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I have so much faith in the writing team that yeah things are for absolutely sure going to get real interesting relating to this. I'm most curious who/what actually brought her case up.

I think what happened is that

Me and the missus loved this, extremely recommended. I could just watch the main character do her thing all day, she's so entertaining.

I'm awful at this game but it's definitely the most positive online gaming I've dones with strangers since TF2. They did a ton of work to help with that, it's really cool.

Cool little slice of life story. I like the way the title interacts with the ending. Also the toys for bob/skylanders connection is amusing. I'd say it could do with an editing pass. Especially jarring to me are sentences like the following, which to me read like the comma should be a period:

The books are even better. Recommended.

Are you asking about recent stuff? If so N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy is pretty good. Otherwise there's a shitton of stuff out there just a Google away. Personal favourites include Margaret Atwood's books like Oryx & Crake and The Handmaid's Tale.

I unexpectedly was alone for quite some time over the holidays, so I dug in and played through Divinity Original Sin 2 - I've not got the time and stamina for such long games these days, but this was an unexpected delight. The systemic nature of the combat and the willingness of the game to let you just do things when you think you should be able is amazing. Examples: a speedrun of the game involves carrying barrels of toxic fog around and exploding them in key fights, rather than severe glitching. I got stuck on a few puzzles but it was never because the puzzle was bad, but rather that I've been trained by games so thoroughly to only think inside the box of combining items. So for example when I'd run into a well with spirits that complained the well was dry I tried dragging buckets of water onto the well to no effect, instead of simply casting a rain spell on it. I played on the default difficulty which felt appropriately balanced to me. The biggest issues I had were mostly self-inflicted: I'm one of those do-everything see-everything players and the game is gigantic. I'd run into similar problems in Skyrim where I'd try to carry around everything that wasn't nailed down.

I've got this game on my shortlist of things to pick up & play soonish but haven't gotten to it yet. So many games, so little time.

I was really hoping he'd touch on the weirdest aspect of Far Cry 2: the conversations all seem to run at like 1.5x speed. Everyone's in a gigantic hurry to get their message out and get on with being on fire/a terrible person/both.

It's kind of silly because they're talking about WW1 in the lyrics. Also the ping is for rifles not machine guns, unless there's some gun lore I'm not aware of (quite possible).

Yes! I was waiting eagerly for this.

Very atmospheric video Erkki, cool. Also, nice to hear that your hobby's going places. It's always a tough choice to switch careers, especially if you're already established. Good luck.

Congrats! Lovely pics, lovely people : ) I like the height gradient in the second pic. Very dynamic.

I would have probably had a lot more fun with those games if I hadn't already had so many that anything that doesn't super-grab me just gets snowed under. Oh well.

I think it's important to remember that 'failure' means something very different to the game designers and to the management/moneyhat people.

Aha, thank you for clarifying. I didn't know they did some sort of bucket-sorting in Arena now. Of course given that there's no mana constraints or other players interfering with your card picks, variance could be much higher in HS than in Magic without those constraints so it makes sense if they are trying to achieve fairness. Given that you've already chosen a large part of your deck archetype at class selection it makes sense not to allow people too much further control over what they get - but still, it seems a lost chance not to give people the ability to 'force' a certain direction. I think knowing what archetype you're going for, and what your role is in a particular situation in a match is always going to be an important skill. One of my favourite things in Magic draft is trying to anticipate which cards you can safely pass in the expectation that you'll be able to grab them when the pack comes back to you. It's pretty unique among the digital card games. The bots seem to do a good enough job that I'm rarely shocked at what comes back. I think Eternal has the best asynchronous draft format, where you are drafting 4 packs, of which 2 are guaranteed to be coming from the same human player, just some time in the past. This means packs can't wheel, but it does mean that you can get a sense of which colours are free and knowing there's actually people ahead of you lets you make informed guesses about what cards they could have picked over that strong card they left in there for you. Anyway, it's interesting. Arena's my favourite at the moment, for the simple reason that I've just not played enough Magic over the past decade to my liking.

I'll spare you the full list of 85. Loved: - Night In The Woods (Love it GOTY ALL YEARS) - Broken Age - Idle Thumbs Video Game Podcast - FTL: Faster Than Light - Shadowrun Returns - Gauntlet of Fools (card game) - To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure (Hamlet as CYOA book) - SPORTSFRIENDS featuring Johann Sebastian Joust - Faëria - Strategy Card Game - Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander - SUPERHOT Meh: (either just Not For Me, or flawed) - Battle Worlds: Kronos - Turn-based strategy revisited - HEX MMO Trading Card Game - Double Fine's MASSIVE CHALICE - Satellite Reign - Darkest Dungeon by Red Hook Studios - Armello - Bringing Tabletop Adventures to Life - Chaos Reborn - Banner Saga - Hyper Light Drifter - The Flame in the Flood - BATTLETECH - For The King - Regalia - Of Men And Monarchs - SUPERHOT The Card Game Bleh: - WARMACHINE: TACTICS - Kingdom Come: Deliverance (devs outed themselves as massive assholes after the campaign ended) Don't know yet (not out or I haven't started it): - Star Citizen - Path of Exile - Torment: Numenera - The Bards Tale IV Man, I'm getting tired just looking at this. WTB time

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. You seem to be conflating some points. It's true that due to the link with paper, Magic can't patch the cards. How is that related to the fact that your opponents may have drafted better decks though? I've lost to bombs in arena a lot as well.

To All the Boys I've Loved Before is excellent, don't sleep on it. I personally really loathe this era of juggling subscriptions. Netflix kind of snuck in under my wife's purview but that's it. Still such a dumb situation compared to just getting a couple of TV channels and being able to forget about it. Oh well, old person.

The tournament this weekend was very fun to watch, I thought. I hope they take a queue from Magic Arena and add more cool little bespoke animations. They already have a ton of cute voice lines and effects, so I'm expecting some good stuff.

Cool! Excited to read it.

I've mostly had my Thumbsy needs met by a judicious cocktail of Crate and Crowbar + Video game Hotdog, with a smattering of Idle Weekend and Designer Notes.

They basically copied all of Eternal's good ideas, more so than Hearthstone I'd argue.

If I gave the appearance of being comfortable with it, that's on me. I definitely don't want to imply that. I hate the way things are. But I think that Blizzard and their servile appeasement approach to community management is actually part of the cause of entitled-gamer-itis, so there's a certain amount of schadenfreude involved, though obviously at the company level, not the individual people getting harassed.