Merus

I remember going into the Kickstarter that there was a question over Obsidian's games. Were they a studio that had great ideas that were constantly let down by incompetent execution, or had they been screwed by publisher after publisher not supporting their developer adequately? I guess now we know. Remove the publisher, and Obsidian makes an amazing, and stable, RPG.

I'm available this weekend! Let's do something Friday night (US time), depending on how many we get. We might do dungeons, or see the coolest of sights, or help newbies get traits, or hold a fort in the Silverwastes. But we are doing something together, a whole hand of Thumbs wait that metaphor doesn't work

"don't feed the trolls" was a strategy borne out of a system where there was no effective way for the community to police themselves. The troll's messages would get lost if not replied to, because Usenet archives were more often in the nest of replies than on a server, so it was the best strategy available. We do not live in that world, and that advice is useless.

There was a small part of me that was tempted to call out 'who here likes horse bags?!' but a much larger part of me thought that was a bad idea Especially if they knew Idle Thumbs but not the forums What did you think of the show? Apparently there were board games afterwards; I had to jet, but if I go next time I'm bringing Hanabi or something.

So I went to this and didn't meet up with Bolegium because I remembered that I grew up in the country and haven't ever managed to conduct myself with dignity around strangers who play video games. I thought it was important to make a good first impression if the day where I'm not thinking 'oh my god I'm talking to a stranger who plays video games' ever comes. I can't be a regular at a video game store because I freak out that we have video games in common. It is 2015. It is becoming an increasingly large handicap. The show itself got better as it went on, by which I mean it started off kind of dire with an extremely long riff on Pokemon, then graduating to recorded sketches with webcomic-level jokes, then an actually half-decent jazzy rendition of Song of Storms (which then had Golden Brown sung over the top of it, which genuinely worked). They brought on a tech journalist who said at the top that she can't talk about any EA games because she's married to Australia's EA marketing director so conflict of interest, and so naturally they inserted a bunch of EA news into the teleprompter, then had the morose forgotten Mario brother, Horatio, read ridiculous haikus as if he was a beat poet, which was inspired. I strongly suspect half the room knew who each other was. I spotted one of the Chasers and that was about it.

oh I knew what I was doing, Ben

Really? I watched it recently and it didn't really do a lot for me.

A glimpse of a potential future ahead of us. Imagine if there was more room for critiques like this in the games press. Imagine if Kotaku or Polygon - imagine if Gamespot or IGN - had the bottle* to run a piece like Austin Walker's critique of Battlefield: Hardline. * a bit of British slang that solves the problem with saying something 'takes balls' that feels more visceral than saying 'guts' or 'nerve'

I've heard rumours that most of Congress also hates Ted Cruz. If there's any truth to that rumour, and his colleagues in the Senate decide that now is the time to kneecap the fucker, we're in for fun times. Remember how powerful ol' Michelle "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann was until she had to try to appeal beyond the bat-shit crazy demographic and people actually started to believe those who were pointing out she was batshit crazy?

I don't think I've had a free weekend in months, but we might be able to knock something together for this weekend depending on what my dad decides to do for his birthday; it's also the state election, so neither of us are inclined to travel. I wouldn't mind doing a dungeon or showing people some jumping puzzles and secret places. So I'm trying to decide what guild upgrade to go for, so I thought I'd ask others. There's three choices I can spend our influence on - unlocking the guild armourer, which lets people buy armor with the guild logo on it, including back items (useful if you don't want to craft); guild bounty training, which lets us spawn a champion somewhere in the map that we can kill for influence (which lets us unlock other things faster); or unlocking passive bonuses, which we can turn on over the weekends (although they cost influence to make, and only a few of them actually give influence back).

I remember seeing a Link's Awakening Let's Play that did the skip trick, and treated everything that happened as being the intended critical path, and talking about the unintuitive 'puzzles' and how the dungeons are all numbered incorrectly.

Yeah that's the thing isn't it: the people left in GamerGate are clearly not getting better.

There's not a lot of wit there from people who genuinely call themselves Men Going Their Own Way. They are self-parodying, because they are obsessed with women despite their whole deal being that they don't need women. Of course, they're the part of the manosphere who gave us Elliot Rodger, so they might be self-parodying but they're not a joke.

Huh. I would have thought the allegory was about death myself.

Yeah, except the Germans in WW1 discovered just how fucked you are when you hand your enemies propaganda fuel. If they hadn't been so monstrous, they wouldn't have pissed off Randi Harper, and if they hadn't done that the GGAB wouldn't have existed. GG was contained largely because they were so willing to be monstrous that it was easy to say you were against them (see GamerGhazi).

Nope, it's serious. This is a funny article covering the same ground: http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/03/22/men-fight-the-seductive-succubi-eager-to-harvest-us-for-our-resources-with-this-tasty-chicken-recipe/

A popular mechanic in tabletop games is to have one 'real' answer amongst a sea of 'fake' answers. Dixit has a robust implementation of this: in Dixit, a player describes a card they have with a surrealist picture on it, and every other player chooses a card they think will match the description. The cards are shuffled, and players vote on which they think is the 'real' one. The player who gave the real answer doesn't vote; they earn points if some, but not all, of the players chose their card, while other players get points only if they managed to choose the correct card, while others chose theirs. You could do something like this on stage: for example, the players are given a series of prompts, for a scene, which they all share, and for elements of the scene. One player is secretly trying to do something different to the rest; maybe they're avoiding a particular prompt, or maybe they have an additional prompt that only they know about that they're trying to work in. At the end, either the players, or the audience, judges who they think that player was.

And I see I didn't give a shit last time either

Interesting to hear about Maslow's hierarchy of needs - I was under the impression it was entirely discredited.

I do kind of hope that it ends up being a Touhou kind of thing where the fan creations massively outstrip what the original creator can do. It's interesting to think that these are games that are designed so that the audience for the game aren't the players.

That Snood observation gives me a good question about knockoffs that improve on the original to write into the podcast with so they can start reading out the first sentence, get distracted, and never come back to it.

This thread has made my YouTube recommendations even worse than they already were.

Ori and the Blind Forest: I have a ton of complaints, small and big, but it's gorgeous and satifying and unique. Even the stuff that isn't executed well is conceptually great.

So for the past fortnight or so Mark Kern has been railing against the GG Autoblocker, calling it a free speech issue and censorship and incensed that his ability to communicate with his peers is being restricted by an algorithm. Apparently his 'both sides have good points' rhetoric in his petition was, as per usual, a feint so that he looks even-handed even though he identifies with the shitty side. Someone noticed only very recently that Mark Kern isn't actually on the automatic blocklist. All those blocks he's accrued from his 'peers' have been manual.

Oh, the personal story, not Living World Season 2. The Orr invasion in the personal story got separated out into 'cleanse Orr' and 'attack Zhaitan', but they didn't move anything, so you're airlifted into Orr missions with characters who you're introduced to later on, who then act as if it's the first time they met you. The 'greatest fear' storyline was cut entirely, possibly because they were bad, and they're going to be restored with some minor rewrites.