What game are you playing?

[ibanezmonster]

Girls are only interested in what happens between the fist and the stove.

Not sure I get what fist and stove means...

[kishnevi]

Oh, okay. Girls are less interested in building computers for fun because of guys because of centuries of sexism. Okay, got it.

Most accurately, millenia of male dominance have resulted in both society and women themselves thinking cosmetology is more appropriate for girls that software development. 
Go back and read your comment...which I think is a very reasonable one....about how men are willing to work a zillion hours but women are not....and think how much of that is the result of cultural expectations:  that men are still thought of as the ones who bring in the money while women take care of the kids.

[ibanezmonster]

Most accurately, millenia of male dominance have resulted in both society and women themselves thinking cosmetology is more appropriate for girls that software development. 

Not sure how software, which is relatively new, fits into this, but I know that traditionally, since the early 20th century, it's been thought that the man's place is the garage and the woman's place is the kitchen. So that might explain the automechanics proportion.

Go back and read your comment...which I think is a very reasonable one....about how men are willing to work a zillion hours but women are not....and think how much of that is the result of cultural expectations:  that men are still thought of as the ones who bring in the money while women take care of the kids.

Yep... but while it's great that women are encouraged to go to school and have careers, where's the encouragement for men to be stay at home dads? I certainly don't feel like this would be much of a possibility for me or many friends (although I do have one friend who fits this description, married to someone a bit older).

[North Star]

Yep... but while it's great that women are encouraged to go to school and have careers, where's the encouragement for men to be stay at home dads? I certainly don't feel like this would be much of a possibility for me or many friends (although I do have one friend who fits this description, married to someone a bit older).

Perhaps the society isn't in dire need of any stay-at-home parents..

[ibanezmonster]

Perhaps the society isn't in dire need of any stay-at-home parents..

Maybe, but my point is that there is often a stigma against men staying home and playing the role that women usually do. Maybe it's a bit better in Scandanavian countries (I heard Sweden was the country to introduce paternal leave)? Some might not see a stay at home dad as a "real man" because he is not a "breadwinner." Maybe some men would rather work part-time and see their kids most of the time, but cultural perceptions affect both genders so that people might be more inclined to play traditional roles.

[North Star]

Sure, there's paternal leave in Finland too, although the parents can decide not to have it (there's 3 months of maternal leave, and the rest is divided by the parents). A big reason being that in many families the husband has a higher income. There are extremely few stay-at-home parents of either gender in Finland.

[ibanezmonster]

If we get back on topic...

I'm finally getting the Oculus Rift Tuesday!


Also, I made a file to track my Final Fantasy info in a neat little summary. I'm going to try to take it slowly now, though. Going to resubscribe to FF11, since I've realized how it's actually easy (and better, in a way, often) to study Japanese while playing a game. Also, I want to get back into it.

I guess this is one of those odd psychological problems, but... having the goal of progressing as much as possible in a game is the only thing that would consistently get me out of bed after 6-7 hours of sleep, so it's going to be odd trying to keep on doing that when I'm not going to view games as goals, but as just fun instead. 

Favorite to least favorite:
9, 7, 6, 8, 11, 10, 5, 14:ARR, 13-2, 12, 3 (DS), 13, 10-2, 1, 2

To play:
4 (The Complete Collection), 13: Lightning Returns

Finish final boss:
1, 3, 13

-Have played original FF4 up until final boss, did not beat
-11: Completed 3 nation storylines, ROTZ, COP, TOAU, WOTG (+San d'oria quest, but not Bastok or Windurst), Adoulin in progress
-14:ARR: Completed main storyline

[lisa needs braces]

Most accurately, millenia of male dominance have resulted in both society and women themselves thinking cosmetology is more appropriate for girls that software development. 
Go back and read your comment...which I think is a very reasonable one....about how men are willing to work a zillion hours but women are not....and think how much of that is the result of cultural expectations:  that men are still thought of as the ones who bring in the money while women take care of the kids.

Or maybe the sexes are innately different psychologically due to evolution and therefore have different average interests and goals. Historically, women, as the weaker sex, were always entitled to more care and protection than men, which meant that far more males than females throughout history have died in brutal warfare or in brutal physical labor. Everybody had it bad in the olden days.

[Rinaldo]

Back on topic: Shadow of Mordor! As a fan of the books, I'm very critical of what's been done with the license since the first movie (which I enjoyed) came out. But this is friggin' AWESOME. Sorry for the lack of a better word but this game just oozes AWESOME while not being braindead stupid at the same time. You're playing as an undead ranger, possessed by an elven lord. It's a silly concept, it shouldn't work at all but somehow it does. And did I mention that it's AWESOME? Imagine Assassin's Creed making out with the recent Batman games and spawning a child that still manages to surprise you and has the most entertaining swordplay since Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The sheer barrage of game mechanics might seem daunting at first but can be mastered soon. GOTY material, folks.

[lisa needs braces]

Yep... but while it's great that women are encouraged to go to school and have careers, where's the encouragement for men to be stay at home dads? I certainly don't feel like this would be much of a possibility for me or many friends (although I do have one friend who fits this description, married to someone a bit older).

The problem is that women's innate nature rules out the scenario where there's an equal number of male vs female stay at home parents. Seriously, look at it rationally. Many men would quite naturally opt out of the stress, competitiveness and drudgery of labor for staying home with their kids and doing the household chores if women were willing to accept that. Instead, men basically know that women won't accept that for two reasons:

--Inherent gender relationship dynamics that will make the woman get turned off by a stay at home dad and be more likely to find an assertive male boss or colleague as attractive.
--The simple fact that women strongly prefer that, if anyone gets to stay home, it should be them.

Also, women have a requirement that their potential life partners earn, at the very least, as much as them, but preferably more. So women's own mating choices will only rarely lead to a situation where the dude has to be the one who stays home.

[stingo]

Back on topic: Shadow of Mordor! As a fan of the books, I'm very critical of what's been done with the license since the first movie (which I enjoyed) came out. But this is friggin' AWESOME. Sorry for the lack of a better word but this game just oozes AWESOME while not being braindead stupid at the same time. You're playing as an undead ranger, possessed by an elven lord. It's a silly concept, it shouldn't work at all but somehow it does. And did I mention that it's AWESOME? Imagine Assassin's Creed making out with the recent Batman games and spawning a child that still manages to surprise you and has the most entertaining swordplay since Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The sheer barrage of game mechanics might seem daunting at first but can be mastered soon. GOTY material, folks.

It is awesome - I actually defeated Tugog the Guardian and posted about it on my Facebook page.

Could there be a separate gamergate thread?

[ibanezmonster]

The problem is that women's innate nature rules out the scenario where there's an equal number of male vs female stay at home parents. Seriously, look at it rationally. Many men would quite naturally opt out of the stress, competitiveness and drudgery of labor for staying home with their kids and doing the household chores if women were willing to accept that. Instead, men basically know that women won't accept that for two reasons:

--Inherent gender relationship dynamics that will make the woman get turned off by a stay at home dad and be more likely to find an assertive male boss or colleague as attractive.
--The simple fact that women strongly prefer that, if anyone gets to stay home, it should be them.

Also, women have a requirement that their potential life partners earn, at the very least, as much as them, but preferably more. So women's own mating choices will only rarely lead to a situation where the dude has to be the one who stays home.

If I said anything about "innate nature," I'd be labeled misogynist...

Besides this:

"--The simple fact that women strongly prefer that, if anyone gets to stay home, it should be them."

which I'm not so sure of (if so, it might be due to the difference in income to begin with), I've observed your points as being valid.

I know match.com might not be an ideal description of people in general, but there was that time when I looked at over 50 profiles of men and 50 of women and noticed that half of the women listed an income requirement while only 2 or 3 guys did. Most of the income requirements were at the same level or greater than the income they made.

Typically, women are attracted to men that are taller, stronger, and have more money than them. The way it's set up is that women are like the employer and men are the potential employees trying to get the job. Which gender asks out which? So, ultimately, it's the woman who decides who to date, and their preferences remain traditional, whether it's because of an "innate quality" or something cultural. Men are expected to "man up" if they wish to be desirable.

[Marc]

Played EA Sports NHL 2004 .... for the first time since ages and ages, with 11 year old rosters , picked the Sabres (dunno why) as my team and beat the Islanders with 6-2 .... on the DIFFICULT (!) level!

And I was already happy that my old GamePad still worked.

When I was young(er) I really liked to play those (ice) hockey games, but EA stopped developing them for PC after NHL 2009. A great shame, it was always fun to visit the websites and forums where loads of upgrades, tools and add-ons could be downloaded.

Anyway, I had the series from 1999 up to 2009 and always liked 2004 the best, best combination of graphics and gameplay IMO. Of course it looks outdated and a bit clumsy now, but 10 years ago this was really .... good.

Here are some examples of an upgraded Finnish League version, but it's more fun playing than watching.

http://www.youtube.com/v/FeK8pHJ_Kfg

[lisa needs braces]

I SO knew that, sooner or later, a game like this was coming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3PhvCf_Jg

(NSFW, extreme violence, etc)

[ibanezmonster]

I SO knew that, sooner or later, a game like this was coming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3PhvCf_Jg

(NSFW, extreme violence, etc)

Lol. It mentioned a comparison to Postal (or maybe they meant Postal 2?), but look. I doubt in this "Hatred" game you'll be able to set a marching band on fire and then pee on their corpses.

So meh.

[ibanezmonster]

Well, I got my Oculus Rift working for the last 2 hours. I still can't figure out how to get the "Direct HMD Access from Apps" mode working, though, which many games need to run. Only "Direct to Desktop" mode is working.

So... lol. Just describing it as "awesome" or "amazing" doesn't really do it justice. You literally feel like you are in another world. Most impressive is, for example, the object such as candles or trees that you walk up to in the Tuscany. They not only look like they're there, but they feel there. I want to to touch them... oh, and yeah. There are some other demos out there that make you want to touch stuff lol. 

[ibanezmonster]

Got my mom, dad, brother and friend to try it. One more friend to go that I'll let try it. All of them were freaking out when trying it. As my friend says, "You're really there." I hate to say it in a thread about video games, but just about every game feels trivial now. They're all just... visually flat.

The only major flaw about the DK2, visually, is the screen door effect is still there. There's hundreds of small, black dots- not a huge problem, but the only major thing from keeping it from becoming perfect. There are a few minor things, such as motion blur one game I played and sometimes you'll see incorrect coloring if you look out of your field of view (due to the stereoscopic effect), but it's really even that noticeable.

I can't stop riding these two rollercoasters- even though you're not actually there, you feel those drops!  I'm going to see what it takes to create my own games for the Rift. If the process is smooth enough (heh, though what ever does go smoothly?) then I can't imagine I'll be playing much Final Fantasy.

[ibanezmonster]

Meh... guess I'm going to play Lightning Returns, since it is the last Final Fantasy game that I set out to play. Then I'll do the main stuff I wanted to do in 11. Then I'll mess around with programming for the Rift.

I was surprised how easy it was to compile and run the Rift demo... I literally just loaded the project into Visual Studio 2013, ran it, and it ran as I put on the Rift. Usually setting up things programming-wise is the biggest hassle imaginable for the smallest goal, but this worked without any problems at all. And this demo featured all the main features of the Rift- head tracking, 3D, etc. all just embedded in the code. So to make your own game you just gotta take that as the base and build off of it.

[ibanezmonster]

So... I think experiencing this:

https://www.youtube.com/v/XV9zrLqb328&noredirect=1

while setting it on mute and instead listening to this:

https://www.youtube.com/v/TQ4kKqYU14k&index=6&list=PL77A92F0DC1C49749

was one of the most beautiful experiences in my life.

It's really weird going right next to an anime character in 3D. The girls look like... dolls. In my opinion, they're gorgeous, though I could easily understand most people just getting weirded out by how they look. And I noticed that dots for the noses actually appear the same exact way in 3D with a frontal view. I thought it was just a shorthand, but nope.

I get all three Vocaloids to dance in unison, though. I don't know... there's just something incredible about these girls that look like dolls dancing to very deep, barbaric, strange and oddly rhythmic music. I'm totally going to show my friend this special combination. 

[ibanezmonster]

Continuing the extensive monologue...

Tried my first horror game in the Rift last night- Mental Torment. Walking down dark hallways with random serial killing looking things and such. I have no problem with stuff like that- somewhat interesting and fun. At the end, I drowned in a cage of blood. Okay, fine. But when the cage was dropped off in the middle of the ocean and there was a shark right outside the cage, and the cage opened, leaving me just waiting to be eaten by a shark... that's when I had to take it off. Being chased by chainsaw maniacs and such is fine, but being in the ocean or being covered in spiders or cockroaches are the only two things that are a no for me.