As someone aptly put it: "Rick, you are, literally, a control freak." I'm not going to argue this. For me, controls make or break a game. I don't care what it looks like at all, but the content has to be pretty much solid gold for me to put up with assy controls. That's why I consider it insulting at worst, and lazy at best when developers fail to provide custom button mapping in console games. Nintendo may be the worst offender here, but I've noticed an alarming trend in console games on the whole offering less and less in the way of customizing the control scheme. Back in the day you had a few presets. This was fine because your controller probably had all of 3 buttons. But now things are far more complex.
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Here's the latest "wife on the couch" review. I have been greatly enjoying the PSN game, "Pixeljunk Monsters" since I bought it. If you aren't familair with it, it is a downloadable Playstation 3 "tower defense" game where you control a weird dude and build towers to fend off monsters who want to kill your collection of little weird dudes. The game has received a score of 83/100 on metacritic.com. My wife has watched me play this many times, and her initial reaction hasn't changed.
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To summarize: A dude named Andrei Gudkov at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute figured out a way to protect cells from radiation damage. The government is way interested because of them terrorists, but this also is fantastic news for cancer patients because of the whole "chemo is fucking awful" thing. Read the full story at MedHeadlines.com and thank Andrei -- and science -- for the awesome.
Oh snap, and maybe this could protect astronauts in the furthest reaches of outer space? See you on the moon, peeps.
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Just read about this, and thought I'd pass it on to the beer drinkers out there in interweb land: Some batch of Sam Adams beer from a specific bottle plant has turned up with bits of broken glass in the bottles. Yum. Here's the recall details and how to ID a bottle of doom: oh noes
Obviously a recall was in order, but did they really have to consult a doctor to determine that swallowing broken glass can injure you?
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I thought Super Hero Movie was pretty funny. Not really "super" funny, but definitely funnier than "Date Movie", but not as funny as "Scary Movie". I think. It's been a while since I seen that one. Anyway, it basically lampoons "Spiderman", some "X-Men" and a bit of "Bat-Man", but sadly no "Heroes" references. In fact it did the whole "learning to climb the wall" scene better than "Spiderman", whose scene was more like "learning to dangle from a string" and basically lampooned itself. I'm going to "stop" putting things "in" "quotes" "PERIOD."ENDQUOT;semicolon
EVE Online is cool and stupid at the same time. You might call it stupid-cool, yet it would still be just plain stupid. Our infamous overlord Idiot gave it a shot a few months ago at my behest, only to be frustrated for some very good reasons. One might wonder then why I'm still playing.
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The reviews for Contra 4 for the DS all warned me: "The game is hard! But it's ok! It's old-skool hard!" Well I've spent some time with it, and no. It's just hard.
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After Activision/RedOctane's heavily publicized mono sound screw-up with the Wii version of Guitar Hero, they tried to make things right with free replacement disks. Unfortunately, that left owners of the game (read: me) sans-game for about 2 months while they processed the exchange. By the time I got the game back, my interest in it had waned and it was a chore to set it up to play it again. Then I got a lovely surprise in the mail.
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Several years ago, my buddy/former manager gave me some of his furniture when he moved. It was all good stuff too. In particular were two awesome dressers from Progressive Furniture. One of the dressers was a horizontal job, with a big mirror that is supposed to attach to it. I thought, this is cool, the wife would dig this. The only problem was, my buddy had lost the connecting rails.
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