Badfinger

Yep I did this. I was hyped to the gills by the guys at Giant Bomb, and it turns out I may have been overhyped, because their enthusiasm in enjoying it is way more of a thrill than my playing it. I played the mission where you jump out of a plane to Kanye and the part where you're jumping is cool. The part where you have to 3rd Person Shoot like 45 thugs is not cool, it's boring. Maybe Deckers.Die is the best story mission ever created, but I'll never get there. I know this is a month too late, but it's sort of funny to read that people "quit" Battlefield 3. I guess technically I "quit" too because I never finished the single player? I played hundreds of hours of multiplayer, so I guess quitting doesn't really fit. Even with touting the sucky single player, BF is still a multiplayer game and I feel should be approached that way.

Teatime is another good book. I'm surprised that someone would be on the fence about Douglas Adams books, but even if you don't think they're humorous I think they're important. He's a great, if scatterbrained at times author, and so much of his work has found its way into every piece of popular culture. The DIrk Gently books are much less going for cheap laughs, and more about building plot and tension and sometimes it's funny.

I'm incredibly intrigued by this, but I also know there's no way I could keep a regular schedule to crusade with everyone. I'd be interested in how it turned out.

Glad your leg husk is healing well, then.

Through the weirdness of childhood I don't think I've ever seen 2 start to finish in a single sitting, but 3 was rented like 8 times. 2 was also completely weird, and seemed probably much darker than it actually was to my tiny brain.

Listening to Sean make an analogy for what sport LoMas most resemble, he said the flow is most like soccer. I agree, it's back and forth. As you have the advantage attacking, you control more of the field. As you defend, you collapse back to the box. I was struck that the analogy for actually coming back and winning the game is surprisingly similar to baseball, though. You're not constrained by time, only by resources (outs). So as you accrue advantages and deny the opponent resources, it becomes less and less likely that a comeback will happen, but that number is never 0% until it ends. The Phillies and Diamondbacks played an 18 inning game a week or so ago (this is the example for the Chinese Meta). The benches were so depleted that the Phillies used an outfielder to pitch. He gave up 5 runs in the top of the 18th. Do the Phillies still get to bat? Yes. Do they have a realistic chance to win the game after that? No, not really. But technically the game is not over. 8 guys in a row could get hits in the bottom of the 18th and the Phillies COULD win. The enemy team COULD walk one by one into the fountain while you destroy their base. Fangraphs even produces a Win Expectancy graph that the gold and experience graphs sneakily resemble. http://www.fangraphs.com/wins.aspx?date=2013-08-24&team=Phillies&dh=0&season=2013

I have not but I'd love to.

Well for a "smart" comic, XKCD is awfully good at being dumb so I think we all got our money's worth. v('-' )v By the way Eric, I am 100% sure there is an option to turn the voiceovers off, I'm just not in front of a copy of the game to check.

Because it's more torture?

Question- was your comment about the meta shifting a comment that you think the Chinese meta will become more prevalent, or the Alliance style win at level 1 always ready to fight continuous assault style? I couldn't tell. Curious, because the LoL meta has seen some shifts to and away from both those styles and it would be interesting if the trends mirrored or reflected each other in any way. I think one of the simplest ways to explain what makes lomas more interesting and watchable than possibly other competitive games is that it's always a team game. 5 people have to work together at all times to win. In CoD there's the potential that 1 person could win against 5, but that potential doesn't exist here. Even if one person takes over the game, they were fed farm or got ganks or someone babysat for them or there was a great team fight to snowball. Alchemist looked like a freight train in some games, but knowing that the team's blessing is behind that is incredibly alluring and you don't need to know the names of any abilities or items to get excited to see a huge dude cleaving the hell out of everyone.

I really don't think it's anything new, it's just that you can expose people's obsessions more easily on The Internet. There's functionally no difference aside from what is being scrutinized between a JFK conspiracy theorist and an Elder Scrolls plothole searcher

Just noticed that the background image on Steam is the Brother 150 motorcycle ad.

Oh hey this thread was real rad until about 15 posts ago. I Went Home today. It was awesome. Got a couple tears from me. The countdown to tears is over. A few things I didn't see specifically get mentioned, or mentioned past by different people who had spoiler thoughts about or around

The discussion about the Thumbs taking more suggestions about games to play was a bit weird, because that seems to be a lot of how they are encouraged to play things anyway. For example, the Kerbal Space Program discussion was prefaced with laments that people were trying to get them to play it for an entire year and they should have listened sooner. CKII was something similar as well. A lot of the indies they talk about are that way, too. So the thought that what's needed is MORE input on games they should check out is kind of strange.

So after my defending Irrational's honor and their right to make whatever sort of content for the game they want, Cloud Combat: The Wavening looks pretty bad and boring after all. Which means I won't purchase it, but doesn't really dampen my enthusiasm for the story portions of their content hopefully coming.

I stopped playing SR3 because I thought mechanically it was mediocre at best. That is to say, getting to and through the ~WACKY MISSIONS~ was a controller-limited chore. I have been assured multiple times that SR2 was just flat bad in this department. I actually think the humor is up my alley, I just can't play it. I also have lost most of my will to play open world games, at least the crime drama style ones. Haven't played GTA since San Andreas. I was given Ballad of Gay Tony/Lost and Damned as a gift from a friend, and it's an awesome gift that I've appreciated by playing about 45 minutes of it. On the other hand, SKYRIM.

It is absolutely of interest, thanks.

Oh NO!

Ok one more thing then. The Simutronics front end is called the Wizard. I apologize for that not being the first thing I mentioned. "Select "Wizard" as your client on the play page and the Launcher will download the software automatically for you. You only need to install the Launcher once for it to work!"

The De Jure designations are based on what historically the duchies and kingdoms actually were, so they can't be changed. Let's say you were playing Crusader Kings 20th century and had created the de jure Kingdom of the United States. You can still go conquer Duchy of Cuba and add it to your realm, but it's not a de jure part of the USA.

God dammit now I want to play Dragonrealms. Y'all are jerks. http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/05/19/rise-and-shiny-dragonrealms/ Looks like this dude plays DR on Twitch for about an hour with GM Solomon, who's been producer since basically I started playing. If you're interested then yeah watch the whole thing. Key points that people sort of mentioned - at ~10 minutes you can see room descriptions. At ~16 minutes the guy looks at a decked out player with a bunch of titles, descriptions, items so you can see what that stuff looks like. Ok I'm done, gonna fidgit in this corner over here.

No, but you could be imprisoned by the NPC guards for things like, you know, stealing stuff from the shopkeepers. Or using chain lightning in the city. Or brutally murdering someone in the town square. Yes, there was a card system. You put them in your card book, and when you had a full set it became an item and I believe you could sell them for a decent amount of money. That was well after the migration off of AOL, so I don't remember its full implementation. Steam did not have it first! The experience system is all kinds of crazy. I mentioned you could learn any skills, which is true. So if you wanted to learn a two handed weapon, you took out a claymore and tried to kill shit with it and you start accruing learning in it, and that eventually turns into ranks of Two Handed Edged weapons. But if you took out a long dirk, that's a light edged weapon and you're a klutz with that and you have to use that weapon type to learn it.

There were some places where that was a description, but honestly it was really incredibly detailed and nuanced. I'm honestly sort of tempted to sign up for a free trial just to show what some of the descriptions were, because it was anything but bare-bones. There was impassable terrain, and there were islands. If there weren't mages powerful enough to gate you over to the islands, you had to take a boat. You had to be there when the boat arrived to catch it, because the ferry boats ran on a schedule. Sometimes they got attacked by pirates and delayed. To go from the mainland largest city to the furthest island could take... 6 hours? 8? There were 5 islands and I believe 5 different provinces, 3 kinds of currency all with different exchange rates. You joined a profession, not a guild, and that governed some of the special perks you got, but not any of the skills you could learn. So any class that could engage in combat could learn any weapon or armor skill with no restrictions. There are a bunch of survival skills, crazy crafting, etc. I actually found my old maps, linked my printout. That is a very uncomprehensive list of maps, because I don't think I ever printed a set for the new province they released. I also linked to The Crossing, which is the biggest, busiest city. So basically you can go to all those rooms, and then on the legends all of the rooms marked with buildings you can go in and they're all building-sized. Multiple rooms with different points of interest in each. And someone in the community made all these maps. The game devs didn't provide details maps like this at all. If you didn't have them you just wandered around and hopefully either got some graph paper, learned it, or gave up and quit. If I remember correctly there were 3 big mapmakers. The second picture for example, is JUST the locations that are inside the temple in the Crossing. http://i.imgur.com/fBlaD6W.jpg http://i.imgur.com/KzPIh6l.jpg http://elanthipedia.org/w/index.php/RanikMap1

Nick! Nick. Nicknicknicknicknicknick you and I were apparently the same person in ~1997, because I played SimuTronics MUDs and went to weird AOL chat rooms as well. http://rdi.dragonsmark.com/history.php I absolutely remember going to the "Red Dragon Inn" chat room. There were definitely a bunch of teenagers or younger there, because half the people were a dark-light uncrowned vampire werewolf prince king aloof loner but with a heart of gold. The other half were the same thing but a princess. One dude was a drunk bartender. Thankfully Goku had not been invented yet. There were roleplaying conventions and die rolls. I distinctly recall "dueling", where you had a set move list of like 8 moves, and you could parry/thrust/high/low attack, etc and you played against someone else. It was a really involved version of rock, paper, scissors and I don't know if it was just a guessing game or if there were dice. I played GS3 briefly, but got more into Dragonrealms. I played that game for a LONG time. I believe the biggest difference was that DR obfuscated a lot of its dice rolls behind really colorful language and GSIII just showed you the numbers. It eventually got turned into GS4. The modern day equivalent is an MMO. Dragonrealms just isn't the same after World of Warcraft. The population is small, the world is HUGE, death is brutal, it's actually more expensive (potentially way more expensive), and the grind is truly an incredible grind. The first person to hit Circle (level 100) had put up a guide online called "How to circle every two weeks", which was a hell of a feat. You can get a WoW character to max level in a weekend. You're an insane person, but it's possible. Dragonrealms is still by far the deepest game I've ever played. The guild, housing, transport, dueling, player-run economy aspects of all the most popular MMOs you wish they'd implement are all in Dragonrealms. It's crazy, and I love it, and I'm pretty sure I can never go back. My fingers still have the muscle memory to get from the bank to the gate in the main hub city, though. You can get 2 free weeks if you sign up if you're insane.

It's sort of like The Tudors, except more real. But also dragons.