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I played Dark Athena a while ago, don't make that mistake yourself. It starts competently I suppose, but missing the magic touch of the first game, and it gets progressively worse until it devolves into non-stop boring combat for the last few hours.

Tbh that needed to happen anyway or they might as well have scrapped the military entirely.

It is starting to get a bit scary isn't it? There's still a long way between Russia supporting/creating a Ukrainian seperatist group and attacking a NATO country though. It all feels like a slow motion game of chicken. It doesn't seem like it'll stop escalating either.

You guys are confusing me you mean Dark Valley right? Because there's a place called the Red Forest but I don't think there's a Dark Forest.

I think I tried to play it with misery, or at least something similar. It was misery regardless. I'm too stubborn for my own good, but it was still too hard and I had to quicksave like crazy just to pass the first missions. Never got that far in CoP partly because of that. Gonna play it vanilla some day.

What build are you doing?

The first time I went down in those tunnels I ended up going back up and after about an hour of exhausting all other ways to proceed I reluctantly went down. They do horror very well. As for storing, there are some boxes that are blue which can be used for storage but I've forgotten exactly where they are. If you store them on bodies or just on the ground they'll probably disappear, unfortunately.

If only there were more hours in the day I always end up thinking "if I'd studied x language 30-60min a day since year y I'd be fluent now", so now I'm finally going to do something about it. Maybe then I'll have time to get to Chinese too!

For how much mouse controls get talked up as being good there are an awful lot of PC games with bad mouse input. I truly wish I didn't notice because I'm so tired of trying to tweak it or find workarounds. Just started Bulletstorm for example, and there's no sensitivity scaling with you aim down sights, so the effective sensitivity becomes crazy high (if the rad/mm is fixed and you lower the FoV the pixel/mm becomes much higher). Luckily it's fixable, but how did they not notice that? Like every other game it defaults to vsync on as well, which adds so much mouse lag you notice it even just clicking in the menus. Like I said, I wish I weren't so picky because it seems that devs very rarely are.

I studied it (mandarin) briefly, but to my ears it's an exceptionally ugly language. Maybe that's silly (or maybe it's just the Beijing dialect), but I had a hard time being enthusiastic about it. Also, I'm not sure I'd want to visit mainland China because of the current regime. There's always Taiwan though. Do you speak it?

I really want to learn Korean but I'm trying to learn Japanese and I figure doing both at the same time is recipe for failure.

There's a lot of stuff to find in pretty much all the areas but some of it is damn well hidden and yeah a lot of it will get you irradiated. Radiation does go down over time, just very slowly. If you don't want to waste anti-rads though you can also consume vodka, that will also bring down your level of radiation poisoning.

My man! That is the advice I always give people. The difference it makes is quite dramatic. I'm glad you're getting into the game it gets even better from where you are in my opinion. I hope you give us an update because there are some great places in store! Just don't get stuck doing too many side quests because some of them will have you running all over the place which gets to be quite tedious.

I don't like gin either. I had too much of it once when we dared each other to take drinking glass sized shots (teens are stupid) and now I can't even smell the damn stuff without feeling sick. As for beer, I don't mind it but I figure it's one of those things I'm better of not loving just for what it seems to do to people's bodies.

Isn't that what the ice bucket challenge isn't though? The cold water is supposed to make you feel paralysed (like ALS).

That's so general that it's hard to give a specific answer, but if I truly think that what I want is more important, and if it's my choice, I'll probably pick the thing that I think is more important. If it's not my choice I'll try to convince the other person, but you have to accept what they choose. If it's a mutual choice I'll probably concede the issue rather than try to strong arm it. It depends though, because there are degrees of conviction.

edit: bah it was on the last page

Why does "going downhill" have a negative connotation? I just had to ride a bike up a hill against the wind, and let me tell you, there was nothing negative about going down it.

Escape Velocity was a great game. I only had the shareware version, which meant that every so often a manifestation of the devs would show up and raid your wallet. I got around it by always reinvesting all my money, because it would only steal hard cash. Tax evasion for 10 year olds. I also remember that the sound when jumping between systems was obnoxiously loud and couldn't be turned down. Sounded like bomb going off each time.

@JonCole that sucks. Can't imagine what it's like for more public people. Personally I've never liked the idea of speaking to everyone and no one like you do on twitter. Anyway, random thought: A spaceship that doesn't collect external energy (and discounting slingshots) has a top speed limited by its rest mass, since the internal energy of whatever fuel you have contributes to that mass and accelerating is just converting rest mass to kinetic energy. That's depressing it means that even if half the mass of your ship is anti-matter fuel and your engine is 100% effective you'll still only reach a lorentz factor of 2, which is only about 0.87c. Someone tell me I screwed up somewhere please.

And suddenly domestic problems involving police become completely public. You can't just give everyone access to that stuff without proper restrictions.

I have to chime in on this as well. The issue is more nuanced than infinite branching (which is obviously absurd) vs no branching. When you design a game and decide to give the player an explicit choice, you want them to believe that choice reflects some kind of agency in the narrative, because the opposite of that is apathy. To maintain that belief you need the story to branch just enough, and downplay the parts where it doesn't. In the case of the example from TWD you mentioned the game draws attention to the fact that you didn't have any agency in that situation. Another point is that TWD intentionally places itself in the contex of other games that are more concerned with branching narrative, and that creates player expectations. I played TWD with my sister who doesn't play that many games, but whose favourites include Deus Ex and Mass Effect. In Episode 3 when the argument at the van happened, and a certain person ate it she instinctively quit the game to replay the conversation. And then again and again until she realised the outcome was fixed. Needless to say the spell was broken at that point. Maybe it's playing the game wrong (I don't like that phrase), but it also feels like the game breaking a promise to the player. Would I rather have no choice at all? No, I think having lots of largely insignificant choices (see Mass Effect) is a great thing. I don't want to tell Garrus he's an idiot it would make me feel bad, even though I know it won't affect the plot. That's what I think you're getting at, but that all starts to come apart when the game tells you what the stakes are. My relationship with Garrus exists in my head; a life and death situation exists on the screen and when you ask me to make a choice about what's on the screen you should show the consequences on the screen too. Finally, whether you want it to or not, suggesting that the player has agency and then consistenty going back on it is making a comment on (the lack of) that agency. If I wanted to make a game about apathy, I'd make a game where you're put in tense situations, forced to make a choice and where the outcome never changes. Apathy might be appropriate in the zombie apocalypse but I don't think it was the intended message of TWD. edit: I write very slowly so sorry if someone else already made the same points.

I think this guy fits what you're looking for, he very rarely puts out videos though:

I'm always such a downer, can't help it, but if it weren't for From's other games there wouldn't be much about that trailer that stood out to me. Having lower expectations means I can be positively surprised again though, so I don't mind. In all honesty the trailers for their other games were never that great either.

I still stand by Falcon 4 as the best flight sim you can get, if you install BMS 4.32. The dynamic campaign makes such a massive difference, instead of flying scripted missions the game simulates the entire theatre of war, with ships, ground troops, airfields, AWACS, tankers, supply lines etc. It's a project to get into it though