clyde

The Rainbow Six: Siege system of earning unlockables through play is perfectly balanced for me, but dependent on enjoying playing the game. The playable characters you select have unique abilities and different weapons/defense-measures available to them. These operators are split up into groups and unlocking one will raise the required experience-points to unlock another in the same group. So it only takes playing 15 or so matches to unlock enough operators to be on an even footing with everyone else, but there is a huge incentive to unlock them all of them just to have them all available. It's also worth noting that the abilities often enhance the abilities of other characters mechanically (for instance Castle can put up armored doors and Mute can put radio-jammers near them so that breach-charges cannot be used to destroy them). If you buy the non-premium version of the game, you have three challenge-slots available to you. Every day a you get a new challenge if you have a slot free. You free slots by completing the challenges (you can't just dismiss ones you don't want to do). When you complete a challenge, you receive the equivalent of winning a match in experience-points (which averages to about a 45-minute investment if you win half your matches). So in this circumstance, I already really like the playing the game but knowing that a win will get me closer to filling out my roster does raise the stakes is an engaging way. Additional to that, knowing that I have a potential 900xp waiting to be won in challenges if I haven't played in three days is sometimes a tipping-point to get me to load the game up. Once I'm there, I remember how fun it is. Also, the challenges often require me to play as characters I am less familiar with and I appreciate that diverse playstyle requirement since I'll just stick with my mains otherwise. I typically hate xp-systems in multiplayer games (especially Battlefield's), but in this case it helps me enjoy more parts of the game more intensely.

I've been enjoying these videos

I'm still playing. I beat the first four missions again and got stuck on the fifth...again.

Rainbow Six: Siege is releasing DLC for free, but new operators take a month or so of regular play to unlock. I think Insurgency did all their DLC for free also.

I'm at a cafe right now. It just occurred to me that looking at strangers has a similar feeling to table nudging. I want to do it a lot, but I resist and conserve my efforts in fear that I may tilt. In the case of the cafe, The frequency is restricted to much less than 2 times every 15 seconds.

If y'all are interested in extending the tournament an extra week, I'd be down. I'm probably going to keep playing either way. The wizard-mode is within reach and I'm still having a good time playing it.

That's pretty cool looking though. Sorry that you can't play. I'm not trying to trouble-shoot, but I'm curious; does that geometry flicker into those states? If not how does movement relate to the distortion?

I enjoyed the campaign multiplayer, but I agree that it wasn't ambitious at all and that really interesting things could be done. I think one significant limitation for it is that the time between matches will have to be the same as thy are in multiplayer if you want players to play through it more than once. The solution to this seems to be having the story branch mid-match which could be triggered by dynamic events. Maybe something like Battlefield 4's levolution but with some commander squawking about how important it is? I suppose the outcome of the match could determine the next map and mode, that would be simple to implement and feel significant.

There is a free weekend going on. Schedule willing, I'd be interested in playing with any of y'all who are interested. Yesterday I played two matches against a skilled team. They were really good. When we were on defense, it felt like Predator where my teammates were disappearing one by one. I was the last person on my team and managed to take out three of them which was really satisfying; we lost of course. When pkaying against a good team, the tolerances feel so much more acute. When attacking, coming around a door is going to get you shot unless you and your teammates breach in a clever way. The matches are typically much more forgiving than they were last night (not that they are typically forgiving though, this is comparative).

I hat a 60mil game that I really enjoyed yesterday. I can beat the first mission half the time now. I think I'm going to read the rule-sheet today because I don't think I'm going to be able to figure out what the fleet-meter on the bottom means or what any of the upgrades do. I've come to really enjoy this table, much more than I expected I would. It has a lot of similarities to Pasha, but this table feels a lot less squished. Maybe it's because I'm not using the default view on it.

Rainbow Six:Siege (PC) is going to have a free weekend 4/15-4/18. If you enjoy tense matches and teamwork in a competitive first-person shooters then I strongly recommend trying this out. I've been playing a few matches more days than not somce it came out and it hasn't gotten old at all.

Let's talk about phones. I currently have an iphone 4s. Phones I previously owned/used previous to that in reverse chronological order are -iphone 3gs (never broke) -nokia 5400 (broke because I left it in the car, I got a replacement, it broke through normal use). -a blue phone that me and my wife shared between 2003-2006. I think it was a Nokia. You could write mono-phony midi tunes on it. It didn't break. So now that I'm not forced to pay for a new phone every two years, I've kept my iphone 4s to the point that it's starting to feel really slow and a lot of apps crash on it. I'm still impressed with its video-recording quality and the quality of audio-recordings. It's alright to use, but my heart is really starting to wander. The iphone SE looks pretty good, but I want 64gb and that costs $20/month for two years. I think I might continue to use the 4s for a while. Also my wife has an S6 and loves it and review sites are praising the S7. It's hard to figure out why people like it though. The internet on my wife's S6 seems significantly faster than the internet on the iphone 4s and she doesn't complain about apps being sluggish or crashing, but she doesn't use many apps. Virtual-reality is a significant feature of the S6 and S7, but I already have access to an S6 in the evenings. I figure that casual discussion in this thread might help inform my inevitable decision of what new phone to get.

A demo of an Oculus Social prototype Here is the other side of the conversation: https://www.facebook.com/mike.booth/videos/vb.1369360149/10209079379126175/

I don't think any iphone has removable storage.

Yeah, adding music and getting voice memos onto a PC.

Your girlfriend owns a penguin? Is that legal? Don't answer that.

There's a Motorola phone that is marketed as "shatter-proof". There are a bunch of youtube videos of dropping them from ladders and shit.

As I'm researching these phones y'all are suggesting on my iphone 4s, it constantly gives errors that explain it needs to reload the page. Sites like Cnet, Polygon, Verge, and Kotaku are unreadable.

I'm on Verizon. Is there a common understanding of when to stop updating your phone's os? I feel like my problems with my phone started immediately after installing the first update that happened after my contract was up. It seemed to make performance worse. Maybe it was just a coincidence. I am a bit nervous about Android. I understand how a Windows PC lets me play tons of hobbyist games and that's why I have no interest in the walled-garden of Mac. But when it comes to phones I hear people talking about bloatware and force-closing apps and some of the stuff my wife downloads on her phone asks for all sorts of permissions. I'm not sure if the openess of Android would be of any benefit to me, but that may be because I'm so inexperienced with it. Is Android buggy and susceptible to malware? Also, are there any types of apps that you use regularly that I wouldn't know about because I've been on iphones. Also, what would make the S7 a better Android phone than another. Speed? Durability?

I've already made Sir Jumps-A-Lot and Brick-Break'N Breckon. I'm just waiting for the inevitablity of those being the names of episodes.

Pinball FX2 on the Rift. The footage is very shaky, but this video shows me some stuff I want to know about.

Just played a nice long game. I think I got two extra-balls. I learned a lot. -In the first mission, its all about the bumpers. The other flashing lanes just give you more mission time. Mission time is weird on this table. The mode doesn't end when the timer finishes, you lose a ship. So the bumper-hits determine how many ships you take out while the other flashing lanes reset the time until you lose another ship. -The second mission is pretty simple; hit all the flashing lanes without shooting non-flashing lanes. Your ship count is the amount of non-flashing lanes you can shoot before the mode will be failed. -The third mission (I'm thinking of repair, I'm not sure if it is third) is interesting because you are basically shooting all the lanes, but in order to launch the required amount of ships, you have to send some off. So each lane you shoot three times is a ship launched, but launching a ship opens that lane back up for another ship to be launched from it (I think). -I beat four missions and then it automatically selects one called capital assault. I had a lot of trouble with this. I didn't manage to beat it, but I started it 5 or so times during this one game. Basically you have to shoot both bumper ramps and then shoot one of them again immediately after opening the hyper-drive. You have to do it 5 times and the who mode is timed. Very difficult for me to make those shots under pressure. -The promotion lane seems to start a multi-ball and whenever you lose a ball it tells you that a new mission is available. I think there are as many extra missions as there are little emblems below the flippers because every time I lost a ball in promotion multi-ball, it lit one of those emblems. -The kickbacks get activated by lighting all the letters in the inlanes and outlanes and then shooting an orbit. I think that's everything I figured out during that last game. The things I'm still really curious about is what the extra missions are (of course) and figuring out what the upgrades do.

The biggest selling point of Titanfall 2 for me is a population of players high enough to let me play some other modes like capture-the-flag which is super fun when it is available.

I like Reuters.

You can do this to some extent in Titanfall. Some of the abilities and pieces of equipment can be combined to be a titan-killer for instance. The sledge-hammer on the large-machine-gun does a good amount of damage to titans when you are mounted on them. The arc-grenades make titans vulnerable to an attack on foot. Cloaked soldiers Are much less visible to titans than they are to soldiers. The nuclear-ejection ability on the titan, and the 40mm cannon feel built to take out titans. Of course you can tune your anti-titan build based off of what works for you. I wouldn't want the abilities and weapons to be class-exclusive. I wonder if the sense of classes could be presented with a few preset-builds. Maybe those presets could be made to feel substantial with models and/or titles that are specific to them. I might not be understanding the advantages of class-systems in this type of game. Edit: I think I misunderstood. I'd love some support abilities. It might be fun to hitch a ride on a titan and repair them as I hold on. And I love spotting in Battlefield games. I would also enjoy an ability or piece of equipment that significantly boosts a pod of grunts. It would also be cool if you could set a trip-wire for Titans that just paralyzes their system for twice as long as an arc-grenade. How cool would it be to be able to hitch-up ziplines for use by your team? Yeah, there's a lot of potential support abilities.