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Ohhhhh.... you mean what is best bass?

I share Rob's weakness for being unable to deal with endzone passes. The problem is that's often the most wide open parts of the field, so even when I have a robot back there, I'm never quite sure what counts as good positioning. The stats vs. no stats design question was an interesting one. Another tactics game that I'm greatly enjoying at the moment is Chaos Reborn, and if you click on any of the monsters or other wizards the game will bring up all sorts of different stats that are, frankly, quite meaningless to me. Luckily it mostly isn't the sort of thing you really need to dive into to play the game correctly, but it sort of begs the question of why they are even there. At one point it was mentioned how nice the multiplayer community is, and that has been my experience as well. It is also true for Chaos Reborn, and if I had to guess I suspect it has something to do with turn-based nature of the games. Perhaps when you take away frenetic action away from players you shut down the part of someone's brain that makes them think that acting like a jerk to a total stranger is an acceptable move. Or perhaps something about turn based games is unappealing to jerks. I do hope the sports theme isn't such a turn off to people. It really is a wonderful game, and I prefer quite a bit to Frozen Synapse. Looking forward to that expanded single player content. I think I liked the single player stuff more than maybe Rob did, but I'll concede it was a little thin (admittedly part of the reason I like the single player is I'm so awful at the game and I feel like I have a better chance of beating the AI than any of the human opponents I've been playing!) and would benefit from a deeper simulation.

So I finally got a beta invite to this, and installed it last night, but did not play it yet. Although I actually like DOTA quite a bit (especially since that dumb year beast mode is over!) so I don't know how long HotS will last... so far my track record with non-DOTA lane pushers is that I get bored with them after a week or so.

I think this is all complicated by the fact that Notch is a dude that very clearly wasn't trying to strike it rich, he just wanted to make a cool game that ended up being lightning in a bottle. I'm like really reluctant to start scrutinizing how someone that falls into wealth almost by accident spends their money compared to say like a really rich guy that works in finance where you know that person just straight up wants to make a ton of money. That's the perspective I gather from someone saying (and also I think it was Steve, not Nick???), this person just made a game a lot of people care about, maybe it doesn't make a ton of sense to have this sneering attitude about what he does after he is super wealthy.

The whole exchange feels like some weird Dadaist performance art.

I think Papa & Yo is different from the games Chris was trying to describe because the message of the game is directly tied into the mechanics of the monster (who is an allegory for a drunk, abusive father) that the player is interacting with. I think maybe the problem with these subset of puzzle-platformer games (even setting aside the potential objections that some of these games might be appropriating other people's struggles) might be that they are the indie equivalent of the ludonarrative dissonance problem where the theme and mechanics just aren't aligned in a satisfying way. Or that's just me speculating from listening to the conversation, I haven't actually played any of these games (besides Papa & Yo, which doesn't sound like it really belongs since it actually does have some mechanical and thematic coherence).

!!!!!!!!

Couldn't help but post about this as well. Last night Blitz posted a video where he breaks down playing Storm Spirit VS Lina. Lina is typically considered a good counter to Storm. In this video Blitz talks through the matchup in a way that is a great example of what he describes in the episode of how he breaks down and analyzes everything that happens. Enjoy.

I mean, I think the Bioshock games delivered on that promise. The only caveat is that the only problem to solve is how to kill a bunch of splicers. Seriously though, if you're not sure how this would work try playing Arx Libertalis. To be sure, there are set pieces where you kind of need to do A & B to achieve C, but the scope of freedom the game gives you is nonetheless pretty impressive, and makes exploring and interacting with the environment a lot of fun.

To be fair, large corporations are extraordinarily talented at making idiotic, tone deaf statements. Twitter is just a new platform for them to do so.

It is times like this when you should let yourself read a very good book!

I think this all gets around to this like unfortunate but very human trait of tribalism where criticism is only well received if the person giving the criticism comes from "within" the tribe as opposed to an outsider. Part of the whole explosion of gamergate is this perception that people like Anita, etc. that are raising issues about gender equality and representation in games are somehow outsiders attacking the medium, and they react with hostility. Yet if they looked at some reddit gaming thread where women talked about the difficulties with online harassment (at least a lot of them) would sympathize. Similarly, my in-laws are deeply religious, and I definitely am not. Sometimes my mother-in-law will complain about the hypocrisies of people that she attends church with, and all the awful jostling for social power that goes on. But if I was to just complain about Christian hypocrisy (since I am a godless San Franciscan) that would, unsurprisingly, be less well received. With feminism it sometimes feels like if you are going to criticize a woman publicly, you need to have the right feminist credentials. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, we all have internalized sexism so it is always worth pausing to consider where a type of disagreement, criticism, or perception is coming from. But it is another extension of that kind of tribalism. Another big problem I have though with the rhetoric with social issues is that those of us with left-wing beliefs all broadly agree that things like racism, sexism, etc. are all rooted in deep structures of how society operates. That is, this kind of discrimination isn't the result of some personality defect, but the result of much broader social forces that influence us. Despite that, we seem to fall back on this sort of very American attitude of trying to attack the problem at some individual level. Like, here we are discussing this one woman, and what her actions mean, and whether they are right and wrong, and like it doesn't have anything to do with anything.

Soren Johnson has some really good videos archived on his twitch stream where he is playing and commenting on Civ 4.

I don't have any general point I want to address about the show at the moment, but I did want to post this awesome image by Andrew Scaife:

This was good: https://twitter.com/CThursten/status/571367010115973120

That TB rant about how much we should respect devs, and that he chose Irrational Games of all places, is especially rich since he actually silenced one of their employees. http://shawnelliott.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-time-that-totalbiscuit-totally-told.html So much for respecting creative freedom or whatever.

Yeah I was really hoping for the co-op mode. I hate the year beast mode because it is pretty imbalanced, and I hate any game mode where people have an incentive to try hard for a non-serious game mode. It really brings the worst out in the DOTA community in my opinion. As it stands I'm taking a break from DOTA until this dumb game mode is over.

Ahh yeah, that's me. Sorry I haven't been on lately, I got food poisoning recently.

Every year I try and make sure I read at least one novel that I feel like as an English major I should have read. This year that novel is Crime and Punishment. So far it's just as good as everyone says it is.

Yeah same. I actually have a coffee table in my living room that folds out in such a way that you can use a mouse & keyboard comfortably on it, so playing PC games in my living room is a pretty straight forward proposition for any game that has large enough text/UI to see from a TV screen, but I still want to check the controller out just because it's something different.

There are a couple of different single player things. One is to basically just keep playing until a team knocks you out. There is another mode that is basically a skirmish mode, and then there is a mode that plays out a season.

Don't see how this could go any other way than exactly as planned!

The thing that's crazy is it starts off so bad, but if I recall in each episode the show manages to one up just how extraordinarily bad it is.

It's worth bearing in mind that Stardock is principally a business software company. Strategy games are more of a passion project rather than their bread & butter. I think declining to buy OTC out of a dislike of Brad Wardell probably has a more negative impact on Soren than it does on Brad as a result. While I agree that Brad comes off as a fairly toxic individual, I'm not sure I agree that this is the hill on which to pick this battle. edit: Apologies for the battle metaphor, I've got Ultimate General Gettysburg on my mind at the moment!