sclpls

Wow this game is so stressful to play! I like a lot of the changes although I miss the music from XCOM 1. The music for XCOM 2 seems way more bombastic and I'm really not feeling it as much. Also I wish the loading screens didn't take so long, although if that's the price to pay for the randomly generated maps then I suppose all is fair. Other than that really loving the tactical variety. So far my favorite thing in the world is getting the perfectly placed flash bang.

A lot of those Myst clones were stuff you'd see in the bargain CD-ROM bin of office supply stores. If you do a search at a site like Home of the Underdog I'm sure you can find a ton if you look around the years 94 and 95. That being said, I do agree with sevirm that I don't think the clones are really what gave Myst a bad reputation. As the level of fidelity in games improved I think a lot of the contrivances of Myst aged poorly. The problem with puzzles in LucasArts style adventure games were that the solutions often didn't make a lot of sense to anyone other than the designers. Myst had a different kind of problem which was that it didn't really make any sense why these puzzles existed in this world at all. Another problem Myst suffered from was that the story was really bad. That meant that the only really attractive quality to Myst for a lot of people was the environment itself. But as game development techniques improved that environment felt empty and comparatively shallow. I think this is the basis for the eventual backlash against Myst, fairly or unfairly. That Myst is now being reappraised more positively is in part I think to general 90's nostalgia where a lot of things we appraised poorly immediately following the 90's are being reevaluated. Her Story is an example of a reappraisal of FMV technology, and I suppose the Witness is a reappraisal of an empty beautiful island full of puzzles.

They are all babies to me.

Another great (and very sad) 30 for 30 doc is The Two Escobars where a finally globally competitive Colombian soccer/football team gets dragged down by the drug cartels that generated the cash flow to make a top tier team possible.

Sorry, it was my intention to keep my post brief, but clearly I failed! Here's the tl;dr version: I think EG is fine. The Chinese teams, EHOME in particular, got a lot better is what changed. But EG have proven adept at growing and developing as a team, so they should be fine, and still should always have a shot at coming out on top at major tournaments.

I'll not have any wrangling of hands from EG fans! They've certainly got the better narrative compared to Team Secret - a team that underperformed at TI5, broke up, got reforged, had some early success with the new team, but since this patch have looked like a tier 2 team that would be lucky to secure an 8th place finish at an important tournament. I'll take being the new Vici Gaming over that fate any day. EG looked great at MDL to me, I thought they played the game as well as anyone could hope. EHOME has just been steadily improving. They looked great at TI when I think most Westerners noticed that this was a resurgent team. They looked even better at the Frankfurt Major. And so finally this tournament was their moment. Despite EHOME sweeping EG 3-0, the grand finals were all fairly close matches. EG's play was great, I think the only problem in terms of how they played the game was EHOME's early rotations were much stronger, and that gave them an early lead that allowed them to control the pace of the game for the rest of the match, even when EG would come out ahead by whatever metric you might consider: net worth, kill count, towers destroyed, etc. they never really felt like they were able to take control of things. But I think the bigger problem was EG's drafting, which felt much less sharp compared to what you come to expect from ppd. In game 1 EG first picked Invoker. That provided way too much information to EHOME, and they were able to focus on banning Universe's hero pool as a result. EHOME also pulled out a Lone Druid pick, which is an extremely strong hero this patch, but isn't a hero you see a lot in the Chinese scene, so I think that probably threw EG for a loop. ppd also drafted Nature's Prophet for Arteezy, and the less said about that pick the better. In game 2 ppd seemed to learn from the mistake of the first draft and first picked Vengeful Spirit and Batrider. Arteezy also got a strong hero (Morphling). EHOME assumed the Bat pick was for Sumail, but they drafted it for Universe, so EHOME wasted some bans on Universe. Unfortunately for EG, EHOME was able to draft a ridiculously strong lineup of Lone Druid, Invoker, and Abaddon, and Weaver... basically heroes that nullified the strength of the Bat & Venge opener. And meanwhile ppd drafts Puck for Sumail. There's some debate about how strong Puck is this patch, personally I think the hero is great for a player like S4, but otherwise underwhelming and this game demonstrates why I think. In the final draft EHOME had another outstanding performance with Earth Spirit, Morphling, and Enchantress. The Earth Spirit and Enchantress combo dominated the early game, and the Cty's Morphling became monstrous at the end game. I think the big takeaway from EHOME's success if China wants to repeat its success is that Chinese teams need to expand their hero pool. I think for awhile Western teams have had a strong edge against Chinese teams because Chinese players didn't really play any cheese strats besides the occasional Broodmother pick, whereas Western teams have been perfectly comfortable running heroes like Techies, the Tiny + Wisp combo, Meepo, and other heroes that force the enemy team to play DOTA completely differently. EHOME has shown that right now a successful team needs to have a broad hero pool otherwise they risk being at a major drafting disadvantage. There are too many potentially viable strategies at the moment for teams to get complacent about running certain types of heroes.

Good point. If I could block every anime visual novel game or indie RPG made using RPG maker from showing up on Steam that would save me so much time.

I have a hot Whiz Burger tip which is that you should definitely order either the mango or banana milkshake. They use real fruit for those, and they are the best during one of the (rare) hot San Francisco summer/fall days.

Fought my first golem recently. That was so much fun. Leveraged a lot of interesting abilities to take the thing down.

I also hate the change. The discovery queue is ridiculous. I recently bought Final Fantasy Type 0 which is some weird off-brand Final Fantasy game that was originally released for the PSP or Vita (I've never followed the handheld gaming scene so I don't know the difference) and ended up as a PC Port. It has incredibly mixed reviews on Steam because people don't like the PC Port (I think it looks fine and don't really care about that), and it is much smaller and tighter in scope than a traditional FF game (a major selling point in my book, but obviously not what a lot of fans of the genre are looking for). Anyway, I'm enjoying this game for kind of idiosyncratic reasons because I typically hate JRPGs, just find them dull and super uninteresting. But now Steam looks at me playing this weird JRPG with kind of mediocre reviews, and decides that my discovery queue should now be filled with bad JRPGs, no matter how many times I click the "not interested" button. I basically think computer recommendation algorithms are just bad news for any artistic or pseudo-artistic endeavors. It's fine for shoping on amazon or something where you buy a vacuum cleaner and here are some other things you might be interested in if you're in the market for a vacuum cleaner. But when it comes to making curated recommendations for music, movies, or games to check out I think it's awful. Because it is only gonna understand genre. That's how we end up with all those ridiculous Netflix genres. It can't make recommendations based on whether there were aspects of a presentation of a thing you appreciated. And I think that ends up putting pressure on people working in these mediums because they know their work exists in this filtration system to reach people. So doing something idiosyncratic, and coloring outside the lines has become much more risky (and it was never easy to begin with).

Takashi Miike! And he also did a movie based on the first Yakuza game. I haven't seen that or the Phoenix Wright movie because I'm pretty sure that neither got a U.S. release. I'll probably try and track down a bootleg copy or something at some point. I know the Phoenix Wright movie had a New York theater showing at one point, so there must be a subtitled copy that exists in some playable format.

Yeah, night time can be pretty intense, especially if you're not prepared. So many wolves to murder...

Holy crap my character is so much more powerful now that I can execute her special moves. Of course I still ended up dying last night when I ran into a pack of about a dozen lizard people and a chimera.

Another classic example of a really special "7s" game, Dragon's Dogma. Which had a lot of kinda harsh reviews but is really unique and amazing, and has a much better reputation now compared to when it was released.

Oh okay, I guess I need to do that with the controller, thanks!

I think the critical consensus is really driven by gaming audiences, and I don't know if there is anything to be done about it. But the phenomenon of people yelling at reviewers for dinging games that they haven't even played yet (but of course were greatly anticipating) is so weird. Of course it is driven by all that emphasis on previews. Certainly book and movie reviews don't work that way.

So I keep learning new skills for my main character, but I can't seem to actually execute them. At first I thought maybe I wasn't setting them correctly, but my pawn character seems to be using his new skills no problem, so I'm not sure what the issue is... Other than not being able to figure this out I am really enjoying this game, and it is scratching that Monster Hunter itch that I've had for awhile.

wazanator - as someone that has messed around with the Steam Web API I don't doubt for a second what you are saying about poor documentation, tools, etc. It is kind of crazy how much you have to rely on the community to figure out basic solutions for pretty straight forward useage. There must be something in the air right now, because the discussion the Thumbs were having about corporations profitting from fan enthusiasm was the subject of an Ian Bogost article that ran yesterday. It even references Office Space as well. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/corporations-free-marketing-instagram/423465/ This is something I've always felt a little sad about when it comes to things like mods, fan fiction, cosplay, etc. where all this work and creative energy is put into some company's brand and acts as free advertising, and thus revenue, for these companies at great time and expense from the consumer/fan/worker. It's just a reminder of how screwed up intellectual property law is since it doesn't really benefit creative workers so much as it enriches people that write licensing agreements, and offers some crumbs to the workers.

I think that's calling for a very narrow band of criticism to exist. A holistic look at the overall intent of the work that examines its unique qualities is an important style of criticism, to be sure. However breaking a piece down into individual elements and evaluating them also has its place. Often, that style of criticism is treating the work as a lens to examine a larger issue beyond the work itself. And that's perfectly valid even if it necessarily reduces the specificity of the work because it means the work has caused the critic to engage with wider cultural issues and practices. That is the methodology that Anita Sarkeesian has used in her videos, and the objections to her criticism often employ a similar rhetorical strategy to what you are proposing: she's taking these elements out of context and ignoring how they fit into the work as a whole, she's ignoring the unique qualities of the work, what's good about the work, that she is using the wrong standards to evaluate things, etc. People have lots of dispositions and personalities, and that will affect their reactions and criticisms to things, and even if sometimes that says more about the person than the work that's okay because people can be pretty interesting too!

Nice to hear that Nels was really into the Dark Sun campaign setting. That was definitely my favorite D&D world just because of how bizarre and alien the setting was compared to the other D&D settings which were mostly different flavors of traditional fantasy. I even played those Dark Sun PC games that TSR did, which I thought were really fun at the time, but were also buggy as hell and I suspect they wouldn't hold up nearly as well as some of the more highly regarded RPG classics like Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate, etc.

I think it was Blitz, a DOTA caster, who said that pro-DOTA is just so much fun to watch when Alliance is doing well, and I totally agree. It was great to see them win this tournament (also because as a Team Secret fan it made my team's early loss to them look less bad, at least they got a win off in a best of 3, can Liquid or EG make that claim?) I've seen a lot of claims that this is a strong Alliance patch because it favors split pushing. I don't really know how to evaluate that claim because I haven't seen enough pro games to tell, and I never really wrapped my head around the changes that were made in this patch. But I guess that will be a looming question about the team's performance if another big patch shakes things up before TI.

I think the idea of guilty pleasures is completely unrelated to what Rob and Danielle were talking about. A guilty pleasure is something you enjoy even though on an intellectual level you think it is terrible. The prisoner of your own taste thing is the realization that the thing you thought you enjoyed on an intellectual level turned out to be some sort of Pavlovian response, and it is frustrating because suddenly your own identity suddenly feels a little too obvious.

Not only are ancient wargames uncommon, but the Mediterranean setting dominates the scene. The closest thing I can think of is GMT's Conquest of Paradise, although it is really more of an exploration game with some very light warfare elements. Seems like there are lots of settings ripe with potential though, India springs to mind for me. I imagine access to good English sources for these histories might be somewhat limiting however.

One point I would add to the discussion about games feeling stale is that any game challenge that feels like a solved problem will feel stale. So I think games that don't offer enough flexibility with their systems are more susceptible to feeling stale than games with more dynamic approaches to problem solving. So traditional adventure games have this problem because there is literally only one solution to the game. Assassin's Creed ends up also running into this problem because even though the game offers you a lot of freedom of movement around the environment, your toolkit for the challenges continues to be limited in scope. Meanwhile I think a game like System Shock 2 holds up fairly well even though the combat system for the game is pretty atrocious, it at least gives the player a generous amount of flexibility in how to deal with the obstacles in the environment.

The SBENU allegations are the most "whoa, if true" story I've heard in awhile! Interesting note about Team Liquid, they have in their player Jerax one of the best Earth Spirit players in the world, a hero that just got released into captain's mode this patch. The hero has a convoluted toolkit of abilities that in the hands of the right player makes the hero seem completely broken. When you have a player that is so strong on a hero that enemy teams have to respect ban it, that always will help give your team an edge in the drafting phase, so I anticipate a strong showing from Team Liquid.