Bjorn

Put your Peter Molyneux hat on and it will all start to make sense.

Was there some sort of indie design conference a couple of years ago where everyone decided that Edward Gorey was the bestest ever? Now there's Our Darker Purpose. I mean, he's pretty great, but this is a third game inspired by his style in a year. And also yet another game that was completely off my radar that just exploded on it like a stealth mothership blowing up. I'll say I'm hesitantly optimistic by what I see. My only concern is that it seems too perfect. Art style, beautiful. Music, haunting and playful. Gameplay, faster and more mechanically complex Binding of Isaac. Depth, multiple paths and a deep inventory/power structure Permadeath with some carryover progression, check Procedural levels, check Kickstarter funded - IS DELIVERING THE GAME AHEAD OF SCHEDULE?! Is this the end of days? But will it have the depth, difficulty and wonder of BoI? It just seems like there is a chance that all those wonderful things will just fail to coalesce into something I want to play. But I want to play it very much. Right now. It comes out tomorrow. Barring terrible reviews, I think I'll have to buy it this week. I'm jonesing for another roguelike, and feel rather burned out on all the ones I've played.

My dreams of Lego Chell jumping out of the side of my monitor are crushed...

Uncut id, a rare delicacy. I played around with this for a couple of hours tonight. It's pretty good, though I had to quickly untrain some BoI habits, as it's just mechanically different enough that it takes a different approach. The roll dodge ads this biggest change. It almost bounces back and forth between a BoI style game and a bullet hell shooter. Some of the rooms just end up crazy dense with enemies, hazards or projectiles. I've always been terrible at bullet hell games, so these rooms are kicking my ass so far.

I'd thought about it for a long time, but the last 2 years saw a lot of improvements in projectors. Prices have plummeted (there are really nice entry models in the $750-$1000 range), quality has improved and bulb life is a lot longer. And there are starting to be some LED lit models that don't even have to worry about bulb life anymore, though those are still on the rare and more expensive side.

I wish I could remember what comedian I saw break this down. The argument was that it's fine to draw on stereotypes, biases, and various -isms in comedy. But ultimately the punchline should never be hurtful to a disempowered group. So you can make jokes about racism, but the punchline should be turned outward on the racists, rather than be about further dehumanizing a particular demographic. It seems that the creator of that game fails to see how some of his characters fail to pass that test. Having a token lesbian and a black thug are problematic. The joke lazily flops down on a bed of old stereotypes instead of transcending that to make some more interesting joke or commentary. Cheap Shot: But maybe he's the kind of guy who thinks that Scary Move 37 is the height of comedy and has never heard of Blazing Saddles.

I went with a home theater projector a couple of months ago, and I can't imagine ever going back to a regular TV in my living room again. Similar price as a TV, a bit of work to setup, but stunningly beautiful and a huge screen. 142" for me, but that's a bit out of the norm, 100"-120" would be achievable for most rooms. If you mostly use a TV in the dark, I highly recommend thinking about it when you need to upgrade again.

My favorite AI moment was around the camping lodge thing, I ended up with a stack of like 6 bodies all in the same place from stealth kills, right on the other side of a chest high stone wall, because more guys kept coming over to investigate. By the 5th and 6th bodies, you would think that a guy would wonder if maybe he should not go right on up and check it out.

So I finally finished this last night, just got done skimming through a lot of this thread. I find myself agreeing with a lot of the criticisms of the game, though I ultimately still quite enjoyed it and think well of it. There was one thing though that was so distressingly pointless that it nearly ruined the end of the game for me.

Last report I saw said that the stock wasn't delisted, but trading was temporarily halted, then restarted before the end of the day. And the investigating office said that the company is cooperating. It's not good, but it doesn't sound like anyone is expecting the company to crash and burn this week over this.

I never really get tired of reading news about Eve Online. I don't always understand it, but it's fascinating. So apparently one of the largest wars ever wiped about $300,000 (like, actual real world value) worth of fleets, and was all sparked due to a late payment between corporations. It's almost as bizarre as how some real life conflicts get started.

I need Lego Chell and a couple of portals for my desk. That just became a requirement.

That's a misspelling, it's actually Legos. Play Valve Lego edition! Includes the legofication of all 3 of your favorite Valve series. L4D 1 and 2, Portal 1 and 2, and the complete Half-Life saga, Half Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1 and 2. I joke, but fuck, I would totally play Valve: Lego Edition.

Yep, there is. Open the console and type tdetect. It disables enemy AI so they don't attack.

Repellant from a design, aesthetic or thematic standpoint? I can see someone having that reaction to...well, any part of BoI honestly. I like it, but it's certainly got its issues.

Unless I'm misremembering, the original story named the woman who originally shared and conversation, which is NOT the woman who had the conversation. The woman who shared it had asked permission, and was willing to publicly name herself. Thanks, I had tried following it earlier and was too lazy to track it down. The comments make me want to cry. One guy kept posting this image as a reply to people. And they would respond, "Well I don't see how that applies to what I said."

Not sure this is quite the appropriate thread, but it doesn't really need it's own and I can't think of a more appropriate threads. Chris commented on Twitter about this article about Blood Dragon designer Dean Evans. It's the most batshit interview I've seen in awhile, alternating between being genuinely amazing and absolutely horrifying, sometimes in the same paragraph.

I liked the lackadaisical pace of the looting/exploring sections of The Last of Us. It needed those timeless spaces. If you had a clock ticking on every scene...it would have ruined something. It would have been existing in this perpetual stress machine. Which in a way they are, but you need the downtime between combat. That said, I still felt that looting was mechanically broken and could have been better. I enjoyed the element of finding the little mini-story in many areas far more than finding loot.

I hadn't kicked in yet, as it seemed like there was plenty of funds for what was planned. If it's going to be more than what has been raised so far, I'm willing to kick some in though. And Sean b-ball card is awesomesauce.

That is in fact incredibly pretty. I played the first one. It was a fun super hero sandbox, but the artificial good/evil choices bugged the shit out of me. And the tweest at the end was so far out of left field that I ultimately ended up not caring about the story. If it had been foreshadowed at all, it might not have felt so weird.

It doesn't seem to me that it would be particularly immersive, but maybe it has a bigger impact that I realize. I'm as interested in how people react to trying as I am to the device itself.

Ha! That's exactly the same spot I quit tonight, about an hour after I should have gone to bed.

This is slightly cringeworthy at times due to technical problems, it being Nathan Grayson's first ever video interview and a few really awkward questions. But if you want to watch Tim Schafer play Broken age for an hour, you can. Tim's defense of the game's difficulty makes a lot of sense, particularly in the context that he never intended some of his older adventure games to be as difficult as they were. Less playtesting back then meant less opportunity to discover which puzzles would stump a lot of people.

Valve just has a script that autopopulates an HL3 folder in every single folder across all their computers.

Don't Starve lets you set a bunch of world parameters to customize how difficult you want it. Default can be very challenging and stressful for a long time as you learn. But if you back off some of the hazards and increase food, it can become a rather nice little survival/camping sim. Both are on the shorter side, but I found Little Inferno and The Maw to be rather relaxing games. Not a lot of difficulty, and really charming. But neither have that sim quality to them.