Bjorn

Nature keeps making more of them

Anor Londo, with its church catwalk, super snipers and crazy hard bosses has inspired more rage quits and internet rants than any other area in a Souls game. even made a song about rage quitting there. But beating those bosses is a major turning point in the game, stick with it! For the boss, go human and summon help. If there aren't any players, there is an NPC somewhere in the big open room before the boss. The distraction of a second target is more valuable in that boss fight than any other one. If you are online, and keep getting invaded (it's a super popular invasion spot), then just go offline and use the NPC. On armor, I'd say upgrade what you have with resources that you can buy infinite amounts of, but hold off on higher level upgrades until you find an armor you really love. On the Drake Sword, some people consider it to be a trap. It's incredible for when you find it, but it ultimately is the far poorer option even compared to some of the common weapons you can get around there once they are upgraded a few levels.

I focused on getting the Artillery Beam up to max level first, then invested everything else into shields/engines for defense. I also farmed an early enemy for experience once I was at shield level 2 to get my pilot and engineer up to max level. Fights were slow for awhile depending on the beam, but it kept me alive and scrap coming in until I found a store with something good. I eventually got hacking and a decent missile launcher, which combined let me control an enemies weapons systems as my beam carved them up. But that wasn't enough to tackle the Flagship once I got there.

The last, what, 30 minutes of that movie? Insane. No one will ever get away with that again.

I've tended to adopt strays from the humane society, and most of them spent some time living on the streets before ending up in our home. So that tends to put them down the path of murdering for survival and fun. The little 8 pounder is that way. Our old orange tomcat is obsessed with catching baby bunnies in the spring. Thankfully he usually brings them home, where he plays them to death before...well, I won't get too graphic. He's also a monster. I say thankfully, because this means we often have the chance to intervene and save the poor thing. We just did this last Saturday morning. Kept the little dude around for about an hour petting him and making sure he wasn't bleeding and had no broken bones before setting him loose.

Oh, wow, I saw that as an option once late in a run, and ended up opting for a Green Engi space, as I was badly in need of a store to repair and figured it was the safer option. I'll have to head down that route next time I see it.

I've tried two different ones, and in both cases I found them drinkable, but not enjoyable. I'd rather just something else. Wheat beer is what finally got me to look into whether or not I had a gluten/wheat intolerance. I'd have a few, and bloat up like a beach ball. My wife finally pointed out that it really wasn't normal to have that reaction to a few beers. To me it was just normal, as that's the reaction I had been having for years.

I love pizza and beer, but went gluten/wheat free about a year ago, so no more of either for me. Appropriate for the intoxication thread, I was mostly just a beer drinker before the diet change (I did go through a rum phase, but rum does funny things to my personality that no other alcohol does). Occasionally a scotch or whiskey, but not common. I still have this moment of like brain-lock panic sometimes when a bartender or waitress asks for my drink order, because I want to default to just saying my old standard beer (Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat), and I can't say that! I still haven't found that good, stock standard drink to settle into.

These gifs/vids always confuse me. Every cat I have ever had has been a sociopathic monster who lives to kill. Our youngest has basically been renamed Monster at this point because of her obsessive need to try and murder things. She weighs all of 8 pounds and has stalked some of the wild turkeys that live around our place. She's never actually pounced on one, but clearly the goal is there.

You have been betrayed! Notice anything else missing from Firelink? I like the Onion Guy's story a lot. He's got one event that is very, very easy to miss, as he travels to an area you've already explored. I think it's after the 3rd time you talk to him, he moves to Blighttown (yeah, woooo!). But by then getting back to and navigating Blighttown will be easier for you, if you have any interest in seeing the rest of his story. Sen's Fortress is one of the most impressive areas of the game to me in design. It's so oppressive. I don't know how many times I died there the first time around.

So I decided to restart my no bonfire run as a no death/no bonfire run. Figured I want to pull this off eventually, so I might as well get a practice run in before the PC version comes out. So far I've killed 6 bosses (including the Ruin Sentinels!) and cleared 3 areas. Heading into Huntsman's Copse next. Just approaching every area very methodically, not taking any risks. Pretty much dumping all my points into Str, Health, Carry Weight and Stamina. I'm playing online so that I can use co-op sessions to refill my estus and repair my weapons. But even with that, I'm having to swap between 4 weapons sometimes between being summoned. Now that I'm out of the introductory areas, I'm starting to get real worried about getting invaded. There are probably 5 or 6 bosses/areas that are really terrifying to me for a no death run. Most of them are all ways to be one shot (falling to death). I'm already pushing 300K Soul Memory, so I'm hoping that it may be possible to hit 1M and skip a couple of the Lords. It's super tense and stressful, but I'm having fun and liking it. I can't play when I'm tired though, I damn near plopped down at the fire in Majula last night right before I quit.

The behavior that the program discovers and exploits is kind of crazy.

Just getting around to listening to this one, and I really appreciated Ryan's story about going from being bad at math in college to an eventual winding path to games. My daughter is in the midst of that right now, end of sophomore year and in a very similar place (the math is just wrecking her). I'm sending this podcast on to her for some encouragement. Not so much that it's guaranteed that she can still end up in games (it's absolutely not), but that other smart and talented people also went through where she's at and still found success in life.

You are cooking through areas! Taking him down just opened up a new avenue for you, to what is one of my favorite areas in the game (I am probably a minority in liking this area). On that area, for people who have played:

It's fun to discover that area for the first time though.

No ghost ever shows up in the worm? I tended to get killed there when I was going for Meat Boy because I would be hurrying.

On "So good it's bad", I'd say that the movie I point to is Eyes Wide Shut. It's a movie that on paper sounds incredible. The themes are engaging, the cinematography is great and the acting is good. I enjoy the slow, methodical pacing of it. And yet I find it to be a completely unbearable film. I've rewatched it a few times (as it's the only Kubrick movie that strikes me this way), hoping that it gets better as I age and have a wider frame of reference for the material, and yet I think it is actually getting worse the more years that pass.

Abusing alchemy and making the most ridiculously powerful potions was the most enjoyable aspect of Morrowind for me. I totally get why people love the story engine elements, and the lore/world, those things just don't click for me with the TES series. The toybox like set of tools you get that can be combined to make what is the fantasy equivalent of a gatling gun that fires nukes is what amuses me.

Yep, this exactly. If you think it looks cool, and the weight is right, use it. Min/maxing armor efficiency really only matters in PvP, and that mostly has to do with establishing minimum poise amounts to ensure that you can get an action off without being staggered. The Elite Armor, fwiw, was at one point considered the single best armor set in the game for its weight class. Then it was nerfed, then unnerfed, really riled the community up. I don't know where its efficiency ended up at by the time the changes were done.

Nice, Hydra is super intimidating the first time you get there! I had actually forgot which boss you had previously got stuck on (which is where I was hinting at with the key question). If you're having fun and doing well, carry on!

Nice, congrats! What starting gift did you take? You've got a few options now, and you can probably handle at least exploring most of them. One of the options can be easy to miss. If you've found any keys and haven't unlocked the matching door, you might look around for that.

I also did the air purged ship with the Lanius, super effective and amusing. I did manage to get the below 20 percent achievement, but I was playing on Easy for that one, as I wanted to make sure I unlocked the B variant. The C version of the Federation ship is interesting, got it last night on Normal (then died on Phase 3 of the Flagship). The artillery beam gets replaced with an artillery super flak cannon, but you have NO weapons at all. Seems like it might be more powerful overall, but would be a slog through the opening sector or two until you pick up another weapon to help out. It's a shame you can't man the Artillery Beam for some other effect. It's also got a teleporter, Clone Bay and 2 Zoltan crew, so I tried using them as suicide bombers. Unfortunately their death explosion isn't that powerful. With their reduced health, they don't do enough damage while alive for their death to finish a normal human enemy off.

Ah, that's the Red Soaptsone. It lets you summon an invader for a duel. As host, you don't really get anything for it other than the fun of the fight, unlike the Dragon Eye. Dark Souls used a Peer-to-Peer connection for multi, not servers, so multiplayer will theoretically always work as long as there are other players and you can connect to the verification server. Given the unknowns about GFWW, the PSN version might actually have a longer online shelf life than the PC version.

For all the hundreds of hours I have put into the 3 Souls games, I am still terrible at Parrying. Just never got it down. Since you're probably going to favor Dex weapons (based on previous part of the discussion), I'd say just raise your Str when you find a new shield you want to use, otherwise focus on Dex. And then evenly distributing between Health and Stamina is always a good investment.

An interesting game jam might be one where you take bad ideas (think the Animaniacs old Good Idea/Bad Idea skit), and then try to build games around the bad ideas. Kinda like Molyjam, but less surreal.