tberton

Yeah, I'll see if I can sell it back. Maybe I could give it to a friend. Still, it's a dumb and annoying decision on their part.

That makes sense, but it kind of fucks over people who bought the first game on consoles.

That sounds awesome.

Great cast guys! That girl is a boss! That Kit deck from Toronto actually belongs to a friend of mine and let me tell you, it is a beast. Yogasaurus, Atman and Datasuckers essentially nullify all your ice. Kit is such an interesting ID: you can definitely play around her, but it requires a different line of thinking than most decks do. You have to be aware of how your ice is setup and how many runs you're forcing the Runner to make each turn. And if you're unable to play around her, she wrecks your shit. Nels actually got the text on Sundew slightly wrong. It reads "The first time the Runner spends at least 1 [click] on his or her turn, gain 2 [credits] unless the Runner just initiated a run on this server." It's not any run that stops Sundew from triggering; the Runner has to specifically run on Sundew or the Corp gains 2 credits. Now, that can be used to bait the Runner in hitting a Neural Katana or Chum -> Data Mine when they're not prepared for it, but the most interesting interaction comes with Replicating Perfection. Remember, Replicating Perfection disallows the Runner from running on remote servers until they've run on a central. Which means that it is impossible for them to stop Sundew from triggering. Essentially, this means that in RP, Sundew is a double Pad Campaign with a cheaper trash cost that is guaranteed to at the very least pay itself back. I am so damn excited for that card. It's coming in the next Data Pack, Mala Tempora, and will get me to resurrect my RP deck. I might even try out that Shipment from Mirrormorph trick that Nels brought up.

Dang. Well, maybe I'll pick it up at some point down the line. I've still yet to complete a campaign in Enemy Unknown.

I'm getting back into Enemy Unknown right now and loving it. Questions about the expansion: on consoles, do you have to pick up an entirely new disc?

Downloading OCTGN right now. This is just going to be my life now.

Read Lives of Girls and Women. Which, come to think of it, is one of the best books I read this year. The best fiction I read this year was definitely Cloud Atlas. I burned through that book in about a week and liked it so much that I'm tempted to read it again soon. The best non-fiction I read this year was Death So Noble by Jonathan Vance, which is about Canada's memory of War War I in the 1920s and 1930s and is just about the best piece of scholarly history I've ever read.

I've never played any of the games mentioned in this cast (except for I think the Blood demo when I was a kid), but I really enjoyed the cast. A few thoughts: Whenever Steve says "interface with" my brain automatically fills in "the Animus." Thanks, Idle Thumbs! I 100% disagree with Steve and Craig about knocked out enemies waking back up. If I knock a guy out and the game treats it like the guy is dead, it takes me out of the experience so much. It's not a dealbreaker (I still love Dishonored) but I hate it nonetheless. I feel like it cheapens the decision to go non-lethal and removes the emotional weight from killing somebody. If killing guys and knocking them out are treated the same mechanically, then the player who is deciding to kill people is doing it just for fun and its much easier for the nonlethal player to take the moral high ground, because the consequences are so few. By contrast, when unconscious enemies wake back up, it means that there is a significant cost to not killing them outright, which is much more interesting in terms of gameplay and themes. Think about it in real-world terms: if superspy Kate Archer could knock people out and know for certain that they would no longer pose a problem to her, then killing them would just make her a sociopath, wouldn't it? On the topic of NOFL 2's visuals holding up, I looked up some screenshots and they do look pretty nice. I actually think a lot of games from that period hold up well visually. Nintendo games especially still look nice. Except for some low-res textures and jagged edges, Metroid Prime, Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin all look good today. And of course, Wind Waker is gorgeous.

The Gentleman Bastard series are novels, not comics, but yeah a League of Extraordinary Gentleman game would be cool.

What an amazing episode. The "oh yeah" stuff had me cracking up and the weird multiplayer gaming email was amazing.

I don't really have a strong opinion about the "waving cell phones at concerts" thing, but I do have an awesome anecdote to share about it. I haven't been to many concerts in my life, but one of the best I've seen was Weird Al at Massey Hall in Toronto in 2007. I've been a gigantic Weird Al fan all my life and he is an amazing live performer, so it was great. Throughout the show, they would play clips from Al's fake interviews, which involve him taking interviews with celebrities and cuts himself into them asking ridiculous questions. One of the ones he showed was one with Michael Stipe. There's a point in it where Al asks Michael to compose a song with him, which ends up just being Al singing "We all have cell phones, so come on, let's get real" over and over. It's a funny clip. Anyway, at the end of the show, when Al comes back on stage for the encore, instead of launching into one of his songs, he just starts belting "We all have cell phones, so come on, let's get real!" in epic power ballad fashion. At that point, everybody started waving their cell phones in the air and it was perfectly appropriate. Then he sang "Albuquerque" and the whole audience sang along to all eleven minutes of it. Man, what an awesome concert.

Oooh man, there's nothing I like more than recommending tabletop games to people. So you want simple games with plenty of interaction that work best (or at least work well) with three players. Lying and deception are not too common in three player games. You tend to want more people to really get the social machinations going. That said, there are plenty of good games that work well with three people and involve a fair amount of screwing your opponents. On the light side we've got No Thanks! (kind of a reverse-auction game - you're paying money to avoid something rather than trying to get it) and Coloretto (set collection where you can poison other people's sets). Slightly more complex are Hanabi (a simple, elegant and nail-bitingly stressful co-operative card game) and the aforementioned King of Tokyo (Yahtzee with a movie-monster theme and more strategy). For medium-heavy stuff there's Tammany Hall (corrupt politicians in New York bidding for control of immigrant populations) and Alien Frontiers (dice-rolling, resource management and interstellar settlement). I won't recommend any truly heavy games because I don't really play many of them and they would probably be too much for somebody new to the hobby anyway. Of course, there are hundreds more great games out there. Those are just a few varied recommendations that game to mind based on what you said you're looking for. Also, not to pimp my stuff too much, I have a blog that I infrequently update where I write about tabletop games. The link is in my signature if you want to check it out. Hope everything goes well with your foray into this amazing hobby! EDIT: Re - rent in Monopoly, of course you don't have to pay it. That's where free passes come in! They are an extremely important resource in trades.

A Game of Thrones: The Board Game is another good example of a licensed game that does its license justice.

Awesome, Nels, I look forward to listening to it!

Same here. Half-Life 3 is also my Half-Life 3, though.

There's a board game set in Ankh-Morpork. Not my favourite, but it has some cool things going on in it and is probably a lot more enjoyable if you're familiar with the setting, which I am not. I was watching Gravity last night and the only thing I think of the whole time was "this seems like the coolest 3D traversal game ever." Mirror's Edge in zero-g. It would be really tough to pull off, but if you could do it, it would be amazing.

My favourite part is seeing all the dumb names for horror movies. The Gingerdead Man? Really?

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

I too had repressed my Mega Babies memories. Thanks for nothing, Tanukitsune.

Does Dueling Grounds not sell models?

I like the idea of you just sitting there with a dead-eyed smile, staring into nothing anytime somebody asks you a question.

For those of you that remember Tammany Hall, which the Thumbs talked about on Episode 106: Imagine the Man, I wrote a post today about how gosh darn great it is.

Oh okay. I kind of want this guy to die anyway. My grandson is going to be Duke of Aquitaine. And then I will make him King of Aquitaine.

After a request I made on Twitter, Chris made it so that gonehomegame.com/ghost redirects to the soundtrack's page on his bandcamp. Awesome.