Bjorn

A single world is significantly larger than I had anticipated, and things get weird after awhile.

Second Heart saved my favorite Assault tonight. I decided to start modding my A team with it just in case. I got that fountain map that Exalt torched you on, but it was with aliens on a terror mission. Everything was going okay, until I unwittingly ended my Assault's movement on top of a ready-to-turn-zombie corpse. He escaped that with 5 hit points left. Then we found a Sectopod in the roof terrace place. I had no choice but to run-n-gun him up there to help in fighting it, but I didn't realize how bloody big the explosion on those things are when the explode, so he went beep-beep-beep as I mopped up the rest of the mission. I got two more missions before he was out of sickbay, neither of which went as well as they should have. Sectopods are brutal when you don't have a single soldier with HEAT Ammo on your squad. My sniper with that perk was in the psi labs being tested for that mission, or it might have gone better.

I agree with you, and you just linked me to an interesting free indie game that totally looks worth downloading and trying. That's the second one today that the forums have steered me towards. I was honestly trying to give the game the benefit of the doubt, as using a trailer and couple of screenshots didn't seem fair to judge it by. Buuut, then I went reading. The original game is: And here's a review of the original beatemup. So maybe it didn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

There's all sorts of things that I'm not sure if they are supposed to be hidden and discovered, or if they just aren't explained well. That some of those show up as context sensitive commands make me error on the side of the latter. Like you can use things in your inventory on things in the world, by picking the thing up and holding it over something else. This opens up a few ridiculously useful resources. But I've only found 2 things that it works on so far, so it's not so common that it would occur to you very often to try it. An example is spoilered below:

I've never actually played anything by Porpentine, even though I've read multiple essays about her work, or by her on other subjects. Which is weird, I should have played something at this point. I think I've been a little put-off by most (all?) of her previous work being Twine based IF. I've got nothing against that, but it's not an experience I've had a lot of interest in. I downloaded it and will try to check it out soon.

Does the absurdity level matter? GTA and Riddick are frustrating because they have powerful, somewhat interesting male characters all over the place. And then when it comes to women, it's like, "Oh yeah, them, they good for rapin', killin' and boobies." At least the japanese game is just going with boobies, and not rape and murder as well. As far as we know. But if it's just goofy, fun and hypersexulaized, does that make it okay, or at least less bad?

HEEEEY KIDS! Are you ready for the breakout new Saturday morning cartoon sensation? It's Spelunky Babies! Queue 10,000 angry emails when all the babies die 3 minutes into the first episode.

What are the odds that games which highly sexualize men would ever make it to the American market, even niche markets? Even people who are relatively open minded can be uncomfortable with things that toy with male sexuality. It's just something culturally, in America, that we are never exposed to. Imagine that cooking game, but with a bunch of half nude dudes bouncing the bulges in their undies the way the ladies bounce their breasts. Wouldn't bother me, but a lot of people would freak out. I struggle with my reactions to things like this because the sexual repression in the US (particularly the midwest) bothers me so much. A nipple shot results in millions of dollars in fines and investigations, but showing the bloody aftermath of a mass shooting. Meh, fine, public interest, blah, blah, blah. So even if a game like this is misogynistic, it's also reveling in sexuality, which we need more of. I would rather that it was more sex-positive, more gender egalitarian, and generally more respectful. But I want media to exist that explore sexuality and the human body. I'm trying to think of a good counterexample of media that does bother me. Way different, but take the latest Riddick movie. A terribly misogynistic movie that wasted multiple interesting opportunities. I wanted to kick the writer in the nuts by the time it was finished. It was dismissive, disempowering and insulting towards its female characters (all 2 of them). But does a hyper sexualized game like this do the same thing? Or are its characters at least somewhat fleshed out (sorry, cheap pun)? Do they have some agency of their own, or at the player's direction? Ugh, I'm rambling about this.

Valve has been secretly publishing obscure academic papers for years just to hide HL3 references.

The first month or two on Classic is unfortunately an overwatch crawl, at least until you can get a squadsight sniper or better weapons. Thin Men are your worst nightmare the first few times you run into them. In the conversation above between Brannigan and I, we both wiped on an early mission that is mostly Thin Men.

Oh yeah, I love reading rule books as well! I've done it for fun, even when I know I'm not going to be able to play a new game for days or weeks. Back in the good old days of 100+ page manuals for PC games, I would take the manual to school/work with me and read it on breaks. But I don't know how many times I've sat down to play a new game with people, and we had to burn an hour trying to figure out how to play before getting started. Once you've got a few people sitting around, and one person is stuck speed reading the rules, that's the situation I would want to avoid.

Just did the base defense mission. It's a lot more fun on Classic, by far the most enemies I've seen on any one map. It also makes me want to have disposable rookies on every mission. I only managed to get one killed, but I tried really hard to order the rest of them to their deaths. They're like Battle Scanners with grenades. I can just imagine the conversation: Colonel Boom: Rook, go look around that corner and tell me what's there. Rookie Fodder: Um, sir, I have paper mache armor. You have chameleon skin AND Ghost Armor. Boom: Uh huh. Fodder: Can't I have the ghost armor? Boom: Nope, I need it. Fodder: You can't even use them both, why do you need it? Boom: That grapple comes in handy. Fodder: YOU CAN JUMP 2 STORIES TALL ALL ON YOUR OWN! Boom: But how am I going to pretend to be Spiderman without a grapple? Fodder: I...I...wait, is that cloaking grenade on your belt. Boom: Yep. Fodder: You can't use it either?! Why do you have 3 cloaking devices on you? Boom: It looks cool. I honestly even forget it's there. This belt has more slots than I know what to do with, and I just usually grab the cloaking grenade before we leave. Fodder: Can I have it? Boom: I'd better save it, these things are useful, would hate to waste one in case we needed it for the very end of the mission. Fodder panics and starts screaming incoherently. Boom: Why are you panicking, there aren't even any aliens in sight, and no one's been shot? Fodder shoots Colonel Boom.

Found that article, quote from it: A truer statement than that second sentence has never been said. The trailer does speak for itself. To be honest, I don't really have an opinion on this stuff. It's a little gross and weird to me, personally, but I guess I don't hold it against someone else if they are into it. I've met more girls who are into things like this than I have guys. I do wonder what the statistical demographic is for it. Is it actually damaging in the way that I think girls toys are...probably not? I don't inherently think that titillation for titillation's sake is bad. Is it worse than the pornographic levels of graphic violence and mass murder that dominate American games? Would a world where those games are the norm, and people into violent FPS games were niche be a better, worse or the same?

That's unquestionably one of the best and most thorough critical pieces on GH. She's able to actually describe why it fails for her in an intelligent manner while also acknowledging the value of the individual reaction to it. It certainly doesn't elicit the rage from me that Bogost's piece did. I do have one quibble with her though. She makes the comment that she could have just done away with the house, and taken the documents to browse through at her leisure, creating something more like Hate Story. That overlooks that the house itself is a character. It has a particular feel to it. There is also environmental story telling going on that isn't a document. The environmental stuff is simply never pointed out to you like the documents are. It just feels like it's lobbing that out, as it would be inconvenient to the point she was making to acknowledge it. Have you seen Cabin in the Woods? It has wrecked my ability to watch cheesy horror movies in the same way. It's the smartest cheesy horror movie ever made.

That's some fascinating insight on the joy of opening a board game versus the tedium of sitting down and reading the rules. Just started listening, and the opening question of Chris on what he had been playing was incredible.

Possibly, but From has also kept the servers for DeS running for more than 4 years now, far longer than they ever intended on running the US/Europe servers for the game. That gives me a little hope that they will keep the online component going in DaS.

OMG, I forgot to mention. I discovered last night that Mimetic Skin works with Low Profile, so that a soldier cloaks on any cover, not just full. My heavy has that. So my cloaking assault finds a group of enemies, my heavy dashes forward to any cover he wants to be in rocket/nade range for the next round.

Okay, watched some of that video. WHAT THE HELL?! I didn't realize it's a post-apocalyptic cult simulator.

I never had much of a problem running into people with modded characters, though it appears that others did on a regular basis. My connection issues got a lot better once I set up port forwarding as well, had forgot about that part. As for GFLW, MS has never confirmed that it's shutting down, that rumor got going and I never saw them comment on it. Which would lead some credence to it. And the increasing number of devs/pubs who are patching out GFLW support, it would seem that even if the rumor isn't true, games abandoning it will kill it anyways. Unfortunately neither From nor Namco have commented on patching it out for DaS.

Ah, that sucks. It's amazing how quickly a solid game can go bad.

On PC, it's been a mixed bag. I had some framerate dips in Blighttown, but not as severe as I did on the 360. But I had far, far, far worse problems with connecting to other players on the PC, though the community mods/fixes helped that.

Huh, I don't think I've seen that one yet. I'm really impressed at the map variety now. I'm still seeing new maps, or entering a map from a new angle, which really changes up how you approach it. You can enter an abductor ship shootdown/landing from the side, which was super disorienting the first time I saw it. I'm getting into late game stuff now, did the base assault. I have 7 Colonels, 2 Majors, 4 or 5 captains, and several Lts. And I HAVE YET TO SEE BULLETSWARM ON A SINGLE SOLIDER. Why you hate me Training Roulette? I actually wonder if a few skills are less likely to show up, or if I'm just having weird luck. No Bulletswarm, Sentinel twice, Sprinter twice. But I've seen other skills a half dozen times or more. I'm overflowing with medics and grenadiers. It's probably just luck though.

I had Demon's Souls on the PS3, Dark Souls on 360 and PC. I can't say that any of them were technical masterpieces, and everything struggles with framerate issues in some parts of Dark Souls. We're just going to have to hope that the new engine fixes at least some of the technical problems they had with level size and number of enemies. We could get historical with the title: 'Dark Souls II (Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition successor (Demon's Souls successor (King's Field spiritual successor)))'? Did anyone ever play the King's Field games? I remember really despising King's Field 2 at times. Vicious traps, unlabeled keys you had to backtrack to try on every door, easy to get lost. And yet I kept coming back to it again and again.

Everything I see about this game just ends up being bizarre. I started a thread about a month ago about this update to the game, which was made to combat Steam being flooded with pictures of caveman dicks.