Bjorn

I haven't been excited by a Kickstarted game for awhile, I put a bit of a moratorium on myself about backing anymore until some of the current ones actually get finished (which two got done this month, so I suppose the moratorium can end!). Bedlam looks soo fucking good. And overall they seem to have very clear and well thought out designs and expectations for what they want to make. Banner Saga engine FTL + Banner Saga style gameplay Designed for single session playthroughs NG+ Mode though for those who want longer sessions And it just looks fantastic! I backed it at the $20 tier. Seems like they are well on their way to their goal, though it hasn't skyrocketed up like some projects do.

I know there have been a couple of pretty hefty patches with balance changes since I last played, so this may not be entirely accurate, but snipers are more usable than they appear. Once you can get them to Veteran status, their range band increases to 2-squares wide, which makes them a lot easier to use. You're often in a situation of only being able to move + fire on a turn, no matter what unit you're using, so it's no more a hindrance to snipers than it is any other class. The real problem with them is their incredibly low health and short movement range (both of which are supposed to get improved, if they haven't already). In the original release, it was next to impossible to keep them safe. Multiple units are capable of 1-shotting them, and their movement is too short to ever run away. So once the AI decides to advance on a sniper, it's usually the end of that unit, as enough classes have long enough movement range to reach them in a single round once you're a few rounds into the fight. I lost more snipers than any other class. I keep trying to talk myself into going back and trying it out again after some of the balance changes, but I think a lot of my enthusiasm for the game got smothered by how buggy it was on release.

I wonder if you could sell people digital insurance? That if at some point they lose access to digital goods paid for, their insurance would compensate them for the lost goods.

Yeah, anytime someone brags about having "proof" but they can't share it for whatever reason, the vast majority of the time they are full of complete shit.

Because those games are power fantasies, and you don't run out of money for the same reason you don't run out of bullets. I get annoyed with the games that give you a skill like Barter (ala Fallout), but then it serves no purpose since money is equally plentiful with 100 Barter or 0 Barter.

The last several years a friend of ours has hosted an adult's only pumpkin carving party and it's been a blast. Organize one yourself this year!

It's about ethics in global conspiracy theories.

He eventually rescinded his opinion and admitted that even if that was how he personally felt, it was wrong to be speaking in such a manner about a subject of which he knew next to nothing. That he should no more give his opinions about video games than he should give his opinion of a movie he hadn't seen yet. So I think the answer is that he wouldn't say anything

We love dressing up, but are blanking on costume ideas this year, and don't have as much time as we usually do.

No, I loved Marina, my primary sniper. She was a workhorse, most fights opened with her killing 2-4 (depending on if she got any free shots from her potential) enemies, usually creating safe territory for my scouts to advance into to blow up cover that other units were hiding behind. Her value usually rapidly declined after the first round though, once everything in her line of sight was dead, and her low movement amount limited her ability to reposition. I did have one mission where she must have killed 7 or 8 units on the first round, thanks to a reload from an engineer and a couple of free shots. On a couple of big maps, I would call in a new sniper at a forward camp once I had taken one, but that wasn't that common. My primary units through the entire game were scouts Alicia, Cherry, Aika (replaced Cherry once I decided I liked her barks better), then Marina (sniper), and Dallas (Engineer). Dallas got brought along on most missions just in case I needed a reload or to fix a tank, but ended up doing a lot of mop work following the scouts around. I really liked Jann (Lancer), I just struggled to justify Lancer use except for very specific situations. I also loved Jane (Shocktrooper), but similar issue with Lancers, too situational. One thing that kind of bugged me was that Alicia, Rosie and Largo gave you bonus command points. I would have rather just had a person from each of those classes designated with that bonus randomly, as I actually liked a lot of the non-story characters barks and personality more than the story characters, but the three story characters were pretty mandatory most missions, so giving up command points for flavor just didn't make any sense. I know I spent some time complaining about VC in the latter third of the game, but I really did overall think it was pretty special.

Yet. By doing the skirmishes, optional report missions and class challenges, I never had any problems buying whatever I wanted, and had almost every single possible upgrade purchased by the end of the game (I did farm the fastest skirmish for some experience, doable in one turn, because I wanted my 4th potential unlocked on my last class, but that was very late game, like Chap. 17 or 18). Oh, and because I didn't realize this forever, there is a second page to the skirmishes tab. Somehow I was dumb and just missed seeing it. That's where the class challenges are if anyone else missed that.

Pontypool remains my favorite intelligent horror movie of the last decade (Tucker and Dale takes the prize for dumb fun). I suggest it to people whenever possible. I watched Nightbreed for the first time in 20+ years tonight. It was okay, the costuming and makeup is fabulous and the underpinnings of an epic story are there, but it's pretty much a hot mess in a lot of other ways. And this was the Director's Cut. I enjoyed it for nostalgia sake, but I think I'd be hard pressed to ever want to watch it again.

I find the Escapist to have become untrustable and indefensible as a publication, therefore I don't trust there reporting and therefore I don't think their reporting should be given any amount of credence without verification from the outside, verification that does not include anonymous sources or Derek Smart. Also, first rule of "question" headlines is that the answer is no. Eject! Eject! Is Star Citizen Going to Crash and Burn? No. Never trust a question headline. If the writer had confidence in the answer, they wouldn't make the headline a question. They'd give the answer. Eject! Eject! How Start Citizen is Going to Crash and Burn The timeline on this series of articles is rushed, far more rushed an they needed to be (as pointed out by Roberts himself). There's no reason, at all, that the articles had to be published when they were, not when there was easily additional work that needed to be done on them. Additional, non-anonymous sources should have been sought out. Roberts should have been interviewed. Even if many of the allegations ended up true, the Escapist still continues to lose credibility in my mind over how they chose to handle this.

Woot, baby! Congrats to you both!

I was looking at that this week as well, visually it's stunning.

I went ahead and subscribed to get Legend of Grimrock 2, and will see what the first bundle is. It's worth $12 to check out, but if the first couple of months are poor selections, or heavily overlap with what I already own, then I'll dump it.

Oh, I think the thread is useful. And it seems like the entire internet took peeple hook, line and sinker. So I wouldn't feel too bad about it.

The Peeple thing is a fart in the wind. This screen grab from their Facebook page is amazing. I'd suggest reading through the Snopes dissection of the Peeple news. It's like this whole thing was just engineered to go as viral as possible.

Fare thee well Danielle, I hope the move goes well! And also bummed about losing you on the main cast, but excited for your and Rob's new cast.

I was looking at the pretty pictures of it last night, but didn't actually look at the reception. Looks very similar to the other recent Kickstarter that got released, Bedlam, where it's definitely pretty, but also buggy and feels unfinished.

I'm struggling to see how this is any different than roughly 90 percent of late night guests. Actors go on to promote their movies, politicians go on to promote themselves, authors go on to promote their books. Like, promotion is literally the primary reason for the interview portion of these shows, and the Daily Show has never been significantly different, other than once every few months having on a politician who Jon would actually press with some interesting questions. Was it because this was about a company (or a dating company specifically)? Was it because the illusion broke with this interview, and it has held for you with other interviews?

Okay, so I watched it over lunch today, and I think you're just being overly critical. Like, having the founder of a dating app doesn't strike me as an abnormal guest, and what were they supposed to talk about? I don't think her private life is a particularly good topic, so that leaves professional. It did feel promotional, but I'm not sure how else the interview could have gone. There were some other questions I personally would have asked, I would have drilled into the more negative aspects of women's experiences on modern dating platforms (Noah just mentioned them in passing, and left out a bunch), but I think that still could have come off as being pretty promotional even if they were good questions. Same thing with asking about her experience with Tinder, probably still would have sounded promotional. She was there to talk about her business. She also seemed pretty nervous. Maybe that's practiced persona, or maybe she's someone who isn't used to being interviewed on major cable shows with a live audience. I actually would have skipped this episode in favor of watching the Chris Christie episode from last night if you hadn't brought up that interview, but I'll have to check it out over lunch tomorrow.

So, as I'm sure everyone will realize when they check their email, Humble Bundle is launching a subscription service. I will probably try it out for at least a couple of months, see what it's like. I've been playing Legend of Grimrock 1 a bit over the last week and have quite enjoyed it, so LoG2 as a signup bonus is pretty compelling.

On Kojima's narrative ability, Metal Gear most often reminds me of The Illuminatus! Trilogy...which I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not?

I've generally tried to avoid black hat/white hat (and similar style terms) because of the continuation of the black = bad/dangerous and white = good/pure motif. It's kind of funny to see Harper (and others) defend it as this sacrosanct term, when there are a lot of other terms that can describe the same thing (and many of those terms are more accurate).