I think there are actually additional options from the ones listed above that open up if you beat the game on Impossible (something about Elirium having a half-life and one where funding levels drop every month).

No doubt. And most of my behavior problems with the movie didn't come from after the chimps were smartified; it was in their behavior beforehand. Like that damn orangutan, when asked why he was so smart - "I was raised in a circus". Ugh.

But I think you guys are missing the forest for the trees in my criticisms; I thought the behavior stuff was bad, but that wasn't my main concerns. My bigger issues were the ridiculous plots points I listed in the spoiler section. And I didn't even list half of my issues. Really, the last 40 minutes of the movie was just a mess.

To each their own, I suppose.  I enjoyed it quite a lot and am looking forward to the sequel.

this.

I'm in this boat, too.

Not sure why Devil didn't like it, but I will say it sounds like Ralph never should have come anywhere near this movie, given his background.  You remind me of when my dad, who was a lawyer, went to see The Untouchables, and when the courtroom scene at the end happened, he threw up his hands and said, "That would never happen!  This movie's terrible."

Perhaps so. Throughout the movie I kept wondering what Jane Goodall would think.

Sorry to spoil the fun.

This wild tale of movie viewership gone wickedly awry wasn't an actual news story. It was instead a humor piece presented to the public at large on 4 May 2010 by the Brazilian satirical news site Sensacionalista, a publication whose slogan translates as "The newspaper exempt from truth."

So you weren't bored but thought it was a horrible movie?  Well, that makes perfect sense.   

Movies don't have to be boring to be terrible, although boring movies usually are terrible. There are all sorts of reasons that can make a movie bad.

[Spoiler]

Saw this last night and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon but I thought the movie was terrible. The premise was fine, but once Caesar gets to the sanctuary it just all goes to hell. The chimp behavior, even before the virus, was completely unrealistic. And every primate has the same hand signal for submissiveness? I will admit that I may be looking at it with too critical an eye, however, since animal behavior is what I study.

More importantly, though, some parts make absolutely no sense. A couple of examples:

 

Spoiler for Hiden:

Caesar can get on the roof of the sanctuary from a pulley that's placed within the chimp pathways that opens the window? Not a smart design.

How was it that as soon as they free the chimps and apes from the zoo, those animals are all suddenly just as smart as the rest of them (as is evidenced from the apes using the bus as a barricade when only one ape was given the virus)?

Finally, the ending was ridiculous. So these chimps have just escaped to the woods by outsmarting and killing scores of humans. But 1) James Franco still wants to take him home and 2) when Caesar says he is home, he just shrugs his shoulders and just walks away? Uh, maybe leaving these murderous primates alone isn't the best idea in the world?

I will grant that the CGI was generally well done and, even though I thought the movie was horrible, it certainly wasn't boring. So that's something.

I beat Undercroft today. The game took about 17.5 hours; not bad for a freebie! I really enjoyed it, although it's completely linear and a bit unbalanced - you can use as many potions as you want on a given turn, even on players that are stunned or frozen, making the game pretty easy. I wish there were more party-based mobile games like this.

Some great games already mentioned. I'd also through Fallout 3 as one to consider.

Fallout 3 is great, but I would recommend getting Fallout: New Vegas over the original. Better story and game play. And since the two games have completely different stories, you can always go back to the first one if you need more Fallout.

I would say the two games that immediately come to mind are the new XCOM game and Sykrim. Then you'll get both your strategy and your RPG fix.

I only recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time. Season 1 was great. Season 2... not so much. I actually stopped watching partway through (as soon as they revealed the killer, I think) and never went back.

As for a season 3, who knows? I'd probably give it a shot.

I think it's been mentioned briefly in this thread once, but I just started playing Undercroft yesterday and think it's pretty good. It's more or less a Might and Magic style, party based, RPG. The game is light on story and is fairly generic, but there's a bit of customization in character creation/leveling up. And best of all, it's free. As an additional bonus, since it's an older game, I can play for hours on my iPod without seeing much battery drain. I'm not sure how long the game is or whether I'll get bored of it before I finish, but so far (~3 hours in), it's been a nice diversion.

My guess would be the 7 pounds of butter they put in everything.

I'm pretty sure I've played Battle of Wesnoth. Am I mistaken or was that a free PC/Mac game from a few years back? I'll check out Pen & Paper RPG. Thanks.

edit: Er, Knights of Pen & Paper.

I went ahead and got something called Orc: Vengeance which has decent reviews and is now free. Also got something called Great Big War which has great reviews (like Advance Wars!) and is on sale for $0.99. But I'm still open for suggestions!

I have both Ticket to Rides and have played (and beaten) FFT years ago. I'll check out Battle of the Bulge and Ascension.

As for RPGs, I can do either Western or Japanese. I love some old school FF games, but I'm a bit less tolerant of grinding for grindings sake as I was back then.

Ok guys, I need some quick advise:

I'm leaving on a trip tomorrow that will involve about 14 hours driving over the course of the next week. Luckily, I'm not doing any driving. And since it's always nice to be anti-social in a car, I'm looking for an iPhone game recommendation for this trip. Preferably the game will be something that will keep my interest for at least a good part of those 14 hours (bonus if longer). Additional bonus if it doesn't drain the battery within two hours (I have the new iPod Touch and so far the battery has been pretty good but that means it can't rely on WiFi). I generally prefer strategy games and roleplaying games, so anything in that genre will work well. I already have King of Dragon's Pass and Dragon Island Blue (and have played them out more or less). Games that aren't free are fine. Thanks.

I agree with those that said it should be something different than what's already out there. How about a section where every so often (once a week? twice a week?) you review some obscure movie that can be found on Netflix or Amazon Watch Instantly? Something that most people haven't heard of but might appeal to some people here? Or, as Bullwinkle suggested, maybe have lists of the top 10/20 best Watch Instantly movies from various genres?

Anything that points out movies than most of us have easy access to but might not know about would be great.

I saw this tonight (in 3D 48 fps) and thought it was pretty terrible, well at least for the first 2 hours and 20 minutes. The last half hour was pretty good and felt more like LoTRs quality. For the most part, it just felt like a bunch of individual scenes one after another with no transitions or story tying them together. And it was like Peter Jackson couldn't decide whether to make it a kids movie or more like LoTR, so you have scenes with silly characters (e.g. the trolls, the other wizard, etc) and bad slapstick humor along with multiple decapitations.

I also thought the 48 fps didn't help. All of the inside shots looked like sets rather than true places. I agree with people who have said it looks like a soap opera; some of the visuals almost reminded me of Fraggle Rock.

I'm a huge LoTRs fan, but unless they get stellar reviews I'm not sure that I'll see the next two movies in the theater.

[The Wind Up Bird Chronicle]

Far and away the best book I read this year was The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami. I know it's been out for awhile, but I just got into Murakami through his short stories this year. Great, weird book.

Other books that I really liked this year: 2666 by Bolano; The Dark Tower ll: The Drawing of the Three by King (which I liked a good bit more than the first book); Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card; the aforementioned Murakami short story collections, especially The Elephant Vanishes.

Guilty pleasure books that I recognize aren't great literature but were enjoyable: The Hunger Games (the first one - didn't read the others); Temeraire by Novik.

I know I'm forgetting about a whole bunch of books that I read this year. I'll have to think a bit more about it.

The 48 fps decision seems to be getting crushed in the reviews I've read. They all seemingly state that it makes the film look cheap. Perhaps I'll just see it at 24 fps.

With 41 reviews counted on Rotten Tomatoes, The Hobbit currently has the largest discrepancy between all critics (76%) and top critics (29%) that I can remember.

If you do see a large spider like that, here's how not to kill it.

Kaepernick is going to shit the bed.

Sure enough.

I didn't see the game but his stats - 21/32 for 208 and 84 yards rushing - look decent enough.

did he really get it?  Looks like he was tackled with his knee hitting the ground before crossing the line.

I don't think so, but it was ruled a first down before they reviewed it.  After review it stood.  Honestly, the whole sequence for the review and marking distance took about 5-6 minutes to resolve

Hometown Review. 

Except that the game was played in SD.

I'm either really good at Fairway Solitaire or no one else plays it.  I have eight of the All-Time records.

I suck at it and have 15 of the all-time records. I'm pretty sure that these "records" aren't really comparing you to everyone playing the game.

It's frustrating when you miss with a high percentage chance, but that's the nature of probability.

However, I missed once on a shot with 100% chance to hit. Now THAT was rage-inducing.

That seems to indicate that the game operates with an internal precision that is higher than what it shows to the player. Your hit chance may have been 99,5% for example, which would be rounded up to 100%. That's a 1 in 200 chance of missing, but it can and will happen.

It's the amount of times I've missed shots with such high chances of hitting that frustrates me. I don't believe every shot with an 80% or higher chance to hit should hit the target, but it feels undermining when I make the effort to get a clear shot on enemy just to miss it so often. Especially when we're talking about my snipers who I've outfitted with advanced scopes and selected aim enhancing abilities for.

I suppose the question is whether you actually are missing at a higher rate than your chance would indicate or whether it just feels that way. The only way to test it is to count how many makes/misses you have over a certain chance percentage over a number of games. Unfortunately, due to the way the system works, you can't just shoot/reload the game/shoot to measure it.

Fairway Solitaire is free today. Not sure if it's any good, but it's free.

Ah, the Nug.

Where has Chuck Norris been in all this? Or has he already succumbed to the 1,000 years of darkness?

A $6 deal of the day? Amazon is slipping.

ESPN2's First Take (?) was on while I was at the gym this morning and along the bottom of the screen they had tweets from the public about various football games yesterday. During their discussion of the Cowboys/Giants game, one tweet making fun of the Cowboys was from "TheRealPeteRock". 

I didn't even know that there was a light sensor in the old models (maybe there wasn't in the 3G model?), so that hasn't bothered me.

In fact, so far, so good. The screen is beautiful. And having a camera and a microphone allows me to do so much more with it. Plus, Siri! I asked her when the first UNC bball game was and she not only gave me the date and time in an instant, she also told me whom we were playing!

So far, my only gripe (which I suppose extends to all those who have upgraded to IOS6) is the awful, awful podcast app. You can no longer download podcasts in your music window but have to use the new app (or a non-Apple app or download to Itunes then transfer over). The new app wouldn't be much of a problem if it didn't take forever to download podcasts. I tried using it this morning and in half an hour it managed to download only 1 of the 5 podcasts I queued up. The app not only downloads incredibly slow, but it also stops downloading if you open up another app!! What a piece of shit.

My new iPod has shipped (from Amazon)! W00t!

Congratz. What color did you get? 

Black. Because I'm boring. And racist.

My new iPod has shipped (from Amazon)! W00t!

Do things you manufacture ever break or wear down?

They do if carried by someone who gets killed with one of the Second Wave options active, but that's all I can think of.

Has anyone confirmed that the Second Wave options are actually in the game? I seem to recall reading somewhere that they finished the game but didn't see any additional options.

Has anyone noticed that since the patch (on the 360 at least) shields that increase or decrease your health no longer show you the amount that health is increased or decreased? I wonder if this is a bug or an intended change.

Freaks and Geeks is now apparently on Watch Instantly. You should watch it. Instantly.

A friend posted a video on Facebook of him and another friend playing......it looked piss easy in Co-Op

I thought the enemies were supposed to be tougher when playing with a friend

I played the first few missions (up until the boss on that huge gun) in co-op and the enemies were significantly harder. The first boss (the one who took Claptrap's eye) took way longer to kill than he did in my solo game.

From the Gamespy review:

As a fan of the old-school X-COM, I do miss the endless replayablity of randomly generated tactical maps -- Firaxis says there are more than 80 different maps in the rotation, though having played for more than 50 hours now I feel like I know most of them pretty well.

I was worried about that as soon as they mentioned no random maps. 

50 hours in though...

50 hours is nothing for an X-Com game, though; that's probably just two or three play throughs. I've probably put in well over 100 hours in the original X-Com and I'm guessing that's on the low side for many people here.

From the Gamespy review:

As a fan of the old-school X-COM, I do miss the endless replayablity of randomly generated tactical maps -- Firaxis says there are more than 80 different maps in the rotation, though having played for more than 50 hours now I feel like I know most of them pretty well.

I was worried about that as soon as they mentioned no random maps. 

I wonder if the install on the consoles will also be 20 Gig. If so, that certainly makes the choice of which console to get it for easier...