Codicier

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Codicier

  1. Movie/TV recommendations

    Just finished watching Cold in July, its a superb film but gawd darn don't make my mistake and watch it late night unless you want to be left pondering a very unsettling opening and some very dark themes overall.
  2. World of Warcraft

    The small plots are either crafting profession buildings, a storehouse which is kinda a utility building or a Salvage Yard. The Salvage yard is perhaps the most important since it allows you to get player items and extra upgrades for your followers. The typical set up is 2 profession building + a salvage yard. Though Altaholics will sometimes take the storehouse. The proffesion building dont offer you everything a proffesion does but do offer a good chunk of it. As for gathering professions, i'm honestly unsure atm if they are worth keeping. The market seems slowly to be recovering after blizz hotfix nerfed the amount of mats people got from their gathering buildings. They do seem to be aware that this hasnt fully solved the problem so i expect to see steps in the next patch or two to sort it out. Wowhead has done a extremely comprehensive guide you should check out. It does a nice job of breaking everything down into understandable chunks, as well as providing links to more focused guides to different aspects. http://www.wowhead.com/guide=2694/garrison-building-basics As for the gold sink, well that's garrisons. You get a few plans for free while you're levelling but you will spend several K gold on plans to upgrade buildings at max lvl if you want to kit the place out fully. yes atm no flying in Draenor, rumour is that like the original netherwing stuff in TBC it will be tied to a quest in a future patch.
  3. World of Warcraft

    Basically garrisons offer you access to up to 3 other crafting professions & to all the gathering professions through buildings. Additionally unless i'm misunderstanding it you can level any profession from 0 in Draenor, with just its daily CD.
  4. anime

    Speaking of Kon, remember everyone, tis the season to watch Tokyo Godfathers. A film which deserves a slot in any family's Christmas schedule along with more conventional classics.
  5. World of Warcraft

    I'm surprised that end of the economy is holding up as well as you say, as with everything else garrisons seem to have pretty much transformed the professions & the market that surrounds them. The Ore market got absolutley flooded so that 1-2 days into the expansion the new ore was going for near vendor price. The transmog market has also changed hugely as suddenly there's a glut of low lvl greens and blues. The bad/good news is that the WoD experience is pretty much the best version of Warcraft's particular take on the model of the MMO they have ever produced. Going 90-100 is pretty much seamless questing and exploring. They have also done a better (though still not perfect job) of making the end quests of a zone offer rewards which don't punish you as harshly for sticking around to finish a storyline just because you are 1-2 levels above. Also if you retain any affection for the Warcraft lore from the RTS's or the 1st 2 expansions your going to get a lot of fun little moments. When you hit lvl 100 the content stays pretty nice, I'm quite fond of this particular set of dungeons, the lvl 100 questing zones while still grindy are nicely spread about the world and have a nice balance of mobs to mix up the combat, the new hoard mode "invasions" that are triggered by questing in those lvl 100 areas are nicely balanced for the gear they give, and the whole meta game of controlling your followers and sending them out from your garrisons on missions means you don't feel as pressured to log on.
  6. Idle Food - Cooking!

    My 1st attempt at cinamon buns My god I felt this was going to go wrong right until it came out of the oven, the dough seem like it was too sticky and didn't rise as much as I expected in the intial proving stage but despite all that I'm very happy in the end, it all seemed to come together .
  7. anime

    I feel fairly certain that the creators did make a active choice to depict Ryuko as gay, although they are never explicit about it.It also feels like they deliberately left it unclear on if she has feelings towards Mako or not. My instinct is no, which is kinda nice in a weird way because there's been a bad habit in Anime to portray any gay person who is friends with someone as being automatically sexually interested in that person. (Not that they wouldn't make the cutest couple).
  8. anime

    I know! I'm sure it would collapse under any strict scrutiny, but it's honestly one of the most pleasant surprises i've had for a long time with new shows.
  9. iOS Gaming

    New Monument Valley Chapters!!!
  10. anime

    What specifically do you dislike about the plotting? I'm mean as you say the efforts they aimed at children definitely share a common core of theme's and tropes that they build their narrative around, but I'm not sure how much of a problem I feel this is(or else every single western film based on some variation of the heroes journey is in deeeep trouble), I mean it's entirely possible to do interesting things with tropes and some of the little ways Ghibli did subvert them feel significant both considering their intended audience and when they were produced. Many of those strong, capable, young protagonists are female, and it was rare their conclusions were unambiguously happy, often featuring concepts like loss and death which you still don't see much in works aimed at children. Is there one of them you think is a "prime offender", one which you think hits all the red marks you mention? Because I don't feel you're wrong at all, it just feels like perhaps they are no worse in their reliance on tropes than 99% of the works that address a similar audience, and better in some important ways.
  11. So we are one day away from the official release of the latest iteration of the Football Manager series and honestly I'm pretty excited. I'm excited because the series has been steadily moving away from just being a game of pure strategic system optimisation, and putting more and more emphasis into producing a wonderfully chaotic match system. A sub game full of plans, failures, and improvisation that really captures what I love about the beautiful game itself. Football Manager will never escape some of the baggage that comes with a game simulating a sport's metagame, it's a theme which will turn off a lot of players regardless of how good the game is itself so I realise that my excitement may not necessarily be shared by that many other readers. However I'm hoping that perhaps the excellent entertainment provided by this years World Cup in Brazil might have stirred some interest in the football itself, showing off just how fascinating it can be to watch a game which has had over 100 years to fully mature. So if you're interest has been piqued but you have previously been put off by the reputation FM has (& shares with many management sims) of a game somewhat impenetrable to newcomers unfamiliar with it's theme I have some good news, the time I've spent with the 2015 beta suggests that this is probably the most user friendly version of the game yet. A noticeable improvement on 2014 (which was itself a notable improvement over the rest of the series), and one which makes some smart choices regarding its accessibility and presentation. There's no sliders to deal with here just a neat series of verbs (complete with mouse over explanations), and enough data visualisations that you can now set out a reasonable team without spending time looking at a big old chunk of stats. Of course the stats are still there for those who want to micro manage, and in fact finding and developing specialist players is more important than ever before, because the AI is no longer the punching bag of yesteryear and anyone who sends the same team into battle week after week will soon find themselves viciously countered . Anyway if there's any other closet FM addicts out there who want to weigh in about the latest revision or readers who are thinking of dipping into the series for the first time and want some help (because even a much more accessible game about a sports metagame is still, a game about a sports metagame with all the accompanying complexity and some assumptions which may not be obvious to the uninitiated) I can offer some advice or throw some useful links your way.
  12. I'll have a look at that wrestling game, it's a shame about the Art style they've gone for I'd love the same basic premise but with nice bright pixel art. As for you're concerns (in reverse order!) 4.Is a bit of a false choice, because FIFA isn't football. I know it looks like football, and makes all the appropriate noises, but the compromises it makes to make a interesting & "fun" arcade sports game also mean you learn virtually noting about what makes a good football player, and even less about what makes good football tactics. 3. Is a very real and very well founded fear. 2. In recent years FM has given people a lot more options about how deeply engaged you get with it, If you really want you can assign pretty much anything outside managing your match day squad to the games AI. The 'Classic' mode in particular cuts a lot of the extra stuff detail down, and taking on one of it's challange modes on easy is a good way to learn the ropes. 1.I have a solution here and one i know worked exceedingly well both for myself, and for a IRL friend who is a much less committed football fan than me, which is to read Inverting the Pyramid while playing FM. It's basically considered one of if not the most important entries in the canon of works on football. People say nice things about it such as: Now obviously there's a certain amount of "going all in" to this approach, but reading about how the meta game of football developed and then seeing those very forces in play in your own matches in Fm was a deeply deeply satisfying experience for me, and lead to me putting a lot more time in yet also getting far more out of the game than i ever had before.
  13. anime

    I watched Yosuhiro Yoshiura's Patema Inverted this weekend, and it felt like it had at least a few similarities with some of Miyazaki's stuff and Laputa in particular. We've got weird quasi magi science going on in the ruins of a modern society, a reasonably sympathetic central hero who happens to have lost his father in a flying accident, and smart heroine who felt like a mix between Nausicaa and Sheeta(from Laputa), well paced a great mix of slow word building and burst of action, moments of great humour, with a really nice (although certainly well flagged) twist in its tail. Probably the least Miyazaki thing about it is that it has a clear and unsympathetic villain, something Miyazaki rarely allowed his films to have, although interestingly Laputa is perhaps the exception to this rule. It feels like Patema perhaps would stand up to comparison to Laputa than the work you are talking about (although i haven't seen the one you mention yet) Booooo indeed. I wonder why this seems something almost universal to almost all "smart' Media Boxes and TV's that aren't full PC's.
  14. Oh boy a wrestling sim sounds fascinating, i'd 100% play a Luchador style one (partly because i love the women's wrestling sum plot in the Love & Rockets comics). you could script the feuds, who wins/loose, who's having a affair with who's wife! (hmm feels like a ck2 mod in the making ) Anyway! do you no idea what stopped you from pulling the trigger in the past Dewar? The big thing for me for strat games is normally either time commitment or a intimidating UI, neither which is a sin FM was entirely innocent of in the past but as i said i do think it go better at this year. As I said above I quite like this years version, (although it does at times feel like a bit like a skin for windows 8 or something) Over the weekend i had 2 matches which really confirmed to me they have done something right this time. In contrast to reality My Liverpool team had after a shack start been having a great season, and now i found myself facing Bayern Munich (arguably the worlds best team and the best manager)the knockout stages of the Champions League. I did what i thought was sensible vs a possession based team like bayern, and sent out a line-up designed to sit back, with a skillfull ball player behind a midfield shield & then hit them on the counter attack with a lightning fast trio of forwards. then Steven Gerrard mis-controlled a pass from one of our defenders, letting my opponents striker slot the ball pass liverpools stranded keeper Let it never be said that games don't imitate life. But still somehow i convinced myself that goal was a freak accident, a mistake not a tactical error perhaps if i persisted id recover. However by 59 mins i was 3-0 down and being utterly dominated. I'd made a total miscall on the tactics and the game was punishing me. So I made all three changes available to me. Utterly abandoning my plan A and all caution went for it, throwing on two big midfield destroyers a powerful forward, to see if brawn could accomplish what brain could not. 1st i got one back, then another, and while 3-2 wasn't the victory i'd hoped for it was respectable. Which is what made my oopponents89th minute goal all the bigger kick in the guts and made me cheer IRL at my extra time third so 1st leg 4-3 to Bayern, and despite being nearly humilated just a victory at home by 1 goal (without conceding more than 3) and i was through to the next round of the cup. So a few weeks of game time later it's the 2nd leg this time I've learned from my mistakes, no quarter shall be given, i'm going to totally out muscle them and get the goal i need to win this. This all is going great until 54 mins in when my star wing back picks up his 2nd yellow card and gets sent off, meaning its now 10 v 11. Not only that i don't have a left footed defender i can throw on to take his place. I end up utterly reshaping my team removing all but two of one my attacking players, and throwing on a right footed player with a partial aptitude for the position, and two of the quick attackers who had failed so miserably last time. Plan B is trash, lets try plan A again. Now this should fail IF Bayern had played the same way they had against my full team in the 1st game, but they don't. Their extra numbers mean they push further and further up the field, finally giving my quick players the space they need to run beyond them, oh that and I get lucky. In FM you can pick different instructions for your team to follow. What turns out to be my most important one i give my team is this one Whipped crosses are high risk, the very qualities that make them hard for defenders to deal with can also make them difficult to capitalise on but here they work perfectly. 1st a opposing defender puts the ball into his own net attempting to prevent a rocket of a cross from reaching my striker, its 1-0 and I'm going through and then a few minutes later the moment that really makes the game for me. Another cross is whipped in on the counter attack and there charging into he area from the left is my improvised left back who volleys it into the goal. What makes this interesting to me is that he's only able to score this easily because he's right footed. If my original left footed defender hadn't got sent off its unlikely that either the cross would have got made or the man on the end of it would have been able to score. For me a big part of what makes a good sim is being able to look at a big event and see how little events,player choice, and AI behaviour interact to make it possible, and for me that sending off proved to be my 'grenade rolling down the hill' moment.
  15. Movie/TV recommendations

    Honestly I don't think they would hesitate for even one moment.
  16. Movie/TV recommendations

    In its best moments Interstellar is a monumental film, a Cathedral built to the dream of space, inhuman but possessing undeniable majesty. And yep I know that's a slightly pretentious thing to say but it's a slightly pretentious film, but I 100% admire it for even attempting to reconcile the vastness of space with something more human and even getting close to succeeding. Sadly the other bit of sci-fi I watched this week felt like it utterly bottled it. As some people have said above I'm 100% aware Doctor Who is a YA/kids series at it heart, but feck me that felt like they had been borrowing for the big book of Sci fi clichés.
  17. I really like the look, sorry gentlereaders if that's not your cup of tea but I'll grab hold of any game with a nice clean art style with some really intresting vibrant backgrounds any chance I get(which is not often enough).
  18. World of Warcraft

    I help run a guild on the EU Magtheridon server and though atm most people are in hibernation untill WoD hits if Gwardinen, dibs or even Roderick want a home to do a bit of levelling and exploring in Outland I can try to help out. & Yes as Forbin points out it's now a lot easier to play cross realm so even if you don't end up on a server that one of the rest of us on here If you pop me a message on here we can sort something out with blizzard id's The one thing I would say is that the amount of time you need to invest these days to get something good out of the game is far less than it used to be. I certainly think you now get a better experience for the time you put in than you used to, but the main problem I could see is that with a reduced time commitment you might not feel you are getting good value for your subscription
  19. anime

    Is it just me or does anime seem to not only rely more on adaptation than many other creative industries but to also treat them with far more reverence, I don't for instance feel that traditional western TV shows or animation do so to such a large extent, and that when they do it's normally with a attitude that if the source material doesn't keep pace it's soon subsumed.
  20. Ideas for 3MA shows

    I'd defiantly agree on that one, tbh I think it's been mentioned so often when talking about other games that I actually thought there had been a show on it at some point
  21. anime

    I really like Chihayafuru but I'm getting worried that the gap since the last series may mean they never actually conclude it.
  22. Ideas for 3MA shows

    I'd love a show on the Footbal Manager series, for the only strategy game apart from Civ which regularly pops up in the steam most played list to never have come up on 3MA feels strange. Now I know part of this may be Troy and Rob may not feel they can speak with great authority about a game they may have not played so much but I noticed them enjoying the World Cup on Twitter so perhaps there's a spark there which could be rekindled and there are plenty of people out there who have written intresting things about the game who could be roped in. Just off the top of my head Rowan Kaiser wrote a great opinion peice on his problems with the last itteratation (http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/07/31/football-manager/#.VFvvPYjfWK0)which I found utterly fascinating but which totally contradicts my own experience on almost ever point, & Adam Smith did a thorough job of doing the review for RPS last time round too.
  23. Baby Got Backstory - A trope creation thread

    Did a little bit of reading to fill in the gaps in my memory it seems I was probably mistaking a Bene Gesserit character for a member of the Honoured Matres who appear in one of the later book, and yep they certainly do like to get their freak on http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honored_Matres
  24. Baby Got Backstory - A trope creation thread

    I raised them for two reasons mainly to offer a comparison with Mass Effects Asari so we could try and figure out where we are drawing the lines here. I think you've actuall answered it to a certain extent, but also that your answer brings up some intresting questions in its own right. You're correct that at least in the initial books at least they were not explicitly sexualised, however if memory serves me(although it is a 10+ year gap since I read them) correctly they are to quite a large extent in some of the later ones. So in BG's case the initial creator wove their sexual aspects into the plot in a integral way which while acknowledging their sexuality didn't fetishise it, but later on other creators who worked with the IP chose to use that backstory in a way which had a entirely different tone to the original work, and which at times seemed like just a excuse to write bad sex scenes. So do the later works count or not? Equally does the existence of the BG mean we should look at the Asari more or less critically since I feel there are at least some aspects of them which are derived from the BG.
  25. anime

    I have the problem with concurrent subs on both my Sony TV, & samsung set top box so sadly I think it might be fairly universal