rohlfinator

This isn't a specific deal, but there's a great thread over on NeoGAF that rounds up a lot of overlooked (and heavily discounted) indie games in the Steam sale: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1161525

These games are great -- I had also been dabbling with Pokemon Picross and this feeds the itch without having to deal with the F2P garbage. I'm almost through Hexcells Infinite and then on to SquareCells.

Glad to hear Jeff and crew take Fallout 4 to task for a bit. I don't understand how Bethesda constantly gets a pass on technical problems that other games are chastised for. The "clockwork world" argument raised by Austin and Brad is starting to get really thin given that the underlying systems (and many of the bugs) have been generally the same for nearly a decade now.

I wonder how their players are taking it -- I'd have some serious buyer's remorse if I had spent hundreds of dollars on the game and then they remove the F2P store. Granted, large price changes are fairly common in games but not usually to this degree. It's interesting that they're both going that direction. Is the stigma of F2P starting to be that much of a hindrance (at least for that type of competitive FPS)?

I've been pretty happy with my Wii U as a supplement to the PC, primarily for Nintendo games. But yeah, the lineup is pretty thin outside of those. Kinda the problem with all recent Nintendo consoles, but even more severe in this case since the third-party support disappeared fast. That patent is kinda wild. The "harness the power of nearby devices" thing sounds like one of those feverish fan theories that would be a technical nightmare to actually pull off.

Starting to get the hang of the wingsuit and it's so much fun. It's a constant feeling of narrowly avoiding a catastrophic crash. Really like how the basic act of traversal can be so interesting. And I'm glad they made Rico a lot more durable in this game -- it's great to be able to recover from mistakes a bit instead of dying all the time. Performance has been pretty solid for me, other than a few odd cases where the framerate just tanks for a few seconds. It seems to happen most often when showing the new perk videos or occasionally during a big explosion.

I finally found a full set of X-01 power armor and modded it up to Mark VI, so I spent some time taking down a few sentry bots and super mutant areas that had given me trouble before. Anyone try any good mods yet? I've been playing with a couple graphics optimization mods that smoothed out performance a bit. Also tried the "More Where That Came From" radio mod that's supposed to add a bunch of new songs to Diamond City Radio, but in my install it just removed all the music from the station so it's just endless news blurbs from Travis.

I don't remember them being too bad, although I think I was mostly impressed with how smoothly JC2 handled switching between gamepad and M/KB, which wasn't very common at the time.

I'm pretty excited for this, JC2 was one of my favorites of last gen and this looks like it's improving on the formula in all the right ways. The wingsuit looks like a blast, and the environments look a lot more varied than JC2.

It kind of feels like the original design was to not have you get free power armor so early. Some of the NPCs refer to it like it's a rare commodity that you'll have to hunt down. And it seems weird that the game hides partial sets behind mid-difficulty terminals and locks after you've already been given a free set. Not that I'm complaining, it's a cool piece of gear that I've been using way more than I ever did in 3 or New Vegas.

I dipped back into GZ for a bit yesterday (since I never did anything past the main story mission) and actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It's certainly less polished than the main game in a lot of ways, but it feels more tightly designed than a lot of the TPP late-game stuff. And I'm a sucker for this style of gameplay with a limited loadout and the difficulty bumped a bit too high. If they released DLC of just like, 50 Subsistence missions, I would be all over that.

With Titanfall it basically boiled down to the game having dedicated servers on console and PC. I suppose on a technical level it might be doing more than most shooters, with the number of AI soldiers/titans, but in practice it wasn't a huge noticeable thing.

Only complaint I have along those lines is that by mid/late-game, you become so powerful that a lot of stuff becomes trivial and the game really only counters that by throwing more helmets/body armor/Skulls/tanks/etc at you. And those tend to reduce the opportunities for emergent chaos, in my experience. The first half of the game delivered better on that experience, partly because I was still learning the systems, but also due to the more limited toolset leaving more room for surprise and mistakes.

It's the only one I've owned, but I've had that CyberPower model for a few years and have never had any problems with it.

Yeah, I think that kind of stuff would help out a lot. I'd also like to see expanded options for playing against friends -- like some sort of free arena/draft mode between friends that could expose players to the full card set in a more limited fashion without having to buy in. I enjoy playing against friends, but we all had pretty small collections so there wasn't a lot of variety. Tavern Brawl kind of touches on that, but the ones I've played have been so chaotic that I can never tell how applicable it is to the "real" game.

There are unfortunately some Skulls repeats, but they're not too bad if you save them for last and come back when you've researched some better firepower. Battle Dress and some of the heavier guns make the Skulls stuff a lot easier.

It's not so much that I want to be competitive, more that it was hard to learn and improve when it often seemed like the solution is to grind out more cards and/or buy the expansions. Even the noob end of the ladder where I played was full of decks stacked with legendaries. Arena was a lot of fun, but it's gated so it's hard to play there exclusively. Polygon had a piece a while back that had some good suggestions for improving the new player experience: http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/29/9067065/hearthstone-expansion-expensive-legendary I'm not sure that the "restricted" format they mention is necessary yet, but I think the others are solid ideas. Although they all mostly boil down to "give players more cheap/free stuff" which is a bit antithetical to Blizzard's business model.

Have most of you been playing since the early days? A couple of friends and I tried to get into this about a month ago, but we all ended up getting pretty turned off and abandoned it after a couple weeks. Mainly it just seemed really hard to make progress as a new player. The F2P aspects seemed slightly more generous than a lot of F2P games, but it still looked like it would take forever to build a solid stable of cards without paying. It also became increasingly hard to tell if I was losing due to lack of skill, a poor deck, lack of powerful cards, lack of understanding the meta, or RNG. The between-friends play options are also quite limited, it seemed like the game was funneling me into ranked play which was my least favorite mode. It sucks because I felt like the core game was a lot of fun and I could see myself getting into it, if it wasn't for some of the frustrating trappings.

I thought Leigh Alexander's piece on Offworld (https://boingboing.net/2015/09/10/is-metal-gear-solid-v-as-big-a.html) made an interesting point about how the Midge Ure cover is a better thematic choice: Also (MGSV end-game spoilers):

Yeah, imo it's worth it for the extra combat deployments alone. Pretty sure the vast majority of my resources are coming from those now.

You can lose a small number of MB staff if they "win" the invasion, but it won't take direct contract staff, so you can minimize the damage by putting your top staff under contract. My strategy has been to just build the bare minimum FOB, and throw a few mediocre security staff on it. That seemed to deter most people from attacking because there's not much there to take. Now that I have an excess of staff/money I've started building out more platforms and ramping up the security. So far that's worked pretty well, I've only had 5-6 invasions and no major losses.

Just discovered that you can stun dudes by goomba-stomping onto their heads from above, and it's my new favorite thing. I need to start mixing up my play style. Silenced tranq sniper + D-Dog makes most of the side missions a cakewalk.

Yeah, the back half of MGSV is really oddly paced. I'm not disappointed with how it turned out, but it definitely feels like they intended something very different. That said, the cut "actual ending" that's been floating around seems kinda terrible to me, so I'm pretty glad that wasn't included.

I thought I heard that it's every 2-3 in-game days, but that hasn't seemed to line up with my experience. It will gray out the icons on your map when they're missing though, so you don't have to land there to check.

I haven't been following the CPU market too closely the last couple years, but everything I've heard is that Intel is a better bang for the buck at everything except the lowest end.