Bjorn

I didn't realize the Power Glove was a third party gizmo. For years I've just assumed it was yet another of Nintendo's long line of in house gimmicks.

The innovation (to me, Merus may think something else) was in how various choices are able to be recognized but not pursued based on how well you were doing with depression at various stages. It's a simple change, but one that mechanically conveys so much. I'm not deeply familiar with these types of games, but I had never encountered it before. In other games where your choices may change, the ones whose criteria you don't meet simply don't appear.

Spelunky didn't click with me until I could consistently make it to the Ice Caves, and then in the course of one evening the entire game opened up to me, so many things just suddenly made sense and worked.

Zues, seriously man, hope you get better soon. I'd never actually known someone who had passed one personally, but a friend just went through it over Christmas. It was like he'd gone 10 rounds with a boxing champ, bunch of broke blood vessels in his face and eyes from puking from the pain.

I habitually go too long before replacing my glasses, and so still get the super disorienting day or two of adjusting to a new pair.

Researchers found in a recent study that false memories, even extremely detailed false memories of committing a crime, could be introduced into people's memories believably in as little as 3 hours during a police style interrogation. The article specifically notes Serial at the end, but its applicable to any case where witness testimony is the primary evidence and that witness has spent multiple hours in police interrogations. Also, that whole thing is just scary as shit, that false memories can be taken up that quickly.

Yeah, I agree the biggest difference is the luck factor, and that ultimately Spelunky requires a greater degree of mastery to do well. You will never accidently luck into a winning run on Spelunky. But in Isaac, even a relatively new player could luck into 2 or 3 items that come close to guaranteeing a win.

No, that's not being dickish, nor is it bad design. It may not be something that you or the GB guy like, but that doesn't make it either of those things. There are few, if any, items that will always be a negative pickup for the player. Even items that are terrible by themselves have some astonishingly good synergies that can emerge with other items. And if you pick up an item that you absolutely hate and despise, then you're probably going to remember what it looked like and not pick it up anymore. And in a rogue-like where a bad room or decision can wreck your playthrough, I don't see how being ignorant of an item's effect during the initial playthroughs is any different than not knowing what a new enemy or boss will do. You quickly learn a bunch of the items right away, because the more common items you will see all the time. Once you've played for awhile, if you run across an item you don't remember what it does, absolutely tab out to a guide real quick to remind yourself. But that's not the same thing as needing to play with a FAQ open. To me, at least for awhile, it is about a process of discovery, being lost in a world of a bunch of unknowns and needing to figure things out. Just letting the player know from the start what every item does would break part of the what makes BoI good. It would be like a Souls game giving you arrows to point you where to go for your next quest. Or if the outcome of every decision in FTL was explained to you before you made it.

I still think that feels super reductive, its just something that's so normalized and established people rarely give it thought, whereas sanity meters are still somewhat novel.

Don't Starve does use a reductive sanity meter, but it's also still one of the better explorations of the mental and emotional stress of surviving. As your sanity dwindles, the world around you grows increasingly ominous, including shadow hallucinations that play at the edge of the screen. As you crouch around your fire at night, fearful of the things in the dark that will devour your, shadowy hands reach in as your fire dwindles, threatening to steal your light and plunge you into darkness even faster. The reason it works is the amount of stress that it puts on the player. It's really unnerving during your initial playthroughs. The lady got stressed enough a couple of times she just had to quit and walk away from the game for a bit. Of course, you play enough, and this just becomes another resource you need to manage and any impact it has on you is eliminated. That's another reason that I doubt we see explorations of this too often, as the impact on the player rapidly fades with more exposure to similar systems.

Just in case somebody missed this piece of brilliance when it blew up the Internet a couple of days ago.

The worst thing about the Haunt is that it can show up on the first floor. It makes blue baby runs and *hidden character* runs really obnoxious.

Pretty much my thoughts on it as well.

So, TB and a bunch of people are incensed that ABC is moderating their YouTube comments. So a guy who doesn't allow direct replies to his videos...gets mad at someone for not allowing him to directly reply to their video. Also, he'll disable replies to his comments if he wants. Because he's allowed to directly speak to the people he wants to criticize in YT comments, but can't allow others to do the same to him. It's kind of stunning, really.

I'm actually borderline cynophobic. If I'm not really, really familiar with a big dog, I'm extremely uncomfortable with it. And if I encounter a big dog unaccompanied just out and about, it terrifies me. So depending on how its presented could actually make this a horror movie for me, which is why I think its interesting.

Ah, RPS ran a piece about Hotline 2. It's exactly the same scene. Comments are classy, super classy (not really, don't read them).

Also, once you let users have a certain amount of control (either through dev choice or hacking), it does seem like rape becomes increasingly likely if its able to be simulated at all. There's the super disturbing Day Z rape, or the rape hack for GTAV. Teabagging has become so common to have practically lost meaning, but the reason it originally worked as a taunt is that it was channeling homophobic fears about sexual assault. It's meaningless as a taunt without it being a sexual violation. In single player stuff, we still have examples of rape. There's the sexual violence against one of Heavy Rain's characters, which ends up being wildly out of place and with no purpose other than titillation in one part. It sounds like the violent rape scene is still in Hotline Miami 2, which the current descriptions of it sound even worse than the scene that was in the original demo, which the devs tried to excuse by explaining the player had walked into a porn shoot and didn't know it. And back to GTA, there's the thing I just wrote about somewhere on these forums about sex with prostitutes, how consent is predicated on a financial transaction, and if a player steals money back from the sex worker, then it becomes rape.

That blows. Hopefully it's not too much of a hassle, not much you can do about a broken toe as far as I know. I've never broken anything either, which is shocking given some of my hobbies and accidents over the years.

I kinda dug the jumping, it was like a thumbsplosion was shaking out the thumbs from their cracks all over the world.

I seriously thought about making oatmeal this morning with sausage and maple syrup stirred into it, but then I didn't want to take the time to fry up the sausage, so I just stirred in some yogurt and orange marmalade. Even though I'm on the pro-meat side here, I do love a well made vegetarian dinner. We actually like having vegetarian/vegan friends out for dinner, because it challenges us to come up with new things to try.

You got on my case for bringing up the ethics of the global food economy, and you go with human sacrifice. Nice.

As I attempted to clarify in a later post, the question was, "Is it wrong to eat meat?" I didn't take that post in the most productive direction, which I already admitted. My point was that our food economy is a ethical nightmare, and we're all guilty of various degrees of problems because of it. The answer to "Is it wrong to eat X?" is going to be yes more often than no. Is it wrong to eat meat, fucking yeah. It's also wrong to eat bananas. Wrong to eat tomatoes. Wrong to eat chocolate. Wrong to eat bread. Unless you're growing your own food, or are incredibly discerning in who you buy it from, the answer for a whole bunch of foods is "yes". It's not a question of is it wrong. The questions are: Why is it wrong? How much can that wrong be mitigated? Are there unintended consequences of that mitigation? Is this an ethical calculus that I can win, or am I just going to have to make the decision I'm comfortable with and live with it? If your primary concern is that we're torturing animals, then I'd agree that the conditions in several factory farm industries are atrocious and should be done away with. If the argument is that the raising, killing and eating of any animal is torture or ethically wrong, then I'll disagree. If the concern is that it is incredibly wasteful, in some cases that's correct, and in other cases its not. There are certainly examples of meat production that are incredibly wasteful (I named the American beef industry as being the biggest as far as I know), but there are other animals and practices where are not nearly as wasteful and can use a wide variety of resources that wouldn't otherwise be going into food production. We're pretty sure there are long term health risks to meat heavy diets, and the solution is moderation. The problem there isn't meat itself. I also think it is actually worth bringing up the problems with other food supplies in this discussion, unlike bringing up say the rare earth materials in my phone, because if I'm not going to eat meat, then I'm going to be eating something else. And if I'm going to think about the ethics of where my meat comes from, I should also probably be thinking about the ethics of where the rest of my food comes from. I am not going to be eating my phone anytime soon, so I'm not going to worry about the ethics of its production in a conversation about the food I'm going to put in my stomach.

I was not ready for the audio in that video. Hilarious!

Yeah, I really want the earthquake set! Leap is actually my favorite ability on the Barb, but I've set it aside for now because it just doesn't have a good roll to play in my current build. I have two pieces, and a RoRG, so one more drop and I can try it out.