Bjorn

They made it with 2 hours to go!

HOLY HELL! That's awesome.

Yeah, I discovered that last night as well. I hadn't tried seeds, and didn't realize how they worked. I assumed that any 8 character seed would work. FWIW, HORSEBAG doesn't work either. It looks like the only good way to get seeds is to get them from in game and share them, just randomly typing in numbers and letters is more likely to result in an error than a good seed. So two nights ago, I think I was playing on Hard by accident. It's really easy to accidently change the difficulty and not realize it if you aren't paying attention to the bloodstain on the page. My wife and I died early in co-op a couple of times last night, and I noticed this red symbol beneath our key/bomb counter. After the deaths, I realized that's the symbol to show that you're on Hard! Whoops. I got to both the Devil and the Cathedral last night, and died to the bosses both times. I should have beat the Devil, just totally botched that. But on the Cathedral run, I just got hosed on damage. Not a single damage upgrade the entire run. And I had a badass character otherwise. I had Tech 1, Tech 2, Mutant Spider (which makes Tech 2 split into 4 lasers), and a trinket that makes your shots do this zig-zag motion (which did affect both lasers). It was like being a fucking Sith Lord. But my damage was just shit for the Cathedral. My favorite run of the night was playing as Samson. Realized that Bloody Lust has changed. It's no longer per room, it's per floor. I got an upgrade that gave me fireballs, which set enemies on fire and had a chance to detonate like a bomb. Then I got an item that caused explosions to heal me! Perfect synergy. With Bloody Lust, the fireballs would be the size of Samson by the end of the later floors. Agreed!

#readergate

23 hours to go, and $7K short. I backed, even though I don't think it's going to make it. Fucking shame, it's absolutely beautiful.

- So with a story like that, you're in then Cool, probably others will as well. Should we do some Thumbs jokes to start with, and then branch out to either generating or other stuff once we've burned through the good ones? For today, I nominate: shty wzrd

That's only if you are running with the big map though, if you change it to the small map (Tab or Back button), the time goes away. I don't like having the big map up anyways, so I just always run with the small map. Is there any interest in setting up our own Thumbs Daily Challenges as long as a bunch of us are playing? Just pick or generate a seed once a day and everyone who wants to participate can?

There's an opacity setting you can change. I haven't tried it yet, but also haven't been surprised by something hiding there. Suppose it's like the UI in Spelunky before they patched it. When it screwed you, it screwed you hard. It only took three items, and I liked it. Flight and free attack flies are awesome. You also didn't have to hold onto the items to get the transformation, so you could pick up and discard the head and paw, and just wait for the tail to show up, so that made it easier to get. Oh, I totally forgot to talk about playing in co-op last night. It's fun, but fucking hard. My wife had never played BoI before, so there were lots of deaths and restarts before she started getting into the flow of it. I suspect co-op will be similar to Spelunky, where we are never as good together as we are separate, but it's fun to do anyways. OH, and Turbo mentioned it, but seriously, bomb everything if you have extra bombs on a run. Blowing up mushrooms and Skulls can make a huge difference in a run if you've got the bombs to spare.

George?

Thanks, I was tired last night and having a hell of a time finding anything besides the crazy that was going on in his main timeline. Oh, and surprising no one probably, he's a big fan of Return of Kings: Someone in the replies tells being they are being "intolerant" of other ideas by criticizing Rogue for liking RoK. Uh huh. And here's a thread of Quinn and Boogie being decent human beings to each other and having empathy for what each has experienced. And holy crap, that Milo tweet is side splitting hilarious.

Yeah, I think TB is a complete tool, but we can find lots of ways to show how terrible his logic and empathy are without bringing cancer into it. Milo decided to go full on racist today though, ranting about how Native Americans should be proud of people dressing up like them for Halloween. He's not even pretending to be anything other than a foaming at the mouth racist: Denial, any links about the Rogue stuff? Obviously not to the docs themselves, but just anything about it. I went through his Twitter, and all I see is him yelling at people to stop infighting and to follow his orders. I'm sure that's going swimmingly.

I think I got lucky with drops on my first few runs, the difficulty is feeling more balanced now, that or as someone in the current podcast thread said, the difficulty steadily ramps up as you unlock things (different room configurations and layouts come active). I made it to Mom's Heart once, and beat her, but wow, is that fight a lot harder. Seemed like quite a few more additional enemies and the bullet pattern was faster and changed quicker. I was really lucky I had 8 hearts on me and the card that doubles your current hearts , or I wouldn't have got through it. I ran into one run killing bug. I got the mini planet thing that makes your shots circle around you. Shortly thereafter I ended up in a room that had a large chasm in it, with three of the new wall spiders on the other side. My orbiting shots weren't able to clear the chasm, I didn't have an offensive usable item and I was out of bombs to be able to bomb a door open to escape. There just wasn't any way out of it. And it was going to be a great run to, I had picked up the Xray Specs on the first floor and was in terrific shape. Really wished I hadn't have picked up the planetoid thing, but I didn't know what it was. The Lemon challenge is great. They made the lemon item and lemon pill way more useful.

I've got some thoughts about BoI, but I want to play it a bit more and at least get past the Womb before making any judgements. I am going to try some local co-op with it tonight though, which is the feature I was most excited about and made buying it an automatic. The other big thing I'm surprised wasn't brought up was the seeding feature. I know Chris was fascinated by the speed run racing leage that was going on for awhile. With the ability to enter seeds, now that is explicitly supported. Those two alone justify the work that went into rebuilding it outside of Flash and re-releasing it.

Weirdly enough I played all the way through it, and came away kind of liking it despite how terrible it is. It's not a good game, and probably not worth playing, but it was a fascinating train wreck.

TB once tweeted a link to that SA rant. Maybe in five or six years he'll look back and want to punch 2014 TotalBiscuit as well. On his above longer reply of his, as bad as the Anita line is, what's more damning to me is his claim that all the misinformation early on was caused by the MASS CENSORSHIP! of sites shutting down discussions of the Zoe Post. Because a conspiracy about shutting down conversation about Kotaku's ethics is way more believable than site owners and mods being really fucking uncomfortable with people dissecting a woman's sex life and failed relationship. This is more damning to me because there is a, sadly familiar, strain of a lack of empathy and an unwillingness to think critically about a situation. Quinn, and likely Sarkeesian as well, do not feel like people when he talks about them. They are characters in a piece of entertainment to be judged. And he rants about the DMCA takedown of MundaneMatt's video, which I had kind of completely forgotten about. Fuck if I know what I would do if a bunch of fuckheads were suddenly uploading hours of videos with them talking about my personal life. I might try to instinctively kill it, even knowing it's not going to work.

Huh, I was sure that I was up over 200 hours, but Steam is telling me 81 hours. Of course, I'm not sure if that counter is always accurate, or if it fully accounts for time played offline. I was sure that it was going to come with a Daily Challenge with leaderboards and everything, but now I can't find why I thought that (maybe it was just wishful thinking). Seeded runs are cool, and will support the racing groups that popped up around BoI, but I really would like to have that same Spelunky type integrated DC to chase every day for awhile.

I'm not sure that they aren't just running Joy2Key or a homemade equivalent in the background. My left joystick tends to wander to the left a hair, and at one point I alt-tabbed out to message someone and my message field just started filling with "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa". They're just mapping the controller to keyboard controls. I don't even want to admit how many hours I played the original, which is realistically the only reason Rebirth doesn't feel harder.

Denial, I saw that. Someone in that thread said they aren't pro-gg, they're anti-anti-gg. Wouldn't surprise me to see this become the next smokescreen, distancing oneself from gamergate while still being able to stand by all the things associated with gamergate. Then they can very naturally slip off the "actually ethics" shroud and slip into their "actually, it's about a harassment campaign targeting gamers" robe. Reading that thread, naïve is the word that kept popping into my head. Just completely and totally naïve, about so much.

This comes out in a little less than two weeks! I haven't seen much more said about the co-op mode in it, which is by far what I'm most excited for. But for Xbox One owners who also subscribe to EA Access (gross), they can get a 6 hour unlimited demo of the game a week early, including co-op. That's kind of a bold move, as it means there should be a bunch of opinions out there on the game before people can buy it. I'm hesitant to spend $120 on a pair of copies for my wife and I, but I suppose we can always rent the last gen version for a weekend to see if we like it.

Good lord, what a gross fucking asshole. The first line of his reply is to claim that Shawn is a liar. And of course KiA or 8Chan won't call him on this bullshit, even through they've screamed about how people in their own movement have had their jobs threatened just for having an unpopular opinion. Oh right, there are actually people in the comment thread defending TB. One even going so far as to say he's the mature adult that handled everything correctly. You're right that he's only in it for self promotion, along with virtually all the other "leaders" and prominent public speakers in gg.

I tried my first Challenge Run, the Tank. About the third floor, I encountered a new room, which randomizes all of the items you've picked up. Ended up giving me almost entirely companions, plus flight and some shot upgrade I've never seen: The Dice room gave me 7 companions, and I picked up an 8th shortly thereafter. It was cool, but since I'm not used to the new items, it was kind of a clusterfuck for a bit as I had no clue what all I could do. It was a cakewalk to finish the rest of that run. I've only made 3 total runs so far, so I know that's not much of a sample. But so far its feeling easier. Maybe I've gotten lucky, but it feels like I've ended up with some pretty awesome combinations of stuff on each run so far. The IV Bag plus Leech is crazy, in the right rooms you can farm a ton of money in no time at all.

To me it reads like a super villain cackling to his minions about his plan to take over the world, which matches more with how some gamergaters seem to view Gawker than it does reality.

Noticed something was wrong with my spoiled text above, fixed it.

Took a break this afternoon from work and played one run. Man, it's weird. It is so familiar, and so alien at the same time. Got a couple of the new items, and a couple of items I thought I knew what they did do something different now. Going to be fun relearning all this stuff. I made it to Mom the first time, but died to her, mostly because I bought 3 devil items (even though I didn't even want or need the third item) to go ahead and get Cain unlocked. Figured as long as I could, I might as well.