Bjorn

No picture has ever embodied the phrase "Be the change you want to see in the world" more.

I remember quite liking 25th Anniversary, it's setup like it's a series of episodes instead of one big long arc. And you can get redshirts killed. But that's about all I remember about it. I do have one very clear memory of an annoying puzzle involving opening an alien door that took me forever to complete.

Yeah, I agree. I never really got tired of all the Spelunky talk. Dota was a bit less engaging for me, but I've never played any of the Lords Management style games at all. But I was certainly fascinated by all the Cities: Skylines talk, even though I haven't played a city sim in over a decade.

Danielle, please feel free to talk more about Bloodborne. Pretty please? With blood sprinkles on top? I really don't get tired of listening to people talk about the Souls games, and their experience (good or bad). It's almost always interesting in some way.

The Romulans were always kind of surprisingly boring, given that they were meant to serve as the cultural counterpoint to their cousins the Vulcans. The Klingons fit that role much better, being the emotional species with a real lust for life.

Wow, A Softer World is probably the one thing that most got me interested in webcomics. I even tried my hand at making similar style comics for awhile (never to publish, more because I was fascinated by how much they could convey in such little space). I fell off reading it years ago though. This makes me want to dig back through the archives for awhile.

Patch is out! Woo! The two biggies in this are: The durability fix should be a godsend, it's silly how quickly certain weapons degrade. And hopefully Jump Attacks will be more consistent now. I only execute them about half the time as it is right now. I finally started figuring out how to use Pickaxe Pete in PvP last night. The key seemed to be to not use the Pickaxe Well, I do use it, but more as a sucker play. Start with it, do some jumping attacks (if they work) and rolling attacks. Maybe get a hit or two in. Once they're good and comfortable with me just using the Pick and do something stupid, switch to the Butcher's Knife and stunlock them to death. I'm still trying to keep all his weapons restricted to working class type items, figured the Butcher's Knife is in that category. I just had to have something with some real horizontal movement. I also used the Chameleon item to play hide and seek with an invader in Aldia's Keep, which was a blast! I never really committed to messing with an invader like that, it's stupid fun to watch them run past you multiple times. I ultimately whiffed my surprise attack, but still managed to kill him. Edited to Add: I got to the Dragon Aerie last night as well. Fuck the fuckity fuckwit who decided they needed to remix enemies there.

So I wonder if it's possible for someone to backup the game on their PS4 and then share it with someone else (who has the license, but can't redownload it). Is this the birth of bootleg PT copies?

Even in the books, theatrics do seem to be one of the chief Dorn personality traits, in the same way that stoicism is a chief trait of the North.

The little song at the end gave me the giggles something fierce at work.

The Card game in FF8 I got obsessed with being able to beat the racing minigames in 3D Dot Game Heroes. Which there was a game reason, you got some item, but it wasn't something I needed. I just really, really, really wanted to beat them and they needed near perfect twitch timing. Apparently sometime after I finished that game, they patched those races to make them quite a bit easier

I got through that whole area without using sedatives, because I didn't know what sedatives did I just healed my way through every frenzy buildup.

:tup: Finished it up tonight! Ultimately I really liked all the puzzles (even the snake in hindsight), except that I could have done without... I think the thing that actually made me smile the most was at the very end...

Talking about the Charnel House game, I heard Danielle's comment as one of those shitty Upworthy style headlines: THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK WILL MAKE GAME JOURNOS LOVE YOUR GAME!

That's my impression as well. Everyone is assuming/claiming its because of AoU, but it's not like this is Whedon's first brush with Internet shitstorms, it seems likely that at most it's a straw+camel's back situation than because anything is particularly special or worse about the AoU reaction.

Just to follow up on the value of status effects in these games, people are starting to figure out the poisons in Bloodborne. There's a couple of videos are spoilered demonstrating what's been learned. Surprisingly, and in contrast to every other Souls game, the best poisoning weapon in the game is also the biggest strength weapon, the wheel. It's transformed attack hits with multiple, smaller attacks, making it capable of poisoning in just one or two hits, and resulting in significantly more damage against players and poison-weak enemies than just flat damage is capable of. Watching that video I also learned I was playing ENTIRELY FUCKING WRONG WITH THE WHEEL. Apparently you're supposed to pretend to be a meth head in a demolition derby, not play all tactical and shit. Also, rolling into people causes poison buildup if you have poison gems in your weapon, like you have a poison aura on. No one knows if this is a bug or by design. Given that DS2 had poison aura equipment, it could be intentional, but it feels an awful lot like a bug.

Fun facts about Carnival of Souls, portions of it were filmed in Lawrence, Ks (where I've spent the majority of the last 20 years living), and it was written/directed by a guy who otherwise spent his entire career making educational and industrial films, while being active in the local theater community around here. Last I knew it was on Hulu in the Criterion Collection. I just watched it again last year (because I briefly subscribed to Hulu Plus). I hadn't really considered it through a feminist lens, but that is an interesting way to look at it, in that much of the movie centers around all the men in the movie refusing to believe the experiences of the female lead, particularly her fear of being stalked. I'd be hard pressed to recommend it to anyone besides film and/or horror buffs though. I've watched it a couple of times only because of its relationship to Lawrence. It's certainly got some interesting merits, but there are probably better and more interesting movies to watch.

Haha, the Bureau, the rare game I thought was so bad it was awesome (I think I have an uncommon opinion on that game). There's a thread here where I wrote a bunch about what I thought about it, including a bunch of spoilery stuff about the story. I'd be curious to see what your reaction is.

Apparently the long tail of lightning spears is still pretty good, they get more additional casts from Attunement than any other spell, but unless you fully commit to only ATT/FTH early on, you're not going to get much out of Lightning until well past the halfway point of the game.

I created a lighting/pyro caster last night, because that's the only kind of caster I've enjoyed in the Souls games (sorcery and hexing is BORING). I knew they had nerfed the hell out of lightning at some point after I quit running a similar character in vanilla, but holy hell did they nerf it. Base of 3 casts on Lightning Spear, 2 casts on Great LS, and the regular spear is just tickling bosses at 22 Faith with a +3 Witchtree. I'm not expecting it to murder bosses at that point, but I would expect better damage than I was getting. If they're going to limit casts that much, they should at least hit harder than my +3 mace with my 11 Str. I did rush Straid for the Agape ring, then rush Harvest Valley to praise the sun. It's fun just being able to camp outside the Pursuer and engage in jolly murdering people with ballista oops omg why did you step right in front of it you're the host cooperation as much as I want.

I'm almost done with this, but quit playing last night as both the kid and the lady were getting tired, but wanted to see the finale. I did hit my only brickwall though, figuring out what to do with that snake. I finally had the lady look up a hint just to see if I would be likely to figure it out on my own. Nope! I totally wouldn't have solved that. Everything else has seemed like it was able to be solved pretty straightforwardly though. My only real complaint right now is that so much of the story has been delivered through a few info dumps, that the actual gameplay isn't really tied to discovery or learning about what's going on. I felt like in the first half, solving the puzzles, exploring and learning about the world all went hand-in-hand in a way they haven't in the second half.

All of our cats are pretty obsessed about sleeping on or next to the lady as much as possible.

I was curious about that and just did some reading, apparently she felt like her character was getting sidelined and really underplayed as the first season went on and asked to leave because of that. She wanted more interesting things to do with the character than what she was getting. That's part of the reason that she returned in various incarnations (past her, playing Tasha's daughter, etc).