neonrev

Man, I really really hope this is legit, but I think I'm with the people in the comments there, a lot feels fishy about this, especially the video, which featured nothing but old stalker footage and some (what some people are saying is stock Unity 3D stuff, but I wouldn't know) in-development shots close-up on car models, and in the background when they show the room of people they apparently have working on it. It also claims that its amazing, revolutionary proprietary engine will allow them to release on PC, Xbox one and PS4 simultaneously, which would be quite the feat in a year, especially given the history of the development of the STALKER series and their rampant bugginess at launch. That, combined with the fact that the guy who's name is administering the account has nothing to do with either company, and isn't mentioned anywhere in the pitch, leaves me extremely doubtful. One of the guys from the MISERY mod team is on there blowing his top over this, and I know people from that team have worked fairly closely with 4A and GSC in the past, so I think if its fake it will come out fairly quick. The STALKER series are some of my favorite games, and I would like nothing more than a SP thing from former stalker devs, but I'm really doubtful and sad now.

On the history podcast note, The Ancient World is an older, complete series on ancient civilizations, and the creator has recently started doing a podcast on the rediscovery of various parts of ancient history, the first of which is a discussion of the discovery of the Rosetta stone, the ancient history behind its creation, and then the academic efforts that led to understanding hieroglyphics, told in his compelling as hell narrative style. Only 5 up since he started, but its shaping up to be pretty good.

Gormongous: I just picked up Demo 3 for the first time a couple days ago and have been messing with it a bit off and on. It's pretty good, the interface doesn't just look nice, its very responsive and displays a great deal of information just through the flowcharts, and has really detailed charts underneath. It certainly didn't take long to pick up and understand, but I don't think I can speak to whether it's easy or not yet, and I can't tell if it does have a liberal bias (I do, so I might not have noticed), but there are a number of very 'conservative' or very 'liberal' policies you can enact, so it seems like you can go however you like. The default nation you start with is the UK, which felt like a more innately liberal nation in terms of what the population wants than the US did, and the other nations (Canada, Australia, Germany) are also just generally more liberal than the usual US conception of liberal vs conservative, so maybe that effected reviews? It has a little mods tab on the main screen, so I assume there are more diverse and difficult nations people have made and such. I think there's enough there to entertain you for a while, and it was almost worth the ~$5 gog sale price just for the interface. It lacks a certain... personality or drive to keep me super into it (if there were scenarios of some sort, more narrative driven situations and goals I think it'd have me by the lungs, but "here's Germany, better bring up that GDP first!" just tickles my imagination.), but its got a lot there, and you seem to like the open goaled gameplay of stuff more than me. Give it a shot, I'd say, and see if it grabs you better, I'd be fascinated to hear someone smarter and better at that style of game talk on it.

Man, I have a serious need to hear you guys talk about Burial at Sea, which you were waiting for sean to be there for. You guys' and the forums' discussions are what has been excusing me (in my mind) from playing any of the Infinite stuff, and that is the last missing piece from my "Thumbs-related Opinion Matrix" of the content and gameplay of the series. I have weird, 100% completionist issues of this type, please save me?

Making local coop on PC more of a thing is one of the things I hope the steam box is able to achieve. For me personally, its not ever really been a consideration, since my gaming PC is usually my only PC and is always in my room, but I think a little steaming box that can have either more than one mouse/keyboard or controller hooked up and either play or stream a couple of fun, quick pc multiplayer games is incredibly appealing, more than any android thing ever was to me.

The Halo books I read and enjoyed were the first three, which I think were written by Eric Nylund. They were pretty good, and I'm not a Halo fan by any stretch.

Yeah, the faction stuff in clear sky is what really put the stalker series over the top for me. It is, to be fair, irredeemably broken in vanilla, but its easy to find mods to fix it. It's handled somewhat better in Pripyat, but I'd have really liked to see a more fully fleshed out A-life/faction based game. If someone could somehow just stick A-life into something like DayZ, and then define areas into different zones of different values that the faction AI could understand and act upon, I think I just very well may die of joy.

So I don't know basically anything about the thing I just watched, but what does the thing in the corner that says "Enable Relief" do? Is that just a part of the OR itself, or is it a software thing, and what does it actually do? I need relief from my headache now.

What changes do you mean? Admittedly, I only played an older version, and after hundreds of hours of the series, so I would have a hard time judging what it feels like to someone without all the self-enforced roleplay stuff I do unthinkingly now. I remember the shooting feeling much, much better, which might be less STALKER in feel I suppose. Besides that, I just thought the main deal was AI changes and a couple of quality of life changes like the sleeping bag and repair services? In retrospect, I do remember it feeling more like a 'western FPS' style game in a stalker setting than the original, 'slavic harshness' of the vanilla, but I honestly can't discern stalker memories between mods and games so well anymore. Edit: If you're feeling ambitious, the game's config files are fairly readable and editable, and you can modify most of the actor attributes and mechanics. Things on the order of run speed and encumbrance scaling, or anomaly resistance or medicine effectiveness, etc. If you find yourself getting frustrated by either the laxness or harshness of, say, stamina and running, you can tune that to either taste fairly painlessly. Although its tempting/possible to make yourself a god/completely unplayable, I always think of stalker as an ethos and setting rather than any one or system of mechanics.

Yep, its just a terribly confusing name. I think they were going to go for another overhaul in 2012, and got bogged down or something and just updated the original 2009 edition? If you have version 1.4.4, you have the latest version.

I LOVE the misery mod. So much. While I'd recommend playing any other stalker game before you dive into it (SoC: Complete is a great way to get into the stalker setting and mechanics in a more stable and comprehensible environment, even if the game isn't quite as good.), I'd also be utterly fascinated by trying to play that game without any knowledge of the zone setting and the misery mod on. There is sooooooo much stuff in that I can't even really get into it all. frozenpoison describes the experience pretty well, but to describe the madness further: Weapon and armor repairs? Now they're significantly more expensive to repair the more damaged they are at a mechanic, but there are only about 4 mechanics in the whole damn zone, so you're also going to need to maintain them in the field if you don't want them to jam up in the face of a charging mutant boar. Just grab a field repair kit you think? Not so quick, there are a range of different kits for different calibers and types of armor, a range of how much damage you can repair with a certain kit, and how many times you can use the kit. After you find a kit you can even use, you gotta consider the weight, how much you expect to be shooting on this trip, ammo/food/water/medicine availability where you're headed and how long you're going to be out if you want to make sure that kit is a boon and not a paperweight that makes you carry out less food. Oh, and that food and water and medicine I mentioned? You're going to need all of it, and hopefully a basic vocabulary of medical terms, because the zone's environmental threats (things like radiation pockets, anomalous areas characterized by intense heat, spontaneous fires, bizarre electrical effects, poisonous gases and caustic chemicals, intense gravitational oddness and possibly being ripped apart by that gravity.) are now made even more dangerous than in vanilla CoP, and also fits into the expansive world of misery's nutrition system. Make sure to count calories, because here you want every single last one. Packing food and water is less like grabbing health and mana potions and more like planning for a real hiking trip. A home base is a very real, very personal need in this game. You go home at night. Night is utterly terrifying. You go home, you eat something, you drink some vodka to wash away the day's radiation, you feel the warmth of a lit room and non-hostile people for once, you sleep on a bare mattress and awake to the sounds of the guards outside shooting to fend off passing mutated dogs. The personal experiences in this game are hard to describe. I've only cried a few times from games, and one of them was from seeing the lights poking out of the holes in the rusted out ship that is the hub in the first zone. I was coming back from an EXTREMELY poorly fated run to the far northern edge of the map, and had been dragging my badly wounded, irradiated, over-encumbered, starving and dehydrated ass across the whole map trying to save an iron man playthrough of about 25 hours. I was half running, half staggering away from a pack of dogs chasing me, occasionally popping off shots with the damaged, jamming pistol I found on the floor, since I had no other ammo left. I had just made it over the final hill to the small valley home was in, desperate and nearly dead, when the sweet, sweet sound of guttural slavic barks and automatic gunfire rang out, and a nearby squad of stalkers opened up, and drew the pack towards them (and the snipers on top of the boat). I was tearing up as I slowly made my way into the ship, so exhausted I had to wait a second or two before jumping over the ragged edges of the ship, and it made the cheesy "welcome back stalker!" bark I heard when I made it inside so, so sweet. I came outside the next morning, and found a bunch of dead dogs, and one dead stalker, one of my rescuers I think. His friends stripped him down and left his body in the swamp. Welcome to the zone.

I don't think you can apply rules or ideas about the use of language in a solo written medium to inform a collaborative spoken medium, especially one that relies on a quick rapport between collaborators and sense of community/? to be effective. Those words get overused because people who like and talk to each other a lot start to form an ingroup vocabulary, and while I can see it maybe being weird to a first time listener (or anyone who has internalized them and then notices later), it also can provide a deeper sense of meaning for what are otherwise fairly meaningless words. (I mean, "Gross" as a Jake adjective frequently means slightly different things than a Chris or Nick "gross", and part of that is delivery (another thing that makes the idea of the 'overuse' of words in a spoken medium a bit of a weird thing to me.), but part of that is a difference in personality, and what things evoke the word "Gross" from them.) I guess to me a collaborative podcast is an extremely different form than sitting down to write a thing, and I'd rather have a number of overused words than podcasters tripping over themselves trying to avoid human nature,

It also (supposedly, I haven't had enough time to really check thoroughly) should reduce the number of laborers wandering to do jobs that they'd get to cold or hungry to do on the way there, and it also supposedly makes the AI smarter about eating food when they're hungry, and I think they can get food at more places as well. From the devblog: "The last major issue I’m currently looking at before the patch is the ‘March of Death’ problem on really large maps. General laborers end up walking a really long way to do an odd job and starve to death on the walk back. Computing a perfect solution of who should do what takes too much CPU time, so I’m playing with some other heuristics. What I’m trying to do is prioritize what citizen gets assigned a job based on how far away it is. However there’s a problem with a simple distance limit. It’s possible that something won’t ever get done if the people are far away. So I’m trying to set the distance limit based on how long the job has been pending. That way only citizens within range of a job will do it when it’s newly created, but once a certain amount of time passes without the job getting done, the range will expand allowing someone across the map to try to get it done instead." And yeah, I like the massive list of changes that had to be made to get firefighting working for real. And this: "Citizens will now only search for water in an area around the fire. Far inland areas need wells for fires to be fought." suggests to me that maybe guys can fight fires using water from lakes or rivers, which is super cool. I also want to share a couple things I've learned in case they're helpful to anyone. The boarding house is both a handy and dangerous thing. Right early on, it's probably your best bet for getting everyone housed before the first winter, but after a couple years you NEED NEED NEED to start building other houses, and might even need to micromange families in those new houses by deconstructing them, letting the current occupants leave, and reclaim before it's demolished. If you get complacent, you get an old, old population, and it'll take forever to repopulate the houses such that you have a decent birthrate again. 2 years of boarding house, then make sure most people have their own home. Keep the boarding house around though, even if no one needs it at the moment. When either doing that, or even when you're expanding housing in any fashion, if you start to run into serious food or firewood troubles especially in the fall or winter, a last ditch pullback to everyone living in the boarding house might be your only hope. The boarding house will require less food and wood per family in it, its a shared resource once taken there, and it holds more of both. It's a shitty way to recover, but it's saved me from negligent firewood shortages. Watch out for disease though. A gatherer's hut is more effective than the fisherman's hut, all things being equal, but very early on, before you've cleared the stone and iron out from your location in the trees, and especially before you can have two foresters working (one 'planting and cutting' in a separate place and one 'planting only' next to your gather and/or hunter. You can set the planter to cut only for a season or two if in need of wood, but it'll always come at the expense of the gathering.), fishing can be more effective than it seems, due to usually lower distance to the storeplace and the ability of the workers to get home or warm faster in the winter. You can also, with a moderate fishing force, turn them into farmers in the spring and fall to plant and harvest on time, with just a token guy tending them in the summer, and add ~30% total food production and increase the number of things people are eating. Fishing is also perfectly sustainable so long as you don't overlap their zones, and I try to make sure I have enough locations that each of them only has 2-3 guys at it, which is probably just paranoia, but still. Also, on small rivers, a properly placed fishing shack can function as a bridge. Traders want an arm and fucking leg for anything, but even really early on, I have had good results throwing everything I can spare at livestock, especially sheep. 1 guy can tend 12 sheep, and its the only place to get wool, which makes them more valuable to me than cows or chickens. Even if I have to sell basically all my tools and stone and such, in the long term, nothing beats having a herd to grow from the start. I hope any of that could be helpful to anyone, the wiki's are sadly undermanned.

So, pre-intoxicated, but I have a full night of no work to do, a girlfriend busy at the campus paper for the night, and a whole lot of beer, and i was feeling like getting into minecraft again after a long time away, and since I sat down to begin right as my podcast manager started to download the new idle thumbs (completely, apropos of nothing, but I use mediamonkey as an iTunes replacement, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.), I named the new map "Motherfucking video games", and left to grab a beer while it loaded. I came back to discover I had spawned over water in a jungle river, and was just in time to see my last half-heart blip away. I can't help but think mediamonkey knows idle thumbs as well as I do, and intentionally caused me to drown in a far cry 2-esque jungle as a welcome back to motherfucking video games. I burned myself out on whisky drinking a lot of jack daniels either straight or in coke (or, I'm the worst, in monster energy drinks. The sour completely kills the alcohol, and in one of those twist of cap cans, monster smells so foul you can't tell it has alcohol in it. Ahhhh, good times?) early on, and I just can't stand the taste anymore. I do still love the smell of it though. Honestly my favorite part anyway. The look and the smell. Like coffee. This managed to make it to intoxicated by the end.

Thanks for all the good words everyone. He's gone back home with his parents for the weekend (ex-boyfriend was around last night to pick up his stuff, and he wanted to avoid that I guess),, and at least there he can focus on school for a bit (our finals are fairly soon). And yeah, I wasn't so much worried that I wouldn't be able to understand what was going on as I was stymied by my lack of fallback social cues for the occasion. I rely pretty heavily on that sort of thing, and I was just struggling because I also don't really know how to console ANYONE in that situation, and all I had was tired hick cliches, which I just knew were going to fall especially flat on a pretty metropolitan kid from the cities (which is what the wasteland of the upper midwest calls minneapolis/st paul), and my already sort of panicked brain (like I said, bad week) just flatlined. And yeah, like I also said, he's just way better at helping people with things than me (including helping me, a lot), and I felt like absolute shit being unable to help more. Notes on: Recovering Alcoholic: Funny you should mention... Not really. Pizza: He's not vegan, but also doesn't understand the supremacy of a 25/75 sriracha/pizza sauce mix, and begged off thusly. Boyfriend/girlfriend: Similarly but not exactly, I was mentally replacing "That bitch!" with "That dick!" while doing the "All the shit he did that no one wanted to mention until now" part of things, and that was fun I guess. Vegan Pizza: Only without vegan cheese. Or compressed chalk dust and oil. Or whatever it is. Anyway, thanks for being helpful to what now looks to me like a slightly different crazy person who shares my name.

So, this is like, intoxicated slightly-to-personal Ask Amy I think. My roommate (who is also probably the guy I feel closest to, despite occasional lapses of us really interacting, we're still very similar, and able to connect in a way I don't find common) has just broken up with his boyfriend of slightly less than a year (out of nowhere for him) which, on top of the usual breakup distress, also ruins his housing situation, and really deeply undercuts his short term future financial security, as he no longer has anyone to share food or rent costs with, a thing he was relying on it seems. And now to take someone else's problems and make them about me, I have no concept of how to handle this. I'm pretty inept at empathy (I'm on a video game forum! I'm breaking new ground!), pretty inexperienced at this kind of consolation, and while I'm not the guy's only source of help (he has a number of infinitely more helpful friends, one of which he is with now, which is very good. He'll be fine, in case its in concern.), I do really feel like I'm falling down on the job as a friend and roommate (all I could do was offer him beer (and myself more beer, which is why this goes in the intoxicated thread) and some pizza (filling out the "college dude consoling college dude" box I needed to tick), and I could use some help, whatever it is (or really any good words, kinda having a bad week myself), as I'm really not good at this. Compounding it I guess, is that he's gay and I'm straight (also from the extremely rural midwest, so I'm not really prepared even peripherally for the idea of being on the side of a male vs a male in a relationship dispute, as small town SD is a deeply, deeply homophobic place, and also a very 'traditional values place' (in whatever sense that influences my view of masculine vs feminine roles in a relationship, regardless of gender (I still feel like it influences the sort of people I come from in their views of sexuality, so I assume it influences me.))), so I'm still recovering and trying to get a hold of a less horrible worldview, but its hard as a guy limited in empathy.), and there is a little bit of a socialization barrier there as far as how I'm trained to react to this (case in point, my only idea was beer and insulting the former boyfriend, which is not really not the most helpful thing I could have done). So, in short, sorry for whatever incoherence may precede this, but I'm really falling down in helping a guy who I really owe a lot of my current stability too in a time when he could actually use the help. Sorry for anything that seems dickish about my phrasing or vocabulary, I'm sorta drunk (duh!) and am thus more prone to the shit from whence I came. Just kidding, South dakota is great. Lol

I haven't played a lot of Raja's of India yet, but I've noticed that trend towards low Jain moral authority, and huge revolts because of it in a couple of my games, one of them in what I think might be the same start? I guess pacifists won't go far in a world were war is the only way to gain legitimacy. I've actually been having a LOT more bugs after the DLC, including some really widespread display errors in tooltips and the character creator simply not working, and just depositing me in a seemingly random neighbor county, with the guy I just made in the proper spot. Going to reinstall, but darn. Disheartening dlc. Edit: Holy crap, my CK2 is barely over 600mb? That's pretty cool, never noticed it was that small.

Yeah, going to the Paradox forums for the first time was a rude shock. I got into it through 3MA and the twitch streams, and I assumed the people who made it were as into simulating societies as well. I feel like I had heard that it was mostly intraoffice testing that was resulting in weird new balance decisions based on multiplayer. I can't even imagine being so absorbed in this game as to get into balance fights over a multiplayer game. I don't even know how you'd be able to tell how the other people are doing, or what they're doing, or anything. It seems like a fair play agreement is necessary anyway. The hunts are a good example I think. For a casual player like me, it was a good way to risk some health to get rid of some negative traits (like craven and slothful, I think), maybe pick up bravery or something, and get a little prestige. I've also hunted my entire life, and none of that struck me as unrealistic. I really liked that you could do a slightly dangerous thing in universe that fits into both a personal narrative of your character (I was a craven until I got separated from the group, and had to take down that boar myself!) and the narrative of the world (A weak king tries to prove himself by hunting a lot, looking to kill a grand stag, and is wounded in the hunt and dies later.) It's not a lot, but from what I can tell, now hunts just trade gold for a tiny bit of prestige, and maybe the chance to make your marshal like you more. Less gamey, would probably never do it anymore. Anyway, I definitely feel you on the wanting it to remain a very different game than EU4, just because there really isn't anything like what it was or could be, and I've never gotten into and back out of a game as EU4, precisely for your reason. Nothing to do but war, and wait until more war is possible. A fair reason to whine, I'd say.

Yeah, I guess I had unfair expectations (although I was sold a game I thought was pretty into history, it's understandable that they don't want to/can't go to the effort to make stuff actually realistic or balanced, in light of how hard that task would really be) going into it, it just bothers me that if I'm not a catholic, I'm either a brutal norse, murderous Muslims (at least they get the slightest beginning of the game tech boost, right? Totally fair), or, as far as I can tell, psychopathic indians. I wish I could argue anything here either, I just got really into CK2 right as it seems to have started getting bogged down in power gamer shit, which is just disappointing I guess. Also, jesus, I'm a big fan of Arumba's actually (He taught me most of what I know about CK2 and EU4), and I remember his channel teaching me that trick. Is it literally just over a slight gaming chance of the ruler designer? Because that is fucking silly, even for them.

You're describing my usual path. But France it is tonight!

I, in my extremely brief searching, could not find a list of good Indian starts, (or even interesting ones). It's getting aggravating, the lack of new bookmarks to coincide with interesting periods in time for non-catholic/norse starting characters. Even the Muslim lords are only ever marked as notable because they are particularly big at the time, at least to me. This particular DLC, plus the lacklusterness of the Son's of Abraham/West Africa, and the fact that I still always find any Indian character (And I hope that this is just a moderate amount of inebriation talking, but still), even AI, makes literally the worst strategic decision in any position, is making it hard for me to not feel weird feeling towards the folks at Paradox. Focusing on a limited part of the world (totally reasonable, geopolitics, especially then, are insane, and it's not like anybody could have comprehended any of it without the benefit of hindsight, which we can only have due to history and hindsight) still doesn't explain the fact that everyone but Christians are dumbass savages, irrespective of reality or logic, and the only real answer to Christianity is goddamn stereotypical Jihads, which (to me, of course) feel less like a response to an invasion of historical lands and more like an excuse to murder Christians, which contrasts with the very (gamewise) righteousness of crusades, which are always a GREAT THING. and even the normal sarcasiticness of the notifications doesn't apply always. I'm not trying to make any statements about anyone there, of course, but the more I play it and try to explain it to others, the harder some of the themeing and mechanics become to defend from people who would otherwise love the concept and mechanics of the game, and it just makes me uncomfortable. I don't really have a point, just some thoughts I've had for a while. Anyone thought about this in away that can talk me down? Edit: Basically, it feels like any expansion is just "more lands to conquer as a Christian" instead of focusing on who actually lived there at the time, and it's just getting boring to me in a way that feels too one sided on the part of the developers in terms of balance and ethnicity .

My roommates have, like, their MOST annoying friends over this evening, so my drinking began a little bit earlier this evening than most, and now I am far to drunk to even play spelunky, mu drunk game. Any suggestions for my last bits of gaming this evening before I am delivered to my girlfriends? I have like, 45 minutes and am extremely suggestable, so now is a time for any personal pitches. As well as other things. Edit; Really any audio, I guess? I'm going to keep hearing a person talk about energy drink drinking games if not.

I think [['']] needs to become my new clan signature for... something.

I thought it was "Lords' Management", referring to the variety of management engaged in by Lords, a caste of people as well as the individual actors of the verb 'management'. But I've never played a single LOMA, so I am literally the least reputable resource.

How did I ever dream I would be disappointed int the new theme? How could I ever think Chris could fail me? Fantastic intro man, although dangerously catchy for a podcast intro. Any chance of a instrumental version being available? I have a busywork playlist that that would fit into perfectly. Man, I was having a bad day, and that song picked it right back up.