Badfinger
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Posts posted by Badfinger
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Well Dota 2 is still in beta, meaning new stuff is getting added every single week and lots of big stuff is going on so I guess there's more to talk about. I'm assuming Riot is not still releasing a new champion every other week.
Speaking of new stuff I like the The International 3 Compendium added today, Valve have finally gotten money from me.
So far this year it's averaged out to about once a month. There were 19 last year, so it'll probably even out to a similar place. They still do about twice-monthly balance updates, plus game modes, plus professional tournament stuff (which really isn't the realm of a multiplayer thread, fair enough). They just released a dedicated matchmaker for ARAM, which used to be custom only, and it's been incredible.
It looks like the issue is that many of the active LoL players are on EU, and I'm NA.
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Hey there, doing my semi-annual check in to see if there are active LoL players who want to play LoL in this multi-game thread totally not only about DOTA.
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I'll check Metacritic for games where I've only had one source of information. When I listened to the 3MA podcast about March of the Eagles, I was intrigued and thought my dad might like it. I went to Metacritic and it has a 71, with the spread from an 80 to a 50. Most of the reviews echo some of the concerns that were voiced, namely that the single player was lackluster, and the multiplayer was phenomenal but required a dedicated group of people, likely a certain base knowledge from other paradox games, and the connection was iffy at the time of release.
So I guess I use Metacritic as it was created? An aggregation service. I don' t know if you'd consider that buying based on the score or not.
It's also interesting to see the peaks and valleys of Metacritic. The very, very highest highs, and lows.
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Let's be fair, the accolades, fame and recognition aren't where satisfaction comes from. Being at a company that implicitly encourages the life-breaking experience of playing Neptune's Pride while at work? That's the life.
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It's a funny thing, growing up. When I was little, the popular thing (oft referenced 'round these parts) was the relative who "worked at Nintendo" who could hook you up with non-broken copies of Battletoads. Then the thought that you would run a game company one day. Then perhaps that you'd get a job at a game company. Then maybe I'd just work at a regular company, but have contemporaries who I could hang out and game with. Now I live in a world where my reality is that it would be really nice if someone where I worked played games, at all. I don't even need to play with them, or have a massive company wide conspiracy game insanityfest. Just knowing they're there would be enough.
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The Stalking Head is being a troll, maybe for comedy purposes, but it seems a little off in this thread. Anyway, Pikmin 3 is definitely a mature title, but can there be any doubt that this system is just waiting, waiting with baited breath, for the next Mario from Team Galaxy? If they pull off another 'Galaxy', as in, a redefining platform experience, then even with that single game, they've got it. Viability, redemption, worth, the works.
He's not being a troll, he's just making his point in a way that's a little juvenile (NOT A JOKE ABOUT BABIES). I wouldn't state it the same way, but I don't disagree with him. Nintendo is the game console for families. You, me, Wii, etc. Even those weird WiiU commercials had 7 year olds in them. It's supposed to be wholesome and family friendly, and the games Nintendo makes are by and large rated E or on some occasions T (Skyward Sword is PEGI 12+). I absolutely think Nintendo is trapped somewhere in between making fan service games and making games that aren't "Kids Games" but are for kids. I also agree that daddy's phone and mommy's tablet have way more entertainment hours available in them, for a less expensive price in a multi use device. Games are ubiquitous now. People who don't play games play games, they're everywhere.
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I think that's a totally bullshit figure, for what it's worth. Gladwell's methodology makes no sense to me and the notion of "greatness" Is too ethereal to quantify.
I agree with you, but the takeaway message is "People are good at things because of the monstrous amount of time and effort you never see". It seems self evident, but there are plenty of people who seem to be good at something without apparent effort. People will sometimes describe certain athletes as "lazy", but to reach a professional level they are in the 99th percentile of skill (and opportunity) and were putting in 99th percentile level of effort at some point.
One thing that will never translate onto the rebroadcast is Sean leaving, and then rejoining the chat getting home and being bewildered when he was talking and no one was replying to him. That was quite enjoyable.
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I think the frequent gating in many games trains you to be a scrounging hobo. I'm sure plenty of people, like me, try to suss out the critical path and avoid it, in favor of turning everything else upside down before they get locked out.
Oh god, yes. I will catch myself saying Oh crap, I went the RIGHT way.
The game I thought wasn't good but was better for having played it was Spec Ops. It wasn't outright bad, but the story was almost aided by the very mediocre gameplay. It was something I was playing to get to the end, not because of the mechanical joy of video gaming.
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The Obsidian thing was really just the result of a bad business decision. Obsidian agreed to a contract where if they scored 85+ they'd get all the money, and if they got under 85 they'd get none of the money. That kind of outcome is totally avoidable by having the bonus scale to score. And that kind of outcome will also occur whenever you have a firm line. Say you tie the bonus to the game selling three million copies. The game sells 299,999 copies instead. One missed sale has huge consequences in that case.
The problem is kind of what I was (badly) driving at when I got all ranty, right? The people that made a bad decision were Obsidian by negotiating an all or nothing contract tied to an aggregation website, but as referenced in Tom Chick's post Adam Sessler is upset and blames Metacritic for literally taking food off of developers' tables. So people are mad at Metacritic coming AND going, and mostly all for bad or wrong reasons. Consumer information is not at fault. No one cost themselves any money but Obsidian. I hate harping back to Game Rankings, but if they were aggregator du jour they would have also denied a bonus because they're even lower than an 84.
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I don't see what the problem is. It's not that uncommon to have a bonus tied to a performance indicator, even one that is ultimately based on subjective opinions. For example, a chef might be entitled to a bonus for obtaining a Michelin star. Or a director might get a bonus based on ticket sales, which are no more an objective measure of quality than is a metacritic score. As long as both parties agree that bonuses will be tied to a performance indicator, I don't see any reason to object. At worse, you'd think tying bonuses to metacritic scores would tend to incentivize developers to produce games that appeal to critics. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Because people can accurately assess that restaurants who don't get Michelin stars didn't meet expectations, not that the rating system they agreed to in their contract was bad.
... Except people DO have problems with Michelin Stars, and claim bias towards French restaurants. It's similar to discussions on Idle Thumbs about how presentationally beautiful games like Anno don't ever get mentioned in discussions for end of year graphics awards. Can you imagine the production team on Anno agreeing to performance incentives depending on winning graphics category awards?
The other direction, imagine incentives based on E3 awards. Holy crap, I could not imagine the shit show from that. Get rich from demos.
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I beat it. I'm fairly sure I missed things, and all this time off has turned me from Ghost into the Mr. Magoo of assassins. Trying to choke someone out and then haphazardly bludgeoning them to death with my sword.
I like it a lot. It's more of the good parts of Dishonored, and you get supercharged into having a bunch of skills quickly ala Minerva's Den. If you like Dishonored Dishonored, you should grab it and play it. Also more on the way, because this is just part 1.
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But that's not Metacritic's fault. Metacritic does precisely what GameRankings does except it looks like it was built by someone who wasn't doing a college project, and also has movies, music, etc. No one gets mad at Game Rankings because it wasn't the cool, trendy thing everyone was looking at. And I apologize if I come off as bashing you specifically, but you saying that is a large part of the issue.
What if workers at the Chrysler factory got laid off because they didn't get enough JD Power & Associates awards?
What if you got a performance review every year/half year, but then your bonus was actually tied to the number of twitter followers you had? Also you're not a salesperson or in PR, you're a web developer.
Whenever I think about it, it makes my blood boil. It's one of the worst things that's not literal racism or discrimination about the games industry.
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I agree with Tom's point re: Adam Sessler and keeping food off of tables based on aggregate scores, too.
That's one of the most egregious things I've ever heard of. Obsidian was denied bonus incentives not based on sales, not based on hitting concrete goals, but because they got an 84 aggregate score instead of an 85. And people got all up on Metacritic for that. Why? Why not get mad at 1) whoever at Obsidian agreed to base bonuses on something subjective and 2) everyone in the industry, but ESPECIALLY the publishers who think that doing something like that is an acceptable practice. I have literally NEVER heard this line of thought in a podcast/video/discussion from the professional video games media. I can't be the only one who thinks this. It honestly makes me mad. Much more mad that a horrible goal was agreed to in the first place than that they missed it by a whisker. Metacritic certainly has a place in the industry, but not as a performance metric. Imagine movies or music having metacritic performance riders. Everyone involved would, very rightfully so, pitch a fucking fit.
So mad.
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Happy Dishonored DLC! Thread resurrection!
The Knife of Dunwall is out today. It's the first Dishonored DLC that adds more story to the Dishonored world. Instead of more Corvo you get to play as Daud, the assassin who killed the Empress. It overlaps the timeline of the main game at least in part. It's more Dishonored with more stabbing, powers, and whales. I'm pretty pumped up. Bought it last night, tooled around for a few minutes. Just long enough to remember how many of the mechanics I've forgotten.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/208575/
Get stoked about Dishonored again.
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The innocuous comment "When Nick comes back..." from Sean is a lot more knowing in April than it was in January.
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I feel fairly confident that I would never WANT to be that good at tetris. I think Tetris and bowling share a commonality, which is the point of them isn't to be good. The point is that it's fun and everyone can relate and no matter how good you are eventually you're going to mess up and shrug and laugh and everyone can laugh with you.
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What's funny about Infinite is that to me it's extremely obvious that
Killing Booker in his own timeline does NOT end the other timelines, only his. Because there are an infinite number of realities, ending even a key point on one can't remove all the others because Booker still exists prior to that. That means there's a possibility that branch can be created again. It's the essence of futility.
And even though it's completely obvious, I'm probably wrong!
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Double postin' to cover other small, less coherent thoughts-
Sean, I like DOTA talks. Talk about the dota hole you go down. I am in the equal and opposite LoL Hole.
Re: Infinite, responding to a post in the thread one of the things I genuinely admired was that it gave you all the information you needed to know about what Booker really was, had Booker heavily imply what he was, but never went out of its way to tell you what Wounded Knee, the Pinkertons, and the Boxer rebellion for Comstock were. I LOVED that. There are no heroes at Wounded Knee. Slate and Comstock are both disillusioned.
With regard to reviews, I had wondered if you were going to bring up Giant Bomb. That's mostly a website not about reviewing games. Somewhat opposite to Patrick stepping outside the normal GB bubble and getting backlash, I think it's refreshing, while sometimes frustrating, for them (mostly Jeff and Ryan) to be completely up front that they HAVE a bubble. There are games that Giant Bomb will never cover or play, and they will flat out tell you that they have biases towards coverage. But because they are direct, they have also established a clear voice about their styles and preferences. When they do review something or weigh in with an opinion, you have the knowledge of them personally to know how their preferences color their statements.
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This is also sort of how I felt as well. Colombia never felt like an actual place to me, but more this sort of symbolic mytheo-poetic journey that evoked the idea of American Exceptionalism rather than a believable place that might have existed had we lived in a universe where there was enough helium for a cloud city to exist.
I enjoyed Kieron Gillen's take on Infinite.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/06/about-a-girl-assorted-thoughts-on-bioshock-infinite/
I don't necessarily agree with every individual point, but looking at Colombia through the lens of not trying to be real, but rather trying to be HYPER-REAL helps me put a lot of things in perspective.
Additionally, I don't think you should HAVE to view outside discussion to be able to get things out of a game, but I don't think in depth discussion is a detriment. Isn't that what a book club is for reading? Even if you like the writing, or enjoy the story, that doesn't mean that every book is good at surfacing what its meaning actually is. That doesn't really exist formally for games. Some of that sort of erupts naturally from podcasts, but that's not actually what this cast (or any I know of) is specifically for.
I have trouble being critical about saying "I didn't get everything I think might be there from this story". I am coming to this from this perspective: I am a TERRIBLE critical reader. Listening to the book podcasts, I know that I do not have that level of critical commentary of a piece in my brain, but I could still hold the same level of appreciation (or disdain) for the work without it. That's not to say that you shouldn't be critical of how the story is told of course. Having 3 overlapping sources of plot exposition at once (tears, Liz, audiolog) is bad presentation. Obfuscating or layering less critical parts of the story isn't bad by necessity.
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The thread here got some pretty interesting discussion as I recall. I think you're selling it short.
I agree. The reason Spec Ops WAS worth discussing was the plot and story. As a game, it was basically functional enough to propel you through the story parts.
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Sure, but not measurably differently than BioShock 1 guy is BioShock 1 guy and not you.
I was generally just responding to your comment up the page, that I agree with you there could be motivations to establish Booker as his own character.
I'm also not sure I agree with you about that. I never finished Bioshock 1, so I started it up a day or so after I finished Infinite. Just the difference of the player-character being addressed as "Booker/Mr. DeWitt" rather than just YOU is a noticeable change to me. I also think the plot helps reinforce that. You enter Infinite with Booker already embarking on his journey, and with his motivations clearly established. Bioshock The First begins with a plane crash, where the only internal character motivation is to not die.
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That's a good point. What I wrote up there was my impression when I started playing the game, and it stuck and was never reassessed as I got further in.
I think I can safely say without spoiling anything that by the time you reach the end of the game, there will be a few moments that very likely reinforce your position that Booker is Booker and not you.
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Holy crap, so much awesome discussion in this episode. Sean, it WAS a good one.
The discussion on the gifts was unreal. Imagine receiving the gifts. At what point does that person's mindset turn from appreciation and apprehension to expectation? On day 19 where you wander by and apologize, do they go "WHAT THE FUCK, NO GIFT TODAY? God, the nerve." Do they feel relief? Would there be a pattern to the gifts?
It goes so deep.
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I think the No decision Is Bad can apply to Sim City, but I also think there are multiple ways it can apply. Deciding how you want to build your city, building a high tech high wealth techno-city is a valid choice but so is building all slums all YE time. Just because there's coal in your city plot doesn't mean you have to mine. At the same time, road or service placement could be objectively bad compared to other building decisions. It's a simulation, there's ALWAYS an optimal decision path
The advertising is saying you can build however you want, but that comes with the implication that it is beholden to the rules of the sim. Your goals are completely wide open.
Idle Thumbs 105: XCOM Obama
in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
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Candy Box is INSANE.
PS. I need more candy. I am running low