PSNOT 2.0 - I kind of want to subscribe to IndieBox.

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Crunchewy said:
Did all of you cheat the speed run in Xeodrifter? I started a new save to try to do it legit, but I don't think I'll be even close to an hour. I was going fine until the 3rd boss. One problem, though, is I was also trying to get health during a boss battle and I probably shouldn't have been trying for that (and I haven't even succeeded yet, not without dying, anyway).

Also I'm not sure when I started my first game, so not sure how I'd get the clock right.
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It doesn't have to be an exact time. You can even set the date to the day before you started the game.

 
MildObstruction said:
Tomorrow morning: I finish omega quintet.
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omega quintet post-mortem. spoilered for boring shitty jrpg talk. if anyone's curious it took me about 30 hours to finish the story with the 'true' ending on the highest difficulty with no replays.

So right off the bat my first issue is that the post-game of omega quintet is apparently 3/5-4/5 of the 100% time for the game. it'd be one thing if there was anything new, but it's mostly just a grindfest to get your approval rating up to 1 billion percent and to get stats to an acceptable level to take out the last extra big monster. I must've known this deep down, but it was a little disappointing to get through the end and then realize just how much was left.

Story:

The story in this game is terrible which should be no surprise to anyone that's been following along. But given the pedigree of who made the game and the fact that it's an idol story that should've been an easy one to guess anyhow. I did stop from time to time to pick up parts of the story so I could at least understand what was happening more or less, but I regretted it every time I did.

Sights and sound:

The graphics are also not great. Somehow they look less awful after looking at them for too long, but whatever. some of the team up effects are nice, but it's about on par with tales of hearts r.

Gameplay:

As far as the gameplay goes it's a hybrid dungeon crawler and hub mission game - you collect main story missions from a computer in your office and go to one of the handful of wanderable areas to accomplish said missions (usually defeating a monster). There's nothing more to it than that - go to the computer, get mission(s), go to where it says the mission is, beat up monster, turn in mission at computer.

There are also quests from people in the surrounding town (also hub mission style - they show up in a list and after a one sentence conversation you accept or decline the quest). The quests are annoying for a number of reasons - most of these are also defeat a monster, but there's some fetch types or make a music video type (yep) so this is the only mission variety in the game. That's the good part. The bad part is that there's probably 200 or so of these things and they often have prerequisites from other chapters so it's extremely easy to miss some of them. If you miss them you can lock yourself out of abilities, weapons and other rewards (of course) the trophy for completing 100% of the quests. Additionally they're 'timed', not in the traditional sense but if you progress the story too far with computer missions you can potentially expire the quest missions and making them unfinishable. In one instance I picked up a quest where I had to go fetch something from an area where the first story mission of a chapter was. I found the story mission target so I killed him, turned the mission in and continued looking for the fetch item. After a whole lot of not finding it I looked at the quest and saw that it had expired, presumably from finishing the first story mission.

DLC:

Normally I ignore this stuff, but I spent about $8 getting the DLC weapons and accessories. they're definitely broken and make the game a bit easier than I expected (despite what some of the internet said), but worth it. there's strangely no useful way to grind xp in the late game - you overlevel past all of the mobs that are accessible fairly early on for some reason so you can't boost yourself to any reasonable badassery without literally spending dozens of hours getting shitty low xp from weak mobs.

Mechanics (this part is long, so stop reading now if you really aren't interested):

This is the only really good thing about the game and it was enough to keep me playing it to the end. The mechanics are very, VERY thorough and well thought out and you can make the game as complicated or as simple as you like.

The basic idea is similar to ffxiii or others where you're a team fighting monsters and every monster has a 'field'. you need to chop through the field with enough damage/effort to cause a field break which creates a 2x+ damage situation. In some cases it's more like 10x - it'll feel like you're hitting the monster with a napkin until the field is down. There's a lot that surrounds this though:

  • whenever a monster gets to his turn in the battle order, his field 100% resets
  • the turn order can be manipulated - there are attacks that can delay a monster's turn, and monsters can do something called an 'order break' where they force themselves to have the next turn, resetting their field and attacking immediately
  • the monsters, like your party, actually can have multiple turns within their turn (for your party, the number of turns you get to take at once is determined by your 'proficiency' aka level with your 'mic' aka weapon.
additionally, there are also bonuses that are slotted with a turn which is really tricky - if 1-5 represent your player and M represents the monster, you might see a turn order that looks like this 1 2 - - - 3 - 4 5 - - - M; the dashes are empty turns where a monster can order break or you can move yourself if you defend. some number of that list will have a modifier - regain HP, more susceptible to status effects, etc. So, for example, if you see that the monster will be in a turn slot that has HP recovery, you want to prioritize hitting him with a turn delay or two to get him out of that slot.

the usual slew of status effects / buffs / debuffs are in the game too, usually stacked from a single attack by a monster. there's also a disturbing amount of instant KO attacks at the later levels (at least on the higher difficulty) and weird effects that I was never quite prepared to deal with (there's a status that lowers the number of moves you get in a single turn I think? sometimes I suddenly had 1 or 2 moves instead of 4 or 5). and while not a focus, there's a lot of knockback attacks and (I'd never seen this) reverse attacks (pulls you forward instead). the idea is that you can line up cone attacks and other non-circular aoes with a knockback or reverse to a poorly laid out group but in practice it's virtually never necessary since you're swimming in very effective large circle shaped aoe attacks.

The balancing is jacked but I think by design - I was always surprised when a low level mob could wipe my party just by virtue of the bizarre balancing this game has. it seems like it's balanced for your team to perform 'harmonics' (team up mode where everyone takes their turn in sequence preventing order breaks and allowing for chain attacks that create new, sweeter attacks). there's a color scale identifying enemy threat - blue/green/yellow/red/purple/big skull - that describes how dangerous the enemy is in relation to you (there's no enemy levels that are visible). if you're prepared you can run in to a big skull enemy group of 10-12 with a surprise attack and wipe them all before they can attack with harmonics and the right chain skills (and you'll usually level up 3-5 levels immediately after). but if they get an attack in they'll wipe you out. conversely, you can be fighting a green (relatively safe) group and they can wipe out your HP in 1 or 2 turns if you're not paying attention. Bosses love instant KO or massive damage attacks. I don't know how many bosses there were where I had a max of 5k HP (and I think I was around the right level or above for the boss) and he would dish out 20k to two party members. There's also terrible options for SP management (the equivalent of MP in this game) - it's a constant complaint, but you'll find yourself out of SP after 3 or 4 fights and having to return to the office to replenish since getting more SP replenishing items is a hot pain in the ass.

Which brings me to crafting - why they decided to put even MORE crap in this game I don't know. But there's no store proper, you can create consumable items but it requires money (EP) and drops from mobs. So if you want to make (for example) a +25% HP thing, you'd need a small amount of EP and then you'd need to go hunt the mobs in whatever explorable area. all for the equivalent of a potion.

On top of all of the above, there's also outfits that are destructible (you basically have to keep two on hand to swap between since they break so easily even maxed out - if they're destroyed the slotted bonuses don't work in them anymore), lots of unlockables, affection between the boy support character and the idols to manage, the 'training room' dungeon which is a good portion of the games trophies (and out of 12 floors 8 of them are locked until post-game), and a lot more as far as the actual functions of the game.

I could keep rambling about this since it really does make the jrpgs I've played historically look really simplistic, but I'll stop there.

And the truth of the matter is I just spammed cosmic fan in harmonics and the big special attack each character has like I suspect most people do.

tl;dr review:

if it didn't have such a shit story/characters and more competent artists with some more variety it'd be a pretty decent jrpg. As it stands, I wouldn't recommend it.

So I'll probably wrap up whatever trophies I can tonight/tomorrow before taking it back to the library and be done with it.

 
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MildObstruction said:
omega quintet post-mortem. spoilered for boring shitty jrpg talk.

So right off the bat my first issue is that the post-game of omega quintet is apparently 3/5-4/5 of the 100% time for the game. it'd be one thing if there was anything new, but it's mostly just a grindfest to get your approval rating up to 1 billion percent and to get stats to an acceptable level to take out the last extra big monster. I must've known this deep down, but it was a little disappointing to get through the end and then realize just how much was left.

Story:

The story in this game is terrible which should be no surprise to anyone that's been following along. But given the pedigree of who made the game and the fact that it's an idol story that should've been an easy one to guess anyhow. I did stop from time to time to pick up parts of the story so I could at least understand what was happening more or less, but I regretted it every time I did.

Sights and sound:

The graphics are also not great. Somehow they look less awful after looking at them for too long, but whatever. some of the team up effects are nice, but it's about on par with tales of hearts r.

Gameplay:

As far as the gameplay goes it's a hybrid dungeon crawler and hub mission game - you collect main story missions from a computer in your office and go to one of the handful of wanderable areas to accomplish said missions (usually defeating a monster). There's nothing more to it than that - go to the computer, get mission(s), go to where it says the mission is, beat up monster, turn in mission at computer.

There are also quests from people in the surrounding town (also hub mission style - they show up in a list and after a one sentence conversation you accept or decline the quest). The quests are annoying for a number of reasons - most of these are also defeat a monster, but there's some fetch types or make a music video type (yep) so this is the only mission variety in the game. That's the good part. The bad part is that there's probably 200 or so of these things and they often have prerequisites from other chapters so it's extremely easy to miss some of them. If you miss them you can lock yourself out of abilities, weapons and other rewards (of course) the trophy for completing 100% of the quests. Additionally they're 'timed', not in the traditional sense but if you progress the story too far with computer missions you can potentially expire the quest missions and making them unfinishable. In one instance I picked up a quest where I had to go fetch something from an area where the first story mission of a chapter was. I found the story mission target so I killed him, turned the mission in and continued looking for the fetch item. After a whole lot of not finding it I looked at the quest and saw that it had expired, presumably from finishing the first story mission.

Mechanics (this part is long, so stop reading now if you really aren't interested):

This is the only really good thing about the game and it was enough to keep me playing it to the end. The mechanics are very, VERY thorough and well thought out and you can make the game as complicated or as simple as you like.

The basic idea is similar to ffxiii or others where you're a team fighting monsters and every monster has a 'field'. you need to chop through the field with enough damage/effort to cause a field break which creates a 2x+ damage situation. In some cases it's more like 10x - it'll feel like you're hitting the monster with a napkin until the field is down. There's a lot that surrounds this though:

  • whenever a monster gets to his turn in the battle order, his field 100% resets
  • the turn order can be manipulated - there are attacks that can delay a monster's turn, and monsters can do something called an 'order break' where they force themselves to have the next turn, resetting their field and attacking immediately
  • the monsters, like your party, actually can have multiple turns within their turn (for your party, the number of turns you get to take at once is determined by your 'proficiency' aka level with your 'mic' aka weapon.
additionally, there are also bonuses that are slotted with a turn which is really tricky - if 1-5 represent your player and M represents the monster, you might see a turn order that looks like this 1 2 - - - 3 - 4 5 - - - M; the dashes are empty turns where a monster can order break or you can move yourself if you defend. some number of that list will have a modifier - regain HP, more susceptible to status effects, etc. So, for example, if you see that the monster will be in a turn slot that has HP recovery, you want to prioritize hitting him with a turn delay or two to get him out of that slot.

the usual slew of status effects / buffs / debuffs are in the game too, usually stacked from a single attack by a monster. there's also a disturbing amount of instant KO attacks at the later levels (at least on the higher difficulty) and weird effects that I was never quite prepared to deal with (there's a status that lowers the number of moves you get in a single turn I think? sometimes I suddenly had 1 or 2 moves instead of 4 or 5). and while not a focus, there's a lot of knockback attacks and (I'd never seen this) reverse attacks (pulls you forward instead). the idea is that you can line up cone attacks and other non-circular aoes with a knockback or reverse to a poorly laid out group but in practice it's virtually never necessary since you're swimming in very effective large circle shaped aoe attacks.

The balancing is jacked but I think by design - I was always surprised when a low level mob could wipe my party just by virtue of the bizarre balancing this game has. it seems like it's balanced for your team to perform 'harmonics' (team up mode where everyone takes their turn in sequence preventing order breaks and allowing for chain attacks that create new, sweeter attacks). there's a color scale identifying enemy threat - blue/green/yellow/red/purple/big skull - that describes how dangerous the enemy is in relation to you (there's no enemy levels that are visible). if you're prepared you can run in to a big skull enemy group of 10-12 with a surprise attack and wipe them all before they can attack with harmonics and the right chain skills (and you'll usually level up 3-5 levels immediately after). but if they get an attack in they'll wipe you out. conversely, you can be fighting a green (relatively safe) group and they can wipe out your HP in 1 or 2 turns if you're not paying attention. Bosses love instant KO or massive damage attacks. I don't know how many bosses there were where I had a max of 5k HP (and I think I was around the right level or above for the boss) and he would dish out 20k to two party members. There's also terrible options for SP management (the equivalent of MP in this game) - it's a constant complaint, but you'll find yourself out of SP after 3 or 4 fights and having to return to the office to replenish since getting more SP replenishing items is a hot pain in the ass.

Which brings me to crafting - why they decided to put even MORE crap in this game I don't know. But there's no store proper, you can create consumable items but it requires money (EP) and drops from mobs. So if you want to make (for example) a +25% HP thing, you'd need a small amount of EP and then you'd need to go hunt the mobs in whatever explorable area. all for the equivalent of a potion.

On top of all of the above, there's also outfits that are destructible (you basically have to keep two on hand to swap between since they break so easily even maxed out - if they're destroyed the slotted bonuses don't work in them anymore), lots of unlockables, affection between the boy support character and the idols to manage, the 'training room' dungeon which is a good portion of the games trophies (and out of 12 floors 8 of them are locked until post-game), and a lot more as far as the actual functions of the game.

I could keep rambling about this since it really does make the jrpgs I've played historically look really simplistic, but I'll stop there.

And the truth of the matter is I just spammed cosmic fan in harmonics and the big special attack each character has like I suspect most people do.

tl;dr review:

if it didn't have such a shit story/characters and more competent artists with some more variety it'd be a pretty decent jrpg. As it stands, I wouldn't recommend it.

So I'll probably wrap up whatever trophies I can tonight/tomorrow before taking it back to the library and be done with it.
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I hope you didn't type all that on your cell phone. I thought that was some relatively obscure game, but there are a lot more players on PSNP than I would have thought. Are there people on the waiting list for it from your library.

 
GatorBeerGeek said:
I hope you didn't type all that on your cell phone. I thought that was some relatively obscure game, but there are a lot more players on PSNP than I would have thought. Are there people on the waiting list for it from your library.
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Yeah, I've had a hell of a time keeping it checked out and there's a hold on it again so I have to take it back Thursday. People are apparently completely starved for jrpgs on ps4. In fact, the library had 6 copies but 5 have been stolen. So I imagine this is my last chance to play the game before this copy disappears too. However I've had no trouble keep re rev 2 checked out for a month and still going strong.

And nope, using my work computer to write my dissertation.

 
Can they not require a drivers license to get a library card or something in Missouri?  How in the fuck do they just deal with all these games getting stolen without seeming to give a shit or put in place things to make it less prevalent?

 
GatorBeerGeek said:
Can they not require a drivers license to get a library card or something in Missouri? How in the fuck do they just deal with all these games getting stolen without seeming to give a shit or put in place things to make it less prevalent?
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I dunno. All I had to do was bring in a piece of mail to get my library card capable of doing holds for games, it could've been anybody's. I've noticed that some people just hang on to games for weeks - it's a 0.30 / day late charge which if you think about it is still an incredible deal. If I snagged mad max day one and kept it for 30 days that'd be a $6.90 rental (unless they mark it as lost and charge the full amount after some number of days).

 
It turns out that someone else on TT got the BBR plat shortly after me Sunday.  The score of the game dropped 600 points due to both of us getting the plat.  I need all you people who bought that bundle to start that game sometime soon to help keep the score inflated :)

 
psa: last chance to pick up wolfenstein the old blood for $10 before the store changes over today.  I think that was the only mildly interesting deal this week.

 
Crunchewy said:
Did all of you cheat the speed run in Xeodrifter? I started a new save to try to do it legit, but I don't think I'll be even close to an hour. I was going fine until the 3rd boss. One problem, though, is I was also trying to get health during a boss battle and I probably shouldn't have been trying for that (and I haven't even succeeded yet, not without dying, anyway).

Also I'm not sure when I started my first game, so not sure how I'd get the clock right.
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Yeah, I was bitching about it in my stream. I wish it wasn't glitched so the trophy could be at least somewhat rare and we could see how many people actually did it and it might be fun to try since its a pretty short game. But with everyone just cheesing it, there was really no point in trying to do it legitimately.

 
Good news:

nintendospy said:
Uncharted 4 Special Editions up at Best Buy:
SE: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/uncharted-4-a-thiefs-end-special-edition-playstation-4/4507201.p?id=bb4507201&skuId=4507201&ref=199&loc=nWAAteHRWjk&acampID=1&siteID=nWAAteHRWjk-6.r1pH3_AJ4fbYNmoPyC3A
CE: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/uncharted-4-a-thiefs-end-libertalia-collectors-edition-playstation-4/4507500.p?id=bb4507500&skuId=4507500&ref=199&loc=nWAAteHRWjk&acampID=1&siteID=nWAAteHRWjk-.FbSYEx5rjoVdrD7sq_BPw
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Bad news: Both versions are apparently charging for shipping regardless of Elite/Elite+ status.

Also, from Best Buy's page: "Enjoy the latest chapter in the Uncharted series — Uncharted 4: A Thief's End — a dynamic RPG packed with action".

If they're not referring to the weapon...wha?

 
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PSA regarding potential save-data corruption for MGS V:

Konami has revealed there's a risk of your Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain save becoming corrupt and unusable if you bring Quiet with you as a buddy on Mission 29 or Mission 42.
An update on the company's support site explains that the only way to currently prevent this from happening is by not bringing Quiet with you on either of these missions. The issue affects The Phantom Pain on PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC and a fix is being worked on.
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http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/09/08/konami-issues-metal-gear-solid-5-save-corruption-warning

 
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This art style looks a little too much like the mobile game Granny Smith but the tricks look decent. Hopefully it controls well. Releasing on the 22nd...cross buy. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHkiMh-w63o

 
MildObstruction said:
I dunno. All I had to do was bring in a piece of mail to get my library card capable of doing holds for games, it could've been anybody's. I've noticed that some people just hang on to games for weeks - it's a 0.30 / day late charge which if you think about it is still an incredible deal. If I snagged mad max day one and kept it for 30 days that'd be a $6.90 rental (unless they mark it as lost and charge the full amount after some number of days).
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MildObstruction said:
I dunno. All I had to do was bring in a piece of mail to get my library card capable of doing holds for games, it could've been anybody's. I've noticed that some people just hang on to games for weeks - it's a 0.30 / day late charge which if you think about it is still an incredible deal. If I snagged mad max day one and kept it for 30 days that'd be a $6.90 rental (unless they mark it as lost and charge the full amount after some number of days).
Click to expand...
I really need to check out our local library and see if they have games.

 
jimbo8574 said:
I really need to check out our local library and see if they have games.
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I'm in a pretty well-to-do area which I'm sure helps. Check your library's website if they have an online catalog. I still don't know where the local branches keep games on the shelves but I'm able to just hold them online and pick them up.
 
kanamit said:
I just checked mine again and the only thing they have video game related is Wii bowling leagues. At least last year they had some lego games.
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The library closest to me has a link to check what is available in the 5 counties near me. Doesn't seem to list anything at the library itself. Has just over 1000 games in the catalog but on last gen.

 
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Weird day. As I'm driving to work a small frog that I hadn't noticed crawled out from the recess in my hood at the base of the windshield wiper. Chilled for a bit on the hood, realized it wasn't safe, and then crawled back into the recess and then under the hood of my car. When I got to work I had to pop the hood and then shoo him out of there. Then I get inside and there's no power (so no computers or phones) so they sent us home for the morning.

 
MildObstruction said:
I'm in a pretty well-to-do area which I'm sure helps. Check your library's website if they have an online catalog. I still don't know where the local branches keep games on the shelves but I'm able to just hold them online and pick them up.
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Yeah it seems like most libraries started renting out video games around 2011-2013 and most stopped due to games not being returned. It appears if you are in a rich community games get returned properly, or if you are in a poor community they view the non returned games as still being good because at least they are at home playing the games lol. The rest of us normal average community people don't get games anymore apparently.

 
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I always thought I was in a fairly well to do area.  We have a library just around the corner from the back entrance to our neighborhood.  They dont have games.

Moral of the story?  I live in the hood.

 
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GatorBeerGeek said:
Can they not require a drivers license to get a library card or something in Missouri? How in the fuck do they just deal with all these games getting stolen without seeming to give a shit or put in place things to make it less prevalent?
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You in MO? We should totally hang out. and yeah you don't need a driver's license. I don't know any one that drives around here but we all hit up the library for games. I heard they have books there too but idk. hit me up if you are in stl area bro

 
im heading to the library to return battlefield hardline and toy soldiers in an hour. also if you accumulate any late fees don't worry bout it. they usually have days where you can bring in can goods and they take $1 off for each can good. You can hit up local food pantries and get can goods for free so its a win/win.

 
Has anyone ever played that Uncharted Fight for Fortune card game for the Vita?

Is it just PvP, or is there a story and campaign mode?

 
i pick up chix at the library. you know they arent rich and can use the $. plus they have tons of events. my 2 older kids are registered on friday for a vintage games party and they have smash bro tournaments and minecraft parties etc. Those moms are usually pretty cool. lol

 
I think the library out near my parents used to carry games when I was in high school. If the online catalogs are accurate, doesn't look like the one near me or my parents carry games now. 

 
I havent set foot in a library since college and the USF library doesnt really count to me.  So I would have to say I havent been in a library in about 20 years.

 
The only bad thing about the library is watching the same movie all week. I have seen how to train your dragon 2, spongebob sponge out of water, toy story 3 and despicable me 2 like 20 times this week

They are closing the tesson ferry library in the next few weeks tho. They built some super huge new one just down the street so that's even more awesome cuz its only gonna be like a 5-10 min walk. ill just go there for ac/heating and save so much $ for games. lol. i could probly just bring my vita and kids and im good for the day

 
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pharmacrest said:
I havent set foot in a library since college and the USF library doesnt really count to me. So I would have to say I havent been in a library in about 20 years.
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Only thing I remember going for since moving here is books on CD for long road trips. My wife gets a lot of eBooks digitally now. I am not sure that counts since you never even have to go to the library.

 
the worst thing about the library is you have to be quiet. I have a 1,2 and 4 y/o and they are very difficult to keep quiet

   also have a 11,12, and 15 y/o but they are a lil more behaved

 
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Velo214 said:
The only bad thing about the library is watching the same movie all week. I have seen how to train your dragon 2, spongebob sponge out of water, toy story 3 and despicable me 2 like 20 times this week
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Velo214 said:
the worst thing about the library is you have to be quiet. I have a 1,2 and 4 y/o and they are very difficult to keep quiet

also have a 11,12, and 15 y/o but they are a lil more behaved
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Well, which is it? :boxing:

 
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pitfallharry219 said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQularrtKOQ

That album was huge back in the day. Goddamn, it's been 20 years.
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I listened to this album so many times. Tried their other CDs and the only one I got into was Secret Samadhi. I think Songs from Black Mountain was the last I even bothered with, though now that I've looked I want to check out last year's The Turn. Throwing Copper was amazing when it came out, though.

 
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