Badfinger

I definitely got my push down the road towards a history degree due to Civilization and Age of Empires. God I wish I'd found those space-y games, a math or science degree from video games would have been so much more helpful.

This is by far my favorite Let's Play, although with the right author anything from Paradox has a chance to be a gem. https://lparchive.org/Tie-Fighter/ I can't believe this is over 10 years old.

I don't like the oil weapon at all, because it's modifying in the wrong direction. I'm going to use my abilities and skills and THEN hit something with my weapon. Once I'm right up in a face I'm swinging, not stopping to use fire bombs which have a wind up animation. Ah well.

Phaser/rapier is basically broken. If you get any other multipliers stacked on top it does massive amounts of damage. I did 7k on the first hit of the combo to the bridge troll this morning using Attack Power/Phaser/Rapier. If you get the timed doors during normal play yeah go ahead, but it seems usually not worth it. I did find a blueprint behind the door once.

It's less that the response is necessarily good or bad and more that it's almost verbatim the same response they gave two months ago on the max fun drive episode. Just a bit frustrating that no one seems to have made any progress since then.

http://theadventurezone.tumblr.com/post/161367685782/on-the-adventure-zone-graphic-novel-blue-taako I'm not sure how I feel about how far down the rabbit hole they've gone on this. If the 3 characters are all white men that's an issue. If he looks like a latin man that's an issue. I understand this! Ok so their solution seems to have been make the character a non-human coloration and now people are mad about Lore. I suppose I'm of two minds. One is that I respect their attempts to avoid real world comparisons that could be problematic, and two that once you give a concrete shape to an abstraction people are going to disagree about what you did because it's different for them. I kinda feel like the extra work of listening to every single voice has really bitten them in the ass, because in attempting to placate everyone they've managed to satisfy no one. Now in service of their art they've worked themselves into a real pity party and are wallowing hard in it. Taako's not going to look like SOMEONE expected no matter what.

https://www.playbattlegrounds.com/news/72.pu Monthly Update patch notes up. I like what I see, though I am of course scared that they're messing with my precious baby shotguns. Eliminating hard spawn points for vehicles is very good.

My brain goes back and forth on this. It's easy to look at the Blizzard launcher and say "Why are there so few games on this?!" and then realize it's World of Warcraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, and Overwatch on there and the launcher is serving and updating like 75+ million people, plus the probably larger than you (I) think contingent of Heroes of the Storm players. Also Starcraft. Even adding a game I expect to be a very big influx like Destiny is going to be a moderate increase to the launcher rather than doubling its usage rate or whatever. Two other things 1) Activision doesn't actually put out very many games a year so the growth rate on the launcher would be small if they kept it to in-publisher games and 2) All the games on the list have game-as-service as at least part of their model. Call of Duty is a franchise that puts out another game every year.

I liked this week's adventure zone, although it still feels 1) like they're penned in having to make one broad choice per year and 2) because of that it just goes the way it's gonna go. I wouldn't be surprised if the success/mixed success/failure isn't necessarily to people's liking because Griffin is moving on to plot points faster than many DMs would. There IS one question I wish Merle had asked that he didn't.

Curious what you mean about the shooting. The shooting feels good and correct to me. The movement is an acknowledged problem (they're working on mantling rather than the weird/bad jump over small obstacles for example). The servers need to improve, that's for sure. It's hard to separate what's the actual game feel vs the crummy servers. Next week's patch is client fixes, next Monthly patch in June is server.

I feel like I have very ephemeral desires for Destiny 2. I want more of the good stuff (which was very good), and I want them to fix the bad stuff that got in the way of all the good stuff (including not even close to enough good stuff). After yesterday's stream, I am heartened at least that they are acknowledging there was bad stuff. It wasn't quite sports games dunking on last year's version, but they know there were issues. At the same time I feel somewhat cynical, because so many of the things they're promising aren't so much innovations or additions as much as they're fixing the glaring omissions of the first game. "We heard you, and it turns out industry standards of the last two decades are actually good, so here are characters that matter, clans, matchmaking, and a loading protocol that doesn't take 10 minutes out of every hour!" Those things are very welcome, but I feel like taking a deep breath and saying FINALLY rather than stand up and cheering their bold new vision. Again though, the gameplay they showed looked like Destiny gameplay, and that's good because that was the good stuff.

So it turns out that when they said "Next week Abby will be in the booth" they were being totally literal. She's now participating in the podcast from the production room like they're a real radio studio or something! He has the right sense of humor for the podcast and live shows.

I have to imagine that's a joke. She has been on camera/on mic for everything they've put out this week so far. How much screen time she gets is probably up for debate though. I imagine she's the Jason to Vinny's Drew, or possibly the Drew to Vinny's Vinny if you want to go back to small times. (e: heard the comment from Vinny about "putting her in the production booth" on the podcast. It's possible they don't want to do a 5 person podcast so there might be some truth to the joking) Kingtern Ben definitely has the right cadence of humor for the bombcast. Will he keep landing jokes? We'll see.

I got so close to the mythical 1.0 KDR, and then I literally did not get a single kill last night. I was so tired and playing so poorly and turned bad luck into poor decisions and set that goal back hours. This game has derailed my video game year like Zelda did for people that buy Nintendo products. Whenever I have video game time I want to either be playing this, or I'm playing a game of Rocket League to cleanse after a tense round before jumping back in.

Yes and yes. One spawn is one round.

Oh gosh yeah that would fix my biggest criticisms almost instantly. I know the tv run of the show was intensely written and prepared, I don't want to suggest it's not, but the performative aspect of it made it very organic and off the cuff.

I'm enjoying the show but not loving it. It's easy in the moment to criticize an episode for not being amazing, but the show is full of that throughout the years and it's still great. I DO love the fact that my girlfriend enjoyed it enough that when we don't have enough time to watch a full episode I have carte blanche to throw on the old MST shorts. My two criticisms are 1) I'm exhausted, they can't stop telling jokes long enough to enjoy any one of the jokes singularly and 2) I think the skits are mostly bad. I've never liked the invention exchange and it feels forced. The two I liked were the Reptilicus Rap, and the monster/disaster mashup. Gonna turn in my nerd card, I don't know what Wil Wheaton looks like now or what cameo he did. The Fudgey the Whale skit was good, but it's literally just a Patton Oswalt standup routine turned into a sight gag. I guess that doesn't matter to anyone that hasn't heard 15 year old Patton Oswalt standup! I really like Patton Oswalt in general, and he's absolutely playing TV's Son of TV's Frank rather than nerd comedian mashup. I don't have an issue with the voices except that they're similar enough and I'm not familiar enough that the tiny extra amount of brain power used to figure out who's talking while they're absolutely pelting jokes adds to the exhaustion. Something I've been thinking about is how you write a joke that is a proper level of humor. Possibly even a purposefully not funny joke. If you're telling a joke every 3-4 seconds, not only do you have to write thousands of jokes per episode to get down to the couple hundred you actually use, you can't make every joke the funniest gag you've ever written both because no one has that in them and also it's probably actively bad for the watching experience.

That reminds me of one of my favorite medical terms, snatiation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snatiation It's when you get the sneezes after you eat.

The test client is the Public Test Realm equivalent. I believe it's only live for rolling out update patches (so it's live today for rollout tomorrow). It's not experimental branch type stuff like Starbound. https://clips.twitch.tv/BlindingFastBaguettePeoplesChamp We tried being way more aggressive yesterday. I was silly and didn't clip the version of this that worked, only the one that was the most bloody. Even with mistakes it almost did work.

Lmao lookit that guy in the office with glasses on.

I am for every decision they make that expands the space for creativity and exposition, and cuts down on the rules they have to follow, the mechanics they adhere to, and the rigidity by which the story is driven.

TOM BOMBADIL!!!

That's a fair and valid criticism I think. I don't disagree that the timing was seemingly random to drop a video about the game this week. However, the game came out in 2016. Talking about it in November and December is exactly when game people talk about the games that came out that year. I can get down with getting tired of the nuance or sameness of the criticism, but holding it against someone for talking about a game during end of year discussions doesn't hold water for me. She talked about it a handful of times on one podcast, a handful of times on another podcast months later, and there are two articles on a website? I do think her argument about the game has changed, but it has the same fundamental streak. It used to be screw this thing on every level, and it's changed over time to asking why they wait until the end of the game to laugh in the face of everything they just told you. Instead of just being not for someone, it's middle fingers all around. I can guarantee that she's spent more time thinking about this game than I have.

You know that's not the point. It's not the job of someone in the media to pull their punches because they are going against consensus. It's no less egregious to wildly cheerlead for something you like than it is to rail against something you dislike. I also beg to differ, because I sent them a desperate email begging them to stop taking a third of the podcast up with Dark Souls every week. They talk about the Witness what, half a dozen times in 60 podcasts?

I will be boycotting this game until they realize their folly and rename this update Patch- Adams.