Bjorn

On the second half of your spoiler: Also, another random compliment to give the movie. There's the now nearly compulsory after-credits scene that any movie that wants to be an on going franchise has, except that they made the whole rest of the credits entertaining! Including little character bits during the first portion of the credits and then an entire deleted scene that runs behind the rest of the credits. The entire audience we were in stayed until the final scene, because the credits themselves were so good.

I really love it every time you take some modern pop culture thing and draw the connecting lines to often centuries old historical reactions to similar developments.

I keep thinking about Ghostbusters today, and particularly about the two primary male characters, Chris Hemsworth as the receptionist and the villain. Spoilering the rest, and the entire existence of another character.

:tup: :tup: :tup: I kinda wanna go watch it again right away, which I never, never want to do with a movie I just watched. I don't want to overhype it, but man did I have fun. I'll try to type up some more coherent thoughts on why tomorrow.

The lady played a magic class and I played a Paladin-style character (mix of healing and great weapons). We both felt that I was the stronger class up until about half way to two-thirds of the way through, when her ability to do damage just blew past me. So a pretty typical arc for a mage in terms of power.

The lack of a world map definitely hurts it, they adhered to strongly to the Souls design in that respect, and their world design didn't really facilitate the kind of map learning that the Souls games do. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it as much solo, I only messed around solo for an hour or so. But in co-op, I felt it really shined.

The first boss is probably one of the two or three hardest bosses in the game. It does have the whole interlocking map with gaining new abilities that let you transverse it in different ways as you progress, letting you backtrack and explore new areas. It's definitely a Metroidvania, because that sense of exploration and gaining abilities that let you traverse in different ways or bypass gates is one of the hallmarks of a 'vania game to me. But fair enough that you bounced off it, not going to click for everyone.

Oooooooooo! It includes splitscreen coop! So many console ports to PC that have it on console end up stripping it out coming to PC (I think because it is often more resource intensive and they can't guarantee the minimum specs will allow it). I've wanted to play this for years and just never got around to it last gen.

Congrats! Logarius was one of the bosses I had to throw myself at a whole bunch before I really started getting a pattern and strategy down for him. Definitely one of the harder bosses.

Yeah, I think that Isaac has really spoiled me in terms of what I expect from a roguelike empowering different playstyles with each go. The closest Mojo gets is you can pick up different wands, but they wear out fairly quickly (even with a wand duration buff you can activate). Which is a shame, because there was real potential to have execute some fun ideas. I'd still suggest picking it up on sale if you've got a group looking for that kind of online co-op experience. It's fun enough.

I can see why that would be frustrating, but it seems to be designed to discourage save scumming your way through a mission, which I don't mind. It forces you to deal with chaos, or be more cautious, rather than just taking a risk and reloading to a minute ago if the risk doesn't pay off.

The world is a weird fucking place y'all.

Resurrecting this thread because it was the only non-3MA thread I could find about Satellite Reign. I got about 3 hours into this last night after getting it in the Humble Monthly Bundle, and I'm really digging it! Great aesthetics, solid gameplay loop (pick a mission, break in, things go wrong, murder, finish mission, waltz out). Had a lot of fun just wandering around the first district figuring out the basic gameplay.

Finished two different games in co-op this weekend. Woah! Full Mojo Rampage - A voodoo themed roguelike. Pretty fun for playing through its multiple campaigns a couple of times each to unlock some stuff, though ultimately it doesn't have the staying power of a lot of other roguelikes, mostly because each individual run isn't that memorable. Items tend to just be flat stat boosts, rather than creating new playstyles. Local co-op summons in a spirit who's stats are based on the main character and has a slightly more limited power set. 1993 Space Machine - Finished this in less than two hours, an okay side scrolling shmup. I wouldn't go out of my way to pick it up, but it came with a bundle and was nice to having something different to play in co-op since we hadn't had a game in this genre for awhile. It's got the foundation to be a richer game than it is, with multiple ship variants and a variety of weapon that can be swapped back and forth and upgraded, but ultimately the campaign is too short to support anything other than leveling up your first ship and the first two guns you buy.

Congrats!

It's a very skippable game, to be honest. I wouldn't recommend it at anywhere near it's normal price. But at ~$2, I think it's worth checking out. I really wish they'd have had the resources to spend another 6 months of dev time on it polishing it, I think it could have been amazing, rather than just interesting.

Another suggestion from the sale, Our Darker Purpose is on sale for $2.24 (85 percent off). It's a roguelike with a...i don't know, Addams Family vibe, kind of? You progress though an orphanage where the children have taken over, lord of the flies like, and have to fight your way to the top. I played about a dozen hours of it, and liked several things it was doing. I ultimately found the balance too hard, I couldn't ever finish a run. But I know they kept making balance changes to it for months after I quit playing. If you like oddball roguelikes, it's certainly worth checking out at that price.

For people who aren't in slack chat, this got linked in there earlier.

Yep. And using the discovery cue for free cards, again, which is the lamest most time consuming thing they've ever done for sale cards. The kiddo was wanting to play something with me for Father's Day, and we realized we owned almost none of the same online co-op games. So we made a list of stuff we should get in the sale, of which Helldivers was up there. If you see me on playing, it will probably be with her, just hit us up and see if we've got a slot. I think you can do local + online with Helldivers. If so, then we only need 2 copies for her, her hubby, the lady and I all to play.

Steam sale. woo. gaben. memes. Interesting deals I've seen so far. If you don't already own Banner Saga 1, it's practically free if you buy the Banner Saga bundle ($1.30 more than buying BS2 alone). New Doom is 40 percent off. I'll probably buy Helldivers finally (I didn't buy it the last time it was on sale, and regretted it recently when I was really in the mood for something like it).

There's a group like that in Kansas City, but I've never gone because they hold church like hours. Their main gathering is Sunday morning, and that's just like the one part of the week that I am least interested in going out to do something. Sunday mornings are for drinking coffee and reading on the front porch.

I was listening to a You are Not So Smart podcast episode on mindfullness and meditation, which focused on the trend of stripping out all the classic eastern religion/philosophy of it and also stripping out the new agey bullshit, and then trying to back up the practices with scientific theory and data about why the practices themselves are still beneficial. And it got me thinking, could you do that with a western religion. Could you do that with Catholicism? Like: Attend a public gathering of celebration once a week (mass) Attend a public educational event once a week (bible study) Take 15 minutes of quiet time a day to give thanks for the good in your life (prayer) Attend a therapy session at least once a month, more if you current circumstances are such that you would benefit from more regular counseling. (confession) I'm pretty sure I could find marginally relevant scientific studies to back up how each of those as individual actions is good for you. Edited to add: I guess I was doing this as a thought experiment to see how weird it would be to treat a western religion like we treat eastern religions, and actually it looks pretty reasonable.

Finished Salt & Sanctuary in co-op over the weekend. It's a really terrific game, borrowing liberally from both the Metroidvania and Souls games. It doesn't necessarily do anything new, but it executes those ideas just really well. If you are ever looking for local co-op games, this is a no-brainer. As a single player game I'm not sure I would have rated it as highly, but it's still damn good.

Congrats!

I'm usually on the pretty politically active side on social media, and this year two people have pretty much got me to stop talking about politics other than the odd local issue (one a Bernie supporter and one an...anti-Clinton is the best descriptor probably). I don't mind a disagreement, but I really don't want to have the same heated debate every single time I post anything.