Merus

The nice thing about Fallen London compared to Night Vale is that you don't really get the sense that they're forcing the weirdness. A lot of the Night Vale stuff I've heard is of the form 'take something normal and insert something creepy into it, wooo' but Fallen London is much more cohesive, and all that weirdness is all going in the same direction.

From the game that he made that stars a very disturbing-looking clown with a heart of gold.

It runs on an action pool system, although actions will refill after about 2 hours. There will be frequent points where the only thing to do is repeat the same action over and over again in order to build up a quality. It has improved some from the early days, where there were also big content gaps and they didn't have the technology to expose different choices in a cycle like they do now, but there's still a big hump around level 60-100 where it's particularly rough. There are ways to essentially skip the grind, by equipping items that improve your qualities, but that requires earning in-game currency and items get increasingly pricey. On the other hand, it is an excellent setting and the writing is exquisite.

The answer is that Transformers is a franchise made by people who have realised audiences do not have standards.

Fallen London talk that almost got read out on Idle Thumbs: They've finally started to fix up the opening stuff, but it never really becomes not grindy so you have to make your peace with that. Sunless Sea, their new game (now on Steam), is set in the world of Fallen London, and is just as well-written, but is also an actual game.

Oh man, I've heard about Dropsy and kept going 'oh that sounds pretty cool' but I don't have a lot of money for Kickstarters these days. Good luck, man.

My personal conception of how Idle Thumbs gets new hosts is when a guest announces their name at the start of the podcast. Danielle could have been a guest forever, but she took that host chair by announcing her name, and she's not giving it back.

I think the chemistry excuse is pretty weak tea. Literally the entire point of feminism is that there is a vast cultural artifice dedicated to convincing children and adults that human males and females are, instead of being slightly different, are in fact so completely different that they could be described as coming from other planets. If you are hiring for culture fit, or chemistry, you are by definition hiring people that look a lot like you because otherwise you would have to change your culture to accommodate someone who has a different background. The criticism is not that Giant Bomb hired two dudes, the criticism is that Giant Bomb has a long-standing cultural bias towards white dudes and there is more good evidence of this.

Yeah, it feels gross to me to have to judge whether the server is doing a good job, given all the things that are not related to the server's performance that affects whether or not I have a nice meal. It's the restaurant's job to work that out. I was hoping to do an end-run around the entire practice by saying in advance that they did it, they're getting paid tonight. Anyway, when travelling through America, remember that you have to tip and it succccccccks.

If I was in an American restaurant, and I told the server beforehand I planned on tipping 15/20/whatever's customary% of the bill no matter how badly things went, so they could relax and deal with the needy people, how would that be received?

In moments like this, I wonder exactly how far things have to go before people start taking the Second Amendment option. I mean, America is filled with guns to stave off the threat of government overreach. Right now, the Supreme Court has essentially privileged the opinions of Southern Baptists over other religious views (as this decision only applies in the case of religious objections to contraception - Scientologists can't use it to avoid paying for psychiatrists, for instance.) But anyway, it is a shitty situation when a deepely conservative part of the government deliberately sabotages something, so I feel for the people deeply embarrassed by their country right now.

I get the strong suspicion that this was changed mid-way through development as a result of some of the discussion going around about damsels in distress at the time. The levels don't really make sense as something you're doing to free people - they're static versions of the five challenge level themes - and they're still princesses, but they're themed after each world (including the SPY PRINCESS) and I guess they decided these characters should be unlocked from doing things in that world. Anyway, the best challenge mode is the Infinite Tower, the source of my only platinum result on the challenges.

Where is this?

Am I the only one that likes assigned seating? I like never having to find a seat, particularly if the theatre is dark: my ticket tells me where there is a free seat, and if it is not free, where the person who is going to find a free seat for me is sitting.

Related fact: apparently rohypnol has been reformulated so that when dissolved in liquid it turns the liquid a little sludgy.

I don't think you could do IHNMAIMS in a way where every possible action you could take was neutral at worst. I'd like to try an old-school, Infocom/Sierra style adventure game where your first solution isn't necessarily the best one, with a modern design understanding, and then realised that basically what I want is The Last Express. Or possibly a game that generates a mystery and each puzzle has several solutions, so you can't get perfect information first time through and there's a strong failure state. Lucasarts adventures suffer heavily from the 'rub everything on everything else' problem where the game is too limited to allow players to use their skillset in creative ways.

I do miss the songs from Old Idle Thumbs but I've been thinking about where new players should start because my housemate has finally taken the plunge. He is particularly picky with his podcasts, and I basically kept telling him that if he wanted a video game podcast he should try the best one, GIANTBO-- I mean Idle Thumbs. Anyway, the week he started with contained the Ode to Waluigi so that was well timed, thanks guys.

What Dewar said, basically; they look pretty high, but if this is just after heavy load you're probably fine. I replaced my stock CPU cooler with an after-market cooler and it's made an enormous difference. Because the CPU's no longer being throttled, everything runs so much better.

I'm fairly sure the deep discounts only come from the flash sales, when the first few sales had static discount prices. The first few sales also had moderate discounts for AAA titles, but indie titles, in the days when indies were first being taken seriously by the enthusiast press, had particularly deep discounts. You could spend a few bucks on a title you hadn't heard about that was just as good, if not better, than what AAA games were doing at the time, which made the Steam sales feel particularly special. They haven't been that for a while, but they've been okay so the cognitive dissonance hasn't caused a backlash yet.

I would bet actual money that it was, although in the US I'd also be able to submit a 4"x6" note card.

It would be Hungary. No seriously, the current Hungarian government rewrote the constitution.

Oh, I'm sorry, I went digging and discovered the US theatrical release isn't the Love Conquers All version after all. I take back my criticisms!

It's a pretty solid game. Nothing special for $60, but it sounds like you want what it's got and it's worth $5.

I was all 'oh, here is a guy with a different experience' until you said this, and now I can't take the entire post seriously. The US theatrical cut ruins the film. I mean, if they advertise that it's the US cut that's what they should show but it is by no means the best version of Brazil.

The first world is pretty easy, don't worry. It has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. I'm glad you're giving it a chance, it was one of my top games of last year.