Synnah

So this is out on Steam Early Access since December, and being a fan of the original game, I thought I'd pick it up! I'm not very good (I generally tend to take a lot of risks in games, in the hope that things will work out, but in a game where all of the combat is based on percentages, that often results in me being killed by a rat or something equally dumb), but if anyone's interested in playing, my Steamertag is 'Giraffe Cat'. I'm also in the Idle Thumbs group, so you can find me that way.

I've been playing this recently as well, and I like a lot (The original Chaos is the only one of Gollop's games I've actually played). I'm finding the matchmaking a little flaky, though, so I thought about resurrecting the Chaos Reborn kickstarter thread in order to find out who else is playing it, and maybe organise multiplayer games.

It is most endearing.

Ben and I are in Cambridge! London's only 50 minutes away by train.

Pretty sure he's talking about Jonathan McIntosh, who was tweeting about white privilege regarding the Charlie Hebdo stuff. The replies to those tweets are predictably garbage.

Oh yeah, I knew about the ant thing. I just figured they were ticking both boxes, by having an ant character that's also a reference to a cultural event (of sorts). But now that I think about it, it seems weirder that they would do that knowingly. Adventure Time doesn't really do pop-culture references, and that one in particular is something that you're not really gaining anything by referencing.

Fuck THAT particular prick. He's completely abhorrent. Everything about this is depressing. I watched that episode this weekend too! I didn't know that it wasn't an intentional reference, though.

Just finished Never Alone. Don't really have a lot to say about it, as it's a kind of sub-standard platformer with beautiful presentation and a slightly naïve-but-likeable story. Buggy as hell in places, but I left it with mostly positive impressions. RE: Monument Valley: Absolutely, the expansion goes much further with the mechanics of the original, and a few new mechanics. And I definitely had to stop and think about it in several places, which never happened in the main game. But man, there are secrets? I don't think I found any!

I was going to switch my Christmas userpic back to the standard one, but do I need to make it even more Christmassier, in preparation for next year? TWO Christmas hats?

It's reading comprehension, as ever. Right below the quoted text, he included a screengrab of this tweet: So he's obviously reading 'toxic masculinity' as 'men are toxic', and hasn't questioned this assumption because it undermines the rest of his beliefs.

It's the Froakie débâcle all over again. Can you beat the previous record of 2971 eggs?

The article in question is even more laughable. It's here, should you want a chuckle, and it contains wisdom like: So because they declared a partnership with Feminist Frequency, all Intel products are no longer 'good' or at 'good prices'. And yeah, man, stick up for capitalism! If you don't, who will?

I think I once raised a male Combee to level 50. It was a wholly pointless exercise. I also have a level 63 Luvdisc.

SO JEALOUS OF THAT SHINY BEEDRILL

I've got a couple of last-minute additions: Hohokum, which I played over the Christmas period, and quickly fell in love with. A game about the joy of exploration, with the only thing it tells you about how to play it being the buttons you need to speed up and slow down. Everything else is left up to you to discover, and there so many details, small and large, that will delight you from start to finish. 80 Days, which I just finished this morning. I completed the journey in 65 days, having survived a sinking airship somewhere between Singapore and Colombo, being abducted by pirates in New Orleans, and having my shoes stolen by train robbers on the journey across America. Definitely going to play more of this, as I feel like there's such a huge amount of things to discover in it, and each playthrough writes its own unique story. I also played this, and while it's currently a little buggy, it was utterly fascinating, and stands as one of the most memorable games I played this year. I feel like I didn't give Fract OSC a fair shake; as a synth nerd, it's definitely my kind of thing, but I wasn't able to stick with it. I think largely because my PC kept crashing while I was playing, which interrupted a game that seems to work best when played in as few separate sessions as possible. I'm going to give this another shot in the new year.

I'm happy for you, Tegan! Merry Chrimbus! I thought the thing about EXP All in Red/Blue was that it split the experience evenly between your whole party, so if you got 600xp for defeating a Pokémon, each party member would get 100xp. In every game before Gen VI you could never get any more experience than the base value, so using two Pokémon in a battle would give them half of the experience each. X and Y were the first games where any Pokémon used in a battle would get full experience, and the EXP Share gives half of the experience from a battle to all Pokémon that didn't participate. If you go back to any of the previous games after playing Gen VI, it's crazy how much longer it takes to level up a party of 6.

If you use EXP Share, and there's absolutely no reason not to, then yeah, the game is balanced the same as X and Y. My Pokémon are all around level 30 at the moment, and I'm fighting trainers with level 20 Pokémon. I'm not even hanging around to catch as many Pokémon as I did in X, but I'm not exactly rushing through it either. It's basically balanced for straight-lining through the story with no grinding at all. So yeah, probably not going to challenge you much.

Love that skybox. After playing through Forgotten Shores recently, Monument Valley has slid right up my GOTY list. The original game is lovely, but the expansion is so, so clever. The last three levels in particular all wowed me in very different ways. I've been playing Hohokum recently too, and it's been giving me a similar feeling. It's one of those games where the mechanics are stripped down but the interactions are often surprising and delightful. On the other hand I went back to Bayonetta 2 recently and got little except frustration from it. I guess it's what I get for trying to get good scores, but I feel that for a game with such a fantastic combat system it works pretty hard to make the combat unenjoyable with some of its level and boss design.

That's a well-oiled machine! I never knew about Flame Body reducing hatch times. Could have saved myself a bunch of grief in X. I'm half-temped to aim for a perfect shiny Weedle (Mega Beedrill looks like a pretty effective sweeper), but I also like having time to do other things, and I'm not great at multitasking! We'll see.

TEGAN IF YOU DONT WANT YOUR SHINY FOARKKIES I WILL GIVE THEM A GOOD HOEM Also how on earth do you hatch so many eggs? My breeding in X generally consisted of hatching 5-10 in order to get the right nature, never mind perfect IVs and shininess. That was about 10 hours of my life that I'd quite like to get back. Do you basically not do anything else now? Tegan, are you okay?

Yeah, agreed. The point here is that GamerGate isn't just trying to preserve gamer culture as they perceive it (and as Glotal says their perception is skewed anyway), they're trying to expunge everything and everyone that doesn't fit with their vision. Their manifestoes make lofty claims about wanting inclusivity, but their actions have proven again and again that these are just words. To address your friend's points, Blambo, I'm all for preserving subcultures, but I think it's odd to want to mindlessly preserve the toxic elements of a subculture simply because they've always existed as part of it. I don't see what is gained from doing this. Take fighting game culture, for example; if you get rid of the sexism that is rife in the fighting game scene, and which is a barrier for a lot of people entering it, who loses out? If it's no longer acceptable to make sexually aggressive comments to female players, who is inconvenienced? Is the culture somehow diluted and poorer for it? I don't personally believe that it is. I guess that's just a difference of opinion.

Crossy Road and 80 Days at the same time? What a glorious day! Played a bit of Crossy Road last night, and managed a pretty abysmal top score of 95. I'll be playing 80 Days over the Christmas holiday!

The more I look at this shitty map, the more confusing and annoying it is to me. The misspelling of 'Anti-GG' and 'Authoritarian', the conflation of 'Anti-GG' with corruption, the choices they made regarding which 'factions' control which areas, the inclusion of #MetalGate as an area almost as large as #GamerGate despite being basically nothing, the assumption that Anti-GG/Corruption is somehow responsible for the UK Pornography Ban, it's all so stupid.

I'll put my friend code here as well: 3780-9031-7475. I need more Pokéfriends! None of my existing friends have played the new games yet. I'm not far in at all, having not reached the first gym yet, but I've got the majority of my Pokémon traded over previous games. It's not as comprehensive as Tegan's collection, but I've got somewhere between 550 and 600, so if there are any Pokémon anyone needs I can probably rustle something up!

Meant to post this earlier, but Whales, from Hail Mary Mallon's latest album, is pretty great: The whole album is fantastic, really.