Bjorn

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Posts posted by Bjorn

  1. Posted

    100% for me. So?

     

     

    Correct. That's the problem. Key reseller, not publisher.

     

    Ummm, Humble has never intended on being a publisher.  They are a mission driven retailer who provides their customers with multiple options for delivery.  If I'm reading you right, you want them to be something they never were and never wanted to be. 

  2. Posted

    There's quite a bit that's cheap on my wishlist.  I'll probably pick up a few things, but with no Flash sale, I'm in no rush.  I've got a bunch of local co-op games on my list, so I'll point out some of those.

     

    Her Story - $3.59 - Police video mystery that the cast was raving about for awhile

    Chariot - $3.74 - Fun looking local co-op game I've been wanting to try where a princess and her fiance have to cart around the king's dead body

    Dropsy - $4.99 - Only 50 percent off, but given the love it's got around the forums, worth noting

    Gauntlet (2014) - $4.99 - Local co-op (naturally).  Been this cheap before, but I've never seen it cheaper

    METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE - $7.49 (75 percent off) - Even though it's a radically different kind of game, I'm tempted because of all the MGS love going around

    Defense Grid 2 - $3.74 - Has local co-op, which is something I wish more tower defense games had as I think it plays with the genre very well

  5. Posted

    It seems a bizarre complaint to levy at a company that 1) donates verifiably significant amounts to charity and 2) does provide as large of a percentage of their library as possible DRM free.  Without Steam keys, it's conceivable that Humble as we know it would be dead, that they wouldn't have been able to achieve the sales numbers to stay viable. 

  8. Posted

    Are you just talking about Stardock games now being on GoG?  I hardly consider that a mark against GoG in any way.  The world is full of assholes, and if you run a business like GoG, you're going to end up working with some of them. 

     

    Also, not entirely clear why Humble sucks. 

  10. Posted

    I posted this in Slack earlier, but for the non-chat people, the dorm my daughter lived in at KU was imploded this morning to make room for a new dorm.  We headed in to watch it, as neither of us had ever seen a building implosion in person before.  It was really cool!

  12. Posted

    There are plenty of instances where this is harder to claim cultural appropriation is bad than a symbolic white oppressor selling knock-off Hopi dolls with a direct negative impact on sales by people on a reservation. Assigning rights to commoditize a culture through some official authentication seems like a conflict between the ability to leverage ties to culture for profit and the ability to leverage ties to culture for personal and social identity. I favor the needs of personal and social identity. For instance, I don't think that a white musician playing jazz is a disrespect to an entire people.

     

    Here's a relevant essay that adds nuance to the conversation.

     

    Or consider this one.

     

    I don't like this need to prove your ability to appreciate something as part of you.

     

    That second link cuts both ways, the writer acknowledges the discomfort of seeing people outside his culture ignorantly adopt it for the sheer aesthetics of it, and how the response to that can run from irritation to rage to avoidance.  The writer is Hispanic, and the history and culture around el Dia de los Muertos is his history and culture.  The conflict of that piece is that his heritage has been appropriated, in a harmful way, and that actually impacts his ability to engage comfortably with his own culture publicly.  It's about how "harmless" appropriation can cause harm. Outsider's appropriation has harmed his ability to actually demonstrate his personal identity.  I really read that piece as a refutation of the argument you're making. 

  16. Posted

    Do you all like data? Do you like analysis of data? Prompted by this discussion, I just went through my two hundred-some Steam library and noted everything's Metacritic rating, plus whether or not I loved the game. Would anyone be interested in a post about what I learned?

     

    Sure, go for it.  That's the kind of thing I would think about doing if I didn't have any games I'd rather play right now. 

  18. Posted

    I know that Deadly Premonition had a pretty terrible Metacritic score, and it's high on my list of fav games ever.  I'm one of those people who tend to seek out others opinions on a game after I've finished it, and have noticed over the last couple of years that a lot of games I liked scored in the low to mid 70s.

  19. Posted

    Over the last 5 years, there have probably been more 60-80 score games I've loved than 80-100 score games, but there's still a lot of trash in the 60-80, so it's a more or less meaningless number for me.  My current obsession, Warframe, scores a 68 on Metacritic, mostly because it's a game that been actively developed for around 3 years and all the reviews are from much earlier in the development period. 

  20. Posted

    But yeah, mostly I was just dropping the question as a conversation-starter and to get a general flavor of the Readers.

     

    We skew very progressive/social justicy (which not everyone can get on board with) and often try to drill down into the nuance of why various subjects/ideas/issues matter. 

     

    I still find the occasional time when African-American feels like the better option to use, but generally I agree with you that it (and all the other hyphenate Americans) can make it sound like those groups are second class or somehow not fully American.  It's also an interesting contrast with other historic nationality/ethnic identifiers, like people self identifying as Irish or Scottish, where no American is tacked on. 

  21. Posted

    Sounds perfect, as I generally love horror that incorporates the surreal, or naturally questions the nature of reality.  If I remember right, it had got middling reviews on Netflix (which I don't pay a lot of attention to, but I think the still affect how quickly I get around to watching something). 

  25. Posted

    I've found it funny that literally anyone who had at least double-digit posts when I joined seems to me an oldtimer and anyone who came after me still seems like a bit of a newbie. You totally seem like a newbie to me, jenna, but I think my brain's just slow. In my real life, I'm seven years in my grad program and still see the people two cohorts behind me as "the new kids."

     

    I'm almost 40 and I'm starting to catch myself referring to 30 year olds as kids (because some of them I knew when they were kids and I was an adult). 

     

     

     

    On topic, another thing I like about resurrecting the specific game threads is seeing how the opinion/experience on a game changes as it leaves the zeitgeist, particularly when someone is playing it several years later.  Another excellent thread was Zeus' journey through all the original Lucasarts adventure games, seeing his thoughts on them as he played many (or all?) of them for the first time and experienced the changes in design between them.