Lamp, broken circa 1988

Honestly, I don't mind developers having the ability to patch games, or even the idea that I'm beta-testing something for full price at launch. For one, if a cartridge or an early disk system game shipped bugged/bad, you were basically stuck with bullshit forever. The ability for a developer to go in and fix mechanics is still pretty fucking magical compared to that part of my life. Secondly, I see no difference between buying a game day one and buying any other technology day one. The risk you run as an early adopter has been severe long before this specific scenario of patchable console games. Third, and this is personal, but I think when games break it's pretty fucking funny as long as it's not wiping save files. I don't even mind the DLC thing that much! If I don't want that game's DLC, I don't buy it. The cases where it's "removing something from the game" are vastly outnumbered by cases where it's content that needed more time or it was just a weird passion project by a part of the development team. Where I draw the line is the X-Box One Microtransaction madness in games like Forza, Ryse and Crimson Dragon. The entire concept of paying for one-time use items or time-limited XP boosts is fucking deplorable to me. However, if I don't like a thing, I don't pay for the thing. This doesn't seem like a weird idea.

I own every Madden from 2006-2012 now. I bought them for $10.50. "why," you ask. Because $10.50 to drag a friend through madness is a pretty reasonable price.

Here's the new single from The Men. There's a new album from The Men coming out in March, called Tomorrow's Hits. Five full-length albums in five years. Yep. EDIT: Hahah, holy shit. According to that link, the new album was recorded before New Moon even fucking came out. "Do what you love," indeed.

I literally had this conversation a few days ago. "man when I was watching there were these dudes that were all in like uniform and they were like evil cheerleaders? they were awesome." That time is a lot closer than six or seven years. also fuck off with Scotty 2 Hotty hate. A lot of that old Cruiserweight Champion era stuff is underrated.

(I would embed a youtube video but the only copies of this song on youtube are static images with weird deformed anime girls and a live version with the wrong name attached to it that totally falls apart. this song is "II" by Perfect Pussy) I was understood to be living I existed only when seen So I died of self-importance I killed the parts of me that still wanted things I tremble with no desire, I need nothing In loss I discovered completion In having things stolen I found that I had more than ever in the absence of everything, I found all things And I understood myself So I understood nothing So I stopped questioning All things pass through me, I’m a tough boy Wild and innocent and dangerous as hell I’m awake And awakening I am here and I have died I killed the parts of me that said that I know I killed off all the parts that keep me awake I’ll die a thousand times to prove that I’m living I'll kiss myself to prove that I’m not afraid of snakes Nothing shakes me any more; I’m tough now, baby Really, I have lost all feeling And I've lost all desire for feeling And I can't thank you enough

I'm going to suggest this as the rule for remakes: this podcast I listen to called Insert Credit talked about when a remade or re-released games are new games (an argument inspired by the release of The Stanley Parable, which is a fine tuning and update of an old Half-Life 2 mod) and the conclusion they came to is that if the changes made effect the way you play the game then it's a new game. So by their logic, the PC release of Spelunky is a new game on account of the Daily Challenges and how that can change your strategy, where as Ducktales Remastered is not because there's no mechanical changes at all. We don't have to do shit that way but I think it's an interesting point.

I'm going to say No on Jai Paul. I took a pretty good amount of care in writing the rules in which I left out bootlegs as eligible releases, and I consider the whole scenario around the release of those songs as an unauthorized bootleg of unfinished demos. Or, put another way, I believe Jai Paul and XL are telling the truth about it being unauthorized.

so the main gameplay rule of Risk of Rain is that after selecting an initial difficulty (basically casual/hardcore/insane) the difficulty raises on its own over time, so you have to become efficient at farming and exploring while you progress through the levels of the game to avoid getting trapped at one of the higher difficulties and having to wait through harder waves to get things done the names of those higher difficulties? Insane, Impossible, I SEE YOU, I'M COMING FOR YOU, and HAHAHAHA I had just crossed over into I'M COMING FOR YOU when I beat the game for the first time i think i love this game

haha, scared off someone I was very much into. they asked to hear some of the music i've made, and, well, i shared where's that bernie mac video, with the "boy just be yourself" bit fuck

If The Last of Us is the peak of this generation, and the next generation is going to be spent trying to "top it" then I'm totally fine with sitting this cycle out. It looks great and seems like it was very expensive to make, but I reject the idea that the high point of gameplay over the last seven years is "Gears Of War Without Catharsis And With Weapon Durability." Fuck, I'm a huge fan of everything about Gears of War* and I'm kind of uneasy saying that's the peak too. *i understand that the story is bad, but the way the first game delivered that bad story was so different and impactful that even hironobu sakaguchi capitalized on it for Lost Odyssey. That method is also "The Entire Naughty Dog Playbook"

also I know so little about football and sports media that I usually just lurk in these threads, but come on, why are you trying to think about a thing skip bayless has said

He's fantastic. His mat wrestling ability in the UWF days were great and then he did the WCW stint where he showed he can be an excellent goofball too. Swayze speaks truth. Smiley's match with Yamazaki is a dang gem that gets passed over too much, and if you just search "Norman Smiley UWF" you get his shit with Maeda, Fujiwara, Takada and Yoji Anjo, all from 88 and all good to great.

Funny joke: I thought I was all out of things to pimp, and then I found another band from my Guitar Tone Mecca in Calgary. This one's called Faux Fur, and it's eight really tightly designed devices with two great, expansive ballads. Added bonus: there's an actual blood relation to Women in this band. The drummer is the youngest Flegel brother. Also, here's a single from Viet Cong, which is the band that the other surviving 2/3rds of Women started. Very gothy and comparatively straightforward. Catchy, though.

the souls games dont have permadeath

RED DEAD REDEMPTION.

The thought of Shellshocked getting over as a finish made me check my bug-out bag for comfort.

how dare you sully the good name of pitbull by associating him with macklemore

While you're getting started early by being shitty to strangers, I'm offering a final FUCK YOU to 2013. A year that was too hard on too many good people I know. It wont be missed.

Will there be Machines Keep our Insides moving Will there be Buttons to press Wires to twist Keep our lips wet To keep us talking? To keep our eyes lit? Oh it's wrong Treating the breath Soothe our skin Make us perfect What thing moves? What stands still? What thing moves? What stands still?

So I was talking to a non-wrestling friend of mine about the Kaufman/Lawler program. They asked if Kaufman was a good wrestler, and I said that he was perfect for what he had to do. Then I explained how a lot of celebrities can be afraid of getting hurt or hurting people so their angles end up looking bad, which is why the Kaufman stuff was great because he leaned into all of it when it was time to. So I tried to name other people who had that kind of commitment to the angle and all I could name were Floyd Mayweather and Mark Cuban. Am I forgetting anyone?

That tune is pretty fucking cool. More Bloody Panda or Khanate to my ears than Neurosis, but that's not because of the vocals (have you heard Enemy of the Sun?). Unsure what “I don't like a lot of metal.” is supposed to mean in that context. I love the hell out of Enemy of the Sun, even though most of the time I'm in absolutely no mood to hear it. So maybe it has sections like that and I've forgotten. With the "don't like a lot of metal" comment, what I was implying is that I appreciate sound and compositional nuance (namely dynamics and the use of space as its own accent) more than musicianship. I've got no taste for the technical/melodic death sound which seems to be the bulk of the metal that's getting pimped around the here and places like rateyourmusic. I respect the musicianship, but it doesn't do anything for me emotionally or mentally. Although I like that new Carcass record alright. It's just not because of the musicianship.

ALRIGHT. GUITARS. This is ordered in least to most extreme. The Diet – The Diet I don't know if we've talked about this, but my favorite album is “Public Strain” by Women. When I saw them live they had this band opening for them called Manchild, who had some neat ideas and a kind of similar sound. They were also huge fans of Women, judging by the look of childlike joy on one of the guitarist's face during the outro of Shaking Hand and the singer standing at the side of the stage clutching a beer and bobbing his head to every song as I was. What I'm saying here is I am biased and I love this album and I have no idea if it's any good. See if it's good for yourself! Circuit Des Yeux – Overdue Friend of mine put me up on this album after seeing her open for Bill Callahan this year. She makes sense as an opener because her work throws heavily to old, insular Smog. Her voice has an epic and powerful coloring effect to the elegant little devices she's constructed. The production is also pretty much immaculate (except for when it deliberately isn't) which allows her to make some incredible kinds of sounds like on the ending of the album's opener Lithonia, where she collides her deep voice and feedbacking guitar against a driving piece of chamber music. PK14 – 1984 Chinese punk rock and dedicated Fugazi worship. Check it out if you are down with either idea. Kind of no use trying to sell it if neither do. Blackout Beach – Blues Trip / Frog Eyes – Carey's Cold Spring I'm personally jealous of Carey Mercer's whole skillset. As a singer, his voice trembles while it holds up weight of his subjects. As a guitarist, the tone he uses makes me feel like I'm going to get electrocuted by my speakers. As a songwriter, he can create a wide range of sound with his self-limited palettes. As a lyricist, he writes more like a poet than anything, using words to communicate an emotion and a state instead of an idea. He also seems like a pretty nice guy, which makes the work he made this year feel pretty tragic. In 2011 he released an epic electronic record called Fuck Death, which was then karmically awarded with the slow death of his father. Mercer felt directly responsible, and the two albums he's released this year feel very much like an attempt to undo this hex. Blues Trip is a drastic reworking of 7 of the 8 songs from Fuck Death done in the immediate wake of the death of his father (with vocals added later). Carey's Cold Spring is the release of the record he's slowly been writing since the release of Fuck Death. The album ends with Claxxon's Lament which, a devastating ballad in it's own right, he revealed to be a song he played for his father on his death bed, and which may have been the last song he heard. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is, don't put these albums on if you're looking for a good time. They're still immense and worthy works, though. The Fat White Family – Champagne Holocaust Man, I kind of don't want to say anything about this record. All I'm going to say is that there's a progression in the sound and the writing that is absolutely brilliant, and that this record is gross. You can listen to it in full here (cover NSFW). The Drones – I See Seaweed You know a record's going to be dark when the opening song is about overpopulation and ex-girlfriends, and sure enough the whole album is bleak. It's also theoretically sound and sonically gorgeous, all delightful bait on the hook Gareth Liddiard has thrown into the water. The sound, to be more specific, ranges from excessively loud dramatics to slow rolling blues rock all while the lyrics spin darker and darker tales. The best place to start in the case of this album is the title track and opener, to see if that hooks you. Savages – Silence Yourself Yeah okay this one isn't so obscure. It still feels like the kind of dirty fueled raging fuck engine that Iggy Pop exposed rock and roll as being, which is a thing that a lot of modern rock records (and bands for that matter) just get wrong. Savages do not get it wrong, but really, you should've heard this by now. Destruction Unit – Void / Two Strong Hits / Deep Trip All the things I've said about lyrics are totally useless here. I can't hear shit Destruction Unit says. This would be a terrible fault if that was at all the point of listening to Destruction Unit. What they're doing instead is the kind of thing I'd like my music to do, where when you put it on it feels like the air in the room changes. This is the kind of music that Hunter S. Thompson was talking about when he implied that good music was fuel. So where to start? Well, that's sadly pretty easy: Void is a total motherfucker to track down. It was released on a limited vinyl run with no digital release, so all versions of it floating around the internet are vinyl rips. Of course this supposes you're lucky enough to run into someone with one. Deep Trip, though, was released on Sacred Bones Records so that's pretty easy to go find at this point. Make sure you get the bonus track, The Church of Jesus Christ. If you need even more D-Unit after that, well, Two Strong Hits is right here. Alternatively, just listen to that and see if you're up for an album of it. Perfect Pussy – I have lost all desire for feeling This is my overall favorite music release of the year. It's thirteen minutes and there's not a second of it I don't love. It's noisy as fuck, it's confrontational, it's fast (but perfectly timed), the lyrics are great... ugh. To my ears it's flawless. I'll avoid making any comparisons in sound and instead just link you here, to the record in full. Again, it's like thirteen minutes. You probably have that much time to get your ass kicked. The Body – Christs, Redeemers My favorite metal band is Neurosis, so I guess what I mean to say is “I don't like a lot of metal.” Lost in the style of all of the acts that claim them as inspirations or heroes is the atmospheric suffocation in those middle 90s Neurosis records, accomplished through their simultaneous use of samples and delicate composition, which served as bookends to the immense sonic devastation (the part a lot of bands come close to getting right). I don't know if The Body has ever cited Neurosis as a key influence, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't (especially considering that their vocal delivery is “the even crazier guy in the padded cell next to yours”). Either way, they're still the only thing I've heard that's capable of making that intensive, vile mood that Neurosis built it's reputation on. See for yourself. And with that I'm out of stuff to pimp.

LEGEND OF GRIMROCK- Had it for a while and since I'm trying to buy less games after the steam sale (my steam library is above 250) I'm going through a bunch of shit I've never even installed but figured I'd want later (which I guess is now, now). ANYWAYS. Shit's rad. I dig on the first person dungeon crawling thing a whole lot and this is a pretty neat modern take on how to make it work. I wish there was some kind of hotkey function for moving people from the front line to the back line, but that's a pretty minor gripe. RAYMAN LEGENDS- it's pure joy, what do you want me to say here and now here are my mental notes from my first five lives in RISK OF RAIN: "wow this is a total grindfest" "man that was fast" "no, THAT was fast" "maybe I need to activate the portal sooner?" "okay maybe this time I should just stockpile items" ten minutes pass "HAHAHAHAHA RUN FOOLS RUN FROM MY BULLETS AND MISSILES AND MISSILE BULLETS" so it's pretty good. it's like spelunky and dota and bangai-o smashed into each other until they are nothing but liquid, then rebuilt into a nightmare funhouse

Minecraft is a survivalist zen garden with randomly generated dungeons. There is an ending, and it's really hard to get. It takes a lot of effort, and a good amount of luck. If you don't want to beat the game, there's plenty else to do. Success in the game is entirely subjective to what you define success to be. like, what is there to be missed here