Ross Scott

Guys, Testosterone leads to more muscle development, men naturally have more. It's really as simple as this. In a lot of traditional farming communities, you have men and women working equally hard, but the men are on average still stronger because of their biology. I'm not debating this point further, if you don't believe me, fine. My problem with this is it doesn't distinguish between the sexism like I'm being accused of (giving women more benefit of the doubt, me personally not wanting to see violence against them) v. I guess traditional sexism (thinking women belong in the kitchen, they shouldn't vote, that they can't handle higher education, etc.) which I don't ascribe to. I think you're lumping these all together equally, but the latter causes much more harm to women, whereas I'm not sure what the harm my view causes to women is. What is the harm that comes from my way of thinking, especially since society itself is sexist (glass ceiliing for women, average less pay for them, men have to register for the draft, women do not, women only just recently have been permitted to enter combat roles in military, etc.)? I think most of the black crime statistics are a result of poverty areas, institutional racism, and by how much gangland activity (which is culturally driven in some areas) can skew averages. That's not a topic I want to get into here though. If you don't like the statistics however, I can say from my own personal experience, I've known FAR more violent and overly aggressive males than females in my own life however. That's not really a quantifiable thing however, so that's why I was using the statistics.

Hey a quick update: The site is temporarily down as we're switching it to a (hopefully) faster host. It's not dead at all, we're trying to make it better.

No, you're just crazy. 1. I ended up having this discussion with someone else. Basically it's instinctual reaction on my part more than anything, though I have some thoughts on it regardless. While it may be technically sexism, I don't carry the same attitudes people normally think of as sexist, for example I don't think women should be denied rights or held back in any way they're capable in. I'm NOT implying what you said about them always being incapable and weak. I probably would imply that are on average more deserving of sympathy than men however. As for the double standard on violence, look at prison statistics. Men are approximately 9-10 times more likely to commit violent crime than women. Women are on average, far less violent than men. The ones that aren't are more of an exception rather than an equal standard. If the game was handling this topic in a mature manner my attitude might be different, but in my opinion most games that portray violence against women aren't especially mature. 2. I think you're arguing multiple points here, one of which I don't disagree with, another I disagree with dramatically. I think because I do play a lot of abandonware, what are the "extremely rare circumstances" for you are much more common for me personally. I don't have much of an issue with how companies price their games and I agree people shouldn't treat access to games like they're a right if they don't agree with the publisher's price. I actually don't even have an issue with copy protection, though I personally don't like online-authentication systems for non-multiplayer games. What I hate, hate, hate is when IP owner pig-headedness intentionally kills old games off that they're no longer collecting any money on anyway. I equate this as essentially book burning in the name of profit and think it should be fought by any means necessary, with pirates often being the last line of defense of games going extinct. To be clear, I'm not advocating that old games that are still being sold should become pirated. They're still making the game available, so it's not dead, thus I don't have a problem. 3D Realms is an example of this. If Midway was still selling CarnEvil cabinets and getting money from them, I wouldn't have gone and covered this game because of that. 4. The larger point here was that piracy can severely hurt brand new games as a lot of companies get the majority of their income within the first couple months, if not weeks. If a game is still being sold years after the fact, great, but a LOT of games have slipped through the cracks over the years. Neither side is really in the right or wrong. It's wrong of the pirates to hurt the game developers, and it's wrong of (some of) the rights holders to snuff out games or make it impossible to keep them functioning after a certain time period. Well I agree this is not on the same level as making people starve, but I think it's part of the same spectrum of attitudes. It's destroying culture in the name of profit, which I find immoral, I can't think of any justification for it, I think that trumps copyright law, implied ownership, almost everything, unless the original author was deeply ashamed of it or something. I see this as superseding laws; if preserving culture that would otherwise die is illegal, then I think it's the law that's wrong, not the practice. Moreover the people who shut this stuff down are almost never the actual creators, but rights holders that bought a company going bankrupt. Again, I think destroying culture in the name of profit is never moral, no matter what the law says.

Client Logic. It's still there apparently! https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Client+Logic&ll=35.993437,-84.226738&spn=0.00612,0.008256&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&fb=1&gl=pl&hq=client+logic,+oak+ridge+tn&cid=0,0,4880591513570323383&t=h&z=18

It's from one page of the manual that I was able to find. This is only a map of the first course, not the full game by any means. Also I appreciate the gesture, but I think I may stick with making the thumbnails for now, the way I've been doing it I think looks okay and hasn't been especially difficult.

Blip.tv link I've been awake for about 35 hours, and only had 5 hours sleep the night before that, so thinking of things to say is getting increasingly challenging. Enjoy the Halloween episode! I made it on time! I'm not sure if it was the best trade for sleep though. I would like to sleep. This one was an experiment where instead of making it more review oriented, I decided to attempt a full playthrough of the game. It combines some of the style of Freeman's Mind and RGD. It may have been a mistake, I'm not sure. It seemed to have more disadvantages compared to RGD or FM individually. It certainly took a long time to do. Anyway, this is quite an exciting game to cover regardless. I was definitely channeling some of FM when talking about Rickety Town. Unless it becomes wildly popular, this will probably the last episode of RGD for a while. I'm pretty much just going to focus on Freeman's Mind starting in November. I'm pretty sure I need to sleep first though. If you're scared of clowns you shouldn't watch this episode at all. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

This is just a quick post before the video release tomorrow. I've received some requests from a few people wanting copies of the maps used in "Civil Protection: The Tunnel." I only made the one outside The Tunnel (from Shadow of A Doubt). The rest (and edits to mine) were created by Andrew "Nicadeamas" Dehnart. If you use any elements of these maps in any of your projects you must include him in the credits somewhere. These maps are unsupported, don't ask me for help on them, I didn't bother organizing them. There are some random test maps in here too. They weren't meant to be playable maps, just used for shots in the video. They were mostly created for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (though the outdoors one was in Episode 1, otherwise the grass looked screwed). A lot of them use assets from other games / mods (Zombie Panic, Fortress Forever, Counter Strike Source, Dark Messiah, etc.). Honestly this stuff is a mess to go through, but if people really want it, they can dig through it. These are all uncompiled VMF files. Here's the link: All maps for The Tunnel (7z archive) LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Whether the IP is alive or not doesn't have much bearing on whether the game is staying alive or not. On the contrary, dead IPs are much easier to transition to abandonware, whereas if an old game is sharing the same name as a new one in the franchise, the company can sometimes try to shut it down because they perceive it as a threat to their own product because of search results (or lawyers might anyway). So say Atari released TDU3, some suit might decide the name "test drive 3" will confuse people from their new product and seek to shut down references to it since they don't profit on that. While I'm mostly just going to extend it to games on the show, this "profit trumps all" mentality I personally feel like causes an amazing amount of harm in the world, and that games are just one small sliver it manifests itself.

I'm pretty good at delivering on promises when deadlines aren't involved. Awesome, though there's no rush on this, I'll be happy if it ever happens. PRESS F6 TO RETURN TO THE ROAD

I really am trying to cut it down to just the material I think is worth saying. Some things I left out of this one: -I couldn't figure out how to reverse the damn car (or IF I can) -The steering still sucks with joypad input, though it MIGHT not suck with a steering wheel with low sensitivity (though I didn't have one to test) -The steering still sucks with low CPU speeds. It's slightly more manageable, but you still get the jackrabbit acceleration starts plus then you have a DELAY to your steering, it's horrible. (I probably should have mentioned this one based on some of the comments, a few people think I'm ignorant now, I added an annotation to mention this). -I'm not outright condoning piracy, but I'll side with the pirates every time if it comes to a game being killed v. respecting IP owner's "rights." For better or worse, this is going to be a reoccurring theme on the show when relevant to the game. -I found a link to the manual and the Cape Cod expansion, but they were both broken. You know, I was actually thinking it's possible with stuff like google sketchup, it might be possible to generate the data some other way, there would just have to be some consistent points that you were "measuring" from. Like if you established one vertices was at the top of the mountain, and kept that as a reference point for the next shot. The resolution might be too low not to have gross inaccuracies trying to stitch all that together though. No, that's more or less what I've been doing for RGD lately, sorry. I won't (or I don't THINK I will be) be distracted with other projects though, so it should go much faster than usual, but not at that rate. I like actually having time to exercise, plus an hour of free time, etc. I had 3 hours sleep when I posted the episode (had a little bit of sleep since then), it's going to be an intense few days for me up to Halloween. I will be covering one of the best games for Halloween ever made though, so that's a plus.

Blip.tv link Well in my quest to cut down the time on the episode, things completely backfired and this became the longest one so far. Also, it gradually started taking more of a stranger and angrier turn than I was expecting. Nietzsche said if you gaze into the abyss long enough, it will gaze back at you, so I guess on that note I'm starting to feel like I'm made out of vector graphics. It didn't get so bad that I considered just burning the computer instead of releasing the video though, so here it is! While it is kind of intoxicating being able to release videos this fast, I have been working on it practically nonstop since the last one, so I'm afraid this rate of videos won't be normal in the future. I do have plans to get one more episode out for Halloween though, after that, I'll be focusing pretty much exclusively on Freeman's Mind for a while. Videos! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Yes, it's not a secret anymore, I was looking for videos that we can put up on Gorilla Gong. People can keep them coming, I'll check some of the picks out here.

Well you'll probably be pleased with what I have in mind for the Halloween episode then. This may disappoint some of you, but I'm really not a fan of turn-based combat games. It's just a personality thing, it's nothing against the quality of the games themselves. I'm unlikely to review any unless there was some sort of overwhelming demand. I promise to make FM the next video that comes out after Halloween.

I mostly take the opposite editing style for this series than I do for Freeman's Mind. Freeman's Mind I have to do all the jokes in editing and constantly check and re-edit to make the time fit. In RGD I mostly just say my thoughts on the game, then find the footage to match what I'm saying rather than vice-versa. For me personally, it goes MUCH faster than Freeman's Mind. It allows me to form trains of thought, whereas those get interrupted every 10 seconds in FM and I have to think of something new to say about killing a solider. This style will slow down depending on the game though. I'll probably only stick to games I'm familiar with for the near future for that reason also. If I have to play a brand new game (for me), it will take much more time for it to sink in with me, then go back and replay parts for recording. Well it's more like I can only get so upset over a videogame, afterall it is just a game. The stuff that gets me legitimately angry are things like corruption, victimization, exploitation of people and resources, predatory deception, etc. I don't plan on going into detail on this stuff anytime soon on the show (though who knows), but there are a few game companies that are slime that I definitely plan to call out later on. And yes, EA is on the list big time. I don't intend to talk about games LOTS of people have already reviewed unless I feel like I really have some things to say about it no one else has. I think people have pretty thoroughly covered Desert Bus. Based on some other comments, it's looking that way. Oh well, I'll talk about that in a follow-up episode (which I'll probably do as a few people are rising to the challenge on beating this game). Don't worry, I'm sure I'll cover something you've never heard of, but it probably won't be for the next several episodes.

I need to have a LOT to say in order to make it any longer than this, I can only think of a handful of games like that, though this one surprised me with how much I ended up talking about it. Thanks, I'll try not to make it irritating or obnoxious, these are mostly just honest impressions, but with me trying to spice it up a little. I feel like I can't compete against somebody like the AVGN in terms of outright game rage (games actually don't make me especially angry, I mostly just get discouraged or annoyed if they're antagonistic. Any anger expressed on the show will likely be on some other topic that's related to the particular game), and I've already seen some other reviews that are far more thorough and informative than what I'll be doing. I figure my strengths will be just flat out talking about games I have strong opinions on, plus having lots of non sequitur rants because why not. So unlike Freeman's Mind, pretty much anything I say on the show will be my actual thoughts and opinions on the games (unless I'm OBVIOUSLY trying to bullshit people).

The player has 2 health, they both have a wrench.

Blip.tv link Well I had intended for this episode to be shorter and less edited than the last one, but that didn't happen as I had too many things to say about this game. Here's the next installment of RGD either way. This is a very noteworthy and deceptive game as you'll find out in the review. I'm really going to try and make the next one shorter. In a decision I'm sure will upset some people, while it's been time consuming, I am enjoying working on the game dungeon (I would have called this show The Game Dungeon if that wouldn't have doomed the name to obscurity trying to search for it) and I'd like to continue pushing with it to Halloween. It's my goal to get two more episodes out this month, with a special one being released on Halloween. This unfortunately means Freeman's Mind will have to get put on hold, but only until November. I promise to resume work on it on Novemeber 1st. In the meantime, hey, more videos! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Hey, just a quick update. With the exception of scary machinima (we'll post as many as we can find this month), we may be scaling down to 2 videos a day for the near future until we get more traffic + suggestions coming in. We plan to bump it up again later, but we want to make sure there are new videos every day and we might burn through our reserves a little too fast at 3 a day.

Well it ended up taking me longer to process things than I intended, but I finally have the results for the contest to win a free copy of the game "Unepic." The winner goes to "dferch952" for this picture below: The angle for this was absolutely perfect and it sparks some thoughts what's going through the player's head. Either way, the person has problems and I can relate to that. Below are the runner-ups: This was easily my number two pick, it was a very hard decision deciding between this and the winner. I like the number of questions being raised here: by Daniel Fendrich An excellent backdrop for a heavy metal video: by Jon Jon This image was received by SETI and suppressed by the government until now: by "jlm" The author claims there are several subliminal images contained within this image, I think it's just bilinear filtering: by Killian Thieme A good "what happens next?" shot: by Adrián Scasserra The eyes of the being on the right see all. by "Neil Anblomee" An excellent photo of this poor creature: by "twisted.nipples" The great bubble war changed history forever: by "blue_dust" LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Ha, "urcousinvinnie5" PM'd me about this. He's actually right on all counts except for them necessarily being Xen creatures and them being harmless. In fact, I almost had an alternate kicker showing the shadow of the creature Mike and Dave first heard, but it wasn't rendering well in Source at the time.. While I don't want to reveal too much since I could eventually make a sequel, I will say there was more going on than what people saw.

Okay, I've picked the winner. I've locked the topic and will have a new post on it soon.