The Xbox controller can't really balance standing up like that.

Microsoft Security Essentials

How are the new units?

Is this really that big of a deal?  How often do we actually "see" anything of Garrett other than his hands in FPS view?  A couple cutscenes, maybe.

Ok, Gratch gets the Garrett model that looks like the Hamburglar. ;)

The latest update has some promising... promises.

Excerpts:

...
Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.

We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.

We are working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city. For instance, emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city. We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.
...

[Spoiler]

You guys seem to be forgetting that CGI is now the Hollywood answer to making older actors look whatever age you want them to be.

Spoiler for Hiden:

People are raving about this game being so awesome over at TA, but I completely don't get it.

Three stages:

1) Tilt your phone to steer the lure on the way down into the water.  You're trying to avoid everything so you can get as deep into the water as you can.

2) Once you snag something, you're now trying to snag as much as you can on the way up, and the most high value fish you can get.

3) When you get back to the surface, all the fish you snagged then get launched into the air.  I guess you touch them to shoot them with a shotgun?  This is where it more drastically departs from Ninja Fishing.  In Ninja Fishing it just turns into Fruit Ninja at this point.

Ridiculous Fishing is ridiculously awesome. 

Seriously, go buy this.

Now.

I thought that Ridiculous Fishing was a ripoff of Ninja Fishing, but from poking around it seems it's the other way around.  Ninja Fishing ripped off the predecessor to Ridiculous Fishing, Radical Fishing.  I have never said the word fishing so many times in one sentence.

I have never cared for the phrase "smells like ass" - lets see if pug can figure out the origins of that one.

smells like ass (adj.)
390BCE, "ye smelt it, ye dealt it" from Greek smellius assinus "wtf was that".
Yo Socrates get the fuck outa my face, y'all smells like ass (Plato)

I actually hate vowels.  Please stop using them, people.

sncrl,

hpct

The Hawaiian word "hooiaioia" has more consecutive vowels than any other word in any human language.

fart (v.)
Old English feortan, ultimately from PIE *perd- (cf. Old High German ferzan, Old Norse freta, Sanskrit pard, Greek perdein, Lithuanian perdzu, Russian perdet), of imitative origin. Related: Farted; farting. As a noun, from late 14c.


petard (n.)
1590s, "small bomb used to blow in doors and breach walls," from French pétard (late 16c.), from Middle French péter "break wind," from Old French pet "a fart," from Latin peditum, noun use of neuter pp. of pedere "to break wind," from PIE root *pezd- "to fart" (see feisty). Surviving in phrase hoist with one's own petard (or some variant) "blown up with one's own bomb," which is ultimately from Shakespeare (1605):
For tis the sport to haue the enginer Hoist with his owne petar ("Hamlet" III.iv.207).


shit (n.)
Old English scitte "purging," from source of shit (v.). Sense of "excrement" dates from 1580s. Use for "obnoxious person" is since at least 1508; meaning "misfortune, trouble" is attested from 1937. Shit-faced "drunk" is 1960s student slang; shit list is from 1942. Up shit creek "in trouble" is from 1937. To not give a shit "not care" is from 1922.

I shocked CA didn't think of it first

Out of curiosity, is the new plastic bag policy in California common knowledge around the country?

I have no idea what you're talking about, so I would say no.

In several counties around the Bay Area, when you go to say, Target, or a grocery store, there is a slightly different process at the checkout line.  When it comes to the time you usually see your purchases transferred into bags, you instead get a blank stare from the cashier.  There's also a chance you will be asked, "Would you like to buy a bag?"

There are no more free disposable bags in these counties.  You either bring your own canvas bags, or you pay extra for each bag you get.

This seems to be a good county by county overview.  Some places have banned plastic bags entirely; only paper or canvas are available.

I shocked CA didn't think of it first

Out of curiosity, is the new plastic bag policy in California common knowledge around the country?

I don't understand the average score here of 60 giving by GT. I get Overall 82 from what you have rated in each category.
Was there a 22 point deduction for DRM?

At the bottom:

NOTE:  I am continuing to play this title and will revisit this review with supplemental updates as things progress over the coming weeks.  Until that time, I’m overriding the score manually.

IIRC, I read on another board that players were recommended that streets be laid out in a Z configuration to make the pathfinding routines work better.  Is there something wrong when we are supposed to lay out cities to work for their algorithms.

Someone elsewhere summed it up very nicely: "The issue is that the current mechanisms make dealing with this less like actually solving traffic issues and more like solving a puzzle with unclear, arbitrary rules."

Twitter says they took West 1 & 2 down a half hour ago for an upgrade.

Just now: "Server Update: We will soon be temporarily taking down NA East 2 for a hardware upgrade. NA West 1 & 2 are still being upgraded."

From what I've been reading elsewhere, I'd bet that these different regional servers are regional in name only.  East, West, Euro, Asia, Antarctica?  All in the same server farm.

Thanks wonder that may solve it, I guess..   It would of been nice for the advisor or someone to clue you in on the solution.   Its another frustrating feature of this game.  Some features such as this are I guess realistic, and then there are some very unrealistic features, like how can beach front property not automatically be mid to high wealth land value? 

Mountaintop and beachside property supposedly does have some innate boost to land value.  How much?  No idea.

I also tend to think something is broken with resources.  I have a city around 200k, nothing too huge, and at the selection of the city it had the highest water rating you can have.  Now almost after just 20 hours or so of play, the water is becoming exhausted? I have had to tear down neighborhood after neighbor hood chasing the ground supply of water,  how can this be? I think they said something along the lines that resources such as water are replenishable with a rainy season, etc, I have a feeling they have had this feature turned off.

Are you putting fresh water pumps next to sewage treatment plants?  From what I'm reading, creating a drinkable sewage circle of life is the only way to keep your water supply sustainable.

The traffic code programmer said he's changing medium density non-avenue streets to have stoplights instead of stop signs.  Should help a bit.

As someone who has never really played Starcraft, would it be worth grabbing the Starcraft Battlechest just to experience the singleplayer story? I have no interest whatsoever of playing online.

Another option is to look for a youtube storyline summary.  I watched a Diablo one in preparation for Diablo 3 that included both cutscenes and important in-game moments.

Twitter says they took West 1 & 2 down a half hour ago for an upgrade.

Thanks for the recommendations. Ordered Lords of the Waterdeep and Mr Jack. I'll probably end up getting quite a few more to throw into the rotation after I see if she'll continue to play on a regular basis.

If she gets scared by the Dungeons & Dragons lore in Waterdeep, reassure her that it's entirely optional flavor fluff.  You can treat it purely as "I need 5 orange cubes and 2 purple ones!"  The flavor stuff makes the game more fun, but your wife can adopt as much or as little as she wants.

Dammit. Devs have admitted that casinos are broken and they're working on a fix.  Recycling plants are broken. Pathfinding is broken. I've been pretty forgiving about the server woes but I'm getting really disappointed that the game itself is turning out to be half baked.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that Vu's tower can lead to hundreds of invisible criminals permeating every city in your region, ones that you can't do anything about but that still upset your population.

One of the main devs, Guillaume Pierre, is being pretty active giving info on the game.  This is nice.  Unfortunately, he gives a lot of bad news.  He wrote the traffic code.  Here's his reddit profile: http://www.reddit.com/user/MaxisGuillaume

• They realized casinos were too profitable just before release and overdid a last minute nerf.
  
• Be sure to mix commercial and residential together some
• "Keep buses on avenues and off smaller streets. Place bus stops on both sides of the road (so they're paired) to limit how many U-turns buses have to make."
• "Don't place your streetcar depot so close to an intersection. Seriously, don't."
• "The problem here is that we send all the neighbor's buses into your city, when really we should send a fraction of them at any given time."
• "Sometimes it helps to be zoomed in when you draw your roads, as the guides tend to be followed more precisely than if you were zoomed out."

And there's this gem.  A user was having some weird traffic issues so Guillaume went into his city to find what was wrong:

Bulldoze the high tech factories that are near your nuclear power plant. One of them is causing all those cars on the road to not go back home or leave the city (it's a high-density one, "Picton Polygons & Pixels").

I have magical debugging powers. You have 1,500 cars that are trying to reach it, and they won't all fit in it.

Lords of Waterdeep was a big hit with my wife and I really like it as well.  She loves Ticket to Ride, too, but I find Ticket to Ride kind of boring with two people.

Mr Jack was a big hit with both of us, and it's specifically geared for two players.

We just tried Last Night on Earth recently and she liked it enough to want to play it again soon after, and with the more complex rules.  It wasn't too hard to learn, and she liked being able to play the zombies.

Dammit. Devs have admitted that casinos are broken and they're working on a fix.  Recycling plants are broken. Pathfinding is broken. I've been pretty forgiving about the server woes but I'm getting really disappointed that the game itself is turning out to be half baked.

Be sure to post the after picture!

Server downtime I'm content enough to wait out, but I'm having trouble getting motivated to play after the discoveries of the brain-dead pathing AI.

Street layout is kind of one the most fundamental aspects of gameplay, and if I'm punished for doing logical layouts and rewarded for gaming the dumb AI? That's not the game I was looking for. 

arkon I ran into the same problem,  the solution is to raise taxes. I lost about about 10% of my pop, but now Im rich, money is pouring in from everywhere.  I did 10% on commercial first, then 10% on industry, then 10% of people.  No one seems to mind now

I think my taxes are at 11%, and I am still loosing money left and right.

Check if your recycling plants are actually working. There seem to be a lot of bugs with them.

I'm still waiting for the 'yeah, you won't have any issues' stage before buying.

Definitely not there yet. And I'm a bit scared by what I've been reading recently about the game AI. Apparently the sim car pathfinding may be no more complex than "take shortest distance route," with no regard to street sizes or existing traffic.

The game access has gotten a lot smoother in the past 24 hours, but its not perfect yet. If you know you'll want to buy it soon regardless, I say go for it.

I vote for keeping everything in this thread.

Ok - I'm researching and am going to build a Solar Power Great Work (or whatever they are called) to provide solar for everyone in the region.  It should be done tonight.    

Wait!

I heard a bad first impression from someone else on how the solar power great work works.  Supposedly it only provides the extra power during the daytime (which makes sense), but what's worse is that it won't start up in the morning until the workers show up, so the actual operable time can be quite small.  And since the power supply isn't 24 hours, you need alternate forms of power anyhow. 

If you want to give it a go anyhow, I'll be curious to see if your impressions.  Just wanted to warn you about possible buyer's remorse, though.  : )

I have plenty of extra cops and fire, but am I to far away from you guys to share my stuff,  Im in the mean street of the region I guess,  it sure is ugly here.

what dictates building style?  I see some of your guys skyscrapers and they are sweet,  mine all look like some housing project from the 70s...... Keep humming the "good times" theme to myself.

Click on one of your housing projects and check the wealth, which I'm guessing is low. If you want it snazzier, stick some medium or high wealth parks in the vicinity.  High density, low wealth housing isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Some of your most profitable industrial factories may be relying on low income workers.

Also, please stop sending your arsonists to my city.
 

And sadly...I have so many arsonists I can't keep them contained.

This is where the level of detail of the simulation is really neat.  I was playing this morning and then saw a limo appear in town representing Mayor Arkon taking a tour of my city (I assume because you were looking around yourself).  A bit later I get the message that arsonists are coming from your town, a fire starts and my fire trucks are dispatched, and then my police units go on a chase after the suspect and catch him.  One more spot taken up in my prison, but I assume the arsonist count for the region as a whole then went down by one.

Arkon, you'll receive my bill shortly.

I've got a bunch of excess I'll put on the market (if I figure out how).

edit: Wait, do I even have to do anything to sell it?  I think my excess is just available for you to grab on your own.

Yup, I am already buying all of your excess, and still falling way short...

Do I actually see any of that money?  I can't find anything in my budget numbers that shows an income from anywhere other than my usual RCI.

Also, please stop sending your arsonists to my city.
 

I've got a bunch of excess I'll put on the market (if I figure out how).

edit: Wait, do I even have to do anything to sell it?  I think my excess is just available for you to grab on your own.

So posts seem to sound like it is getting better?  Hate to give them money, especially $60, but I finally have time to play this weekend. Please keep posting server updates.

It's getting a little better, but there's still a lot going wrong and the high weekend demand seems likely to just exacerbate the server woes.

One thing to keep in mind is that there's no reset button on any city plots unless you obliterate the entire region.  If you run your city into debt and bulldoze everything, abandoning the plot will just leave the next mayor a wasteland in debt to start with.  We can gift each other money to get people out of painted corners, but I read somewhere you at least need a city hall to be able to receive gifts (a little armored truck actually drives from one city hall to the other), so it's sounds like it's theoretically possible to create an unrecoverable city.

I should have waited...but that Amazon $20 credit seemed too good to pass up, when I knew I wanted the game.

Eh, I'm frustrated too, but there's not a big difference between me paying $40 now or $40 in a few weeks.  Well since the sale ended, it'd be $40 now or $60 later. 

While the launch is at MMO-level disastrous proportions, there's at least no monthly fee / free month to be up in arms about.

Though if the game is still nonfunctional a week from now, I may yet join the torch & pitchfork crowd.