sclpls

Ahh yeah, I probably should have mentioned the name of the game rather than just casually reference it huh? I was indeed referring to The Deadly Tower of Monsters.

If you aren't able to get a ticket they have very large screens setup in the park that you can watch for free, and I did that sometimes when I needed to just step out from being in a dark, loud arena for a long time. It was a pretty great viewing experience for the most part watching it outside. So that can be a backup plan in case you can't get a ticket. Well worth it in my opinion!

Haha yes! I remember the amazing feeling when I discovered the dir/w command, and I could actually read all the files in a directory!

Personally I was relieved to discover that Quadrilateral Cowboy didn't feature any real programming. My problem with games like Glitchspace and Double Fine's Hack n Slash is that doing all the work of programming, but with a video game avatar interface rather than a text editor is actually a miserable experience. So I wasn't really looking forward to playing another game of that type. Happily, QC is more like you have these pre-written scripts, and all you are doing is running command lines. The elements borrowed from heist movies in QC really is fantastic though, and what has kept me going. While I still eagerly await Jean Pierre Melville the Video Game, QC is the next best thing.

I agree with Nappi's assessment. I found there's often a real issue with the readability of Headlander. Sometimes you enter a new room, and you don't know where you are, but you've attracted a lot of guards attention and there are lasers flying everywhere and you're not sure where you are either since you're in one of the guard bodies. I also found the controls fairly awkward, it was kind of weird that the primary buttons I was using on a controller were the left bumper, and the right trigger. Those criticisms aside, I am deeply appreciative of a studio releasing a Metroidvania type game that isn't punishingly difficult, but instead is simply fun to explore. Also it is kind of crazy that we've gotten two action-adventure type games in the last year that have fully absorbed the aethetics of sci-fi B films from two different eras of sci-fi B films!

I'm not going this year, but I went last year. I'm very jealous, I would have loved to go again but it just wasn't in the budget this year. The trickiest thing to figure out is breakfast. There aren't a ton of options near the arena. This wasn't a big deal for me, I rarely eat breakfast, but proved to be a bit of an annoyance for my wife. I think we ended up ultimately settling on eating at some spot with good lox bagels near Pike's Place. There's a very good sushi place nearby called Shiro's. It is probably the best sushi I've had in the U.S., and the prices are very reasonable. Without reservations (not even sure if they take them or not...) expect to wait half an hour to get seated though, it is understandably popular. The EMP Museum is nearby the Arena as well, and very cool. They had a great Star Wars exhibit when we were there. Bring sunscreen! Normally it is rainy and cloudy in Seattle, but I think in August it is like other places in that it is mostly sunny (though not always hot, still a good idea to bring things like jackets or hoodies).

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Owned

While the title for this episode is strong, I think we also need to appreciate the parallel universe where this episode is called, "I Considered An Oeuvre".

Yeah Review has a really amazing arc to it.

Yay! http://steamcommunity.com/games/240440/announcements/detail/955145859582492969

Reloading to an earlier point did fix the issue.

I'm also encountering some weird bugs for the Bergamot Tower levels. Trying to use the deck causes me to crash through the floor and die. When I restart the level I can't use any equipment, and also can't even exit the game without alt tabbing out and shutting it down.

Oh cool!

One weird design choice in this game is if you use the portable record player during one of the missions it will keep playing even after the mission is over, but at that point there's no way to turn the music off until you start the next mission, and meanwhile it is clashing with other music playing. That aside though, this game is so amazing.

Hahaha yeah Ross Perot was a trip. Personally I think the idea of a viable 3rd party in the U.S. is nonsense. Politics is all about coalition building. In a parliamentary system you have procedures for different political parties to form governing coalitions, so then you end up with functioning minority parties. But in the American winner-takes-all approach to democracy of course there will always be a strong trend towards two political parties that try to represent as large a community as permitted by their general ideological axis.

I get that a lot of people associate managing large number of things with strategy games, and that's definitely an important subset of strategy games. But there are plenty of board games that people think of as strategy games that don't involve managing large number of things so to me its an insufficient way to categorize things. And I think it's okay for people to think of games like DOTA as something else because hey it is this super weird thing that is doing a lot of different things, but I also don't think there's any good reason to insist it isn't a strategy game either.

You just do a lot of the same things in DOTA that you do in other strategy games. Like, if you look at a typical Euro board game what a player is typically doing is building up an economic engine, and then, at some crucial point, converting that economic advantage into taking points/objectives. DOTA works the same way. In a game like Twilight Struggle there are different zones of the map that a player is trying to control at any given time, and their relative importance shifts as the game progresses. So to with DOTA. I could go on and on. The actual distinction is the amount of weight that is emphasized on the strategic qualities of the game. CS:GO has strategic elements, but at the end of the day the most important aspect is how good is your team at clicking on the heads of the characters that make up the opposing team. Clicking on things in DOTA is important, but not nearly as important as all the strategy stuff. Strategy games are very heterogenous (which is why they're great!), but that means that things are necessarily fuzzy and so you have to consider slightly subjective criteria like weight rather than hard and fast rules. If you want to look at sports and card games you can see some fit into the idea of a strategy game much more neatly than others. Strategy is much more emphasized in soccer or basketball than in pole vaulting. Poker and Bridge are easier to understand as strategy games compared to War. So I don't think I can point to any one thing in DOTA and say this is what makes it a strategy game. But the overall feel is much more like a strategy game to me than an action game. When I look up the stats for a game I play on a site like yasp.co I'll see I typically have the lowest actions per minute of any player, and yet it is still easy for me to have the highest impact as well. My ability to play the game well has nothing to do with having the best twitch reflexes. Making the better decisions wins the games. Another important criteria for me is what is the heritage of the game? Part of the reason I feel perfectly confident calling Gone Home and Firewatch games is because they are things made by game developers. I think of Gone Home as an immersive sim even though it doesn't have any combat and isn't set in a derelict spaceship or whatever because I know the qualities of immersive sims were important to Fullbright's design sensibilities. So the fact that DOTA is a Warcraft 3 mod is actually very important, rather than some incidental aspect. Its ideas and inspirations are very much from the strategy and RPG space. The way the game is iterated and improved upon is done in the way that a strategy game developer would iterate and improve upon a game. Does it do everything a strategy game does? Of course not, but no such game exists. But I still fail to see how it doesn't belong to one of the many branches of the strategy game tree.

Man, I just don't agree with that at all. But I don't want to get into a long argument about that so I'll just say that if you talk to any pro DOTA player they will call DOTA a strategy game, and if you talk to any pro CSGO player they won't call CS:GO a strategy game even though undoubtedly CS:GO has a lot of strategic qualities. And that, at a bare minimum, is probably a meaningful consideration when trying to determine whether something is an action-y strategy game, or a strategic action game. But regardless, my point remains the same that people will exclude certain things as being strategy games ("there's no base-building!", "you only control one unit!", "you play it on your phone!", etc.) regardless of whatever strategic qualities the game has (and I totally get it, I've rolled my eyes over the years at various things Tom Chick has proclaimed to be strategy games), and that makes the space smaller than maybe we should regard it, and the audience similarly smaller, and as a result even more gendered.

I agree with just about everything Rob & Danielle had to say, along with poster rharwick, about the lack of women in the strategy game scene. I have two simple points to add. 1. I can't help but notice that people have a habit of defining strategy games in a way that just so happens to exclude subsets that women happen to play. Even the author of the email sort of excluded games like League of Legends and DOTA, which in my mind are 100% hardcore strategy games. I think city builders are also a subset of strategy games that people tend to think of as strategy games with an astericks. And I don't know the percentage of women playing a game like City Skylines, but I'd be willing to bet money that it is higher than the % of women playing the latest Slitherine title. We can debate why certain games get regarded as not "true" strategy games, but I think the result is that certain games that women are playing ended up getting excluded from the conversation about strategy games generally. 2. When I think of strategy games that have resonated with women I know, I think of games like Civilization or Concrete Jungle. The shared common feature is an interface and art style that is inviting and very newcomer friendly. However strategy games are pretty famous for their unappealing (to put it mildly) interfaces. For people already deep into the genre perhaps that's not a problem, you learn to deal with a game's shortcomings. But when that audience is already male dominated it means the opportunities for women to get into the genre diminish. To turn things around I think you'd need more games with a polished presentation. But as mentioned most strategy game developers are working with pretty limited budgets so this isn't something that can be easily fixed. And the issues with how women are socialized would still remain a problem. Rob's description of the Tour de France was beautiful. One of these years I'm sure I will get into it!

I'm also seeing the new Star Trek movie on Tuesday. I can't believe I'm seeing two new movies in a week, what a time to be alive!

Yeah, Busey was disappointingly straightforward. As much as I love the Sapienza area I think they need to stop doing elusive target missions there unless they put a lot of interesting rules in place because otherwise most of the time these missions are going to be a little too easy. I actually held off from killing him for awhile just so I could follow him around and listen to some bantz. I didn't even see Gary Cole. The nighttime missions are really cool though, I am enjoying those a lot!

It is true, that merely as a businessman, Trump hasn't been afforded the opportunities to engage in the morally awful practices of foreign policy that a secretary of state is responsible for. I fail to see how that makes people in the Middle East and Latin America safer under a Trump administration. We know that Trump has been signaling he wants to give Russia a freer hand in its foreign policy practices, and he seems uninterested in upholding diplomatic norms that have been in place since WWII to make the world relatively more peaceful. He has also openly advocated for torture, and doing horrible things not just to people that commit violent acts, but also against family members. Both of those directions strike me as increasing the amount of violence inflicted on peaceful people, not the other way around. Perhaps he is simply exhibiting campaign bluster, and we'll see a conventional Republican foreign policy agenda. That is still an agenda that for the last few decades has consistently been more ruthless and bloodthirsty than even the most hawkish alignments from Democratic candidates. The wide expanse of the U.S. military-industrial complex being what it is, U.S. foreign policy is aggressively horrible and violent even under the reigns of relatively dovish leaders like Jimmy Carter. You need a much more radical transformation than just who is heading up that organization to change that. But I'd still rather have someone that engages in modern statecraft heading that up than someone who wants to take foreign policy in the direction of the Roman Empire. I can't think of an election where the notion of "both parties are equally awful" has been less true.

I expected to enjoy the new Ghostbusters, but even so the movie definitely surpassed my expectations. Really smart, funny script.

Schultz has resigned. Good riddance!