mrburger

I've got one guy saying my ancient craptop might still be able to run this game, based on its undemanding sys reqs, and another guy saying the RAM required for this game exceeds the physical capabilities of both the 360 and the PS3. Only one of you gets to be right.

My own research seems to indicate that the game does indeed exceed the XBLA (not "the 360 and the PS3") RAM limitation, which also means it probably wouldn't run on my ancient laptop (which could only barely handle the first game). This RAM limit, however, is probably not physical but arbitrary, defined by Microsoft based on their own fiscal goals and how they think XBLA ought optimally to function.

But then what about this: What if they released Torchlight 2 for download not as an XBLA title, but as an On Demand title? Straight-to-On-Demand, never having touched store shelves. An impossible, unprecedented move that goes against everything Microsoft stands for ($$$), but ... theoretically conceivable. As in: I wish Runic would look into it.

My gf and I are genuinely heartbroken that Torchlight 2 won't likely ever be available on XBox Live Arcade. I have dreams that I'm playing it, and then I wake up and it's not there. Neither of our puny, ancient PCs are able to handle it, despite its having fairly undemanding SysReqs. It is said that any computer from the last 5 years should be able to play it. Hers is 6 years old, mine is 7.

But if the XBLA memory limit is all that's keeping it off the 360, then what's keeping Runic from releasing Torchlight 2 physically? Limbo, Minecraft, and Plants vs. Zombies all saw physical releases (with mixed results, but still!). One could claim Runic is too small a company to be able to afford a wide physical release. But Torchlight 2 would sell, darn it, just like its predecessor did, and almost certainly shift enough units to make back publication costs. There are lots and lots of people in 2012, self and gf included, whose whole entire entertainment systems revolve around their consoles, and whose lives would be better, warmer, by the glow of Torchlight 2.

Question, I guess, is: Would you purchase a physical copy of Torchlight 2?

Pontypool is awesome. And [rec] is the best horror film this side of 2000.

I have a Gold Account and my girlfriend doesn't. We go into the game through her profile, rather than mine. We have to play offline, but at least this way it saves both of our progresses.

Good words.

Just recently dragged this back out onto my nightstand.

@Clairabel said:

@mithical: This is a wonderful piece of writing - thanks for sharing your experiences, it means a lot to us here.

Seriously, mithical. You laid it down.

@ck1nd I have offended, and you are right, I'm sorry. I don't actually believe that growing older and growing wiser happen simultaneously, or that either has anything to do with justifying belief in the unverifiable, and I think I was just so caught up in my own rhetoric by the end of my post that I forgot that. I'm an ass. I'm sorry.

Forget who I am and all I've said and take away only this: that it's not immature, okay, but more like logically unfounded to believe in things that have been neither proven nor disproven, even, if not especially, because it runs contrary to "that very feeling" that calms your guts. Believe in empiricism. Believe in the beauty of a hard-earned truth. Your guts are impulsive, to be actively ignored on matters of grave philosophical importance.

I'm half talking to myself, here, if you can't tell.

I like you and like Borges don't like to believe that death is the pin-point end of experience. But my brain also knows better than to flat-out reject the possibility (which is, admit it, at the very least strongly compelling) simply at my heart's request. I remain in limbo. Agnostic, kind of. I'm writing a novel about it, using people who've been magically turned into ghosts, immortal ghosts, not to explain it away but to grapple with it and feel its lumps, because I'm obsessed with it. Even if the idea of immortality or eternal experience is just an idea, and a wrong one, it still casts an intriguing reflection on mortality.

Here's three sentences that all start the same way and I can't figure out which one works, so I'll just give you all three: Maybe this is all we get, at least in any meaningful sense, and we ought to just, as Joel Barish says, "Enjoy it." Maybe this is all we get, but it's not as though that makes us fertilizer, dude. Maybe this is all we get, but it can be an awful lot if you squint your eyes and tilt your head and look at it just right.

As a waiter, I've had tons of guests think I mistreated them for racial reasons and then stiff me. It's awful, but it's just how our country is right now--especially in St. Louis, where I live and work, and where racial tension is palpable almost everywhere you go. What happens to me at work is just classic "reverse racism" (popularly confused with when blacks hate on whites, which, let's clarify, is just regular old racism (and to call it "reverse" is actually kind of racist)) and it's a regular obstacle I face in my job. Like all waiters, or anyone who works face-to-face with a broad cross-section of Americans, I short-circuit on issues of race. It's probably the most difficult conceivable conversation topic for me anymore, because I have such strong feelings about it, but almost no means of putting any of those feelings into words. Instead I just get frazzled and shake my head and say yeah sometimes my job is hard.

Anyone else here see anger as a weakness? Even at my angriest, I know to keep my mouth shut to keep from saying stupid shit I know I'll regret. I can't remember the last time I said something out of fury that I later in my right mind recalled and was like, "Yep, couldn't have said it any better." That never happens. Rage is human, but weak.

EDIT: Let me qualify this statement: I think as a physical motivator, rage is almost incomparably great. Rage turned Goku Super Saiyan! ... But intellectually, socially, emotionally, rage is usually regrettable and dumb. There.