TychoCelchuuu

Well, the way I see it, giving Dreg the new game for free means that the "chance" Dreg gave them on the first Elemental was given back for use on Fallen Enchantress. Having not turned around and given that chance back to Stardock, we're at zero net chances given, I'd say.

To be fair, it wasn't a linear shooter. You could pull out of the missions at any time, it seemed like, and there is/was a risk/reward mechanism: stick around to try to collect more alien artifacts, at the risk of dying, or leave with what you've already secured to keep you and your squad from dying. To be fair to whoever made the original decision, they looked at X-COM and said "this whole investigating invading aliens and then turning their tech against them by commanding a squad of agents that grow over time and that are managed from a home base you are in charge of sounds like something people might like, but maybe making it a shooter would appeal to a crowd larger than 8 people."

Demigod wasn't Stardock and if you gave them money for Elemental you already own this game for free. So you've given them more like zero chances, because the one chance you did give them, they've tried to make up for.

This game is sooooo pretty. It's tough to stop taking screenshots when I play.

Just unlock the achievements and then have fun.

If you just keep your OS, your productivity programs (Photoshop etc.) and the games you're currently playing on your SSD, and keep your data on your actual hard drive, SSD failure is no big deal.

https://twitter.com/SMBlob/status/260476366326222848/photo/1

An i5 will only matter in a few games and even then the difference won't be very big. I realized belatedly that I should just have linked this article for CPUs and this article for GPUs since they're more in depth than anything else you're likely to find. I tend to be a bit of a cheapskate and I guess an i5 could be sensible now that prices have dropped a bit, Ivy Bridge is out, and four cores are useful in more cases than they used to be. It will be more future proof, at least, so your choice is between buying an i3 now (which can easily run everything at max) and saving the money for an upgrade later, or buying an i5 and hoping it lasts through the next console generation's worth of games. I dunno how risky of a bet that is. The reason to get an HD + a small SSD because for the same price as a large SSD, you get much more storage, and if you put your OS and whatever games you're playing at the time on the SSD and use the normal HD for storage, your performance will be basically the same. "Small" meant in terms of gigabytes, not physical space.

This hasn't been posted yet, right?

An i5 is overkill for video games. An i3 will handle things perfectly well for less money. This guide is pretty handy. If you want it to be quiet, read reviews of cases before you buy them to see whether people are saying they're quiet or not. The same goes for the GPU, since often different vendors will use different coolers that differ in noise level. Depending on how much space you want, you might want a traditional HD + a small SSD rather than a large SSD.

Eh, maybe back in the old days you had to do the boring inventory stuff, but in these modern times there are programs that automate that all for you. All the complexity, none of the tedium.

If the narrative were "you are a person on the ground experiencing the war" then there would be massive ludonarrative dissonance but DEFCON is depicting the people in the war room and in doing so it inspires zero ludonarrative dissonance.

Eek noooooo DEFCON is perfect ludonarrative assonance. The narrative is "everyone dies" and the game punches that shit into your gut in a way few games have. The ambient sound is of people coughing and dying, but subtly done so that there's just a constant aura of death. Your score is basically measured in the millions of dead people you kill. The antiseptic aesthetic perfectly mirror's as seen by the people who are launching nukes (the players of the game). The narrative is that you are in the war room, making the decisions. The gameplay is exactly that, and done perfectly.

I haven't read it myself, but I've heard that Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper is more or less accessible to people who aren't philosophers.

Confirmed - bees replaced with crows.

Ludonarrative assonance and dissonance are extremely prevalent in games. Almost every game has one or the other, I'd say, to at least some degree, and many have both. AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity - The game rewards risky behavior. The narrative is that you are a nutter engaged in risky behavior. Orcs Must Die - The game is about killing orcs. The narrative is about killing orcs. FTL - The game is about desperately running away from the rebels. Even with the pause button, the game itself is an extremely frantic experience. The Stanley Parable - I don't even have to write about this game. BioShock - Clint Hocking's favorite example of ludonarrative dissonance is one of my favorite examples of ludonarrative assonance. I could write an essay on this and I might someday but the short version is that I think he's approaching things from a game designer's perspective and arguing that the design of the game doesn't say anything about Objectivism, which is true but irrelevant, because as far as I'm concerned, the narrative is as much about freedom and choice as it is about Objectivism and in fact the Objectivism stuff is a side issue in the main narrative. The game itself, at least until the last section where it breaks down and introduces MASSIVE dissonance, is a perfect example of assonance which is why everyone remembers the twist. Crysis - The greatest fun in this game comes from using your awesome super suit to terrorize Korean soldiers and once the Koreans start showing up in super suits it turns into a bit more of a slog. And then the aliens make things worse. The narrative is about 4 Americans sent in to take on an island full of Koreans, because Americans are fuckawesome, but then the Koreans step up their game, the Americans have to send in the big guns, and then suddenly aliens and nothing is happening according to plan. Thief - Duh? Especially when the narrative is "Garret is sneaky and steals stuff" there's admirably little distance between the ludo and the narrative in Thief. Thirty Flights of Loving - The jump cuts! And so on.

"Indie" means independent of a publisher. Given that he's getting his money from us and from other investors, he's a poster child for indie development.

In some sense, aspects of the game itself seem to be oriented towards a controller rather than a mouse. The inability to fire weapons other than grenades/rockets at anything aside from targets (and the attendant oddity of having panicking soldiers decide that "panic" actually means "shoot the shit out of a friendly person") works out fairly well for console controllers, because if this game were like the original X-COM and you could shoot anywhere you wanted, moving your crosshair would be a fairly tedious affair if you used a controller instead of a mouse. Simplifying cover down to a numerical abstraction that attaches to hugging various terrain features means that most movement is going to end at those various terrain features, which means you can have the movement thingy snap to those cover points. If it were like the original X-COM where moving just about anywhere was equally viable, and if you could reposition your squad members more than a couple times per turn, things would be much more fiddly on a controller. And of course getting rid of the complex inventory with separate slots for each leg, each shoulder, the belt, the backpack, and so on, and getting rid of much of the micromanagement on the Geoscape, gets rid of the sorts of things that would be hell on a console controller. I'm not sure how many choices were driven by a bare desire to simplify and how many were at least partially influenced by the knowledge that there would be no way to do that sort of thing on a system other than a PC, but the end result is a strategy game that plays extremely well on consoles (from what I hear) and with console controllers. They certainly could've done a much better job on the PC UI and made it play just as well with a mouse and keyboard, so I wonder if, in an ideal world, there is other PC centric stuff they could've done that would improve the game, or if there's really no connection between simplifying the controls (which turned into a bad thing for people who want to play with a mouse and keyboard) and simplifying the game (which is potentially a bad thing if you liked some of that stuff in the original, but also potentially a much needed streamlining). I personally haven't played the new XCOM except for the demo, so I can't make any decisions, but I am sure that I like a lot of the complex stuff in the original, because I'm playing through it right now and wouldn't give up the inventory management for the world.

VVVVVV might be a better example than bullet hell games, then - not much improvisation there, just figuring out the correct solution (and then implementing it, which is of course the challenge). So I think if we wanted to refine your definition, we'd have to say that puzzle games can't tax the player's reaction time. That still doesn't cover SpaceChem or similar games, though, which I think sinks the definition.

Under that definition, though, SpaceChem doesn't have any puzzles (because nothing in that game has a few pre-determined solutions) whereas bullet hell games where you have to figure out the patterns and then follow them are puzzles. So that might not be a perfect classification.

Might wanna stick some spoiler tags into that post buddy.