Laura might not always be right, but she certainly knows more about Final Fantasy! Another great show guys.

On the graphics card, are you sure you installed the correct 64bit graphics driver. It's unfortunate but you could have just got a bad card. Not all 8800GTS are made equal, it's same for CPU's. The manufacturing process doesn't make perfect exact specifications of CPU's or GC's.

I prefer XFX for nvidia cards.

Mao, I also got deja vu with that question. Do you listen the (new) idle thumbs podcast or RPS? I think it might have been on on of those last week, exact same wording. I think it was the RPS one now that I think about it more.

I have 2 children and I had no problem with Heavy Rain, the children did not felt real and also I don't care about other children ( sorry for the joke. I think to design believable children is really, really tough. I attended a painting class and my teacher told me that painting children or babys is the most difficult thing, because one wrong brush stroke and the portrait does not feel natural. So if you have uncanny valley with adult characters, well you can double that problem with child characters... makes sense?

I was quite literally blown away by the last few minutes of the show. Criticizing the Final Fantasy series because "every game plays the same?" If only there was a word out there, some term that we could use to describe a subset of media that shares similar characteristics.

"I was quite literally blown away."

No you weren't. Please don't use "literally" to mean, "well, not LITERALLY, but with great emphasis." "Literally" means "this is not hyperbole, I am talking about something that actually happened." It's a really useful word and every time someone uses it to mean its antonym it becomes less useful.

I quite literally shat myself.

Lara didn't say bitches at the end!! I literally feel robbed. Like she stole my lunch money. And now I can't have my delicious, nutritious lunch. Or dessert. Bitches!!

It's been used that way since the 1860s (according to the OED). You lost this battle a long time ago.

I love the line of thinking this sentence sent me down. What are the practical applications of creaming your pants? Insect repellent? If you're hunting might it attract prey?

I gotta say I cringed every time one of the members said Portal was retconned recently for the ARG. Retconning implies that they changed the establish facts, and all valve did was extend past what was in the original game. It seems like a minor distinction, but there is a huge difference in the spirit of what was done and what you've labeled it as.

Retconning is usually a byproduct of sloppy writing or people going back to a story that was never meant to be revisited. Neither of which could be said about Portal, because it left distinct impressions that there was more to be had, and we knew right away that they were working on a sequel.

Retcon stands for "retroactive continuity." Adding radios to the original Portal and modifying its ending adds retroactive continuity with the sequel. They added story hooks for a sequel to a game that didn't have those same hooks before. It's less sloppy than the retconning you'll get in, say, a comic book series, but it is retconning.

Do you think?

Hey, I saved my frothy rage for later in the show, when it was actually important. Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy XII equivalent, indeed! Troglodytes!

Yeah I think I heared it on the same show. I think this reader even took some of the Thumbs answers and incorporated them into his question as well. This is getting very incestuous.

Note the retroactive part. This is just plain continuity, the game did not add anything in the existing timeline of the original game. Bioshock 2 is a good example of additive retroactive continuity.

As the resident JRPG hater, I'm actually enjoying FFXIII so far. I am quite literally not usually annoyed by it.