youmeyou

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Posts posted by youmeyou

  1. Posted

    The guard break is usually pretty telegraphed tho isn't it? So you can roll once you see it coming and punish... I don't successfully PVP much so don't listen to me.  :getmecoat

     

    Speaking of frustrating PvP: in Drangleic Castle

    The looking glass knight started summoning human invaders (guess he always does that but I lucked out in my NG playthrough) and I just did not know how to deal at all. He covers so much ground that focusing on an actually challenging human opponent + him feels next to impossible. I got more frustrated than I've been with DS2 in a while after losing multiple times to that nonsense

  6. Posted

    Wow this one is pretty intense. Really great breakdown of how game systems combined with agency-less sexualized female NPCs create really horrific scenarios and often by design.

  9. Posted

    This game, Pay Day, and that one GTA IV mission all owe heavily to the stylistic choices of the "Heat" bank heist scene. Whereas GTA IV at least tried to tap into the themes of desperation that Heat was going for, BF:Hardline seems content with following Pay Day's superficial aping of the tone. There was even one *terrible* Polygon interview where a Battlefield PR guy was all "cops and robbers, pew pew, fun!"

     

    Where some further dissonance arises is pairing something that isn't meant to be taken very seriously with the overtly serious pre-existing Battlefield 3/4 military tone. You act like soldiers but in a "populated" urban setting. It isn't more or less moral than soldiers shooting each other, but it *is* more dissonant I think. As has been said here, if the mechanics had changed at all this might not be an issue, but it's clearly just a reskin. A TC mod practically.

     

    Rainbow Six: Seige, while having a huge problem with shitty damsel tropes, does seem to be a much better execution of the cops/robber formula.

  12. Posted

    Just finished the game. Really enjoyed the combat: it rides that fine line where I feel challenged without dying very often. I'm assuming that'll change during NG+ but the difficulty level of the first playthrough felt just right. I followed a similar pathway as others here mentioned of trying out everything a bunch in the first half of the game before settling down with a fairly consistent build by the end.

     

    My build by the end:

    Very passive heavy, especially reliant on jaunt (to speed up turn recycling) and bounce (generates a shield, super useful when fighting grant) Other two passives were purge for auto strikeback and load to drop very handy explosives everywhere. I only used 3 actives, void (which is insanely useful by the end, especially on 'man') with tap upgrade, breach with crash and ping upgrade and mask (to wait out turns). I was pretty much only using turns, the movement speed is a bit too sluggish and cumbersome to fight regularly

     

    The story was interesting but I echo the comments about it being too obfuscated. I can get behind a little mystery but it's important to lay out character motivation early and Transistor did not at all.

     

    If it's going to be a fridged lover plot as it ended up being I need to be aware of the fact that they were actually lovers. It wasn't clear until the final moments and I don't think that's a surprise that works when it's supposedly your characters main driving force in the game. The lover's role in red's life was super unclear for most of the game. I had assumed he was a suitor or just a superfan with an adoration bordering on creepy when he got spine drunk.

     

    The camerata were also terrible bad guys. I couldn't tell them apart and there wasn't nearly enough information to suss out why exactly what they were trying to do. I couldn't really tell who I was fighting and why and when. Really didn't like them being the lynchpin for the rest of the games events.

     

    The tone of the game definitely saves it and allowed me ultimately to overlook my negative feelings about the plot. Music was incredible and added tons of atmosphere and soul to the game. Without it, the plasticine nature of the plot would have stood out in starker contrast I think.

  13. Posted

    I also get strong Dota vibes from Transistor's combat system. The idea of combining various "functions" in surprising ways totally gels with the way Dota treats skills and items.

     

    And the way each function is representative of a character and backstory segment reminds me, in turn, of Dark Souls' item description based lore. It's fun seeing the way the Supergiant peeps have been inspired and how they've adopted their inspiration into something really fresh in its own way.

     

    The whole losing skills instead of dying mechanic is pretty brilliant. I felt I had to force myself to experiment with any item combo in Bastion that wasn't gun+hammer. The few hours I've played of Transistor thus far have been so much more mechanically varied than my entire time spent with Bastion. (Not to say Bastion's combat wasn't excellent, just a lot more of a 'pick what you like and stick with it' type of scenario)

  14. Posted

    I do think nerd/geek is a great example, because it also covers the two sided nature of reclamation.

     

    Someone can still call me a nerd and attempt to use it in a hurtful way. But as the idea of being a nerd is improved through reclamation, I can use it to feel better about myself and feel more central to society.

     

    Someone can call a woman a slut and use it in a pejorative way. It can, and is, used in this way. But for friends to playfully call each other sluts can actually be uplifting and sex positive.

     

    This also works for nigger/nigga.

     

    To me it's not about completing disarming the word, it's about using it to empower yourself through self-centering action. Dominant members of society can still attempt to use these words as pejoratives but marginalized members can still find ways to twist those words around for the opposite purpose. They're still weapons but now they fight for both sides.

  15. Posted

    Holy hell what an awesome cast and thread. So much food for thought. My brain is filled with thought peas. Dusted with media literacy.

     

    The South Park/Sopranos/Heisenburg villain valorization is a HUGE stumbling block / interesting thread for me. It also came up recently in my reactions to watching Wolf of Wall Street. I understood that Scorcese was kind of winking at us throughout and implying "what an asshole, this guy eh?" At the same time there were actual theaters full of bankers cheering the lascivious, gluttonous excess that was happening on screen. It's just extremely conflicting.

     

    I also had huge problems with the way Breaking Bad ended. Because villains are interesting and often moreso than heroes. But often it feels like popular media is addicted to riding this fine line dramatically. There are ever increasing examples of movie/series prime movers who are promoting messed up attitudes and are explicitly bad but are implicitly good guys or men of their time or whatever. It seems easier to write good stories that use this device or maybe it's just the current trend. I find it extremely problematic though (cue misandry klaxons)

     

    Also the suey park/cancel colbert stuff is super complicated and a lot of what i thought about it has been said. i don't think it's as simple as misunderstanding satire. i do think it's about thinking about WHY you're laughing at a certain joke and whether satire is being used to allow for marginalizing attitudes, in some ways. but it's a whole other huge discussion.

  17. Posted

    Small Game:

    Yeah it was neat, I'm not sure if I'd ever play that tiny of a game again though. With just three other people it was really easy to track who was trading tech. So at one point I was friends with someone and they were saying they were against this guy, the next, they both had the same technology levels, so I could never really trust them.

     

    There was a tipping point where three of us were going to come down on Sacroulix (SGP) but at the last second I decided to double, double cross and continue my blood feud with Dr. Zaius. I thought it was funnier, but it just made the game play out by the numbers as we were both over powered by Sacroulix.

     

    An interesting suggestion to the dark galaxy mechanic, would be to black out a players stats, how many stars they have, maybe even tech levels, it would have made the smaller game more interesting I think.

     

    Also, congrats SGP, I hope you name the baby Neptune.

     

    65 player game:

    I was only half paying attention and didn't really do a lot of politicking so was never in a position of power. The Thumbs Cabal at least set out to do a couple things and we took out a guy to more or less unify our little cluster. Meanwhile in other parts of the galaxy the real game was going on and eventually just washed over a couple of us. For the last few cycles I've just been diverting all funds to "youmeyou" as he has a greater chance of surviving a bit longer. But the behemoth is producing 500 ships an hour, at most, I was making 25.

     

    It's the very example the Idle Thumbs talks about with the fog of war. In our little corner of space we were doing alright, we were taking out the little guys and working together which was a lot of fun... then the fog of war lifts (figuratively, we could have been more aware what others were up to) and other people were a million years a head of us.

     

    Really interesting, but I noticed most of the behemoths in that game were the ones that started on the outer edges, which may have given them a slight advantage, then combine that with the dummy accounts, etc..

     

    Yeah it was an interesting game for sure. I'm about get eaten up by one of the mammoths. In some ways it kind of feels realistic? We had our own little squabbles but were never a match for the superpowers.

  18. Posted

    Agreed, I don't think age has anything to do with it. Well, I'm sure it's relevant for some people's experiences, but not mine. I have a lot of friends my ages, some younger, who are way into The Simpsons. I just never watched it because my parents wouldn't let me when I was young. I remember sneaking in a Halloween episode once because my friends at school talked about how awesome the Halloween episodes were (this must've been in like 4th or 5th grade, maybe a little older?), and my parents caught me and grounded me from TV for a while. Good times!

     

    Anyway, I just never got into The Simpsons once I was old enough for them to stop caring.

     

    And yeah, that's what's making Seinfeld so funny for me. Most of the problems they face are so dated, and would likely never be a problem today. I love it.

     

    Re: South Park: I don't just not watch South Park. I think it's dumb and I don't WANT to watch it.

     

    Well, Curb Your Enthusiasm is basically Seinfeld in the 00s so I wouldn't say the show is funny *because* of its dated setting.

     

    I'd argue a lot of the episode premises are centered around the main players being self-centered misanthropes and the world punishing them for it in hilarious ways. (this was unfortunately, rather explicitly laid out in the finale)

  19. Posted

    I'm actually having a lot of fun playing with the game purely on a mechanical level. It was always the personal aspects of it that soured the experience for me. Coworkers getting bitter and such. It's also cool being able to play it almost as a cooperative game with a thumbs cabal sharing tech and strategy.

  23. Posted

    I think the post-endgame is an interesting idea. Fable 2 had this to a limited extent. You made your choice and you lived in the world shaped by that choice. You could go on hanging out with your family and being lauded as a hero and that was that. It also allowed me to exchange stories with friends on what we chose ( the dog obvs) and why.

     

    Red Dead Redemption also had a super-cool ending/post-ending in terms of cycling story beats via new lineages.

     

    Once Fallout 3 introduced the Broken Steel DLC it had one of my all time favorite end games for a long form RPG. All the DLC combined was probably a whole new game's worth of content. And it also allowed me to further explore the vanilla game subtly changed by various aspects the DLCs brought (ability to craft ammo in the Pitt and water merchants in Broken Steel come to mind)

     

    So maybe well-made DLC is a good endgame. Guild Wars 2 is certainly exploring this with their Living World system of free expansions dropped regularly, rather than the traditional WoW-derived endgame of raiding dungeons over and over to get loot.

  24. Posted

    Yeah, his review was fair and seems to reflect the general critical consensus about the game. Even the Polygon review, which felt more negative, had a caveat where Aegis (another controversial figure) said he actually enjoyed playing the game for all its flaws.

     

    So basically it's a flawed game that still has a lot of good things in it. 

  25. Posted

    I know, right? Really dumb! Just like that time in Star Wars where Han and Luke are shooting TIE Fighters in the Falcon and Han turns around to yell "don't get cocky!" at Luke even though they have headsets on! Titanfall and Star Wars are stupid.

     

    Lol. This reminds me of my friend who says weird ragdoll corpses in Dark Souls are a deal breaker for him. Like, what? (nothing will beat wall hacking corpses in Stalker pounding that staccato drum beat in ever crescendoing collision sound effects)

     

    Vasari, one of my favorite window shopping subjects! I own both a Corsair k70 and a Das keyboard (forget the model). They're both great, clacky mechanical monstrosities. the k70 has a palm rest though. And reinforced WASD keys.