osmosisch

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Posts posted by osmosisch


  1. I think what happened is that

     

    she was the first really weird ambiguous case in that period, since her good consequences mostly happened posthumously. All humans (until the main cast) immediately go to either the good or bad place on death, so she also must have. But then some entity decided the case was weird enough to take her case to the Judge, and she got the medium place made for her instead.

     

    So it's not so much that she was much better, but that she was weirder than anyone else in that period, weird enough to actually have her case considered manually rather than the automatic bad place dumping that everyone else got.

     


  2. On 2/7/2019 at 4:05 AM, twmac said:

    Russian Doll So, according to friends Natasha Lyonne is just doing more of her OitNB schtick here, but having given up on that show after the first season, I am really enjoying this tale of a woman who keeps dying and waking up on her Birthday. I don't want to say too much but it was a fun spin on Groundhog Day and elicited more than a few laughs. Co-created with Amy Poehler and some of that shines through.

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


  3. 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:

    Quote

    Gareth spent over an hour getting destroyed over and over, he had even taken a time out to realign his team and tweak their gear and still made no difference.


  4. 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.


  5. 7 hours ago, Henke said:

     

    Damn osmosisch, that's a lot of games!

     

    I've played several of those. Actually had a lot of fun with Satellite Reign and Hyper Light Drifter as well.

    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.


  6. 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.


  7. 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


  8. On 11/22/2018 at 11:23 AM, Deadpan said:

    I've been dabbling in MTG Arena next to Hearthstone and I don't have the energy to indulge in another card game next to that. Arena is sort of a fun nostalgia trip and I really like how the UI/UX stuff works in this iteration, but now that I'm getting a bit deeper into it, it feels odd to push up against its physical roots. Because Hearthstone is purely digital, they get to do balance changes whenever they want, they can rewrite cards if they need to and they also have their own, fine-tuned system for how drafting works in Arena. MTG Arena is much more "it is what it is" and I frequently get my ass kicked up and down the block by people who just got to draft a couple of combo pieces. It's almost as frustrating as playing against Druid!

     

     

    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.


  9. 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.


  10. 16 hours ago, I_smell said:

    Even now, where we DO have people digging deep into design decisions, everyone else just seems too self-serious, not experienced enough or less inquisitive.

    When Bioshock Infinite came out, I was refreshing the page waiting for the Idle Thumbs episode. It felt like a perfect storm for picking apart ambitious endeavors that were often very well achieved, sometimes not, and always lead to bizarre cool-dude antics that don't hold up to scrutiny.

     

    I agree, I like listening to Waypoint Radio when they have an episode about what a "game developers union" would actually look like, or when Quantic Dream is arguing with journalists, or somebody says the N-word, but I don't tune in to listen to them talk about games.

     

    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.


  11. 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.