Cleinhun

I just want to say that this might be my new favorite podcast. You guys are 3 for 3 on great episodes.

Nah, can't be.

I've read Griffin's post about it and I get what he's going for, and in theory the idea of using "narrative damage" to build stakes is pretty clever. In practice, though, I don't think it actually works, mostly because it doesn't feel like they're being punished for choices they've made, they're just being put through the grinder repeatedly and unavoidably. I initially thought Wonderland was going to be a puzzle, and they would have to keep enduring punishment until they solved it, which might also have worked ok, but they found the lich and it's spend the last two episodes telling them just to wait for the signal, so I guess the solution is just "wait for this NPC to solve it for you". Also, as someone on the reddit thread put it: "Merle getting his arm hacked off by Magnus because he saved his friends from an exploding crystal is fun and interesting. Merle losing his eye because a random number generator landed on "lose an eye" just doesn't have that same impact." The episodes have still had some great character moments and goofs, so these episodes haven't been a complete slog, but I wish whoever DM's the next game can find a different way to provide tension.

I'm surprised Jake never played the Portal 2 co-op, considering I recall him lamenting that the puzzle design in the main game is lackluster, which is a problem the co-op levels mostly do not have. You guys should consider streaming it, I bet that'd be a fun game to stream.

That video makes my incredibly uncomfortable for reasons I can't explain.

Very similar interference occurred on this week's Video Games Hot Dog, of which Frog Fractions creator Jim Crawford is a host. This is clearly part of the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and the fact that the two podcasts are recorded in the same room on the same equipment is probably a coincidence.

Oh my god no. No I will not.

I think you "only" need 800.

A local pizza place was serving pizza with tater tots on it, I suppose it might make sense to put ketchup on that, or at least would not be more insane than putting tater tots on a pizza already is.

My problem with that Ghostbusters trailer was that the jokes felt like the sort of jokes I would expect from a comedy movie in 2016, which are not the sort of jokes I would expect from a ghostbusters. If it was an original property it might look kind of interesting, but I don't think it's association with Ghostbusters is doing it any favors.

I don't think he knows how to pronounce words. If a team picks Ogre Magi in a game he is casting I just have to turn it off.

I can only assume that the 4 people who voted yes did so on accident.

Person of Interest does get significantly better in the later seasons, and a lot of that is because they introduce additional main characters which takes focus away from Reese, who is basically the least interesting parts of Batman. It never entirely abandons it's case-of-the-week structure, and the cases of the week never really stop being predictable, but as the show goes on they spend more time on the larger plot and character stuff. The show is really at it's best once Root and Shaw become regulars, especially Root, Root is the best.

I've heard that commending people makes the matchmaking more likely to put you in the same game as them, although I'm not sure there's any way to verify that.

Yep, that sounds about right. I wish Valve would make any sort of single player game again, even if it's not Half-Life related, but it seems like even that is a long shot at this point.

spoiler because large image This was a fun round.

I honestly don't think I would have realized that wasn't a real trailer if I had't been told otherwise.

If the goal was to make the most wizard jam friendly title I would have gone with "Guard Barfer"

I believe JoBlo said in an interview that The Witness made more money in it's first week than Braid did in it's first year, so even if it doesn't have the staying power that Braid did I think he's probably still happy with it.

Adding invincibility frames seems like such a bizarre change to me. Doesn't that fundamentally change how the combat works? Before, being good at combat felt like it was way more about positional awareness than about precise timing, but I guess now good timing can get you out of way more. I understand if they wanted to make the game easier (although I liked the difficulty where it was) but why not do that by making enemies attack less frequently or giving the player more hp, rather than change the nature of how you fight? To a lesser extent the faster medkits also feels like this to me, since I though the whole point was to make it so you couldn't reliably heal mid combat and it wasn't nearly long enough to be annoying outside of combat in the first place. The weirdest thing, though, is that this was a mandatory change rather that an additional difficulty setting. Unless there's some technical reason they couldn't do that I don't understand why they would.

That music article is very good. I hadn't noticed most of that stuff consciously, but as soon as it was pointed out it seemed obvious so I mush have at least subconsciously been aware of. The second part if is here if anyone wants it.

For me it took about an hour before the game clicked with me, but once it did I started to enjoy it quite a lot. I understand not having the patience for learning a game, but this isn't like dota or something where you have to spend dozens of hours practicing before you can even properly play the game. I think that another part of the problem, and this is somewhat the games fault, is that the bosses are significantly more difficult that the areas they're in, especially if you have no upgrades. But the game does nothing to clue you in to the fact that you should probably warp back to town and buy the chain dash or the bullet reflector before fighting your first boss. In fact the game doesn't do a good job of letting you know you can even upgrade you character, it sounded on the cast like Chris didn't know what the gold squares were for (they let you buy upgrades in town).

Aww, I was looking forward to that one too, but I haven't been able to find anywhere it's playing.

Yeah, I felt that too. I think they must have started writing thinking they had more episodes than they did and they ended up with a story that was too long for the time they had. It's really too bad, since aside from that the season was fantastic. The only thing I can think of that might have worked is to cut the season down to a 4-5 episode miniseries that's just about the Blue Morpho arc, so at least it would feel like something concluded, even if some of those side plots were really good on their own. The most frustrating part is that the show's notoriously long production time means we probably won't get another season for at least two years.

I feel like I should balance out this negativity with some stuff that I really did like: