idkicarus

Little Nightmares, Darkwood, and Layers of Fear could be good.

The Brutes in Mass Effect 3 always get to me. Whenever they appear I just can't help flailing. Part of it is the guilt of shooting something with a Turian face. And the other part is how panic-inducing it is to be charged and hope that you have enough ammo/biotics to put them down before they close the distance.

Nope, it happened for me too!

@wcarle: Yeah, it's fixed for me now. You guys are magicians!

Forgive me if you're already aware of this, since you have a fix in store for fullscreen video getting cut off in some browsers, but I've been having a related issue with videos being cut off at the bottom when using "fill browser".

Perfect way to end a rough work week. Thank you so much!

I'm working my way through Alien: Isolation. I picked it up on sale a long time ago intending to play it even though I had never seen any of the movies in the franchise.

Since I felt like watching the films first was my obligatory homework before playing, I just saw Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection in pretty quick succession. And, for what it's worth, Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection don't get the respect they deserve—they were my favorites from the quadrilogy. Sure, the effects in Alien 3 are hokey, but I love how it's much more geared towards suspense and psychology than action and blazing gunfire.

I'm only 6 hours into Alien: Isolation, but the aesthetic and tension are great. Not sure if I have the desire to deal with stealthing around all the Working Joes, though. They're a turning out to be a bigger hassle than the Alien.

Thanks for the memories Austin! You introduced me to 4X games and Invisible Inc. I'll be thinking of you when I play them.

I'm sad to see you leave Giant Bomb, but happy that I'll still be able to continue reading your thoughtful work.

Games mean something, but it's more what's behind them that has meaning for me. Of course, I enjoy a good narrative and well-crafted gameplay, but there's something communal about games. I don't even like multiplayer games or games with co-op, but just being in the same room with someone as they play a game (or having them be there with you) can leave a big impact on your memory from a very specific place and time.

For example, one of my strongest and fondest memories from high school is of watching my little brother play through Mass Effect with Kid Cudi's album Man on the Moon looping in the background. Hearing anything about the Mass Effect or hearing Kid Cudi's album gives me the warm fuzzies.

I played Mass Effect 2 when between undergrad and grad school when I was working a crappy overnight job at Walmart. I'd come home after 1 AM, then dump hours into the game before going to sleep and repeating another workday.

Games and other media are often communal, even without being explicitly designed to be that way. It's these unexpected or unplanned uses for media that I think is part of what helps them stick out as landmarks in our memory for certain times in our lives.

I've had a similar thought, actually. My introduction to Giant Bomb was through my younger brother and seeing him sit down to listen to a 2-3 hour podcast every week. At the time, it seemed beyond ridiculous that he'd would devote that much time to a single episode of a podcast with a bunch of strangers or that he'd spend hours watching complete strangers playing a game. Flash forward a couple of years, and now Giant Bomb has become a big part of my own daily routine. Owing to the fact that the Internet allows (and encourages?) us to feel bonds with people who don't know us personally.

All the Giant Bomb content is great—there's so much more than I can absorb on a weekly basis. And yet for the sake of my other interests, I've thought about scaling back on content consumption here and elsewhere. I basically have a podcast for every day of the week, and not too long ago I realized that I wasn't spending much time being alone with my thoughts and writing.

Basically, I've been thinking critically about the podcasts, websites, TV shows, and movies I consume and I've been trying to determine if I'm using them to avoid thinking about something else or if I've grown overly accustomed to being stimulated rather than being my own stimulation.

There's no clearcut answer. Honestly, though, I think everyone is guilty at some point in their lives to some degree of media overconsumption because of a fear of "missing out" on conversations going on in society. What I've come to realize is that there's a need to be entertained, and there's an equally important need for boredom and quiet (the latter of which I've all too frequently neglected).