Gormongous

My feeling though, and this is just coming from the gut, is that we already have an extremely optimistic take on human history floating around the gaming zeitgeist right now, in Civilization V. It's certainly fine for the Firaxis team making Beyond Earth to transplant that philosophy to their game, but I hope they don't, at least not in the same form, if only because I want this game to be something more than Civilization V in space through tone as well as content. I don't want anything bleak or cynical either, but I'd certainly be more interested in something with a bit more nuance, like Dualhammers said about Alpha Centauri. I don't know why I feel that way exactly, except that human history is a done deal up until this point and therefore a positivist tone makes some sense, but pure optimism in speculative works has a hard time not coming off as pollyannish or saccharine.

Yeah, I wasn't freaking out and didn't mean to sound like I was. It was more just gentle teasing at a game I'm quickly learning to love. I beat the Gaping Dragon after I spent a couple hours trying to find that phantom invasion Bjorn mentioned. It was a good time but I was also kind of disappointed by how clumsy it was next to the Capra Demon? Whatever, it's done, I'm good, and now I get to see that Blighttown that everyone hates. I also got invaded twice more and aced both guys. I think one guy was trying to have fun and be dramatic, constantly gesturing and running around, but I was so hardened from the fuckfest last night that I just started swinging the moment I saw him and cut him short. This is such an odd game, for sure, but I am digging it a lot.

I can't speak for the book or for the elementary/secondary system firsthand, but I personally believe the current American obsession with teacher assessment comes out of a paranoia about "bad" teachers lurking in the system and a desire to systematize teaching by treating teachers like low-level bureaucrats. This really came into play with the "No Child Left Behind" policy of the early Dubya years, which basically tried to rationalize all policy and funding in the American education around a vastly expanded battery of standardized tests. The end result, of course, was an exodus of qualified teachers who refused to teach to the test and an increased gap between poor and rich districts based on who could attract high-performing students that could raise their district's average and get them more funding because of it. It's generally a mess now because no one can say outright what a failure it is; if they do, they get attacked for being "against education" and hence "against children". However, Miffy's from Canada, right? I don't know if their education system is in a similarly terrible state or if it is just one bad principal who recently made the jump from boardroom to classroom.

I guess I've got to sit down with a wiki and learn about weapon scaling. I thought the letter ranking was a ceiling beyond which a weapon couldn't scale, for reasons I can't say, but apparently it's a weird percentage-of-a-percentage thing? Whose job is coming up with arcane RPG systems, anyway? Is it just people who get tired of designing tax forms and writing lateral thinking problems?

Interesting! So, in this game, is resistance a base number that gets subtracted from damage, in which case a dual-damage weapon would have two different numbers subtracted from it and almost always be less damage overall than a single type? I'd figured resistance subtracted a percentage of total damage, which wouldn't make nearly as much difference as a flat rate.

I didn't think it was lag, because I was hearing and seeing hits, but it didn't seem to stop him. It was all faintly terrifying, but whatever. I got back the humanity he cost me while killing rats when I went to get the first pyromancer trainer anyway. Okay, I have an actual Dark Souls theory question. I've been using the Drake Sword since... well, forever. I have a Claymore I'm upgrading on the side and since I found the Large Ember to ascend it, I figured I'd give it a spin. Wow, it is so much more effective at +6 than the Drake Sword. I figured, since it had a damage of 156 and the Drake Sword had a damage of 200, I'd need to hang onto the latter for a few more levels, but that is definitely not the case. Is it just because of the strength bonus? Do I have to equip an item and then look at my character sheet to know if an item that's weaker on paper is actually better in practice?

What a crazy afternoon. So yeah, I beat the Capra Demon on the fourth try. First death, I took a bite of my sandwich because I forgot how quickly you traverse fog and didn't look up in time. Second death, I couldn't find my bloodstain and got trapped in the back of the room. Third death, I got him down to maybe one hit and stopped playing properly in celebration. Finally, smooth as butter. I think my only flaw is that I always seem to dodge left, which was right into his blades sometimes. Then I killed a giant rat and wandered around the sewers for a while, generally having a good time while being nervous as heck. I found the bonfire nearby and went human to kindle it, but was invaded almost immediately. The guy was kind of a dick? I don't know, I've been invaded three times, one of which was like being PK'd by a level 99 in Diablo 2, another of which was a tense fight that ended with a lucky kick by me, and the last of which was this one, where he trapped me in the bonfire room, stood at the end of the long hall, and just shot arrows at me until he apparently got bored, then came in and swung randomly at me until a hit finally connected and I died. I swear I hit him with at least one fireball and a half dozen sword hits, since there were animations and sound effects, but he didn't pause for a moment and generally seemed unafraid of being hurt by me. He didn't even have his shield out or try to block or anything. It was not the way I was thinking to end my night. Anyway, I've had a great time tonight and feel really accomplished with how easy the Capra Demon was and how smart I was in the sewers. I look forward to playing more tomorrow or the day after, although probably as a Hollow.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: the Cloud Atlas of video games.

Actually, and I know you're joking, but it's Tom Senior at PC Gamer using "race" instead of "faction" in a question to David McDonough and Will Miller on page two of this interview. They both carefully reassert the use of "faction" in their response, probably to avoid the exact scenario about which you're joking.

Yeah, that seems like a decades-obsolete management strategy. If an employee is struggling, the answer is more oversight! More cooks in the kitchen will fix that broth up right. Miffy, I feel for you. I know it's not really the same thing, but a lot of this year has been spent being the best damn TA I can be in a system seemingly designed to enforce complacency and leave students behind. I'm lucky that I'm finding myself rising to the occasion just the little bit that all the shit allows; other TAs are not and it hurts everyone. I know you've got a lot of love for your job and your kids, so just spend it on both and do your best to sideline Nabokov's terrible turtles. Whatever you accomplish, it's the best you can do and it'll have to be enough.

Also, and this deserves another post because I'm a history dork, but the "president emeritus" system that the Thumbs joke about is almost exactly how the Senate of republican Rome operated. You served as one of two consuls for a year, then retired to the Senate for life, where you drew up laws for the plebs to approve and "advised" the current pair of consuls on pretty much everything. Hey, it was a good enough system to conquer half the known world!

Man, now I feel Sean's pain with Dota 2 and Chris' pain with Spelunky, since I firmly believe that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is the greatest game ever made and I had to listen to it described in vague terms that totally failed to capture its appeal. Oh well! I enjoyed the discussion that Chris and Nick had about how Civilization V's "optimistic" design was evinced largely in the often undesirable cost of waging war. Warfare always seems to be a sticking point for any historical strategy game, at least beyond a certain level of breadth, because people have voluntarily gone to war since the beginning of human history, but war has always been unprofitable to both sides in the long term. How do you make a suboptimal decision desirable in a game without an invested player avatar? It takes a special kind of game like Victoria 2, which spends immense amount of design resources and player goodwill, to construct a scenario with objectives that make war always useful but never preferable. In the case of Victoria 2, it's an open sandbox game about bringing a given nation successfully through the tumult of the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, in service of which war is of high risk and only occasional use. You can't fight political and social change with guns, after all. I wonder if, as Chris suggested, using quests rather than numerical thresholds for victory conditions will also make war a less useful tool of the state in Civilization: Beyond Earth. Also, there were no aliens beyond Planet's mindworms and the fungus in the original Alpha Centauri, although the technological victory heavily implied that the entire thing was maybe a colossal supercomputer-cum-immune-system constructed and then abandoned by some unknown entity. The expansion, Alien Crossfire, ruined that like it ruined a lot of other things by having two of the new factions be the Progenitors, caught in the middle of a civil war over what to do with Planet. They were suitably alien to interact with, although ludicrously overpowered to play, but it was all so much better when Planet was a strange, hostile world touched by the hand of an unknowable, perhaps sinister god, not made by some stupid bickering shovelheaded dudes.

I was just kidding, sorry I'm actually the worst.

Awesome! Then we can put all three versions to a vote on the store.

That's a great way to put it, Thrik. Sorry for being so glib, everyone! I thought the "heartless ladykiller" would tip people off.

We did and I took a depressingly similar position, even to the point of harping on Stalin. Consistency for the win! In all seriousness, I heard a similar thing from the designer of Navajo Wars. It's a singleplayer board game because he didn't want someone's objective to be the eradication of the Navajo, which would undermine the theme of their struggle to survive in addition to being morally repugnant.

Yeah, I guess that's fair. So rarely do I find someone with whom I enjoy myself but don't see any prospect of a relationship that I didn't give the notion its due.

Yeah, I guess the fact that most game development happens on the coasts has left me thinking that game devs only come from there, too. I'm not from St. Louis, where I currently hang my hat, but I'm a Dallas boy and went to college in Iowa, so the whole Midwest is pretty fundamental to my identity, at least once I got over my petulant rejection of the culture by reason of politics. I really enjoyed hearing a couple hints of that in the first few minutes of Jake and Steve talking.

I never can wrap my head around that. If I had a good time and don't have anything else planned, why not go on a second date? Maybe that's why I'm thought of as a heartless ladykiller...

Still stalled right before the Capra Demon. I'm level 31, wearing the full Balder set with the Gargoyle Helm, Drake Sword, and Pyromancy Flame. I'm honestly just stalling, thinking that I'll give myself an afternoon during Easter weekend to figure him out. I actually feel the opposite of most of you guys. I can navigate trash quite easily, but I always choke on bosses something terrible. Fighting Havel, seven out of twelve times my death was because I tapped the roll button twice and would roll behind Havel and then back in front of him, just in time to get hit.

I couldn't find any of the articles I knew existed on the morality of wargaming as the Nazis, but I did find a Three Moves Ahead episode on the subject that I remember being pretty enlightening. Isn't it also a common theme of fantasy (and fiction in general, really) that populism invariably decays into totalitarianism? You can't trust people with power, it makes them genocidal child-killing maniacs overnight.

To be fair, this is probably less Blizzard cashing in on Nazis and more Blizzard cashing in on that segment of genre fiction from the sixties onward that was way too eager to retell twentieth-century events through the tropes of fantasy. If I ever read another elves-in-concentration-camps-run-by-orcs mass-market paperback, it'll be too soon. Unless it's in The Witcher, that's the only one I can trust.

I agree. I think the experience of playing a historical psychologist and exploring how that kind of person would solve problems is something that would be a great game, but it sounds like Malachi Rector is a vapid asshole and all the people he meets are vain, selfish assholes, so I guess it's a concept still waiting for a developer to bring it to life...

The big revelation for me is that Steve grew up in the West County.

I want to swap the names of #2 and #3. Also, requesting even more incredibly fat Sean dunking on fit happy Obama from Blambo.