sclpls

My problem with this (aside from it not being as interesting as DOTA once you get over the initial learning curve) is that solo queue is just not fun at all. The lack of any way for an individual to snowball in the game means that if your team is kinda unfocused there isn't anything you can do to turn things around, and that's incredibly frustrating. Also the community seems just as toxic to me as DOTA and LOL's, so it isn't really better on that front either. Playing with friends definitely makes it a much better experience, but for my group of friends it is difficult to coordinate playing a game that isn't on Steam, and everyone else I know is kind of lukewarm on it, so I don't see myself playing it very much.

This was the best, I wish the video had captured a little more of their effort to cut a path through the trees. Watching Blitz's stream I felt like it took them a good 3 minutes to pull that off, so hilarious.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to checking this out tonight!

I was definitely intrigued when Chris tweeted that Sean comment about Bloodborne being like DOTA because I don't see the two games as at all similar, but listening to him talk about it I totally see what he was getting at, and basically totally agree. However I don't think Bloodborne could be that for me. Because I've played all the Souls games, and so I think I would go into the game with a stronger sense of what the possibility space of that game is, and so I wouldn't have that same really powerful feeling of not knowing how deep things go. At this point even if it takes me awhile to get acclimated to how the systems have been switched up, I basically know what I'm getting into. But it's definitely a testament to From Studios that they are still evoking that feeling for people, because I remember that feeling from Demon's Souls and it was awesome. Also, I weirdly agree with Sean about Bloodborne's aeshtetic, and Chris about Dark Soul's aesthetic. I think all those games are just really strong at evoking powerful moods, and the character designs are really good at communicating a lot of different intentions to the player.

Oh hi, I'm late to the party. I haven't played CK2 in ages so I'm sure to do a bunch of awful things, but if you want to entrust me with that terrible power I won't turn it down.

And yet, despite all the complaints about 4X games, I find myself potentially excited about this: http://www.pcgamesn.com/oriental-empires/check-out-oriental-empires-an-awesome-looking-4x-game-set-in-ancient-china

Yeah I would say the only thing I really miss is when Chris was really obsessed with Spelunky, and Sean was really obsessed with DOTA, and we got the deep dives into those games. That's the sort of stuff I love, but I guess the other side to that is some people were sick about hearing about those games, and games that you can obsess over in that way are kind of rare and special events anyway. The mix of people has been totally fine though, and just strikes me as the inevitability of busy adults managing schedules for a weekly event.

I'll second avoiding Fisherman's Wharf. You are definitely stuck with the worst eating options in the city by a long shot.

Having played some Vietnam '65 now I'm in awe of Rob's swift mastery of the game. I'm playing the regular difficulty, and with each new game I think I've figured out what I need to do to win only to be thwarted by some other flaw in my plan. My current game is promising though. I'm about halfway through the game, and H&M are well in my favor. I'm sure now that I've announced this fact everything will come crashing down in a matter of turns. I'm enjoying the dynamics of all the units with indirect fire. Indirect fire is such a powerful thing the way casualties impact the H&M score. Cobra gunships have great mobility, but the range of their indirect fire is so limited, and yet I still find they have some of the highest impact on my games. Artillery is incredibly useful too, but the lack of mobility and the fact that rearming them is a pain in the ass kind of limits their usefulness. And tanks are incredibly useful as long as the terrain is favorable... When setting up bases I've started to start with a forward base, and then move onto the firebase. I find this to be a better setup then setting up the firebase first because it provides a stronger supply route in the late game, although the flip side to that is your forces are stretched a little thin in the mid game.

Anyway, definitely not disagreeing with you tberton, or the point Chris made. I agree it is not the same thing. Lyrics are like actually this super weird thing because they are both a part of the music, and not a part of the music (in that music doesn't have any intrinsic meaning even though it creates these emotional states for us, but words of course are tied to meaning, and can generate emotional reactions). But I suppose another way to look at it is imagine an alternative universe where music is overwhelmingly instrumental, and the occasional song with lyrics is like this weird, eccentric thing done by artists without great commercial ambitions. In this alternative universe don't the people that hear those songs with lyrics react to it much the same way we react to an abstract game with the message that feels hammered on? It's possible of course that it doesn't work that way at all. Perhaps the creators of these games are just clumsy with their artistry and that's all there is to it. But I'm at least open to the possibility that part of it just comes down to historical & social conditioning, and that songs with lyrics feel like a natural thing to us just because it has been such a recurring aspect of human creative work.

Most people do, but my point is you have no idea what sort of emotional connections to a song you would make absent the lyrics. I realize I'm arguing a counter-factual so it isn't anything I can prove, but I feel like there have to be at least some instances where there might be alternative emotions you might feel towards a particular song if they didn't have the same lyrics attached to them.

One thing I couldn't help thinking about during the discussion about abstract games with tacked on themes is comparing it to music. I feel like there is a lot of music made with singing & lyrics that doesn't necessarily need any of that, but releasing and performing instrumental music necessarily means you are limiting your appeal because most people just won't have any interest in instrumental music. It doesn't quite track the same way since the human voice definitely adds a unique musical quality to any given piece of music, but certainly in my mind most lyrics are pretty arbitrary and they don't have anything to do with the actual piece of music being performed, and they can potentially close off certain emotional associations a person might develop with a piece of music.

I made the grave error of not playing FemShep in ME (I wasn't up on any ME news and criticism, it was just a game that my wife told me I really needed to play). In the first game I didn't romance anyone. I was roleplaying Shepard as a kind of emotional Switzerland trying to avoid any social connections that would impair his ability to keep the Normandy crew operating as an independent entity, and that extended to him being too cagey to introduce romance into his life. With the events of the second game though, I decided it made sense that Shepard would be emotionally vulnerable at this point, and so I allowed him to become emotionally attached to Tali. Say what you will about the crassness of Bioware sex scenes (because you're absolutely right), but I found their exchanges to be genuinely touching and sweet.

I think it might be for the best if critics were to retire the term 4X. Because when designers and audiences start thinking about games as 4X games, I think that adds all this unnecessary baggage that removes us further away from what made games like the original Civ and Alpha Centauri special. One of the things that I really admire about historical war games is that a lot of these games are grounded in actual research about these conflicts, and the best war games have a sort of historical thesis to make expressed through game mechanics. I'd like to see that sort of spirit and inspirations followed through to the vast array of non-military historical subjects. When a new 4X game shows up you can be sure that there isn't any kind of larger point to be made, it is the product of people playing previous 4X games and deciding to make another iteration of one. So by all means people should be working on games about revolution in India, or diplomacy among the Italian states in 1400, and there should be all sorts of scopes for these games from as epic a scale as Paradox's games, to a single day in the streets of Madrid as its citizens clash with Napolean's forces on May 2nd. And lets not stick to being 4X games, lets just have more historical strategy games. And hopefully these games will be provocative, and have interesting things to say (and be fun to play).

Yeah I agree with LostIntheMovies' assessment of the episode. It certainly doesn't feel like a comeback episode when you're watching it, but after you've seen the whole arc of season 2 you definitely recognize this as an important turning point if for no other reason than so much garbage has been jettisoned.

For what it's worth, some of your information is out of date. There is a save system in place (although you can only save between expeditions unfortunately), and most of the actions in the game require clicking something a second time to confirm the action so the risk of misclicking is minimal. The game certainly is difficult, however what I actually wonder is if it is difficult enough. I've already made it to the 6th expedition at this point, and I think barring a couple of boneheaded moves I made at the end I think I probably had a reals hot of completing that. So the point from the game being incomprehensibly difficult to more or less solved is maybe a shorter journey compared to games like Spelunky and FTL.

I recently did a stream of this on twitch that you can watch here: http://www.twitch.tv/sclpls/b/648853997 There are a few sections where there were some kinda long lulls while I talked to my chat so I apologize for those, but hopefully this video conveys some of what is cool about the game.

There's also that moment from (season 4 I believe? The seasons kind of blur in my head though so I could be way off here) when Don comes up with that ad for that hotel in Hawaii, and everyone but him sees it as suicidal imagery. So the show has definitely done some stuff to play around with the idea of Don as suicidal. I don't really see it as a literal thing, but it is definitely there metaphorically to sort of highlight that Don is full of these self-destructive impulses.

I'm like at least a season behind with Mad Men, but I'm honestly okay with them skipping over more of the current events of the time because although there are some instances of it working out deftly (I remember the way the Kennedy assassination was handled was the first moment when the show sort of clicked for me) most of the time it feels kind of pointless and not really serving any purpose other than to remind the audience what the time period. Which is fine to a certain extent, but I'm not looking for the show to keep hitting those beats over and over again. edit: was looking at the wrong page. This was in response to Argobot's question about whether people were disappointed about the jump to 1970.

Yeah, it's just a dumb gimmicky thing that American CEOs sometimes do.

Inevitably video game lore conversations always have to go back to Blizzard because they are clearly so in love with their own lore despite it all being so generic. But yeah, DOTA 2 having lore is definitely the ultimate version of someone at a company kind of shrugging and saying, "well, I guess we should have lore because that's what you do?"

Patrick beat me to the exact question I was going to ask. I've started many twine games, and finished none precisely because I've obsessed over that question without really satisfactorily resolving it in my head.

I was watching a recent match between eHome & IG and one of the casters brought up that Axe and Disruptor belong to the same race or clan according to the DOTA 2 lore which blew my mind mostly because I always forget that there is theoretically some lore to DOTA 2.

Dude, Spices II is so legit!

This is basically what I was getting at with my earlier comment. The trailers I remember seeing for HR looked way more action-y and shoot-y than the game we ended up getting.