prawks

I'll probably try and watch some of it, but ESL One's DotA event is coming up soon, and it's going to be a good one.

http://dueprocess.info/ If you've played competitive Counter-Strike, this blew my mind. Apparently they were at PAX, did anyone get a chance to play it? They were also looking for playtesters earlier this year.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention you linked it to me in the other thread I had trouble getting into Monaco, I guess perhaps it didn't really click until I saw it done in an FPS. It just makes that kind of shooter so much more fun to have not only strategies worked out, but also be able to illustrate them as well. Makes scenerios play out much more interestingly when everyone is on the same page. There's also a ton of extra strategy that they pile on on top of that with the way weapon selection works and the (seemingly) randomly generated levels.

Completely true. If you're not near a coastline, don't even bother. Totally understand if land-locked folks despise seafood, I would too.

Agreed, I didn't play a ton of the game, but the strategy of it really stuck with me. I liked planning out my approach by being able to see the way enemies patrolled with specific weapons in the adjacent rooms, and with the events unfolding very quickly afterwards (as you describe, SWAT-style "breaching" of rooms). I'd love to see something similar in a FPS.

I just paused the most recent episode to tell you that you are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Jane says in the comments of this blog post that

I think I feel the same way, the last episode didn't really pack the punch I was hoping for. And you really had to be paying attention to "get" the ending scene, I feel. I beat the newest Tomb Raider the other day. Really enjoyed the first half of the game, but I think I just got bored after a certain point with the story. Though I thought the character development was good, Laura's relationship with different characters takes some nice turns. It probably could have been a little shorted, with more tombs to explore. Combat was pretty fun once you get the hang of it, but a little exhausting at times. Some good stealth moments sprinkled around towards the later part of the game which made it fun picking people off with the bow. And pretty neat scenery and environment to run around in. Overall I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to people who like 3rd person shooters with some platform-y stuff thrown in.

Thank god it's quieter thanks to electronic motors rather than an internal combustion engine. I was worried that I might be able to hear it chasing me.

Also this .gif

Gotta say I loved the Blades Trivia Quiz. Shoutout to the Media blade, completely forgot about how I used to stream music to my bedroom on the 360 from the family PC. A little janky but it was cool at the time.

I think I'm quitting Starseed Pilgrim? Can't really tell if the point is to "beat it" or not. I feel like I got most of what I'm going to get out of it after getting to the second platform in the Home area. Also, there are just other games that I want to play to their entirety, and this one feels like a long one. I think I may have stuck with it longer if I didn't have such a huge back catalog of stuff to play. Hopefully that doesn't detract from what it is: an awesome game. Really incredibly creative and abstract, and fun to wade through.

Wanted to add my perspective on jargon and buzzwords, and specifically their difference (perhaps to illustrate this problem for those unaware). As someone who has spent time at a Fortune 500 I've become pretty familiar with such things, and it gets messy fast. Jargon is, in most situations, very useful. It allows people in a specific field to discuss complex topics efficiently by creating terms that are commonly understood within that field. If I'm talking with fellow software engineers, I don't want to have to define what a tree data structure is, it's handy that I can just say something is a tree. Some confusion in the term "jargon" arises from when it is used colloquially as a term for "technical words I don't understand" or "gibberish". That's fine, and it makes sense as a colloquialism. If someone was listening to software engineers talk about balancing their splay treaps, it sounds like utter nonsense. Buzzwords, on the other hand, is what Chris, you're talking about with "franchises" and other now meaningless terms. Buzzwords are words that used to be jargon, and well-defined, but have expanded upon their original use (usually by people outside of their related field) and become so muddy that they are now meaningless. This is a *huge* problem in many large organizations, because you can be in a room with 10 people all talking about (for example) making a "web portal" and come to an agreement that one should be created (or doing something with your "franchise" which actually isn't). The problem is that all 10 people can be envisioning a completely different thing, because "web portal" doesn't actually mean anything. It did at one time to a small group of people, but was reused a thousand times over without being fully explained, or was used to describe things similar but not exactly the same, which further dilutes its meaning each time. "Synergy" once meant something precise to someone. Rather than explaining it in detail to everyone for the rest of time, they coined a term for it. That person was successful in "synergizing" their team A, so team B goes "We need more synergy too!" ("me too" attitude is the worst thing in the entire world, by the way, just think about it) without bothering to find out what that means. "Franchise" and "platform exclusive" are buzzwords now in the same way, and as you mention, completely flatten language into a muddy mess of nothing. At some point the syllables are just meaningless. That's one of the reasons why most corporate speak doesn't mean anything to anyone. If you aren't there for when the term is coined, good fucking luck figuring out what it actually means. It sounds pedantic, but hey, that's language for you.

I have trouble enough working out ways to vocally articulate my feelings on this stuff. My hat's off to anyone tackling it through another artistic medium, I think that's a really valuable pursuit (exemplified by the impact of games like Coming Out Simulator). Similarly, wanted to give major kudos to the Thumbs, especially Chris (taking nothing from Sean or Jake, of course), on their vocal articulation of their feelings on the situation. I haven't been following the events discussed very closely, but I thought I thought it was admirable that you guys tackled the discussion like you did. Edit: Forgot to mention that I had the Banjo Kazooie N64 VHS and watched the shit out of that thing. It's also still one of the my favorite games of all time, and it's probably because marketing for it was burned into my brain at a young age. But I'm oddly okay with that.

Oddly related, this same thing is a problem with going back and playing Morrowind on new hardware with an unlimited view distance. The fog made Vvardenfell feel a lot larger than it really was. When you remove it, you realize the only reason the game's scope feels so large is that your movement speed is so slow. IMO it's also why Oblivion feels so small to me in comparison to Morrowind and Skyrim. In Skyrim they used mountains instead of fog, but in Oblivion they wanted to show off the immense view distance and "If you see it, you can go there" selling point. What a tangent.

Haha, what a great easter egg

http://blog.camposanto.com/post/94087378744/come-see-firewatch-at-pax-prime-2014-this-is Live Firewatch gameplay and reveal of a trailer at 10:30a on 8/30 at PAX! Been a while since I've been this giddy to see a video game announcement/reveal/panel/thing.

Wow just read the first page of the RPS article, this game sounds nutty. I can't tell whether I should read the rest of the series, because it mentions spoilers, or whether that doesn't matter because I might get too frustrated to ever see what's spoiled anyways.

"Well, no water for me today. Guess that means it's sex-scene day."

Got a link to that? Think I want to start watching some of these fabled streams, I never seem to be able to catch them.

Another summer-y jam: https://soundcloud.com/snakehips-1/miss-u-always Additionally: https://soundcloud.com/rawtakes/september

At first this saddened me as well, however there is such a wealth of content out there that is both great and not horror-themed that I honestly don't think you're missing out on much, especially when you consider the influence of personal preference. Some people just don't like critically-acclaimed games/movies because they just don't resonate with them. I'm not sure if that makes complete sense (kind of rambling thoughts here), but if I could try and make an analogy to it: I suspect it's similar to me being disappointed that I don't enjoy Starcraft as much as I think I would if I had a thing for RTS games. The things I don't like about RTS games are the things that make Starcraft great, and the things people do not enjoy about horror games/movies is often what makes them critically acclaimed. Their portrayal of that mood is masterful, but if you don't enjoy that mood, they're just not something you'd agree with the crticial opinion of even if you did manage to play them. Ditto for Flight Sims. Or caviar.

For more people interested in the crazy transformations that male action-movie actors are now going through, Men's Journal ran an article on it a couple months ago that I thought was pretty interesting (albeit a bit lengthy and paginated): http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/building-a-bigger-action-hero-20140418

Watched the first game, but there were a bunch of technical issues with the stream during the early-midgame. Will probably catch a VOD eventually, I really enjoyed watching! The casting was a nice change from the rambunctiousness of the TI casters.

I'm excited to see some real Lords duke it out for once