Merus

I'm curious to see how deep the integration goes: do you download the game files from Amazon's servers? I imagine Valve will be all over this.

Also if it's like City/Asylum, you're able to leap across the entire room to keep the combo going, which can be very useful if you're being surrounded by dudes.

This is what I was getting at with the hipster comment: it's gross to be dismissing something that lots of people freely choose to do, and dismissing it for specious, poorly-defined reasons. Plenty of people pull out the lighters/light-making devices and feel good enough about the shared experience that they've had that they try and replicate it, even when no-one carries lighters any more. Why is it lame? The fuck do you mean by lame? Aren't lame and cool fundamentally dishonest descriptors, trying to appeal to some non-existent tastemaking authority about what behaviour is and is not acceptable? What's cool changes on a dime - there was a brief moment there where Gangnam Style went from 'lame' to 'cool' and back to 'lame' again. Are you saying we're just talking about concert lightmakers on a bad day? So, okay, let's substitute 'lame' for 'a thing I dislike', which is more honest. I still have a problem here, in that being in a room filled with other people obviously enjoying the same things you are enjoying is a core part of the appeal of a popular music concert. We are herd creatures, and respond to being part of a crowd - if you have ever been to a movie screening where the audience really gets into the movie then you'll know how much the audience adds to the experience. For music, it's easy to share your appreciation for a fast song with a strong beat in limited space (jump, headbang) but for a slow song, without a lot of energy, it's a lot harder. That's the problem the lightmakers solve. It's not about the act of holding up this thing that makes light, or it being expected behaviour at concerts (because people don't do it when they're not enjoying themselves), but as an expression of appreciation and fellowship, of becoming part of the whole, it's not a bad one.

I am getting a strong hipster vibe right now. A man with glasses and beard, living in San Francisco with his own podcast, who needs to interject to declare that something is definitely not cool? Yeaaaaah, I'm banned. Isn't the whole point of the lighter thing to have a field of lights swaying in time to the music? Here is my tiny contribution to the whole, it says, to this whole moment we're having here. Now that no-one smokes, you can't really replicate that, but then we carry around these other things that make lights basically all the time now.

Yeah, it has problems, but it had one job and it nailed it. The increasing importance of the Asian cinema markets really worked well for it - it didn't do so hot in America, but China and Japan went nuts for it so it's getting a sequel.

Yeah, that is exactly why the auction rule is so important, the game drags and drags until people start getting colour groups. These days, they'd probably distribute some title deeds to players before the game starts. Anyway, I'm looking at the Monopoly rules right here, and this is the pertinent rule: If you don't ask for rent, you don't collect it, so you are entitled to make a deal with another player that you just won't ask. Also a fun thing to try: sell your Get out of Jail Free cards!

You know, it's kind of great that we are starting to get licensed board games that draw on the strength of their material and make something utterly unique and far more enduring as a result.

Battlestar Galactica works well for generating weird tension. It's a betrayal game - the team is trying to work together to jump to safety and preserve their dwindling supplies, but there may or may not be a traitor at the table who can sabotage their best efforts.

Betrayal is super super unbalanced. The second edition fixes some problems - my favourite is a misprint where the underground lake can only appear on the top floor - but the game is just inherently unbalanced. Fun, though. For utter ridiculousness you cannot go past Arkham Horror. It has billions of pieces and goes for like four hours but it is utterly unique. Our group is also fond of Lords of Waterdeep, which looks like a D&D game (because it is branded as a D&D game) but when you open it up you discover that it's actually a fairly sophisticated harvesting game, like Agricola. You play a Lord of Waterdeep, out to gather the most influence, which you do by recruiting adventurers and sending them on quests. The trick is that if someone else is recruiting adventurers from a specific place, then you have to send your agents somewhere else - and there's also skulduggery, building new buildings (which lets anyone recruit more adventurers than usual, but you get income from the building too) and jostling for new agents and the right to go first.

Is there a website that tells you when to stop watching a particular series? Like Red Dwarf, where you watch up to season 6, or Parks & Rec, where you start from season 3 and if you like it go back to season 2, or Heroes, where you stop watching partway through the final episode of season 1.

Here is the key rule that everyone forgets that shortcuts like half the game: when someone lands on an unowned property, and they don't buy it, it goes to auction. This gets the properties into the game really early without having to wait for everyone to go around the board and get an income to afford to buy things at full price. Once you own all of a colour (so wheel and deal, collecting properties you don't want in order to sell or trade them to people who do want them to get the stuff you want), you get double rent from them, and you can build on it, which increases the rent you get from that property further. There is also nothing in the rules that states you have to collect rent, only that you're entitled to it if you ask. This allows you to make deals with people where you say that you won't ask them for rent on a particular stretch of property so long as they do something for you - and then backstab them when it starts getting into the closing stages. As for board games, probably the best available ones of the new ages of board games are Settlers of Catan (a trading game), Carcassonne (a strategic tile game where you build up southern French countryside, and try and put your men on the bits most likely to score you points), and Ticket to Ride, either the original America map or Europe (a card-collecting game where the cards let you fill in train routes between cities, to get from one side of the country to the other). All three work well with three players.

Also we found out specifically what the deal was with Majora's Mask in A Link Between Worlds: apparently Lorule and Termina have some connection.

Device 6 was a neat little morsel, but only a morsel. I tried Rayman Fiesta Run, and surprisingly it is not bad! They added a bunch of platformer verbs: punches, wall jumps, gliding, so it kind of feels like an actual game.

Honestly the thing that pointed out to me that pinball has objectives was Space Cadet, the one that came with Windows XP. It has the flashing lights and everything and if you dick around on the table long enough or read the help file even briefly you discover there's missions, and you get promoted. I figured they probably did that because pinball tables do that, it's just that even with a home version of pinball I still can't prevent the fucking ball draining straight off the table, ruining everything. I guess that's what nudging's for.

Someone will pay me 15 actual dollars for my Sam & Max tie-in gun. Okay, they will pay me $13 Steam dollars, which Steam will accept in lieu of payment for a game, but still: what.

I feel like watching you explain how I probably haven't really played pinball, and then immediately have the ball drain three times in a row, is really the core experience of pinball.

They really should outsource their tools development, because it's been years and they just are not good at it. That is probably not a thing they should outsource, though. I think Nintendo will stop making hardware when they are dead. Their industrial design is their most underrated asset, but they could make basically anything and it would be inexpensive, curiously absent of some seemingly important features, and be both utterly charming and figuratively bulletproof. If they put half as much effort into their firmware and development tools, they would be formidable.

Yeah, but that was more due to tools and ease of development. Ease of development is a significant factor in what console developers prefer. The only exception that comes to mind was the PS2, which had a very dodgy architecture but because Sony was seen as far more stable than Sega, it was a safer bet, even if their hardware took some finessing to work with. By the time the Xbox and Gamecube came out, Sony's first-party developers were freely sharing code with other PS2 developers, which reduced the burden significantly. It's also one of the reasons why developers tend to avoid Nintendo home consoles but will embrace handheld consoles - Nintendo's home consoles have amazing architecture and fairly poor tools and APIs. A lot of middleware didn't support the Wii because they don't see a lot of demand, and nearly every Western game uses some form of middleware these days, so if it doesn't work on a platform, they won't port it. For some reason, though, there's lots of middleware available for the DS line, and most developers use it - even Japanese devs, where code reuse is not nearly as common. Until recently, Microsoft had the best tools in the tech industry - as it stands Visual Studio is still an amazing piece of software - but in my estimation it's been superseded by the Mac development environment.

You know you've got problems when the best positive quote you can find comes from IMDB.

Reminds me of this.

I always wanted to see an open-world crime game set in Ankh-Morpork. The setting supports parkour/rooftop exploration as well as general nuttiness, and you have a police force that has a well-developed personality instead of being the generic one to six stars. Oh no, Sargeant Colon's after you? Better walk slightly faster. Angua? Get peppermint bombs. Vimes has taken notice? oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit Ideally you'd be more like an assassin/agent provocateur than a thug, to align better with the kind of protagonists that actually exist in Discworld.

I went to the hospital last year and showed them my healthcare card, and then they cured me of staph infection, which was pretty boss of them. And then I left.

It is not particularly bloody - there's some deaths, but they're mostly pretty tame. It is very faithful to the goofy tone of the game - I mean it's not a masterpiece, but we had a Japanese Video game movie night and it looked pretty damn good compared to Advent Children and Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva. (Also, despite the fact only one of my friends likes Hawaiian, all my friends agreed that Professor Layton as a franchise doesn't really work. So proud of them.) Ace Attorney is very faithful to the game, so you already know what happens, but it actually works as a movie.

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