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I guess the interesting thing with regard to the Supreme Court is the Constitution doesn't specify the number of Justices that are supposed to make it up. So if the Senate doesn't want to appoint more Justices they are well within their right to do that since there's nothing special about having nine Justices. Kinda weird how permissive the Constitution is of allowing behavior that would generate a constitutional crisis though.

I got about 4 hours into the game and got stuck in a section that a lot of people get stuck in. At one point they released a baby mode difficulty so I set it to that and I still couldn't make any progress, but last night I was thinking about this game, and relented by installing the mod that turns the alien's behavior into a dummy so I can explore a fun late 70s/early 80s sci-fi spaceship some more.

Nice to listen to an episode without a particular topic in mind. I'd be happy if you guys decided to do episodes like this every once in awhile. I've been playing a lot less board games lately. My interest in board game mechanics hasn't diminished, but after the initial excitement upon the discovery of the board gaming renaissance wanes, you enter a phase where you start to develop specific tastes about board game mechanics. Then it becomes trickier to find people to play games you're interested in because at this point in my life while I could play another game of Settlers of Catan and have a good enough time, it isn't so good that I want to carve out a couple of hours in my free schedule (not to mention all the planning and coordinating involved with other people) for it.

I think the show the numbers philosophy of modern game design comes down to appealing to the sensibilities of people that enjoy the min-maxing aspect of games. And it isn't something I normally enjoy, but if I get deep enough into a game like DOTA or one of the Souls game I find I really appreciate being able to look up the numbers for things and figure out if I'm playing efficiently or not. But I actually have an alternative theory I suppose, which is that the numbers quickly reveal how inspired or uninspired the overall game design is. If the game systems aren't that interesting, the numbers probably tell a story about that. A game like Imbroglio, on the other hand, has a designer obsessed with the number 4 (see blog post: http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2016/06/imbroglio-notes-3-monsters.html ) that is clearly the result of divine/infernal inspiration, and the number in its systems reflects something beautiful about the world. PC strategy games used to obfuscate a lot of numbers to the players which gave the impression of depth, but thanks to the board game renaissance the trend is towards transparency which allow us to more quickly evaluate whether a game is any good or not.

The Alien Hunters DLC makes the game significantly more difficult in my opinion. Kinda struggling to get through the campaign because anytime one of the boss aliens show up I'm definitely going to be taking some casualties it's just a question of am I losing a rookie or two or something more significant. Civ 6 can't come out soon enough. I think I need a strategy game to play that isn't so stressful.

Also, another super weird thing is I swear more NPCs have British accents than American ones.

This level was indeed challenging! First time that to complete a challenge I had to lethally kill a bunch of non-targets. I'm gonna have to think real hard about how to get through it without that crutch!

I think discussions of a film version really highlight how strange the plot for this game is.

I like this version better:

Stylistically 30 Flights montage cuts always felt like a Godard film to me. Although they all have their own purposes and uses, I think one way that all those games have in common is that the cuts are a useful way to break up the monotony of the "walking sim" experience. Something like Gone Home can get by without it because of the density of the environment, but when I think of something like Dear Esther man I would have loved a couple of montage breakaways because holding down the w key or forward analog stick forever was a real unpleasant way of having a narrative fed to the player. Montage helps cut the fat and keep the players alert.

Yeah, sometimes even sober this game is bad enough. I've been doing well with my current ironman campaign, but yesterday I had a squad wipe that made me rage quit. It was right after the ship invasion mission so I had a lot of injuries so it was only a B or C squad wipe, so the campaign is completely recoverable, but still it was so aggravating that I needed to step away for a bit.

I liked this game a lot! I'm pretty okay with narratives that don't really add up to any logical coherence if the images are interesting enough, and I think it delivers on that end. I also think the developers did a terrific job with capturing the feel of Virginia in the stretches of road and the interiors of the homes. Also while the soundtrack wasn't my favorite I was impressed with how it flowed so naturally with the state of the game.

I want to play more XCOM but I also know that after getting back home from a bar that I will kill off too many of my dudes playing right now. The classic XCOM problem.

How responsible is Palmer Luckey for Pepe becoming a white supremacist meme?

Man, I really enjoyed Sean streaming some DOTA 2. I miss hearing him on the podcast, so I hope he streams some more in the future!

Ah yes, the Half Life 3 episode of 3MA.

Probability and dice rolls have never bothered me, but I enjoy statistical reasoning so I like trying to figure out how to play the odds in a strategy game. But yes, the drift is a clever and satisfying mechanic to play around with. It works really well for the game's 2D presentation, although I imagine it could work just as well in a game with a top down perspective.

This game is really good. The hats are a lot of fun. My criticism of it is I think the balancing falls apart towards the end of the game. There was a huge difficulty spike starting around the last few missions of the 2nd board, but then in the 3rd board you get super OP weapons, and the new enemies you encounter have new powerful abilities except that the AI doesn't really know how to use those abilities at all, so the 3rd board ends up becoming a bit of a breeze. The difficulty spike is forgivable though since you have the ability to change the difficulty of the game any time you start a mission, but the AI's inability to provide a challenge on the 3rd board was disappointing. Still, this game is great as a quick, fun tactics game and it got me inspired to get back into XCOM 2 which I'm also really enjoying too, so it gets a full recommendation despite the criticism I have.

I started a new ironman campaign recently so I finally had a chance to check out the new DLC. Since I received it all at once I'm not totally clear on which components are parts of which DLC (and to complicate things further I also have some new mods installed from the Long War folks), but so far I'm really impressed. The artifact weapons bit is really awesome. I just wish it hadn't arrived in the form of DLC, but was part of the original core design so the gameplay could have been more tightly integrated with those systems.

Yeah for sure. I need to do more explosive kills. I've had a lot of fun with the explosive rubber duck when I've used that.

Yeah, I went with a more inelegant solution because I was nervous about the potential time pressure element to this challenge.

Here you go!

Wowza. New EG is RTZ, Universe, Sumail, Zai, and Crit. Crit captaining, Fear as coach. PPD has transitioned to the business side of things, which is the real shocker. Seems kind of crazy since he's arguably the best captain in the West.

I found Duolingo useful for vacations. Three months prior I'll start studying up using the app, and I've found I've developed enough of a vocabulary to cover the basics of what I need without needing to try and locate someone that speaks English. I've done this with Italian and Spanish.

I'm a little more than half way through Joanna Walsh's Vertigo and while I don't think it is the sort of book you could describe as something you enjoy, it is very smartly written. It consists of these short vignettes where the author just really draws out as much anxiety as possible out of a particular scene (a woman processing her divorce, a couple at a restaurant feeling impatient about the lack of service, feeling out of place in another country, etc.) At its best it is a powerful reflection on some of the moments of quiet desperation generated by adult life. I also appreciate that it is a tiny book that fits in a jacket pocket, ideal for reading while on public transit.