TheLastBaron

So I've decided to start playing Go again. I was super into it when I was 10-14 and read books and stuff, but haven't played it or really even though of it since. I remember a lot less about the game then I feel I should for how much I read about it, which means I remember nothing except for the most basic stuff.

I logged onto the server, saw my player name was "Matthew" which is annoying, disconnected to set it to Baron, got a knock on my door, and that's my ARMA experience for this week.

I feel like everything I've ever thought I knew just turned out to be a lie. Fuck you Neo. Edit: Yep, it was all a lie.

It's worse than I thought, it's not even a Renaissance Fair, it's a "Fantasy Festival" which means there's faires and stuff. and When I say it's worse than I thought I don't mean to imply that I would not be down to go to a renaissance fair, I just mean I've missed ARMA 3 times so far. I'm not into faires however. I'm going to see if I can get 15-20 minutes in, but I don't know how well this will pan out.

Every other time I've tried to play Bloodbowl I've played Skaven so I guess I'm the most experienced with them, ignoring the fact I've lost every time I've played. That being said I think they're adorable so I'm going to go with them.

My parents want to go to a Renaissance Fair, wtf. THIS IS NOT HAPPENING TO ME! asfisdaifhsdaihf I'm going to see if I can get out of it, but the odds are not in my favor.

On a related not, I've never been able to edit my posts, and I've tried on both my PC and laptop, on chrome, firefox, and IE, and also on my phone. When I click the edit button nothing happens. I don't mind forcing myself to be perfect, but since this topic already exists I figured it might be worth mentioning.

While doing some stuff at school today I was listening to 3MA and listened to the X-COM episode and the one directly following it, this one (I've been listening to 3MA for a long time but I listen to every episode of podcasts I follow and get sidetracked with other podcasts that in the past I heard of when their hosts were 3MA guests like the Jumping the Shark Podcast and also, IDLE THUMBS!) Alright, off the bat, all star panel. You've got the always amazing Troy Goodfellow at the helm and he mentions that despite Julian and Rob being unavailable for the podcast, but he has a deep bench to pull from. He isn't lying. Guests are Todd Brakke, producer of the aforementioned awesome Jumping the Shark podcast, Lara Crigger who I loved on the episode about the gender gap in gaming, and finally clean-up hitter Soren Johnson. So discussion starts and pretty soon theres some amazing back and forth commentary going and I'm just completely hooked. I don't want to summarize anything because the whole point is nothing I can say will be anywhere near the quality of the actual discussion and you really need to just listen to it. The one thing I will mention is a part of the episode in particular that really made me fall in love with 3MA for the 93rd time. After discussing X-COM, Soren talks about how games about aliens are so common because it's so easy to map different mechanics onto the games because aliens can be anything. He mentions games that are ostensibly about aliens, but actually about their mechanics. Galaga is about pattern matching, Starcraft is about asymetry, Gears of War is about cover mechanics, and X-COM is really a game about dealing with limited information. Lara then disagrees with the idea that a game is about it's mechanics, but Soren brings up Left 4 Dead and asks whether it is a game about zombies or about teamwork. Too good. Lara however counters this by accepting that the game is clearly about teamwork, but that Left 4 Dead needs to be a game about zombies to work and when Soren asks why it couldn't work with a different theme like aliens she says that it's because zombies elicit a different response in people from aliens. "What are you afraid of when you're afraid of aliens? You're afraid of the unknown. What are you afraid of when you're afraid of zombies? You're afraid of the inevitable." OH SHIT. And this is only halfway through the episode. You really don't get this quality of discourse anywhere else on the internet/in the world.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197993018700 BOOM.

Consider me confirmed. Also I'm adding you on steam Orvidos, playing against someone who won't judge me for being as incredibly terrible as I am sounds lovely.

So yesterday after seeing the Xenoblade thread and getting interested in it I looked for a video review of it on youtube to see some gameplay. I saw this guy's review of it and it was really good so I decided to watch some more of his videos. That's when I came across his video for FF13. I'm not posting this because I found it "comical" and I never played FF13, but would probably agree with most everything he says. What I found so entertaining about this video is just how mad he is at the game. He doesn't just hate the game, he gives me the impression that he is offended at it's existence. He's also a fairly buff cop who is very into JRPGs so this whole video is sort of surreal because this isn't some super nerdy guy who learned japanese for the sole purpose of playing non localized obscure jrpgs, but he hates the game with the same passion as someone like that. A couple minutes in he gets mad and leans forward and starts pointing at the camera and I literally got scared that he was going to attack me for a second before realizing it would be hard for him to do because this is a video. Also the part starting at 13:33 made me laugh out loud. This is a long video so if you don't plan on watching it at least just watch that part because it's awesome. UAF8VFREHL4

Wow, so I watched some videos of the game and the world looks super cool. Normally I find the settings of JRPGs so bland and uninteresting, but this one looks amazing. Also everything about this game looks so compelling to me to the point that I'll probably go see if I can find it asap so I can play it this weekend.

What killed WoW for me was when raids became something everyone just did with pubs. What I loved about vanilla and BC was the sense of achievement at progressing through things with a guild. I was in the same guild for all of vanilla and we worked through everything. I joined when I hit level 60 and they were a new guild trying to do dungeons and get people attuned to start doing Molten Core and with the same people we worked week after week, and slowly worked through every raid in the game as they came out, all the way up through AQ40 and Naxx 40. This was when you would spend sometimes weeks (at least for us as we only raided on weekends) trying to progress past certain bosses and each new boss was a significantly greater challenge than the previous one. I know that theres a large amount of people that don't find it fun wiping continuously for sometimes hours on a single fight, but the level of satisfaction and reward at beating a boss for the very first time, or even getting it down to 25% when before you only got him to 50%, that just does not exist in any other type of game. The fights where my guild ended up finally beating bosses like Blackwing, C'Thun, and Kel Thuzad are some of the most indescribably amazing experiences I've ever had. The level of tension in the fight, especially when the boss gets so low that you start to think that this fight might actually be THE fight, combined with the unparalleled sense of accomplishment and also pride as a group... I don't really know what else to say, it's just something that I loved and is no longer really in the game. That said, that was years ago and at this point I'm not sure that type of game is something that I want anymore. I don't really have the time I did and that type of experience isn't what I actively seek in games. I'll probably play Guild Wars 2 because it looks fun and has no fee so I can play it super casual, most likely only with real life friends so I will for sure be playing that for completely different reason than why I played WoW.

Oh, I should also mention that 3MA got me into board games which I didn't play at all before and those have probably cost me more than the video games I've been FORCED to buy since I started listening to the pod, though both are probably significant sums.

3MA caused me to literally buy every single Paradox game, but luckily during the Steam Christmas sale the Paradox complete pack was only around $70

I'd be interested in playing. I bought Bloodbowl LE after the TMA episode with The Abner, though in all the time since I've barely played it. Despite the discussion about how bad/broken the AI in the game is, I am terrible and have lost to it in each of the very few games I've played. Perhaps this will motivate me to try the game again and spend the time to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

At PAX Prime I saw Troy sitting down in the morning doing work or something and I thought about going up to him, but I didn't know what I'd say and I kind of wanted to ask for an autograph but that'd be super creepy so instead I just looked at him in awe from afar which is still super creepy.

I loved the combat system in FF12, I was just skimming through this thread because I hadn't heard anything about this game at all and am now interested.

That was supposed to say Warcraft, not warranty, I'm on my phone and have autocorrect on.

I loved Warranty for a long time, as in I'm that guy who has spent hours reading lore on Wowwiki, read some of the books years ago, ect., but I stopped caring about the story a long time ago. Haven't followed the new expansion in any capacity and am done with WoW completely, but if they make WC4 in 10 years I might care again as I played the crap out of wc2/3/tft

How good is witch doctor? He was my favorite hero in dota, I probably played 50% of all my games with him. Is he a popular pick at all?

As someone who started listening to TMA a while back and was coming into strategy gaming from RTS games only (mostly Warcraft 2/3) I became very interested in grand strategy games, but was very intimidated and didn't know where to start. I ended up just getting the Paradox complete pack in the steam christmas sale and spent a fair bit of time just trying to figure out what was happening rather than trying to be successful and eventually got to the point where I feel fairly competent in all of the games. As I got the pack in December I don't have CK2 yet, though I've been meaning to. I'd also recommend watching youtube videos of game commentary as it makes things a lot easier to pick up, for me at least. JosefVStalin has a lot of playthroughs of games and does very good commentary.

I don't really agree, there are certainly builds on certain champions that aren't viable at all, but if you know what you're doing you can make a lot of builds work. I mean, what specific items you buy aren't that flexible in the sense that there will be a best item set for AP "champion x" or jungle "champion y" but a lot of champions can be played in multiple roles and built different ways and you can be very successful if you have a solid understanding of the game mechanics, especially at low/non-competitive levels of play. Examples are AP Tristana mid, Miss Fortune jungle, AP Blitzcrank mid, support Nasus, or pretty much anyone as support.

Hellllllloooooooo gamers want some free Viagra? P.S. welcome TMA!

Oh boy are you missing out -xIYVw3ZPJk