Problem Machine

Oh I use headphones as my situational awareness hack. Don't need to see em if you can hear exactly what they're doing.

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Yeah I've heard some people say that you need to do that in Dark Souls, otherwise how do you run and look at the same time? I just don't run and look at the same time. Plenty of time to adjust camera while I recover stamina.

My new (old, refurbished) phone's music app doesn't even have the option to play tracks in order on an album which is the most infuriating fucking thing. The way that so many people don't even conceive of the album as a work of music, just a bucket to shove individual music tracks into, just makes me deeply sad and frustrated. No, I don't want to listen to Abbey Road in fucking alphabetical order!

I like the part where Idle Thumbs (the streamer with the glasses) calls the salt rat a salt pig

I think that people pointed out that was the origin of Wario's name before -- though mostly I think as a reason why Waluigi's name isn't quite as stupid as it sounds to Americans. In light of recent revelations on Idle Thumbs, though, it does take on some new and sinister implications

I think the satire is extraordinarily effective -- articulating the massive gap between what it means to admire the accomplishments, arts, and even culture of black people and to actually respect them as human beings, which are often treated as equivalent.

When I played through the first half or so a year or two back it was very JRPG-ish for me. Chrono Trigger is one of my all-time favorite games, but I have a hard time actually playing it any more just because I no longer have as much patience for the genre conventions as I once did -- which is why I wish I'd played Earthbound when I did have patience for those conventions, because I loved pretty much everything else about it. The one entry on that other list you bring up here that comes to mind is Rogue Legacy, which I thought I would LOVE but ended up... Well, 'despising' is too strong a word, but I thought it was misguided in a few fundamental ways.

The one game that comes most readily to mind for me that I regret missing the boat on is Earthbound. I saw the oversized box and assumed that it was some weird peripheral game like Mario Paint, the only other game to come in an oversized box, and assumed that I didn't have the peripheral and couldn't play it. I'm pretty sure if I'd gotten to it at the time, though, it would have ended up as one of my all-time favorites.

Yeah I'm loving the show generally but that line lands the same way for me tbh. I'm sorry that Drew Carey ruined this for you.

I use a very similar extension to that which Chris has endorsed, but for Firefox! It's called LeechBlock, and even lets me set blocks of time, so for instance I have twitter blocked after 10 minutes every 3 hours. I originally downloaded it in November when I was getting obsessive and hyper anxious and just completely blocked twitter, but now I can give myself enough of a trickle to satisfy while not letting it eat all my time.

I prefer to give things letter grades. We all know how we're supposed to feel about getting a D.

Added followed hosted etc. I'm trying to see about getting onto a streaming schedule again, but still trying to figure out what will work for me. I'm probably going to be streaming multiplayer Terraria and Starbound along with Feeona and (maybe?) Badfinger and evilskillit on Fridays and Tuesdays respectively for a while. Currently playing through Ori and the Blind Forest, which I'm trying to do around noonish PST. If I can stick to a schedule for a couple of weeks and feel good doing it then I'll make it formal. Anyone know any good resources for setting up a channel to look more professional? I'm not exactly sure where to start in terms of overlays or pre/post-stream screens or what have you, but get the feeling they make a big difference when it comes to the presentation of a channel. ALSO: I noticed there are both 'idle_thumbs' and 'thumbs_readers' communities. Which is the preferred community for people to stream to? Which should I be linking to?

I think many would consider a 5 to be at best unkind

That's true, those things do make a difference. It'd be a lot harder to represent that with a map like this. I think that it's totally fair to say that the way areas are interconnected is simpler and more abstract in DS2, since you largely don't have the kind of landmarks that you do in DS1, it's just that the exaggeration irks me

Ahh that one is clever but its depiction of DS2 is so obnoxious to me. Those straight lines in practice would look pretty much like the branches on DS3, and some of them would circle around to meet each other. I know he frames it as his perception, but I don't think it's a fair take on them. And I just spent like 30 minutes trying to make a reasonably accurate map of the areas and their connections in the games for comparison. I think this also fairly clearly illustrates why I feel DS3 has the least interesting world design.

Ah I forgot those came in later. Yeah that's right, I'm getting my timelines mixed up a bit: Later games added the solid EOs and fixed the tracking on the energy EOs to make them good. The heavy one still saw some use in AC3, with people just trying to get basically point blank to make it hit, but it was a pretty non-viable strategy competitively, especially since the ACs that could spare that kind of weight were mostly the ones that needed OB the most. Ah they must have added that in a later game then, maybe Silent Line. The most popular weapons for the fire and forget strategy were the orbit launcher and the missile pods, since they didn't require any particular input to be effective and could be quickly spammed and dropped. Personally, I honestly didn't think much of this strategy: Even these weapons were usually greatly improved by careful and judicious use (some people favored using missile pods as just an extremely powerful short-range rocket, since if you hit someone with the pod itself all the missiles would detonate in their face) -- and, even though you're just firing them out as quickly as possible and then dropping them, that's still a chunk of the fight where your mobility is hampered and your opponent's isn't. I think it was largely not worth it -- nevertheless, it was a strategy that popped up fairly often.

Turn boosters shook things up a bit but not as much as you might imagine. In fact, it was overboost that originally gave heavies their fighting edge back, by allowing them to reset the encounter and forcing the lighter opponent to close in again. Turn boosters helped and made EO more viable, but since you need to maintain lock-on for a second or so to get good tracking it was still fairly easy to outmaneuver the enemy's reticle at close range. Oddly enough, back boosters ended up having a bigger impact, since on a light frame they provided a massive mobility boost which could be harnessed in interesting ways -- particularly using hover legs, which had tricks to coast for a really long way using momentum from that and from OB. EO isn't quite as useless as you make it sound, but didn't really see much use until Nexus, when the solid EO cores got a huge boost and the energy cores got regenerating ammo. The mid and heavy EO cores saw use, the former on light harrying builds since it had pretty good accuracy and the pressure of dodging that and conventional fire simultaneously was hard to cope with, and the latter in bulldog builds that just got as close as possible and deployed the heavy EO to do a lot of damage quickly. Dropping weapons had some crazy effects in competitive play. I can't remember if AC3 had this or not, but it was sometimes possible to pick dropped weapons back up, so quads using two heavy grenade launchers who would drop one, empty the other, then drop that one and pick the first back up became a thing. Lightweights using heavy back weapons that made them overweight and emptying and dropping them as quickly as possible became a thing -- in general this became a huge boost for weapons that were previously hampered by their low ammo counts. Also a thing: Accidentally dropping the wrong weapon, which won me a round at a tournament. It's funny that they were so reluctant to add left hand guns and then made the one weapon that they added so incredibly OP. I ran the numbers on the damage capacity of all the different guns and the howitzer has the most absurd damage capacity to weight ratio in the game. Its spammability, ability to stun, and high damage made it irrelevant that most shots missed: Even if you just spammed it, odds were good that you'd get more damage out of it than a laserblade. On the other hand, laserblades still managed some relevance just because of the odd property, present through all the games, of making you boost directly towards your opponent. Properly harnessed this meant a laserblade was actually a far more powerful mobility tool than any auxiliary booster. In AA I had an exclusively short range AC that was impossible to shake just because I'd swing the sword just as their overboost fired off and end up covering like 60% of their OB distance just flying off of that one swing. Still, ACs in AC3 overwhelmingly used the howitzer, which was one reason why this iteration was not fondly remembered. I believe AC3 is where they brought in the composer for EverGrace, which has a similarly weird soundtrack

Reusing a generic cloud poof asset in all these different ways with a color tween is clever. Is that a common technique or did you come up with that?

Did the second half of the WizJam4 stream ever happen?

Mirrors reflected the environment but not the player, since the player plays a vampire. I think they might actually just be a duplicate of the room geometry on the other side of a blocking volume, but I can't remember.

Oh that's gonna make a real nice jump cut one day

They mentioned Vampire: The Masquerade being able to do mirrors really easily, and in fact VtM: Bloodlines was the first game that came to mind when I thought about mirrors in games. Because the player can't actually see themselves in mirrors, there's a somewhat sneaky hidden passage disguised as a mirror that can actually be fairly deceptive. Nothing ground-breaking, but a good clever way to exploit the vampire loophole in mirror rendering in an interesting way. Oddly enough I've also gotten used to X/Y inversion in Dark Souls of all games. I don't know why, I just tried turning them both on and that felt the most natural to me out of the available control schemes. Apparently I've set myself up to suffer in the future if I want to play other third person games, though. Playing with the familiarity of spaces is one of the really interesting things that games opened up as a medium: It's not really possible to have a place feel like you belong to it and to subvert that feeling in a film or novel. I wonder, too, if harnessing and then subverting nostalgia in funny and disturbing ways is one of the reasons Undertale has had such an impact.

"This video contains content from WMG, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." :|

Yeah for the Karasawa it's completely aesthetic. I wish they'd stuck with the thin beam of AC1, it actually made it seem a much more lethal and refined weapon.