Synnah

shows the timings for parrying the Butcher's blades with Rebellion. The Osiris charge you're doing is pretty easy because you can just hold it and release it when you need to parry, and it's basically instantaneous; the Rebellion parry requires no charge time, though, so if you can get the timing is pretty flexible. In terms of actually doing damage to him once he's stunned, closing the distance quickly is the key. Angel Evade is good enough for this, but I tend to use either Streak (L2+Forward, Forward+Triangle with Osiris) or Stinger (Forward, Forward+Triangle with Rebellion). Both of those will do some damage, and then you can go straight into a combo. Yeah, sorry, should have specified that I was referring to the Rebellion move High Time when I was taking about getting Dreamrunners into the air. There are other ways of juggling enemies, though. Aquila's Big Slick (L2+Forward, Forward+Triangle) takes Dante into the air with multiple enemies, but is a bit inconsistent and can sometimes leave him too high to hit them. Holding the Eryx Uppercut (R2+Circle) for one or two charges will also take Dante up into the air. You can Demon Pull them into the air as well, but it takes a bit longer. You could also launch with a move that leaves Dante on the ground (Osiris Prop or Arbiter Tremor; L2+Circle and R2+Circle respectively), and then jump straight up and continue attacking. Dante Must Die can be pretty frustrating until you know the most efficient ways of dealing damage to enemies; you want to be killing everything as quick as possible, either using Demon Evade and Arbiter or charged Eryx attacks, or by grouping enemies together with Aquila's Buy-In and hitting large numbers of them with things like Osiris Prop & Shredder and Arbiter's Trinity Smash. SSS runs of DMD missions on Youtube will probably give a few ideas of what works well!

My 3-year-old nephew is kind of obsessed with the game; he hasn't played it, but I gave my sister a copy of the soundtrack, and he saw the album art and was really into it. I think there's something about the cartoon gore/horror that really appeals to children. I might sit him down in front of Rebirth over Christmas, see what he makes of it. Seeing you guys talking about the late game makes me realise how little of it I've actually seen. I put most of my time into vanilla Isaac, and only played Wrath of the Lamb briefly, so I've got all of that content to explore on top of the Rebirth additions. I've been through Sheol a couple of times (Although I think I only beat Satan once, when I had Money = Power; with about 60 coins, I was one-shotting the late-game bosses, and killed Satan in two or three hits). I've never seen the Cathedral, though; haven't even seen that many Angel rooms. The other stuff that you've mentioned just sounds made-up to me! I really need to put some actual time into it and start getting more completions under my belt.

I played Mario Cars 2: 64 by Chelsea Saunders last night, and you should all probably do the same.

I played quite a lot of this as well, and it's really great! The kinds of things you can do when you understand the mechanics are often really impressive.

I think I ended up playing more new games this year than I usually do. I don't have a specific order for these, but here's what I liked the most, and why: Dark Souls 2: Absorbed me every bit as much as the previous game, and although I agree that it's not quite as good overall, it's still fantastic. Mario Kart 8: The Wii U has been the console for me to revisit Nintendo series that I'd skipped over the previous entry of, and I'm definitely glad I caught up Mario Kart. Insanely polished, absolutely beautiful, and Nintendo actually got the online mode right! DLC has been great so far, too. Kentucky Route Zero Act III: I played all three acts at the same time, and the third is by far the best. Easily the most inventive and fascinating game I've played for a long time. Binding of Isaac: Rebirth: Considering my love of the original game, this would have had to do something spectacularly wrong for me to dislike it. It doesn't! It's fantastic. Forza Horizon 2: Kind of a counterpoint to Mario Kart, this is a big sprawling game that's less about racing to me than it is about collecting cars. It's got some pretty compelling online modes as well, though, and I've had a lot of fun with it. Monument Valley: Wonderful puzzle game, with a fantastic art style and lovely design. Need to play the DLC over Christmas! Other games that it's worth mentioning: Smash Bros. for Wii U, which I'm really into at the moment, but haven't yet played enough of it to know where it stands. Action Henk, which I kind of knew I'd like from the trailers, and then I did! Crypt of the Necrodancer, which I was kind of obsessed with for a while, but then stopped playing quite suddenly. Bayonetta 2, which I liked a lot, but which for some reason didn't grip me as much as the first game did. Maybe I need to put some proper time into it, and play the game on harder difficulties. I played a lot of Civilization V: Brave New World, too.

Oh, right! I guess I'm not doing so bad, then. And my Shiny Altaria will now have a Mega Evolution. How do you change the shiny rates in X/Y, then? Is it by tipping people, like the rumours suggested? I'm just about to start Omega Ruby!

Dammit Tegan, how do you do it!? In all of the 1,000+ hours I've spent across the various Pokémon games, I've caught a grand total of 3 shinies (And that includes a long time spent using the Poké Radar in Diamond, which didn't turn up anything). I've got Omega Ruby sitting here, but I got Smash Bros for Wii U at the same time, so I haven't started it yet.

Don't know if you're still playing this, but the best strategies for dealing with the Dreamrunners involve waiting for them to teleport and dealing with them when they come out of the portal. If you get the timing down, you can attack them just as they come out of it (A single Rebellion strike is usually best for this) to parry them, which leaves them open to an attack; taking them up into the air after this is usually a good idea because they're less likely to start blocking, but at some point they will parry you, which leaves you with a small window to perform an evade, or you'll take damage. If you don't want to risk a parry, you can just evade their attack when they come out of the portal, which still gives you a window in which they won't block attacks. It's slightly smaller though. Aside from this, Arbiter attacks are generally pretty useful, and will stagger them, allowing you to combo them a bit, or finish off with Trinity Smash. When they're blocking, though, you don't really want to attack them, because they'll just keep blocking (Until they decide to parry you). The Butcher (Blade man) generally requires a bit of caution to deal with, and generally quite a lot of distance, but when you know his attack timings and tendencies, you can usually stick pretty close to him and evade most of the time. You can parry all of his saw blade attacks (Even the blades he launches across the floor at the end of his 3-hit combo on Son of Sparda difficulty and above) with pretty much any weapon (Except Aquila, which doesn't parry anything in the game), if you can get the timing down. This is probably easiest with the vertical line of blades, because their progress towards you is pretty obvious, and a single Rebellion attack is fast enough that the timing is simple. The horizontal ground blades are also pretty straightforward, but the aerial blades are trickier, requiring you to jump into the air and swing your sword at the right time. Usually you should avoid these. As for attacking the Butcher directly, it is almost entirely uninterruptible, so you need to look for its down-time. Until you're comfortable with its attack patterns, the best time to do this is after it's thrown blades at you; it performs an animation where it reloads its blades, which is usually enough time for an Arbiter combo. You can usually get a strike or two in between its attacks, too. There are ways of interrupting it, however. The third strike of the basic Arbiter combo and Trinity Smash will both stagger him; the first has an advantage because the final basic Arbiter attack comes out quicker than Trinity Smash (Which requires you to pause for half a second before performing it, and then takes quite a while to strike), but you can perform Trinity Smash after two Rebellion strikes (All pause combos in the game allow you to switch weapons; you can perform two Aquila attacks in Angel mode, then pause and switch to Demon mode with Arbiter and finish the combo with Trinity Smash), which is quicker but does less damage. Finally, all fully-charge Eryx attacks will stagger him, and the fully-charged Uppercut (Hold B in Demon mode) will actually launch him into the air. Oh, and you can launch him with the Osiris Raze attack, if you release the button exactly as the second charge is ready. That's called Just Release, and the timing is tricky. If you have any other questions or need any help with any of the achievements, just let me know! I know... kind of a lot about the game.

I experienced the Tetris Effect recently with Crypt of the Necrodancer, where I got so into performing actions on the beat that when I stopped playing it, I felt like I had to do everything else in time. I get it occasionally when I play games with particularly strong mechanics; After playing Jet Set Radio I was so used to looking for grind paths that I would walk around town and think things like, "I could grind along here, jump off the rail and then wall-ride up onto that roof". With puzzle games it's slightly different, because I tend to see the mechanics in my head, but because they're more abstract they don't have any real-world implications, like rolling up lamp-posts after playing Katamari. I saw Meteos blocks in my head a lot after playing it, and it was like my brain was passively working on better play strategies, but I didn't really feel the need to reorder real-world shapes.

I hope they're offering a Turkey & Stuffing pizza.

Hey sweet, I'm on that block list! So are Chris, Jake, Nick, Danielle... and probably most people on these forums, considering all it took for me to get on there was following Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and Leigh Alexander.

Mitu Khandaker and Cara Elison came under GG's vomit-encrusted microscope earlier today, because Mitu once supported Cara's Patreon, and then Cara mentioned Mitu's game Redshirt in an article she wrote much later. Mitu wrote a response to the 'allegations'.

Christmas games! I got both Final Fantasy VII and Tomb Raider 2 for Christmas in 1997, and it was an amazing one-two punch. I think the combination of the two is why Tomb Raider 2 is my favourite game in the series, and why I'll always have a soft spot for FF7. I think I got DOOM and Bust-A-Groove/Move for Christmas next year, and then we had a 3-day power cut that meant I couldn't play either of them. In 2000 I got a Dreamcast with Sonic Adventure, Jet Set Radio and Shenmue, all of which count as Christmas games for me, although Shenmue has the strongest associations. Shenmue 2 was released towards the end of the year after, and I completed it on Christmas morning. I think Christmas 2002 was the year I got a PS2, and Ico became my Christmas game. Viewtiful Joe was a notable Christmas game after that, but I can't think of many others. I got Mario 3D World last year, which I guess is special enough to count. Going back before the Playstation era, Super Mario All Stars, Super Mario World and Street Racer on my sister's SNES were all pretty important fixtures. And Lemmings on the Atari ST before that. Even further back, probably Donkey Kong and Kangaroo on the Atari 800XL. Christmas games!

"This week, I have been mostly poopin' to... Helix!"

TotalBiscuit still refers to GamerGate as a consumer revolt. And he's right; the consumers are revolting.

Okay, that makes sense! It does have a huge amount of post-game stuff in it. I didn't stop as soon as I beat the Elite 4, in spite of wanting to get back to X and mess around with all my old Pokémon, but I didn't get any further than Nacrene city, and I'm pretty sure that there are a whole bunch of the caves and isolated locations that I didn't get to. Like how are you supposed to get to Anville town? It's miles away from anywhere! So yeah, I think if I'd have played the game for what it was rather than as a stepping stone, I'd have got more out of it. And yes, Roxie's gym is ace. My final team was Serperior, Musharna, Galvantula, GARBODOR, KlingKlang and Audino, which I just realised are all Gen 5.

So I skipped over the Black/White gen (And Heart Gold/Soul Silver, actually), and went from Diamond to X. After completing X and deciding I wanted to bring over my Pokémon from various older games, dating back to the original Sapphire, I picked up Black 2. I'd be curious to know why it's your favourite! Perhaps it's just the way I played it (I went into it with the intention of blasting through it so that I could transfer my Pokémon from Diamond, and then dump them in Pokémon Bank, but because of how I play Pokémon I ended up changing my party around every 5 levels or so and I levelled everyone up quite thoroughly), but I came away from it kind of relieved it was over. There are probably a number of reasons for that, not least that I'd just come from Pokémon X, which has the crazy EXP Share tweaks that make levelling up much less of a chore, so keeping everyone at the same level was a pain. I did quite a lot of power-levelling using Audinos. I dunno, maybe it just wasn't the best way to play that game. This match is amazing. Competition level Pokémon blows my mind, because I know enough about the game to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, but I also know that my brain is never going to be able to store the raw information required to do it myself. It's the thing Sean has talked about on the cast before, in relation to Dota 2.

This is the 'Christmas song by a respectable artist' that I always pull out: Slightly different to the studio version that I'm used to, but still great.

Pretty sure I've managed to play that album on Christmas morning at my parents' house in the past. Always a classic!

Considering what he said about Thatcher in that latest Twitlonger post, I'd say it's pretty unlikely. But who knows! Maybe he thinks Cameron is rad?

TotalBiscuit describing the UK as a country 'where race [is] less of a factor' is just about the stupidest thing I've seen today. This is a country that's been notoriously hostile towards Indian and Pakistani people in the past, has political parties like the BNP and UKIP who build their platform on racism and xenophobia, and even now has 'immigration scares' in its national newpapers about people from Eastern Europe 'flooding into the country'. That UKIP has found the alarming foothold that it has over the past year is proof enough that race definitely is a factor in the UK. Uh, in slightly more depressing news, the developers of That Dragon, Cancer, a game about their son who died of cancer earlier in the year, after the success of their recent Kickstarter, assuming that the only reason it could be successful is because of corruption? From 8chan:

I just wanted to say that Chris' laugh in response to what Jake says at 31:50 is the best thing. Jake's entire description of Knuckles' new look cracked me up completely.

This is the thing that annoys me the most about GamerGate; they've constructed a reality for themselves in which they're the only people who can identify as 'gamers', which allows them to believe that they represent everyone who considers themselves a gamer. You see this in their rhetoric all the time, and you see them talking as if the people who oppose them aren't gamers in any way (Which, when you consider that their most vocal opponents are indie developers and games journalists, is kind of insane). I think this narrative mostly comes from the way the mainstream media decried the movement, which allowed them to stick a big 'OUTSIDERS' label on anyone opposed to them (But of course it's fine for non-gamers like Milo and Cernovich to come out in support of them). Things like their stupid Gamer Bill of Rights are poisonous because they presume to speak for everyone who thinks of themselves as a gamer, which I still do. But I definitely want more people to be able to think of themselves as gamers, which is apparently the opposite of what GG wants. Edit: The conflation of 'nerd' and 'gamer' in this infographic gets on my nerves. I thought we solved the 'nerd, geek or dork' thing back in 2003? We (mostly) reclaimed those words, and as far as I was aware, a nerd was someone who was academically gifted but socially awkward, and a geek was someone who was knowledgeable and passionate about a specific subject (And also socially awkward). Not only does it treat 'nerd' and 'gamer' as interchangeable, but it seems to confuse nerds and geeks. Semantics aside, though, these guys need to get their persecution complexes straight.

As a result of the Mattie Brice 'scandal', GamerGate is turning it's email-writing spam-factory on everyone who entered a game in this year's IGF. It fucking infuriates me that they think this is still some righteous crusade, and that Mattie's joke justifies it because it's somehow indicative of bigotry. For people who'll accuse 'SJWs' of taking everything too seriously, they're remarkably bad at knowing the line between humour and actually problematic behaviour. I think the IGF's apology is softer than it needs to be (Just name GamerGate, for christ's sake), and their clarification that their initial concern was that Mattie's tweet suggested that judges might not be taking the position seriously is a little odd, because their replies to the Gater that sparked this whole thing certainly didn't read that way. Their heart's in the right place, I think, but they handled things really badly. All it took was for them to respond to the initial tweet with 'That's a joke, you're an idiot'. I've got more stuff I want to say about the past week's stuff, having not really had time to post much in here about it, but I don't have the time! Look forward to that soon, I guess.

This is the one that Zoe was referring to, I think. But I don't think that murder was because she'd rejected his advances?