the_korben

It would be great if as many people as possible could enjoy your show. Free access once a month seems fair to me. There's only one thing to sort out first: in today's show, we had to endure ads during (and throughout) the show. On all previous occasions ads were only shown once after joining the live stream. If that was due to the fact that today's show was not password protected, definitely keep that in mind, and do something about it. At least the subscribers should not endure more ads during those all-access shows.

I think I'm getting too old for this sort of thing.

First off, you can't see Venus "at night". In principle, therefore, you are right. If you really look directly in the opposite direction from the Sun (this happens exactly at midnight wherever you live - unless it's daylight savings time) you won't see Venus.  You can see Venus quite easily though it in the evening or the morning. So, referencing your graph, you need to turn Earth by 90 degrees. Now imagine looking down onto the plane of the solar system, rather than onto the edge of the plane. That means that in your picture Venus and Earth are actually in orbit on big circles (or rather ellipses) around the Sun. Since for any interval in time Venus sweeps through a larger angle in its orbit compared to Earth, the orbits are out of sync and the relative positions of the planets change as seen from the Sun. There are times when the planets are aligned like in your graph (i.e., Sun - Venus -Earth are almost on a straight line). Most of the time, however, the Sun, Venus, and the Earth will form a triangle.  One example of such a triangle is displayed below.
 
Sun  ----------------------------------- Earth 
   \  
     \  
     Venus   
 
 The larger the angle between the Sun and Venus (as seen from the Earth) the longer Venus is visible in the evening or the morning (whether it is visible in the evening or at morning depends on wether Venus is above or below the line connecting the Sun and the Earth in the schematic above).  

This review captures essentially everything that made Deadly Premonition such a great experience for me. Well done, Mr. Gamespot Writer Guy!  
Ah ... it is such a pity that the game demos so badly, and that it really takes some dedication to wanting to like it, in order to really get everything the DP lovers 
have been raving about out of the experience.  
 
A good example is the completely open nature of DP: you could have 15 different people doing endurance runs and get 15 vastly differnet experiences. 
The reason becomes obvious once you play the game on your own. You might want to actually try to follow some leads (Should I pay Becky a visit since she obviously knows something ? What is Anna's mother all about and why didn't she come to the town meeting? What did the General talk about?). The game gives you a ton of directions and leads to follow, but it is structured around specific story missions that will simply advance the main story if you chose to do that. Now, this is not a bad thing, since the main story is excellent. It just gets so much better when you explore all the different sides of Greenvale and let yourself be immersed in the situaton of an outsider having to figure out what the hell is going on. 
 
However, this is difficult to pursue if you have to present the game in chunks of 20-40 minutes and stuff needs to happen. Naturally, since some of your hunches are going to be wrong (talking to person XY might not yield anything else than 2 boring sentences ... still you drove 4 minutes to get to that person; a different hunch might lead to that infinite rocket laser launcher SMG or something, or you might catch somebody doing something at the right place at the right time). Therefore, nobody who watches these ERs and has not played the game should in any way claim to know that Deadly Premonition is a bad game. You can say "I don't like it!" or "It's ugly" or "It looks clunky - I never would like to play that game!". That's all fair game. But don't judge the quality of the game without giving immersion a chance. If the game is only presented to you, immersion is very difficult to achieve. Moreover, if the people who present the game to you are not immersed in it, immersion for the viewer is an even harder thing to do.  And if you are not immersed in the world of an open world game - then what is left? Think about playing GTA without actually enjoying being the environment at all. That would be boring as hell.  
(Now obviously GTA's gameplay is much less of a diamond in the rough, but this is beside the point and can be at least somewhat justified by budget constraints).
 
Just to clarify, I am not bashing anything BR or VJ are doing. I think they are doing the best they can and I have tons of fun with the ERs. But I have the privilege of already having completed the game. 
In any case, the game still has a lot in stock for BR and VJ, since it only really starts to get going right after the town meeting. So there is still hope that some of you, who have a very negative opinion about DP might still change their minds. If that doesn't happen, however, so be it. Last time I checked, everybody was entitled to their own opinion. 
 
And now I should get back to something more important than arguing about video games. Thanks for reading though, if you made it this far :o).

This was a great idea. Not only is it fun to complete the quests, but it also shows off the great content that this site is (actually) all about: the database. It certainly motivated me to get an account, edit some pages, and read up on some video games trivia. Thumbs up!!!! :)