gregbrown

At least he'll always have that fallback job at Trader Joe's.

My opinion of Rymdkapsel is dropping like a rock the further I get away from it. The mechanics are just such a mess, and the game so half-baked beyond the excellent graphical style. In my experience, the way to win is to keep your minion-count low—I maxed out at 8, personally—only send a a little span out to each of the monoliths, and try to keep the key rooms in the central core. All you really need is one defense room near each of the monoliths to send your two researchers to during waves. After researching all four, just build four defense rooms near the center as close as possible to each other, with food and quarters nearby so you can respawn quickly. And like you said, at a certain point you just have to be holed up and wait to die. Here's what my base ended up as: http://cl.ly/image/2K2n1m1E0J2I The really frustrating part is that so many of the choices I made were necessitated by the game's clumsy minion/resource-handling, than by any property of the space or the enemies. Ugh.

I'd even say that the lack of conventional resolution isn't uncommon amongst literary fiction, which happens to be the fiction most likely to find its way into translation (outside of a few huge successes, which tend to follow the traditional structure).

Rymdkapsel is frustrating because it suffers from the same dumb-agents problem that sclpls noted. It's the worst when you're building a long corridor. Everyone will grab a reactor unit, until the first minion gets there, at which point everyone discards their reactor unit and goes for a resource unit, and repeat back to reactor. And when choosing a weapons module to go to, each minion just selects the closest one to them, and the closest minions to each unit get priority. Ideally, there would be some heuristic whereby it would minimize the overall time until everyone's in a room. But no. It gets to the point where I felt I was spending more effort compensating for their stupidity than on actually accomplishing the objectives. I can understand why they chose the levels of abstraction that they did—blunt controls for simplicity, individual agents for the deaths and resurrection mechanic—but it ends up really sapping my energy to deal with it. Plus the overall depth is minimal enough that you've seen all you're going to see by the second play-through, and nothing really to justify going through an hour+ of repetitive gameplay just to try and get further in the end levels. I feel like Kingdom Rush (& KR:Frontiers) strike a much better balance of time-investment, plus just have a lot more depth in general. BTW, you can cheat the Tetris mechanic by placing and then canceling a piece, which still advances you one in the queue.

If you guys do livestream Far Cry 2, I highly recommend playing where you only save at safe houses and other designated points. I went through the whole game not realizing you can save anywhere, and it made for so many great moments. Getting back from missions was often more tense than the mission itself, since I was acutely aware of the danger of losing progress.

As a kid, I had pretty low standards for video games because I hadn't played many. Chex Quest was my only pre-HL1 FPS, and I played TFC at 1-5 FPS for years before I got a faster computer. (Thank goodness for the Engineer class.) My only Star Wars games were Rebellion and X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, both considered the duds of the era, but I played the hell out of both. This is a long way of saying that despite those blinders and incredibly low standards, even I recognized the main screen music loop and R2D2 sounds as incredibly fucking annoying. Wtf devs

100% agree. All "Vlogs" Are Horrible.

100% on Team Fish on this one. A serious chunk of the gaming community is goddamn despicable, and driving good people away from the industry. And not to drag other topics into this, but this kind of harassment is the same reason that we're driving away women as well.

His other writing on that blog is excellent, especially his annual book recommendations.

Calling it right now: movie of the year. And my favorite:

Seeing Gately dominate the book more and more as it proceeded was wonderful, and probably the closest to how DFW wished he was.

It's from a band that the host, Michael Silverblatt, really likes—and they composed it specifically for the show. It is putrid.

Pro surgery simulators have mini-games.

Finished the book, and the boredom of Paris seems like almost a deliberate choice by Hemingway. His writing becomes much more descriptive once the book reaches Spain, and there's even a specific instance where the main character notices things anew after a fight. More subjective than I expected, and certainly a range I didn't see coming after the mediocrity of the Paris part. Still didn't like the book at all, though. The characters all seem further soured by to the historical distance between us and them, due to the racism that everyone's mentioned. And I never really felt comfortable with the heavy gentlemen-adventurer vibes given off by the characters, almost as if they were using their Spanish trip as kind of an Eat, Pray, Love thing to go and find themselves. This is a very uncharitable reading, but one that I felt throughout. Really feel ugh about the whole thing, and don't want to read more Hemingway even though I should.

Halfway through and not digging this at all yet. Hemingway could lay off a bit on the goddamn bon mots.

Pacific Rim is no Speed Racer, which I love. It's more even and consistent than Speed Racer, but the visuals aren't nearly as impressive. It's s competent summer blockbuster, but not much more than that; think the first JJ Abrams Star Trek film. Independence Day is still the reigning champ.

Deus Ex does the same thing (albeit under a "whelp you got knocked out" trope), which games sometimes use as an excuse to take away all your weapons/gear. Usually it gets handled through a cutscene, but I was happily surprised to see Deus Ex handle it through just normal gameplay. And as far as interesting failure-ish states go, Homeworld had a persistent fleet that drove me crazy because I felt I had to be as perfect as possible in missions, as well as one or two cases where you'd be best served by building a particular kind of fleet in advance of a difficult level. Never did finish for that reason.

There's a similar place in Chicago called The Book Cellar that I loved when I lived there. The cafe was a bit more slim, but they had wine and beer to make up for it.

Tonight at 11: new research indicates that you or your child may be Fred Durst, and not even know it. What does this mean for your family? Tune in to find out.

Amazed that you guys didn't mention the "Authority and American Usage" essay, which is my favorite by far. An amazing piece of rhetoric that is itself about rhetoric.

This is a great thread, and as mentioned by Thyroid, The Millions published a second-half of 2013 preview earlier today. http://www.themillions.com/2013/07/most-anticipated-the-great-second-half-2013-book-preview.html As for myself, I'm excited for the volumes of My Struggle to be gradually translated into English (one per year). There are six overall, so it'll be until 2017 before they're all out. Also on the horizon is Caro's final volume of his LBJ biography/masterpiece, which is a race against time since he's getting pretty old. :[ I don't really have much of a list since I have so much book guilt over existing books I haven't read. For example, it's hard to get too excited about new Pynchon when I still have old Pynchon to tackle, weighing on my mind.

Bret Victor's rememberance is especially excellent: http://worrydream.com/Engelbart

Now imagining Vonnegut's asides as The Wonder Years narrator, and this is amazing.

More than that, though, it's the most amazingly consistent franchise I've ever seen. No matter where you are, when you enter a Cracker Barrel you find that same food and that same trappings of Southern-ish culture, even in the woods of northern Michigan where I used to live. The demographic of visitors even shifts, with inexplicable transplanted southerners somehow showing up, even though you've never seen them elsewhere in the city. They are the damnedest things, and while I can't really stand their affectations, there's a perverse fascination with how they manage it in northern states.

I'm so glad they're making a stand, because so many people think you can get moral points by expressing qualms and then doing something anyways.