Cleinhun

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    476

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Cleinhun

  1. Posted

    22 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:

    The illusion of control reminded me of a Kotaku story about how claw machine games are rigged.  It doesn't matter how well you align the claw, only a certain number of times will the machine actually apply enough pressure to successfully grab the prize.  Your odds of winning are predetermined.

    This is especially interesting given that I seem to recall Nick Breckon claiming to be "good" at claw machines a few episodes ago.

  4. Posted

    The more I think about it the more side stories I remember that never went anywhere. Like the scene with Bobby and the honking woman and the barfing zombie child, what was that about? We don't know because it was never mentioned again. But I do know that I enjoyed that scene immensely at the time. There's also things like the Ed and Norma story that did have a resolution, but still didn't impact the central plot at all, so is that better? If you cut out all the unresolved side stories you'd lose a lot of my favorite scenes, so I think I'm ok with the show being what it is.

     

    I feel like if I watched it again knowing how it end up it might feel more like a collection of vignettes about the people adjacent to a central plot, rather than a story about that central plot. I mean, it's "starring Kyle Mclaughlin" but there are large stretches of the show where he doesn't even appear.

  5. Posted

    1 hour ago, Invisible Strings said:

    I'll just say that, for me, the "most underrated character" of this season has been the showgirl Candie. Her somnolent, Dougie Jones-like existence was so baffling and endearing in equal measure that I found myself thinking about her state of mind a lot. We are unlikely to ever know more about her or why her behaviors were so disconnected, but it was a really striking performance. There were plenty of great performances, that was just one that really hit me as being sad and strange in a way I can't quite articulate. Okay. That's my random, pre-finale thought.

    She's going with Cooper and the Mitchums to Twin Peaks, right? It's not out of the question that we get something.

  11. Posted

    Mr. C asks Jeffries something like "did you call me five days ago?" which I assumed was in reference to the scene in epsiode three. I don't think there's any way the events of the other plot threads could have taken place in five days, so that somewhat confirms that, at the very least, the various plot threads aren't happening exactly concurrently. It's weird to me that we get an exact timeline for badcoop's story when every other thread is so vaguely defined that it's not unreasonable to assume time travel is involved. Can any useful conclusions be drawn from the five days thing?

  12. Posted

    1 hour ago, Mentalgongfu said:

    When Lucy transfers Margaret Lanterman's final call to Hawk, she tells him it is on Line One. She does not say, for perhaps the first and only time in the show's history, that Line One is the one that is flashing. 

    It seemed like Hawk was expecting her to say that, too. He pauses a second before picking up the phone like he's waiting for Lucy to finish talking.

  13. Posted

    20 hours ago, Badfinger said:

    At one point, the devs jokingly referred to the game as "stick figure Skyrim", and I think I agree with them. Mostly because I care about some of the more involved side quests than i care about the main quest (ooh, sick burn). 

    I believe what they specifically said was "it's like Skyrim with beans". And based on how they've talked about Skyrim on Video Games Hot Dog, I suspect that the idea that the side quest would be most interesting part of the game was what they were intending to suggest.

     

    15 hours ago, neonrev said:

    The devs did a weekly Q&A radio show/podcast about their MMO KOL for many years, and made a West of Loathing focused one that is very open about the development process, who did what, financial and sales matters

    http://shows.kingdomofloathing.com/The_KoL_Show_20170817.mp3

    I want to second this recommendation,  this is absolutely worth listening to. It's really interesting to hear about the development process, since it seems so different than other games at this scale. They're also just entertaining people to listen to.

  16. Posted

    I'm a couple hours in and I have to say I'm impressed with this one. It's the kind of game that makes it easy to overlook it's flaws. On paper, the fact that the combat is so haphazard  should be a big deal in a game with this much combat, but it hasn't led to be being bored or annoyed at any point so it feels like a pointless criticism. I think the fact that the writing is so consistently good is what makes this game work, every side area is worth exploring because you know something amusing will happen even if you don't get anything useful from it..Even the combat has some decent visual gags, like how Doc Alice heals you by dumping a bad of medical supplies on your head.

     

    My favorite joke so far is when you ask the circus vendor for a vegetarian option: "this is a carnival, not a herbival"

  18. Posted

    10 hours ago, LyonArtime said:

     

    You goal in Turf War is not to ink ground as fast as you can, it's to ink a higher percentage of the ground than your opponent. That's an important difference. 

     

    Dead enemies aren't spreading ink, so killing players is a means to acquiring a turf advantage. There's always a little bit of rock/paper/scissors going on with weapon selection, since things that just outrange the tier below them can usually get kills quite easily. A mediocre Splattershot Pro player can eat up a good Aerospray player. Likewise, Chargers and Splatlings can act as area denial, preventing players from inking territory within their kill radius, thereby holding turf. 

     

    There was a time in early Splatoon 1 where people hadn't internalized this difference yet; a disproportionate number of people used Aerosprays and would actively avoid fighting each other, instead just sneaking elsewhere to paint. People would literally paint circles around each other and get 3,000+ pts in a round.
    Then people slowly realized that if you used a Roller or a Squelcher you could easily outzone those aerosprays and never give them the opportunity to paint at all. 

    The thing is, I feel like a lot of this is only relevant if you're better at the game than I am. I understand the theoretical advantage of using a charger, but if you aren't good at reliably splatting people with it, it does very little because that's all it's good for. If you're bad at reliably splatting people with the splattershot it's fine because you're only trying to do that when you have a good opportunity and you can do other stuff the rest of the time. The reason I don't feel that way in ranked is because if I'm bad at platting people with the blaster there's less of an opportunity cost, and I'd be doing just as bad with any other weapon anyway.

  20. Posted

    On 8/1/2017 at 5:20 AM, Roderick said:

    It made me appreciate how much variety and freedom there is in Turf War, where you basically get to decide your own play style (offensive, sneaky, more focused on splatting enemies or inking ground). In Ranked Matches, there is a singular objective and nothing else matters.

    I kinda feel the opposite of this. Whenever I play turf war I feel like I'm wasting time if I'm not inking ground, and so many of the weapons don't spread ink very quickly. If you want to use a weapon that's tuned for splatting like a blaster or charger it feels like you have to be really good at it or you just drag the team down. In ranked the objective takes up less of the map, but I feel like I can use whatever weapon and even if I'm not doing that well I can do something with it that visible helps the team.

  21. Posted

    When I first heard about this I for some reason thought it was a physical card game and convinced myself it might actually be pretty cool. Then I realized it was obviously going to be a hearthstone and got much less excited. Then I heard Brad Muir was making it so now I'm cautiously optimistic again.

  22. Posted

    I had been assuming Audrey didn't live in Twin Peaks anymore, and that was why nobody ever mentioned her in situations where it would clearly make sense to mention her. Then Audrey showed up talks about going to the Road House so I guess that's what I get for making assumptions about anything in this show. I don't think she's in a coma, but there's clearly something weird going on here.

     

    Also, I'm a little surprised people are so down on this episode. It wasn't my favorite episode, certainly, but it wasn't categorically worse than anything else we've seen.