Niyeaux

I've never understood some people's beef with the tricky(ish) jumps. It's a game in which the primary gameplay mechanic is jumping, why would you want all the jumping to be easy?

More words from me. I wrote a feature for Unwinnable about Earth Defense Force 2017, which is possibly the biggest sleeper hit the Xbox 360 has ever seen. http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/06/04/the-little-things/

Tegan, where in Canada do you live? I'm guessing not Vancouver, because an apartment that size would be a fucking billion dollars here.

I've got an extra copy of Hotline Miami from the most recent bundle. Holla at me.

This is the best bundle since that crazy Psychonauts + Bastion one, IMO.

The Bechdel test manages to be even more stupid in real life than it is in fiction. Fancy that.

I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen this whole kerfuffle about the XBO's used game system, and in particular Ben Kuchera's silly article in support of prohibiting used games sales across the board. I wrote a response to it that I think turned out really well. Check it out if you feel so inclined.

I'm pretty sure that game exists...

It's been labelled as "a scam" and something with "the capacity for real harm" in this thread. Those are not the words of someone who doesn't really like it but doesn't mind other people playing along.

I get why people don't want to use it, and that's perfectly fine. The people who are offended by the fact that it exists at all are being patently ridiculous, though, and are a pretty textbook case of "STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE."

This is possibly the silliest argument that's been presented in this entire thread. Scientology and cigarettes aren't bad because you want to do them and they're somewhat addictive, they're bad because they do tangible harm to the people using them. No one is telling you not to smoke cigarettes because yo enjoy them too much, they're telling you that because they give you fucking cancer. There is no similar harm caused by idly collecting imaginary trading cards on an online gaming platform. Most of us have specified that we don't intend to spend any money on this system, and are engaging with it purely as a matter of curiosity. I don't understand people's beef with this at all.

Shockingly, some people enjoy things that other people don't enjoy. I know, weird, right!?

So I managed to pick up a couple of the CS:GO cards. It's strange though, it seems you can only early a maximum of three cards in-game, and to complete the set you have to trade for the rest. I'm not really sure what you're supposed to trade for them, though, since presumably you don't have enough cards in any of the other sets to complete them and have leftovers to trade, since you can only unlock three cards per game by playing them. Is the idea that you complete a set by trading away cards you've earned in other games? Doesn't that make it impossible to complete the set for the game you're trading away cards from, since you can never earn replacement cards?

I would like an invite! http://steamcommunity.com/id/Niyeaux

Thanks for posting this! I already own it on console, but I've been meaning to check out the PC version. At that price, I'm not gonna say no.

If a character is doing something that they don't have any logical motivation to do, then that's bad writing and it's pretty lazy, but it's not sexist. That would be like saying the aforementioned example of Anakin killing children is proof that the creators of Star Wars are child killers - they're not, they're just bad at writing. Worst case scenario, stuff like Joffrey being a rapist for no reason is evidence of lazy writing, not of sexism.

The answer is that the things characters do, regardless of how terrible, never make the piece itself (or the author) terrible. Ever. Having a narrative that condones terrible things is a different issue altogether.

Never. At no point does it become acceptable to accuse an artist of being the things he describes his characters as, unless the narrative in question is constructed in a way that explicitly condones that sort of behaviour. For some reason this issue is perfectly clear to us with other forms of terrible behaviour - Nabokov is not a pedophile, the guy who made Saw is not a torturer - but when it comes to sexism, I constantly see this very obvious distinction become hemmed and hawed about. It's a bit ridiculous, to be honest.

The core concept is far from the only thing that makes Diablo 3 a pretty huge pile of crap. This is evidenced by the fact that Path of Exile uses the same core concept and is an awesome game. Things that are awful about Diablo 3: -The bosses who were so cool in D2 have been written like saturday morning cartoon villians for D3, constantly explaining their own evil schemes so that you can beat them. -The RMAH is not only a crappy idea, it also manages to compromise the design of the game in a way that affects people who don't even use (or wish to use) the RMAH. (see next point) -The loot drop rates have been nerfed to oblivion because Blizzard has a vested interest in making you buy stuff from the auction house. -The randomly-generated abilities for blue mobs are wildly unbalanced, resulting in certain combinations of abilities causing huge difficulty spikes in random places.

Also, I'm not a fan of how the money production only ticks every day, but the ship production ticks in real time. It's a weird inconsistency that doesn't really add anything to the game, other than making you sit around a lot in between production ticks instead of building stuff as the money comes in.

It's pretty disappointing how poorly balanced the research options are. You pretty much have to do weapons 2 right out of the gate, or you get steamrolled. There's no other upgrade path that competes with someone who gets weapons 2 first and just starts taking stars.

I wanted to be "Scoops," but a non-Thumb apparently has that name already.

I am also down for this if we wanna get a second game going. It looks like we probably have enough people.

Welp, Neptune's Pride 2 is out and was talked about a bunch on this week's podcast, and now I really want to play it. Can we get a game going?

Definitely true, but I feel like that topic and the topic of curated reviews have very little to do with each other. Saying "I'd like reviews curated by a woman" (or a gay person, or whatever other underrepresented minority) is sort of missing the point. What it sounds like you guys were talking about on the podcast, and what I think would be cool, is if there were critics with a large enough body of work that you could get a real feel for their tastes, and how they compare to your own. This would allow you to read their reviews with a little more perspective, and possibly make those reviews more rewarding and informative for the reader. But as I said before, I don't think having that window into their tastes, and either agreeing or disagreeing with those tastes, has anything to do with what race or gender they are. Would it be nice to have more women and minorities in game making and in games writing? Yup. Would it be nice to have Ebert-style curatorial reviewers? Yup. Do the two have much to do with each other? Nope, IMO.