Gormongous

Yeah! The wave of happiness when you throw down a graveyard was really counter-intuitive the first few times it happened to me.

I don't know if I can care, because I can't really believe you. Since you're willing to ditch everyone in this forum just for defending (or, in my case, sincerely not caring about) occasional recreational use of marijuana, how have you ever known anyone who smokes it long enough to find out what kind of person they are? And, I don't know, that's okay, but I'd probably just confine myself to saying, "It's not for me," rather than going on about how Danielle has failed me a little as a role model.

And not because we're all notorious weedlords here! More just because saying that smoking pot is the pastime of children and criminals is a little bit shitty to say. Oof, you're really going to go through life refusing to be friends with anyone with whom you disagree, even about smoking pot once? Rough times ahead.

I also think that, just like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls have an incredibly debt to the through-a-glass-darkly neo-medievalism of the Berserk manga among others, Bloodborne seems to have a debt to Priest and similar works, cooked up from the drip-feed of Christian dogma and foreign culture that Japan and Korea knew before the twentieth century. Sometimes it's corny or shallow to see what works come out of this several-steps-removed process of filtering, but at least with Miyazaki and his team, it's really enlightening, like Chris says.

Unlocked! The menu and music are amazing, the Kickstarter thank-you screen stays up for too long, and bringing up the Options menu shows about two dozen different contexts for auto-pause activation, more than I remember in Baldur's Gate II. That's all I have time to assess right now.

Would you mind elaborating? I always enjoy hearing people who are extremely conversant with a game's mechanics talk about where they fall down, even if I still like playing that game myself. Actually, I have more than a few problems with Payday 2 myself, mostly centering around stats that don't add up and its tedious timesink of a metagame, but after the first couple months of play, I've been treating it almost exclusively as a "build cool guns and use them to help your friends" simulator, which is enough for me, although probably not the perfect basis for long-term play.

Well, time to file that away in the bank of possible usernames... Also, agreed on all counts. Honestly, this whole "Drugs: Not Even Once: mentality probably does more to promote substance abuse and addiction, by stigmatizing even harmless experimentation to the point where someone can't admit to it, than smoking pot once every decade or two and then playing video games.

What you're asking for is the Pretty Cure franchise, aren't you? That's the other big one, although without the same youthful nostalgia that surrounds the Sailor Moon franchise.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is also a good candidate. Honest.

Born into blood, lord of blood.

I mean, the High Five is an engineering marvel because of how fast it was constructed and how much it improves over the partial cloverleaf it replaced. I remember that and it was beyond awful. Really, no matter what's there, it's an ugly meeting of two huge highways, in one of the highest-density commercial zones of the city, that has to accommodate half a million vehicles daily, and every time I drive on it I'm struck by how successful it is at mitigating that as much as it does. Anyway, if you look at its plan from the air, it's not much wilder than one of the more grounded custom interchanges in Cities: Skylines.

I mean, it's not legal, but tons of people do it and are fairly open about it. I live in the US, and I really didn't find Danielle's admission, framed as it was with a little shame and discretion, more or less uncomfortable than Chris' occasional drunk gaming stories, which is to say that the story itself was okay if not unbearably funny, but the teasing that followed was sublime.

Yeah, that's a good articulation of it. Either I read all the mediocre dialogue, or I walk through the (sometimes quite long) interstitials (and some of the levels themselves, because of the switching characters and motivations and dates, which does a lot to erode the cooler elements among those) not knowing what's going on. It turns them from one kind of a waste into another, which isn't a particularly good "fix." Well, more that the story was so much less present in the first one, especially with shorter conversations, that the flab was intriguing rather than burdensome. But yes, basically. Thanks, Twig!

I don't mean to make it a direct comparison where the ratio of story to gameplay is what matters. My intent was simply to point out that time has a different and higher premium in Hotline Miami that, when combined with other things, makes overly long or poorly written dialogue more of a fault than with other games. If it's not clear to you with that, just assume my point is stupid anyway and we can leave it at that. Hmm, I didn't realize that the transition from free to paid was also the transition from DLC to full game. You're right, oh well! Hopefully the fact that I've seen your last comment echoed in several prominent and well-written reviews means that it's something from which they'll learn.

I mean, "you can skip it" is not a particularly useful or interesting rebuttal to criticism of a game's writing and pacing. The Hobbit movies are a fast and fun time if you're leaning on the "skip scene" button every time you get bored, but that doesn't make them good.

I don't want disasters. It's a problem with tuning, for me. I know that contradicts my hope for variant-gameplay DLC in a previous post, but right now roads, fire, garbage, and corpses are important to the point of being over-valued, while tourism, leisure, education, employment, and police seem under-valued. Leisure is especially ridiculous right now, considering that it's served almost entirely by the gardens that get thrown down to improve property values, and tourism is only really able to cover the upkeep of the infrastructure needed to bring it in. Education and employment both serve your population even if your citizens aren't able to make it to school or work, which isn't particularly broken but a little silly, and you might as well not even build more than one police station, because crime relies on low education and unemployment that are extremely unlikely to happen because of the aforementioned systems' compromises. Basically, I hope they keep tweaking stuff, because the simulation's not perfect and that makes the whole game rock solid in some respects and incredibly fragile in others, usually once a city's grown large enough for local trash and corpse pickup to overwhelm the basic road infrastructure (which is far from the most common reason that cities begin to stop growing and then decay).

Yeah, but that's why I said it's also a dozen restarts. Both in theoretical and actual gameplay, a minute-long cutscene is a substantial footprint onto the pacing, at least for me. I'm not really interesting in pushing that argument farther.

Oh, my bad! I misspoke, Arararagi. I meant that, on the run that beats a level, it takes one minute. A theoretical perfect run takes about one minute. I think I've only ever one-shotted a single Hotline Miami level and it was the worst feeling ever. I hate that kind of success where I know I can't reproduce it. Okay, that makes me glad, because I agree completely with you there. My frustrations with Hotline Miami 2 stem from it not feeling like a single coherent product, which keeps me from really digging into it how I want. Almost anything I like about some part of it is absent from some other part, so it would be much better for it to be three to five DLC that each explore a different splinter-reality of the first Hotline Miami. Does anyone know why they ended up making a sequel, especially since I heard that it was initially supposed to be DLC? I personally only heard that they were working on new Hotline Miami content once, and then suddenly Korax is talking about his preorder.

Yeah, it doesn't happen often anymore, but it is just fun to rubberneck occasionally at the more stupid moments that #GamerGate is still serving up. I don't get any happier from it, but there's still a sense of satisfaction in knowing that the remaining supporters of such an ugly and hateful movement remain as ignorant and pathetic as they ever were.

That's... really weird. I razed an entire city to the ground and rebuilt it on the other side of the highway, but it recovered just fine, at least the parts that still had water and power. Even the absence of basic services didn't keep people from moving back in and then complaining until their taxes paid me enough to construct them. I'm inclined to say that you just encountered a burp in the game's flow there or something, if literally no one moved back.

Hey, I played all the Infinity Engine games and made it through forty hours of Wasteland 2. I'm not bothered by reading, at least in a game where reading does not totally destroy the pacing that's established by the gameplay. In Hotline Miami, running through an entire level in one go takes that same minute. I could die and restart a dozen times in that minute. It's a method of storytelling that's horribly unsuited to the game's core systems, on the level of Skyrim's books except mandatory, unless the intention is to enforce downtime between levels. In the first game, that seemed clearly like the intent -- minutes of frenetic damage followed by seconds of psychedelic noodling -- but in the second, there's so much more talking and so much of it is actually about the events of the prior or upcoming level, which requires not just consuming but digesting, that it's not so much downtime anymore as a separate task entirely that I found vastly less interesting to execute. I also am not in a position to argue this very well, but I feel like a lot of the fluid interpretations in Hotline Miami come entirely from the first game. Except for the mob boss' scenes, which have a very simple diagetic reason for the contradictions and ambiguity, the writing and gameplay of the second game do not seem to support the same fluidity, not without extensive reference to the first game, which is a separate text that should stand on its own.

I love the idea of a podcast doing a "this is our first episode" bit, maybe not for the entire run of the podcast, but at least for several episodes in a row, just a little.

I mean, the advantage of cities in Cities: Skylines being so financially stable is that you can undergo a rezoning and road-widening project simultaneously in an entire neighborhood and, so long as you have at least five figures in the bank, you won't go broke. Once you have a stable city pulling in a few hundred dollars in revenue, it's really hard to put it into a nosedive. That's an advantage and a disadvantage, I guess.

Careful and fascinating work that's totally on-point. Tip: even on Paste, don't read the comments.

I ended up bulldozing my starter city entirely after I'd unlocked everything and made a new city from scratch. I wouldn't recommend it, it was extremely tedious and caused a brief economic depression from everyone becoming homeless and jobless before moving into the new lots near where they used to live. Not difficult at all. There are mistakes to be made, mostly with bad road layout, but otherwise a decent density of garbage, fire, and park facilities makes a city grow with no effort at all. I'm hoping/betting there'll be a DLC for "advanced" players sooner or later.