Cleinhun

I started playing this, but it seems poorly suited for solo play, and none of my friends own it. Collecting scrap and placing turrets frustrating given how slow you move and the fact that the sprint ability is super cumbersome.

I was also super confused as to whether Nick was permanently back. He didn't seem to talk that much, and nobody made a big deal, or even a small deal, about the fact that he was there. And the "Hey, Nick Breckon is back for real" at the end was said in exactly the same way you guys would make a joke about Nick Breckon being back for real. Was the goal to be confusing to people who didn't read twitter or was that an accident? Anyway, good episode, and I guess just congrats Nick now(?)

After I played Kentucky Route Zero, I was blown away (ign.web), it is honestly one of my all time favorite games. From looking at discussions of it on the internet, I've gathered that few people had responded to it the way I had, and it wasn't until listening to this episode that I had some idea why this might be. It sounds like people are turned off by the writing being "pretentious" but to me the content of the writing was less important than the tone and metre of it. It felt poetic, and helped the world feel mysterious, or alien. Also, the scene where you return to the farmhouse was beautifully constructed and contained possibly my favorite moment in a video game. On an entirely different note, Jake mentioned "Glory to Rome" and while I also found the game fun, I felt the need to share just how ugly the original art was. If I recall correctly, there was even a card with no art at all, like they forgot to draw it or something.

Also a spoiler for Risk Legacy.

So "Kentucky Root Zero" could totally be a diet root beer.

I was amusing to me that the museum had so much false information about the past despite the fact that there was a functional time machine literally in the next room.

I had to stop listening because that room escape sounds really cool and I live close enough to sf that I'm considering doing it. I'm not even typically a fan of the online room escapes that you tend to find, but something about actually being there is really appealing to me.

I really liked Dustforce, but that was almost entirely due to the visuals and music. The gameplay was fine, good even, but at the end of the day it was still just a platformer. This however, looks quite interesting. The item combos and the procedural generation remind me a bit of Binding of Isaac. The first-person platforming is something that seems hard to do well, but the movement mechanics in Dustforce were satisfying, so these guys probably know what they're doing. Really curious to see more of this one.

I'm basically drowning in beta invites. I added you on steam if you still need one.

I just went ahead and joined the steam group because I don't like to queue by myself and none of my friends are online. Nobody is in the group chat though, so I don't know how to find people who want to play a game. Is this more of the sort of thing where you guys games planned in advance or did I just show up at a bad time? Basically, how does this group actually function?

"This game shows no restraint!" -igndotcom

I felt the opposite way about the darkness mechanics in Amnesia, and it's one of the reasons I never got too into that game. The fact that there is something inherently scary about darkness means that putting an arbitrary mechanic over it feels to me like the game is telling me when I should be scared. It took me out of the game when my character was freaking out while I was just chillin'. It was also unclear to me how dark it had to be before you started losing sanity. Maybe I was just playing the game wrong or something.

I think that "about violence" may have been a bad choice of words, because I don't think that most game are about violence in a thematic sense. What I meant was more that games tend to have core mechanics that are inherently violent, and the ones that don't tend to avoid violence altogether.

I feel like if I hadn't read about Halo 4 King of the Hill Fueled be Mtn Dew prior to listening to this episode I would have been slightly confused as to what you guys were talking about. I also thought the flaming halo skull was really dumb when I first saw it. It didn't fit with my mental picture of what the Halo aesthetic was supposed to be. To be fair, I have never actually played the single player portion of a Halo game, so my mental picture may have been more informed by the fact that the teaser trailer reminded me of Metroid Prime. I liked Sean's point about how TWD can contain violence without being about violence, and I realized I can't think of many games for which that is true.

I was eating dinner while listening to this, and the airplane story almost made me choke on my food, as did Dishonored Halloween. Some people listen to podcasts while driving, but to me, that just seems like a bad idea. Also, I'm a little surprised at how much discussion there is about lowering your gun vs. game over screens. What is it about the situation that makes it so important to people? It seems like both options break immersion to some degree.

I had this problem as well, playing the steam version. I think I need to collect my thought some before I say anything about the actual episode.

I'm in the middle of the most interesting run of this that I've had so far. There were a number of occasions where I should have given up and restarted, such as when I lost 2 of my starting 3 crew members before reaching sector 2(a human to giant spiders and an engie to boarders), or when I was down to one fuel with no store in sight while passing through a nebula. For whatever reason, today, I pushed on. And look at me now. I'm just about to fight the boss for the first time, wish me luck. Edit: Ok, I beat his first stage without taking too much damage, but I was not prepared for the number of drones stage 2 has. I suppose a comeback that crazy was not meant to be. Oh, and this was on normal difficulty with the Torus ship

I know it's possible to replay the game or look up alternate paths on youtube or whatever, but too me that feels like cheating. I spent most of ep. 3 wondering what would have happened if I had made *unspecified important choice* differently, but I kind of like the idea that I don't get to find out. This episode did seem more "adventure-gamey" than the first two in a few places. Did other people get that feeling?

I was slightly confused here as well. Even though I followed them, Anita and Borges seemed to get lost in the crowd pretty easily. I'm not sure there's a way to avoid that, since everyone has the same shape. Maybe they could wave you over when they're sitting down or something.

Hey everybody, I've had an account for a little while, and I've been a reader for a lot longer, but I never posted here and said hi, so hi.

I feel like that isn't a comparison worth making, I doubt anyone would get an award for being only as mysogynist as the average video game. That said, I never actually played Borderlands, so I would like to see an answer to that question. I have further thoughts on the topic, but a) several people have already articulated similar thoughts better than I could, and I'm pretty tired anyway. Maybe I'll come back later and say something more intersting, but maybe I won't (feel free to make bets). Yes.

A future episode of The Walking Dead should have an easter egg where you pick up a banana and the voice of Sean declares that it is, in fact "the stuff". You can make this happen, you have the power.

The twitch.tv page seems to have recordings of the loops, so that's good news. I hope Idle Loops becomes a regular feature of the podcast.

I've played many hours of Minecraft, but I've still only been lost once. I don't even have any sort of system, I just explore the tunnel that looks the most interesting and place torches mostly at random. The one time I did get lost was because I had come in through a tiny crack into a more open area, and even then, I managed to figure out what happened after 20 minutes or so.