Bjorn

They expected it, apparently there's a txt file in the install directory that says, "Please don't datamine, and if you do, don't share it online. We think this is cool and would like to see it play out." They just hoped that people would respect their wishes for at least a couple of weeks. I was the same way, and this morning I just posted to r/bindingofisaac asking if it was worth holding out on avoiding the info. A couple of people replied describing the scale of the puzzle, at which point I realized avoiding it was silly. Good starting guide! A couple of things I would add are:

My first time through DeS, this was the WORST area. Though once you understand it, it's arguably one of the easiest. It's almost as much a puzzle as anything.

So, as far as anyone knows, Rebirth's biggest secret got revealed in less than a week (Ed and company thought it would take weeks or months). I had seen mention of this, but avoided it as I didn't want to get spoiled. But this morning I read some things about it and realized that it's impossible to ever discover this stuff on your own, the scale of the puzzle is just too big and takes hundreds or thousands of players working together to solve it. It took finding a rare trinket, dying in a specific way, getting a clue, and then accumulating dozens of those clues to reveal the solution. My spoiler doesn't reveal any of the new late game material, just specifically one thing that was unlocked by solving this puzzle. Ed and Nicalis were disappointed it got solved as quickly as it did, and particularly that dataminers came in and did the last of the work on it. But from what I've read, the people working on solving it legitimately were already like 75 percent of the way there and it was likely to just be a few more days before they had it. Seems like the devs in this case vastly underestimated what a community does when it gets its teeth into a secret.

This was soooo distracting watching BH6, as I couldn't stop thinking about Snow Crash.

It's an interesting progression the series has made. Dark Souls took the thematic, story and world elements of Demon's Souls and refined them into something wonderful. DS2 took the mechanics of DS1, and did the same kind of refinement mechanically. Maybe it's just expecting too much to see every facet of a series improve from one to the next.

Great news on its sales, these are the kinds of games I want to see coming to PC. That said, I'm not going to buy this for awhile. There's soooo much stuff out right now that I want to be playing.

I didn't think this shit could get any weirder, but Roosh starting a gaming site proved me wrong. A quick look and search doesn't show KiA talking about it (I may have missed something, not going to discount that). Imagine that, gg not talking about a raging misogynist creating a site just for them.

You pretty much nailed how I feel about DS1 vs DS2 as well. I think the same idea applies to movies as well. There are terrific movies that I have almost no interest in rewatching, but will rewatch something that's not as good only because it is more entertaining. 2001 vs 2010 comes to mind as an example of that for me.

I'd say this is the definitive version to play, and that it's not going to be any harder than trying original BoI. Plus this version just runs so much smoother and has baked in controller support, both of which help elevate it over the original a ton. I opened that spoiler, and then immediately closed it. Not quite there yet, though I did get through the... Finally got it done tonight! Though I got kinda lucky and cheesed it. Got one of the new runes, the one that makes you invincible for like 10 seconds, then immediately found a Vera run that let me double the invincibility run. I had the Tarot deck that lets you hold two cards, so I was able to take both runes in and just sit on top of the Heart for 20+ seconds without worrying about damage and letting my flies wreak havoc.

FWIW, if you ship like this via UPS or FedEx and don't tell them what's in the box, it (while very unlikely) can actually come back on you with legal responsibility if the bottles break and cause damage to other packages. I'm friends with a guy who owns multiple UPS stores, and this is a real thing they've had to deal with. So if you do it, make sure that shit is packed crazy good.

Oh good! Boston Dynamics is teaching their robots karate now.

I shouldn't be surprised, but there are people complaining in a Bioware thread about how the multiplayer characters in DA: Inquisition are split 50/50 between male and female characters, and how unfair that is because there should be more male characters. Hilariously...no, sadly...wait, I'll call it sadlariously, it opens with someone who looked at list of characters and arrived at the conclusion that there were more women than men: Because when you have an equal number of men and women, men see it as women dominating the space. Edited to add: This thread is killing me. It's mostly just a few shitheads going on about it, but are they ever pearls:

That's a good point, it is kind of crossing into the same territory as, "Well if a woman doesn't want to be catcalled, she shouldn't dress that way." Hold people responsible for their own behavior.

Dream Loadable Content.

The economics of volume pricing!

I fully agree with Mangela that personal, true stories like this can do more to drive change and conversation about societal problems than any amount of statistics or dry information can. But that's also walking down a path of the ends justifying the means, wherein the greater societal good outweighs individual suffering. Which leaves me feeling a bit gross, like Twig, including feelings of personal revulsion that I am being entertained by the pain of real people. I know me though, and I will almost always error on the side of an interesting or valuable story being told rather than silencing it for the possible harm it may cause.

Holy shit, that's audacious. I'm genuinely speechless. Straight up mixing in F2P unlocking costs with a full price AAA game.

I don't know what TB said in his stream about her(or if he said anything) but he definitely made sure the mob targeted Simins on Twitter. Because the mob was aimed in the wrong direction for some quote that was being passed around. Also, #misandryisreal made a bit of a comeback. Some pretty good ones in there.

I think both options are terrible. Tell a compelling story that results in people's privacy being violated, or don't tell the story at all.

I've only ever used GMG once, and that wasn't for a pre-order, just a sale. I've always been hesitant about them, but several people on these forums seem to have had good experiences. The biggest worry to me is that I wouldn't get the key in time to pre-load. Speaking of which, I might just pre-order or track down a physical copy at Gamestop or Best Buy. People are reporting the Xbox One pre-load (which is already available) is 42GB. My internet blows. That could easily be a 24-48 hour download. The pre-load will unlock 3-4 days before launch, and 42GB could literally take most of that time with my download speeds.

But the implication there is that people shouldn't tell stories like this at all, because they can't control how people will react. That's...something I'm really uncomfortable with.

I still haven't had time to watch that stream of MP earlier, but this thread on the BSN details all the things known about MP so far. So a pretty good chunk of the ME3MP team was bought over to work on DAMP, which I hadn't realized. Looking through all the known things, it sounds like they've addressed a lot of the best criticisms of ME3MP. Promoting was almost useless in ME3, but now you get a reward for it. Your exp and rewards are tracked in realtime, so if you disconnect you still get something. In ME3, if you dc'd, that was it, a total loss. Mission times are still expected to be 20-30 minutes. People who have died can actually help, they get access to some tools to guide and inform living players about the area. Also, it looks like there is an equal number of male to female characters, which is cool. ME3 had a sizeable female player base, and one of the common complaints was that there weren't nearly as many female characters as male (and the Asari made up like half of the non-human women). You can play with less than 4 people. Yah! Running high level challenges with just my wife and I was one of my favorite things in ME3. Man, I'm getting really, really excited about this. I'll probably buy a copy on Origin to pre-load it. My wife is going to want to play SP anyways. It looks like you can pre-order it through Green Man Gaming and use one of their discount codes, so I'll probably do that.

I've tried Head Trauma a few times now in co-op, and the hardest thing about that is being able to see enemy tears. With two people firing, the screen is just full all the time. I got through the Cursed! challenge, which I honestly though would be harder than it was. Things got really hairy in the third level, but then I found a heart filled Super Secret Room to fill me up and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way. I'm trying to break myself from backtracking through every level to speed up my playthroughs, and having every door be a cursed spikey door is a good way to make me always go forward. Sometimes I think my favorite runs are actually the ones where I have items I'm not a big fan of, where I'm just squeaking by floor to floor. I got Monstro's Lung last night, a chargeable attack that shoots out a bunch of red tears like Monstro's attack. My charge was so slow it was a bit of a slog clearing rooms even though the attack is powerful. I thought about restarting a couple of times because of how slow it was going. But I just kept plugging along, and then on the Depths 2, got Chocolate Milk! Which turned it into an auto-win attack for almost every room. I still haven't gotten access to any of the new stuff past Sheol/Cathedral, but I think I must be close. I'm avoiding any of the forums for Rebirth, as I don't want any of the new stuff spoiled, and I've already seen the names of a couple of things and don't want to learn anymore about them.

Playing Battletoads in co-op with my older brother is one of my favorite gaming memories from being a kid. Even though I don't think we ever got past the hover bike level. But I don't know about them bringing it back. It feels like a series that belongs solely in the 90s and is unlikely to work right now.