Bjorn

Unintentional humor from the NPR newsfeed:

Cool! It's also available to rent or buy on Vimeo (for those of us who don't use iTunes). It's still listed as a pre-order there, but the release date is today, so hopefully it just unlocks soon. We'll probably try to watch it in the next week or so.

The lady went with the sniper tree, while I went with the middle tree. We both got our capstone skills last night, and holy fuckaround, the debuff of my character + her critical hits are just absurd (like her taking a ~2300 point rifle and putting out ~180K crits with it). I run around in close range debuffing everything with kunai, melee and slag, and she just pops heads all day long. The little bit I've messed around with the Mechromancer is hilarious. She's got a skill that can boost her damage by up to 700 percent, but also lowers her aim by the same amount. But then she has another skill that makes bullets ricochet. So you just run around aiming at enemies' knees and let all the misses bounce around and murder everything else.

I'm surprised this hadn't come up here. The parent company of Desura has filed for bankruptcy, and devs haven't been paid for Desura sales for months.

It might help that I'm playing both the pre-sequel (where he's a character on the good guys side) and 2 concurrently, without knowing anything at all about his character. The pre-sequel definitely sets him up as having more depth and a stronger character arc than 2 does. Although I could be totally wrong since I haven't finished either!

I saw you were on when I was quitting last night. I think we're around level 31/32 with our mains (both assassins), and I'm sometimes playing through as a Mechromancer by myself. We haven't finished the main story yet, really close, but decided we at least wanted to play Tiny Tina's Keep before finishing it because it looked really cool. I think I would play an entire game that just Tina and the Gang narrating a D&D adventure with guns. If I was an editor, I'd cut easily a third of the content in BL2. There's a lot of meh stuff all over the place. But the good things are fabulous. The lady absolutely adores Ellie. Torgue is awesome and ridiculous. Jack is incredibly confusing, which is not a bad trait in a villain.

We're working our way through the B2 DLC right now, and just hit Torgue's section of Tiny Tina's Keep.

IGN.COM Edited to add: I just noticed the subhead of that IGN article is "The fire spreads." Along with the armor design and some of the other leaked art, the possibility of a game focusing on Chaos seems more likely. Some of the context of that suspicion by fans is a connection between the Bed of Chaos in DS1 and the Old Chaos in DS2 (Ivory King DLC), that destroying the Bed of Chaos actually just freed the Chaos to spread faster.

Not kidding, I was super unironically into ICP around '96 through '98. I might have to go put on the Great Milenko for the fuck of it.

You're right, because SotC is perfect! Lots of things are great, but few things are prefect. I'm glad we could agree on this. Not touching that second sentence with a thousand foot pole.

But what if you could disarm him...with a chainsaw gun. Now that's a video game.

The Guardian listed Firewatch as one of its most anticipated games for E3. Link courtesy of kaputt in the Last Guardian thread...which is just soul crushing every time it gets revived.

The only reason it it resonates at all in my brain is from a copy editing class in college, where obtuse was on a list of words to generally avoid in casual usage, because it probably doesn't mean what you think it means and there's also probably a simpler way to say what you mean.

And given how thoughtful you generally are, I didn't think you likely intended it exactly as it came off, but it does fit a particular kind of rebuttal that's been used, and I thought it was worth delving into some of the larger global race issues that we hadn't really touched on. Oh, hey, everybody! An honest-to-god Ethics in Journalism thing happened! Ubisoft has apparently banned Kotaku from their E3 presser, through non-invite. KiA/gg is of course celebrating this, because a billion dollar corporation shutting out a media outlet is Ethics in Action! (this is all based on a tweet from Kotaku's news editor, but it's been floating around for a day and he hasn't indicated it was just a joke or anything, so I'm taking it as straight up what happened). I mean, I know that gg doesn't really care about ethics, but the process of 1) Ask company uncomfortable questions -> 2) Company refuses to answer in any clear way -> 3) Company refuses access to one of its biggest media events of the year Is exactly the kind of ethics thing that people have worried about with enthusiast presses for decades. If you don't ask they questions they want you to ask, then you will be punished. This is one of the foundational ethics issues of all enthusiast presses, and gg is, naturally, celebrating its existence. This is also funny because KiA has a new manifesto thing currently stickied that's all about how womenz ruined games and they re-wrote their origin point as being back when Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot. You know, how a big corporation put pressure on a gaming outlet to act a specific way, or they'd be punished? Gee, where did I just read something about that?

You're abstruse.

There's a couple of dozen video clips about Alaska, the native culture, weather and wildlife that are all pretty interesting. It's a shame that you have to unlock all of them, as I quite enjoyed going through and watching them (missed one though and couldn't be bothered to go back and get it).

I'm excited about this! I really haven't gotten into many 4x games in the last decade, for a variety of reasons, but I would definitely give a new MoO a shot.

And this encapsulates everything I think about comedy and controversial subjects! I'm also leaning towards this whole thing is just old men being grumpy. Chris Rock (now 50) said the same thing last year, claimed he'd been feeling that way for most of a decade, and said that George Carlin was saying the same thing at least a decade ago. I wonder if this is just that young audiences haven't found these men as funny or engaging, because their material just doesn't land as well with 20-year-olds as it does with 50-year-olds. And instead of thinking, "Hmm, maybe I'm just too old to be as relevant to the current youth generation" they think "These fucking humorless kids wouldn't know a good joke if it slapped them in the face."

I don't know how to reply to you on this. I mean, I was specifically replying to this quote: "On the other hand, I think it's also true that specific local history is deserving of more representation than always being transformed into the US version of the the representative social issue for the sake of mass appeal." That literally puts the onus on this being an American thing that people care about this, that it's about appealing to American values/standards, and I was directly counterpointing that by showing an actual, current harm that a culture which constantly posits white people as heroes and beautiful causes. There was also a comment a few pages back that falls into similar territory, which I'm not going to quote just because I don't want to pick a fight about that comment specifically. There is some truth that American values/standards do come into play, regularly, in this discussion. People have made comments about making something more mass appeal to cater to a global audience (I might have said something about that myself, I'm not sure). But it's equally true that there are other factors at work, including things like how some cultures have internalized white = beautiful and good so strongly that they are causing permanent health problems to try and match that. And the dominance of white American and European cultures worldwide is the reason for that. We've talked about how a dominant white culture is a problem, but we hadn't really delved into the actual effects that it has had. I was showing, hey, here's an example of why its a problem that has nothing to do with American diversity or social issues. If someone wants to say "It's Polish, it's excusable," then say that. But don't at the same time insinuate that a big reason people care about this is because of US social issues when the issue is bigger, more global and more complex than that.

I really don't play these games because of their story and lore. I love the design of their stories, how obtuse they are, the way the community figures out various things. But that's not really why I play. I play for the mechanics, to design characters, for co-op and for PvP. So far, DS2 has done the best job on all those elements, while Bloodborne really took some steps backwards compared to the Souls games. And there is still significant room for improvement. Those things could be refined in a new IP, but I'm fine with it returning to the Souls universe. Also, lore-wise, there are some interesting possibilities on where 3 could go. DS1 was about the forces of Light trying to hold on as their power faded. DS2 was about what happened when the Dark proliferated across the world (through the shards of Manus' soul). The third power in the Souls world is that of Chaos, which has only tangentially been looked at. A third game focusing on it has lots of material to explore.

Variations of this response have been popping up (both here and in other places) and they've been bugging me. Please don't do this. This isn't an issue that exists because of American diversity, American "p0litical correctness", mass appeal or whatnot. First, as has been repeated ad nauseam in this thread, it's the region's ACTUAL history that is being ignored. Secondly, the global effects of an American and European dominated culture that worships whiteness and demonizes color causes actual harm worldwide. The proliferation of skin whitening treatments in Africa and parts of Asia is considered to be a potential epidemic to some doctors, as dangerous and cheap products have flooded the market. People literally say, I'm black, so I can't be beautiful, I have to become more like white people. Of course the Witcher and CDPR aren't responsible for that, one game isn't going to really change anything and Poland cultural exports aren't going to fix it. But they exist as part of the same cultural dominance that causes actual harm. When people insinuate that the only reason to want diversity is to appeal to an American audience, they try to minimize and ignore the harm that homogenous white culture has caused, and continues to cause, worldwide. The same is true when people say things like it's only white people who care about this stuff. White cultural dominance is something a lot of people worldwide care about, and stories like the Witcher games exist within that framework. Intentional or not, that kind of comment is about trying to shift responsibility for caring about representation in media solely onto the shoulders of American liberals while ignoring the rest of the world. Which, hey, ignoring the rest of the world is kind of the whole problem here.

As far as I know, DS2 (pre SotFS) sold at least 1 million copies on PC. That's pretty significant sales numbers for a From Software game on a single platform and I would be damn surprised to see them turn away from that size of an audience who obviously has a thirst for their games.

Tig does the same thing. We finally just gave him his own cup on the table, which mostly keeps him out of ours (mostly).

And I was trapped in the cultural desert of western Kansas growing up, so when I "discovered" punk, it was just badass (given that the only radio stations we had were country, classic rock, and christian). I was totally divorced from any of the music scenes, cliques or evolution of those groups or genres.

I got through it in co-op, but it was not nearly as good of an experience as I was hoping it would be.