Badfinger

Well holy shit The Adventure Zone was a doozy this week. I thought I knew where this was going, but Griffin zagged for sure.

He said he's going solo and it may involve travel.

How dare you, my monocle's fogging in rage! That's pretty much what I'm saying. It's half the syllables to say it correctly. Like I said, I'm laying the blame firmly at the feet of the English.

Ult is fine and good. It is absolutely the "i". Adding the I makes something that was a clean and straightforward shortening of a word and adds a vestigial second syllable that doesn't do anything but make it worse.

Came out in Giant Bomb's chat ramble over b-roll that they've retained the Power Combo system from ME3. That is a good sign, it's one of the fun niches to dig into as you go deeper into multiplayer.

Here's some true pedantry! I really, really detest how the English call Resident Evil "resi". For years I thought they were saying Res E, which is fine. It's the same reason that calling your Ultimate in a LOMA an "ulti" is bad. The reason is this - it's a shit job of abbreviating and it offends me as a genteel and sophisticated human being.

My interpretation of their annoyance was that you experience this whole series of vignettes and scenes, and then the mother stands up at the end and moralizes like a 60 year old whose kids are out of the house, with basically no connection to anything else depicted. It was not that she was used as a mouthpiece, but literally the words she said.

I was loaned the game from a friend, I've played about 10 hours or so now. I'm enjoying it! It's got all the trappings of a solid 7/10, with all the positives and negatives that carries with it (just like every souls game is basically a 7/10). The difference is the combat doesn't feel like garbage and there's like a story with dialogue and stuff. Still plenty of things that rub me the wrong way, especially the menus and skills that go completely unexplained, but hey this is longer than I've played every other souls game combined and exponentially more enjoyment. We'll see how long I can keep going, Horizon comes out next week.

I like mute and ash, because those are the characters I've been able to afford to unlock

Telling me something I know intimately is broken isn't at all helpful. I know exactly what the dodge block is because I watched 3 videos to figure out what the fuck the tooltip was talking about, and then I spent, and I cannot stress this enough, literally 25 minutes trying to do 2 in a row. I know this because I streamed myself failing to dodge block in one of the most boring and frustrating moments of my recorded video gaming life. No, the timing window isn't small, it's literal frames. It's beyond miniscule. Most of the time, getting as close to the enemy character model as i can be, she will just dodge. Occasionally it will take the attack input first and she'll start to swing and I get my ass crushed instead of executing something interesting. Almost none of the time, it will work.

I know video games don't exist anymore but your prescience knows know bounds, because the video game where the future is humans communing with animals and nature and killing robots with spears and arrows to fight back is Horizon: Zero Dawn and it's coming out literally next week.

I got so mad at the game I uninstalled it over the weekend, which is healthier for me and the people around me. I disagree you can just "figure it out". I tried to do the Valkyrie's shoulder pin (a move whose description makes no sense) for 20 straight minutes against bots and never figured it out. Did the move happen sometimes? Yes. Did the move, 80% of the time, not happen for absolutely no discernible reason? Yes. Is guard break countering LITERALLY impossible? Yes, except for everyone else apparently. The description for how to do that is also garbage, incidentally. Game's broken in some pretty fundamental ways.

I've been enjoying this in a really low key way that surprised me. I'm not even a high enough level to play ranked, but it's a pretty good game.

Oh god I'm sorry, I just quoted the paragraph because it contained the words "developers" and "lazy". I make no claim to intent beyond bad inside jokes. Lazy jokes, greedy jokes.

Confirmed Lazy Devs; Greedy Devs.

Listening to the episode, I actually assumed (like most Hanna-Barbera cartoons) that Snagglepuss was a rip off of the Pink Panther. Much to my surprise, Snagglepuss was first. Fun Facts: The little hood worn by a falcon to cover its eyes is very boringly called a hood, but the straps that you use to hold a falcon are called jesses. Thumbs you offhandedly asked what the difference between a robot and an android is. I'll try to just use my words and not fall back on wikipedia but a robot is a machine set up to do tasks automatically/autonomously, and an android is a robot that's made to look like a human or additionally act like a human. Big Dog - not an android. Petman - probably an android. Comment - you moved from our crazy cyber future straight into fish spatulas without really much of a segue. It seems like the show will flow from topic to topic, but that Endorsements are an actual seg where you make a suggestion to the audience? That might be worth calling out as its own thing, perhaps with a brief description. I found the transition very abrupt and would have been more confused if I hadn't seen the show notes with links to Amazon before hearing it.

WHAT THE FUCK IS A DODGE/GUARD BLOCK. This game has way less documentation than it needs. What's an "automatic parry". Holy shit.

Oh man these are the scoops I crave. Thank you for doing such good work.

Love you all. Thanks.

I am the confirmation of Nick Breckon's hypothesis about Dark Souls. I was offered a choice of a few things as a birthday gift, and chose Dark Souls as that gift after deciding to give it a try when the entire gaming world wouldn't shut up about it 4 or 5 years ago. I made it past the gargoyles (?) and quit forever. I am literally repulsed by those games. I'm physically capable. I could beat them. But I won't because I find the entire dark souls industrial complex repellent.

Paradox is having a Valentine's Day sale in case you already didn't own all of their strategies so grand. https://www.paradoxplaza.com/valentines-sale

I think you can absolutely level the claim of uncanny valley towards Rogue One but I'm struggling to remember where you'd apply that for Force Awakens.

I'm so glad that when I brought this up whenever it was in Slack people backed me up. I like the mission of 99 PI but it's the A#1 most unlistenable podcast because of the shilling. I don't mind the stuff pods like MBMBAM do, because 1) some of their ad reads are personal messages and 2) they still bring the goofs in that segment. The only thing I'll really ever skip is if there is more than 1 or 2 MaxFun ads at the end of the show. The same goes for Idle Thumbs and the Giant Bomb stuff. Especially when Vinny was still in San Francisco, the ad breaks were their own little mini-dramas inside a podcast. Thumbs have the continuing saga of Nick Breckon's Back, and while the ads are very clearly delineated, the break/not break sections meander through a more broad stream of consciousness. I'm also a massive McElroy fan. We're subscribing to Seeso specifically to watch the show, and we drove 9 hours on like a week's notice to watch them live. My GF watches weird video game shit because the McElroys do it. Shill all of your shit you want. I'll admit, I didn't even know skipping sections of podcast was a thing people did for years of podcast listening. Whenever I catch myself doing that, I'm probably just over that cast.

I like it, though the open beta was MUCH buggier than the closed beta. There's apparently an entire single player campaign that no one has talked about or played. I was struggling, then I got into it again when I figured out I'd been doing the wrong thing to parry. I quit early Saturday though, because there isn't that much to see. If I end up owning it I'd rather get on that grind in a release of the game that's permanent.

Self Imposed Rule: Playing dorm room madden, I picked teams at random and wouldn't pick a new team until I lost. Senior year I ended up with one team in November that I played for the rest of the year. Less my skill than the team itself and the available player pool of opponents, who got to know each other inside and out.