malkav11

It will, though, since it's coming to PC. Although that particular detail is getting even less coverage than Rogue itself.

I don't think it's reasonable to describe Dumbledore as a "straight character" that was suddenly altered to be gay. There's no real discussion of Dumbledore's love life or sexuality at all in the series proper that I can recall. I can understand feeling Rowling's revelation that he was gay is tacked on, but it's not a contradiction of any previous characterization, it's just...not really present in the story as written.

Just because someone's music might appear in the background somewhere you happen to be doesn't mean you'd be able to identify that music or who's performing it.

It's pretty easy to entirely miss mainstream musical acts if you 1) don't listen to the radio, and 2) don't watch TV (at least, live with ads). I think the only reason I was vaguely aware of Taylor Swift's existence was that Papa John's Pizza had some sort of promotional deal with her album Red. If that was her. I might be getting confused.

http://fancyfishgames.com/DeityQuest/

I respect that there's a deep, adult-friendly game in Pokemon, but I'm probably never going to actually get into it. For my collecting-and-training needs, I've tended to opt for the Shin Megami Tensei games, which don't seem analogous on the surface, but tend to have a surprisingly similar core loop. The difference for me is the trappings. SMT spins often quite intriguing tales of reality bending, apocalypses, death timers, theology and morality etc and substitutes classical demons and other mythological figures (or very Japanese versions thereof) for your adorable tiny monsters. This aesthetic just does way more for me than Pokemon's grade school adorability and very lightweight narratives. I'm not actually sure which franchise has deeper mechanics, though. I would have said SMT (or at least, one or two of them somewhere along the line), but then tegan held forth on breeding and my brain about exploded. So I dunno!

Although I feel like the larger continuity of the Mass Effect games has been fumbled repeatedly in frustrating ways, they've been really good at doing the small callbacks to previous decisions, both internally and particularly across games. I mean, really, there's no way they could do major plot branching based on decisions in an entirely separate prior game. It's hard enough to do it in a single game, and almost nobody's actually pulled that off (The Witcher 2 being a notable recent exception). But just having those little nods does a huge amount for feeling like Mass Effect 2 or 3 is respecting past decisions made in Mass Effect 1 or 2, respectively. (Very little propagates through both sequels.) Deus Ex is another game that gets a lot of mileage out of that sort of design. It's actually a really railroady game in terms of the overall plot, but there are so many smaller details that change based on your actions that it's not immediately apparent. On a different note, Codename STEAM sounds rad as hell but I am getting confused because multiple places are referring to it as an RTS, yet Danielle said it was turn based. (Of course, I've even found an article that leads by calling it an RTS and then in the very next paragraph talks about it being turn based.) So, er...which is it?

And that's the thing. I could see Versus in L4D1 being better since it seems like a lot of people tend to prefer their competitive experiences to be as stripped down as possible to focus entirely on the core elements that make it work, and L4D2 is definitely more of everything. But it makes for a pretty dull solo or cooperative experience, in my opinion.

It sounds to me like you're coming from the perspective of Versus play. Is that the case? I for one am only interested in cooperative multiplayer, so Versus wouldn't even enter into my analysis of which game played better.

Speaking as someone who rarely seeks out any movie older than myself, I suspect the dreadful covers have more to do with it than the quality of the picture (and of course, the further back you go, the more vastly different the style becomes, as I was reminded when I watched The Spy Who Came in From The Cold with my family a couple weeks back. Just...nothing like pretty much any films of today, or even the other Le Carre adaptations I've seen regardless of age.). I've never heard of The Sweet Smell of Success, but if I came across it with the old cover I'd never touch it. The Criterion one actually makes me interested.

No, I'm well over a year behind on my 3MA because I've been trying to listen to them in order from the beginning and even despite days where I binge 4 or 5 in a row, that's still a tall order. (I did eventually make it with Idle Thumbs, though! So maybe I'll get there with 3MA.)

Will do. Hopefully the time zones work out.

Personally I just like turtling because something deep in my lizard brain likes building forts and huddling in them while my mighty defenses dismantle oncoming forces. As such, tower defense is a genre that's been pretty good to me, although it's not -quite- scratching that itch just right. Maybe a little too abstract or formulaic. I dunno.

IIRC the lack of controller support was also because of Flash. And having just tried my PS+ copy of Vita Binding of Isaac Rebirth, holy -crap- is it easier to play this game with two joysticks than with the weird keyboard controls. I'm still bad at it, but I can actually make some progress. Even made it to the second floor without too much trouble. On the Flash version I usually die inside three rooms. Edit: Rebirth apparently also has a local coop mode (though presumably not on Vita), the ability to save and resume mid session and the ability to enter seed numbers so that you can revisit a particular layout and/or share it with friends - this should make it possible to do an impromptu daily challenge sort of thing ala Spelunky, although right now it would have to be community based since it's not actually built into the game at the moment. They could probably patch such a thing in if they wanted, though.

Something that I've read about Evolve that doesn't seem to have come up: there's going to be three different characters in each hunter class, with different personalities and abilities, and at least three or four different monsters. I assume they probably only had one of each in for testing this time around, but I'd imagine that ups the variety and strategic choice potential dramatically. RE: Left 4 Dead 1 versus Left 4 Dead 2. I gotta say, I never really understood why people were so excited about Left 4 Dead. I did get and play it, but I found it a pretty monotonous experience because there was so little enemy and weapon variety, and so few gameplay mechanics, that even different maps felt like essentially the same experience, just with different hallways and quips. I have to assume that the people that liked it are the sort of people who get really excited over really subtle variations and nuances on a strong (but essentially singular) mechanical design, and that's just not me. It felt more like a proof of concept than a full game. Left 4 Dead 2 felt to me like the game people were talking about Left 4 Dead 1 being. Every map had genuinely different twists instead of being slight reconfigurings of the same formula, there was a significantly larger range of weapons with much more rewarding feel to them (pretty sure all the dismemberment effects and such were new in 2, no?), the new enemy types mixed up encounters a lot more, etc. It ended up still not really being entirely up my alley - there's just not enough narrative there and I've never had a full group to play with (the bots are nigh useless) - but I could finally understand the appeal. I suspect the Payday games would be more to my taste but I still have the "reliable coop partners" issue. I would not expect Sorcery or Sorcery 2 to offer 80 Days' depth or quality of writing. 80 Days is an original inkle creation. The Sorcery games are conversions of a series of gamebooks released back in the mid-80s, that were a spinoff of the Fighting Fantasy series. They're some of the better gamebooks of that era and it looks like inkle did a bang up job of doing them up as apps, but still...adjust expectations accordingly.

Coincidentally, Arcen Games just announced a new science fiction 4X-style game with no units and no conventional combat.

1) I can understand cringing at the use of "xenomorph" and I don't think it's necessary to use in the context of a discussion that's already specifically about the Alien franchise, in which we've only ever (in the movies,at least) seen two types of alien - the eponymous one, and the Traveller in that dead spaceship. But I do think you need -something- to refer to that specific creature in a more general context, because there are a whole lot of different kinds of alien in media. So, xenomorph is, for now, that term. 2) Man, 80 Days is awesome. Getting into fistfights with waiters, committing mutiny, having a romantic evening with Death...and I think that people who dislike steampunk as a general rule should be okay here. It's not nearly as tropey as that label might make it sound, and the worldbuilding on display is solid and original. It's also demonstrably really meaty, because even my (unfortunately failed) run only made it through maybe a sixth of the cities in the game before I made it back to London, and it seems like most of them (and most of the travel methods) have at least one unique bit of narrative attached, probably more than one in many cases. And that was a several hour experience. Well worth it.

I gotta say, I think the Road Redemption guy's "we're not Ride to Hell, guys!" post really was necessary. I frequently confused the two until I watched a Let's Play of Ride to Hell. It is jawdroppingly awful, by the by.

I'm pretty sure I saw the Back to the Future movies at some point, but these days my association with them is Harlan Ellison hating on the first one (or two?) in his movie reviews and instead recommending Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married as a much better take on similar themes. I was startled to learn that Coppola had even made a movie like that (I mean, how often do you hear about his movies other than the Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, and maybe The Conversation?), and ran out and rented it. And yeah, it's pretty fantastic. Complete with a really charmingly dorky young Nicholas Cage. PS: Ellison's kind of a jerk, but his reviews were a great read. (As is pretty much everything the man writes, but I figure people probably know about his fiction.)

It was stolen by bats, actually, and whisked down into an immense underground cavern complete with Unterzee (which is the Zee you are zailing in Sunless Sea). It's now run by giant hooded figures running a very strange and eldritch bazaar where the currency is echoes and you can buy practically anything. Nobody dies anymore. Hell has established an embassy made of brass, and will quite cheerfully purchase your soul from you - you weren't using it, were you? There are strange, tentacle-faced Rubbery Men (or are they men?) who speak a language of whistles and seem very fond of amber, who form a scorned underclass. Cats speak and hoard secrets and conduct shadow wars with the bats. There are revolutionaries and nobles in a sort of exile, constables riding velocipedes, a body-hopping serial killer called Jack of Smiles (though of course, with no death, being murdered is more of an inconvenience), sorrow spiders that have a tendency to hoard human eyes for mysterious purposes, animated clay men, etc, etc. Of course, that's Fallen London. Sunless Sea presumably takes place mostly on the Unterzee and the further islands in it, which you can visit to some small degree in Fallen London, but most of that game happens in London itself. Fallen London is at fallenlondon.storynexus.com. It's free and awesome, marred only by the action economy preventing you from delving as deep as you might like on any given day (Sunless Sea will avoid that, thankfully) and some grindy patches. But seriously, if the above sounds enticing (and it should, it's one of the best settings in gaming), it's well worth at least poking at. The writing is incredible, and the slow burn of secrets....so good. It's the same setting, same sensibilities, same company and writing team. Different gameplay and a different part of the setting for the most part.

I largely agree with you. About the only way I've ever been able to eat seafood is in that super-breaded, super-processed way you get at fast food restaurants in their "fish sandwich" (heavy on the tartar, of course), or in fish and chips. And tuna salad, sure, sparingly. I guess I've also had fish in the tiny bit of sushi I've ever eaten but I've never had any idea what was in the rolls and I know you can do veggie sushi so I can't say for sure. And clam chowder is okay although I prefer other less sea-based chowders. Everything else? Bleah. When, in the interest of not being a complete stick-in-the-mud about food, I've tried, say, lobster bisque, or Subway's seafood sub, etc it's usually made me actively nauseous.

For those checking out Terror Aboard the Speedwell, the author (or at least one of them) has a previous Twine piece on itchio called You Were Made for Loneliness that's worth a look as well. Theoretically it's in the same setting, although there's apparently not a huge amount of connection between the two. Edit: I guess YWMFL is also a multi-author piece. I suppose not surprising, as there are a lot of quite varied (though all centered on a common theme) secondary text pieces buried in the "main" plot, some of them quite lengthy and that would have been a pretty big task to take on as one person.

I used to be a huge Agatha Christie fan, and I've read Curtain, although I remember not being particularly impressed. My favorite of hers is still Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None, though. Her detective mysteries are very well done, but are much more formulaic in the way that I find nearly all mystery novels to be*. These days I only read them if they have either a really compelling protagonist or a really compelling sense of place, or if they're genuinely outside the normal bounds in some way, like And Then There Were None is. So I've dug stuff Ken Bruen writes (because they tend to feature compelling protagonists and also often tend to have the problem at hand solved by someone other than the protagonist if at all), David Peace's really stark, raw Red Riding Quartet (paints a really upsetting picture of Yorkshire in the 70s and 80s), Eric Garcia's Rex books (because they are noir books with the utterly nutty premise that dinosaurs did not, in fact, go extinct, but rather survived by developing rubber human suits and congregated in LA; also they get high on herbs. The protagonist being a velociraptor detective with a parsley habit. I was startled to learn just now that apparently Syfy made a movie based on one of them.), etc. *I am well aware that many people would suggest that genres like science fiction, fantasy and particularly my favorite subgenre, urban fantasy are also very formulaic. This is fair, but mysteries are set in the real world and I already live there, so they have to go out of their way to present me with contexts that are new and interesting to me. SF and fantasy have an automatic leg up because they by default include stuff that isn't actually part of my life experience.

Even with that you still probably only want to use a couple at any given time. I'm thinking Eldritch shouldn't suffer from that particular issue given that they already have separate decks to handle all of the scenario-specific stuff and they decided to make other dimension encounters specific to the card you draw and not what gate is on the board.

You really should. The upgrades aren't as interesting, but it's a pretty different mix and a great experience. And by some accounts, it's the tightest version of the game. In general, I am all for games I like being a) expandable by design and b.) expanded like crazy, and I love how full of variety and specific thematic bits games like Arkham Horror and Sentinels of the Multiverse have gotten (it's one of my biggest criticisms of Eldritch Horror when regarded as a replacement for Arkham the way so many seem to, although we're already on announced expansion #2 for that, so I expect that will be changing rapidly). That said, as someone buying into a game that's already been out and accumulating additional content, it does end up being a bit of a turnoff. It's why I still don't own Arkham, though I love it to bits and have played it countless times. For my copy to feel complete, it would need at a minimum all the expansions I've played with elsewhere, probably all of them, period, and assuming I can find all of them in print, that's a several hundred dollar proposition. Better to just buy Eldritch (as I did) and get in on the ground floor, I think. On a completely unrelated note, y'all should not only check out Capy's Below, but also Below.