tankadillo

More importantly, how many stars do those reviews have? I only bother read reviews rated 7 stars or above.

It also acts as an auto-translator for when you get matched with people who don't speak your language (I assume so, at least).

I've been leveling up my outlander's shadowling ammo skill a lot lately, and my favorite thing in this game now is that the bugs you can squish are able to spawn shadowlings. My guy is running around stomping cockroaches and making their ghosts fight for him.

oops, I thought I was in the other Torchlight 2 thread.

Wow, you guys were right about Act 3 being really good. I've only just started and all of the encounters so far feel much more substantial than Act 1 or 2. Also, on the first day of October I get a bunch of masks drop. Coincidence? (I hate it when my coolest looking armor has the lowest stats.)

I just met the Djinni and I believe that over half of my play time now has been Act 2. This game really is huge, much much bigger than I expected. I am getting a bit bored with the desert setting though, so I'm really looking forward to Act 3! Also, is it normal for me to only just now find a healing spell? I rarely get spells drop (maybe because I'm an Outlander?) and I finally found a healing spell from a vendor. This should save me thousands of gold on potions now.

I'm really liking layout B of that ship. I try to get a teleport as quickly as I can and immediately start taking over ships. Sector 3 pretty much destroys me though, probably because I focus so much on leveling up my away team and teleport that my shields and weapons are pretty much useless :\

Have the devs talked at all about patching in any new features? Aside from basic stuff like Steam achivements, I'd love the ability to save/export replays.

I've always played on normal, but tonight decided to check it out on easy (partially to cheese my way through some achivements) and wow the difference is huge. I actually stopped playing around sector 5 just because I got bored, it was so stupidly easy. Normal is still so hard though.

Every time I jump to a solar flare, I think I'm so clever for opening all the airlocks to empty rooms and drain all the oxygen. It seems like every single time I do this, the very next thing that happens is my doors and oxygen systems go down.

I think you guys are probably right that a system like this is undeniably biased like that. The worst case scenario I see is that Steam gets a lot more games, but a much less diverse selection. I'm not too pessimistic about it though because I think Valve has a financial incentive not to flood their storefront with samey pandering zombie games.

It's interesting how Greenlight's entire purpose is to put *more* games on Steam, however everyone's concerns are that it will limit the selection instead. To counter you guys' example about games like Amnesia possibly having trouble on Greenlight, it's worth noting that Routine (Amnesia in space, as far as I can tell) was accepted by Valve after only about a week of voting. I found Routine through Greenlight, with no idea what it is, and immediately voted on it because it looks super cool. On the other hand, La-Mulana is a game with a very strong fanbase that has been asking for it on Steam for a while now, and it' still only 3% of its way to approval. It would be a real shame if it just sat in limbo forever, and Valve just assumed no one's interested because it isn't attracting a massive number of Greenlight votes. I assume that for short ~10 minute long story games (like Thirty Flights of Loving), they'll just have to make a name for themselves outside of Steam first. I'm thinking of stuff like The Stanley Parable which has existed for a while as a free mod, and has a pretty strong following. Personally, I'm not afraid of Greenlight limiting the selection of games, but rather reinforcing the status quo. Popular games that would get on Steam anyway will all be voted up, and niche or obscure games won't. But no matter what happens, it's not like Steam's the only place I can go to play games anyway, so I can deal with it.

Did anyone else die more often in this episode than in previous ones? I never died in episode one, only once in episode two because I was dumb and didn't pay attention, but died several times in three. I'm assuming that was a deliberate design choice on Telltale's part, since the shooting and punching parts seemed a bit harder. I guess this episode was supposed to be a bridge between the first and second halves of the season, since it just seemed to be setting stuff up for the next two episodes and tied up loose ends from the previous. The plot arc wasn't as strong as the previous ones either, and once I decided to check my achievements just so I could gage how far into the story I was.

I just got a Dota 2 key, and I've never played a game of lord's management in my life. I joined the steam group in hopes of playing with some fellow Thumbs who won't be too mean to me

You guys did a good job at articulating why I dislike games that pull a twist that reveals that you (or rather your character) is a horrible person and/or a mindless product of an environment because of everything you did by playing the game. The only game I can think of that actually did a good job at addressing that idea was Deus Ex. The twists are heavily foreshadowed throughout the game (like at the very beginning when Paul expresses his concern about you killing real people), and you're always implicitly given a choice on how to get around each situation. After it was revealed that (does Deus Ex need spoiler warnings anymore?) I changed my play style since I realized how cloudy the morality is. I've never been a huge fan of BioShock in general, but one thing about it that really irritated me was the fact that after you learn that literally nothing changes at all after that. You just keep on mindlessly killing a hundred nameless people just like you did before.

Finished this book a few days ago, and I really liked it, more so after letting it settle in my brain for a while. I may reread it to see if I can pick out any more subtleties I missed. The only weakness, to me, was the climax. It didn't see how learning that added anything to the story. We already knew that Tony misremembered his own past and didn't have all the information about Adrian's or Victoria's. The reveal at the end didn't do anything to develop those ideas because they had been firmly established at that point already. It felt like, for a moment, the story turned into a soap opera. It didn't really detract from the rest of the story, but I didn't see how it contributed to it. Maybe my opinion will change after I read it again. Overall that's a very minor complaint anyway.

I keep recommending this game to my friends, and I keep having a very hard time doing so. "It's an interactive movie that's mostly cut scenes with quick time events, a few simple puzzles, and moral choices! It's awesome!" Everything in that sentence immediately turns everyone off. I always have to follow up with "no guys I'm serious, it really is good! Trust me!" I need to find a better way to pitch this game.

In regards to the general writing of the article, it drives me crazy when people make arguments like "3 days multiplied by [big number] equals OVER A DECADE OF LOST TIME." It's so vague, abstract, and removed from tangible reality. He doesn't present a very convincing case that those hypothetical 3 lost days have negatively impacted the quality of any particular game, not even his own.

If you read lots of public domain works, then having an e-reader is almost a necessity. I've saved so much money and read so much more since I got my Kindle, just because every single public domain book was freely available to me at any time. It's worth mentioning, however, that most of these ebooks are made by an open community that frequently pays little attention to quality control. I've notified Amazon when I find ebooks that have downright horribly formatting (I've seen ebooks with margins taking up half of the screen, enormous font sizes, inappropriate linebreaks everywhere, etc.) but to my knowledge they haven't done anything about fixing or removing the offending books. I once tried reading a book that had bits of every single paragraph in the entire book (as far as I could tell) missing. Amazon had it listed as the "official" Kindle version of that book, which means it shares reviews with regular print versions that don't have those issues. In the end though, I've saved enough money that the inconvenience of running into a few bad apples is hardly a deterrent, but it's still an issue that needs to get sorted out somehow. I don't know how non-Amazon services fare in that regard.

Another long time listener and part time forums lurker. With the relaunch I finally felt motivated to register and start posting. Looking forwards to more good casts and forum posts.