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I'm more hyped for this game than any I can remember, and there's 44 days left. I need an anti-hype injection to make the time pass quicker.

Midnight eastern time I think.

I have a CRT too! I think I'm about ready to give up on it though. edit: maybe that's not a CRT, but it looked like one at first glance.

That's any luxury product, some people will feel good about a more expensive thing simply because how the price changes how they perceive it. I don't know if it's fair to call them a complete scam though. Personally I like having something that feels sturdy and well built, and you don't get a metal frame and decent keycaps with your $15 rubber dome keyboard. I can type fine on those, but they feel like plastic junk. 'Complete scam' to me is Apple charging $100 for a laptop power cable. Also, I looked for a plain black keyboard for quite a long time. Most keyboards aren't plain, they have a ton of pointless buttons.

I don't want the pre-order weapons if there isn't an option to disable them. Might just buy the game on release date instead.

I don't know if I'd call it fancy, but I have a Filco Majestouch 2: I like that it's plain, no glowing crap, no extra buttons, no excessive branding etc. Mine has brown switches and I quite like them, but I'd say having a good mouse makes a bigger difference than a good keyboard unless you type a ton. I've had it for three years and no real problems, the build quality is great and it has a good heft to it. I will admit this brand is a bit overpriced though, but I'm still happy with it.

I.think() that would make your.posts hard to read();

And Dark Anor Londo sucks.

On the topic of retro games, two old strategy games I love are Myth II and Ground Control, and both hold up surprisingly well. Hearing them talk about either of those would be a treat!

No It's just me being an idiot and erasing the sub-forum part of the URL when the predictive search matches it with 'i' but then I forget if I need to erase the first /forum/ or not.

This is kind of a pointless nitpick, but I think: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/forum/ Should redirect to: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/forum/1-idle-forums/ or just https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/ Instead of giving a 404

I think you're misinterpreting that if you think it's trash talk. He's talking about the pure aesthetics of the design and his aesthetic ideals are rooted math / programming. It's not even what makes a "good" game, I think he'll tell you he'd rather make something that meets is aesthetic ideals than something people think is good, or fun.

Making or saying something that comes off as racist doesn't necessarily make you one, it only makes you insensitive. TWD plays on the stereotype of a black convict to make the other characters (and possibly the player) feel uncomfortable about him. Using a stereotype is not inherently problematic, but TWD and Infinite are a world apart in that regard.

Save your sympathies for the 200 newly unemployed I say.

I liked TW2 but I think the potion mechanics were bad, straight up. It's hard to know when you're going to need them in advance and boss battles are often preceded by cutscenes, even dialogue trees sometimes. At the same time they vastly reduced the duration of them so if you pre-apply them they might run out in the middle of combat. It's got some gameplay issues in general though, the difficulty curve is inverted (combat becomes so trivial that it gets boring later on), Quen is overpowered while being boring to use (stops vigor regen), upgraded roll is silly good vs blocking which is pointless. I'm not sure I could replay the game now that I've played Dark Souls. I still like it for its world and story though. What they did with chapter 2 is kind of amazing.

The principle of least action is a fairly obscure thing to bring up, I wonder when he got so into physics.

That was a good review by Yahtzee! Strangely positive for him. It is a weird thing, isn't it? I can't imagine it happening to any other game, there's just something about Dark Souls that I can't articulate. On the surface it's not a particularly unique game, yet somehow I feel like it's fundamentally different from almost every other game I've played. I feel weird even saying that.

Well, the only thing I've read is this: http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/1/10/3853198/ken-levine-bioshock-infinite-vgas

I didn't get the feeling that stuff was cut, to me it seemed more like levels and characters were repurposed, shuffled around and bolted together. He left Valve, didn't he?

Here's a talk I like by Jonathan Blow and Marc Ten Bosch. It's a bit hard to summarise, but they basically define a set of values in mechanics and puzzles that they think make for good games from a certain aesthetic point of view.

I used to take 'beta' to mean more or less feature complete software that still needs polish and bugfixing, whereas alpha is the stage where features are still being revised and added. No one follows that though, even 15 years ago mods called their releases betas when they were what I'd call alphas.

It's always video tutorials! Does no one else hate them? You can only go at the pace of the video, you can't skip around effectively, you can't easily use them as a reference etc. It feels so inefficient.

There are IRC clients other than mIRC?

What's interesting about the EVE battle is that it kind of happened because of one guy, the CFC fleet commander who decided to go all in. Making that call was just insane, even though it worked out. I think it's fascinating that you can have power structures like that in a game, 2,000 people waiting on the word of one person. It must be stressful being in charge of $300,000 worth of internet spaceships though.

It's not the pinnacle of writing in games no, but it's a weirdly endearing game. I don't know how to describe it other than to say it's very Japanese. It juxtaposes extreme campiness (that I think's intentional) with grim moments like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRP0Ha9ok4o It reflects that mechanically as well. It's got surprisingly fun combat (it gets better when your rifle is upgraded a bit) but it mixes in this nonsensical relationship mechanic where your squad gains approval of you when you headshot lots of robos (which is followed by very campy random exclamations of approval from them). You can also diss/approve of jokes they make and your relationship status affects the ending. It's fucking weird. For whatever reason though, all that kind of works. I ended up really liking the game (I replayed it right after finishing it) but I understand if people think it's just the worst. It probably took at least two hours before I warmed up to it and another two before I was willing to admit that I enjoyed it non-ironically. Also, it's surprisingly refreshing to just shoot terminator robots instead of gunning down a thousand humans.