Aeronaut

Heads-up: If you disconnect while playing online, an apparent glitch in the system may ban you from the game for upwards of 71,000,000 minutes (apparently over 136 years). Screenshots like this one have been floating around: http://i.imgur.com/0YWQAyA.jpg I don't know if a cause has been determined yet, but you may want to be careful just in case.

I have taken the survey! Out of curiosity, do you know how long it's going to be until we can see the article/results? I'm interested in how each game fared, especially Gen II/HGSS.

No mention of Ikaruga? I've yet to play it myself, but I've heard it's absolutely fantastic. It is a bit of an older game at this point, and although I'm not sure it can run on your laptop, it's on Steam here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/253750

Nintendo has evidently sent out four (4) Smash Bros Demo early-access codes to this past year's Club Nintendo Platinum status members via email. ...but only, apparently, if you had enabled emails from Club Nintendo. Naturally, the whole Club Nintendo site is now so bogged down with traffic that it's practically impossible to change the relevant setting. The public demo will evidently be available on the 19th.

The whole thing looks amazing! I especially love the closeup of the little BLU candy sentry/dispenser/teleporter base in the Spy picture. Nice work.

Is it bad that I didn't even know Greninja could learn Shadow Sneak until that image was posted? Regardless, I'm mostly hyped for the Substitute move shown in the trailer and I'm really not sure why.

Pokémon Bank is now finally out in North America.

I distinctly remember starting a new Golden Sun file and squinting at my old GBA screen long enough to purposefully get to the point where "The Elemental Stars" is played.

You can hit a little button in the bottom-left (I think) of the GTS's main "seeking" screen and it will bring up the option to filter out "Special Pokémon" requests. This doesn't help with the Articuno from what I've seen, but it gets rid of everyone asking for Xerneas and Yveltal. It's quite helpful. Not sure if the patch is required for this to work.

They haven't removed anything as far as I could tell, and they did give a lot of biomes their own music. That said, "Rain" music seems to overwrite an awful lot of the surface stuff when it happens.

Bumpin' this for the release of update 1.2 last night. They added over new biomes, new NPCs, and over 1,000 new items. It's practically a new game!

I believe they mean that the Sentry Busters will now damage their own teammates (enemy robots). Gamemaster says the explosion's actually pretty powerful, so I'm looking forward to seeing some shenanigans with Über Canteens.

Glorious.

I made it about halfway through this topic before my brain mentally processed "Ben AFFLECK. Right." The other half was spent wondering why the hell Ben Stiller was even considered for the role.

Of the 50(?) or so stock maps that exist, I can name only two, Badwater and Frontier, that were played "just about every night" as of a week or two ago. We play on Harvest, Upward, Thunder Mountain, and several other maps pretty frequently, but unless the crazy resurgence in Degroot Keep you're describing has only happened recently, we hardly play it "every single night". Hell, I'd estimate that the server rolls through about 5-6 maps on a typical night depending on what's played. The only monotony I directly recall with regard to map votes is Frontier magically winning more than I'd care to play it. If map voting doesn't automatically happen at the end of every single map, nominating will only even matter if half the server chooses to RTV off the current map. I don't think we'd see nearly as much abuse of the system if that was the case. As for the "recently played" list of maps that can't be nominated, I'd completely agree with lengthening it enough to prevent the same group of maps from being played over and over, but sometimes everyone just wants to play cplrtf_dustrushbadbowlgoldwater.