Gigabomber

@wwen: People only pay attention to radicals. Could blame the news, but it's bigger than a lust for ratings.

@spaceinsomniac: MSNBC, seemingly overnight, becoming the counterpoint to Fox and just as repulsive, but Fox is the original, at least for me. They get high ratings. The worst part is that the talking points reduce debate into known, predictable quantities.

To clarify, I was trying to make the point that when the average throws around liberal/conservative, it equates to Hardline Democrat and Hardline Republican, and is generally meant as an insult; same for the word socialist.

Libertarian is different, but to me, stands for small government, the leave-me-alone party. Kennedy also labels herself as conservative, which overrides Libertarian, so you know where 90% of her talking points are going to come from. So boring.

Since this was necro'd, I'd like to point out, mostly for any non-American readers, that liberal and conservative are terms that have become almost completely entangled with party politics in the US, and that most of the population has internalized the corresponding democrat or republican talking points to go along with the respective liberal or conservative moniker (people hurl them as insults). Socialist is an insult thrown around against "liberals" as well.

Currently, if someone throws out that they are a liberal or democrat, you can simply list the things that person ascribes as their core political beliefs and be 90% correct; vice-versa for conservative and republican. This is why it is extremely dangerous for any writer that values their career to come out as conservative, because that party is associated with many things that aren't popular including some extreme examples of xenophobia, racism, and the pervasive love of nascar, all three of which are quite popular in the States if you look for them.

If a writer or newscaster exposes that they have any beliefs that may fall into anything in the republican cannon, the narrow-minded will assume they are also racist/xenophobic and blacklist them (happened to me once). This is a risk you can't take if you are in a public job and everything is on the internet, because one of these people might be your future employer. On the other hand, it could also get you a job because other narrow-minded people will label you as being in their in-group, which is fine as long as you want to work for a FOX affiliate for the rest of your life.

@yummylee: The inclusion of semi-trial-and-error platforming is actually putting me off of the game. It just doesn't make sense, so I'll need to watch a few sections. Sounds like they made a ton of decisions that break the flow of the game for the worse.

I felt that Jeff was referring to being pulled into calling something shit due to the zeitgeist around a film or game. Being goaded into saying something is shit through Twitter doesn't interest him as he has exorcised those demons.

I'm here because Jeff is hilarious, his reviews and opinions on games are generally solid, he is honest, and he shits all over games that deserve it. Can't watch a UPF or listen to a bombcast without him.

@chaser324: @rikiguitarist: Not custom graphics and GUIs, but there are custom servers that host up to 100 players in a searchable, gamespy-type of format.

You can pick campaign and custom tracks tracks from each of the 4 handling models and tilesets, game time length, track style for player filtering, minimum driver level, and private or public hosting among other things. Way more than any console game I've seen...at least within memory.

Way closer to PC Trackmania than I imagined.

@rikiguitarist: Nope. No one buys a console so that they don't have to budget for hardware upgrades.

I feel like MPP 5 had playable minigames, and the crowd was a great addition, so there is the distinct possibility that the video series has peaked. Dan can't really surpass his dickishness in MPP5, right? Either way, I'm dying to find out.

It would also be pretty great if they decided to end the series unceremoniously, and 10 years down the road Jeff admits that they got better after 5. Would be even more of a twist if they actually played them and liked the future MPPs, but Dan begins to hate the series. It would be an elaborate troll, but is not beyond Ryckert and the crew to execute if the future games are shorter.

Feel the same way about the previous game. RNG they had felt forced. I'll wait for heavy modding or an expansion before buying.