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Ardennes Assault is a standalone expansion FYI, so I would just pick that up, and skip the base game.

Hey Sean, while obviously I appreciate the benefits of the Idle Thumbs style "get everyone in a room together and have at it" format, I think this format is totally fine. The conversation was good, and that's all that really matters when you get down to it as long as the audio quality isn't too awful. I think the audio quality for this was somewhat rough, but it wasn't bad enough that I noticed it after about a minute. If this is a format that works for getting more episodes to happen then I'm thrilled. I agree with your guest's comment about how more leagues or tournaments need distinct identities. Although I'm interested in watching competitive matches, there are so many that I don't really know what to follow, and therefore I'm reluctant to spend any money buying a ticket to watch games. That seems like a pretty big marketing failure that needs to be addressed. I also feel bad for all the pro players that have to figure out what tournaments to participate in. If Valve would at least endorse tournaments they think are cool and worth checking out that would make a huge difference towards improved standards, but their whole philosophy is so built around not imposing their own desires that this will probably never happen. I saw that Puppey did some streaming on twitch last week, and that was enough for me to join the Team Secret bandwagon. That dude makes DOTA so much fun.

New DOTA Today episode is so new I guess there's no thread for it, but I really enjoyed it!

I am so excited about the return of the Best Show.

I agree about the importance of new blood, as it were, to sports. I don't agree that the new players in e-sports have less of an impact on the game because physicality isn't involved, or at least it isn't clear to me how that's the case. Bear in mind that the dexterity and reaction time demanded on players in your typical Lords Management and Starcraft 2 are exceptionally high so it isn't as if these games aren't physically demanding in their own way. I also disagree with the idea that e-sports have less theatrical value. Try watching some videos of the International, or the finals for League of Legend (this year both events took place in enormous sports arenas, FYI), and listen to the deafening noise of the crowd when one team makes some crazy play. Ultimately it just comes down to familiarity with the games. I'm with Rob Pardo in thinking that e-sports are just going to keep on growing. It's still early days, but already League of Legend tournaments get viewing numbers that rival most American sports events. Their popularity in Asia is important too, since that's where most population and economic growth is happening in the world.

And yeah, as Twig mentions, the DOTA 2 map does change from time to time. And I would argue that's probably a superior way of providing variety instead of adding maps that the player base isn't interested in.

I think the critique of map variety is it is one variable too many. Because Starcraft is adding new units with each expansion, and I don't know how often balance patches come out, but they happen more frequently than the expansions and those are kind of like the sports equivalent of different players and/or different player performances. It's also worth noting that some of the changes you listed for sports aren't particularly meaningful. Arenas might be different, but the pitches, by regulation, have to be the same for most sports. Golf is really the only popular sport I can think of where terrain layout is an intrinsic part of the game. Weather is certainly a variable, but it usually isn't considered a good one. One of the controversial things about one of the upcoming World Cups being hosted in Qatar is, of course, that it's incredibly hot there. I suppose you could argue that being able to play in incredible heat is a type of skill test that we ought to be testing in sports to see which team is the best, but I don't think most people would consider that a meaningful challenge. Similarly, I remember watching an Italian Serie A match between Roma and another team that I am blanking out on where it was snowing, and that made it hard to kick the ball around precisely, and difficult to run as well. And while it was certainly an "interesting" match for the 20 or so minutes it went on for before getting canceled, I don't think it really made for a good competition. Anyway, I think you're right that competitive games do need some variety, but that doesn't mean that all variety is good for a competitive game, and it isn't clear to me that a larger pool of maps fits into the category of variety that is good for most competitive games.

dium you're probably in luck, since the consensus around WoW at the moment seems to be that the latest expansion has made the game the best its ever been. I don't play MMOs though so this is 2nd hand info... Still making my way through the episode but one thing that struck me was early on in the conversation when Rob insists that more maps is vital to the longterm health of a competitive game. I would have liked to see him justify that claim more because it isn't obvious to me that that is necessarily true. He even cites how players naturally tend to converge around a couple of favorites, and I'm not sure why this is supposed to be a bad thing. DOTA is just one map, and I have to think that helps with matchmaking, and there isn't any indication that people are sick of the map. CS:GO has a handful of maps, but is essentially just Dust 2. LoL has a few maps but my understanding is everyone plays the traditional 3 lane map similar to the one in DOTA. More maps is great for variety, but I don't think that's what people are looking for in a competitive game. For competitive players the same, well designed map, is a feature, not a bug. Not too long ago Rob Zacny did an interesting piece on the relationship pro Starcraft players have with maps: http://www.pcgamesn.com/starcraft-ii/why-pro-starcraft-2-has-rejected-the-classic-maps Like, there are two pretty important problems pointed out here with the desire from Blizzard to feature greater map variety. 1. It creates greater pressure for competitive players 2. Now that we're in an era where we expect competitive games to evolve and have shifting "metas" it becomes harder to evaluate the state of the game. A different map is going to have different balance values. You can buff or nerf the value of a particular unit, but the importance of that can vary from map to map. So if a particular unit needed to be rebalanced, how good a job did the designer do when you have to evaluate that across a spectrum of maps? It becomes a much more ambiguous question. So all of this is why I think that claim deserved more scrutiny since there are actually some pretty compelling reasons to think that a smaller pool of maps is better for a competitive game.

Yeah, I am nervous to boot it up after I saw it updated and some people were having issues. Fingers crossed...

As far as "weird stuff" in Twin Peaks, I treat all this stuff as basically metaphor. Like, in literature its the equivalent of some particularly dense and poetic passage that elides ordinary meaning. I know for Twin Peaks diehard fans they have this whole cosmological explanation for all this supernatural stuff, but I've never found any of that particularly interesting. I just think of it as the visual equivalent of literary metaphor, and therefore stuff that gets interpreted, but not necessarily explained and resolved, if that makes any sense.

Don't feel bad. This game is way difficult. Co-op is not at all balanced, but great fun.

I'm just stoked to be playing a game in a space station where you have to deal with microgravity. So good.

I'll concede that's also a valid interpretation of what's going on. And revulsion was the wrong word to use just because I was thinking of tropes we see in media at large, and its not an apt description for this scene, but I wouldn't say he reacts favorably to it. And that's the basic dynamic I see here. An act of violence pushes him up among his peer group, while the reveal of fatherhood brings him back down.

I understand that this is also sort of what is going on, but I feel like that still sort of amounts to the same thing. Like, this super macho action permits Andy to behave as the idealized partner in the relationship. Naturally, this idealized version of Andy is an illusion that falls apart as soon as he finds out about the pregnancy. Regardless of whatever Lucy is reacting to (the other men talking Andy up, or how he proceeds afterwards) it still ties masculinity to violence, as well as revulsion at pregnancy and engagement with feminine existence. As stereotypical as that is, there may be a certain amount of truth to it, especially in Twin Peaks' small town setting where traditional gender norms are going to exert a powerful influence on the behavior of the characters. But the way the show plays it up for comic effect makes the whole thing feel completely preposterous to me.

I agree with this. I think the game holds up pretty favorably compared to other adventure games from that era, and I'm hoping they use a light touch with whatever updates they do.

!!!!!!!

This gif proves that cat, mouse, cheese is the new rock, paper, scissors.

There's a lot of ambiguous ethical questions there. However one thing I am certain of is that the position Sarah Koenig has staked out for herself is analogous to that of a lot of popular YouTube Lets Play personalities. They are all claiming that standard journalistic ethics don't apply to them because they are entertainers. And in both cases I think they are being disingenuous. I used to work at a non-profit law firm that handled capital punishment appeals. One thing the attorneys always insisted to our clients was not to agree to any media requests. The reason for that was because there is always too much uncertainty in the outcome of both the presentation from the media, and the reaction from the public for it to be an acceptable risk. I haven't listened to Serial even though by all accounts it is excellent, but because of my experience I am always deeply suspicious of how this sort of narration is handled.

It's also extremely common in Asian crime and action movies, so even though this was pointed out as something the devs might be referencing, I never really made the argument that that was a point in the game's favor.

What a bummer. Really pretty outrageous that Bethesda, a publisher with tons of experience with PC games, released such a problematic port...

The difficult thing for me is that the games that really stood out are so different from one another so I'm not really sure how I would choose among them.

I'm playing it on a powerful PC at 60 fps, and I haven't had any issues with frame rate drops, but I have had some issues with crashes initially, but once I switched the type of anti-alias being used that fixed the problem, so maybe give that a shot? I'm really enjoying this a lot. Its been so long since I played RE4 so even though its obviously similar, its difficult for me to say how similar it is. But one thing it is reminding me of that I didn't expect is System Shock 2. Like, obviously it is a different school of game design from immersive sims, yet I find the amount of design overlap kind of striking.

I'm disappointed that I ended up finding Transistor disappointing too! It's frustrating!

Standout games: Endless Legend Dungeon of the Endless The Evil Within Divinity: Original Sin (haven't finished it, but feels like it will end up here) 80 Days Totally solid games: Wolfenstein Jazz Punk Nidhogg Towerfall Road Not Taken Monument Valley Games that did a bunch of great things but had problems: Alien Isolation Shadow of Mordor Thief The Banner Saga The Novelist Abyss Odyssey Wasteland 2 (haven't finished this, but it definitely feels like it belongs in this category) Sir, You Are Being Hunted Games I was looking forward to that ended up being disappointing: Transistor Civilization: Beyond Earth Planetary Annihilation Watchdogs And finally, the game I don't know how to feel about: Betrayer

I've also been really enjoying King Dedede this version as well. I enjoyed playing him in Brawl, but in this version I think he might be my favorite character to play.