Merus

Cryptics are also fairly common in Australia. David Astle, one of the setters for Fairfax, is particularly notorious for inventive and bizarre clues. A fairly tame (but clever) one from DA: Chicken gutted, prepared, about to feed zoological business? (7-3) The first cryptic clue I ever got, and still my favourite: Feline weapons? (9)

The combat in Final Fantasy games hasn't been 'standard turn-based final fantasy' combat since FF9. FFX slowed combat down to make it much more tactical. FF11 and 14 are MMOs, so they run real-time with hotkeys. FF12 was real-time, with battles taking place without leaving the world. FF13 was semi-turn based built around changing classes in real time and had a strong emphasis on buffs and debuffs. For that matter, describing Final Fantasy combat as 'standard turn-based' is a bit weird because the 'standard' is Dragon Quest, with no real-time elements. Are you referring to how there isn't a separate battle area?

Number 12 is

See, the whole point of the Steam Curators system is that Steam Curators would greenlight games instead of Valve or Greenlight.

Yeah, but Mike Bithell got on those "DO NOT BUY FROM THESE SJWs" posters pretty early on.

I am getting rather sick of people saying that they like Anita's videos although they do not always agree. With what part, exactly? That would be a useful conversation, and yet no-one has it. It's almost as if people are throwing Anita's videos under the bus in order to appear impartial.

Isn't that what engrams are?

I think the Project Zomboid guys are a little on the extreme end because I think pretty much everybody would have excused them when they had their game and all their hardware stolen. I don't know if you can actually make a good game if you're constantly worrying about fulfilling expectations.

That's still an ad, its target market is just existing customers. It's like how Coca-Cola run ads despite there being less than three people at this point who know what Coca-Cola is.

quantum electro dynamics

All the talk I'm hearing from this game is reminding me hard of previous MMOs. There's factions that you put XP towards by equipping an item? And the only way to get a particular high value item is to feed a particular NPC high-value items for merely the chance of an appealing return?

Funnily enough, it's a way to represent even more indecipherable mathematical calculations to be more friendly.

Goddamn, now I know #10 was Diddy Kong Racing I can see the level where it plays. I feel like I should have picked Illusion of Gaia, as well. I knew it was a JRPG I'd played, but not which one.

Well, either way the story isn't reaching any kind of conclusion any time soon, so.

I don't use Roll20, but I'm GMing a game of D&D5 right now because our usual GMs both wanted to play. D&D5 is pretty good, as far as I can see - more interesting than 4, less crunchy than 3, and the base game is free which makes it very easy to recommend.

I also kind of feel like that Potato Salad guy launched a comedy career off the back of that effort.

Let me tell you, when i was told there was a gif of Jim Jones saying "ballin'", I was expecting kool-aid to figure into it somehow.

There's also a ton of white dudes in that trailer, which is weird. My patience for contextless fight scenes and showy displays of power is razor-thin, at this point. I just don't find spectacular punches cool.

I've been suspicious of the argument that games don't encourage violence pretty soon after it was raised, because I remember during my misspent youth playing 12 hours of GTA3, going for some fried chicken, seeing a parked cop car, and then starting to run towards it with the intent to jack it. I don't think that means it needs to be taboo, exactly - there's a huge cultural force pushing against the idea that violence is an acceptable solution to problems - but I think it's a problem that violence is so typical.

I feel like Kickstarter projects should be prevented from offering the completed project to backers without a contingency plan. I think Kickstarters should be allowed to fail, but that's because I can't imagine how you'd handle it otherwise. Knowing that there's a hole in my imagination, I wonder if maybe artists who aren't sure they can deliver on a big project should use something like Patreon to get that experience.

You might be familiar with the idea that there are 'alpha' and 'beta' men, but did you know it goes much further than that? Karalora over at We Hunted The Mammoth explains:

I'm disappointed, I was expecting it to look a little nicer than just an iPad.

Australia usually gets up that high; officially our last election was at 93.9% but there were enough people that entered spoiled or informal votes that the number should be more like 82%. That said, there usually isn't quite so much public engagement in Australia. I think, on balance, that what people were expecting from an independent Scotland wouldn't have been what would have happened. I think that the result they got was the best they could have asked for: Westminster got a hell of a scare that the SNP can use to press more and more concessions, but they also don't have to make the shitty choice of either setting up their own currency that no-one wants and being poor for decades, or jumping on board with either the euro or the pound and having a central bank who won't take the interests of a newly independent country to heart. I think it's entirely possible that Westminster won't make any of the concessions Scotland wants. I think Westminster would be fuckwits if they look at 45% of Scotland voting to never have to deal with Westminster again and decide to antagonise those people, because those people are still voters. And I think there's nothing stopping the SNP from responding to the Better Together arguments that cut through, and prepare for another referendum in a decade.

I no longer trust Final Fantasy, and this looks... well let's just say that there's Persona 5 coming down the pipe and I bet it'll have more of what I actually want.

I patriotically watch all of Farscape, even the dumb episodes. I love how Americans use New Zealand for this mythical/fantastical backdrop, with rolling green hills and dramatic mountains, and Australia's landscape is bizarre sci-fi/hellish postapocalyptic wasteland. We are like right next to each other.