Cleinhun

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Cleinhun

  1. Posted

    I disagree with this. Yeah, sometimes playing a game competitively will expose behaviors of your friend(s) that you never knew before. If you're willing to say a new grievance is worth ending a friendship over without attempts to work through that grievance, well, I'm not exactly sure what to say to that. I've definitely run into instances of my friends doing despicable things when we play games, but I'm willing to apply that newfound negative aspect to the event that triggered it. For example, when one of my friends picks Pikachu in Smash Bros. I know exactly what to expect from him and will compartmentalize that frustration and anger to the time we are playing.

     

    Also "ruin friendships" is generally hyperbole to talk about how angry people get at one another over something. If something is actually 'ruining friendships' regularly by its very design, is the game healthy to play?

    So either I suck at writing (which I do) or you suck at reading, because what you just said was basically what I was attempting to say. Obviously "ruining friendships" is hyperbole, but I still get the sense that some people have more trouble with the "compartmentalizing frustration: thing. I've definitely read posts along the lines of "we can't play this game anymore because we always end up hating eachother when we do" and I'm always slightly confused, since my experience with games is so far from that. If the rules of the game allow for or even encourage tricky plays or "backstabbing" how can you personally fault someone foe using those? And furthermore, why would you expect them not to? I'm going to stop now because I think I'm rambling. I'll probably come back and edit this for clarity when I wake up.

  2. Posted

    I took umbrage (and this really seeded in MANY conversations I've had with Jake about this) with the broad statement that is essentially "You guys are bullies; why can't you be nice," which just feels uninformed. The guys I play DOTA with are some of my closest friends. If I ever felt like I was belittling anyone or someone logged off and felt guilty/bad/whatever because of anything that came out of my or one of our friends' mouths, I'd probably quit the game forever. 

     

    I've noticed that occasionally you'll see people talk about games that "ruin friendships", games like Neptunes Pride or the board game Diplomacy. I've never come across this problem, so I brought it up to a friend of mine. He came to the conclusion that if playing games with your friends makes you hate each other, you probably weren't very good friends to begin with. Getting mad at your friends is fun if it's in a context where it's understood that it's not meant to be taken personally.

  3. Posted

    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.

  4. Posted

    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(?)

  5. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    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.

  12. Posted

    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?

  14. Posted

    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.

  15. Posted

    I kind of feel the opposite. I think the most games aren't about violence, they're about hemotechnics.

    I think The Walking Dead succeeds because it makes the violence peripheral

    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.

  16. Posted

    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.

  17. Posted

    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.

  18. Posted

    I had this weird thing at the end on the screen that shows you all the decisions with percentages for each one, I just got placeholder labels like Decision 2:3, so I don't even know what the major decisions were (though I can probably guess at most of them.) Any way to go back and see those stats after completing the episode?

    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.

  19. Posted

    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

  20. Posted

    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.

    Also, I think this is the first time in a video game where I've made a decision based on me being angry at a character.

    -Is there a handy metaphor for a situation in an adventure game where, instead of a newspaper-under-the-door situation where the answer is contrived, the problem itself is contrived?

    This episode did seem more "adventure-gamey" than the first two in a few places. Did other people get that feeling?

  21. Posted

    I somehow managed to miss my cue to take a seat at the table. I wandered around up and down the stairs for a long time before figuring it out.

    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.

  23. Posted

    I'd like to see the same kind of analysis as to how, exactly, Borderlands is misogynist, particularly in comparison to, you know... video games in general.

    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 B) 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).

    (Apparently I need to see that movie)

    Yes.