Merus

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Merus

  1. Posted

    NO TWIG I SPENT THIRTY MINUTES WRITING THIS ENJOY IT

     

    There's several different frustrations, actually. Some people feel like they've been cheated because now the core game has been discounted to free, which is kind of silly to me. (It's also the logical end-point of a trend - the game's gone on sale for $10 multiple times.)

     

    Some people feel like they've been victims of a bait and switch, because the messaging before this was that the core game was required for the expansion, so they bought the core game. Now it's not.

     

    For me, it's an expansion at the price of a full game. It's actually kind of small - most of the changes that have been announced are evolutions on existing systems, and certainly welcome, but they don't change the core of the game the way, say, a Diablo expansion does. We know there's only one new region, which unless it's significantly bigger than the game's existing regions, is only going to be a handful of zones. Loot's not changing much. A few new skills for each class are being added, but you can only use them if you build your character a certain way. I would pay $30 for an expansion of the scope offered, but $50 is a different proposition because then I start thinking about actual new games that I could be playing instead.

     

    My feelings might change after launch, if it turns out the Heart of Maguuma is genuinely significantly larger than the other regions of the game, but knowing ArenaNet well at this point I can guarantee they're going to drop the ball on at least a third of their promises.

  3. Posted

    So I'm getting really close to the end of The Last Of Us - a game I bought at launch and have put down for long stretches of time before deciding I really needed to finish it.

     

    I'm reminded why I've had a tough time of it - there's something about the way it's balanced that makes it very difficult for me to enjoy. I'm finding plenty of supplies, but I find combat particularly tricky, especially if I get into open combat, where I usually either die or lose a great deal of resources. I find the infected sequences particularly difficult in this regard, where the presence of a clicker (which are introduced pretty early on) usually means that if I'm ever spotted, I'm seconds from death (because taking out clickers with conventional weaponry when they've spotted you is untenable).

     

    I can only imagine I'm missing a few critical skills - I get flanked particularly easily, and I'd imagine I'm supposed to be at least a little better in open combat than I am- but it means that, in practice, I end up stopping right at the start of a somewhat taxing stealth sequence because the game's pacing makes finding natural stopping points a little unclear (a problem the Uncharted games don't have, with their obvious chapter breaks), so my impression of the game always starts a little negative.

  4. Posted

    I dunno, that article's thesis is basically dress like the corporate behemoth you are, or express your personality through clothing choice. Don't half-ass it.

    Saying that jeans and a t-shirt is comfortable and therefore sufficient makes me wonder if it isn't the fashion equivalent of chicken nuggets.

  5. Posted

    It probably is worth dropping Patreon a quick email - I think, at the size they're at, they're still staffed by humans and they might be able to do something to help with the money side.

  7. Posted

    To go under her clothes that she also doesn't need, obviously.

     

    That's completely different; clearly making the robots humanoid and self-aware was necessary for some reason, so if you have that, then making them wear a uniform like human soldiers isn't much more of a stretch. But panties usually aren't standard-issue.

  8. Posted

    I took my daughter to see Inside Out and it was absolutely incredible. Definitely one of Pixar's finest films.

     

    Agreed, except for the part about taking Zeus' daughter. Their last few films have been wobbly but this one is really good. I don't think I enjoyed some of the visual metaphors as much as some of the reviewers, but the movie's got a lot more going on than that. I particularly enjoyed Lewis Black's side-plot, which is not something I expected.

  9. Posted

    I think we need them more than ever, and even if we don't I still want to hear them.

    I'm interested in hearing them, but I won't assume you are much of an authority

    The worst thing to do; speak.

     

    I'm sort of dismayed that my attempt to acknowledge the thread but not derail it seems to be backfiring.

    A key part of wisdom is in understanding when it's better to listen rather than speak. For me, this is one of those times, especially for someone who's already derailed one thread talking about American problems.

    I don't want this to be about me and whether I should be contributing, because that seems like part of the problem: taking an important discussion and making it all about how the white guys feel.

  10. Posted

    Yeah, but it's just a remake of the first gam-- oh I can't keep it up I really want to play this new Ratchet

     

    I think the key for Sony is that they managed to grab a bunch of people for their games division who have genuine taste, and strategically, Sony has an interest in appearing as if they have good taste and can deliver a wide and exciting range of projects. 

  11. Posted

    I think one of the many lessons from Minecraft is that having hostile enemies and something to kick you out the door brings a procedural landscape to life in a way just dropping you in a landscape doesn't. It gives the space context and meaning if it can be used for more than just looking at. Some people like to explore an endless landscape full of samey details, but they're only a subset of people who like exploring in games. If they can be persuaded to defend themselves, it opens the game up to a much larger audience.

     

    (Now that I think about it, the photography in Beyond Good and Evil served a very similar purpose: the flora and fauna of that world were much more memorable because they weren't just background details. One of my concerns about No Man's Sky is that the procedurally generated flora and fauna are all going to become a little samey because they're unique to each world, so every time you go to a new world you find a bunch of new stuff and finding new life just becomes routine.)

  13. Posted

    I'm sort of hoping that Aerith (as she will inevitably be renamed) is retooled so she scales better than everyone else if you spend resources on her you can't get back. Not so much that it's noticeable to new players that there must be a reason why Aerith seems like she's going to be super unbalanced in the end game.

  14. Posted

    A Four Swords game whose titular innovation is one fewer player is definitely not exciting, that was probably biggest dull thud of everything Nintendo announced, but the Metroid 3DS game seems kind of rad to me.

     

    I can see three players fitting Zelda more than four, although you're still playing three Links instead of, like, Link, Zelda and maybe Nabooru? It'd be a bit weird for Ganondorf to be ont he same team.

     

    ANYWAY apparently the chief selling point is that it's much more involved than Four Swords, so it's much more like a multiplayer dungeon where there are puzzles and you get stuck than Four Swords' crazy rupee grabs.

  16. Posted

    So I got a job, so that's nice.

     

    It's kind of neat, I would be working at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, which given the presence of 'sustainable' in the time, gives you an idea of the general research they do.

  17. Posted

    I don't know if that answers Zeus' question, though, Mangela.

     

    For me, I think, culture imparts a sense of belonging and shared norms. A broad culture is generally fairly shallow - it doesn't give us any ideas of how it's acceptable to act, and in that kind of environment we tend to suppress the personality traits that make us unique. When I visited the UK, I was struck by how much more complex the public language was than in the US, which I visited earlier that year. The standard for crassness in each country is quite different, as well.

     

    I know I bristle when aspects of American culture are taken to be universal - Hulu is a frequent reminder of this - but that culture can't be meaningfully critiqued by someone whom it's being foisted on. Like, Saturday Night Live and David Letterman are mostly not funny, but in American culture they are funny because of this long history of influencing American culture in subtle ways that you have to have been part of to appreciate. With a universal culture, the ability for any one person to influence it is vanishingly small, which means that most people can't feel any kind of ownership over their milieu. (This is complicated by capitalism working out how to control the milieu while making its consumers feel like they're in control, but the basic principle is the same - just imagine a culture too small to be significantly influenced by capitalism.)

     

    I don't know if this makes a lot of sense outside of my head.

  22. Posted

    This is a little off-topic but I want to share this.

     

    So about a year ago I managed to convince my housemate to start listening to Idle Thumbs, and he's enjoying it (and having a hard time telling Jake and Sean apart as well, which makes me very excited because it's clearly not just me). He still remembers hearing all the jokes about Nick Breckon and how weird he was, and then heard Nick on the podcast for the first time, on episode 144 (which was apparently February last year, which throws out my timeline some). Chris anticipated that Nick was trying to win at Buzz Lightyear Astro Blaster, and he thought that Chris was just winding Nick up, so he was very surprised to hear Nick readily agree that he was genuinely trying to optimise a Disneyland ride. He thought you were all joking about him!

     

    What I'm saying is that a full hour of untapped Breckon is going to be a fun listen for him.

     

    Also I broke down in an airport once listening to Nick Breckon spending all day in The Sims making his virtual girlfriend a megastar. So he won't be the only one.

  25. Posted

    I see this as a Captain Toad of the Metroid series: of Nintendo's franchises, Metroid is the one they think of when they think of science fiction and shooting, but this clearly isn't a game that should star Samus Aran, because the emphasis is in different places. Hence, the Galactic Federation.

     

    I suspect people wouldn't be as salty if it didn't seem like they weren't making games with Samus Aran in them.

     

    Edit: I kind of love how everyone is confused that Kanye West went to E3. Does he like games? Is he in a game? Doesn't he have like a million things going on? Why did Kanye West go to E3? I thought, with gaming's mainstream respectability, that the old 'wait, what's Stephen Spielberg doing at E3' stories would have dried up, but we've managed to go a whole new level instead.