Gormongous

I will always hope that Blizzard captures me like they last did with Warcraft III, which I played exclusively and intensively for eighteen months, but their ongoing attitude surrounding Diablo III speaks more to me than anything at BlizzCon ever could. I mean, someone mentioned it in the thread for another episode, but did you see the interview that RPS did with the lead designer at BlizzCon? Until things like the above aren't being said at all, Blizzard remains firmly a "wait-and-see" company for me, alongside other former greats like Creative Assembly and Bioware.

Third time in the ice caves for me! If you guys would post about how hard something is every day, I'd probably play a lot better as a result. I was sad that in my warm-up run, I found my first Spelunky "bug." Trying to climb a ladder, if it in any way intersects with even a pixel of one of those big boulders, counts as a hit by said boulder, even if it's no longer moving. Lost my last hitpoint trying to climb up a ladder like that.

I was feeling bad, so I went and dug up the Prophecy of the Popes, a twelfth-century (actually late sixteenth-century) list of every pope elected between Celestine II and the End of Days. According to it, the current Pope Francis, subject to the motto "Peter the Roman," will be the last pope.

If I remember from my comps, that legend came about because there are two stone stools in the papal palace, dating from Roman times, that have holes in the center. We don't know why. Well, I don't know why. It's nothing personal, clyde. It's just that, as a historian, it's my job to drain all magic from the world.

... But there hasn't ever been a female pope.

Did Jake eat all the onions?

It'll be different, for sure. But it's still much saner than immediately post-The Old Gods. I've had several more cool things happen: a French queen, deposed, fought her usurper for independence instead and created the kingdom of Aquitaine; my cousin on the Scottish throne was attacked by my nephew the adventurer, brother to the duke of Benevento; the Fatimids finally collapsed after they lost a jihad against me, then lost everything south of Cairo to a rebellion that created a new kingdom of Nubia. I'd go even so far to say that it's saner than it's ever been since launch. Also, Georgia is insanely hard unless you swear fealty to Byzantium, in which case it becomes trivial unless the emperor maxes out crown authority. EDIT: Some people are having even more amazing things happen to them: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?736028-From-Holy-Kingdom-to-Unholy-nightmare-Why-this-is-the-best-DLC-yet

That's the thing I just haven't learned how to tell, it seems. Total War: Rome II looked amazing and I liked Creative Assembly's work on Shogun 2 and the first Rome, but taking the dive on a preorder, my first time in several years, was an awful experience. Anyway, back to Spacebase (Aceface).

Almost all of the balance tweaks are in the patch, not the DLC. The changes to levies, which are now deeply reduced by realm size and vassal opinion, make a lot of difference to the ebb and flow of the game; the Holy Roman Emperor can only field about ten thousand men at the 1066 start, so while he can still stop Italy from revolting day one, he can't stop it forever, so Italy's mostly independent by the mid-twelfth century. High crown authority offsets that, so Byzantium still starts out a monster, but one lost jihad and they're a paper tiger. So yeah, the patch is a big deal, but I would really recommend putting Sons of Abraham on your watch list. It just fleshes out the experience of playing a Catholic ruler so much. Hospitallers offer me five hundred gold to build castles in my territory, my sons go off to join the Templars, the pilgrimage event chains (while a bit boring after a while) are beautifully written... I could go on for a while. This is exactly the opposite response I had to The Old Gods. Yeah! Yeah, it's good. I've played up until 1170 as king of Sicily and Africa (ironman, which is cool) and I've had exactly one adventurer: a fourth son of the Almoravid sultan, who hit me with eight thousand troops right as I was fighting a war with Byzantium to get back the heel of my kingdom. I don't know if the opportunism was on purpose, but it felt good, because it made me white peace with Byzantium in order to face the new threat. EDIT: Awesome, the united kingdoms of Scotland and Norway just split between two infant twin daughters, Martha and Mor. I hadn't realized how much playing Europa Universalis IV was bumming me out, but Crusader Kings II is just so much more alive. Stuff happens all the time and you feel like you're being told the most amazing story, as opposed to just growing as big as you can as fast as you can until the devs slap you on the wrist and say, "Nuh uh! Not too big or fast!"

Did the power go out and stop the recording?

Fuuuck guys, I was saving this season as a special present for myself, why'd they do this to me?

I bought the first No One Lives Forever because there was a hot lady with embossed boobs on the cover. I was a lot more satisfied by it than the person Craig overheard.

After having played for four hours, I can do a quick roundup. This is the DLC that makes Crusader Kings II feel like a complete game. Religious events are now everywhere when you're a Catholic. Religious decisions, too. You can pack undesirable courtiers (or heirs) off to monasteries, petition the pope to make your courtier a bishop somewhere, petition the pope for money, petition the pope for the title of someone he hates, go on pilgrimage, and so much more. Most of it's controlled by the weird, obfuscated college of cardinals that basically has you dumping money into a bucket in the hopes that you've dumped more than everyone else, but the effect on the feel of play is undeniable. Everything just seems better tuned, and even though there are some big bugs as always (a broken decision basically gives the pope infinite piety, meaning that moral authority never goes down and therefore heresies never happen, plus apparently the pope can marry right now. Oh, and because of a bug with the Jewish religion, the Mongols spawn with a couple million soldiers), I was still getting a bunch of really plausible outcomes. The Spanish kingdoms united under Castile, nearly pushed the Muslims out, then broke apart in a succession war, during which the Almoravids ate up all their gains (and then France came in, which has been annoying since day one, but devs still can't give the AI a good reason not to grab land in Spain). The German emperor got excommunicated, which started a civil war, and he made an antipope in response. Byzantium lost Anatolia to a jihad, which started a civil war that put a new dynasty on the throne. Yeah, the Fatimids are still rock solid and factions still fire a bit too often, but I truly think this is the best that CK2 has ever been. At least until infinite Mongols.

I know that that's probably the right way to look at it, but I can understand, on a much more fundamental level, buying a product that is being sold and then finding out, rightly or not, that it isn't all that you wanted. Intellectually, you can frame it in terms of developer support or patronage, but if the game for which you paid money disappoints you, which is unfortunately likely if you buy into early access, the feeling doesn't become any less valid for said framework. That said, I suppose it's probably up to the developer to manage that feeling by only offering a game for early access when they themselves feel all the fun things are in place already. Also, preordering is terrible. Because I am dumb, it took me years to realize that the most for which I could hope from a game I preordered is to not feel burned. Early access is certainly better in that regard, because at least you're paying for a product that either does or doesn't validate your decision, but it's bound to have some of the same feelings associated with it.

Speaking as a medievalist, you could just say that the slums are the province of tax farmers, who pay the authorities a lump sum every year in exchange for the right to get their money back from the people living there however they want. That would explain why the slums would be pretty much ignored, in addition to maybe providing the source for a surrogate police force? Yeah, I don't know. Until maybe two hundred years ago, self-help was how the law got done, so the question is not why there are no police in Ye Olde Pruitt-Igoe, butwhy there are police anywhere else. Good luck!

I know why it is how it is, but it bums me out to no end to read the King of Dragon Pass blog. Almost all of the developer's posts are about how i) he'd rather update the current iOS version than "waste" time and effort porting it to Android or PC, and ii) he doesn't really think there's a market for his game outside of impulse buys on the App Store and nostalgia buys on GOG. At least we're past the point where he'd regularly argue with people in the comments about whether Steam would even have the infrastructure to distribute his two hundred-megabyte game online, but it's still frustrating to see the developer of an excellent game limit his market so drastically because of assumptions almost a decade out of date. I sometimes wonder how he was convinced to update a fifteen-year-old game to release on iOS in the first place.

Has Nick found out who's on the other side of that mirror?

Yeah, same. But man, the ice caves tunnel is just impossible for me. The moment I get my hands on a shotgun, I start playing so irresponsibly that it's just game over. EDIT: Case in point, a golden run, my first to break six digits, was ended when the shotgun kicked me back onto some spikes. Sigh.

They announced the Sons of Abraham DLC like a month ago, to not that much fanfare. It's mostly about adding pilgrimages and cardinals for Catholics and fixing a lot of what sucked about Sword of Islam. For some reason, totally ineffable, I really hope it's $10 and not $15. Oh, there's also going to be Jews, too. Finally.

At least for me, the shortcuts aren't feasible for serious play, because you need the money and momentum of a good run through the mines to do well in the jungle, and so on.

Good things in store with the 2.0 patch that is going to accompany the Sons of Abraham DLC. Levies more dependent on opinion and less on realm size, flanking is now more important, death in childbirth and sickly children now added, and converted characters have tolerance! These are all positive changes. Short of a fix to factions, which I doubt Paradox will ever implement, this is pretty much every item on the wishlist fulfilled. EDIT: Oh shit, looking at the full changelog, this is even bigger than I thought. Highlights: a new +30 opinion bonus for marriage alliances that makes marrying your daughter to a vassal worthwhile +50 opinion bonus during defensive wars theocratic and republican vassal caps most heresies now have unique features and religious heads adventurers are now less common the "assassination plot discovered" penalty is greatly increased characters use their own money for a ransom and get a small opinion bonus for it kings and emperors now set up their own antipopes if the current pope hates them AI will try to concentrate their demesne in as few duchies as possible fixed succession law in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fixed Latin Empire bookmark THIS. IS. HUGE. Pretty much every non-transformative gameplay, interface, and AI improvement from CK2Plus is in here. I knew that Paradox hiring Wiz would pay off someday! Monday is going to be sweet.

I really enjoyed the podcast, although mostly because of the moments when the discussion was more about games as a whole than Netrunner in particular. I especially liked you guys talking about Battlestar Galactica, because it has the same sort of long-term planning with hidden information that makes for an instantly interesting metagame.

How I was taught, which seems to work: your front wheel even with their sideview mirror, turn the steering wheel all the way, and back into the spot. Don't hit their car.

Well put. This is the principal reason that I've dragged my feet on listening to much if any of Welcome to Nightvale.

Yeah, I was going to say an old boys' club, an office in the 1950s or whatever. A dorm's a great way to put it.