of offering a better experience.

I agree with everything you said, but I wanted to emphasize this point especially. No game has ever reached me on multiple emotional levels as this game did. I typically find that most games don't get anything but the most minor of genuine emotional responses from me, but any other story based game has its work cut out for it in that respect. I'm not sure I'll ever play another game that gets to you the way Heavy Rain did for me.

Both of those will work as well. I'm actually somewhat surprised I forgot about Starting Strength.But for that matter, his stated goals are to build some muscle and tone. CrossFit will do that as well, and it will improve his fitness in more areas than just strength. So is there any particular reason you're against him trying CrossFit?

I played through more than half the game (had over 70 stars), and did play at least two levels in almost every galaxy. The only reason I stopped playing was because the game didn't get any better than the early levels. I actually found a lot of the levels actually got worse rather than better. I agree with the sentiment that Sunshine was shit though. If the repetitive levels weren't bad enough, the shitty water pack mechanics were the cherry on top of the shit sundae. And Bleck, Sunshine and Galaxy aren't better than plenty of games I can think of. In fact, I hated Sunshine so much I gave it to my sister so I never have to look at it again. There are very few games I can say I did that with (the others were pretty much all first party Gamecube games too though).

I wish I could this Friday. I'll be having some friends over that night. I'm always up for some versus at other times though. Weekdays usually work best for me though.

I utterly despised it, largely for the reasons Ajax said, as well as the piss poor motion controls and Mario suits. I've seriously never been more board than I was when you had to use the Bee suit.

That was awesome.

Not to sound like a broken record, but you might want to check out CrossFit: www.crossfit.com Plenty of exercise demos and daily workouts that you can follow. Check out the FAQ for exercise substitutions, and there's a site that posts scaled versions of the workouts for different athletic abilities as well. Best advice I can give is that if you start CrossFit, start of slow and take it easy for a bit, while getting plenty of rest. CrossFit isn't a program you want to jump right into full bore. And Penfold, I just watched those videos yesterday. Absolutely insane. The top guy (I'm blanking on his name at the moment) is looking like someone to watch right now. Crazy performance.

Get it because it is an awesome game. I also agree with you on Blazblue. Mind you, I do love Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (own my copy on the Dreamcast), but that's almost in spite of itself given how horribly unbalanced it is. I'll grant that it's more balanced than a game like that has any business being, but it's still pretty bad. And anyone who thinks Super Puzzle Fighter isn't awesome had better spend the five bucks to see how wrong they are.

Prescribed was 135 lbs, so I was a fair bit under that. They keep moving me up with any WOD that includes presses or jerks or the like though. Since I got almost 14 rounds in death by push press I got to do Fran last night with 85lbs. so I'm only ten pounds off of the RX'd weight for that. Subbed jumping pullups for normal pullups and still managed to do it in 11:40. As a point of comparison, I tried a scaled Fran with 65lb thrusters and high pulls instead of pullups back in September (I lacked the strength for the proper weight and a pullup bar), and was still only about a minute faster then. That was with a month and a half of training behind me at the time. And I'll agree that Tony and Jodi are beastly, but I'd say that about any 110lb woman who can deadlift 3x body weight. Can't say enough about what a great couple of people and trainers they are.

If that were true then Resident Evil wouldn't have made it past the first installment. I mean, the game didn't even have auto aim for fucks sake. As far as I'm concerned, walking in Heavy Rain wasn't that hard to get used to, and since it's not exactly an action game it doesn't bother me that much. I can easily look past that one aspect to enjoy the rest of what it looks like the game will offer.

Oh please. It was convoluted long before that.

We do indeed: http://www.crossfitfredericton.com/fredericton-exercise/ I doubt the main site will ever post strength work either beyond the max effort days they already work in, but I'm not sure they really should anyway. Main site programming will lead to great strength gains and at a certain point you'll hit a wall and need to tailor your programming to you anyway. Tougher to do that for every Crossfitter out there. Indeed. I managed to get my first full pull up in a month today. Had to kip it a bit to get the chin over the bar, but still. Also did "death by push press" tonight. I made it to 13 rounds +12 reps with 75 lbs. The weight might have been scaled, but I still managed the second highest number of reps of the day. I didn't even realize I was the last one going in the evening class until I noticed no one picking up the bar for round 15. Can't agree with this enough, not that that should surprise anyone. But CrossFit is all about building functional strength and fitness. The sort of fitness that's useful in everyday life, and I've never had fitness gains all around like this from any other program.

I just started about a month ago so I'm still building a lot of strength especially in the upper body to be able to do a lot of the workouts as RX'd. It's tough as hell but it's getting easier every day. Only problem lately is a cold I've been trying to shake for the last week. Almost better though. We do our own programming there rather than following the main site. We start with a warm up that's modified from the regular one. It adds some things like Turkish get ups, lunges, and burpees, and we sub some stuff like push ups instead of dips because we have no dip bars (there are rings, but yeah... ). After that we do strength work, going through squats, press, deadlift and power cleans each day. And following the strength work in each class we do a metcon. We usually cap it off with some practice of L-sits, planches, planks and the like for a minute or so. As for numbers, I'm 6'2" and at 253 lbs. now, down about 5 since I started. I'm currently squatting 155x5, deadlift is 195x5, press will be 80x5 after tonight. The only named WOD we've done since I started was Grace. I did it with 65 lbs. in 3:27 with plenty more gas in the tank, so the weight will have to go up next time . Did 100 burpees last night in 14:03, and I'm still working on getting the one pullup I had before I started back. Almost had one last night. It's a bit tough with some WODs right now just because I'm not at my max for some of the weights yet, but it's hard to always figure out something that'll be challenging without being heavier than what I'm pressing or cleaning. They start you off slow on the strength so you get more time under the bar before it gets heavy and so the improvement is fairly steady until you plateau and things need to be switched up. If you can't tell, I can geek out pretty well about CrossFit as well. At least I managed to avoid getting started on diet or I'd be here a while.

Most proponents of duration over intensity will tell you that long duration stuff at a moderate pace will get you into a zone where more of the calories you're burning are fat than anything else. Whereas with high intensity stuff you'll burn fewer calories from fat. So on the surface it sounds logical to go with long duration stuff because more of the calories you burn are in the form of fat. Trouble is that with high intensity stuff you'll burn more calories in less time so if you were to compare say 15 minutes of interval training to 40 minutes jogging at a moderate pace, you'll generally burn a lot more calories going with the high intensity workout, and more fat because of it. And you did it all in about a third of the time it would take jogging. So if you want to burn fat, always go high intensity. There are some other problems with long duration stuff like jogging as well (such as loss of muscle mass) which aren't nearly as big an issue with high intensity short duration exercise making it a better compliment to strength training. Anyway, as far as goals for me, I've joined the local CrossFit gym and my long term goals are to get a lot stronger and increase my conditioning by a large margin. I want to be able to deadlift above 500lbs. and squat over 400 on the strength side. On the conditioning side I want to lower my times on a lot of the standard CrossFit workouts like Fran and Angie. It'd be nice if I could work up to handstand pushups this year and work up to hammering out a straight set of at least 30 pullups as well.

If you're so close to your target that you don't have time for a full charge then why would you wait for the full charge? Odds are popping off a quick arrow to the head will do just fine.

I didn't even know reserve slot holders could force a scramble vote. I doubt I'm the only one who was unaware either.

You were being sarcastic right? Because four years is considered to be anything but a short development cycle even when doing a game from scratch with a new engine. Plenty of talented developers manage to do just that in less time. I'll get excited if Nintendo decides to make a game other than Ocarina of Time this time around. Unless it's on the DS anyway. I could do without ever using the touch screen to control everything ever again after Phantom Hourglass.

I thought you were complaining at the idea of restricting classes and didn't understand that that was part of playing Hunted in the original game. If I was mistaken then I apologize. I still think that playing Hunted could be fun though, although with the changes made to the classes between TFC and TF2 things could end up vastly different from the original in terms of game balance. You really can't say that it would be totally unbalanced without playing it though. As for why it was taken out of TF2 to begin with, I'd put my money on the fact that it's popularity had waned later in TFC's life. Not to even mention that it felt like a completely separate game from TFC (and was really) which would put off a lot of players looking for the standard TF experience (just look at the initial reception arena maps had). It probably should have been a completely separate title altogether to be honest.

It wouldn't be Hunted if every class was available to each side. Back in the day the assassination team could only be Sniper's (maybe Spy as well. It's been too long since I played it) and the game played differently since they couldn't take the other team in a straight fight, but I doubt that would ever work now, hence they get a couple more options. If you guys get the details of where to play worked out then count me in. I'd love to try playing Hunted again. Best time for me is on weekdays after 9pm EST.

The Direct Hit doesn't need a nerf. Perhaps lose the mini-crits on jumping targets, but that'd be it. Sure the thing is poerful, but it should be when you have to actually hit something to kill it. Cue Atmuh laughing rather than explaining his position.

So he named it after OCReMix for testing purposes so people can find it easily in their favourites list since he asked the OCR TF2 community for help in testing it. I fail to see how an obviously temporary name indicates that it's going to be used for this community on it's own, especially when he's indicated otherwise.

That hasn't kept Hydro out of the rotation. I just played Nightfall for the first time, and I thought it was pretty fun despite being unfinished. Granted it was teams of 5 so larger teams could probably get pretty unmanageable. If people want to take it out then I have no problem with it, but for god's sake get rid of Hydro while you're at it.

People are getting tons of items and I'm getting next to nothing. Not cool. I suppose I don't have time to play as much after the update as a lot of people probably did (moving in abour three hours), but still. And am I the only one slightly annoyed at how much stuff you need to craft stuff that you use to craft actual useful stuff? Again, it wouldn't be a huge problem if I had kept everything I ever received from drops, but the only hint of an item system we were ever given was trading which I had no real desire to use. I suppose I'm just continually annoyed by a system that rewards things like having no life and leaving my computer on while I do something productive.

Okay, I thought I was being obvious but I'll clarify. You claim that people who complain about Badlands or Granary being played too often should be complaining about Dustbowl, Goldrush or Badwater being played too often. I'm not going to say those don't get played just as much, but I'm certainly not going to complain about those maps because I like them. I hate Badlands though and wouldn't be bothered one bit if I never play it again. If I wasn't clear enough there: people aren't going to complain about playing maps they like a lot, and saying they shouldn't complain about the maps they don't like being played often until they're willing to complain about the ones they do enjoy being played often is stupid.