Badfinger

I watched the GB quick look and I was massively put off by how much everyone is a dick to your character, a boy who saves a woman from assault, because you got in trouble for saving a woman from assault. I guess they were all very stylish assholes. Jeff and Vinny both seemed wildly put off from it as well, but at the end went "YEAH I'M INTO THIS!" in a way I very much was not. Is anyone else feeling this way?

Most of the actual seconds of the letters songs are bad, but man some of them go to some dark places. It's less that I think they have different tastes or I wouldn't like the movies, it's more that I really just don't actually watch any movies. If I have my choice I can always find something to do that's not a movie or a tv show.

I don't begrudge them for a second, but I think the podcast would be better served if they did weekly episodes. I'm not saying they can or they should, but it would be better if they did. If you cut an entire year off of the run of this arc, I bet a lot of complaints either disappear or are mitigated.

They sound interested and perhaps even enthusiastic about doing this particular thing when the current arc ends.

I genuinely like the story, I'm invested in the characters. I think Barry Bluejeans is a nice punchline on a joke. I still feel pretty critical about the way their roleplaying is evolved. They talk pretty candidly about not "breaking" Griffin's story, and I think the characters are way more important than a "story", which is where my sandpaper rubs up against theirs. It's nice to nod to Kravitz being penciled into a storyline, but if stuff changes and you think it's important, change the story and put 'im in there. The fact that for the next arc they're thinking seriously about getting away from a d20 system is an excellent idea. Something Dungeon World-y where people can say yes more often is definitely their style. I liked both Travis' idea and Clint's idea. I thought Justin's idea was hilarious but he's obviously steadfastly against thinking seriously or putting real time into this thing ever. I did not like Griffin's ideas, unfortunately.

I appreciate a true play podcast is a hell of a thing, but the actor and roleplayer in me still rankles when Griffin gets so defensive about people (rightfully imo) calling out his sometimes heavyhanded method of steering the plot. The lunar interludes when he does a lot of the driving doesn't bother me at all. Exposition and character management are things you gotta do. They all do it to some degree. Like "we do that!" is a silly catchphrase but that's not the way I'd do things.

I don't think you're asking too much, but I think you're asking for way more than the games industry thinks you can handle. They did this whole teaser-teaser/teaser thing like we all literally didn't know Destiny 2 was coming this year, knew the exact date, knew it was coming for PC, and hadn't known for the past 6-18 months. So yeah, dude. Marketing. Check out some reveal trailers from other games, they're all pretty schlocky and vapid. Look at these, seriously. I'm with you. There should be more, but I wasn't expecting more. They get a break from me, because they don't need to establish a game for Destiny 2. They need to establish a tone, and I hope they did.

PC release confirmed, via preorder website. @Mington Did you mean humans like with their faces showing on the cover? The original Destiny box art is dominated by people standing behind the logo.

You can kiss all of the characters I dunno why that's particularly spoiler-worthy. It's no different than kissing Kaidan or Jacob. It doesn't provide any big new reveals or ideas, though. We've now neatly talked around the important point he made that they took the absolute milquetoast safe way out. Rather than commit to a story universe where one ending of Mass Effect 3 was the real one, they rolled back to some nebulous time between the end of ME1 and end of ME2 that's very comfortable, where you get a Normandy, a Mako, one conscientious male soldier, one strong female soldier, an Asari, a punch-man Krogan, and a cocksure Turian to go find ancient alien technology with the exact same loadouts you had 5 years ago. All of the politics are the same, which makes all the planets interchangeable. And crucially, I don't actually have a problem with that if they teed that softball up and hit a 500 footer! If the reviews were that they made ME1 but the shooting is good now, that'd be awesome! But most of the reviews and personal experiences are that they tried to make ME or ME2 again and it's a big shrug. They hit a single. Singles are valuable but not exciting or interesting. That doesn't make the game bad or liking it wrong, but I think wondering why someone went to all the trouble when this is the end result is pretty valid. The game feels like it needs another 18 months in the hopper.

I dunno, I'm pretty firmly with Jeff. If you cant point to big, obvious things in this new game that you can say are better, or newer, or innovative, or even just different (things that do not come with the natural march of time like texture resolution), why did you work so hard and long on something? It feels so Big Corporation to make something that screams new and different which is so much the same, and that doesn't feel very BioWare. It would have been way more exciting to me to see them really go for it and fail rather than achieve breathless sameness.

Yeah they did. The Titan Defender's special thingie was an impenetrable shield that augmented the whole fireteam. It was Winston's shield turned up way past 11. Nightstalkers special could spec into a blind/snare/ally heal/replenish. The seed of that stuff's all in there. I fervently hope they don't go after Overwatch. They're wildly different games, even the PvP part. Overwatch's characters are extremely static. A year out from being in that beta, they're almost caricature now. The sense I get is that most people feel like the core of Destiny is the best part of it. The shooting and classes are all super good. They need to fix the game by filling it out with stuff that lets you put all that good Destiny-ness to good use.

I saw a tweet re: prequel, and I think that was dunking on the gigantic 2 in the logo. I have assumed since Destiny 2 was possibly a thing that it would be called Destiny 2. I know people are up in arms because of the word they used but it's just Noun 2. Skyrim 2. Breakfast 2. Purgatory 2. It's the second thing, it's fine. If it's coming to PC you have my attention.

Axiom Verge - Why did it take me so long to get into this game? It's great. When a storm knocked our internet out I turned to something sittin' on the ol' hard drive, and got further the first sitting than I had in two or three attempts previously. I decided to keep going, and while there were some backtracking and signposting issues, it ended up being very good at metroiding my vania fix. The bosses were a bit of a simplicity, but outside of a couple of specific encounters that's never been The Thing for me in these types of games.

I finally listened to the episode of The Flophouse, and it's absolutely hilarious. I was put off of the show by the ads on other Max Fun shows, but it turns out that their voices are less annoying and there are far fewer songs than I was led to believe. The fact that I basically never watch movies turned out to be a non-factor after all!

Follow Teen Vogue.

I bought a PS4 to play Destiny and up until like a month ago really regretted that decision. I really hope it comes to PC. I'd happily accept the game being controller only, even (that won't happen but it'd be fine). It's the gaming life choices and not the control scheme, for me.

Destiny 2: Now With Content?!

I didn't play Dragon Age Inquisition until after all the PSA warnings to get out of the hinterlands!!! came out, and then I ended up, through playing, doing what I eyeballed as about 75% of the hinterlands before moving on to another zone. Guess what, it was totally fine and I enjoyed it almost entirely! That stuff's for some people and not for others. I played 100 hours of the Witcher and I haven't even gotten into the DLC yet. I've played every Warcraft expansion except one. There's a satisfaction in just challenging yourself to hit the rotation properly, to be as mana efficient as possible, to see how long you can go between healing, etc. It's not hard (it was sometimes pretty damn hard 10 years ago), it's a personal challenge that buoys less directed content.

It's the gimmick of the video.

The counter to that is literally no other open world game suffers from this issue. It seems to be the only thing that I've found anyone to consistently criticize about the game (outside of the straight tech stuff).

My dad flipped Nintendo controllers over so he could hit the buttons with his fingers instead of using his thumb. He fixed the issue on later consoles by never using them and switching to PC forever. I was literally reading a history of controller evolution yesterday and it parallels this nicely, down to the X cancel O accept discussion and e: I found it! http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/03/20/under-the-thumb-the-evolution-of-buttons

I've never had much trouble mapping button prompts to their positions. I have Playstation controllers and Xbox controllers and it just must be a thing my brain does for me because I swap seamlessly. The problem I have, like Chris, is when the commands are in the wrong spot. BotW sounds like it's a very special case of putting run and jump in completely the wrong spots relative to each other, but most people probably experience this in Playstation imports where instead of hitting X to continue (cardinal south button) you hit O to continue (cardinal east button).

I missed out on Earthbound so hard that whenever people talk about it I briefly confuse it with Gunbound, which is a Korean Free to Play Artillery-style game from a decade ago which I KNOW no one is talking about because I'm the only person I know who played it. http://gunbound.softnyx.net/ I rarely buy music for a much more banal reason, which is that at some point I started listening to podcasts and that snowballed so hard I regularly subscribe to between 30-40 pods, so that's the thing I listen to at work, in the car, doing housework, etc.

Just trying to coalesce my feelings about it. I liked a lot of the smoothness of the combat, but I really, genuinely disliked the part of the demo boss fight where you rip off a living oil rig's arm and use it as a sword. I do not like that kind of game. Running around in an open world and fighting half a dozen enemies zipping between them sounds good though! I know most boss battles in games are contrived. It's hard for me to really explain when I like them and when I don't? I like when they feel more organic, so the very regimented style of oops you were actually just fighting the giant space frog's left eyeball now let's zoom out and you're fighting its left arm and there's no way to outsmart or outplay the scripting is kind of a bummer.

That's always been a weird sentiment to me. It's been 5 years since the release of ME3, but it hasn't necessarily been a 5 year dev cycle. One could, and I might, argue that now there's a new piece of a franchise that isn't being stacked on top of existing games, you can give them as much time as they need. I think their announcement in 2015 with literally nothing but stills, devs talking, and over the shoulder shots of people looking at computers sped them up honestly. I don't think, say, 6 more months fundamentally fixes some issues people have with the game, but man it looks like it needs that fine grain sandpaper.