Bjorn

You know, I've been figuring he'd get conjured up at some point. I'm surprised it's taken this long. But I wasn't expecting it to be in their "documentary" of all things.

AC1 is my favorite, but I only played the first three. I felt like the assassinations were much, much stronger in 1. Also, I didn't really care for the steadily accumulating cruft of the other ones.

Yeah, movement is not what you expect it to be. Locking onto enemies does seem to give you the Dark Souls style circle strafing. But locking on seemed a bit wonky, camera zooms way in and you can switch targets quickly and unexpectedly. Though that might just take a bit of getting used to it. Keyboard controls are TOTAL FUCKING BALLS. I looked like a drunk Dwarf on Disco Night who mistook his shield for dance partner. I took the Dwarf fellow up to level 7 and the Keeper up to Level 5. Only had one successful run through Zone 5, and that's cause some lord was carrying us babies through it. His score at the end was more than double second place. The other runs all ended, and ended quick, in Zones 3 or 4. Man, once one person goes down, things go belly up fast. I'm really not sure what I think of it so far. I haven't spent any skill points so far, because I have no clue how to build these characters. Money seems a lot more generous than credits were in ME3. The handful of matches I played let me buy one large chest and 3 small chests.

I actually did use CE last night to do the Lost runs. Over the last week since I unlocked the Lost, I've had about a couple of dozen serious attempts with it and about 400 or so resets. And the best I ever got was Caves 2. So I just loaded myself up with a bunch of good items. And even starting from Basement 1 loaded, I still took the odd hit here and there and burned through a few cat lives. I'm most of the way through the character unlocks at this point. I've got maybe 8 or so successful runs left to unlock all the character stuff, mostly going back through on Hard to beat the Heart. I wanted to get the Lost stuff unlocked so I'd have a better chance of seeing those items while I'm going through the rest of my unlocks. I don't particularly like cheating, but you're right, the amount of luck + skill necessary for successful Lost runs is just too ridiculous. I really like the challenge level of the Blue Baby. It's hard, but there are a dozen items or so that will give you a great shot at it. It's not like needing multiple items just to have a prayer of making it like the Lost. Only played one run tonight, and Lazarus got what might be my favorite combo so far: Fire Mind + Ipecac. Explosive shots that poison and leave behind a pillar of fire that incinerates things. Then in the Chest, the first item I got was Pyromaniac. Apparently the game thought the end of my run needed to be even easier than it had been.

Yeah, that was me, I was completely hooked on ME3MP. My wife just got home with her copy of it, and is installing it on her PC now. I'll try the MP on her account first to see what I think about it before committing to buying a copy for myself as well. From the streams I've watched of MP now, I don't know what to think of it. It's obviously not going to be the shooty and space magic fun that ME3 was. But it there certainly looks like there is potential there. It's probably going to take a few hours of playing before I know if I'll like it or not, since I'll need to get some characters leveled up. I'll also admit to having some worries about getting into DAMP. I was genuinely addicted to ME3MP, I played way more of it than I am comfortable admitting, and part of that was the gambling nature of the unlock store, where it took hundreds and hundreds of hours of grinding out credits to unlock most things. I really don't want to fall into a habit of playing a game like that again, but then it was also really fun.

Susan Arendt has a nice piece up at Joystiq about the ordinariness of gender diversity in Dragon Age Inquisition. It's something a bunch of people have noted in the multiplayer as well, the launching MP characters available are split 50/50 male and female. Just cause. There is a hilariously awful thread over at the Bioware forums with a few men angry that there aren't more male options in DAMP.

He's one of a few Brit/European commenters I've now seen insinuate that racism and/or sexism don't exist across the pond, and so they find the American obsession with this stuff to be completely mystifying. Which I'm assuming (based on reading other British/European writers) that people like TB are just completely fucking blind. I had really avoided gg and KiA for most of the last week, but I dipped back in this morning. Dammit. So KiA is all sorts of pissed off that the Daily Dot had the audacity to point out that 8chan has boards dedicated to pedophilia. Because Free Speech means that you have to host child porn. Because ETHICS! I mean, obviously you can't really support free speech if you ban kiddie porn. Wait, wut? And remember, this is all about ethics in gaming journalism and not the persecution of a few people who are either women, have specifically pissed off gg or are both.

Baby steps, gotta move in baby steps. For a baby game.

TotalBiscuit decided to triple down on appealing to the gamergaters, by denying that white privilege is something that exists. It's a response to this guy's Twitter rant last night about how white privilege doesn't exist because Irish. Last week, Jon Stewart had a running gag in one episode where he kept looking at the camera, and saying, "That joke was brought to you by context. Context, it's what let's you understand what's happening in the world, relative to everything else."

I also had Death's Touch, if that matters, but I don't think it would. The problem was the relatively short range of the Lung and the spread pattern of the attack. If I was moving forward or backward, it became hard to anticipate where the closest explosions would hit to me, and if there were any rocks in my vicinity, the spread of the lung could clip one and blow me up. Plus small rooms or rooms with LOTS of rocks were just impossible without taking damage. I did manage to get through about half a level being dying though. I think certain roguelikes are a good fit for non-gaming folks who are interested in playing something. Tend to have short playtimes, so if you've only got 15-30 minutes you can probably get a game in. Plus death is assumed. It's meant to be hard, so that means if you die, you're not a failure who doesn't know how to play a game.

It's totally the premise of the show, and I assume it's heavily advertised. But, like Ben, I managed to watch it without having any idea that it was about [redacted], and it was a super fun surprise.

I'm jelly, I've yet to have been able to really abuse the Blank Card. It either shows on a build where I'm depending on some other Active item, or it's in the store when I have no money. Pro-tip: Don't take Monstro's Lung + IPECAC. I thought IPECAC was the rubber cement bottle, because they look just enough alike. Whoops. End of that run.

No, we haven't gone back to it. Shortly after watching the first three episodes at my friend's place, we started watching Farscape, and we tend to just watch one show at a time until we're all the way through it. My friend is a big fan of the show though, and I generally have a lot of faith in his recommendations.

The bolded part is a common mild hallucination caused by heavy caffeine intake as well, which often goes hand in hand with sleep dep.

Wow, you've got a harsh post office then. Though a huge factor for our experience may be that we've known all the employees at hour post office for a decade, we know a couple of people really well as our kids were all in school together. Was it paid for with PayPal funds, or a credit card? At this point, rather than dealing with anyone's customer support, I'd think about filing a chargeback or dispute on the charge, might be the easiest solution.

Poop doesn't drop bombs or keys now, just coins and hearts (including soul hearts on rare occasions). So poop farming isn't what it used to be, but it is still useful.

Monstro's Lung is tough because it bottoms out your rate-of-fire, which is what governs charge time. But it synergies like crazy with a handful of items, to the point that it's probably worth picking up. I find the Cursed Eye hard to use in general, and lacking in DPS compared to almost any other upgrade. But the real reason to avoid it is that it has a hidden ability. While a shot is charging, or being held, if you get hit you have a chance to randomly teleport to another room. It's infuriating. I've quite using dice rooms with a 6 or a 1 in them, as I had a pretty decent run ruined by randomly getting Cursed Eye on a character reroll. But it's sooooooo tempting to see what will happen. I'm thinking about using Cheat Engine to mess around with The Lost. Not to make it too easy, but to give myself one or two items at the start of the run that will at least make it possible (nothing cheesy like Gnawed Leaf and Daddy Longlegs). As it is, I'm just startscumming over and over, so all I'm doing is saving the time of the dozens of automatic failures when the first treasure room is crap.

Congrats!

I agree with Twig, the RNG is always a factor, but skill will take you a long, long ways. And once you're past a certain threshold of knowledge and skill, you need an exceptionally bad collection of items to not at least have a chance of going the distance. Health management might be the biggest one, not just mastering dodging, but learning how to best get more health in the later levels. One thing that may not be initially obvious is to leave Soul/Black hearts on the ground unless you need them to progress, even fighting the level boss, and then backtracking to get them. The boss will always drop 1-2 red hearts, so you can maximize your health going into each new level if you're letting your red hearts take damage, healing, and then going back to get all the soul/black hearts afterwards. Once a level is finished, you can also go back and use any Sacrifice Rooms or Curse Rooms if you have extra red hearts lying around, before picking up soul/black. Guppy's Paw can save even a terrible run if you have a bunch of red heart containers, but giving you a giant battery of health for your final boss.

Here's your Monday Morning Dick Joke (obvs nsfw), in case you need a little smile this morning.

Are you sure you never got the refund? Part of our sales are on eBay, and it's not uncommon for us to void several labels a month, and we've never had a problem with the refund coming through. For the post office, it takes up to 30 days for the refund to be processed, so it can be easy to miss seeing it in your statement. As for postage, for future reference, you can hold onto a label for days and days before you use it without a problem, even though there is some language in there that says it needs to be used same day or within 24 hours or so.

Out of curiosity, what level were you on when you died to the spikes? Each type of charged shot is unique, and some of them are much easier to use than others. Brimstone is easy mode, while the Cursed Eye is terrible. If you're finding the Cursed Eye, you should just skip it. I finally got the Tammy's Head + Brimstone + Homing Tears combination last night. The only time I took damage in the last four levels was when I walked into some red poop. Now I know what it feels like to be god in this game. Since starting to go for Mom in under 20 minutes, I've pretty much just started speedrunning every time now, whether I need to or not. It's a lot more fun, and stressful in the good way, when I'm skipping rooms and missing out on some items to push ahead to Mom as fast as possible.

If there's enough interest in a game, someone usually makes a thread in the Multiplayer Networking sub-forum under Video Gaming to keep the main games thread cleaned up. No one has made one for DAI yet.

So I've been screwing around with the super secret character this weekend. Took about an hour and a half to unlock it, got it on the first go (though I got really lucky on the third run). You can use seeds for the first three runs, but the fourth run has to be a normal, un-seeded run. Using seeds makes it a ton easier, particularly since the first run has to die to a specific enemy that doesn't always spawn in the first level. It's fucking ridiculous how hard this is. I probably died and/or restarted 100 times in the span of a couple of hours. Probably 90 percent of the items you can get, you might as well restart since they aren't going to help. I kind of hate just farming the first level for a good item, it's not how I want to play BoI, but I don't see many other options when a single hit kills you. I did have a few good runs, the two best were with Daddy Longlegs, but I still only made it to Caves I. I also finally got the Family Man challenge done, which was by far the hardest challenge for me. The successful run ended up being hilarious, I got both Samson's Ball and Chain and Guppy's Hairball, and was just a whipping them both around every room slaughtering everything. Between them and my 3 extra large Pretty Flies, I was mostly immune to enemy tears and just had to watch for contact damage. Only one challenge left, and it should be one of the easier ones (Darkness Falls), I've just had two frustrating deaths in Sheol mere minutes from finishing it.

Ninja, that blows. Thank you for reminding me to back up my own save though. I got the 16th and final ending last night (unless there are super secret others). It was a crazy run to pull it off, it started off as a co-op run using Eve, but around the Womb my wife dropped out as with two of us it was too big of a drain on health. The only saving grace was that very, very early on I'd picked up a 1UP and I got the Wafer. Managed to make it to the chest before dying and using the 1UP, and that let me push on through the end. Ended up finishing with just a half a heart left.