Zeusthecat

Finally got to mom last night but ended up dying. Progress! I've come to realize one of the dumb things I've still been doing that has hampered my progress is that I've been wasting keys on the shop rooms when I only have like 5 cents and then I just buy whatever I can afford. It seems like the better strategy is to wait until I have around 15 coins and buy one of the better items instead of wasting my money on bombs, hearts, and keys. Obviously still some randomness to that so it's not always gonna work out but I've noticed myself doing just a bit better since I've been smarter about what I spend my money on.

Yeah, after watching a few videos, I think I do prefer Northernlion. I watched a couple of his earlier ones and it totally makes me feel better about my current skill level. It's nice to see other people making mistakes that I've actually managed to move past.

I guess I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel yet. I played some more last night and finally managed to get to the sixth area before going down. On my first run I ended up fighting a new boss that unlocked the Little Steven familiar. Then I lucked out again on my next run and got Little Steven right off the bat again. I love that little guy, he's the best! My biggest struggle at this point is still getting through some of the mob rooms in the later areas. The bosses usually aren't too big of a deal and it's been pretty straightforward to learn all of their attack patterns. But man, unless I've gotten a good roll on multiple damage upgrades some of those rooms are still melting me way too fast. I think the ones I hate the most are when it's a small area with little room to maneuver and it is full of those little chubby guys that shoot fish out of their bellies. Also, the guys that you can only hurt by hitting them in the back or side kind of give me trouble too. And tiny rooms with 9 fat flies shooting 2 blood bubbles each.

Please give me some all of that knowledge. Seriously though, this is agonizing. This game really is great but my impatience is getting the better of me and I just want to jump to that point where I've internalized everything and stop making stupid mistakes.

Man, how do you go about internalizing all of this stuff? I've tried to read some Wiki's and there's a few items I've gotten enough times that I've learned how they work but so many of these mechanics and alternate effects of pills are a complete mystery to me. Now I feel like maybe I'm playing this game wrong.

I think I have about 18 hours logged on Binding of Isaac (original with Wrath of the Lamb) and I might be just about done with it. It feels really great to play and the music and atmosphere is something I really like getting lost in but the reliance on good luck to have a good run is just getting to be too much for me. I've definitely gotten a lot better and pretty consistently get to world 5 but I have yet to get a good enough mix of items to make it to the final boss. I either get some good damage upgrades with little to no extra health upgrades or I get a bunch of health upgrades with little to no extra damage upgrades. And then just when I get a good build going I find a bunch of pills and when I eat them one lowers my health, one lowers my shot speed, and one lowers my shot distance. I actually think I've had a higher rate of negative effects from pills than positive. I realize if I really stick with it and perfect my skills some more I would eventually get good enough to clear the boss regardless of how lucky I got with my items, but that just seems like too much of a slog. I think this game would be much more enjoyable to play (for me) if they did two things: Lower the number of pills that drop but remove all negative effects from pills. I fail to see how having some pills with negative effects is at all a desirable thing for this game to have. Scale the room difficulty based on your build. It is bullshit when you have a great run with a full 5 or 6 hearts going into one of the later areas and then hit a room where you are killed in 10 seconds because you didn't get enough damage upgrades to take the enemies out fast enough. I'm so torn on this one. I really really like playing it but the longer I play the more I feel like there is just a whole bunch of annoying game design bullshit to fight against.

I've been going through the entire Bombcast back catalog now for around the last 2 years and I'm currently on the June, 2013 episodes (can't believe it took me 2 years to listen to 5 years of Bombcasts!). Whatever negative initial reaction I had to the show is long gone and I absolutely adore these guys now. They really do (or at least did at the point I'm listening) put out some very entertaining content and the mix of personalities is just perfect. Getting through the last few Ryan Davis podcasts is going to be pretty rough though. After listening to him for hours on end every week for the last 2 years its become pretty clear that he was a phenomenal dude. It's so hard to imagine the Bombcast without him.

That is pretty damn fascinating. I stopped playing in the middle of Cataclysm and I remember wondering how crazy the numbers would end up getting a few years out based on the scaling I saw in the couple years I played. If an MMO was faced with the option to either scale numbers up with each release or scale old content down whenever new content is released to keep the high end caps roughly the same (I guess Destiny kind of went this route where 365 used to be max attack and the current max is 320), I wonder if there would be a noticeable difference in how players perceive the scaling and if they perceive the latter as less compelling simply because they are using the same number ranges. I kind of feel like my initial gut reaction to the Destiny re-scaling was slightly negative upon seeing all of the new numbers being lower or around the same as the numbers in year 1. But obviously that was fleeting and my brain pretty quickly adjusted to the new scale.

How do people go about choosing the scale of numbers they use in video games? For instance, kill an enemy in an MMO and you might get 100-200 experience. Get the top of the flag pole in Mario and get 5000 points. Start a new character in an RPG and start with something like 100 HP. Is there a good reason why developers don't just tend to start out with the smallest numbers and scale from there? Why not have 1 XP granted for killing a lower level enemy, 2 for the same level enemy, and 3 for a higher level enemy in an MMO? Why not have your character start with 5 HP and have beginning enemies do 1 damage per attack? Why not 1 point for breaking a brick block in Mario, 5 points for killing an enemy, and 25 points for getting the top of the flag pole? It drives me crazy. I just want small, obvious, and simple to understand numbers.

I feel your pain Dewar (although your list is much more intimidating than mine was when I started). I started tackling my Steam backlog in earnest about a year ago and even with multi-month Destiny interruptions and other distractions I managed to knock out 16 or 17 games since then. I suppose I should update this though with my mini non-Steam backlogs that have cropped up in the last year: PS2: PS3: PS4:

Minecraft.

Yeah, it really was a step back from 2. And I also feel like they padded this game out in the worst way possible by making you go back through areas 2 or 3 more times long after you had already done them to death with other missions. There is one particular area where you have to take jump pads from spot to spot to get to your destination on the outside of some kind of space station and between all the jump pad misdirection and the terrible verticality they tried to implement, it stands out as one of the worst areas I've ever had to deal with in a video game. And their mini map is so inadequate at showing where your valid paths are we would regularly spend like 15-20 minutes just trying to get to the area we needed.

Yeah, just beat the boss on normal. Took 18 hours so I figure I hit enough hours played at that point to shelve it for awhile so I can knock these last games out.

Any idea roughly how many hours it took you to get to the point where you could reliably get to the last area (last meaning that final node on the basic world view, not sure if there's more after that)? I know at 5 hours I'm still taking baby steps here so I'm trying to gauge what the skill curve is. Also, are there some runs that are more or less impossible to beat? I had a couple runs in area 4 last night where I would hit these rooms with 8 enemies that were all rapidly shooting two projectiles each and the layout of rocks in that area gave me almost no room to maneuver. Maybe if I had gotten some better weapon power ups it would have been different but I find it hard to believe I could get good enough to get through that kind of room unscathed.

I'm playing the original with the wrath of the lamb stuff.

Also, any show where a stoner and a stoner dog eat sandwiches as tall as they are is alright in my book.

I finished FTL much faster than anticipated and now have only two games left: Binding of Isaac and Kerbal Space Program. I've put about 5 hours into Binding of Isaac so far and I'm not sure what to think. There are things about the game that make it highly replayable and intriguing but it sometimes just gets to be too much. There seems to be a much higher reliance on luck than in FTL (where even on a bad run I could turn things around) and whenever I get to around the 4th or 5th area, I always hit a random room or two with so much bullshit going on that I feel like there is nothing I can do to avoid being hit a lot while taking out the enemies. It feels kind of oppressive and frustrating especially considering the boss fights have all been pretty easy. Yeah, I could maybe dump 100 hours into this game to get the perfect muscle memory I need to clear everything even with the worst item rolls but that doesn't sound very appealing at this point. I prefer FTL's "get better by getting smarter" to BoI's "get better by having perfect muscle memory and twitch reflexes". Maybe things will turn around though. I'm surprised that I'm not loving this game since I've seen universal praise for it.

What happens when you put those in the toaster? Does a blind, miniature Harrison Ford come out?

Borderlands The Presequel. I think I'm fucking tired of these games. This game was not very fun. It was buggy as hell and completely locked up way too many times, which was made even more annoying by the fact I was playing with some co-workers and we would get out of sync with each others quest progress with all of these lockups and have to redo areas. Beyond that, the controls kind of suck too. Your character has no weight so jumping just feels like a weightless, floating point just going through a jump arc. The double jump is sometimes available and sometimes isn't. Even when it is available it is not a very satisfying double jump. Honestly, the whole time I was playing this I just wished I was playing Destiny instead. The controls and mechanics and loot game here just don't even come close to stacking up to what Destiny has to offer and the experience felt hollow. Also, the characters sucked. Handsome Jack's arc was really lame and predictable and there was this character named Pickle that may have topped Tiny Tina as the most annoying character in a video game. Maybe this game just hit me at the wrong time or maybe my standards have just gotten higher but screw this game. FTL: Faster Than Light. This game was absolutely amazing and I loved every second of it. I don't know if I just had a lucky run at the end or what but the final boss ended up being a joke. I had 4 shield bubbles, 45% evade, 2 defense drones, cloaking, and a teleporter and through all three phases of the boss fight I took maybe 4 whole points of hull damage. I got obliterated the first time I faced him but that second time it wasn't even close. Since I'm trying to finish my backlog I'm calling this one finished. I will probably jump back in and try some other ships at some point or maybe possibly try hard mode (although normal mode hit that difficulty sweet spot almost perfectly).

Personally, I love this thread. I tend to be way out of touch with what is considered a 'classic' and tend to find out after the fact that I am an idiot for not liking a random thing I watched that others apparently consider a masterpiece. This thread makes me feel like slightly less of an idiot. And while we're at it, The Fifth Element is also partially cool but kind of garbage. Bruce Willis just has this slightly rapey vibe throughout the movie that has always bothered me.

I think Pitch Black is overrated. It's kind of corny, Vin Diesel is kind of a turd, and it bothered me endlessly that they luck out and find these glowing slugs that produce enough light to repel the alien bugs and the alien bugs are too stupid to just sweep in and scatter them quickly before the light could damage them. With as vicious as they are, they could have easily overwhelmed them and killed them all without barely sustaining more than a sunburn. Also, I may just not like these types of movies.

Since Black Spindle was up yesterday, I logged on with a couple friends to make a run at it and we destroyed it on our first attempt after coming up short the last time it was available. The key to our victory was dropping a titan bubble with armor of light on the boss and two of us spamming our exotic sword special attacks until he was dead. Took about 15 seconds to bring him from a little over half health to dead. Then we quickly mopped up the rest of the adds and had enough extra time to do a quick nightfall run. It was quite refreshing to have a nice challenge again that actually gave something I needed. Seeing how worthwhile trials is looking now, I think we're gonna make a run at that this weekend if we can't find enough people for an evening raid. This game is really good at tricking me into thinking I'm done for awhile and then dripping just enough content to pull me back in. Still holding out hope for some new PoE stuff soon though.

Oh awesome. Really glad that's the case because I always rename my characters to fit within a certain theme that I'd rather other people not have to be subjected to.

How are the random crew member names in FTL generated? I've gotten some Nick Breckons and Chris Remos in my crew so I assume either the developer is a fan of Idle Thumbs or the names are pulled from crew member names that other people on your friend list have used.

We had a fucking earthquake last night. In Phoenix. I've never had that experience before and because it's not something that ever really happens here, it freaked me out and actually got me to stop playing FTL and go to bed at a decent time.