Iosef Stalin

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Iosef Stalin


  1. I really wonder about who could claim to own what from the original Defense of the Ancients characters. As I've pointed out a few times before, beyond even the huge number of characters taken directly from the Warcraft 3 main campaign, there's a character, Lina Inverse, whose class is the title of the Japanese anime she's taken from. Her appearance in Dota 2 is no longer a dead ringer for her appearance in the Slayers franchise, but all her skills are still signature spells used in the anime. Judging from that, maybe there's just a general willingness for none of these companies to step on each others' toes? I don't know. I'm sure Kadokawa and Kanzaka Hajime both couldn't care less, but Blizzard and Valve have both borrowed a lot of their characters from all over.

     

    The thing is that the original Warcraft series characters are pretty derivative. They all pretty much fit into the tropes established by D&D and fleshed out by pulp novels and Warhammer and so on. Sure, once you make a thing and trademark it you can do what you want with that specific character, but it's not like they came up with the world's most amazing characters.


  2. Ok I just made a shitpost that reminded me of something interesting, does anyone remember the discussion where they talk about domain names? Like the domain name registry being opened up to a bunch of random crap instead of just the .com .co.uk etc. Or it might have been one of their discussions about hover or something, I forget.

     

    Also the episode where they talk about a bunch of old DOS functions to get old games to run, that was pretty amusing.


  3. Ability Draft seems like it should be a good laugh, but it totally isn't. There's always some guy who picks the most broken combination of skills and is like a 1000 range dragon form Mirana with blink and crit stun or something and it's just stupid. Meanwhile via sod's law your team is picking 4 passives each and doing nothing. 

     

    Also why can't you team chat during the draft phase? It seems like some communication would be nice so your teammate doesn't steal the skill you wanted etc.


  4. Regenerating health

     

    If you are a futuristic marine with a regenerating shield, that is one thing. But if you are a soldier fighting in World War 2, you should not be able to take a bullet in the chest and then sit behind a rock for a few seconds before popping back up and taking another bullet in the chest. But I suppose going back to having magical band-aids that heal all imaginable gunshot wounds isn't much better. Maybe what I really want is for games to stop being about an entire enemy force solely going after the player because they know the player is the only one with elvish healing powers.

     

    The thing with the regenerating health is so stupid. I think Halo was the first game to do it, but it made sense because he literally had a shield that absorbed a certain amount of damage which then had to regenerate before going back into battle. It also had health underneath that which you had to get medpacks for, in Halo 2 I think they dropped that and just had the shield.

     

    And then one of the Call of Duty games came along (Modern Warfare 2?) and lifted that mechanic straight out and pasted it into their game, except it made zero fucking sense. I guess it's a cute little mechanic for a fast paced shooter, whatever, but it's still fucking retarded. I hate that stupid series.

     

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  5. Chris you haven't read/watched Game of Thrones? Huwhaaa? You really should. Borrow season one off a friend and just dive in from the start, i'm pretty sure it's impossible not to be hooked. It's easily one of the best shows on tv at the moment, especially if you like a bit of fantasy and power-games between great characters.

     

    Maybe you have some esoteric reason as to why you haven't seen it yet, but I think you should just forget that and watch it.


  6. Anyone remember when Jake used to ask people, "Did you beat it?"? How are we supposed to track whether or not a thing was beaten, now that this question has fallen into disuse and ill repair?

    I used to work in a camera shop and had this co-worker who would always do that whenever i'd try and talk about games. He'd be like "do you get to beat the boss? Did you beat the boss yet? It must be a good game if you can beat the boss." Was so annoying.

  7. I'm kind of over Kickstarter as a thing since it's become obvious they'll allow any project on there since they get a cut of it. That Susan Wilson thing with her 9 year old making a game from RPG maker, and this ridiculous second kickstarter by PA http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pennyarcade/penny-arcades-podcast-downloadable-content-the-ret

    I pledged to like 3 or 4 games in that initial excitement rush a few months ago and i'd kind of rather just wait for them to be delivered than give more money for new games. It's not like there's a dearth of indie titles available to buy and play right now, rather than buying and not getting for a year or whatever.


  8. This nails it as far as I'm concerned. She had a very modest and straightforward goal, and she is very obviously delivering on it. I think it's crazy how intensely people are talking about what THEY wish this should be or what they think it SHOULD be. She said she was going to make a bunch of videos about tropes in video games as they relate to depictions of women. She is obviously doing that. Fine, it's not your favorite video in the world. I have never seen so many pages of people on Thumbs complaining that a particular internet video is not exactly what they think it should be, or not as emotional as they think it should be, or not as unemotional as they think it should be, or not as objective, or not as subjective, or not as detailed, or not containing the right examples, or enough examples. Maybe there are places on the internet where this kind of bizarrely obsessive analysis of internet videos is common, but I've sure never seen it done this doggedly on this forum, and it bums me out that this is the video where it happens. It isn't very flattering to the discussion here, because it plays into the exact stereotype of how women are held to a different arbitrary standard than men whenever they open their mouths about video games.

    I almost NEVER say this because I don't generally think it's useful. But I'm going to now. To all the people endlessly picking Sarkeesian apart: if, as most of you seem to claim, you do actually sympathize with her cause, just not her execution, then I find it strange you're putting so much effort into these nitpicky concerns. Just make something better if it's TRULY that important to you. If her cause is NOT that important to you, then maybe give it a rest? I'm pretty sure you've made your point by now, and there really can't be all that much more say about it.

    Again, I don't usually bust out the "if you don't like it, make something better" line. I usually in fact dislike it. But there is a VERY disproportionate and atypical amount of effort being put into the criticism of this video--a video that is only one single first part of a series--and surely that effort could be spent elsewhere.

    It's because she got a hundred and fifty grand to make the videos and so far it's indistinguishable from any other random Youtuber talking to camera about the topic with a budget of zero.

  9. Jake and Chris, I think you guys are really selling yourselves short comparing Idle Thumbs and its Kickstarter to Anita Sarkeesian. I mean does this even need saying? You make a fun, entertaining podcast where you talk about games with knowledge and passion, it's a great thing to listen to every week. Being slow with the reward tiers wasn't really a big deal since most people were just paying for having the cast back on the air and the stuff was just bonuses. You also did things like the progresscasts which were great.

    Anita spent like eight months to make a twenty-minute video where she basically reads a tv tropes article to camera in a dull monotone delivery with no enthusiasm or anything interesting to grab the viewer and put her points across in an engaging manner. Now yeah this is just one episode of the series and maybe it will get better, but it doesn't seem great so far.


  10. Hull repair drone is amazing, especially on the final sector where you usually don't get to repair between stages of the boss. It also saves wasting scrap on repairing at the shops.


  11. The thing with the Wii that eventually soured me on it, is just going through that whole cycle of being super excited for a couple of games, them coming out and then it's just a wasteland for six months or a year until the next big release. The third-party support was still shit for it, despite having the largest install base of that generation, just endless waggle shovelware, and crappy Wii versions of the multi platform releases.

    And I think it's the system where I finally got tired of Nintendo's franchises, I mean the N64 brought them into 3D, the Gamecube upped the graphical fidelity hugely and had some great atmosphere and experiences. The Wii versions added... what? Basically the same stuff but with dodgy Wiimote controls and more idiot-proofing and general dumbing down and blandness. Mario Galaxy was really not that interesting of a game once you got past the "omg planetoids" phase. Metroid Prime 3 was good but didn't have the impact of the first Prime, Brawl was good but nothing really spectacular... Skyward Sword.... meh. It's all just so formulaic at this point. Wouldn't it be amazing if Nintendo gave their top tier franchises a break for one console and came up with all new stuff? Kinda bored of playing updated versions of games from the 1980s tbh.


  12. I'm pretty lax about standards of morality, as long as they can be justified with tangible statistical outcomes. According to my mum's Catholic newsletters, Ireland has the best birth mortality, infant health, and child care in the world. I don't know that that's true

    It's 22nd in the world according to a Wikipedia table. That whole story about that woman made me spitting mad tbh. She died a completely preventable death because "this is a Catholic country". I mean I guess it shows you how far that fake "except in the mother's life in danger" clause gets you from pro-lifers.

    I've also read that foreign occupation in the middle east has driven down violence

    Yeah and president Romney would have been fantastic for women's rights. Seriously, what?


  13. Don't really see the appeal of the thing. Wii was much less impressive than even the Gamecube and this looks worse.

    Is it just me or is NSMB U the exact same game as the Wii ones? And the only other game anyone's talking about is some third-rate zombie fest that wouldn't merit a second mention if it wasn't a launch title.

    I dunno, it just seems like Nintendo are trying to recapture lightning twice. The Wii was a good idea for a couple of years, it sold well and yeah not so many people had HDTVs so the low power and low price made sense. But by what, three years in, that thing looked like crap compared to the games coming out on 360 and PS3. All the controller innovation in the world didn't stop third party companies just using it as a dumping ground for waggle shovelware and spinoff inferior Wii versions of their main franchises. I don't see how that's different in any significant way this time around, and it will probably look seriously underpowered again in a couple of years.

    So third party publishers will avoid it again, Nintendo will continue to run their franchises into the ground... It's just, god. Nintendo are still running on the same IP from the 19 goddamn 80s. Sure they've done a few new bits and pieces like Pikmin or whatever, but man who honestly jumps for joy to play another fucking Mario or Zelda game any more? And if they're not going to compete on graphics appeal like they did with every console before the Wii, and it's just left to relying on controller gimmicks, what's the point? You can't even say the gameplay's better, in fact it's worse since they're baby-proofed and tutorialed and unskippable-hinted out the ass, you can't actually just sit down and get lost in these worlds any more.