sclpls

Wait a second, are you trying to tell me that this screenshot isn't absolutely tantalizing?

Worth remembering that the trailers for HR were pretty bad too.

I recently picked up Far Cry 4 at the behest of a friend that wanted a co-op buddy to play with, and I just want to say don't let this game color your perception of what Far Cry 2 is like! I basically agree entirely with your assessment of Far Cry 4. For all the chaos that is generated in the world I am not finding any moments that are nearly as interesting as Far Cry 2 because I don't think the game's systems are designed in such a way to force the player to improvise. My experience with Far Cry 4 is I either get the jump on some enemies, or some enemies get the jump on me, and there isn't too much else to any given encounter. Like, one time I stepped out of a safe house, and instantly got mauled by a rhino. That may have been unexpected, but it wasn't particularly interesting. Meanwhile, despite Far Cry 2 in many ways being way less "player friendly" than subsequent Far Cry games, I find I'm typically able to somehow narrowly escape whatever crazy situation I end up in. Add to that that Far Cry 2 just does a way better job of selling its setting and I think it is still very much the best game in the series.

Probably the best thing I can say about the Adam Jensen character is he could have turned out a lot worse. Probably my favorite thing from HR was his apartment where I think the game did some nice bits of low key environmental storytelling.

Haha. Still to this day I can't decide whether I like Lost Highway or not (the one thing Lynch has done that I know I really didn't like is Inland Empire).

I definitely was speaking in a very general sense because I've seen these types of comments with some regularity on forums before. I think it is bad manners to start critiquing someone's voice, a thing they are born with and have limited control over. I had a bad stutter as a kid that I had to go to speech therapy for. I received a ton of grief from other kids because kids are little shits. It just really is not good when you see echoes of that shitty behavior.

I should try and finish HR one of these days, but trying to decide how to spend skill points in HR is seriously the most stressful thing I've ever done in a video game.

While I won't deny the potential for a gender bias component to that sort of criticism, I'm pretty sure people pointlessly criticizing how someone's voice sounds is a regular occurrence with podcasts. I'm thinking back to GFW Radio where someone like Ryan Scott got a lot of flak for having a nasally voice. Regardless, people ought to show a little humility. The vast majority of us are not gifted with a soothing NPR radio voice. Instead our voices will be strange sounding and vaguely unappealing when we talk into a microphone. Part of what I like about podcasting is you get to hear from people that don't get to appear on TV or radio for very superficial reasons. Lets celebrate that instead of needlessly knocking people down.

Interesting, I made it to level 6 for the first time this weekend. For whatever reason the bird monsters were giving me less problems than usual. I came across the flame shotgun for the first time, which was an amazing weapon that I sadly did not get enough time with.

What is Danielle's non-Thumbs twitch account?

Yeah I found it to be a really strange and unnecessary piece of moralizing (in addition to not having a coherent idea of what the article was about). There's a ton of humor in Twin Peaks as well as its darker subject matter. It's not an either/or proposition and I don't think anyone that has watched the show is oblivious to the heavy subject matters. Complaining about its hipster audience is especially bizarre since the show is basically a cult classic and so that audience you're complaining about are basically the people that have kept the show alive and something that remains culturally important instead of just a cheap punchline for a sitcom or whatever.

Really interesting discussion at the end of the podcast. When Bruce starts posing the hypothetical about the alternative universe where Vietnam '65 is a board game they play maybe 10 times (at most) and have a great time, I can't help but wonder if the question motivating that hypothetical needs to be turned on its head. There's no question that for a long time, computer strategy games were WAAAYYY too complex and fiddly. In an episode that references the Chick Parabola it should be sufficient to point at MoO 3 and call it a day. For years now there has been a call for strategy games to take cues from board games and create a simpler, and more elegant rule set. I always nodded along with these calls Well, that's the world we're living in now. Almost every new strategy game I pick up nowadays is easy to understand and has a board game like ruleset. Ultimate General Gettysburg, Cults & Daggers, Armello, Chaos Reborn, Starships, Frozen Cortex, and Endless Legend are all strategy games I've picked up in the last year. None of them really resemble each other, but they all adhere to the ideology of board game simplicity. And yet with the exception of Ultimate General Gettysburg, I find the single player component of all these games to either be completely hollow, or have hollow elements (I suspect UGG remains thrilling since it's the one real time game in the list). I don't yet have a fully thought out reason for why so many of these games ring hollow (Cults & Daggers in particular being especially disappointing to me since I love the concept of the game on paper), but it is starting to make me suspect that a lot of board game mechanics just aren't very good without other people involved, and so adapting board game conventions to computer games creates a new set of problems that need to be solved by future designers.

Man, the Guardian came out punching with the most hilariously alarmist op-ed you could imagine. Did you know the real problem with Twin Peaks popularity is it's watched by too many hipsters? http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/06/cool-twin-peaks-david-lynch-abuse-sexual-murder-young-women

Also, James and Donna's picnic scene might be the Platonic ideal of awful James acting. Also, what is up with that picnic arrangement? No way teenagers have it together enough to setup a picnic like that.

Genius:

Haha yeah, I thought about the Mitt Romney thing too! So I really liked Sherilyn Fenn's acting in this episode. As an actress I find her a touch inconsistent on the show generally, but I thought her performance was an authentic expression of Audrey's character. This episode was still mostly bad, and I personally rank this as the worst ending of all Twin Peaks episodes, but there are at least some pretty strong moments to remind you of the good things about the show - I think Pete's scenes are strong. Most of the plot stuff is not that great, although I like Ben's new scheme to reinvent himself as an environmentalist out of a desire for revenge. Also good riddance to Josie.

I'm not entirely sure this show will be good even with Lynch at the helm. What a disaster if Showtime is seriously considering going on without him...

Oh wow, I don't think I realized that it worked across platforms. That's sweet.

This is slightly different, but last weekend I saw a documentary about the DC punk scene called "Salad Days". I mostly wouldn't recommend it, but it did have one interesting moment where they were interviewing one of the members of Fire Party (who were all women), and she was talking about they went to all these efforts to downplay their gender because they didn't want to get stuck with the label of being a "girl band" (and this was in the 80s, and it is sad to think how that is still an issue for women trying to play in bands now), and how she had a hard time wrapping her head around Bikini Kill when they arrived on the scene and Kathleen Hanna would get up on stage with the word "SLUT" written across her body, and you know just had a much more confrontational approach to their gender and how they were being perceived. Anyway, just an interesting example of how women in different contexts approach sexism in different ways.

Argh... I got to this section last night, and I stopped the game after like two tries because I knew it was going to be too exhausting and frustrating for me to deal with at the time, and I'm not looking forward to it. I really feel like these sequences are a serious misstep for a game that I find mostly challenging in a satisfying way, whereas these parts are just feel like a real nuisance and "fuck you" to the player.

The thing about Windhom Earle is that as botched a job as they do setting up the character, I nonetheless like that he ends up being a mirror image of Dale Cooper, thus bringing to light that despite appearing to be a charming, eccentric FBI agent he is in fact also a psychopath. So I actually like Ben Horne's pretending to be a civil war general sub-plot (which I'm sure is not the general consensus), but this episode handles his coming to his senses moment in the most clumsy manner possible, which is deeply unfortunate. But watching all these people around him poorly acting out this civil war fantasy is pretty satisfying, and I'd like to think the whole sequence is some metaphor dreamed up by one of the writers as meta-commentary on how off the rails the show had become by this point (but that's surely wishful thinking). And on the topic of wishful thinking, I'm realizing now that the last time I watched the series I had all these kind of big ideas for what the show meant, but in my re-re-watching I think maybe a lot of the ideas aren't backed up by the evidence because I'm seeing a lot of stuff that contradicts the ideas I had. It reminds me of the first time I saw Battle Royale before it had any sort of official U.S. release and the bootleg translation was horrible, but that meant I was sort of free to imagine what was going on in the movie, but then when I saw it later with a better translation the actual movie was less exciting than the imagined version in my head. And I think something similar is happening to me now with the (3rd? 4th?) rewatch for Twin Peaks, and I am just starting to reach the conclusion that the show is worse than I thought it was. I mean obviously we're in the worst part of the show, but actually I think there are a lot of things that just don't hold up all that well. Bummer...

Congratulations on 300 episodes, and welcome back Tom Chick!

It looks like the Crate & Crowbar podcast called their Cities Skylines episode what this episode probably should have been called: "Forget it Jake, It's Pootown". God that is good.

Hahaha a Puppey DOTA Today interview would be incredible.

I agree with all of this. Aui is clearly not much of a public speaker, but lets be real, most of us aren't. Some people are naturally good at it, but most of us have to put some work into it. I've gotten pretty decent at giving a simple presentation to a group of 30 or so people, but it took me awhile to get there. In other contexts I'm still pretty lousy. I notice this playing DOTA for example. I'm so concentrated on my own play that when I'm trying to communicate with my teammates I frequently trail off and don't finish sentences. I'm sure it is annoying, and I need to work on it. I bet Blitz put in the time on his public speaking skills if his approach to DOTA and casting, and the anecdote about his sister offering up constructive criticism is anything to go by. Anyway, despite some awkwardness, I enjoyed the episode, and I would strongly recommend people check out Aui's replay analysis series. I started watching it after listening to the cast, and I definitely am learning a lot from it, and expect my DOTA game to improve as a result.