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I know most people felt much more positively about Transistor then I did, so fair enough, I can live with having an outlier opinion. But having the basic interaction of the game feel tedious and clunky = design failure in my mind. If it works for other people that's great, I just didn't enjoy it, and I wouldn't play another game that copied that mechanic.

Man I don't agree with that at all. Shredding enemy armor is way more important than having a bonus point of armor (and explosive damage is too infrequent to prioritize). Supression and demolition are both kinda good, I wouldn't prioritize one over the other. Holo targeting is supremely useful though, it just makes the rest of your team better. If you combine that skill with a weapon upgrade that gives the grenadier a chance at a 2nd action you can sometimes holo target two enemies, and that can turn a really bad fight into a fight where suddenly you have an overwhelming advantage (personally experienced this, not just speculating here). I definitely think salvo is way beter than hail of bullets though.

If you are struggling getting engineers in the early to mid game it is totally worth building a workshop in a middle square in the base building section. The workshop gets some drones that get to act as bonus engineers. I would prioritize something like that over a foundry. Once you have some power armor you should be in good enough shape to take on the first alien facility mission I think.

I thought Jake's point about how the tactical pause works in Super Hot compared to Transistor was on point. One of the many frustrations I felt with Transistor was that what you could do in real time combat was so underwhelming compared to the turn based tactical executions that combat in that game devolved into a couple of turn based moves, followed up by running around stalling for time until the meter filled up that would allow me to do more turn based moves. That ended up feeling like a real design failure to me.

So day 2 of the playoffs seemed to go much more smoothly. I was really happy to see Secret outplay OG after Crit talked some major trash about Secret after the Frankfurt Major. That has got to feel like some really good payback. But in game 3 w33ha accidentally GG'd first, so now they have a fairly harsh penalty where they won't have any reserve time in the first draft against EG. What a dope!

I largely agree with Rob and Andrew about James. While the bits of his hosting I caught I was entertained by, I since learned about some of the more boundary pushing moments and became decidedly less impressed. When I read his super long letter I really lost all sympathy for him. It came off as just trying to deflect all blame, and he was also clearly trying to add fuel to the fires of a terrible situation at that point, making life for his former coworkers much more difficult during a very trying situation. Where Rob and Andrew lose me is when they argue that it is okay for personalities like Thorin and Richard Lewis to remain on board. I think they're completely toxic, and in Richard Lewis' case also involved in physical assault, and I think it is ridiculous that any organizations continue to work with them. If a stock broker assaulted another employee at a financial firm you wouldn't justify that stock broker's continued presence at the firm on the basis of his or her passion for finance. Ultimately this is just another example of the boys club mentality that dominates esports. In James' letter he complained about turning e-sports into professional sports. But I think that's a false dichotomy from someone stuck in an older era, and producers and the audiences for e-sports shouldn't have to choose between a dry carbon copy of a professional sports presentation copied for video games, and what we're witnessing at Shanghai. Perhaps the most amazing thing though is as bad as the group stages were, day 1 of the playoffs was so much worse. There hasn't been a single thing that has gone right this tournament, and this has to be one of the most colossal fuckups Valve has ever pulled off. Valve is going to have to pull off some serious magic to fix this because they've alienated a huge part of their audience and the players and casters with this tournament. And it sucks to have to talk about all this stuff because the games have been really amazing. Liquid vs Alliance was amazing, high-level DOTA. MVP continue to impress. Chinese teams are hanging on by a thread. If Secret bring their A game their match against OG should be excellent too.

Yup, the Alliance and Team Liquid games were genuinely thrilling to watch. I wanted to watch the LGD and MVP games but it was time for me to go to bed before they went on thanks to the massive delays. I'm gonna check the VODs when I have a chance. I woke up to discover that the delays were so long that they had to have the lower bracket games take place back at the hotel over the internet. Shitty! This picture LD posted on twitter kinda says it all:

This is actually the worst e-sports event I've ever witnessed.

Man, trying to watch games tonight has been total garbage.

I wish the stop wasting my time mod worked for me, but if anything it made the performance of the game even worse on my machine. :-(

Composing a really brief song is actually such an awesome creative exercise. Brian Eno related his experience about being approached by Microsoft to create the music for Windows 95, and it is incredible:

A friend of mine does a podcast where he and some other comedians and artists in the Bay Area discuss documentaries. Very great conversations and the nice thing is the podcast is pretty interesting to listen to regardless of whether you've seen the documentary being discussed or not. https://supdocshow.tumblr.com/ https://soundcloud.com/supdocpodcast

Regarding the ending of XCOM 2...

I don't think anything really tops early William Gibson novels. Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Burning Chrome (this last one is a collection of short stories, not all cyberpunk really, but some are must read like "Johnny Mnemonic"). Bladerunner is the best film I think. Unlike the panel I'm less enamored with films like Hackers, and The Net but are worth seeing for sociological reasons. For games the System Shock and Deus Ex series are all excellent, although not all have aged particularly well, and whether Deus Ex 2 is good or not is controversial. There's also the Shadowrun tabletop RPGs (and the subsequent computer RPGs) which are a weird cyberpunk-D&D style fantasy hybrid. I loved the tabletop game in junior high school but haven't gotten along with any of the video game adaptations, but they are generally well regarded. The recent 3MA episode that had Austin on discussed Satellite Reign and a bunch of other games that are probably worth checking out. There's a ton of anime I'm sure, but you'll have to check with other people. Ghost in the Shell is constantly referenced, but seeing that when I was 15 made me realize I wasn't really into anime at all.

Yeah I'm with Mangela Lansbury. I did a 180 on James from being sympathetic to feeling like Valve made the right call (which is not to say that Valve haven't screwed this up majorly, clearly they have). On twitter Purge also pointed out that he thinks James made the thing up about base $0 pay for TI4 talent which was definitely the most outrageous accusation he made. As far as I'm concerned his whole statement is untrustworthy. Even before I saw Purge's twitter statement though I found a lot of red flags that made me skeptical about his claims. He is throwing a lot of people under the bus for no good reason (especially Sheever). His casts major doubt on her place in professional DOTA and that is the shittiest thing possible. I thought he was fine as a host, but his statement actually makes him sound nightmarish actually.

I always felt like the aesthetics of 90s cyberpunk films were aligned with 90s rave dance culture (how many hacking sequences featured the Amen drum break synonymous with jungle music?). A film like Groove makes these parallels explicit: young people in San Francisco with stymied careers find out about an underground warehouse party via email, and shed their individual identities to become part of a greater collective consciousness (this time fueled by MDMA instead of the internet). This synthesis of dance music and cyberpunk fetishism emerges perfectly in Burning Man: the Google engineers that methodically work to turn our world into a dystopian nightmare security state of total surveillance and drones are the same people that go out to the desert to lose their minds for a few days in a Dionysian spectacle wrapped up in some vaguely conceived of ideal about a post-commodity society.

I like those ideas too!

Supposedly he is going to release some sort of statement so hopefully that will shed some light on the situation. And yeah, I agree that he has been a great host. edit: Whoa, this got big enough that Gabe Newell stepped in and made a statement. https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/47sc46/update_from_the_shanghai_major/

I dunno, the victory lap phase for XCOM 2 feels way longer to me compared to XCOM 1. Maybe I dragged things out too much with the strategy layer?

Well this is weird. The host for the tournament, James 2GD, was unceremoniously sacked. Basically every thread on the DOTA 2 subreddit is about that right now. Lots of speculation going on about what happened. What a mess.

Tom Francis had some good suggestions for making the game less snowbally. I hope these ideas make it into the game either in the form of a patch/expansion or mod. http://www.pentadact.com/2016-02-25-solving-xcoms-snowball-problem/

Ha, I remember Dave Heron made a similar complaint about Martin Wallace's A Study in Emerald where he claimed, after only a single playthrough, that the game had a degenerative strategy and therefore was "solved". This, in a deck building game where a significant portion of cards are not removed from setup each playthrough, and therefore you can never count on a particular card being available in any given game. Dave has a habit of shooting from the hip quite a bit!

Yeah I think LA (and Seattle) have better Asian food overall. SF's Japanese and Vietnamese food is thoroughly mediocre. You can get great Chinese food, but you need to know where to go because there are a lot of bad spots. To be fair though, if you extend the scope outside of San Francisco proper into the South Bay the situation looks much better.

I guess I deserve what I get for talking big on the Esports Today thread about the Shanghai Major where I told Andrew that he was severely underrating EHOME. EHOME and CDEC both failed to make it to the upper bracket. How does everyone feel about the structure of this group stage? I don't know if it is better than the typical structure where teams get points based on wins, but it is certainly interesting. How do people feel about MVP? I missed their games. Do they seem like they just had a really good opening day, or does it seem like the kind of performance they can sustain?

Haha no SF burritos are a real thing (although people from San Diego will insist the burritos there are better, and I'm afraid they are probably right, but aside from there SF burritos really are the best in the country). Declaring which one is the best is a sure way to spark up an intense internet argument, so I'll just throw in a couple of names that regularly get cited. I think they're all really good, so I don't think you can really go wrong. In no particular order: Taqueria Cancun El Farolito Taqueria Los Coyotes La Taqueria El Metate Taqueria San Francisco Taqueria Vallarta Some people will also insist on including Papalote on this list, but you should ignore them!