Problem Machine

Ah yeah, I ran into some of those problems with triple-shot as well. TBH I probably would have self-destructed anyway if I wasn't rolling knee-deep in spirit hearts from blank card and dark bum. Those chain reactions were getting pretty crazy.

But it sounds amazing. It's not amazing?

Just did my first chest run, and boy was it a doozy. Ipecac + triple shot + the parasite (splitting tears). If you think that sounds like a recipe for disaster, well, you're not wrong... except I also had blank card and hierophant as well as a dark bum to keep me in spirit hearts. Before I got the hierophant I had a two of clubs card, and along with a bombs are key pill... well, I didn't have any trouble with locks, and on the rare occasion when I needed explosives a bit more precise than three ipecac shots that split into 6 more I was well stocked.

Sorely disappointed that Tammy's Head with Monstro's Lung doesn't unleash a screen-covering storm of death

Everything about that picture is amazing

Oh, great, a game ghost.

Paired with the resemblance to dreadlocks it carries some, uh, unfortunate implications

You... might want to get glasses?

I also really like the idea of having a simple syntax to declare an pointer ownership that will deallocate once it goes out of scope. I guess there's a couple of other languages with that feature, but it's sure as hell a leg up on C++

Just got magnetic tears for the first time. Fuck magnetic tears. Congrats magnetic tears. Good job murdering me.

Grandson of disgraced senator Leland Yee. He changed his name to escape the shame, but only very very slightly.

Just had an absurdly powerful run and unlocked Blue Baby. Cricket's Body + sacred heart + blood clot + mom's eye + pill bottle + tear bombs are the salient points I think. The biggest danger was being blinded by my tears spraying everywhere, which is pretty much how I took most of my damage. Bombs in particular were terrifying: Homing bombs which released a spray of homing tears which each split into four more homing tears

The Objectivity Myth: Why Games Need Gonzo Journalism by Maddy Myers Shame about the technical problems, but I thought it was a pretty interesting talk anyway

It's not a bad title, though if you come up with a sweet name for the ship itself then you might want to go with that instead. At one point, for one of the tigsource game comp/jam things, I briefly worked on a game called Monstrous Derelict, based on this fragment of a story idea from HP Lovecraft's notes: The idea there being to tell a story both about a badass haunted Titanic-esque ship and the monstrous incompetence of the player character that brought him there (I think maybe the idea was he was the captain responsible for it sinking, but that would be a big reveal). Unfortunately the team totally fucking flaked because internet people and it never went anywhere, which is a shame because I thought it had a lot of potential.

You might want to make a new topic about this. These are interesting questions but kind of hard to get into the specifics of, and this is really more a thread to discuss GG's BS. My short thoughts on this is that this is probably unfortunately what a lot of entry level stuff will look like, and there's probably not a lot you can do about it. These sound like legit concerns, but probably not worth making waves over if you're still new on the job? Then again, if your sense is that they're open to this kind of feedback then feel free to give it a shot. If you're looking for data to support your hypothesis, maybe you could search through the Gamasutra archives to see if anyone's written about it?

Men, Get On Board With Misandry

Charger is the best at preventing shiva stacks, makes linear paths and ledges dangerous, and has by far the most powerful melee attacks which lets him down a low-health survivor and then charge a healthy survivor off into the distance, splitting a team's attention. I kind of would like to see the other pinning SI buffed up to the charger's level of overall effectiveness, since I think he's by far the strongest of the four. The angle and timing of his charge are super important. The problem with the spitter is she just spits, and then might as well not exist. Occasionally she can get in some weak 4-damage scratches, and very rarely she can do something worthwhile with her death-puddle, but the spitting mechanic isn't that interesting and she doesn't have anything else going on like the confusion smoker or boomer can cause with their area effects or the damage the hunter and charger can do with melee. Area denial is something that is only rarely worth doing, and basically never worth giving up a pinner for, and cutting off routes only works if you can get it down early enough that it's matured enough to do damage when they get there but not so early that it's already fading away. The overwhelming majority of the time, the spitter just spits on whoever the charger hits to amplify damage. It's a relatively one-dimensional class.

I wanna get in for sure if there's gonna be l4d1/2 vs at any point. Just let me know a while ahead of time since I need to reinstall it (limited disk space ) And yeah, they're all reliant on teamwork, but spitter is completely useless without her team. Any pinner has the possibility of basically instantly killing a survivor anywhere there's a one-way drop, boomer can sacrifice to delay the team, but spitter can do nothing at all if she's the last one up. She doesn't actually do a very good job of solving the problem she was added to solve. I don't mean to get down on either of them too much, because I think in practice they both work okay, but they really feel half-baked compared to the nuanced and thought-out roles of the original three.

Jockey is okay but pretty redundant with the smoker, which I actually think is more fun since you can be a little trickier, pulling down from ledges and across gaps. Spitter relies more on teammates than any other SI: Most of them can do SOMETHING by themselves, but even if you land a spit on all 4 it's completely worthless if your team isn't there to keep them from instantly running out of it. I find her pretty hit-and-miss, and feel like she could have been designed more elegantly to fill a more nuanced role, as with the boomer. Boomer you can also be a lot trickier with, spawning behind cars and vomiting over them, jumping off roofs and spawning in at the moment just before you'd become visible, etc.

Didn't finish because I was getting super bothered that he was conflating the intended purpose of rhetorical devices with their rampant abuse by progressives looking for scapegoats. These are problems that have been observed and described without the implication that they're intrinsic to the understanding of tone policing etcetera. I probably just don't have the attention span right now though.

I doubt it will be twisted so much as ignored, the same way GG ignored all of the clarifications re: Jenn Frank's Guardian piece. Though I think the criticisms are legit, I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make if they were addressed.

IGF posted an apology that seems pretty decent to me. http://igf.com/2014/11/a_statement_on_igf_inclusivity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+igfnews+%28IGF+News%29

I think it's decent enough but wasn't impressed at first... but I've been noticing that as I play more it seems like new layers are getting added in, particularly when I'm in rooms with lots of enemies. I'm curious what the full extent of this adaptable soundtrack is. That's probably why they made a new soundtrack, though, since it would be difficult and not especially rewarding to try to do the same trick with a soundtrack everyone's heard 100 hours of.

Absolutely, yeah. I barely ever touched campaign, and mostly found it kind of boring since you can get away with so much and only get to play the survivors which, IMO, are pretty milquetoast compared to the variety of SI.

Jesus Christ, the speculation about how Mattie Brice is probably a rich kid who has no idea what things are like in the real manly man world of STEM is the shit cherry on the moron sundae.