Gormongous

"You are what you eat" is a weirdly reductive concept when it comes to media consumption as well as food. A lot of my post-college experience has been that I have nothing in common with people who play video games, unless they play video games that I play, in which case what we have in common is not really that we play games, but that we play Total War games. But I'm not a Total Warrior, so why would I be a gamer?

Europa Universalis IV is going to have an ironman feature: no saving except to quit, no changing options ingame, no console access. I kinda wish they could port it back to CK2. I rarely savescum, but sometimes I'm weak.

Now I'm reading that Latin again and worrying that suas could be read as reflexive. Maybe "occide uxores eorum" instead? I think too much. And yeah, for some reason Paradox left the latest round of DLC out of the "complete" pack on Steam. I think it had to do with the Steam summer sale happening like a month after The Old Gods came out, maybe they were worried about the sale gutting their sales?

Looks like the Steam database leaked the unannounced August DLC. There will be an Europa Universalis IV savegame converter, which I'd be more excited about if my best games weren't ages ago and now incompatible, and a "customization pack." I've never played Hearts of Iron 3, but people say that it has something similar where you can tweak who holds what and where at a given start date. Who knows.

That's kind of fair game, though. I think everyone beat Kangaxx the Lich pretty much the same way in Baldur's Gate II. Developers used to include stuff that had to be cheesed around in older RPGs, for some reason.

I didn't! I had to go to work in the morning. But now I'll waste the time anyway by watching the tail end while at work. Gaelic is too much work and Latin is more historical anyway. Occide suas uxores! Or occide suas mulieres, whichever works better for you.

I love giving advice, but the chat on the stream drives me crazy sometimes. Between Nick and them, some really terrible decisions get made. Still, that was a fun few hours of politicking, even if the crown of Ireland grew but little. After a while, I started making a template for all of Chris' kingly sayings: Yeah, Duke Rollo in 911! Sadly, there aren't really any mechanics to settle adventurers in defense against other adventurers, which would be super cool.

Yeah, the Christians are pretty weak in the 867 start, somewhat unhistorically in my opinion, to let players who bought the DLC to play pagans have their fun. They'll settle down once England converts around 1000, though.

Yeah, I'm suddenly really sensitive to all the rage in gaming culture right now. Just now, I was checking the Paradox forums for updates to the Crusader Kings II mods I played and, in six hours since I last was there, four "fans" have posted "friendly" death threats should the modders "slack off" and fail to deliver the promised mod content before midnight. Sorry about all the scare quotes, but these are the people who like the game! It's nuts. I want to put the Internet in time-out.

Yeah, I stand by what I said on the last page, but it feels a lot less relevant in the face of all the bloodthirsty glee I'm seeing now.

I think that's a pretty fair assessment. I beat it last night and came out satisfied, but I'm not going to go back through again with a decker character like I'd planned in the first few hours. I don't like the combat enough, not when the gear is so gated and so linear. Each gun is better than the one before, except for that one revolver, and there's always one outfit you should be wearing. From what I'd seen of the mage and decker characters I hired for runs, they just have more stuff to buy, but not really more options for it. I don't know. I really liked the traditional RPG parts of it. The character building was great, the writing always popped, even with Jordan Weisman's goofy Kickstarter-reward NPC, and I genuinely enjoyed the whodunit. I just felt bored after the first six hours or so whenever combat started, if only because I could blow everyone away but didn't really feel like it. Good narrative-focused modules might be able to fix that, but we'll see what the community puts out.

I was more referring to the features associated with playing each new gameplay group (decadence, trade posts, and so on). I worded it poorly, though. That said, I'm still half right. In addition to the 867 start date in The Old Gods, Legacy of Rome unlocks retinues, which are pretty important for any player. The fact that they had to be left out of the core game is proof to me that Legacy of Rome is the weakest content DLC, but then it costs pennies right now, so who cares.

Sometimes I read Mington's posts and they're just the record scratches that the King of All Cosmos makes, in written form.

It was his time, then. The nicest part about Elective succession is that you can skip a generation. Or two.

You know what, I'm going to go to bat for Star Wars: Empire at War, too. That way we have all the Star Wars RTS games represented. Yeah, it was a fairly simple RTS game at its heart, but it had a turn-based sandbox campaign that was more or less on par with the early Total War games. Plus, even though I can't really defend the boring ground battles, the real-time space battles were a lot of fun. Sure, it was annihilation and base defense dictated by only a few capture points, but both sides played differently (the Rebels had specialized capital ships that disabled the enemy for fighters to take down, while the Empire was more about effective use of all-purpose ships) and there were tactical elements to jumping in ships, blocking hyperspace lanes, and targeting different hardpoints. The one level near the end of the second campaign where the entire battlefield was like one third of a Super Star Destroyer did more to convey the scale and depth of space combat to me than anything since Homeworld. The expansion, not so good, but at least it was one of the last and most visible attempts to integrate Star Wars EU stuff before Lucas really started speaking out against it.

That does happen. It's fun sometimes to type "charinfo 1" into the console and discover that your character's hidden health value is 1.8, therefore making it a series of increasingly improbable dice rolls that he lived past infancy, let alone into his forties.

It's too late for me at night to give this the response it deserves, and I didn't get much further than you in the game (just to the first bell), but I think the inconvenient checkpoints is very much at the core of Dark Souls' design. The game is all about cultivating a careful and methodical -- but never hesitant -- playstyle. Part of that means putting you through rote sections following death, not only as a palate cleanser, but also to keep the boss battles from being isolated from the normal flow of gameplay. Getting to the boss is just as important as fighting the boss and, because of that, Dark Souls isn't going to meet you halfway. I know that section of the Undead Burg you're talking about by heart. Even though I haven't touched the game since May, I could probably still get to the Taurus Demon's rampart in one go without taking more than a single hit, if only because I ran it two dozen times trying to figure out the deal with that fucker at the bottom of the tower. That's muscle memory you don't get a chance to develop in many other games, which I think is special enough in itself.

My biggest fear about the gradual enlightening of the Internet and gamer culture is the co-opting of words like "racist" and "sexist" by trolls to put down good people doing nothing of the sort. As for Fish, I feel as though he's not his own worst enemy, but definitely among them. The number of times he's quit Twitter in a rage, only to come back a few weeks or months later, shows an unhappy and unhealthy relationship with his own fame. Like Henroid said, I hope he gets some therapy or better therapy, so that the only demons he has to fight are the ones he meets on internet article comment threads. Those are bad enough.

Title histories are the only way to check events like that after the fact. Just click on the shield, the button second from the right along the top in the "title information" screen that comes up will have a list of holders and the date they took power. I think the four gameplay DLCs I listed above -- Sword of Islam, Legacy of Rome, The Republic, and The Old Gods -- are a must if you're going to play the game more than a couple of times. They all unlock different gameplay features and, except for Legacy of Rome, give you new lords to play as (Muslims, patricians, and pagans, respectively). They cost just under ten bucks all put together, which seems pretty reasonable to me. Add to that the Ruler Designer if you want to make your own custom lord, which I never have, and Sunset Invasion, if you think that Aztecs wrecking western Europe is hilarious. The rest of the DLCs are cosmetic and honestly pretty hit-and-miss (Norse and Mongol facepacks look great, Mediterranean facepack is so ugly and clumsy that it's kinda embarrassing a professional studio released it, and so on).

I think it's pretty unambiguous unless you're exercising a pretty zealous brand of skepticism. I wish you were right, though.

Usually I'm pretty dismissive of spoiler culture, but I like this movie so much, I just don't have the heart to risk anyone's sense of wonder.

I have all of tomorrow and some of tonight free, I think.

Yeah, but if you want the technical achievement of a long take, you just watch Russian Ark instead (and are incredibly bored). The way that Cuarón uses long takes to explore a space and draw the viewer in is nothing short of masterful. I actually just rewatched Children of Men last night (a friend had never seen it and wanted to) and was shocked at how good it still is after seven years. Except for a few flat lines from Clive Owen and the last forty-five seconds, it's a perfect movie.

Just a heads up, Crusader Kings II and all its DLC (including, for the first time, The Old Gods) is 75% off on Steam for the next forty-eight hours. You can get the base game and everything ever released for it for $33.50 or so, but everyone should at least get the four big DLCs if anything: Sword of Islam, Legacy of Rome, The Republic, and The Old Gods.

Just a heads up, Crusader Kings II and all its DLC (including, for the first time, The Old Gods) is 75% off on Steam for the next forty-eight hours. You can get the base game and everything ever released for it for $33.50 or so, but everyone should at least get the four big DLCs if anything: Sword of Islam, Legacy of Rome, The Republic, and The Old Gods.