Bjorn

Third party exclusives now have the effect on me of making me hate a platform just a little bit more, and want to refuse to reward them for unnecessarily blocking access to games. That's assuming that this is exclusive exclusive and not whatever it is that the games industry thinks "exclusive" means.

I did a bit of looking, and apparently a lot of people still consider the Sidewinder to be the gold standard for force feedback sticks. You can still find them used on eBay. That's really tempting! Wing Commander III is free on Origin right now, might as well grab it.

Only if you start hanging out at airports to watch the planes. What stick did you get? Are there still new ones produced? I can't even remember seeing one in a store or online in years. I went through a bunch of sticks in the 90s. My favorite was probably the Microsoft Sidewinder with force feedback. Wish I still had it, but one of the steel cables snapped that provided the feedback and I could never fix it.

And four player local! Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I haven't played Season 2 yet, but this got my curiosity up enough to spoil this much. Reading through the comments in that IGN article Merus linked, there's this comment that calls into question the entire premise about 1) whether or not she's useless and 2) whether there's something about the way she's presented that causes people to view her as more of a liability than other characters who take actions that are just as detrimental to the group. Spoilered for its length. If that's even mostly accurate, it does seem reasonable to question what it is about this character that is creating the hate, particularly if that hate is in many ways derived from her being considered "different" in some way.

I guess I don't even really think of comparing Spelunkys to Rogue Legacys. To me, one is the modern embodiment of that arcade spirit (Spelunky) while the other is a groundhog day like exploration of the same space with steadily increasing knowledge (skills/equipment). I enjoy both quite a bit for different reasons. Necrodancer actually embodies both, with a mode that includes persistent upgrades and a mode that is like Spelunky. I find myself alternating between the two when I play.

Ha, when I saw the title, I was like "gamer lingo", wtf? I've known people using the word grok for years and years. In the comments, your friend says that after giving the interview, he suddenly learned that it was common to certain groups, he just hadn't encountered it himself outside of the game industry, and so thought it was mostly a developer term.

I've never played a Pokémon game, I had no idea what some of the story beats were in them. Fucking weird.

I'm in agreement with this. Alien very easily could have continued down the path of all the other horror classics from the late 70s through early 80s, with rinse/repeat sequels. And for what is an action movie, Aliens is still exploring territory that we wouldn't see other actions movies touch for years, if ever (motherhood, PTSD, gender integrated military forces, genocide). It's a great movie, it's just not Alien.

Has anyone ever modded a Pokémon game to just make it dog fighting in the grossest way? Also, a reskinning of all the Pokémon as various gods from throughout history would be amazing. I might actually play that. Especially if I could breed gods together to make more powerful gods.

FWIW, I was just linking to information for people who weren't aware of anything regarding AA. The ethical and moral quandaries of clothing production are as wide as they are deep. If you're interested in ethical suppliers, I would suspect that AA is in many ways one of the best options, shenanigans of the former CEO notwithstanding. If your customers are satisfied, my opinion is that you don't necessarily need to change brands unless you desire to. Of course AA is going through a pretty significant change now, revisiting how they act as a company in another year will probably be much more informative. Also, the style of the marketing bugged me less than the requisite beautiful homogeny of it. One part of me has rather respected them for being practically a satire of the way that almost every company uses sexy women to sell shit. AA just said fuck it, let's just not even pretend that we're not doing that. But, on the other hand, gross continuation of the objectification of women.

Read up on their recently ousted founder and CEO. The marketing vision came from the top.

There is actually a Wasteland 2 thread. Most interesting thing in it is how W2 was being influenced by its fan community.

I actually never played the EU version either, I didn't discover the Long War until after EW was out, and I was having to much fun with the expansion stuff to roll my install back to an earlier patch. I was more curious what your impression compared to vanilla EW was.

I feel like you've been waiting for a long time to use those images together.

I know enough people with positive views that I should watch it again. But when I saw it at the theater, I walked out seething mad. Not with like Alien-nerd rage, but just mad that it was such a mess. But someday I should watch it again with much lower expectations. I know that my reaction to a movie in a theater can be significantly different than watching the same movie at home (or just watching it in a different mood). There are a few movies I hated on first viewing, that years later I rewatched and quite enjoyed. Oddly enough, the Aliens-derivative Pitch Black is one of those.

Dammit, I have no rebuttal for that. But the bigger question is, why is this thread tagged Groundhog?

Wouldn't Alien be a pentology now? Of course, I really want to live in a world where Prometheus isn't part of the Alien world, but now every time the rest of the movies comes up, it seems inevitable that Prometheus at least gets a brief mention. Maybe in a few more years people will forget about it.

Oh god yeah it is, not to take Monopoly too seriously, but what a super weird reskin to put on that game. Like, in the AC world, you'd be assassinating the guy who owned Park Place, not buying it. It's like making a Monopoly: Occupy Wall Street edition. At least they didn't have to animate any women for this game. Must have made it super easy. Could not stop myself from making that last comment.

Putting joking aside, an AC tabletop game could actually be cool, whether that's something like a reskinned Mafia/Werewolf traitor game, or a 2 player vs board game where one person is trying to defend a target while an assassin tries to get close enough for a kill. Defender has say, 10 guards and the assassin has 10 identical units, one of whom is the real assassin and others are distractions or other tools.

For complex co-op games, I think an app can be a real advantage. Players end up tasked not only with keeping track of their own decisions, but communally making sure that the game's clockwork is turning appropriately. Offloading that to an app should, theoretically, make the game flow better and create a better sense of actually competing against something. Of course, that's assuming it is done well.

So there's an Xcom Board Game coming soon: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/06/xcom-the-board-game/ Not honestly sure if I'm excited about this or not. I've become increasingly disenchanted with several of the FFG games I own. While awesome, the setup and teardown times are so onerous that they don't get as much play as simpler stuff. Plus the amount of time spent making sure you're following all the rules in a new game tends to be on the high side. On the other hand, I have three local friends who are all Xcom junkies, and I'm sure this would be fantastic with them.

Oh yeah, just like Chris, the first time I encountered that was a moment of pure video game joy. I really like the joyful dissonance of this game compared to other similar types.

I cant' believe there have been 8 core AC games, plus multiple portable games in 7 years. The resources dedicated to AC are crazy.