Merus

The system also catches up to people who are not assholes. The system does not always understand what it is trying to achieve. And the fretting over the fate of racist people who are rightly being challenged is part of the system that has allowed racism to grow, so it might be frustrating, but racism isn't caused by the racists. It is everywhere. The world you live in has been shaped by racism, and it is the work of generations to root it all out, especially in America, which has racism baked into the constitution and its most fundamental systems. (Take the electoral college: imagine what kind of states benefited most from a system where the population of a state was more influential than the amount of people voting in that state.) (It was slave states.)

Oh no, that was my point; it's sad that everyone is treating the existence of an Assassin's Creed game as big news.

I too draw my socks

Oh Ben, you sweet summer child

A friend of mine really liked Valdis Story, but I'm there for the exploration, not the combat, and Valdis Story's kinda combat-heavy while the map design is a little boring.

So I remember WoW's elemental resistance; it survived until Wrath of the Lich King, and while they only used it in vanilla raiding and in one fight in Wrath of the Lich King, it existed that entire time. What separated raiding gear in vanilla was whether it had fire resistance on it, and you wanted to take just enough fire resistance that you didn't stress the healers, but the more you took, the less strong the rest of your gear was. I suspect this inspired the design of hit%, which acted similarly: you needed a certain amount to guarantee you'd always hit but everything over that amount was useless. By Wrath, players had access to buffs that improved their resistance (in this case, frost) and resistance didn't count against the stat budget, but Blizzard still weren't satisfied and eventually gave up on the system entirely. I always thought it was interesting that Final Fantasy games had a 200% to -100% elemental resistance scale. In those games, if you improved your elemental resistance enough, instead of not taking damage you'd actually start to heal from certain kinds of attacks. This gave rise to the classic Phoenix Down attack in those games: zombie enemies healed from dark attacks - and were weak to light attacks, so if you healed them, they'd take damage, and if you tried to revive them using a revive item, they'd die. This worked on bosses. Guild Wars 2 launched with a system for dealing with crowd control effects a bit like CoH's: enemies intended to test a group had several applications of a buff called Defiance. Using crowd control effects reduced how many applications of Defiance enemies had, and once they're run out of Defiance, the next stun/what have you went through and they gained Defiance again. It was a disaster because you'd frequently get people using their stuns at the wrong time or saving up a big stun for when the Defiance fell off and someone would drop an immobilize as part of their attack and it just never worked. They replaced it in the expansion with a defiance bar: every crowd control effect reduces the defiance bar, which regenerates on its own depending on the properties of the enemy. Things like knockbacks and stuns take off a chunk of the bar, while effects like slow act over time, and some enemies can lock their defiance bar entirely until they expose it by doing an attack, so players have to focus down their stuns in a small window. If the defiance bar is fully depleted, the enemy's either stunned, or maybe loses an invulnerability buff, or in some cases fall out of the sky and smash on the ground. It seems like some enemies can take more defiance damage from particular sources, so a fiery enemy will feel chills more keenly. I still think the most interesting resistance system is the Souls' resistance system, where you have a certain level of tolerance for a status effect, and when that's exceeded, you have the effect until it falls off. There's lots you can do with that to make the effects different - Dark Souls' toxic vs poison is a famous example. Poison is unfortunate but survivable, whereas toxic lingers and does great chunks of damage if it manages to penetrate.

Three responses to that: no more, and more importantly no less, than other considerations required for your job. It's more of a problem for Kim Davis to be a bigot than it is an Apple store worker in terms of whether or not they should lose the ability to feed themselves over their bigotry a mob intent on shaming and un-platforming people have demonstrated their inability to tell whether someone is actually prejudiced or ignorant of social justice being unprejudiced and fully conversant in social justice is a standard that maybe one or two people in this thread meet. Cast not the first stone and all that.

I think it's a little gross to say multi-billion dollar companies deciding to freeze out people who don't portray them in the light they've decided is most optimal for parting customers from their money is about the same as not being friends with someone who gossips too much. It's the pettiness of the leaks that grabs me. We're not talking about Denis Dyack here, a tool that Kotaku nailed to the wall for malfeasance. These leaks were about a new Assassin's Creed and a new Fallout game, both things that were as inevitable as the rising sun, and for those franchises, the details are completely irrelevant. Assassin's Creed is set where? Will you still climb up a tower to reveal the map, and will it involve a stupid conspiracy, repurposing of historical figures and the sense that you've played this game at least three times before? (Yes.) Does it matter, exactly, what the name of the town that Fallout 4 used to be in is called? (No.) The development of a software product just isn't news, and it's sad that everyone pretends it is.

I knew before I opened it up that it'd be that Reddit thread with all the people correcting a terrified person that they were nearly shot to death with a magazine of bullets, not a clip.

The joke with robots in Futurama is that they have all been designed and built for a purpose and that purpose is maddeningly non-sensical. Who built Hedonism-bot? Why??

It's textbook whataboutery; those Syrian refugees will still have been failed by the United States. It is horrific seeing what passes for discourse in America right now - someone is genuinely putting forward the Japanese internment camps as a model. (A model that Australia currently operates....) anyway, you would not guess Australia operated a goddamn concentration camp by the way we've been acting about Syrian refugees. We're already talking about a second wave of intakes and the first lot have only started to arrived (and when the Murdoch paper's treating resettling refugees as a success story then you know there's something going on). I mean there are still racists with microphones, but we have a right-wing government and they've basically reached out to the Australian Muslim community even when the grand mufti makes comments about how the West did destabilise Iraq and Syria and gave Daesh an opportunity. I can't imagine how hard this'd be if we still had Abbott in charge.

Honestly I'd be happy with the terms 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' being abolished to try and stem the rot. The concept of 'high' and 'low' referring to the mix rather than the quality is really really useful.

Wait I missed a discussion on pretentiousness and I use it correctly and everything (I wouldn't say Terminator 2 was pretentious because while it vaguely gestures towards larger themes it doesn't really try and engage with, it's also winking at the audience that it's still basically an action film. Pretentiousness involves a front, to my understanding: you have to be putting your grand ideas prominently in the narrative, and disguise the fact that most of what you're saying about it is either surface level or just made up. Less Interstellar, which I felt did take a punt at the idea that wouldn't it be great if we explored, and more Dresden Codak.)

Well, there are also people who don't own one of those systems and will buy a Nintendo console, and I do know a Nintendo fanboy so there is at least one. But yeah, this isn't particularly insightful commentary from Pachter. Nintendo of course needs 3rd party support, receives it on handhelds, doesn't get it on consoles, and they always do okay but obviously where the 3rd party support goes determines how well everyone does. If Nintendo releases a more powerful system than the current consoles, mid-cycle, then yeah, there's going to be some interest, but the room for control innovation is limited because no-one wants to design their game around a system if they can't port it and they can't reliably predict sales. But that stuff's fairly obvious.

I think what people liked about Chrono Trigger was that it was the first JRPG that leaned heavily on puzzle bosses. Most JRPGs have strategies that are more effective, but Chrono Trigger's bosses require you to think a little about what will work. This is not exactly uncommon these days - FFXIII made regular encounters work this way - but it's notable for the time. It probably also helped that its story was episodic, so it was easier to follow the plot and feel like it had momentum. Compare to FF6, which is made up of a series of moments separated by some distance.

I'm guessing what Griddlelol ran into with the combat is that you really do benefit from doing things on the top screen, and if you're planning carefully, you might be dropping the puck. A 5x damage puck ends fights pretty quickly. The early fights are easy enough that you can flail around for a bit, but you need to have worked out the puck to beat taboo noise quickly.

Probably a sense of humour that is in tune with theirs. Comedy is way more subjective than drama, and it ain't no thing if it ain't your thing.

The recent Dollop episode on the Iraq War is heartbreaking and enraging. Iraq was lost because of the bigotry and stupidity of a small handful of men in power. Iraq probably could have been rebuilt. Instead, they fired the army and anyone educated, made sure they were unable to feed their family, and then made a torture jail just to demonstrate how monstrous the people in charge were. So you have a lot of resentful people with guns, who then want to define themselves to be as anti-American as possible. It makes an excellent case that America created ISIS.

My housemate is pulling apart a Super Nintendo, and it turns out the Super Nintendo controller is two NES controllers. Nintendo are experts at reuse - after all, the cheapest chip is the one you've already got the supply line set up for - so I think Nintendo would have been smart to get two GameCube chips. They've got the tools, they've got the manufacturing, the architecture was much smarter than, say, the PS2's, and the only hazard is dismissive sniffing from people who don't have to decide how to ship a hundred million consoles. Wasn't that the SpyParty guy who said that? Is he even capable of shipping? Anyway that's what I think about reductionism.

I must say, I'm enjoying how salty Aaron Diaz is being about Nintendo announcing a female counterpart to Link for Hyrule Warriors on the 3DS.

I also played the Impressions Games city builders, and am surprised to discover that they're apparently unknown.

I think I enjoy stealth more as a puzzle than I do as a prelude to combat. I was always disappointed when I'd make too much noise and have to switch over to combat, and most of the zombie sequences involved me dying several times when I explored, got spotted, and then got easily surrounded. I never worked out if there was a good way to get out of combat and drop back to a cagey kind of stealth.

Dayum, son. Hell of a post.

I still think it's prudent to remember that optioning is the start of a long process that does not inevitably result in a released film. They might not find the money. They might get a director that can do the material, or worse, has their own agenda. They might not have a script. The film could be unwatchable. The film might not find a distributor. And that's ignoring the possibility that the film could be fine, but not be representative of Zoe's story. Amy Pascal deliberately underpaid actresses relative to their male counterparts while at Sony because she could. It's very easy to imagine Pascal, or another producer, or the financiers, deciding it'd make the movie more marketable to make it entirely about Gamergate rather than about Zoe, to have the movie define Zoe as Gamergate's slayer rather than as a woman who clawed herself out of poverty to become a notable game designer. I think this is less likely than it would have been 10 years ago, but then they are optioning an unwritten book - so it's possible, though unlikely, all they want is to ensure Zoe has to sign off on the approach they've already decided to take.

It wasn't the sexism I cared about, although it gets my hackles up. It was the fact that it was predictable. Let me make things worse and compare it to Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which uses an Indy plot to have its characters do a crazy thing, and then have that thing go wrong so then they have to fix it. Most Bond plots don't manage that kind of counter-play, because it's hard to give the villains an unexpected way to make things worse when they mostly, sensibly, rely on henchmen.