Bjorn

I used to be able to easily give away the extras, but so many of the people I know who game also buy the bundles, or have a lot of them already, so even gifting them takes more effort than it's worth. When I do buy a bundle, I've just taken to putting the extra copies onto my wife's Steam account for cards if they have them.

Okay, that Cara pieces really sells it and raises my hopes a notch. The access to the archives and the kind of details they are working in (like making sure that the architecture of the station matches the original ship and that decals and logos are accurate) is the kind of obsessive attention to detail that can really help elevate something like this.

Last night my wife was playing this (she's really gotten into it). Winter was just starting and she had her base camp all prepped and ready, with a chest fully of live bunnies to feed on for the winter. Then the sounds of hounds approaching started, which really stresses her out. While trying to swap some stuff around in her inventory to get ready to face the dogs, she accidentally hits the wrong button, causing her to swing her hammer at the chest next to her. Hammers break things down to their base components, and hitting a container once causes everything in it to fall out onto the ground. She hit the chest with the rabbits in it. So right as the pack of dogs roll into her camp to attack, 16 bunnies magically pop out of a chest. Bunnies spook if ANYTHING gets close to them, and try to retreat to their rabbit hole. If no hole is nearby, they just run for a bit and stop. But with the dogs and my wife running around the camp, the bunnies just kept spazzing and running every which direction, with dogs alternately switching between targeting bunnies and my wife. So there's 16 bunnies, 8 dogs and one madman with swinging a hog's leg as a weapon (my wife) all running around by the light of a campfire. And queue the Benny Hill music.

New Humble Bundle. I used to get so excited for these, but now it seems like I own all or most of almost every bundle that comes out. Maybe I buy too many vidyagames. Naaaaaah.

I'm done being excited for Alien games until they prove me wrong. I actually think something like the canned Obsidian Alien RPG would be a great fit for the franchise. Permadeth with squad combat ala Xcom, but with more of a horror motif going on. A great ending would be a twist on the Aliens ending, let you start with a mech, but then take it away from you and make you mostly powerless again.

The best drinking scene in any game ever though is out of the Mass Effect series, when you get drunk reminiscing with the doctor in ME2. Then in ME3 it can happen again as a yearly ritual.

I had no idea, this game.

I apparently missed the short film from a couple of years ago. It's just a 9 minutes short about a young girl from a troubled household and her escape through Zelda. Go watch it if you missed it. I just watched it over my lunch hour, and it was a bit of a gut punch. I can remember being a kid and listening to my parents argue. I'd sneak out of my room and go downstairs to watch my older brother play video games, usually Zelda or Metroid, so I wouldn't have to lay in my bed, alone in the dark and listen to them. Not to give the wrong impression, my parents were mostly super awesome, but money was really tight through a chunk of the 80s and they would always wait to argue about it until they thought my brother and I were asleep in bed. I'm sure in hindsight those arguments would sound a lot different to my adult ears than they did to an 8 year old. The director of Escape is working on turning the idea into a feature length film, "Princes in Another Castle". It's interesting that he's setting in 1996, as it seems to be hitting a lot of the same nostalgia notes as Gone Home did.

I suppose that's true, in the 90s and early 00s there were certainly a fair number of movies and shows looking back so fondly on the 70s. Now that we're in the teens, it makes sense that we're looking back on the 90s in the same way. Weird.

You could have bought Spelunky!

Ha! That's actually kind of a hilariously disastrous way to lose a soldier. The last disaster I had like that was an escort mission in my current game. I wasn't very far from the extraction point, but was pinned down in a building, had terrible lines of sight and didn't know how many aliens were outside. I decided to grenade a wall, which worked fine, but I missed noticing that the explosion set a car on fire (or another car blowing up did, not sure). I had 2 guys on cover against a wall on the INSIDE of the room. Next turn, car blows up, destroys wall, kills 2 guys in cover against wall. NOOOOO! I'm starting to feel bad using Mimetic Skin on Classic. Once I got it on 2 people and got some mobility boosting armor, it's getting a little out of hand. Missions are just rolling by, which doesn't seem like they should on Classic.

Brilliant!

That Exalt dude mission, Portent I think it's called. It's brutal for when it pops. It wrecked my first CI game on Enemy Within, total squad wipe, and left me with only rookies in the barracks. Restart. This game, I got through it, but still had one soldier killed and the other three in the infirmary when it was done.

FUCKING CRITS! I'm taking crit immunity on every single soldier it appears on, even if I'm sacrificing another great ability for it. Every soldier I've lost so far on this game has been to a crit. I really thought about turning on the "flanking auto crits" and "improved aim as you approach flanking" options, but then I realized how ridiculously frustrating that would be. It's funny, the eligible random perks should have an equal chance of showing up, but it's silly the number of people I've had immune to criticals and close combat specialist show up on. When I switched to Classic, I think I restarted 6 or 7 games in a row within the first 2 months as I relearned how to approach combat. I rarely used explosives in Normal, as I wanted all that sweet weapon fragment swag. Classic is just like screw it, I rocket and 'nade if I think there's a ghost of a chance of a soldier taking a hit. The most dangerous thing about Training Roulette is the loss of dedicated medics. I had one Support who had actually drawn good medic abilities, and she got killed by a one hit crit last night. She was the only soldier I had even seen Field Medic on so far. The one thing I would criticize about Training Roulette is that I think you ought to be able to see what their tree is once they hit squaddie rank. It's fun to be surprised, but it would be better for the game to still be able to plan soldiers out if there are perks that synergize particularly well.

I really want to talk to someone about how how incredible Training Roulette is in the new Second Wave options. I'm using it, hidden potential, not created equal and random economy on a CI playthrough. It doesn't feel like there are only 4 classes anymore, it's like there are a bunch of classes and you never know what one you're going to get. I've got an assault Grenadier with Mimetic Skin who is AMAZING. He picked up Deep Pockets from the support tree and Grenadier from the Heavy tree, so he can carry 6 grenades that do +1 damage. He can move forward safely staying cloaked until he finds some aliens, use a grenade to soften up the group before they scatter, then everyone else can finish them off. It also means that aliens rarely have safe cover if I can keep him forward far enough. I've got a heavy who is the tankiest tank that ever walked in XCOM. He's lucked into a tree of basically all defensive bonuses (immune to crits, reduced damage and low cover counts as full), so he gets used to pop alien pods knowing that he'll live even under dangerous conditions. It's also got downsides. My only Colonel sniper basically got the Assault close combat bonuses. He's just waiting until his replacement is trained so he can "volunteer" to get his arms and legs chopped off. His replacement just picked up HEAT ammo, so that pretty much seals that deal. So anyone want to talk about all this awesome? Anyone? Anyone? Beuhler? I also did install that mod that I linked to. Turns out the mobility and xp view is still disabled even in the beta. But I'm really digging the ability to equip an Arc Thrower in the pistol slot. And skipping the overwatch animation and enemy spotted movies speeds up combat a bit.

That's wizard.

I am a smoker, and use to feel this way as well. But I'm actually coming around to thinking all the rules are a good thing. My sister-in-law is psychologist who specializes in treating addiction. She's said that it is often harder to get someone to stop smoking, and stay quit, than it is to get someone off of much harder drugs. Increasing the costs, both financial and social, of smoking means that it becomes easier and easier for people to quit. And its hard to find a smoker who wants to be a smoker. Most of us want to quit.

Beyond that, the source article makes it even more clear: The additional details in the source article are just heart-wrenching.

The twitter suspension blows. It's fascinating that this is actually spawning some much needed conversations. Ya done good work here pigeon.

If regulars from around here want to volunteer the occasional piece, I'd say let them. Just make sure everyone is on the same page. I've volunteer written a few pieces over the years for a couple of gaming sites, mostly for my own enjoyment. It gave me a chance to write something that I wanted to write, and get it in front of a larger audience than my mostly neglected personal blog would ever attract. Even writing for free, I viewed it as a mutually beneficial deal, so long as it didn't interfere with my other responsibilities. But I've never had any desire to write about gaming professionally, and so wasn't settling any hopes on the pieces that were published.

Good for her, she's picked up quite a few more patrons today. She was just over $400 per article when I first looked at her page earlier. On your other topic...I see the logic behind that, but don't necessarily agree. That's the kind of statement that basically says certain people don't have a place in the conversation, which is a problematic thing to say. You don't necessarily want to give a seat at the table to your most virulent enemy right away, but you also don't want to alienate friends and allies. I certainly don't want to ever want to twist someone's elses words to fit my perspective (which I don't think I was going by selecting out a few quotes to share).

Remo tweeted a link to this article by Mattie Bryce earlier, and I think it covers a lot of the points on how I feel about certain reactions to Penny Arcade, and why they make me uncomfortable, as much so as the actions of PA have made me uncomfortable. I know these are out of context, but I think they stand on their own as commentary on how the nature of communication goes in regards to certain topics in the gaming community.

The next great 4 podcast game specific special event for Nidhogg: Idle Lunge

A podcast about annoying your co-workers: Idle Hums

Tycho, I think we need a thread documenting your Objective Review adventure at this point. Please do the honors. And you got linked from NPR's On The Media today! I was kind of shocked when I saw that pop up in my feed. It's a banner week when you make it on Kotaku and NPR. For what it's worth, On The Media tends to be the best of mainstream outlets when it comes to covering video games.