Gormongous

Wow, you hate-listened to an episode of Three Moves Ahead just so that you could take a weak potshot at its host for having an issue with Battle Brothers' racism and sexism a month and a half ago? That's sad, it's just a game. Also, never gets old when "calling out racism" is the real racism. Cheers, you weirdo.

Same.

I just watched the trailer for Annihilation and I mostly enjoyed it? I wish Portman had a crew cut. Some of the imagery is exactly what I expected and some of it's absolutely not? I wish there were less rainbows, but otherwise I can deal with it. I want to be deeply, deeply distressed by the experience of watching this movie. I know that's a big ask for Hollywood, but if anything can do it it's Alex Garland and Annihilation.

Nah, it's entirely randomized. My closest stuff was subverters, slipstreams, and armor-piercing blades (which are a godsend and make the game half as hard).

I'm monitoring this thread.

Yeah, I didn't realize at first how there are some really powerful unlocks on the liberation screen. Prioritizing ones that complement your playstyle or give you more options with the harder missions is essential.

I am also interested in Left 4 Dead. I've only put eighty hours into it, but I'm always looking for an excuse to go back!

I love double-posting! I'm actually in a bit of an anime slump, not because I'm not watching shows, but because I'm watching three older ones (Turn A Gundam, Space Runaway Ideon, and Urusei Yatsura) that are all both long (fifty, thirty-nine, and a hundred ninety-five episodes respectively) and indifferently paced, so I don't really have the feeling of making progress. I guess I'm also watching the second cour of Sakura Quest, but I've found that show to be a disappointment and I'm just counting out my time there now. Anyway! All of that is to say that the best anime that I've been watching lately is Aggressive Retsuko, starring a red panda who's the new character from Sanrio. Like the last Sanrio anime for which I stumped, Show by Rock!!, Aggretsuko is way, way better than it should be. The episodes are under two minutes long and follow a very similar pattern: Aggretsuko is going about her life and minding her own business, something frustrates or demeans her, and she fantasizes about telling the offending party off with death metal lyrics. It should get stale really fast, but it doesn't, partly because of the craft of each episode but mostly because the situations that bedevil Aggretsuko are so real, both in their setup and in her response. She's plagued by the indifference of her bosses to her talent, the demands of sacrificing her social life for illusory professional success, the shallowness of modern friendships, the difficulty of enjoying simple pleasures in life, and more! And she gets pissed about all of it in a really satisfying way. I'm not the first to point out that Sanrio's making something of an anti-capitalist paean here, but that's not going to stop me from promoting it. Unfortunately, it's not available in English except through fansubs, but that shouldn't stop you. Also, I parlayed my thoughts on Patlabor: the Movie 2 into a podcast with the rest of the Key Frames team! Listen to it here (and to all the rest of our episodes, after you do).

It's part of Polygon's Facebook push, because social media, and Facebook's algorithms severely punish videos over 7-10 minutes. I don't really know why it exists, and I think it's a huge handicap on a formula that already works great, but whatever.

What are your opinions on the Beta Strike modifier for campaign creation, if you've tried it? It's a set of changes that makes moving from pod to pod and wiping each out as soon as they activate less feasible. I avoided it myself, since the main change is doubled hitpoints for soldiers and aliens, which would probably lengthen the tactical segments drastically, but it's still interesting to consider.

Sounds like your dad grew up internalizing Heinz marketing about the "difference" between ketchup and catsup!

Yeah! It's the conflation of "This is the most efficient way to do things" with "I must never lose control of the situation."

For the record, the original word was "ke-tsiap" from the Amoy dialect of Chinese, probably borrowed by Dutch traders via the Malay "kechap" in the late 1600s. Both "catsup" and "catchup" predate "ketchup" by at least twenty years ("ketchup" probably being a more deliberate rendering of the Dutch version "ketjap"). Jake's correct that Heinz's marketing strategy was what was responsible for exalting "ketchup" to the denigration of "catsup": Heinz originally sold their product as "catsup" but changed the name in the sixties to the rarer form "ketchup" as part of an attempt to distinguish their product as higher quality and more unique. It worked incredibly well and, within the space of a generation, Heinz's competitors at Hunts and Del Monte had changed the spelling of their products to "ketchup" too, leaving "catsup" to languish as a word used by oldsters and rubes who don't know what real ketchup is all about. There's probably an ad exec up in heaven (or down in the other place) clapping in delight at Chris' instinctive disgust for and dismissal of the very existence of "catsup" — Heinz's branding has worked perfectly!

Yeah, every time I encountered the Chosen Assassin, she spawned on the other side of the map and it was typically two or more turns before she reached my squad. By that point, I usually had no idea where she was and got in the habit of sending a rookie into danger to "spot" for my Rangers to cut her up, which felt authentic and tense. I'm realizing now that my encounters with the second Chosen, the Hunter, have been more in line with your experience: his main attack is easily avoided and his hardcoded weaknesses are really easy to exploit. I guess that's the downside of using the Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system under these circumstances Slight spoiler, but the rulers from the DLC are still in the game as well, so don't bemoan their absence too much!

To address a couple of your concerns, the Lost quickly begin spawning with more than four HP (and you get introduced to new types, like the dasher and the brute), which make the Gunslinger strategy only contextually useful. And it sounds like you got really lucky with your first Chosen's traits? My initial encounter with the Assassin wiped out my entire four-man squad and only the two mission-critical characters survived. It was only when I gave all my Rangers Bladestorm and made sure to bring at least two along on any mission where the Assassin might be there that I reliably began beating her. I just finished the stronghold assault that kills her off for good and it was actually a bit harder than I remember the late-game story missions being. Hopefully you'll find the extreme tactical challenge that you were seeking with the other two Chosen? I agree with you about the fiction of the game, though. XCOM2 was already pretty far down the cod-melodrama rabbit hole, with the Elders' pompous and nonsensical plan for humanity, and War of the Chosen only shoves the game further down it earlier on.

Yeah, I've already heard grumblings from Rob on Waypoint Radio when Austin's talking about it, so I'm not sure that the weird grudge against that game is going to get dispelled by anything, let alone an expansion that doubles down on the majority of the base game's design decisions in fairly ambitious ways.

To be fair, that particular thing was a standalone "interlude" DLC released long after the base game that the Director's Cut remake inexplicably chose to integrate into the chronology of the main storyline.

The initial waft is of bloat, when the game first kicks you out to the strategy map and you're getting interrupted every ten seconds by crap popping up all over the map. That said, they've added and overhauled a lot of systems that make engaging with the new content more natural. You curry favor with the factions by sending soldiers on auto-resolved "covert missions," which combines with the new fatigue/stress/illness system to force you to rotate soldiers in and out of your active roster more frequently, but there's also now a super-powerful "bond" system that two soldiers can get, as well as ability points to spend for non-class skills, and meanwhile you're researching the Chosen's weaknesses and dealing with them ambushing you on missions... Unlike Enemy Within, which made the odd choice of making it possible (even desirable) to miss out on much of the new content and systems by not choosing to adapt your playstyle to optimize for Meld, the systems in War of the Chosen are integral (if sometimes outsized) additions to preexisting systems and playstyles, and engaging most of them is as simple as taking an extra step when you're leveling your character and adding mods to your guns. The ones that aren't (the Chosen, the factions, the Lost) are generally fun and interesting, and give a sense of added depth rather than a mechanics "fix" to an already-functioning game. That said, there is a ton of new stuff and I shiver to think of someone going straight into it having never played an XCOM before.

Oh cool, written by 3MA's own Rowan Kaiser!

The only difficulty spike for me was running into the first Chosen, mostly because I didn't know it was coming. Otherwise, the old tactics of using grenades to demolish cover and give free "flanking" still works great for the first half-dozen missions — even better, actually, since ability points are now awarded for flanking. Getting in contact with all the factions as early as possible, since their soldiers are quite powerful from level one, and building the Alien Hunters weapons, which are cheap and effective, is a good way to get an early boost.

I've eaten them my whole life, but I don't really talk about them, since a PB&J sandwich is mostly just a concession that I'm not going to be eating something more fun and interesting (and thus worthy of conversation). PB&J is the silent majority (but not really, maybe once or twice a week) of my meals.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is really good. It improves every aspect of the game in an additive way, so the first few hours of a new campaign feel overfull and underexplained, but it settles into a great rhythm soon enough. I've stayed up way past my bedtime playing it for two nights running now, and I'm excited to do it tonight, too. I hope to have more thoughts once I've actually sunk my teeth further into the game, so stay tuned!

I read Ninefox Gambit, during my brief attempt to have an opinion on this year's Hugos, and enjoyed it the most out of everything I read. Lee's plotting is intricate and precise, his characters human while still being very exotic and alien in the way they live, and his settings are the best in the biz now that Banks is dead. I mostly disliked its simultaneously rushed and slack third act, but it basically moved the needle from A+ to A for me, which isn't saying as much as one might think, given my standards for sci-fi.

Yeah, same. If it's all of the depth and texture of the first game(s) and none of the jank, it'll be one of those games that I might play for years.

Googling "Germany" and "refugees" gets forty-one million hits (and it tries to autocomplete it to "crisis," too). Either the devs are making a statement, or they are terminally oblivious.