Merus

We apparently do: I consider a loot game one in which the core gameplay loop involves sorting through randomly generated items to determine which best fits what you're trying to achieve. I don't consider, say, Guild Wars 2 a loot game, despite the presence of loot, because the only real consideration is 'is the number bigger' and, at endgame, 'where's the stat distribution I want'. You need ectoplasm to craft the gear you want, and you only get that from loot drops, but you're essentially cashing in tokens at that point. Destiny appears to be similar, from an outsider's perspective: light is a function of the item level, so the loot becomes a currency to unlock the next area. (If light isn't a straight function of the item level, and it's possible to get more or less light from equippable gear in the same place, then I'd consider it a loot game.)

I weigh up the possibility of a sensible chuckle versus the very real possibility of them selling it to scammers that would like to pretend to be a .gov, and I'm suddenly thinking we change the plan:

I understand that's the idea; from what I gather, she's college-age and supposed to be in night-clubs and things, which is either an attempt to do something like the social stealth that Assassin's Creed is all about - instead of hiding in the darkness, hiding in the crowds - or it's a transparent attempt to be hip to the kids' jive. Edit: according to this interview, the idea was to deliberately separate it from Batman, make it lighter and more fun, and focus more on mystery-solving rather than supervillainy.

This seems like a golden opportunity to plug this ol' thing I wrote a few years ago about Rare's output and collectathons: http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/TragedyOfTheCollectathons

Oh right, sorry didn't notice.

Is it, though? I got the sense that the loot was purely a gating mechanism and the core loop is all about shooting guys in the face.

Wasn't the point to move back close to people who know you, though? It doesn't seem like you're treating this as a factor.

Correct; the game does have offline progress (and it's actually somewhat more effective than leaving the game running), so you can mostly leave it on the level before a boss to grind up enough money to buy enough DPS to kill the boss, then get on with your day. After some point, though, you want to buy as many low-tier levels as you can to get your hero souls up to about 3 or 4, ascend, then start again. It'll be significantly quicker the second time around because the hero souls are a huge boost to DPS. Or you could just quit now.

I can't imagine any of the Game Boy DK games being relevant: Donkey Kong '94 was great but pretty different, and Donkey Kong Land was not good.

I've realised that I find setting up a new social network exhausting; I certainly don't follow everyone I possibly could, and the process of pruning away people who are too noisy, too boring, too extreme, etc. etc. is one I don't really have patience for.

It's not really a patch on Candy Box, though, which I think is by far the best of these*; they all use the promise of something interesting just over the next horizon, but I think only Candy Box and maybe A Dark Room have actually had something over that next horizon where you think "yes, this was worth seeing". *and Candy Box had balance problems that stalled me out I think half-way through, which gives you an idea of how these games frequently leave a sour taste in my mouth despite me regularly falling for them.

Still don't know how I feel about 20,000 Days on Earth. It feels really self-indulgent, but it's kind of a biopic, except it's semi-fictional, and I'm not sure it has anything to say, but Nick Cave is so charismatic that maybe that doesn't matter. The one thing I do think for sure is that if Operation Yewtree finds evidence on Nick Cave I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

It's fairly functional for Early Access but I totally understand you wanting to hold off just because of the risks. I don't think Failbetter are really searching hard for the fun at this point or planning any more substantial systems (other than a combat revamp everyone said they needed to do); at the same time, that does mean that it'll be out in a few months anyway so you're not missing out. In Fallen London, their first game, your gender options are 'male', 'female', and 'my dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London at this very moment with the faces of squid! Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions about mine? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day'. The last one takes up about half the page. It's an opportunity for a great joke. It also inspired the Rubbery Men as a player race, which also allowed them to reflect Victorian racism without throwing any actual humans under the bus. Fallen London does support non-binary gender, somewhat clumsily - where gentlemen and ladies are referred to as 'sir' and 'madam', those of mysterious and indistinct gender inspire NPCs to stumble around for an appropriate honorific. The response they got to even that small bone encouraged them to support non-binary gender more completely in future projects. Sunless Sea asks you how you wish to be addressed, including non-gender specific options such as 'Captain' because of course you want to provide that option.

I lost about a week to this fucking game. I ended up stopping way, way later than I normally do, when I realised that the only things left to see were some of the ancients and the centurion bosses past the first one. There's two bits where it really starts to slow down: when you're about to unlock Grant and Frostbite, and at around level 140 where Frostbite's levels stop mattering and you have to level Treebeard up to level 1000. At that point you're supposed to restart, bank your hero souls, and get a tasty DPS boost to zoom through the levels. I have a real problem with incremental games because it's initially so easy to see what's over the next horizon, and then it becomes slower and slower and apparently this is a massive trap for me and I haven't learnt to deal with it yet.

Ello's business model is apparently that they will sell features to users directly. I think this is fraught with problems, but not nearly as insidious as selling user attention.

WHAT WHAT God I think I'd be able to convince people to play a 'Nam roleplaying game.

So three sessions in and I quite like D&D5. It feels like the kind of refresh that 3rd edition was, stripping out stuff that seemed useful but really just went too far like magic items and bonuses to rolls. A lot of the +2 bonuses are now 'roll twice, take the best', which is actually not much of an advantage when you run the numbers but boy it feels like a big deal. We shall see how well it scales and whether players enjoy how their character evolves.

"VC money" is not just "money". Angel investor money is fine; grant money is fine; VC money means there will be an acquisition or Ello will collapse because that is the business model of VCs. They are designed to buy parts of cheap companies and then sell off those parts when those companies are worth something. There is no future in which a company like Ello will be allowed the time they need to grow. These days, you can't launch a social network and be an overnight success because you need to persuade people that they should get their social network from you, which means they also have to be convinced that there's enough people on Ello that they're not going to abandon their existing social network. That means steady growth, identifying obstacles to new users and removing them. This is not how VCs run things: they want big explosive growth, which they aren't going to get from social networks in 2014, and their efforts to make actual money off this will undermine what everyone hopes. I think we've got six months at minimum before anything happens, though, so until then...

I ended up giving up on it a little later than you did; I think there was some grounding, enough to highlight the otherworldliness of the space, and the huge sense of scale, I felt, helped give a sense of progression. But then there's a bit where they throw all that away for weird disconnected segments after some fairly tedious jumping puzzles and that's when I went to YouTube to see if it gets back to the bits that were working for me. Spoiler alert, they don't.

There are several such expressions, and here's how you tell: * If the expression is of the form "it's the <object>", it's probably good! * If the expression is of the form "it's <object>", it's probably bad! For example: "it's the shit" means it's good, "it's shit" means it's bad.

The whole 'artist collective' thing is apparently bullshit, though, they've taken VC money and will thus inevitably compromise the usefulness of the service. But yeah, ello.co is not a government enterprise and is thus incapable of repressing free speech nor censoring. ello.gov, on the other hand...

Is number 2 It sounds really familiar but I'll be damned if I can place it. Is number 8

The pun would be nice but no-one will ever have ello.gov unless the US federal govenment uses ELLO as an acronym. Which they might, now I think about it.

I am glad someone else was too weak to resist doing a "well, actually" lore dump. Really convenient for me. The company that made Sunless Sea basically did so because they had a few projects that they thought would go gangbusters not turn out so successful, and so when they asked their players what they thought they should do next, basically the consensus was 'take Fallen London, put it in a game with good mechanics' so that's what they did. It's written to lean on the tone of Fallen London without being a sequel - it's enough that you're sailing out from a London and there's zombie guys, but you don't really need to know about how many times the Tomb-Colonists have died and how little of their bodies work properly. Sunless Sea's the stronger game - its mechanics are better (even at this ill-tuned stage), and its writing is more confident. Fallen London is brimming with ideas but I don't begrudge anyone from not wanting to wait months to be able to extract them.