sclpls

My guess is that Jon and Soren didn't work on it, so they didn't comment on it.

My definition of a party game is a game where actively trying to win completely misses the point of the game (and potentially diminishes the enjoyment). Examples: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Apples to Apples, Taboo, Pictionary. Games like Mafia and Werewolf also potentially work as party games depending on the crowd. A healthy amount of drinking helps. I haven't listened to the podcast yet, but looking over the list of games discussed this sounds more like games that don't take forever to play, but I don't think I could get most people I know to play a game of Agricola, but I could definitely get anyone to play Taboo. But I guess my definition of party games wouldn't be appropriate on a strategy game podcast.

It is kind of interesting that the final tutorial mission is the more finished looking setup which is completely at odds with the fiction of the game, but hey, why would you pay attention to those cut scenes anyway? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't normally eat breakfast, but yesterday I made donburi with chicken & eggs, and it was tasty.

Oh god, ppd's jabs at Arteezy, too good.

Note: Sean died on the way back to his home Planet

The conversation about how much leniency to give a TV show reminded me of a similar insight I had with getting into a band's discography. I've always detested the Grateful Dead, but have plenty of friends that that have gotten inside that bubble. And they always try to tell me that I just always need to hear some particular track off of some particular bootleg (it's always different depending on who you talk to...) and that will be the missing key that suddenly unlocks the revelation that actually this band is amazing, or at the very least that there were these nuggets to be found. But eventually I realized I just wasn't hearing whatever the fans were, and even if there was stuff I might like there is a ton of stuff I know I will appreciate on a deep level that doesn't involve having to wade through a bunch of trash. And I bring a similar approach to getting into TV. If I'm not feeling it after two episodes I'm more than happy to just stop. That might sound a bit extreme to some people, but I'm not interested in watching that much TV anyway, the point is everyone needs to find their ratio of BS they are willing to put up with.

Man, I wish Hitman had released a little earlier when Steve was on the podcast because I would have loved to have heard his reaction. Based on his twitter he seemed really enthusiastic, but it would be great to hear him go into detail about it. Oh well. I've played the game for like 6 hours, and I'm really into their approach to remixing these levels, and when I'm in the game I'm constantly exploring the environment in increasing detail because I want to figure out how I can accomplish some other set of objectives, and you can only do that by really scouring the level for all these little things. Yeah, there definitely is a thing where sometimes a community gets upset for the wrong reason. Valve just implemented a change to DOTA where they revealed the attack range of the towers, and also the range of neutral camp spawn boxes (if you don't know don't ask), and there is a sizable portion of the community complaining about the change even though there isn't any good reason why that sort of information should be opaque to the player. For a developer I guess you just need to listen to the community, and try and understand where they are coming from. Which doesn't always mean give into what they want, but ideally the developer then has room to consider the implementation from a critical perspective and try and evaluate what you're trying to accomplish, if that goal is reasonable, and if this implementation is a reasonable way to achieve that goal...

I've done some travelling to other countries during election years, and they are covering U.S. elections fairly rigorously. Of course you don't get the volume of coverage that you would get in the U.S., but you can expect to see something about the U.S. elections on any given day show up in the front page of major newspapers. For example, I remember being in Spain and France during the 2008 election and they did a great job of covering the details of the primaries, but they couldn't really grasp how Americans saw the Clinton vs Obama race, for example. And this shouldn't come as a surprise given that the U.S. has such an oversized influence on world events. I definitely feel like it is pretty unfair that the rest of the world doesn't get to vote in our elections since so many countries will be so heavily affected by the outcome.

I wouldn't feel too bad. Though they did announce a release date awhile ago I feel like they've been pretty low key when it comes to promoting the game.

Yeah I feel super bad for W33 and Misery. I don't think my heart is into rooting for this new Secret lineup. And yeah, Valve has turned the Majors and TI into a joke with the way the current system works it is potentially possible to lock out a top-tier player from competing.

He's living that hobo indie dev lifestyle and making games on trains. https://bburbank.itch.io/discharge

1.I never said it doesn't happen to other people, but it is an important piece of contextual information in understanding the relationship between Clinton and the media. 2. Gormongous already brought up her comments about AIDS and I already agreed that was a valid criticism. However a lot of criticism of Clinton from the media comes down to tone policing. There was an infamous moment in the 2008 campaign when Clinton got emotional and teared up, and the press was vicious against her, it was seen as manipulative, inauthentic, etc. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say she is not allowed to act like a normal human being. I specifically called out more general criticisms of the way she talks, which tends to be vague and non-committal, I think veers into sexist territory. As I said where you quoted me, I'm not trying to convince anyone to change their mind about who they are supporting. There is just a specific piece of criticism from people on the left that I really think they need to knock off because it comes from a really ugly place.

Yeah, this is probably especially relevant when it comes to strategy games (in the broadest sense of the term) where there are so many complex systems at work it is really hard for developers to even understand their own game. When Civ 5 came out there was this kind of infamous piece of criticism about the design decisions of the game from a former Civ 4 playtester by the name Sullla (link here: http://www.sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html ). There was a lot of push back at the time from defenders of the game, but by the time Jon did a post-mortem of Civ 5 his criticisms ended up being about the same.

Yeah, point taken. I was not at the GDC Talk, and I haven't looked at the Steam forums, so I don't have any knowledge of how ugly it got, but I'm certainly familiar with how much gamers can act like a bunch of entitled babies. One thing that is clear is that developers just can't have the same relationship with people playing their game in EA that they would have with traditional play testers. And that should be fairly obvious since there is a difference between someone paying money to play a game in an early state vs someone that is paid or volunteering to play the game in an early state. It does seem that with each passing year the expectations surrounding EA games are going to become increasingly clear. I'm now thinking back to a conversation Jon Shafer and Soren Johnson had awhile back about EA games (possibly on 3MA?), and Jon was very cautious about early access for his game, and he hasn't made it available on Steam, and he has been radically reworking systems as he goes on. And at the time Soren thought this was crazy and his attitude was that early access was essentially a form of arbitrage for game designers -- it was just free money on the table. In light of how Darkest Dungeons played out though I think Jon was probably wise to hold off from putting his game up on Steam. Finally, I just want to post a picture of a slide from the Rocket League talk that Soren just posted on twitter because it is kind of hilarious.

I've never been to GDC so maybe my perception is way off base, but aren't the majority of atendees game developers? I wouldn't think that game developers would be up on the controversies of other games (they are too busy managing the communities for their own games). I imagine a more general audience you would feature more people familiar with the corpse problem. I think dismissing the vocal minority is potentially a mistake too. They might be a minority, and they might be complaining about things in a stupid and over-the-top way, but they are also probably the segment of that community that is most engaged with that game. I see developers talk about this all the time, always listen to feedback because even if people can't articulate a criticism sensibly it does probably mean there's something wrong with your design. Certainly my own personal experience playing Darkest Dungeon in EA was I put a couple of hours into the game, they made the changes with the corpses, and then the combat felt a lot more tedious to get through. I understand wanting to combat a degenerative strategy, but their solution was heavy handed and, for me at least, eliminated the basic enjoyable loop of the game. I don't have an issue with difficult or challenging or even slightly unfair games, but if the game feels boring I'm going to drop out and that's certainly what happened to me with Darkest Dungeon.

It is also just a general trend where candidates and politicians engage with the media less and less, and more on their own terms. One of the downsides of the internet I guess. Before the internet politicians needed the media to get exposure. Now they can just use twitter or youtube to reach people without worrying about some pesky reporter sending them off-script!

Personally, I think the best approach to solving the stack of doom problem is Jon Shafer's approach in At the Gates. :-)

This definitely reminds me of the double standard with how the media covered Tea Party rallies vs Occupy Wall St. The media was definitely ready to jump on board the Tea Party movement as an "authentic expression of American anger" or whatever garbage phrases they were using at the time, but it took months before Occupy Wall St. was treated as anything more than a curiosity. The media definitely loves going for the smelly-hippy-punching-bag trope.

Yes, absolutely. I wasn't trying to claim there aren't valid, substantive criticisms about Clinton. She is very much a politician in the full sense of the term. But when people complain about the way she talks that gets into some messy territory with how women in powerful positions are perceived compared to men.

I've seen a lot of people make this complaint about Clinton. But I remember what reporting on the Clintons was like in the 90s, and I think that family's paranoid relationship to the media, and how they present themselves is kind of justified? Because total nothings frequently got blown up out of proportion. And this is all the worse for Hillary who has been a prominent woman in the media eye and she is just not allowed to act human at all, anything will be interpreted by the media in the most negative light possible. So it drives me a little nuts when people are overly harsh on Clinton about this kind of stuff. Bernie Sanders gets to play the guy with integrity, but he's also a white dude from the state of Vermont, and that gives him an enormous amount of privilege that Hillary lacks. And I'm not saying this to try and get anyone to change their mind about which candidate they are supporting, but on this count at least I really don't think it is fair to turn Hillary into this villain because the decks are pretty stacked.

Yeah, the gameplay footage definitely has looked great! I was really uninterested when this game was first announced, but I am totally on board with Stellaris at this point.

Honestly I use it way more now then when I first picked it up. It is really hard to get into and you kind of need to deprogram your assumptions about how controllers should work, but it works great once you get the hang of it.

I have the opposite read where I think people are profoundly underestimating Clinton's viability as a general election candidate. In this case the conventional wisdom is correct as opposed to the sea of hot takes and Slatepitches that make up how most people are digesting this election. People are underestimating her because she lost to Obama in 2008, and because people underestimated how strong a candidate Bernie Sanders is, and so she appeared kind of weak comparatively because she wasn't crushing it even harder. But it is pretty obvious she is running an incredibly strong campaign. Sanders managed to capture a huge swath of the white liberal city-dwelling demographic of the Democratic base. Unfortunately for him, this does not make up the majority of the Democratic base, not even close. If you look at raw numbers of votes, Clinton is outperforming everyone, including Trump. And Republicans are much better at voting in primaries than Democrats. When it comes time for the general election, Clinton's position will be even stronger. Clinton doesn't need to attract "reasonable Republicans" (whatever that means) as Gormongous puts it. All she needs to do is convince people that generally vote Democratic in elections to continue to vote for Democrats and she will win this election. There will be some true Bernie Sanders believers that decide not to vote for her and would rather watch it all burn, but most people that generally vote for Democrats will be genuinely terrified of a Trump presidency. As we move away from primary season most people will realize that they'd rather vote for Clinton then hand the election to Trump. Because they will think about what it means to have Donald Trump select Supreme Court justices, to have unprecedented surveillance and assassination powers, the ability to pardon whomever he pleases, what it would mean for the Black Lives Matter movement, for abortion rights, for all the people that currently have healthcare that used to have none, and they will realize that a centrist corporate-friendly Democrat is still a much better deal. Just as Republicans that currently are horrified by Trump will make peace with Trump in the general election, Democrats and left-wing voters will do the same with Clinton because that is how electoral psychology works. And Clinton will win because Democrats have the better electoral math. And this doesn't even have to be a total loss for Sanders. If he can use his considerable influence down ballot to get some more progressive and left-wing Democrats into office then he'll have shifted the political balance into something better than the status quo.

For DOTA 2 I would recommend a podcast with Purge, Blitz, and Hotbid. There's a catch though, it is just skype conversations uploaded to Purge's youtube channel. I just use one of those websites that converts youtube videos to mp3 files (or whatever your preferred audio format is), and then upload that file to my phone. You might have to try a couple different websites though because not all of them will handle videos that are 90 minutes long. It is a really fun podcast for DOTA 2 fans though. The most recent episode is really good and gives you an inside look into what the Shanghai Major was like.