eot

I had an exam that I felt I'd be happy to just pass. Came out of it feeling quite good about how it went. Got the results back and I missed the highest grade by one point and now instead of being pleased I'm annoyed. I know it's irrational but that doesn't help.

I wish I liked DA:O because then I'd have another BioWare game to play now. Maybe I should give it another shot, I didn't like Mass Effect the first time either.

What do you guys think Dark Souls II improved on mechanically?

For a while I figured they were a money laundering operation. Still wouldn't surprise me.

I feel so put off by everything Blizzard makes nowadays. It's like their endless iteration and playtesting strips the games of their soul and make them resemble cynical iOS games more than games you remember for more than just their addictiveness. I'm sure it'll be fun and people will play it, but it'll probably feel like something from a fun factory. Or maybe I just haven't gotten over Diablo III.

That's what I heard as well, the project was completely unmanageable in flash so to continue adding to it would require remaking it in something else.

I played about 15 minutes of the XCOM shooter. It's got the sloppiest writing I've seen in ages. I hope it's a parody but I doubt it.

My bicycle tire exploded today, which was odd enough in and of itself, but there was also a flash. Not sure if I hit a home made mine or if a tiny part of the tire rubber became hot for a second. Strange.

I picked that up too even though I won't be able to play it for a while, mostly hoping that if it does well they'll bring over some more of their console games.

You had a pretty good The Dude look going on in the first picture

There are hardly any Nintendo games I like, but Super Metroid is amazing even by modern standards.

Never had a proper beard to shave (couldn't grow one if I wanted), but I did cut off ~30cm of hair once and that felt weird but also great. It grows out again anyway, until it doesn't.

I wish it'd let you drag and drop games into categories. RMB -> set category is so inefficient.

Super Meat Boy is 80% off. Not the first time, but maybe some people haven't played it. One of the best games ever if you ask me. http://store.steampowered.com/app/40800/

I just saw a youtube comment that read: "was there still racism when the vid was made?" The irony of that being posted on youtube of all places is just too good

I beat Volgarr the Viking. It's a very well designed game in my opinion. The mechanics are simple enough that you learn them in the first 20 seconds, yet there's still significant depth and nuance to them. I love elegant design like that. Many of the challenges are built around deliberate limitations in your moveset instead of empowering you to you crazier and crazier things. It's like Veni Vidi Vinci in VVVVVV, where jumping over a single block (the most basic action in a platformer) becomes the hardest challenge in the game. I like that sort of thing because it shows a complete understanding of the mechanics on the part of the designer. I'm not sure I'd recommend the game to everyone though, because it's so unforgiving. The bosses in particular can be a little much. On one hand it's good that they make you play through the stage in a close to perfect manner, since it's a game that is about being mastered, but that's more or less just the price of admission for the boss fight. Taken on their own I think the bosses are fine, but you can't react or adapt to them in real time. Most of them are about positioning, so if you're in the wrong spot you will take damage and you die in one or two hits. In Dark Souls I don't mind the run up to a boss because a failed attempt on a boss often takes 3-5+ minutes, but in Volgarr you'll spend 95% of the time going through a level and 5% dying to the boss. It's mostly the boss of the 2nd world that's an issue, but I think they could've implemented them better overall. Maybe give you 2-3 attempts for each runthrough of the level or something, just to let you iterate a bit faster, because they're not super challenging in terms of raw exectution. You just have to learn what to do.

If you're not invested enough in the story to finish the game then the ending probably wouldn't have lived up to the "hype".

When you teleport there is a discontinuity though. Personally I think continuity is a useful concept to apply here. A continuous function can be different in every point, but the change from one moment to the next can be made arbitrarily small, so the function is always "itself" in every instant. 20 years from now you will be a different person from whom you are now, with different tastes, values, experiences etc. but you were always yourself in every instant between now and then.

I just played the DLC a few weeks ago and I thought they were better than the base game, mainly for how they change and add to your abilities and gadgets. It does a lot to improve the stealthy playstyle. The storytelling is better too, for what that's worth (it's one story across the two DLCs). They're what, $10 each though? It's always weird to buy expensive DLC for a cheap game. I'd say both of them together are about half the length of the original.

Interesting, I loved the GTA III series of games but hated IV (not interested in V) and I figured I'd just grown out of their juvenile humour, overuse of caricatures and (quite often) bad writing. I wouldn't mind being wrong about that.

That's a classic topic of discussion. What if you replace parts of yourself piecemeal, at what point do you stop being yourself? You certainly replace a large proportion of your cells even over the span of just a few years.

I've mostly ignored this whole thing, ignorance is bliss, but today I tried to see what it's all about and I can't even come close to wrapping my head around it. Originally this was about people getting wrapped up in gross rhetoric about the Zoe Quinn thing, right? How did it go from there to some crazy internet Jihad (that doesn't seem to have a well defined cause, because everyone you ask gives you a different answer)?

The quote feature in this forum software can be a little hard to work with.

That's great. Boards of Canada too!

It's not even theoretical, as there are no theories for how it could be done, it's hypothetical. In my personal opinion it is also absolute nonsense.