sclpls

Well, karmic retribution has happened. Secret will not be going to the Boston Major.

I'm the same as Nick, Nero Burning ROM was an obvious reference to me, but for whatever reason I never thought about Phoenix Down until just this moment.

Gatazhk, I like the point you made about how history is tied to places. I think that's an insight that is much more obvious in a place like Europe compared to America. In the U.S. we often think about how history is just the stuff that happened in the past. But it is probably more correct to think of history as the stuff from the past that endures in the present. In Europe, this is unavoidable. You go to Rome and you see buildings from the 3rd century right next to a building from the renaissance, and another building that used to be from that time period, but is now just a building built in the 50s after the war because the old building was bombed into rubble. That's history as a lived experience, and it is what makes traveling intrinsically satisfying. Even going to a hyper-contemporary city like Tokyo you can't help but notice the skyscrapers have design patterns that echo something much more ancient in the culture. There's another aspect of experiencing a culture's history though where the historical object has been quarantined in a museum, and that can be more hit or miss because at that point you can only experience the thing through the lens of a tourist, which is a bit alienating. In contrast to Rome, I thought being in Venice felt like being in Disney Land, and as incredible of a city as it is I can't ever see myself making a point of going back there for that reason. It probably helps to develop your own itinerary as opposed to just going to see whatever it is people are supposed to see. I spent my 4 days in Paris going to various spots where certain events happened to writers I admired. Like I checked out a restaurant where Rimbaud and Verlaine got into a fight, things like that. It's more work but can be more rewarding.

While I wouldn't say I'm hyped for the Last Guardian, I'm still looking forward to it. I only played Ico & Shadow of the Colossus when they were remastered for the PS3. At that point Shadow of the Colossus felt dated, and Ico felt super dated. Despite that I enjoyed both games, especially Ico even though the controls and camera were awful. Maybe the Last Guardian will be a mess because of the time it spent in development, but I'm not worried about the game being bad because of the dated game design. In my experience that ends up not mattering for this studio. I thought the comparison to Brothers was off, but I'm also the only person in the world that thought that game was awful. Brothers wore its emotions on its sleeve, but Ico & the Last Guardian were refreshing because they were these games that had these emotional resonances without beating players over the head about how they were supposed to feel, and that is always a refreshing experience.

I loved Sid's recollection of his first encounter with a computer game, specifically how he stops himself from saying it was at a sleazy bar, and then instead chooses to describe it as a "lounge". That just fits perfectly with my mental image of Sid.

Sounds like you just didn't gel with it? On the other hand, you might want to wait for a performance patch because I know I've played a lot of games that I thought weren't fun, but once I checked on them once they were running better I suddenly had a much better impression of them. A game being sluggish and unresponsive really does make it less fun to play (I had that issue with Civ 5 in the early days).

Looks like Windows Defender was the culprit. When I made the change suggested in the article it fixed my problem! https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/10/25/civ-vi-loading-crash/

Speaking of patches, I don't know what changes they made but all of a sudden this game freezes at launch for me.

Yeah I hope they patch out the worker exploits. I definitely feel like that shouldn't be in the game...

Oh, can we say Lords Management now? Thank god... Edit: Damn, foiled again...

I did the classic thing and was up until 3 AM last night playing Civ 6. I like it a lot so far. I'll try to post some coherent thoughts about it when I complete a campaign.

Thumper is a really cool game, and I agree with the cast in that I suspect Chris would enjoy it quite a bit just because it is a fun twitchy kind of arcade experience. I think the other thing that really stands out about it as a rhythm music type game is that the way your actions synchronize with the soundtrack is flawless, which actually makes a huge difference in terms of how enjoyable these games are. I bounced off of Audio Surf because it felt kind of floaty and not very well attached to the soundtrack.

I like what I've seen so far! The shots of some Splatoon (I never played it, so I assume that's what that game was) esports tournament were kind of amazing.

Good job with the responsive design. Because I am a dork, when I go to a new web page I regularly mess around with the browser size to see what happens. This one passed the test. All the other upgrades seem great too!

Wait, really? I thought they just released a game...

Well, this recent Elusive Target was kind of bullshit. There are a lot of ways to potentially trigger a fail state that the mission doesn't really do a clear job of communicating to the player. Also it is just kind of long & tedious. I don't mind some of these being stupid difficult, but this one is the wrong way to go about it!

I hope I didn't come off as a dick too much. I was just poking fun, and I'm sympathetic to how difficult it must be to coordinate the schedule for the show.

Ahh, okay, in light of that information that makes my take on Nidhogg 2 look like total garbage. Go figure! Also, I continue to be sad when I hear like Chris or someone say he feels pressure to keep playing new games instead of playing whatever he wants to play. I feel like my favorite times with the podcast are when people go deep with a game like Far Cry 2, Spelunky, or DOTA. That's when a lot of deep, interesting observations often happen. But I guess when you're running the podcast you have to hear from the other side of people complaining about how they are still talking about some dumb game.

I think the jumpcuts in Virginia are used to mixed success. Sometimes they are used in a way that is very dramatic and effective, and assist in providing momentum to the game's narrative. At other times they definitely feel off for reasons that are less easy to describe, and sometimes what these edits communicate to the player are very ambiguous. And that really highlights what an amazing achievements that Blendo games catalog is. The jumpcuts in Brendon's games are always masterfully placed, and help make his worlds feel like thrilling places to occupy. That Nidhogg 2 art style is definitely outrageous! I haven't watched any of the video clips so I don't really want to judge the art style without seeing it in motion. My only concern I guess would be about how readable it is because the nice thing about Nidhogg is it is really easy to figure out what's going on generally. I do disagree with Jake with answer to the question, "why Nidhogg 2?" where he just pointed out that a game like Street Fighter has a bunch of different styles. Each Street Fighter iteration brings with it new characters, balance changes, etc. But a game like Nidhogg specifically feels like an exercise in cutting all the bloat of a genre, and reducing it to a simple set of mechanics, and extracting as much depth as possible from those mechanics. So I'm not really sure what Nidhogg 2 brings to the table besides the new art style, that's the main thing that makes the Nidhogg 2 announcement baffling.

A friend of mine that grew up on a reservation said she preferred the term American Indian, so I've always gone with that. But yeah, it is a contentious and complicated issue, and I doubt opinions and preferences are uniform.

Interesting! I wonder if I just moved the bodies somewhere where they didn't get discovered then maybe? Yeah, I've heard a lot of complaints about the Colorado level. I certainly prefer Sapienza & Bangkok (and I've also come around to Paris too), but I really appreciate how Colorado switched up a lot of conventions that we've come to expect from this Hitman iteration. If all the levels were like it it would be awful, but as a one off I really appreciate what they did to keep things fresh, and that extends into how instead of an exotic locale it is like a rundown rural area. I am excited about what Japan ends up looking like. Fingers crossed, I hope they take advantage of the density and verticality of Japanese cities.

I think what Chris experienced was just a bug. I remember when I used the phone two bellhops entered the room, and I just took them both out and that was that. Also I think once you use the phone that's it, you can't try and call hotel services again a second time, and if I'm remembering that correctly then the only way for the person who made that video to do that would have been to have deliberately sought out a bunch of unconscious/dead bodies, and relocated them back to the bathroom.

FDR's fights with Congress over the Supreme Court are also pretty interesting to read about!

Yeah I'm amazed I got through Shen's Last Gift without any casualties because I dragged my feet through certain sections of that level, and also one time I misclicked and put one of my XCOM peoples in a horribly bad position. I'm finally starting to get the hang of a good approach to taking on the alien bosses. It is still possible to get totally fucked though if some other bullshit enemy squad shows up at the same time. Like, I wonder if they changed the enemy distribution system for this game because I don't remember running into so many Codex when I was first playing the game, but now I regularly will run into two of them in any given mission, and if I have to deal with that and an alien boss that means I'm fucked, I never have enough tactical bandwidth to deal with both of them.