Winks

The post-apocalypto death-locomotive sold me.

Boy, I sure do like watching competitive League of Legends. LMQ looks surprisingly good. I'm also maybe swaying a bit from my Koreans-won't-lose-a-game-except-to-other-Koreans stance. I think Cloud 9 could conceivably take a game from White Shield.

Growing up, I wanted to be a writer. I got frustrated with journalism in college so I switched to the furthest thing away I could think of that I was still interested in and ended up with a couple CS degrees. I think making games takes advantage of my (hopefully) unique skillset. That said, I haven't exactly finished anything yet.

I immediately thought of Ruby Heart from Marvel 2, but I guess those were actually just ghost pirates.

I agree with this. It feels like you're playing the same game, just inside-out and with the wrong hand. Which is even more frustrating, I think, because you know you have this proficiency with a different, incredibly similar game that just won't seem to translate to the new one.

I've heard a lot about what Dota 2 is like for an absolute LOMA beginner, but I'd be interested in hearing how Brad and Nick, who I think both played LoL a bit, found switching from one LOMA to another specifically. I guess Brad did talk about this a little bit, but I think it's an interesting topic that hasn't quite been exhausted. I've been trying to get my friends to make the switch to Dota 2, but we've just invested so much time in LoL management training that every time we try Dota everyone just ends up frustrated and confused. How do you cross that learning curve resistance threshold without just falling back to Lux or whatever?

My ears perked up when Sean mentioned getting lost as a kid at Cedar Point because I grew up very near there in Ohio. I think I should mention a fairly Thumbs-y ride there that was recently closed called Disaster Transport. It was basically a late-80s/early-90s space-themed indoor bobsled rollercoaster with this ridiculous narrative surrounding it about attempting to deliver goods from a space station to Alaska when DISASTER strikes. (Lots of klaxons and lasers and strobe lights and that sort of thing.) Why you were on a mission to Alaska and not Ohio always puzzled me as a kid, since you exit the building and there's Lake Erie. Quoting from Wiki here: I remember there being this great sort of industrial, dirty-Tron motif in the queue where everything was lit with red lamps and black lights and these little animatronic sort of factory-style robots would ever so slowly rotate back and forth. This is a pretty good example of what this all looked like. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's since been torn down, but it was awesome and funny and I thought you should know.

I just listened to that Bastion narration pack and cracked the fuck up at how many times he said "got a case of the mega creeps."

I always seem to love the board game themed shows. So, I guess, I'd dig more of those.

Yeah, Schafer talking about how they'd "figure out" a way to get Bagel to produce both final artwork and concept art sort of freaked me out in a what-reality-does-Tim-Schafer-inhabit sort of way.

Saunders is absolutely wonderful (and so is CivilWarLand in Bad Decline). I wonder, though, if the fact that it's a short story collection would make it more difficult to discuss in a podcast. I think Joshua Ferris' books, The Unnamed and Then We Came to the End, would both make for pretty interesting discussion.

People seem to really like David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game about the Blazers' 79-80 season, but I haven't read it.

Just got in, one day after registering. My username is winks.

You are absolutely right. I'm a pretty defensive player, so I'm sure that has a lot to do with preferring the game that requires footsies and careful defense. And I often confuse tactic and strategy, because I am a fool.

Right, I agree with this. The strategic aspect is definitely the thing I love most about fighting games. And, perhaps, this is the reason I like the Street Fighter IV series more than other recent fighting games. It's slow enough that I feel like I can get a more solid grasp on the actual strategy involved. I like GG, Blazblue, and Marvel, but, to me, these games feel like they're hiding their strategic depth behind a wall of execution that's difficult to break through.