shenstra

Has to be Europa Universalis IV for me. It's basically the only game I play these days. I've played 1480 hours now and I'm starting to get goodish, I guess. Will probably be my Old Game Of The Year until they make Europa Universalis V...

Best use of Leisure Suit Larry 7 music? Maybe.

My two cents:

This isn't a problem with digital distribution per se, it's a symptom of a much larger infrastructure problem. The exact same problem strikes websites, companies, governments etc. It's a hard problem to solve and the medicine might be bitter. I think as far as Internet stability, reliability and security goes, not being able to play games for a while should be the least of our concerns. We should worry about companies being kept from doing business for a few days which could kill some companies and cost thousands of jobs. We should worry about dissenting opinions being stifled, minorities being oppressed and journalists being censored through brute force.

Not being able to connect to a digital distribution service is a bit like your console dying, except it's temporary and doesn't cost any money. About a year ago, the disc drive in my old PS3 crapped out. Suddenly all those dozens of games I owned on disc weren't playable unless I bought a new PS3, while my downloadable games still worked just fine. It doesn't happen as often as PSN/XBL outages, but the impact was much bigger.

I'm still waiting for a European release of Trauma Team. No localization needed. I just need Nintendo to put the American version on the eShop. Would sell me on the WiiU...

@br4dl3i9h said:

Actually, review is the perfect word for these kinds of articles. I think you're getting hung up on a very specific purpose that reviews can serve, namely to provide advice before purchase or consumption. But people review things for other reasons than that. They review one-off concerts and plays to reflect on and share their experience, even though others can't go out and have that same experience.

To me, reviews have intrinsic value. They stimulate people to go beyond merely consuming media, to consider meaning and themes, and to discuss their thoughts and feelings with others.

There may not be such a thing as "big boned", but people do have different builds. Some people are tall, skinny and perfectly healthy with a BMI that would classify them as underweight. I'm fat, but I also have decent muscle mass. If I were to lose every single gram of fat on my body (not exactly healthy), my BMI would still classify me as overweight.

BMI is a gross simplification of body shapes. It may work for people with average bodies, but for some (on both ends of the spectrum) it does more harm then good. There are far better methods of determining whether someone has too much fat, like measuring their body fat percentage.

And people do have different metabolic rates. You can estimate your basal metabolic rate with various formulas based on weight, height, lean body mass and age, but there's still a large non-explained factor that, as far as we know, just comes down to luck/genetics. Quoth Wikipedia:

For instance, one study reported an extreme case where two individuals with the same lean body mass of 43 kg had BMRs of 1075 kcal/day (4.5 MJ/day) and 1790 kcal/day (7.5 MJ/day). This difference of 715 kcal/day (67%) is equivalent to one of the individuals completing a 10 kilometer run every day.

The mere fact that people like to use their build and metabolism as simple excuses for their weight problems doesn't mean they're not actual, legitimate factors.

While these words are roughly each other's opposite, they carry very different emotional and social implications. The word "skinny" (as far as I can tell) generally isn't meant in a bad way. Unlike, say, "scrawny". When people are called "fat", 99.9% of the time, there's an implied "too" in front of it, often accompanied by a thinly veiled disgust and an expectation to do something about already.

You hate not being able to call people "fat" without them getting offended. Maybe you should consider why people get so offended? I've dealt with other peoples' judgements about my appearance all my life. When you call me "fat", you remind me of a lot of pain and disappointment I've had to deal with. Is it so hard to use a different word which doesn't carry the same hurt? There's plenty of words to choose from, most of which won't offend fatties like me. Overweight, chubby, portly, heavyset, etc.

My taste has broadened a lot, but at its core it's pretty much unchanged.

I grew up listening to music my mother listened to. So lots of '60s, '70s and a bit of '80s pop. Especially British Invasion bands. The Kinks, The Beatles, The Animals, etc. I also really dug soul as a little kid. Apparently two-year-old me was waaaay into Jackie Wilson, singing along with Reet-Petite when it became a hit again in '86-'87.

As a preteen I played the clarinet for a tiny bit, which introduced me to jazz. My sister sang in various choirs and introduced me to classical music. Both didn't really have a huge impact at the time, but both stuck and my interest in classical and (especially) jazz music has grown over the years.

As a teen, I got more into classic rock and prog rock. I also had some bad affairs with hardcore and trance, because I was a Dutch teenager in the '90s.

Since then, in high school, college and after, I've mostly just discovered new genres of music that I really like. I can genuinely enjoy anything from minimal music to zydeco, from country to Tuvan throat singing. My biggest love is for soul and jazz, though. Followed by British Invasion and '80s pop. And when nobody's listening, I still sing along with Jackie Wilson.

Almost all of them have my #10 game (The Last Of Us) somewhere way up high on their list.

Other than that, Vinny has my #1 game (GTA 5) at #7 and Patrick has my #4 game at #8.

So, I guess Patrick and Vinny have the most similar lists to mine because there's a two game overlap, with Vinny taking it because he's the only one who included my GOTY. And Jeff is the only one whose list has no overlap with mine at all.

Though, I'm playing AssPirates right now and if I'd done so earlier, it would've been high on my list as well.

Some random tips:

• Use Yosuke. He's an allround awesome character.
• Don't sweat time management too much. The game can be played pretty casually. If you do want to 'play the game right':
  • Try to get new dungeons cleared quickly. The first dungeon might take a few days (though it can be done in one day), but later on it's pretty easy to clear dungeons in a day. This frees up time to hang out with people, and makes more people available for hanging out.
  • Raising your SLink with team mates provides the biggest benefits. Luckily, they also tend to be available a lot.
  • Beware the summer holiday. I'm not sure how much they tweaked this aspect in Golden, but in the original game several SLinks weren't available during summer (sport club, drama club, ...?). There was also a quest required to progress in another SLink, which couldn't be completed in summer. Getting that quest out of the way before summer helps a lot.
• Yosuke is your brosuke.