Bjorn

Yeah, my shotgun character is by far my biggest disappointment. She's occasionally useful when she can hit 2-3 enemies in a shot, but that's not consistent and the damage still lags behind the ARs. Plus there are rounds she can't fire due to friendly fire. I do have a pistol user I'm pretty happy with. I ended up switching the NPC Rose over to ARs, since I already had one pistol user and saw no reason to have a second. My sniper is my non-combat character, max Int and Cha with almost all points focused in non-com skills (except for a single point in Sniper). He also has TERRIBLE initiative, so he goes once for every 2-3 times my other characters go. So I can't say I have a good feel for how good snipers are.

Going to put in a recommendation for watching Sleepy Hollow (the TV series) for Halloween. We did a watch party for it at a friend's house last night and saw the first 3 episodes. Our friend is a big fan of it, and was frustrated that no one he knew was watching it. It's actually pretty good. First two episodes were much better than the third, but I'll assume the third was the anomaly for now.

It's out! I fooled around with it this weekend. It seems a bit like Gone Home in terms of actual mechanics, you're mostly just exploring a house, examining things with a bit of limited interaction. The house resets every so often and the "nightmare" starts over with different things going on. The house seems to develop a maze like quality in some versions of the nightmare. I don't really have an opinion on it yet. I wasn't really in the mood for that type of game the night I fired it up, I just wanted to see it in action. It's a very atmospheric, moody game (as expected), and I was playing it with my wife and daughter watching, and we had just finished dinner and been laughing/joking about something. So kind of the exact opposite of the frame of mind that the game is trying to explore. It will probably work better for me if I wait to play it some night when I have the house to myself.

I'm actually really enjoying the writing and story, particularly compared to most other video games. Sure, it is pretty stock post-apocalyptic stuff. But compared to something like Bethesda's Fallout 3 (or Skyrim), it's great. Of course I find those games to alternate mostly between forgettable and grating. I'm a bit frustrated with combat, but that's mostly from feeling overly reliant on my one Assault Rifle character (according to the stats, she's done as much damage as all my other characters combined). The damage, range and AP use of the ARs I've seen just really outshine almost all the other weapons.

Not direct sneaking, no. I have found one side quest where there was a non-combat route through a building that required me to have fairly high levels in 4 skills, but that's about it. My goat is still alive.

I ended up leaving this running over the weekend and fooling around with it whenever I would go into my office. After Ascending once and getting back to where I had been previously, I deleted my save game. The incremental progress per ascension is kinda dumb. I was only able to make it one boss past where I had been the first time, even with 4 gilded heroes and 12 Hero Souls.

Wow, so I don't much keep up with comics, but that design doesn't even look like anything I would expect out of Marvel (maybe out of a smaller press, but no one of the big ones). It's just...fucking sensible. I mean that in the best way.

That's probably the single most unsettling part of the movie for me.

Primer is so hard to talk about because all of the things that are really interesting about it end up giving away too much.

I loaded it, had a browser crash, and then haven't been able to load it again since. Which, really, is probably a good thing.

Yeah, 2 is a bit of a mess and all over the place, which is what can easily happen when you want to actually explore branching possibilities resulting from changes in the past. It's a lot easier to keep the story clean and elegant when you are mostly restricting your action to a single time like 1 and 3 did. That stuff doesn't really bug me though, at least not in a movie that isn't taking itself very seriously like BttF.

It definitely looks like a comic version of this could have easily existed on the pages of Heavy Metal back in the day.

I don't know how common they are, but there are laundromats in my area that are also bars. They always have clever names like Sip 'n Spin.

Please do! I'm super curious.

Hey prospective date! Let's take this shovel and drive out a bunch of miles from the city to see what we find. We'll park in a secluded area, then walk several miles into the woods where no one else could possibly be near us. Don't worry, I do this all the time. It'll be fun!

Yah! Sunless Sea talk! Thanks for giving your thoughts about it Danielle. I really wanted to hear someone discuss it because of Fallen London. There's so much that looks interesting about FL, but the time commitment and structure of it completely turned me off of it. So the idea of being able to explore that world with better mechanics and without the artificial time constraints of a free-to-play game sounds fun.

Yeah, that's fucking insane, comparing the police actions in Ferguson to how the media treats "gamers." Wat da fuq? You can see his comments in context, with followups, here. Also, Cracked has continued to pile on the gaters.

Thank you for asking. I was so confused.

I really like ME3 mechanically as an action game (and I got kind of obsessed with the co-op horde mode with it). I think it's the most fun combat of all three. Story wise...it's got some great set pieces, maybe some of the best in the series, but it's ultimately not as interesting as it lacks the world discovery of 1 and the character development in 2.

I would play the hell out of some weird Sam & Max x Mass Effect crossover. They could just be found in a lost cryotube and be be brought back in Shepard's time. Max interacting with the Elcor...brain melty goodness.

While on one hand I don't entirely disagree with you, particularly about the possible risk of online drugs, the reality is that parents make medical decisions (sometimes decisions that might be dangerous for a child) all the time in this country and are rarely prosecuted for it. And in a case where wealth and privilege come into play, I'm not going to automatically say that charges are warranted simply because the defendants did not have access to the services or options that would have been easily available to someone who was more wealthy. And both the judge and prosecutor showed a pro-life bias in their choice of language in talking about it, which makes it look a lot more about punishing the woman for supporting her daughter's choice than in enforcing the law.

The conversation around Ziggurat (and then going and seeing a video of it) reminded me a great deal of the Wheel of Time game from 1999. I remember buying WoT, and being SOOOO disappointed when I installed it, because I was expecting some kind of RPG epic, and it was just like, "What, this is just like Doom with wands and shit." Which was completely unfair, and WoT was apparently a very good game. But the dissonance between what I was expecting and what I got was so much I was never able to get into it. WoT also has a badass female protagonist, which was pretty novel for a game that was trying to compete against the other big FPS franchises of the late 90s.

That's incredible.

Yeah, I think it did it some with the Aunts, though that was often pretty goofy "mentorship" at best, and the same with the male cat's advice. I did like that show though. On a totally different topic, hopefully Chris doesn't mind these being linked (he specifically mentioned the Times one in the episode, so I'm guessing not). Here are two different obituaries of his distant relative: Times and the Post. Guy sounds like he had an incredible and fascinating life, but there are only little glimpses of it as he protected the privacy of the families he served all the way to his death, other than the odd minor anecdote here and there. Also, I particularly love the phrase Chris used of "disposable curation." It feels very apt for something like Steam Curation.

Hey, according to that there are 2 of them in my area! Checking the website of one of them, they confirm that they do have one. I'll have to put together an arcade outing with some friends soon.