clyde

FYI: I canceled my Touch pre-order from Oculus because I still have gotten know info on being charged or shipping even though it is launch-day. Best Buy had them in stock online so I just ordered from there; expected delivery is Friday. This means that I won't get The Unspoken or VR Sports Challenge for free, but I don't really have an interest in those games anyway.

I just spent 4-5 hours playing Paragon for the first time. I was relieved to see that I could play cooperative vs bots for as many matches as I like. We won every time. They recommend four or five heroes for beginners, I tried all of those and played as Gideon three times to get familiar with a character. I like it. I expected it to be more similar to Super Monday Night Combat than it is. Shooting doesn't require a lot of accuracy, the 3rd-person shooter perspective is just for people like myself who are uncomfortable with top-down action-rpgs and not being able to jump (even when it does nothing). Paragon feels satisfying. There are optional buffs and resulting pushes.There is an archer who can do a piercing shot and since range is far more important than accuracy, you can halve the health of a whole wave of creeps in your lane; that feels great. Gideon has an ability to suck all the enemies towards him in a stun. Steel has an ability to ram and knock-back enemies. The two of them could work together really well. It's really pretty and I could see myself playing this for a while. I tried the Battleborn beta and didn't like it much at all. It seemed like they watered down the leveling and that made the pace of the match feel sluggish. Paragon on the other hand feels well balanced to me (after just a few matches this morning). I'm probably going to play more cooperative versus bot matches until I can navigate the jungle reliably. I also want to try all the heroes before I go into competitive matches. I was surprised that the cooperative versus bot matches were fun for me; we never lost, but double and triple kills are encouraging during practice. I am starting to understand the general idea of how the card system works and the difference between towers and ...intercepters(?) If anyone else is playing, it would be fun to discuss it.

It's interesting to have a comparison piece. The more I listen to these, the more I think this could be a genre in itself.

I'm able to turn with a mouse.

Regarding lo-fi programming: If you think of the game-engines and default assets as the instruments, then there are certainly lo-fi games being made. http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/games You can do a lot just by using Unity's standard assets, dropping .jpg on cubes and telling it to play an audio file. One of my favorite games is Destroy Your Home. http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5279 ...which has coincidentally been cloned in Earth Defense Force Your Home https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/10305 For something less serene, check out A Terribly Fast World. https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/9144

Well I've already ordered the Touch. If there are any questions you want answered about it you can ask me once I get it. There are a couple of other folks on here that have Vives so they might be able to provide answers about that product.

Oculus just listed a bunch of games that will be available for Touch at release on December 6th. https://www.oculus.com/blog/touch-launch-lineup/

So I had a really cool experience this evening. A good amount of context will be beneficial to my testimony: I've been playing the demo of Trackmania 2 Stadium and Canyon off and on for a year or so. The way the demo works is that when Persephone is in the land of the living, you get an hour a day to play what appears to be the full game of either version which are separate applications somehow unified by something called "ManiaPlanet"; when Persephone is in the land of the dead, you are supposed to get unlimited time with the demo. Over Thanksgiving-break, I ended up over-extending the demo somehow, multiple times. Now I will explain what the appeal of Trackmania 2 is for me: I play on the multiplayer-servers. The ones I play most are the "Full Speed" servers which exclusively feature maps that require no braking. Sometimes they play unlicensed music and that really hooked me. Eventually though, I started to appreciate how the game required a similar amount of attention to what Bejeweled requires on casual-mode. (I often don't finish races within the 5 minutes, so my standards have an impact on how focused I feel a need to be). That, mixed with the sense of other people from all over the world experiencing the same simulated space and music simultaneously without an expectation for interaction beyond witnessing each other's existence. I recently tried surfing in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (what an appropriate name!). In fact, I bought CS:GO because I heard about surfing in it. But the required skill-level for the beginner-maps is ridiculously high. Trackmania 2 Stadium Demo helped me get the CS:GO surfing-experience without the high dexterity requirements or the toxic chat. I should mention that if you download the Trackmania 2 Stadium Demo -> go into the online multiplayer Full-speed room and start playing, you probably won't be able to finish the races; I wasn't able to initially, but the expectations that the tracks put on the players were fascinating to me because they weren't purely dexterity challenges; sometimes the tracks seem more like mazes , but most of the time they just have paths that are intended to surprise rather than challenge. Once I start zoning out a bit, the tracks become cathedral-like in a way. I didn't mind failing over and over and I quickly adapted to the short-races and frequent restarts. The 5-minute limitation, non-interactive presence of other players, and the jukeboxy nature of the music and all of it somehow made the failures digestible. So from what I understand, these servers are run by players rather than by the developer. The various servers often have HUD-links to PayPal for donations and Facebook for community-organization. They also keep persistent global and personal race-time records. I've briefly looked into running a server just because I was curious about the unlicensed music-track aspect, but I quickly realized that running one of these servers takes a load of commitment (not something I have). But still, this is an important part of my story: I have a respect for folks who are organized and committed enough to curate custom-made maps and music in order to create these fascinating and populated digital spaces. Wouldn't it be cool to have the opportunity to be one of those curators without all the work or commitment? A lot of the reviews for Trackmania Turbo focus on the lack of customization and lack of support for a 3rd-pary leaderboard-system or dedicated-servers and the damage that would do to the existing Trackmania 2 community if they were to move over to this newer title. I myself am disappointed with the lack of ability to upload .oog that is played on speakers around the world as we race, but est quod est. In deciding between buying the games I've demoed for 18 collective hours (Trackmania 2 Stadium and Canyon) or buying the simplified and newer Trackmania Turbo, I went with the newer one because I figured the older ones were going to be harder for map-making and map-sharing. Plus I can just continue to play those demos OK. So now that I've caught you up, let me tell you what happened yesterday: I spent some time figuring out how to download hobbyist maps, how to follow authors, and how to create a public room where I get to show other folks the maps that I've decided to curate. All of this is detailed in the video I posted here most recently. So last night I made my first room. I populated it with all the maps I could find by one particular author who had caught my attention as I played in someone else's room. I tried to set them up in what looked most like chronological order so I could get a sense of how this artist has progressed in this creative medium. I assumed that there would be some duds (there were), but that this would be a good way to figure out which ones I liked and the others I could "remove from favorites" during the race and then when I make a room next time, the playlist will be a bit more refined. And I went ahead and made the room public. It didn't take long before two other players joined and I think those two players stuck around for half of the playlist. More came in. At max it was five players. I was so excited, I felt like I got a chance to roleplay as a Trackmania 2 server host! They weren't listening to the same shoegaze, but I didn't notice that too much. By the time the playlist started repeating, pretty much everyone left and I had flagged the maps I didn't want in my future rooms using the "remove from favorite" system. It was really neat playing through an oeuvre with randos! So after this experience I had some more thoughts, specifically about the assumptions that I kinda shared with the folks who are disappointed with the lack of support for dedicated servers, unlicensed music, and customization. It's counter-intuitive that a lack of cross-platform map-support would be a good thing. I mean, doesn't it make sense that it would be better to be able to play a Trackmania Turbo map made on PS4 on the PC? I would think so, but now that I've had this experience with game's lack of cross-platform support, I kinda think it is a good thing. Making maps and curating maps are super rewarding roles to fill, but at some point everyone kinda gravitates together and it makes it so that only the most committed curators and the most talented and/or skilled map-makers will be played. I like that the communities are broken away from each other in the case of this particular game. I'm sure it would be cool to fill a room to the max in Trackmania Turbo (PC), but there isn't really that much difference between playing with 2 people or with 12 like there would be in a competitive first-person shooter. Because the communities are asunder, it allows for casuals such as myself to fill the vital roles of curation and map-making and feel some amount of appreciation for our smaller efforts. I think that is really neat. Right now I've collected all the maps of about 6 different authors and I'm going to work through each of their oeuvres and develop a taste from my combination of their various sensibilities and technical capability. I'm psyched. Oh, here is the music playlist I've been listening to as I play btw:

I made a tutorial video on how to download custom tracks in Trackmania Turbo on PC.

Congratulations on this accomplishment.

Damnit. I tried the YouTube and Twitch recordings in hopes that I would be able to figure out how to progress in the game, but in both cases there is no audio! This is becoming very ARG-esque for me. Edit: I finally got "something" to happen. I'm a little tortoise; slow and stubborn. Edit: now that "something" has happened, that being a bunch of loading or something, everything gets corrupted faster so typing dir only gives me a glance and I don't read fast enough or have a memory of what was listed before. Edit: I restarted so I could read them again. Fuckin A Spenny, I had to do work!

Based on your description, it sounds like the processes of creating this piece is more important than my listening to it afterwards. Still, since you shared it I thought you might find my response interesting. While my ears hear the piano as passionate expression, they hear the vocals as being satirical or ironic. Based on your description, I don't think my perception is accurate but it makes me wonder what the auditory heuristics I've developed to grade the level of feeling emotion concurrently with the actual performance (in vocals). I suspect that when a singer is trained, the legit personhood in their voice is replaced with a hyper-real symbolic style that culturally represents personhood. A cyberpunky extrapolation of this (after all, it is Cyber Monday) would be that eventually algorithms will sound more like person-like than actual people. I guess it's already happened with widely distributed recorded media. Realizing this, I find myself wanting to listen to more stuff like this so that my learned biases may dissipate and I can appreciate the pure shit.

I have no idea what I am doing largely because I have no experience with dos commands, But I find the interface's visual and auditory effects to be very evocative and interesting.

It's actually on sale right now. If you put TITAN20 in the promo code box on Origin, It's $32

Here's a neat video that was included in a Rock Paper Shotgun article about maps built where you are just supposed to press forward.

I read that keeping text blocks visually small goes a long way. So for instance, a 100-word monologue is easier to digest when split up and requires the user to click to get all the sections of the text. Personally I think that frequent sound and visual changes help too.

This is a longshot, but if anyone gets a coupon for Trackmania Turbo and you want to give it to me, please PM.

I like the background textures. I'm curious if the game will feel completely whimsical or if it will have some weight.

If nothing else, make some more evocative gifs.

OPEN WINTER DEMO is live again! So that basically means I can play all the Trackmania I want for free. I don't know what happened, but the Trackmania2 Stadium multiplayer servers don't seem to have music anymore. So now I'm playing Trackmania2 Canyon. The drifting is a significant difference and I'm really enjoying it while I listen to erotic EDM that I would never know about otherwise. Also, it seems that the demo clock will start again if you switch between Stadium and Canyon. If you do that and run out, you'll get your hour again on the next day, and the clock won't start ticking until you switch between the games again. There is something really valuable about playing custom tracks and listening to the same public playlist with people from around the world at the same time.

What article?

I'm also in a period of reassessment. My method of coping in the meantime is watching gospel organist videos on Youtube between reading articles about politics.

I'm very much looking forward to Medium. Hopefully I'll never have to unwrap a UV map again! http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-medium-review/

I got three beta keys for the Steep beta. It lasts til Nov 14th 11am PST. I haven't played much yet, but it seems like the closest thing to SSX on PC. So far it feels much less arcadey. There is wing-suit and parachute stuff that I don't find very interesting, but the snow-boarding feels rewarding regardless of whether or not I'm making a jump. My favorite thing about it so far is that after you reach the finish line, you can keep going. These keys can be redeemed here. Friend 1: MCPCNWRVGZRN Friend 2: 9FCKHG2MNCNE Friend 3: ZD6UBMB3QMDJ