sclpls

The Soviet spy bit is so weird, just kind of drops in and right back out.

I'm only about 6 hours into the game I think, but I've noticed this as well. It's much more difficult to get a sense of what I'm trying to accomplish/where I should be trying to go. Felt like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were much better at telegraphing that info subconsciously even if they never explicitly told you where you should go.

It's such a weird mess of a game. Especially off of a sale or bundle it's worth checking out because there are some shadows of great ideas in there... but yeah, what a mess.

The WC3 mod scene is like the gift that keeps on giving. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/07/11/the-red-solstice-space-marines/

This is a very late response (but DOTA only recently started getting its hooks in me, so I only recently started listening to the podcast) but Nels also had something of a Breckon Problem, and he ended up getting his own podcast, so clearly Tycho is on the road to success.

I'm glad it was mentioned how you kind of want a large screen for this one. When I heard about how movement orders were given by drawing lines I figured I would wait for the iPad version, and in many ways it still sounds ideal, but perhaps that screen space makes PC the better platform here.

Can someone describe how the turn-based combat works for this? And how it works when playing co-op?

I feel like this is not uncommon. An amazing team will make another team that is merely good look mediocre or worse. Same thing happened when Spain played Germany in 2010, and lots of people said Germany just played bad even though as far as I can tell they were playing in a similar style to their previous games where they were lauded.

My wife met someone who works at Valve who told her that Half-Life 3 was coming out "this year or next year for sure", but I think he was just trolling her.

Yeah, I also recall World War I getting glossed over in history class in school. To be fair, it's much more difficult to summarize WWI compared to WWII in a general history class. Like, the causes of WWI are still fairly contentious, and reasonable minds differ about which countries are really to blame, whereas the nickel and dime version of WWII is fairly easy to comprehend, and reasonably close enough to the more nuanced version.

One can hope. I really want to know what both Arkane studios are up to.

Big surprise: the guy that put hundreds of hours into Spelunky, and is on record discussing whipping dogs is tired of dog violence in video games.

Nick's story about buying the WiiU had me laughing so hard. Too good. By coincidence, I was over at a friend's place last night and he had just bought a WiiIU that afternoon. We played Mario Kart, and of course it was a ton of fun, but also like I can understand Nick's reservations in the back of his head because I was thinking about if I would feel good about owning a WiiU if I had bought one, and I wasn't sure about the answer...

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is certainly a powerful literary document exposing a wretched chapter in Belgium's history, but of course as Americans we have to be careful when pointing out other nations' histories of genocide... we're certainly hurling stones from within our own glass house. That being said, eff Belgium, they are incredibly lucky the U.S. didn't finish that game during stoppage time in the 2nd half! This topic flows nicely from Bruce's Vietnam game series where he was asking the question about how interpretation of that conflict informs how a designer makes a game about the Vietnam War. Volko Ruhnke (I feel like I reference him every other comment I make on 3MA episodes, sorry, I can't help myself!) solves this problem in the COIN series by having the event cards have different effects depending on which faction ends up using the card, which is an elegant way of showing how a particular event in history is going to have different meanings to different parties. In some ways tabletop games have an advantage over computer games at tackling this problem since the tabletop space permits a level of abstraction that would feel weird in digital games where there is so much more reliance on representation, camera angles that imply a particular point of view instead of multiple views, and a specialization in conflicts that tend to be fairly black and white instead of morally ambiguous (this last point counts as an important strike against the portrayal of the Eastern front in Company of Heroes 2). As Jon said, how strategy games handle the issue of revisionist history is not easy since they are a web of systems. In a lot of ways, the video games best suited to tackling these issues are games in the immersive sims tradition where typically you are exploring dead worlds. After all, it makes more sense to think of history less as "stuff that happened in the past", and more as what continues to endure. The immersive sims genre is all about piecing together stitches of the past to tell a story. Why not make it different competing stories? I would totally play a Bioshock game set after World War I where the player is trying to figure out what really were the causes of the conflict, what were the different leaders doing, and who is lying about what?

I'll second Pocket Tactics. It's the only worthwhile place looking at mobile games as far as I know.

This doesn't fit your criteria of always featuring more than one woman, but the Indoor Kids podcast has two hosts, and one of them is a woman. The short lived LAN Party podcast (sort of a post-GFW podcast after Sean Elliott and Jeff Green left to work in game development) featured two women panelists if I recall correctly. Other than that I'm drawing blanks unfortunately. It's sad, if I was trying to think of comedy podcasts, for example, I would have no trouble coming up with tons of examples.

Oh yeah, I remember playing this last year when it was a free webgame. It was coool! Is it just more scenarios now, or is there anything more to the game?

I think the segregation between men and women in sports in general is stupid, and should be disallowed. To understand why, we can look at an international competition like soccer. You can anticipate how well a national team performs based on the number of competitive matches it has played in (see here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-isnt-the-u-s-mens-national-team-better-at-soccer/ ). By performing in more international competitions players gain greater exposure to competitive tactics and strategy, information, and practices. By segregating players, you are systematically putting at a disadvantage women athletes who are exposed to a more limited network of competitive advantages. In fact, if one looks at the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education you will see that the SCOTUS applied the exact same reasoning when they decided to desegregate schools. Separate but equal is always a lie because of the advantages that are accumulated through access to social networks. We also live in a society now where the division of labor has (imperfectly) ceased to be divided by gender. That sports gets these sorts of exemptions always boggles my mind.

I don't follow Giant Bomb like at all, but I just wanted to chime in and say Cara Ellison is rad, and what she is doing right now being embedded with game designers is a really excellent project that everyone should check out.

I haven't dipped into co-op and PvP yet, but I also only just defeated the first boss. I'm looking forward to checking out more of the online experience. For what's it worth, I was enjoying my time with the game last night slightly more than the first day, so maybe I was just annoyed with the slow start compared to the earlier games.

I picked this up during the Steam summer sale, and so far 3 hours in I'm feeling, kind of... underwhelmed? I have avoided reading anything about the game so far, although I'm aware the reviews were positive. I put so many hours into Demon's Souls, and the first Dark Souls, I'm not sure why I'm not feeling this one. There isn't anything I can point my finger to, and say this is a problem. I wonder if there is something about this one, or if I'm just burnt out on this style of game?

Shawn Elliott's ability to conversationally shift between totally juvenile humor and super-salient cultural observations is impressive.

I have many friends that are complaining about how the Steam sales just aren't as good anymore, which I personally think is silly. It doesn't seem that good because you've already bought a ton of games in past sales! I'm really happy with the equilibrium I've hit at this point where it used to be I would consider kind of mediocre games because like they were only $3 or something so why not? But now I've moved on to really only making a few discrete purchases of titles I've had my eye on for awhile. This way I also don't have the problem of "oh, what game do I play first?" I have no opinion about Valve's meta-games.

Yeah, good podcasts are like fine wine and tend to improve with age. That being said, I do recommend people that enjoy 3MA listen to the early episodes. The tone is much more anarchic, the sound quality is often spotty at best, but man a lot of those episodes are really entertaining, and feature some pretty epic rants.

Oh nice, I recently found out about how UG is on Steam Early Access and was thinking about grabbing it sometime soon. Definitely looks like there are some novel and really great design decisions happening there.