Gormongous

You're right, it was my mistake in my initial post to use the word "inspired" instead of "adapted." I think Dick's works have proven to be fertile ground for other people's imaginations and as a generalized subcultural milieu, but that they're rarely appreciated, let alone adapted, as their own thing.

We probably have different senses of the word "great." Looking at this list, the only adaptations that capture for me what was good about Dick as source material are Blade Runner (which is tenuous at points) and A Scanner Darkly. The Man in the High Castle is notable to me for being just the latest of a long succession of works that are interested in the aesthetics of Dick's works but not in the ideas that create the worldview behind them. That's why I find it and others mediocre.

Hah! I actually thought briefly about his NBA Y2K series (a beautiful and weirdly tragic look at how important talent is for making a sport good to watch and play) when Nick was talking about being this basketball superstar who didn't actually have any chops...

My biggest concern is that nearly everything inspired by Dick is mediocre at best. His work has a delicate balance of weirdness that, when mishandled, produces either the mundane or the outlandish instead, and neither is quite as satisfying. Still, I'm very eager to hear assessments of this game's quality, no matter how qualified!

My hot tip was more in reference to Nick talking about reloading over and over to thread the needle between two patrols without being spotted. The game tempts you into thinking that you can stealth missions, but you're actively screwing yourself over if you try. It's really one of several ways that XCOM 2 fails to explain itself properly—I almost think that just rebranding "concealment" as "surprise" or "ambush" would solve the miscommunication there. After having beaten the campaign once on Veteran, I've found that it's best to break concealment by getting everyone in a good position, preferably with a height advantage and high cover; put them all in overwatch except one; and then blast the group of enemies with a grenade or a heavy weapon like a flamethrower. There's going to be a -10% penalty to accuracy from overwatch, but it's better than the accuracy penalties for firing at an enemy in low or high cover (-15% and -30% respectively). Only the ranger has a class skill that gives them an accuracy bonus for attacking from concealment, I believe? I could be wrong there. Generally, wiping out whole groups of enemies the moment you break concealment becomes much easier once you get sharpshooters with Killzone (free shots at all enemies within a cone of vision if they move or take an action), the specialist ability that lets you give another soldier a defense bonus and free overwatch, and spider suits that put you on top of buildings or hillocks without using an action. I eventually had one soldier, a sharpshooter with a scope and the biggest extended mag, who could singlehandedly kill up to six soldiers in a single turn thanks to Killzone. It was extreme. For non-timer missions, though, it's much more feasible to use concealment for a snatch-and-grab. My best mission was a facility assault where I broke concealment with a rocket to the side of the building, set the demolition charges on the pillar inside, and evacuated on the third turn. My only "flawless" mission rating!

I figured that Nick was just talking about Xenonauts and mistaking a simpler visual design for a simpler mechanical design (which is definitely not the case, Xenonauts is much more a direct update of the 1994 X-Com).

Important PSA: concealment in XCOM 2 is for setting up a perfect first strike on the initial group of enemies, not for bypassing them completely. It's actually a bad thing to slip past too many enemies, because spotting them in concealment technically still counts as them being spotted, so they'll seek you out once you're revealed, unlike unspotted enemies. After a series of attempts to stealth entire missions, which all went down in flames with a dozen enemies closing on my squad, I've come to agree with the PC Gamer guide that staying in concealment for too many turns is probably even worse than losing concealment early to a bad move, because the latter allows you to overextend yourself without it being reported to you as such.

I just found a post that has been the object of my search for years now: a defense of Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo that is actually persuasive! As a disclaimer, the author is a bit off with his assessment of the preceding movie, You Can (Not) Advance. Sure, it presents itself the shallow wish-fulfillment version of the Eva mythos, but I think that it shares the themes of You Can (Not) Redo by showing that empowering Shinji by giving him everything that he wants causes the Third Impact anyway. Otherwise, I really like his analysis of how Rebuild 2.22 sets the stage for 3.33 by calming and satiating an audience that is mostly tired of being challenged and done listening. The additions to the traditional Eva soundtrack, from Kare Kano and The Man Who Stole the Sun, even support this conclusion, since they are both explicitly tracks about things seeming normal when they're actually falling apart, perhaps beyond repair. It's almost genius to me that the messiness, the incoherency, the obviousness of You Can (Not) Redo is Anno Hideaki getting sick after twenty years of problematizing anime as a medium and his fans taking the problematization as the new normal, so he gives up and uses the script to address them directly while explosions happen in the background to point out the superficiality of such things. No wonder everyone hated it, it all makes so much sense... I mean, when that's the level on which most of your readership engages anime, there's not much of an incentive to go deeper. That's probably the biggest problem with anime in the Western world today: we have Susan Napier (who introduced me to Wilhelm Reich and "muscular armor" as a wonderful way of understanding the inherent psychoanalytics of mecha anime) and a few other people doing long dives on celebrated series, while the rest of us stay on the surface, intentionally or no.

Thanks, Syn. Fingers crossed, that's what this thread is for!

I moved into my girlfriend's old apartment, since she took a job in Chicago, and it's a really nice and affordable place. Finally, I feel like I have ownership of a space that I'm happy to share with people, for the first time in my life. Also, long distance does suck, but this is the first long-distance relationship that I've had where both people are making regular efforts to see each other, so that's going right, too.

Sadly, the best way to get through System Shock 2, which I've beaten twice somehow, is to roll a straight soldier and play it like a shooter. Granted, not the most evocative or robust way to play, but it definitely works.

I really think that Rob and Dave especially were coming into XCOM 2 expecting all the lessons that they'd internalized from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, unconsciously to gauge from many of their criticisms, and were extremely frustrated when those lessons did not apply. A total squad wipe is devastating in Enemy Unknown, full stop. Unless it was a squad of all rookies and squaddies, you've lost expensive equipment and irreplaceable experience that can't be recouped without putting you behind the escalation curve of the terror mechanic. "Terror" in the game is a finite resource that only depletes; if you fill one continent's meter by taking a mission there, it's at the cost of other continents where you didn't take the mission. Therefore, you simply have to trust that the designers built enough room into the system for you to fail as many times as you have to succeed. For many people, that was not the case. Meanwhile, XCOM 2 has several built-in mechanics to roll back its equivalent system, the Avatar track, and simply doing the time-tested strategy of doing a story mission every so often is enough to keep it under control. A squad wipe puts you behind the power curve temporarily, because new enemy types keep getting introduced, but there's not a doomsday clock behind it all that you're losing time on. I can understand how XCOM 2 would be difficult to enjoy if you assumed that clock was there because it was there in the previous game. I also agree with you and Badfinger that it's not the panel mostly disliking XCOM 2 that bothered me; I've enjoyed episodes plenty where they hate on games that I love—or vice versa, love games that I hate. It's just that, usually, the criticisms are coherent and, through them, I get an appreciation of how much and in what way the members of the panel have each played the game. Here, it seemed more like Rob and Dave had both played a little of XCOM 2 and gotten frustrated, not without reason given the game's poor onboarding, so they were taking turns throwing their frustrations against a wall and seeing what stuck, while the other two panelists with more experience took a more passive role in the conversation, even though they had better understanding of the game's sometimes-obscure systems and tried a few times near the beginning to help Rob and Dave see them for what they were. Those choices had two major flaws, in my eyes: Even though Three Moves Ahead often works "newbie impresions" into their discussion, they're never the tentpole of an episode. Rob, Rowan, and Frazer might recount their first impressions of Kingdom or Thea: the Awakening, but only on the way to a holistic assessment of the game's experience as an entirety. That didn't happen here, because all that two of the panelists had were newbie impressions and they weren't prepared to cede the floor at all. In situations like those, I don't expect people who aren't enjoying a game to have played even more, especially in a short timeframe, but maybe just don't do a show on it if you've only played a few hours and don't like most of them? Most of the criticism was very shallow and reactionary in a way that I don't expect from Three Moves Ahead. Dave Herrin opened with the assertion that everything except the armor system and the Support class were steps backwards from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but then proceeded to state repeatedly throughout the rest of the episode that he didn't understand certain elements and that he felt like he was missing others. He doesn't understand many of the design choices... but he does know that they're all steps backward, I guess? That kind of embarrassing near-contradiction of opinion is out of character for the show and I'd like to think that it's something the show would preferably avoid. In sum, I think that timeliness is something that Three Moves Ahead should avoid. Even if Rob and Dave had shotgunned XCOM 2, they had maybe forty hours to play it and that's one successful campaign or a few unsuccessful ones. It's not fair to put them on the spot, without time and space to consider their opinions, and hopefully it'll be otherwise in the future.

At a certain point in the late campaign, every sniper had either AP or EM ammo, otherwise I'm using too many explosives to shred armor on high-level enemies. You don't need to play the Proving Ground roulette to get EM ammo after the initial project and it is very worth it: double damage against mechanical enemies and shield-piercing. It's even odds whether I'd rather take them or AP ammo's five points of guaranteed armor piercing... Yeah, that's fair. I was just hoping that XCOM 2 would be the game to stop retreading parts of the franchise.

Non-story mission skulljacking is called "skullmining" and only its chance to miss is reported honestly, I think. Skulljacking, to unlock the Codex or Avatar, always seems to hit.

It's been pointed many times out how perverse the idea of "health insurance" is. For car insurance or homeowner insurance, you're paying money in the hopes that something won't happen and companies are taking that bet. For health insurance, you're paying money in the knowledge that something will happen eventually... but companies are still taking that bet like it's a car accident or a house fire. It's perverse.

I am disappointed, I was expecting something more looming, like out of a sci-fi movie...

It was so great to hear Tom Chick on this podcast, even if it made me blanch when Danielle said "hate-fucking" in front of him. He's such a passionate and articulate voice for the medium, a reak pleasure. I think the spread of "bland protagonist" as a conceptual staple of pop-culture storytelling has spread beyond video games, so it's not necessarily a sign of immaturity or shallowness in video games as a medium. The majority of anime, for example, have a total cipher as the lead character, because it's important to the creators that the audience has a point of guaranteed insertion into the web of relationships between the show's other characters. Even in TV, we have characters like Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead start out as patient, vaguely moral do-gooders and often stay that way for several seasons before the sheer weight of accumulated drama forces them to grow some personality and some flaws beyond "cares about everyone a bit too much" and "doesn't fully appreciate the necessity of violence." Actually, a show that I've been watching that plays a little bit with the ubiquity of blandness is The Last Kingdom, a BBC series based on Bernard Cornwell's historical fiction about the Danish invasions and the rise of Wessex. The main character there, Uhtred, presents in his looks and his low-level actions like your typical handsome, moderately ambitious, justice-loving protagonist, but he is actually impetuous, impatient, and prone to anger in ways that actively harm him and those around him. It's quite hard to watch, until you get your head around the fact that he's not going to be flawless just by virtue of being the show's protagonist. In general, The Last Kingdom is a masterclass in having characters who believe different things without some of those things being depicted as dumb and having them act against their own interests in believable ways without being pointlessly self-sabotaging. That makes me like it a lot, because my bar for historical fiction, especially from the medieval period, is whether the majority of characters believe in God and whether that belief is pilloried—a surprisingly high bar, as luck would have it. Make sure to invite Tom back! He's always welcome as a voice in my ears.

I had a corrupted save on the final mission! I beat it anyway; it actually benefited me, having to revert. Anyway, the game's done on Veteran. The plot was dumb as hell after the first hour or so (I've decided that Firaxis' writers generally have no handle on good stakes in fiction, about on par with late-era Blizzard, and that the XCOM games bring this out into the open even more than the disappointing writing in Civilization: Beyond Earth) but the ending cinematic was actually quite excellent... except...

I think there's probably a complex story behind the current state of the game. Someone on the Steam forums mentioned that there's a "fast load" option that's commented out of the .ini file "by request of the art director," so it sounds like some of the game's technical woes at launch are the result of the creative and technical teams clashing and the former winning out. Overall, a lot of this game's first impression seems emblematic of "new" Firaxis: the shaky technical launch of Civilization V meets the patchy documentation, tutorialization, and UI of Civilization: Beyond Earth... I got that sense, too. The sheer number of times that Rob especially said some variant of "...and there's no way I was going to come back from that" had me wondering if he even tried with most of them or if he assumed (not without reason, given that they're games in the same series) that it would probably be as impossible in XCOM 2 as it was in Enemy Unknown.

Wow, I just got to the end, where Dave calls XCOM 2 a "bad game" that he plays because he's "dumb" and "flawed." That is, uh... Honestly, as I said in another thread, there are some Three Moves Ahead episodes, especially ones where Rob as host really doesn't take to a game, that are classic examples of missing the forest for the trees, as one or more panelists get totally lost down the hole of listing every single little way that the game doesn't work for them, without putting forward a coherent critique of the game as a work or letting other panelists add their two cents in any other way than asking them, "How could this specific design choice possibly be defensible?" The last episode like that, at least the last one that was as bad as this, was Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, but here it's made egregiously worse by all hosts (except Rowan, by turns) totally forgetting how it was to play the 2012 game at launch. Seriously, "There was a right answer to this mission and I just didn't get it" was one of the things said about XCOM 2 in contrast to Enemy Unknown, minutes before and after copping to "move forward in a loose cluster and end every turn in overwatch" being the only way to play Enemy Unknown well. Dissonant criticism like that is what makes this such an odd episode to listen to... Between them, Rob and Dave's perennial complaints are "there are too many choices in XCOM 2" and "there is a correct choice in XCOM 2," both of which are legacies of how the punishing linearity of the first game taught its players to play more than the actual reality of the sequel's broader design. As Jonathan points out, there is a tangible split on the strategic layer between running an area-control take-every-mission strategy and running a leaner use-last-mission's-rewards-to-equip-the-next strategy, and I've seen players succeed with both. On the tactical level, there are very few instances of lemon choices among soldier skills (every class has a dichotomy that allows for specialization in one or a mix of both: sniper/gunslinger, infiltrator/assassin, support/demolitionist, healer/debuffer). I've been looking, because the game didn't grab me immediately, but I haven't been able to find a way that the game doesn't empower players infinitely more than the first game. The only problem, and I grant that it's a big problem, is that it does a spectacularly poor job of explaining the size and shape of the decision space: that the strategic layer has these nodes for resources, missions, and area control that you can ignore or exploit in accordance with a non-totalizing strategy; that some missions can be blitzed rather than requiring scorched earth; that the Avatar Project is as easy to roll back as completing a single story mission successfully and therefore that squad wipes don't put you behind a power curve in the same ways as in the first game. Really, the biggest flaw of XCOM 2 is that it doesn't explain how it's different from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which leaves proponents of the first game to assume that it's trying to be like Enemy Unknown and just doing a bad job of it. I was kinda hoping that this episode would dig beyond that surface impression, but no such luck. Maybe they'll revisit XCOM 2 when an expansion comes out and time will have colored their memories of it as much as it did for Enemy Unknown.

To be completely fair, both Dave and Rob get totally lost down the hole of listing every little thing that didn't work for them about the game, something that I last remember happening with the Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion podcast, which combines in this instance with a very rose-tinted memory of how the 2012 predecessor played at launch to make them both mostly miss the forest for the trees. Dave is correct that there's a bigger and messier design here, this time around, but the flaw is that it explains itself poorly, not that it's a bad game. I think there are very few failures of design in this game, and most of those that are present are inherited from the previous installment. Check out the episode thread for a lot of better-considered responses than mine!

I agree emphatically. Despite what Rob and Dave say in the episode, the only "simple" decisions for a new player in XCOM: Enemy Unknown are how many satellites to build, where to launch them, and whether you got your base build order right. At any difficulty beyond Easy, a failure to answer those questions correctly means a dead game walking, except you don't know it until the enemy's power curve had outpaced yours or you'd lost too many continents to continue. For all of XCOM 2's egregious failures to explain its basic systems, which you can see me complaining about in the game's thread on this forum, the Avatar Project is infinitely more forgiving than the continents' approval from the first XCOM. A lost continent is lost for good, but even when the Avatar Project is on countdown, barring a total failure to contact territories where retaliatory missions can be taken (as explained by tooltip), you can always recover from any level of mistake, failure, or inaction in XCOM 2. I personally took two months to actually act against the Avatar Project and I'm set to win my first campaign in the next few days.

I think a lot of the general sense that William the Conqueror is the "first (proper) king of England" is the desire of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone scholars to establish a clean break with England's "barbaric" Germanic past, so that the concept of a unique "Englishness" could be identified. William did transform the country, mostly by necessity since the bulk of the kingdom's old nobility was killed at Hastings, but he shares a lot of his impact with the conquest of England by Cnut the Great a generation before, the Anarchy following the White Ship incident two generations afterward, and the Plantagenet inheritance a generation after that. It was a complicated time, the long twelfth century, for England!

"Ass" as a suffix functions as a basic intensifier, like "very," although in some regional variants it's also used to convert a pejorative adjective into a noun, like "dumbass." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ass

Right? I loved it and hated it. It reminds me of a friend (well, the son of my mother's friend) I knew growing up, who fundamentally didn't get that Shadows of the Empire was a story that took place concurrently with Empire Strikes Back, and so he sold me on the game with this confusing spiel about how, when Vader threw the Emperor down that shaft on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, the Emperor landed on a planet, survived, and then attacked Hoth again(?) so Dash Rendar had to come kill him. Hence the events of the video game. It didn't take me, dumb kid though I was, to realize that he was wrong, but I didn't have the heart to tell him. He wouldn't have taken it well.