Got a few irons in the gaming fire at the moment. First, I stayed up late last night to finish the final mission of the excellent Invisible, Inc.  I’ve had it on my hard drive for a while and had taken a few stabs at it before, but never really got that into it and didn’t play very deep into the game. In the past week…

This is the promise he decides to keep?

I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this game before, it looks great. Does anyone have a sense of how long of a game it is?

Heavy Rain had some merit and some ambition, but it’s also a complete mess with maybe the most egregious “twist ending” I’ve ever seen in any medium. It’s already a major storytelling faux pas to deceive the audience about the motives and intentions of a POV character (i.e., Arya and Sansa in the most recent season of…

Oh, you’re underselling the tastelessness of it. It’s basically a minigame where you’re “supposed” to choose the right dialogue options to be able to stall this club owner so you don’t have to strip at gunpoint. There’s actually a fucking trophy for not disrobing past your outer layers. However, the game advances the…

Oh, wait, they make video games?

I think FOX must have promoted the hell out of M.A.N.T.I.S. when it was first coming on, because I remember being really excited for the series premiere as a kid. I barely remember anything from it, but I’m pretty sure I watched the whole season.

Wait, what?

As a semi-relevant aside, does anyone ever get the feeling that Trump’s lawyers are not very good? That cease-and-desist letter may have been one of the most idiotic bluffs I’ve ever seen. Obviously they weren’t going to stop the book from coming out, and obviously they were only going to draw more attention to it by…

Your perspective is starting to make more sense to me, but I disagree. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from dabbling in psychedelics like LSD and mushrooms (which I try to take 1-2 times a year for therapeutic purposes) is that our normal perspectives aren’t even remotely perfect. We think our senses give…

caffeine is beneficial for alertness

I just can’t imagine how being high and losing grasp on objective reality could possibly be pleasurable and fun

Jesus Christ, dude. You’re like a broken record, just repeating the same vague points over and over, never acknowledging what anyone is saying to you, and insisting that you “don’t understand” things that multiple people have explained to you at length. Doing something because you enjoy it isn’t pointless—the point is…

I agree with this: video games are intrinsically an art medium in the same way as novels or films or paintings. There is no definition of art that you could give that does not apply to the video game, unless you’re willing to do some Ebert-esque mental contortions to reverse-engineer a definition that specifically…

Man, Charlie Daniels used to be cool. Cussed in his songs, wrote about getting drunk and smoking weed, took some shots at organized religion...basically everything you could want from a country singer. Folks who only know “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and his recent Twitter presence probably have a skewed idea of…

I mean, not to pile on, but David Cage said the following, in 2011:

Can we please stop pretending like Detroit: Beyond Human might be a good game? There are already a ton of games that engage with themes of artificial intelligence in smart and thought-provoking ways; if anything, it’s kind of a played-out trope. We all know that David Cage has never played any of them and that his new…

For the most part, no. Obviously, certain drugs are pretty intrinsically dangerous—I don’t think people should do meth or heroin, generally—but moderate marijuana use by adults is essentially harmless. As I explained in a previous post, it can also be beneficial in a number of ways that don’t strictly correlate to…

Why does it matter whether it’s the only way? It’s still a way. In many cases, it’s certainly the most convenient and efficient way. That is such an irrelevant objection, and it honestly comes across like your are just reaching for whatever you can come up with to justify a dogmatic, anti-empirical viewpoint, rather…

Listening to bad music when I’m stoned actually kind of pisses me off.