Gormongous

The Shrine of Amana has easily been the most beautiful and interesting level in the game for me, which is ironic because it's also been the angriest I've been at Dark Souls 2. There's nothing like discovering that I have absolutely no defense against those Amana Priestesses when I am effectively the same build as them. It's been the first time that I've only been able to progress to the boss once I've farmed out all the enemies on the path to the boss. During this, I began nosing around online for some better armor than Straid's black robes, but mostly found people talking about Fashion Souls, which is awesome. I agree, Dark Souls 2 is worth it for the additional cost of a X360 controller.

Yeah, I don't want to make anyone's moral decisions for them, but if that's the case, it seems like a situation where one could justify deceiving one's parents by omission for the ultimate good of a sibling.

I love Microsoft's OS-tan marketing strategy! I wish it weren't a Japan-only thing. Windows 2000-tan is the best OS-tan, but Windows 7-tan is alright, too. XP-tan is boring, 8-tan can die in a fire.

Took me a couple minutes, but I got you covered there!

Sure, here's a download link. Make sure to boot up Dark Souls before you install it, to set Anti-Aliasing to "off" and Windowed to "yes". If you have a control method other than an X360 pad or a resolution other than 1920x1080, it'll also take some supplementary editing, but these files were good through my own hundred and twenty hours.

I feel you. The Dark Souls PC port is a goddamn embarrassment, to the point that Namco-Bandai could probably make unbelievably good money rereleasing an "HD version" that just included some of the graphical and interface features ported from Dark Souls 2. Whenever I get a friend into it, I just email them a .zip file with DSFix, DSCFix, and all that pre-configured, so they can drop it into their root directory and run the game no-fuss. Otherwise, half of them would probably not even get past the first menu.

My only bad experience was buying a TV when I had maybe a hundred bucks cash to my name after moving to a new city. I responded to an ad for a like-new TV and met some lady in a public park. I had the cash ready, then I saw the TV, which was clearly about a decade old and had been in a house with a heavy smoker, and started to put away my hand. She stepped over, snatched it from me much more quickly than seemed possible considering how pregnant she was, and drove away as I just stood there shocked. It turned out that the TV also didn't have any RCA jacks and had probably been dropped, considering how bad the CRT shutters were out of alignment. Several phone calls to the number she gave and one to the police gave me nothing. I really just learned a fifty-dollar lesson. I imagine the situation is different if you are the seller and can control the circumstances, though.

I learned a long time ago that, if I wanted to take my fun seriously, I ought to play offline. I think the real moment of realization was one of my first games of Diablo on Battle.net, when Sir_CockInYourMouth joined my game out of nowhere and spent the better part of an hour dropping gold on the ground and screaming, "Cheetos!" Incidentally, this knowledge is why I'm not terribly interested in Destiny, even more than not connecting with the Halo games.

I haven't watched, let alone played, Dota since early Warcraft 3 days. I'm just here because I'm interested in the opinions of smart people on subjects about which they care. Why are you here, that you want to shut down the conversation?

Honestly, that's a problem I have with the Resistance games, too. The first round is always going to be a wash, because there's no reason to reveal any information yet and no way to know anything otherwise. In my regular group, it's gotten to the point where we all just joke about who looks trustworthy, but there's always one person who doesn't understand the stakes or doesn't take it seriously. Maybe that's why I'm stumping so hard for One Night Ultimate Werewolf, because its time constraints really do obviate any kind of player listlessness. Once everyone figured out that they need to talk to win and that the worst possible consequence to saying something is not being believed for ninety seconds more, until the game ends one way or another, it seemed to draw everyone out of their shell. I definitely don't think that hidden-traitor games are a solved design problem, contrary to what you read if you look anywhere online for reviews of Ultimate Werewolf: Ultimate Edition in particular, but speaking as someone who used to check out books from the library as a kid based entirely on page count, I'm surprised how well a really brutal time constraint makes ONUW's flaws not really matter.

Interesting! Do you think it's entirely an issue of money, then, or is there a culture problem (or, as Codicier says, a design problem) where teams don't feel like they're playing for fans (or don't feel it's worth their time)? If it's the latter as well as the former, how do you work around that? I feel like a simple GG timer isn't the solution that'll actually stick.

So, in that case, I'm curious how you feel about the recent World Cup and Super Bowl blowouts. Do you think the entertainment value would have been even worse had Brazil or the Broncos been part of a sports culture that encouraged a forfeit? I also like hearing how people feel professional esports fits into a sports/game/entertainment/hobby continuum. People seem to bring up chess whenever esports is compared to something unfavorable about traditional sports, but the fact that it's considered poor grace to waste your opponent's time and skill (potentially allowing future opponents to study them more than otherwise) if you honestly think that you can't win doesn't seem to come up as much when discussing the politics of GG.

Jesus Christ, that's awesome.

The entire reason to watch Bleach is the first season, which does "wacky school comedy by day, intense monster battles by night" really well. It's almost entirely due to Rukia's seiyuu, who has oddly never done anything else of note, and when she gets kidnapped in the second season so that Tate Kubo can introduce a billion new characters, the quality of the anime drops like a stone. Even when they finally get Rukia back, the plot's now about all of Ichigo's bullshit with the new peeps, so it just never gets good again. You can watch the first twenty-odd episodes and be content that you've watched the "Kyoto arc" equivalent of Bleach. And yeah, shounen! At least Bleach ended finally, after three hundred and sixty-six episodes, not that I know anyone over the age of fifteen who watched them all.

I feel you on the Mithridatic Wars, Troy. Not because I would ever want to play that boring game of Pontic whack-a-mole, but because I know people think of the Pyrrhic Wars the same way. The only game ever to give Pyrrhus his due was the Rome: Total Realism mod for the first Rome: Total War, and even there his expeditionary force was subject to repeated nerfs. Hearing you guys talk about this game brings back all the good feelings of playing Hegemony: Gold. My three abandoned campaigns will live in my heart forever. It bums me out to hear that the AI is not that aggressive in this new one, because in the old one, the AI never tried to expand, but it was very good at burning your farms every spring and fall. Peltasts were so light and fast that the only way to stop them was to burn their farms preemptively, but there was a limit to how many raids you could orchestrate like that, so the "truce" diplomacy option became very valuable after your empire reached a certain size. Attempting to stop the raids for good on a given frontier when I didn't have the money to buy the tribes off was also the cause for one of my best experiences playing any strategy game, where I sent my biggest and best army, fresh from the conquest of Aetolia, northwest into Illyria and Pannonia to incorporate those regions and secure the western half of the peninsula. I knew for a fact that there was no single army big enough to oppose mine, so I thought I had it in the bag, but it ends up there was a reason for the scarcity of enemy forces. I didn't know it, but I was sending my men into a nightmare of starvation and rout. The entire army, which I think was ten phalanges and about double the support troops, melted away after capturing a half dozen economically worthless cities, never having fought a single battle. It was humiliating and basically ended that game, but man, was it authentic! Also, I think the reason no one realized this came out was because it came out on Early Access, which I know a lot of people (including me) ignore, before quietly switching to a formal release. I really don't see the reason for it, if it's as solid as everyone on the podcast says.

The RPS review is incredibly damning, too, but John Walker's prone to getting turned off games over singular issues (high volume of repeated dialogue, in this case) so I don't know if that informs the rest of his critiques.

I remember Bleach started a filler arc in the middle of a fight. Like, the episode before ended with Grimmjow or somebody charging up a huge attack, saying he was going to defeat Ichigo for good, and then the next episode was like, "Anyway, we'd thought we'd tell you a bit of Hitsugaya's backstory..." I dropped the show immediately, it clearly didn't respect my time.

My favorite flub in Resistance was when I, as moderator, accidentally handed my traitor friend two success cards on the third mission. He sheepishly had to ask for a failure card, which let him screw that mission over but meant he sat out the rest of the game. I now hand out success and failure cards face up, to be sure.

Shitty other sorcerer clone guy.

Oh no, agreed! Honestly, I think Nintendo is at its best when it lets its games be products of front-facing individuals with their own opinions. So far, they really only do that with Miyamoto, which I like but about whom I have mixed feelings.

I hope this doesn't make it worse, Zeus, but my only experience with kidney stones is this horrific scene from Deadwood: In other circumstances, it would probably be somewhat flattering to be compared to Al Swearengen in my head.

I feel like that's the difference between being a person (albeit a commodified celebrity person) and being a corporation. A person is allowed to have their own beliefs that they put into their own products, but most corporations try studiously not to have any beliefs, even though the lack of belief is clearly becoming a belief all its own, because beliefs inhibit profit. Incidentally, that's a big part of why corporate personhood is so silly, because it removes the veil.

Yeah, I only have a couple of player-elimination games, all of which are either old-school (Dune and/or Rex) or short (King of Tokyo). The problem with Battlestar (which I think is otherwise almost a perfect game) and its younger sibling Resistance is not elimination, but being marginalized. Too often, you say the wrong thing or overplay your hand too early, everyone pins you down, and you're out of the conversation for the rest of the game. ONUW doesn't really have that, because of the extreme time compression. Worst case scenario, the first thing you say pins you down as a werewolf, the villagers vote to kill you after ten seconds of debate, and the game is over. Start a new game! Or something even more interesting could happen, like during one of our last games where I was on my third cider and not terribly lucid and lied about being the robber just after someone else had definitively proven that they were the robber. I got really flustered, but overall kept my mouth shut, and then watched as my group decided at the very last minute that I was too good of a liar to do something so obvious and that I was really the tanner trying to get killed. There's no time to establish a pattern of behavior, so it's all about your vague knowledge of your friends and quasi-logical snap judgments. There's also a free phone app from the game company (Bezier Games, I think? I only know that because Béziers was the first city sacked by the Albigensian Crusade) that does all the housekeeping, which is nice because in bigger Resistance games I'll burn out my voice announcing all the roles. Jeez, I'm so obviously in love.

I currently have three hidden-traitor games: Battlestar Galactica, Resistance: Avalon, and now One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Each has something to recommend them, because the spin-up is different for each, but ONUW is unique for having no spin-up at all. It's the last round of Resistance every game, with everything on the table and everything to lose. I'll give an example five-man game from last night. This is almost an exact transcript of our third or fourth game last night. The available roles were: Two werewolves (know each other, villagers need to vote to kill at least one to win the game) Seer (can look at another player's card or two from the pool during the night) Robber (steals a player's card and gives them their own during the night) Troublemaker (trades two other players' cards during the night) Drunk (replaces their card with one from the center pool during the night without looking at it) Tanner (wins the game if killed) Villager (don't know shit) Everyone closes their eyes, the roles get read out, and everyone wakes up. Gorm: Okay guys, we have three minutes to work this out. I'll start. I'm the troublemaker and I switched your cards, Carl and Annie. Carl: No, you didn't, because I'm the troublemaker and I switched your card with Annie! Gorm: Are you sure about that? Carl: I'm sure I'm sure, you werewolf. Gorm: Okay, got it. You're right, I was a werewolf, but now I'm whatever Annie was. Annie: What! Gorm: And Sally's the other werewolf. We can kill either of them. Sally: Gorm! What the fuck? Gorm: Sorry I'm not sorry. Werewolf. Annie: Wait, wait. We haven't heard from Sandy. Sandy, what are you? Sandy: I'm the drunk! I don't know who I am now! Gorm's a werewolf! Carl: What? Gorm: You're not the drunk. Sandy: I'm not the drunk! I'm the robber! You're a werewolf! Gorm: You're the tanner. Carl: You're the tanner. Sally: You're the tanner. Sandy: Shut up! Werewolves, all of you! Annie: Anyway... Sandy: I just want to die so bad! Gorm: Anyway, we should kill Annie. Annie: Why?! Gorm: Because you're a werewolf. Blame Carl. Annie: I think Carl's lying. Sally: I also think Carl's lying. Carl: Why would I lie? Sandy: Because you're the troublemaker, werewolf! Gorm: Ten seconds left! Final arguments? Sally: Not a werewolf. Annie: Not a werewolf. Sandy: Kill me! Carl: Wait, what was Annie's original role? The buzzer goes off and everyone points. Three votes for Annie, one vote for me, one vote for Carl. Annie was killed, but was a werewolf, so the villagers (me and Carl) win. Every goddamn session was like this. There's no reason for people not to commit a hundred percent to whatever their version of events is because they only have a handful of minutes in which to commit. And no matter how people get screwed over (say, a robber, a troublemaker, and a drunk all in play) the game takes ten minutes at the absolute most (we had it down to five minutes by the third hour of play) so there's always another chance to win. Two people who had to get up at five in the morning today kept playing until eleven by their own request.

I remember Dallas outlawing homelessness really aggressively when I was in high school. It felt like a thing that might have happened in former Yugoslavia or something. They replaced jail time (which many homeless used as a last resort to have a place to sleep for them night) with fairly steep fines in the thousands. The ultimate effect was to drive a lot of homeless out of the city because they owed so much money to the city government from getting picked up again and again that they were afraid of getting caught and... I don't know It was a weird law, because everybody I knew approved of it in theory but despised its execution and effects. Nope, still there and still friends with all our mutual friends. My only theory is that he's trying to prune his friends list down to a nice round number like 300 and a friend from high school who doesn't visit home much is a prime candidate for unfriending, however cordial our online interactions. Which is still a bit dumb.