Merus

Yeah, almost always for weight loss the diet is the problem. Exercise is important, but if you're not seeing weight loss results and you exercise regularly (2-3 times a week), it might be worth re-examining your diet. Carrots, for instance, are a delicious snack, and somehow I forgot this.

I've never had a problem with "zero-sum" because I know what it means and can deploy corrections at will. I can't deal with "RNG" because it's basically people complaining about how they don't actually like randomness at all, because they are human beings. I feel like these people haven't really been watching the show very much because it pretty quickly turned into "here's these nerds and they know some people, including one incredible jerk that they have to put up with". For all the show goes "hey look at these weird nerds and their weird things" every now and then, Penny is basically the only non-nerd who's allowed to have a positive portrayal, unless the non-nerd later reveals they have nerdy interests. But anyway "nerd blackface" is terrible. It is one of those phrases that makes me an asshole briefly.

I think Ubisoft's betting the farm on people wanting an open world game every year. The problem with that strategy is that Activision does yearly releases with the explicit intention of running the franchise into the ground, so that they capitalise on current tastes with as much product as possible, and can quickly cancel development as soon as people are over it. The Ubisoft formula is way too specific for yearly releases to work for them; what'll happen is that they run their open world games into the ground and have nowhere to go except Rayman. I wouldn't mind more Rayman.

Surely by now we're all aware that trusting the market is a sucker's bet, great games don't perform in the market as they should, and the biggest predictor of whether a game will sell well is how much unwarranted hype it gets. Particularly for Watch Dogs, which Ubisoft clearly invested too much money in before it became clear it wasn't coming together. From what I understand, part of the reason it feels so much like all of Ubisoft's other games is because the teams that build Ubisoft's other games were drafted to rescue the project, and no-one's going to work hard on someone else's game that's doomed to fail.

That's assuming the assassin run cycle is supposed to be fitting of assassins, and isn't used for every NPC that runs. I don't know that for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I understand where you're coming from, but I feel like it was obvious it was going to get darker and darker until people threw up their hands and stopped caring because that's essentially what George R. R. Martin wanted. The whole philosophy behind killing off characters is so that readers don't know what's coming next. It's the same sickness that infests genre storytelling, where it's so important to have a twist that telling a good, satisfying story gets kicked to the kerb. I don't have any confidence that Martin has anything to say, that his story actually has an emotional core, or that there'll be any victory for the good guys that won't be forced and rushed, because if he did, then he wouldn't have structured the story in the way that he has. We would have an idea about what the story is actually about by now. Or maybe I'm not that sympathetic towards people having this problem in Season 4 because I already went through it in Season 2, and decided that I'd need to rely on my emotional investment with my housemate to get me through, and enjoy the series as a lavish compilation series about tragedy. If I was watching it on my own, I think I probably would have already given up.

I don't understand the complaint that Game of Thrones suddenly got grim. It has always been a nihilistic series. A Song of Ice and Fire is just as bad. I don't know why you were expecting any different from a series that kicked off with the cheerful attempted murder of a 12-year-old to cover up an incestuous relationship. To me it feels like this period of television is going to be seen as kind of the equivalent of 90s comic books where we'll all wake up in ten years and go 'why the hell did we believe that something being darker meant it was more worthy?' especially because it means I get out of having to watch Breaking Bad.

Yeah, that's exactly my point: it's not going to be exciting, and it hasn't been exciting for years, because the incentives to go as big as possible haven't been there for years. They shut down E3 a few years ago because the incentives weren't there, but everyone missed getting on the hype bandwagon so they brought it back. At this point it's mass delusion. Not sure about Double Fine, but iD's been gutted. iD's just a mess these days, and working with Carmack on something that's exciting and cutting-edge is why lots of those people joined iD in the first place.

I'm pretty sure the age of megaton E3 press events is over. There'll likely be one, maybe two, pretty cool announcements at the events, but no-one wants to be the cool announcement that got overshadowed by bigger news, and there's no real need to do it all at once because of the internet. That's why you've seen a bunch of games announced for E3, but not at the press event. Anyway, official prediction: no megaton news at the press events. Every single announcement will either be something we could reasonably assume would be coming, a pleasant surprise that we'd need to actually get our hands on to evaluate fully, or a weird thing that isn't really designed to shift systems.

The best part: it corroborates this gossip column.

See, here's my problem, right here. If you've got a few adventures, you might as well roll the dice a few times because at least that way you're getting a full day's play instead of forcing yourself to quit early. Advancing in the quest is random, and I think that's what bothers me about the adventure limit. I don't have a problem with the mechanics per se, but how they impact on other design decisions - I wouldn't be having the same problems if, for instance, you had to spend 5 adventures or something and you got a sequence of encounters one after the other, with a quest item extremely likely to turn up as one of those five. Hell, just having a predictably scheduled conclusion is apparently enough for me; generally I can tell how many adventures it'll be before a storyline in Fallen London will advance.

So I pulled out of the test game I was playing. I don't think Storium's a particularly good system; you start off with only three mechanic-relevant responses to anything, which means that you're constrained to fairly cliched responses to any challenges. There were several moments where I wanted to play a card, and had to work out what the card represented for my character, how that applied in this situation, how that could possibly help, and how in god's name that was supposed to lead to the desired result. It took me a long time. There were several instances where 'what I wanted to do' would just bog down the storyline because it had nothing to do with playing cards. The more I played, the less enthused I became at the prospect of making a post, because either I could waste the other players' time or I could put in a ton of work to force my cards to work in a situation, with what felt like little middle ground. I'd far prefer to either do forum roleplaying, where I can make more nuanced responses, or in-person, with a character that has more than two personality traits.

Honestly it started to get problematic by the second book. I think it had a place back in the day when there wasn't much fantasy to read at all, but we have much better stuff these days.

Oh so they've retooled Sabrina the Teenage Witch to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

what is Sabrina getting her powers from Satan now or something Honestly it's Archie comics so I wouldn't be surprised

I understand your defensiveness, but I wasn't clear that when I think of energy systems, I think of KoL first, and then the monetisation that people came up with later make it even worse. Honestly didn't occur to me that everyone else would go 'oh gross, monetisation' as if that's the only problem with energy systems, when what annoys me about them is that they're pretty much always tuned to deny players closure. In KoL, the adventure limit ticks down mostly uniformly, but making any progress is tied to a random amount of actions, so every day you're likely to be in the middle of something when the game locks you out. It's still 'fun pain', and it's no wonder sleazier developers saw an opportunity to mug their players at that point. More recent (taking into account that KoL is old as balls) games like Animal Crossing also have deliberately paced content, but they try and ensure that you get a little closure, and the stuff that is still open will at least advance with the passage of time. There was a game that the Fallen London guys did called The Night Circus that handled it well - you had a deck of cards, so limited actions, but that game's writing style let them treat each card as an opportunity for a somewhat ambiguous conclusion. (I think The Night Circus handles it better than Fallen London does. Fallen London has an energy system and has the same 'no closure for you' problem, although because of Fallen London's structure and the recent action limit increase, you can usually move forward in a story every play session if you're trying to.) It doesn't help that the early content in KoL is (presumably) a fair bit simpler and brainless than the later content, so for the first few days it feels like most of what you're doing is grinding on monsters. I did once manage to get to an area where you explored around a temple, and that was fun because every time that came up I had decisions to make. As I said, KoL is a decade old, and it has a decade worth of content built around that design, and it's kind of shitty to be inducing a discussion about a game's design with the designer when they didn't even ask for it, but it's still frustrating to me because KoL also does some really smart things. It's my go-to example when talking about how gating affects a multiplayer community, with the gating of the chat system behind a simple test of observation and grammar.

For a game project I'm doing for uni, I wrote some simple-ish AI for hounds that seems to work pretty well - or, at least, we've had a playtest where there was a lot of tension over whether the player would get away. The player leaves a trail that the hounds follow until they see the player, when they attack and likely kill the player. It's essentially a state machine where the AI either paths towards a target (either the closest trail square, or the player, or it naively follows the trail).

Johnny Driggs continues to be an Idle Thumbs MVR.

Also continuing the long tradition in internet comedy of making it suddenly dark when they run out of jokes.

Apparently it is. I presume he's got the full thing and can tell us more about it if he swings by. (I can't place the BindBurn Softworks reference but it's so specific that it's gotta be.)

I can't tell whether I disliked Days of Future Past because it set up a bunch of themes and then never really addressed them, leaving the ending weak and flaccid, or whether its action scenes were essentially special effects driven as opposed to action driven, or whether they never showed the iconic image of a grid of mutants that have all been killed, captured or otherwise dealt with.

Johnny Driggs found this:

I could never get into KoL because it took a really long time to load everything and the adventure limit was frustrating. It's basically an energy system before all that stuff was formalised.

I think this just reinforces my point - Rodgers didn't need a gun to kill enough people to count as a serial killer, and while gun control made a big difference in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre, that's clearly not the only issue at play here. I think a cultural narrative of justified violence is a good way to put it. Games have an effect, but they're mostly aping action movies which have long had the same justified violence narrative. As for these kinds of killings seeming more common, it's had to say, but I note, once again, that lots of other countries have 24-hour news cycles now and these countries don't seem to find more of these massacres occurring that they wouldn't have otherwise heard about. I'd suspect it goes the other way, actually - there's more incidents than you hear about, and the 24-hour news cycle has squeezed out the local reporters who would have reported on them.

PAX Australia is still at the stage where a) tickets sell out in months, not hours and the culture isn't established so I don't feel quite so sleazy.