Badfinger

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Posts posted by Badfinger

  2. Posted

    A couple of things I had to yell out immediately. Haven't finished the cast, or read the whole thread -

     

    ~THESE MAY BE SPOILERS THOUGH DO NOT SPOIL ANYTHING MORE THAN LISTENING TO THE CAST~

     

    I also definitely chose heads/tails. e: after reading the thread, wow, I thought I had made a choice as well. The brain sure is unreliable.

     

    I wondered if the choice of Liz's brooch did anything. A friend said he thought it swapped back and forth while he was playing, but I didn't notice that.

     

    I did not throw the baseball at all. You have the option to let it time out.

     

    Re: Sean's "She'll be right back" rant, the difference between you and Chris having a wonderful date on the beach and Chris saying he's going off for a minute, comparing it to Elizabeth saying that is that Booker was specifically sent to the city to get Elizabeth and remove her from the city, and they had just been attacked and fell a billion yards onto a beach, and a contingent of people are being pretty antagonistic towards you. The second she says "WOO A BEACH I'LL BE RIGHT BACK!" my reaction through Booker was "holy shit do not let her out of your sight for one minute, she is the most valuable commodity in the entire city and doubly so for you." (I then prodded behind every shed for hot dogs in the sand because it's a Bioshock game, but my point stands)

  3. Posted

    I liked the game a lot. Maybe not 10/10? But I enjoyed it a great deal, as evidenced by the fact that I finished it the day it came out (or at all frankly for me these days).

    I wasn't put off by the ending. I enjoyed it. There was a bit in the credits that gave me goosebumps, frankly. I also feel like I mostly understand it, while at the same time if I mused on the plot twist early in the game I didn't guess it "a third of the way through" like I've seen people in other places claim. Full disclosure, I never beat either of the previous Bioshock games and apparently there is fiction in other genres similar to this that I've never read or seen. So I wasn't put off because of sameness either.

    I do wish some if the plot elements fit together better. I love the Luteces. If you think you might like this game you probably will. The God Only Knows cover is absolutely stellar, I want this soundtrack.

  6. Posted

    I'ma double post to answer the sports thing (that other post is mad long): I love sports and also I love video games (and the competitive aspect of both). It's weird to me that people find it weird that you can like both things. They're certainly not mutually exclusive, just somehow stigmatized as being opposing ends of a social spectrum. Things I have had conversations about in the last 24 hours: Hanley Ramirez needing surgery and how the World Baseball Classic affects MLB, how boned the Flyers and 76ers are and how much I miss Andre Iguodala, the hilarious over-anticipation of the Blizzard card game, how medivacs are apparently overpowered (they're not, it's mutalisks no I'm not zerg why do you ask), and LoMas, LoMas, LoMas.

     

    To address the second part of your question also not addressed to me, I am fully in Sean/Chris's camp when it comes to recreational sports and acceptable behavior. Those are casual environments where the explicit goal is to have fun and play to the end of the game so you can go have beers, and a secondary outcome is winning. If you are getting shit-talked or berated by opponents (and ESPECIALLY by your own team) that is 100% unacceptable. I've had forum conversations about trash-talking in LoMas, and some people have attempted to compare that to psyching out/trash talking in professional sports. Somehow, that always attempts to justify people dropping racist and sexist epithets as "good natured ribbing" which boggles my mind.

     

    But long story short - professional athletes are being paid to play at the highest possible level, and to win at any cost within the rules. If that means attempting to gain a psychological advantage through trash talk, then that's what they do. Recreational game players are NOT being paid to play, and in fact have explicitly signed a social contract (ToS and Riot's Summoner's Code, for example) to be respectful and exhibit good sportsmanship. That's compounded with the fact that athletes are physically there with each other, and gamers are thrown together by algorithm and will statistically never randomly play with each other again. If you have reached a common ground with an opponent where you can share good natured trash talk (no swears or slurs are ever good natured) and helps you enjoy the game a little more, have at it. "LOL NOOB UNINSTALL" is not good natured.

     

    The way I think about it is that online matchmaking is Little League Baseball. You get grouped into random teams based on location with a very thin veneer of matching on skill, everyone is playing for a juice box and a ribbon, and anything unacceptable to yell on the field or in the stands at 13 year olds is also unacceptable here.

  7. Posted

    Point 1:

     

    PLAY CAESAR 3. Oh my lord I played so much of that game. It is awesome. It is not exactly a city builder ala Sim City, and more a scenario game. There's actually a campaign mode that's very reminiscent of traditional RTS campaigns, where you play with progressively more complex/difficult goals to attain to win the scenario.

     

     

    So either I suck at writing (which I do) or you suck at reading, because what you just said was basically what I was attempting to say. Obviously "ruining friendships" is hyperbole, but I still get the sense that some people have more trouble with the "compartmentalizing frustration: thing. I've definitely read posts along the lines of "we can't play this game anymore because we always end up hating each other when we do" and I'm always slightly confused, since my experience with games is so far from that. If the rules of the game allow for or even encourage tricky plays or "backstabbing" how can you personally fault someone foe using those? And furthermore, why would you expect them not to? I'm going to stop now because I think I'm rambling. I'll probably come back and edit this for clarity when I wake up.

     

    I don't know if you are a competitive person, but I am. When I do things with other competitive people, it can get kind of heated. I ENJOY competition. But, especially when I was younger, it was easy to let that run away from me and get very loudly frustrated at other people. I'm sure I had a few "take the ball and go home" moments across sports, games, and video games throughout my teens. Most of the time with sports with was with friends, and certainly you're playing card/board games with people you're friends with as well.

     

    One of the things I think makes frustration/raging more prevalent/noticeable in LoMas is the nature of how you see the game. When you're playing CS (I actually played MoH:AA and CoD competitively), you see a first person view, and the only things you have vision of are the things your gun is pointed towards. In DoTA/LoL, you have a 3rd person isometric view, and real-time vision of everything your team can see on the map. You can very literally see a person casually walking to their own death 10-15 seconds before it happens. That can be a very frustrating experience (both directions). The nature of a small team, an omnipresent view of the map, and a guaranteed time investment means frustration has the propensity to build and burst much more quickly.

     

    It's also directed frustration. If you're on a team with 15 other people in an FPS, and the top guy is going "UGH CAN'T WIN PLAYING WITH ALL THESE NOOBS" he's not raging at you. If you're on a team with 4 people and the guy with the most gold starts bitching "UGH CAN'T WIN PLAYING WITH NOOB SK. QUIT AND UNINSTALL" that's personal. It's personal because you're 20% of the team composition and they need you. But in CS you can quit mid-round and be playing another map or gametype in 30 seconds with no consequence. In LoMas, that's THE GAME you are playing. You can't just drop in ~15 minutes in to just do a little light CSing before dinner, and you can't quit and be replaced. If someone is being so abusive that you just straight close the client, YOU'RE the one who's in line for punishment for quitting. Also the team is now at a 25% manpower disadvantage (5/4) and even if you could have worked it out you're boned so you just let 3 potential non-jerks down.

     

    It's also Dunning-Kreuger.

  8. Posted

    Let's be fair, EA will never win gamers' hearts. They could do everything right and some fucker up the back will go 'I still remember what you did to Westwood'.

    That fucker is me. Westwood was probably the first developer where I truly understood what a developer was, and that they had made all the games in a series I liked. Even Maxis, Microprose, et al didn't occupy my consciousness like Westwood did.

     

    EARTH AND BEYOND, YOU JERKS.  :oldman:

  9. Posted

    Mania Planet is its own weird niche of insanity. It is much weirder than UPlay by far.

     

     

    I would recommend Giant Bomb Official and Unofficial Classic as servers to play on if you are Open Beta'ing right now. They're generally full or close to it, have some weird and fun tracks, and are stuffed to the gills with the worst possible dubstep you could imagine, which is wonderful.

  10. Posted

    Mass Effect 3 as a free game is weird -- I'd almost say it needs the DLC for the story to hold together.  The ME 2 DLC was decent but easier to separate from the rest of the game.

     

    From Ashes because it shows us that Protheans are dicks, Leviathan so the overall plot makes at least a little bit of sense, and Citadel just because it is awesome.  I guess 25 bucks for all those isn't that bad if the game itself isn't free but meh.

    The ME3 multiplayer DLC is all free, and is awesome. It is the weirdest dichotomy where Bioware/EA 100% deserve a ton of criticism about how they've handled the single player DLC for the game (some of the content is basically mandatory to the game as far as the story goes and should be contained in the main game) and just as much or more praise for the multiplayer DLC (completely free, almost doubled the amount of content since first release).

     

    My "problem" with the free game is that I own BF3 and expansions, I own ME3 but would have happily accepted the expansions, and DS3 is not interesting to me, to the point where I bought Dead Space 2 on a steam sale for $5 and I don't think I even installed it. It is incredibly surprising to me that they're actually offering a game that was released less than 6 weeks ago. If I just wanted to claim as much monetary value as possible, I could be getting $120 MSRP in games for $40. Chances are I'll grab Need for Speed or SC4, though. That's kind of funny, too.

     

     

    It's sad, I was so excited and I put at least 6-8 good hours into various cities in the first 2 days after release. Then it actually got MORE difficult to play, and it has become slowly realized that my nightmare scenario where I had massive traffic problems bankrupting my city wasn't (totally) because of my inept city planning, but because the traffic algorithm was so dumb that taking out bonds to add avenues wouldn't fix it. I'm not sure I'll go back until they release the traffic patch. I am ok with gaming the game to some extent, but to others I just want to Build Stuff.

     

     

    If EA really wanted to win my heart, they'd offer me a copy of Heart of the Swarm and the new Dishonored DLC.

  12. Posted

    I was going to say a similar thing with regard to Metroid, because I did not play the original Metroid until long after I'd beaten Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion and moving left is just as natural as moving right. In Super Metroid, the first motion on Zebes (?) is left. It's the only way you can get to the tunnel network.

     

    For the more open-world Castlevania games this is mostly true as well, although you do generally start with the castle to your right.

  13. Posted

    This KILLS me because I knew it was D'Brickashaw -- my fantasy football team was called D'Brickashaw's Rickshaws this year and I simply got confused and befuddled by the majesty that ist he name "Ndamukong." (Which, if I'm not mistaken, means "House of Spears." Holy shit.)

    That is an excellent fantasy football team name. Ndamukong is absolutely a name completely ensconced in majesty, you are correct.

  15. Posted

    According to Internet Football Documenting website Kissing Suzy Kolber, it was sadly not Ndamukong Suh who was on Wild and Crazy Kids, it was D'Brickashaw Ferguson.

     

    http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2013/02/dbrickashaw-ferguson-once-appeared-on-wild-crazy-kids.html

     

     

    Maybe that's not sad, as his name is even more fun to say than Suh's. It is sad that there doesn't appear to be video on the internet.

  16. Posted

    Hmm, sounds like they could've prevented some of this downward spiral by making emergency vehicles not abide by traffic rules and not sacrifice too much of gameplay. After all, why not. they hardly follow traffic rules in real life anyway.

     

    So if you have the fancy police and fire stations, you can buy fire marshal cars, faster response dispatches, and helicopters. So you can have police/fire helicopters. They will chase criminals, catch them before crimes have been committed, the fire marshals will actively PREVENT fires, etc. You actually CAN get around the traffic rules, I'm just stuck in a horrible spiral where I can't get the money to do it.

     

    And just to be clear, I know how to fix it. And when I say know how to fix it, I mean I have a plan that may or may not fix it but seems feasible - more than one train station. I can run the train station infrastructure to both sides of my city and split it. I just wish I'd thought about this 90 minutes prior when I had a chance in hell of fixing the debt.

  17. Posted

    Think you've hit the nail on the head there, when I watched the thumbs stream of the beta a few weeks back it got me very interested in the game. However I've seen enough havoc during MMO launch's to think to myself "ok lets see what happens, after all EU launch isn't until Friday", & boy am I glad I waited now.

     

    I also think the criticism Polygon have taken over changing their review is although harsh, both entirely of their own making (by deciding to go for such a early review), and entirely predictable (what game with always on DRM hasn't had a troubled launch?).

     

    From that perspective, Chick is 100% correct that you can't review a game with a heavy online component day one and call it complete. I have been telling everyone I can who's on the fence to just BE PATIENT. However a person who is having lots of fun with the game and did NOT experience "launch issues" (we were playing on EU West rather than a US server, which meant basically nothing because oh no my ~latency~), I do disagree with his claim that there are things fundamentally broken. My experience so far is that sans online-style issues, it's a well built game. It's definitely not perfect. There are bugs. Hopefully a few really weird things are patched soon. But there are also things that I'm just bad at and the simulation doesn't like.

     

    For example, making the highway right through town also be a major artery to get to places IN town is horribly dicking me over. Traffic is terrible and it's causing people to miss work, which is causing them to be homeless, which is causing buildings to be abandoned, which is causing crime, which is causing me to spend more money on police infrastructure (but I can't spend it on the really fancy police station because I can't afford it, so I'm band-aiding it over with the cheaper ones which end up costing more overall), but there are homeless people so I'm losing out anyway because I'm not getting enough tax revenue, but the traffic is still so fucking bad that my police cars and fire trucks are in horrible traffic jams and can't stop the crimes (example crime: arson). Traffic so bad that the common cry of "why aren't people pulling over? Why aren't the emergency response services using the unused lanes?!" have no merit to me because all the lanes are jammed for HOURS. And guess what? When the skyscraper on the avenue is the one that's catching fire, then the fire trucks are the ones causing the traffic jams. Hooray for me.

     

    And that's my problem, not the problem of the City Simulator. That's what I get for making the Residential zone in the region "pretty" arches instead of goddamn squares like urban planners of the 1950s intended. Is it frustrating to see all the homeless people and abandoned buildings, but it's also extremely gratifying to be able to see a momentary breakthrough where I get to put in an avenue and streetcars where there was just a 4-lane highway and the ripple where things DO get better.

  18. Posted

    So I got home at just before 6pm EST last night. Opened up the box that had arrived from Amazon, installed lightning fast no problem, was ready to go by like 6:15.

     

    Played until almost 2:30AM. I have work at 8am, I never do this. I am an old person (for video games). It is pretty addicting, even though I have almost ruined my bedroom community city. We were on mumble, just buildin' cities, helping each other out, ruining everything.

     

     

    Some people are going to hate this, but I love that this shows how deep the simulation truly is: I know why your gift took so long to get to where it was going. It's because when you give someone money, SimCity creates an armored truck full of money and it has to drive to the city it was gifted to. Your armored car was probably stuck in traffic somewhere.

  21. Posted

    Giant Bomb: https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-simcity/2300-7103/

     

    Glad I hesitated in pre-ordering, it just sounds, too small. Like, you can quickly max out a city and then you just have to go do a new one, nor do the "region online" things sound interesting.

     

    If a city was, like, 9 times bigger it might sound good. But if I want small scale simulation, then I'm probably sticking with Rollercoaster Tycoon.

    The thing people are finding out, generally, is that it is REALLY easy to fill a city space. As in, instead of trying to increase density if you just pop down new roads and new zones for what has demand, it will be filled.

     

    And then they find out that's a virtually unsustainable way to grow the city and go through tremendous pains to expand up instead of out.

     

    I'm excited to find out if it truly has the depth I'm expecting from region play and how cities in the region coexist. That is because I've never been about filling a space with skyscrapers anyway.

  22. Posted

    The frog itself doesn't really make a noise, I think. It just has the wackiest fucking face so when it pauses for a second at the end of a board and then just goes sproinging into the camera, I always imagine it making the most excited goobery nerd sound as it flies outta there.

    So I was curious if I remembered correctly, and I didn't remember the crazy frog jumping off the screen. So I looked up a gameplay walkthrough on YouTube (of course there are gameplay walkthroughs) and I was please to find out we're both right. Hidden Incan people do shout ZUMA and the frog does jump wackily from one board to the next, with the added bonus of apparently an earthquake ripping apart each level to reveal the next one.

     

    Since you are now Zuma-indoctrinated you know this, but everyone must see and know for themselves.

     

     

     

    That frog really does have the wackiest face.

  25. Posted

    He seemed more positive on the bombcast. At first I thought that one day between the bombcast and Idle Thumbs had made him less positive on it but then I read his review just now.

     

    Funny enough I had 100% the opposite interpretation. On the Bombcast, he sounded like 3 Star Brad, he was being positive overall but was making a lot of reservations. On Idle Thumbs he sounded like 4 Star Brad and specifically said as he got through the middle chunk of the game it grew on him well. As I was listening yesterday I said to myself "You can tell the secret connecting timeline when the Bombcast and Idle Thumbs were recorded, because Brad is closer to the end of Tomb Raider and likes it a lot more now!"