BadHat

3 Homestuck characters.

The knight is pretty easy to cheese with some black firebombs and a few lucky hits early on, Havel (the dude at the bottom of the tower) not so much.

I find it super weird that most of the characters have a different art style, but hey I recognise a few of those people! So uh, good for them, I guess. By the way that first link just links back to this thread, which I have to assume was unintentional.

Damn it. Why does this game have to be on The Worst Console.

Oh man I totally forgot I was trying to catch up with Gunnerkrigg again. Second the recommendation for that, Awkward Zombie and Oglaf. Three Word Phrase has jokes about butts and is funny as heck. Nedroid has less butts but is also funny. Chainsawsuit is more "heh" funny but I consistently appreciate his wit about dumb everyday things. I don't know why I still find Garfield Minus Garfield so entertaining/absurd/occasionally depressing. Lackadaisy Cats is really good if you don't have a weird complex about hating anthropomorphic characters since furries became a thing. The Meek would be really good too except he hasn't updated in over a year, yikes. His last update is depressingly ominous, too. :<

I watched that video and assumed the attitude behind it was, "well, God of War had tits."

I found Gone Home and Walking Dead pretty awesome emotional experiences, but not quite in the same way I felt about Journey. It's hard to explain what specifically was so affecting about it, but conquering that last mountain with a silent, anonymous partner who seemed to care as much about my well-being as their own was a pretty profound experience.

I'm not sure if you meant this literally, but vitality is the life stat, enduarance is stamina/encumbrance. Personally I would totally prioritize stamina over HP at a certain point, though.

Well, against all advice to the contrary I'm soldiering on through the Artorias of the Abyss content with my SL1 character, having never seen this area before. I just beat Artorias, which was probably the tensest fight yet. Seemed downright impossible at first but I just had to be extremely on-form with my dodge rolls and super conservative with my attacks. Haven't felt that massive sense of accomplishment from a boss in this game since my first playthrough, so I'm glad I stuck it out... for now. Edit: This came up in my youtube related, haven't watched yet but it sounds kind of nuts.

Wow tough pick. This was a good-ass year for all things metal and prog. Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing Steven just makes crazy good prog rock these days. His first two solo albums might have sounded a little unrefined but this one's sharp as a tack. Deafheaven - Sunbather I don't listen to a lot of black metal and a lot of black metal people would probably fight me irl over whether this is even black but fuck it this is just a really, really, really good album. Tesseract - Altered State One of the few bands to come out of the whole djent explosion with their own sense of style intact, even moving away from harsh vocals entirely and cultivating a spacier sound than their contemporaries. Catchy song writing, crunchy-ass guitars, insanely good drums, what's not to like? Also I gotta shout out a few bandcamp releases from smaller artists because a couple of them are pay what you want and just too good: Cloudkicker - Subsume - Instrumental tech metal-y post rock-ish stuff made by one guy with a crazy sense of rhythm. Thousand Mile Channel - T A P S - Solo guitar album, heavy on tapping as the name suggests. Has a chilled-out math rock vibe to it. Dawn of Midi - Dysnomia - Acoustic jazz trio plays awesome, super-repetitive dance music. I bob my head and feel vaguely sophisticated for liking it.

Damn Spike is getting those videos taken down pretty quick.

That's kind of hard to quantify, really it just feels like there's a genuine sense of exploration and discovery in going to new planets and exploring both on and under the surface. I guess it's the variety? Gameplay-wise, exploring a cavern, flashlight in hand, and carefully delving deeper and deeper with no easy way out can be incredibly tense, but I guess that was true of Terraria too (minus flashlight). Setting up a base on each planet with a farm and stuff is pretty fun, and constantly shifting from place to place prevents you digging in too hard and just settling with your initial designs. Also you get to decorate it with all the latest stuff you pilfered, which gives it a sense of storied progression which is completely player-driven. Then again, it's hard to say how much of this is influenced by playing with people.

What the fuck did Joel McHale smoke to get through this.

The Baron had Snoopy dead in his sights He reached for the trigger to pull it up tight and then he did

I don't know but my favourite version of this is the end of this episode of Clone High (skip to like 19:45). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TCr_7tC09U

Damn it Steam, quit tempting me to buy things so shortly before the One True Sale starts. It is going to start... right? Edit: Whoa cool, thanks Activision.

Hah, these are fantastic.

Well, I broke down and started playing with a group of friends and we had a ludicrous amount of fun just exploring and discovering things. The amount of detail and content and... just stuff in the game seems kind of immense, I'm honestly surprised given the way they described how incomplete this phase would be. We've come across villages belonging to a few different races, each with their own extremely distinct style and cool race-specific structures. We landed on one planet where the ground comprised mostly of compressed bones and sounded awesomely gross to walk on. The water physics are a nice step up from Terraria, but even more impressive are the sand/gravel physics - it's not only possible but dangerously easy to cause a sand avalance, which can be either hilarious or terrifying depending on the outcome. Perhaps most impressive of all is the sheer amount of pointless cosmetic details they've included to fill out the world(s). I noticed early on that you could inspect things, adventure game style, and your character would spit out a line of dialog describing the object you clicked. Some of it is still a bit placeholdery, but much of it is incredibly specific, not only to the item being inspected, but to the race of the character inspecting it. I created a Glitch (robot dude) character, and when I inspected an Apex (gorilla dudes) poster declaring "OBEY!" I expected him to say something along the lines of beep boop look it's a poster, instead he actually had a retort for the message on the poster. I found a specific style of chest which has a protruding tongue when you open it, and he had a line about analysing the organic nature of the tongue. My mind boggles that someone sat there for god knows how long, writing incidental observations for (nearly) every object in the game six times over, to fill out a feature most players might not even notice exists. That's really my biggest takeaway from the game so far, that it's just so lovingly inundated with care and detail that it's impossible not to appreciate the enthusiasm the developers had in creating this. But yeah if you're not sold on "Terraria in space" then I don't know if that stuff will sway you. I find it a much deeper experience so far based purely on how much there is to discover, but it's hard to tell how long that will last and how well the gameplay will hold up once the discoveries start to wear thin. So far everything seems really solid and fun, but there are definitely some major balance issues, some of which are already being addressed (the entire system dictating monster levels and weapon stats is being overhauled in a couple of days). Still, it's hard to believe I've already put 16 hours into this, it doesn't even feel like half that.

Electric Castle will always remain my staunch favourite, it has my favourite instrumentation and cast of singers by a mile. If I ever had a ludicrous sum of money at my disposal I'd throw it at Arjen and have him make it into a stage production ala War of the Worlds. Anyway, I'll definitely give the new one another go, that track was quite enjoyable. As we're vaguely on the topic of folk metal, here's something I've been really digging lately even though I normally steer well clear of this sort of thing (sorry, it's long). Whoops, I listened having not watched the film. That was beautiful though, so thanks for convincing me to watch it. You're welcome! The rest of the album is just as good.

Hey man, that 18+ sticker does weird things to the adolescent imagination.

Figured so. I always kind of wanted to pick up some of Cave's stuff, but there's no way I could justify the price.

Most Criminally Underrated Game - The Last Of Us An inspiring tale of success from a scrappy little studio with nothing to their name but a dream, a mocap studio and millions of dollars. Most Predictable, Paint-By-Numbers CoD Clone - Arma 3 Okay but really I have over 200 hours played in this already and it still continues to provide me with immense amounts of fun playing with friends. In between all the running for miles and dying, that is. Honorable Mentions Dust: An Elysian Tail for being incredibly fun and endearing and Spelunky for being Spelunky.

Well I mean, looking over that exclusives list linked earlier in the thread was a little depressing. Besides the big name stuff, it seems like a lot of the titles that actually stayed exclusive are relics of Microsoft's desperate push to make Xbox relevant in Japan (did that ever actually pay off?).

I always wondered who actually drove the buses to and fro while I was playing. After a while I sort of just assumed they were left there as a public service when every non-mercenary character abandoned the area and the player character drives them around himself. Which begs the question: why not just drive them all the time if you can bypass checkpoints that easily?