Gormongous

I just had a knock-down drag-out fight with my only other anime-watching friend in town about Another. She loathed the characters for being empty, I insisted the class as a whole and the curse afflicting it were the characters, not the various individuals. It actually ended in tears, believe it or not. Ugh, worst. Oh, and Tegan, thanks for giving me that last little push to watch Ouran High School Host Club after all these years. I'm over the moon about it. It reminds me of everything I love about The Wallflower, née Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge, even though there are literally no points of contact between the two except the reverse-harem bishounen comedy genre.

We're Steam friends and Runic friends, which is even better than real friends.

I have an abandoned level twelve Embermage I was head over heels with at the time, I'd be fine just ghosting you guys until you're my level. I think we're friends already, SecretAsianMan? For everyone else, I'm Gormongous on Runic's goofy account system thing.

Yeah, me too. I call the race that gets to cheat all the time!

That was my process when I did comics for my college newspaper, but they never looked half as good as yours do here. I guess that's the different that actual talent makes?

I think the market's bottomed out for the Steam Summer Sale trading cards as of this afternoon. Most of them are going for ten or fifteen US cents, which is marginal as far as I'm concerned. I'll hoard them in hopes the price goes up when everyone decides to start crafting their summer badges.

I hate to say it, but I kind of agree. Although Dark Souls is best when you're finding everything out yourself, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with having a tour guide. It's only a problem because Ysbreker gave advice the same way I would, unfortunately: "Go here, do this, not that." It was annoying to those in the know and confusing to those not. Plus some of his advice was pretty unhelpful. I suck hard at Dark Souls, but the Taurus demon was a piece of cake with the pine resin Chris found minutes before the encounter. Roll through his legs, hit him in the back, four hits tops. I don't think I have anything constructive to say. The good humor for the first two hours or so was great, at least.

I understand the desire to keep the job of game critic open to everyone, but I have seen what Tom's seeing with some Company of Heroes 2 reviews many times myself. Sometimes I read a review and realize that the reviewer is blown away (IGN.com) by something that most people (or at least most gamers) would consider superficial. One Civilization V review at release, I can't recall which, was almost entirely about how insane it was that a game modeled all of human history. The reviewer was so impressed by the concept, regardless of its execution, that you could tell the game had earned a perfect score in his head from the first turn, no matter how the rest played out. I don't think all reviewers have to be old hands in their given genre; a lot of unhelpful reviews come from critics who've just been in the shit too long and can no longer see the forest for the trees. But I expect reviewers to be informed, at least more so than my pothead friend James who thinks explosions are dope, and that implies some degree of perspective, however they go about getting it.

Yeah, I would be hoarding them all for the last day of the sale, had I any patience at all.

This is actually not that old, but I'm still drawing a blank: there was one episode a few months back where Chris was making fun of the Roman emperor Marcus Clodius Pupienus Maximus Augustus, whose name is pretty much the perfect junior high joke. He said it with such enthusiasm, I just want to hear it again.

It feels even more extreme than that, like games refusing to install on an overclocked PC. Yes, it's a sign of a power user, which pirates often are, but the act itself has almost nothing to do with piracy.

It's funny, because I'm really derisive of those crazy Counter-Strike freaks who can't catch the wave and play the most current iteration of their game, but put one beer in me and I'll tell you how beta 6 was as good as Day of Defeat ever got and how DoD: Source is a pile of shit. Competitive games are weird like that, one specific implementation of the rules can click with you and then never again...

Oh no, it's television that I'm against.

It looks amazing, Tegan. I honestly like the rough feel of pencils, it gives it an industrial vibe that I find a bit haunting.

The same reason I'd feel bad buying a crackhead's TV. I know, that's not a fair comparison and I'm exaggerating for laughs, but I still feel as though each of us getting what we want might not be the best thing to happen.

I second Cosmic Encounter without reservation, because it's fun and light on rules, which every race breaks its own way anyway. I don't own a copy myself, because I'm unspeakably bad at the game for reasons unknown to me, but it's the perfect game for people just getting into the medium. It's the best example of a game that whisks its players away from the "Well actually, you can't do that because of this" and to the "Oh my goodness, this is like hanging out with friends but on steroids!"

Yeah, I've sorta conceptualized it as a one-a-week minigame that gives me 25% off all the DLC I've been meaning to buy. Like I said in the Steam Summer Sale thread, I just feel bad that, by participating, I'm aiding and abetting someone else's habit. Eh, whatever.

I kept doing that with Tropico 4 and Anno 2070. I mean, I think I like city-building/efficiency-engine games, but I've never played one for long, so maybe I'm just deluded? I'm going to do my best to pass.

I think you're underselling Del Toro a bit. If nothing else, both of the Hellboy movies show a lot of self-awareness and self-parody in what was at the time (and still is, really) a po-faced sub-genre. I guess I expected the same with Pacific Rim, but it was really just a very earnest love letter to Godzilla movies and mecha, with not much else to say. Anyway, now that I'm sober, I can rephrase my post in a way that won't prompt Nachimir to make fun of it: I thought it was fiercely dumb, but liked it just fine, which did take me by surprise

I liked it just fine, but thought it was fiercely dumb, which did take me by surprise.

Nah, a gift just sits in your inventory as a thing. Anyone can open it, even you.

Pile up the corpses of their customers! If even just one pirate is thwarted, the cost is worth it.

I see. Yeah, they're not advertising the broad-spectrum publisher discounts this time around, for some reason. I just checked at random and Hegemony Gold: Wars for Ancient Greece is 75% off, which is a pretty deep discount for just "summer sale" reasons.

Elaborate.

I was always pretty sour, but didn't want to spoil other people's fun. Still, this incarnation of the trading cards is a little more unpleasant, so I feel okay speaking up about it. They're replacing the Summer Sale metagame of previous summers, which was usually based around rewards for playing a lot of games, with one based around buying a lot of games. You can still earn cards in a roundabout way by playing the games you have (and buying the rest off the marketplace and crafting badges), but it's still an important change for me. This'll probably be the first Steam sale in years that doesn't get me a badge for participating, simply because I don't think I'll be spending the sixty-plus dollars for all the cards to drop.