tberton

Anyone remember when Jake established that Young Steve's catchphrase was "Zingle dee dingle dingle!" I'm not actually asking when that happened. It was . I just wanted us all to remember that for a moment.

FTL is one I go back to a lot. I'd go back to XCOM: Enemy Within more often, but it's not currently working on my PC, so I don't. Outside of the PC, I constantly go back to the original Warioware: Mega Microgames. Easily one of my all-time favourites.

Here's a really fantastic article from The Atlantic where people from different parts of the world have shared their experiences of racism.

Here's a really awesome article by Austin Walker about the empty streets of Arkham Knight's Gotham.

An open letter of resignation from Pride Toronto's former Trans Pride Team Lead. There's a fair bit of conjecture, but the claims are pretty damning about how Pride Toronto has ignored the needs of trans folk, people of colour and other marginalized groups in favour of pursuing an image more palatable to corporate sponsorship. A worthwhile read.

Oh. I am dumb. Anyway, mazel tov, undermind!

Maybe they're Jewish? Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is September 15 this year, so October 6 would still be kind of the New Year. I'm reaching here.

I don't think I ever knew how. Grim Fandango presented me with the same problems and I quit Machinarium when even the hint system couldn't help me solve a puzzle. I beat Broken Age Act 1, but apparently that was "too easy." I wish this one was more like that.

Ugh, I'm playing Act 2 right now and I want so badly to like it, because I really enjoyed Act 1, but I'm just finding it unendingly frustrating. Each bit of progress is won by bashing my head against a wall, only to quickly encounter another wall that needs bashing. I can clearly see what my goals are, but have no clue how to accomplish them, so I end up walking in loops, hearing the same dialogue bits over and over again. I like the writing, I like the characters, I like the world - I just hate feeling so goddamn lost all of the time. Broken Age, why do you work so hard to make me not like you?

Jake, did you ever play Portal 2 Co-op? I felt that those puzzles felt a bit more in the spirit of the original game. Also, you should really play Boxboy on the 3DS eshop. Better than any other game I've played, it captures Portal's feeling of a stripped down ruleset that still allows for creativity in puzzle solving. It's my current GOTY.cx

Thanks for that, Apple Cider. Coming up on about four months of a pretty bad depressive slide in my life, even though I'm sure I seem fine to most of my friends. It's nice to be reminded that other people go through this shit.

Jake, the selfie Zelda was Wind Waker HD (there hasn't been an Ocarina HD) and those selfies were totally an intentional feature.

It hardly needs saying at this point, but the latest batch of Steven Universe episodes is killing it. The ending to today's episode was amazing.

Yeah, I guess I just disagree that it's ambiguous. Or at least, that it's intentionally so.

Good article, but I think the perceived issues with the game that Hudson notes come back to our earlier discussion.

I'll confirm Gormongous and Gerretic here: If the card belongs to you or is shared, you choose to either play it for the event or for points. Opponent's cards always trigger the event along with the points. So if I'm the US and I play Panama Canal Returned, I either get 1 Ops Point (or whatever their called) or I add 2 influence in Panama, Costa Rica and Venezuela. If I'm the USSR and I play that card, I get 1 Ops Point and the US player gets 2 influence in Panama, Costa Rica, and Venezuela.

I quite enjoyed SotN when I played it a few years ago, having only had experience with the DS Castlevanias before that.

Hey guys, I just wanted to congratulate you on a really amazing discussion. I'm midway through an MA in history and I'm specifically studying historical representation in games, so I was a bit nervous going into this discussion, worried that the topic wouldn't be given the nuance it deserved. I'm happy to say that my worries were unfounded! You all did a great job of tackling the topic from various angles and gave a lot of food for thought about how one represents history in games. Two points were made that I feel are especially important: first of all, like Rob said, games have a tendency to reinforce pre-conceived notions of historical events or processes, simply because a game has to be learned (doubly true for board games) and it's easier for players to learn something that goes along with whatever ideas they already have, so designers lean into that; second, that any interpretation of history is just that - interpretation. That goes for games, books, movies, scholarly articles, museum exhibits - you name it. The interpretations of games should be held to the same standard as those other interpretations.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf would not work nearly as well without the app that reads out the roles to you. Alchemists also relies on an app to combine ingredients to potions without letting you know how exactly they resulted in the potion you end up with.

You may be right here. I think some of my reaction to Gone Girl was coloured by it not being what I expected. The twist took me hugely by surprise and left a really bad taste in my mouth. I may need to watch it again.

Ex Machina and Gone Girl spoilers here.

This is how I heard about the game, ironically from Tom Francis himself who streamed the game and was like "actually, this is way different from Gunpoint and super cool."

I think "universe" in that general sense is fine, because it's implied that you're talking about about the fictional reality of the work, rather than the vast expanse of all known space. But when the game is set in space and sells itself on its scale, the distinction is pretty important. It was especially relevant in that discussion, since Jake was talking about his awe at how far everything zoomed out. "Galaxy" and "Universe" in that sense are several orders of magnitude different, so using one rather than the other gives a very different sense of the game.

Yeah, the galaxy/universe thing annoyed me too. The universe has about 170 billion galaxies, so it makes a big difference in the scale of the game if you're talking about one or the other. I had a long drunken conversation about "meta" last night. "Meta" classicly means "over" or "above" but people often using it today just to mean "self-referential."

The sequel to Kobe's last chance?