sclpls

Oof. Experiencing awful performance with the game again after this update. Hope it gets fixed before the Elusive Target release!

Yeah, this was a really rough episode to listen to because of the audio issues. :-( Gray Goo is great. Yeah, the name is really unappealing (though it basically is just referencing a really cool sci-fi idea), but it is the best RTS I've played in a long time. My only issue is the minimap drives me kind of crazy. I wish I could set it to the left side of the screen, which is where I'm used to seeing it thanks to DOTA, and I also find it really hard to read. But aside from that the game is basically perfect, and exactly what I want out of a traditional RTS design.

Haha I missed his 2nd post XD. Mostly I just wanted an excuse to talk about stuff I read in A History of Reading because it's a really fun book.

That's concerning. I think they weathered through a lot of the initial criticism of the game from people that were upset about the episodic structure & the always online components, and most of the recent steam reviews were overwhelmingly positive. But people buying episodes piecemeal are getting a really raw deal with this bonus episodes feature, and I think they'll take a (justified) hit because of it.

His character on Veep is a true sociopath tho

On a recent episode of the Crate & Crowbar Tom Francis pointed out just how obsessively data driven Valve are, and don't seem to follow any moral or ethical interests. He gave an example of a talk they gave about how the Steam store didn't use some fake currency thing the way Microsoft used to do that for the Xbox store. But their argument wasn't that it was bad for consumers, it was that there wasn't any evidence that this was effective at making the store more profitable. So I think the current course correction from Valve is the best you're going to get from them.

In Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading he cites some neuroscientific research that suggests that our ancestors' brains had to evolve to handle silent reading. Reactions to silent reading varied wildly. Saint Augustine famously made quite an impression with his habit of silent reading, and various figures took it as evidence that the man was truly touched by God to possess such a habit and gift. Certainly though this was a fairly disruptive practice from the normal method of reading aloud in groups. The new method was dangerous since it allowed individuals to arrive at their own interpretations of textual meaning instead of forming a group consensus. Technical innovations that made texts easier to read such as punctuation, and spaces between words helped facilitate the silent reading revolution. Whatever parallels might exist with Pokemon Go though, I am taking the safe bet that it won't have a similarly large impact on the course of human history.

Assuming it works the same way as last year it will happen right before the group stages. I believe it just took one day to get through the matches.

Really hoping for a strong Chinese showing this year. I'd be stoked to see Newbee or Wings take it this year.

I did this elusive target similarly to Steve Gaynor, but in a less insane fashion.

Man, so Chris complaining about Steam's search bar reminded me how weird it was to try and download Evolve this weekend now that the game is free-to-play only to discover that typing the word "evolve" into the Steam search bar does not bring up the game!

The less said about that iOS port the better.

I keep a copy of NetHack on a USB stick so there's always at least one PC game I can play if nothing else is available.

I think there were two things that made the Pirates! game special. One was the simulation qualities of the game. When I encountered the game in the late 80s I hadn't seen anything like that before (I had, admittedly, not played very many computer games at that point), but it was really cool the way these different colonial powers would declare war on each other, or declare peace, and there were a lot of moving parts that had nothing to do with whatever the player was up to. The power fantasy the game presented was quite alluring. There are all these colonial powers doing the sorts of things that nation states do, but because of the remote location and the technologies of the time their power is quite constrained. Meanwhile the player is able to operate as this independent force free to engage with the world as you like. The only other game that I thought did a great job of selling that sort of fantasy was the original Mass Effect game. I'd definitely love to see the XCOM team take a crack at another Pirates! game. Keep the overworld strategy layer in tact, but add a turn-based tactical combat game to the mix, maybe some XCOM-like RPG style progression systems to resolve various events instead of the num pad driven mini-games, and throw in some Paradox style events system for good measure, and I think you'd have a real gem of a game.

This article spans a lot of different things so it is hard to summarize, but it covers a lot about the hegemony of popular movies, music, and how it isn't cool right now to dislike popular things, which is not how things have always been. But mostly I like the article just because it is the most robust piece of criticism I have read in awhile. That is probably more on me, I read too much junk, but this article was a nice reminder for me of how satisfying it is to read a really thorough piece of considered criticism. I don't even know how I feel about the argument, I just like that it got me to think about some ideas about culture from a different perspective. http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-pop-pop-pop-popular

I don't have any interest in relitigating the arguments over XCOM 2, but I think Rob is misreading the situation that not a ton of people are still talking about XCOM 2 as a sign of vindication that maybe the game is not as good as people thought. XCOM:EU came out around the end of 2012, and I don't recall any other game coming out afterwards that distracted me from playing it. On the other hand XCOM 2 comes out early this year, and there have been a shit ton of games that have come out that I'm excited to play. So I see it as more of a timing thing. I still have XCOM 2 on my favorites list, and I keep thinking about clicking it and jumping back in, but then I think about how there's gonna be DLC coming out that adds a whole bunch of new stuff, and I think maybe I should wait for that stuff to come out first... But basically the amount of quality games coming out this year makes it hard for me to devote a ton of time to any game this year.

Same. Although I'm about to go on vacation, but if people are still playing in mid-July hit me up!

I think everyone is a little wary about Microsoft trying to meddle around and have a bigger footprint in PC gaming after the whole Games for Windows debacle.

Ahh, thanks for the clarification. Looking forward to that!

Yeah the side effect for me is I barely paid any attention to the non-Valve events. Like ESL One was this weekend, and I just totally ignored it whereas just a year ago I felt like that tournament was a big deal!

Yeah they really need to rethink this and figure out what they want to accomplish because right now they have this rule in place, and they seem to be fiddling with the structure of the tournament to keep that rule in place. Not ideal at all. If they really desperately want to have roster locks I also think they need to have some sort of off season which doesn't really exist anymore in DOTA.

Sword dads!

North America goes from winning TI to receiving no direct invites in a year!

Designer Notes?

Looks like Aui might be an additional coach for Secret?