prawks

I play probably every day, but for some reason never the Daily Challenge. Probably because I always play with the aim of it being quick, and the Daily Challenge would force me to concentrate. I also haven't gotten much better recently, still working on getting to the City of Gold, but I always fuck up somewhere and lose the Ankh before I need it in the Ice Caves. Game is awesome for "I have 20 minutes to play a video game" -type situations.

Think you mean http://www.twitch.tv/slackaholicus. I was very confused.

Say no more, I'm sold. I need a new game to fill my old-man-style video game sessions and this is looking pretty awesome.

You don't quit until we say so.

I think Majora's Mask is one of those "acquired taste" games. It's not for everyone, but it has some interesting mechanics that set it apart from OOT and upped the difficulty (or at least the agony). I have yet to beat it even though I've played through OOT + Master Quest multiple times. I recently started a play through of MM again though, and I've found the 3rd or so time seems to be a charm. I echo the sentiment that the beginning is incredibly boring, the later dungeons are really well made.

I'm really interested in this question. In the circles I played CS in, COD players were looked down upon significantly because COD was seen as a less strategic, rambunctious game with a younger audience of (mostly) console (vs. practically PC-only) players. I think you have to consider how much visibility plays a factor. As HoN has gone significantly down in popularity, the remaining players are the "core" (xxXxxhardxxXxx) HoN players who are obviously significantly invested in the game for one reason or another. Similarly, the more invested the players you play with become, the more heavily opinionated they likely become, and more assertive and vocal about those opinions. DotA is (imo) doing a better and better job at relegating toxic players to low-prio queues and building out a more effective reporting system. It's obviously not perfect, but Valve has emphasized it cares a lot about cultivating a welcoming community. I have barely over a hundred non-bot games played, but I've yet to run into more than a handful of truly disruptive players. I'm sure it gets worse in the 3-4k ranked range, but I've never been directly harassed in DotA, and I'm fucking terrible at the game by most people's standards.

Think this will be the next game I play, I've had it on my list for so long. And I need a new game for my Gamecube

Many of the most enjoyable, mature communities in multiplayer games are ones that are newbie friendly, and have members who are enthusiastic about teaching new players and sharing their knowledge of the game. Definitely keep an eye out for those kinds of groups if you're worried about messing up someone else's game, they're usually plentiful to boot. Heck, these groups even exist in games like DotA if you do a little digging.

I haven't played GW2, but I can echo the sentiment having played a ton of GW1 that it's full of great communities. I like MMOs for starting out, because you can usually find a list of guilds, and find one that resonates with your needs (casual, mature, competitive PvP, whatever you're looking for), then go about applying and playing with them. Usually once you have your foot in the door in one game with people you enjoy playing with, they inevitably play other games as well and you can branch out very very easily from there.

Does the inability to surrender increase the stakes of each game? Something I've just begun thinking about, but I think it's worth considering. I implicitly think about it when I start a game, looking at our picks vs. theirs, getting a sinking feeling knowing it's going to be an uphill battle that I'll have to participate in. Those last 10-15 minutes in an low-tier AP game where it takes forever for the other team to take high ground, even though they're 30+ kills ahead and we haven't had map control for the last 20 minutes. I don't think that feeling would be the same if we could GG after the laning phase. I just wouldn't care as much, and queue for another. I wouldn't try as hard to make something out of nothing if I had the option to start over whenever I wanted. EDIT: This has also probably been brought up thousands of times in the course of the "white flag" debate.

This has been on my radar for a little while now, and is 50% off on Steam so I just grabbed it. Seems pretty well hyped by the (very few, it seems) reviews that I can find, and the trailer interests me. I think the lack of press on it is what surprises me the most.

This has happened repeatedly to me in The Wolf Among Us, usually to hilarious effect. There's a case where you're talking to someone in a bar, and you have the option to pick up a glass. So I figured I'd be having a drink with the guy I'm talking to, maybe loosen him up a bit. Instead, the main character smashes the glass into the guys face. Definitely not what I had in mind.

I interpret it is a sadder way, in that he definitely redeemed himself over the course of his experience with Clementine and the others (he was an overall positive influence in their lives, Clementine most of all), but he himself died with doubts as to whether he did or not. I don't think you can ever truly get closure on something like being redeemed for murder.

I'd imagine risk management has to play a large part as well, and I'd postulate that what looks like dilution on the outside is likely to be the embodiment of conscious decision-making at the upper level to avoid being too experimental. It's "traditional" Fortune 500 (read: AAA) business tactics: use your money to make more money, with the least chance to lose money. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the discussions surrounding the UI being such a departure from the norm in such a large production. I'm curious whether it slipped through the cracks at one point or another, wasn't seen as something that could make/break a AAA game, or was something presented to decision-makers who loved it. Regardless, I'd imagine it had a very interesting life.

Finally finished The Wolf Among Us this weekend, and overall really enjoyed the whole series. Makes me want to read Fables. The very end was pretty interesting, and while the lead-up to it was good, I thought a lot of the detail was a bit unimportant, and felt lackluster. What felt like they should have been big reveals just kind of hit me as backstory and "Oh, yeah makes sense." I was expecting more twists, I think. The Walking Dead had a more impactful series of reveals, or so I felt. It seemed like there was a substantial increase in the amount of QTE's in the final episode, and I'll be honest, as someone who doesn't mind them, they became a bit much at one point. Might have just been my state of mind at the time, though. It was getting pretty late. However, there was a point where a QTE was used to make a split-second storyline decision, and I was surprised that they weren't used like that more throughout the story. I didn't play through it again, so I'm not sure how much of a difference it really made, but my point stands. Most of the major decisions are made on long timers, etc. The fast reaction timer to make a story decision just adds a level of authenticity to making a decision that I really enjoy, and it's used so well during conversation trees. One last nagging issue I had with it (and The Walking Dead, since they're basically sister games) is that some of the options in the conversation trees sounded one way, but Bigby acted them out another way. That's probably a tough problem to solve, but it made me laugh when I was trying to be nice to someone and Bigby tears them a new one. Regardless, those are very minor issues. This game has some great art, and the music is fucking fantastic. The first episode is a serious hook, too.

Yeah...

If you really want to form tight friendships online with people and you have any interest at all in competitive games, I think that's where most of my strongest friendships (actually, all of them) have come from. I don't have the kind of time now to get together regularly with the same group of people to practice E S P O R T S, but finding a team like that really builds relationships. After that game dies down, everyone moves on to other games, and you can usually find someone on your Steam Friends list that has X game to play. Similarly, a small "clan" of people owning a server and slowly getting to know them and then joining their "clan" was always a blast for having people to play with in a much less scheduled, lower-pressure way. Sometimes you still had to go through a try-out though, which can be fun in a way. It's almost a shame that with the rise of cloud infrastructure personally owned game servers are going the way of the dinosaur. But I suppose guilds in MMO's are very similar. The unfortunate aspect of human relationships is that developing them takes a time commitment no matter how you look at it. Though the Idle Thumbs forums seems like probably the best place on the Internet to find fun people to play with at random.

I suppose that one's a given, you'd be crazy not to.

Adding myself into the "people who co-op frustrates" group. I'm glad no one I know plays WoW anymore. When it was big in the circle of people I grew up playing video games with, I was always wrangled into playing it, but when I missed a day that they spent grinding out levels it was a bummer. Then I missed another day and then another and another until they maxed out and I was barely 1/3 of the way there. I'd just give up and go back to Counter-Strike or Quake where I had access to everything without having to go full-on "my life for the Horde." The worst is it would come in and out of favor, so the cycle would renew each time with my hopeful self saying "This time it's going to be different." I can't even imagine voluntarily signing up to play a game like that again, and I loved Halo 1-3. In my honest opinion they even surpass the Goldeneye days when it comes to console, split-screen FPS (not to mention online).

Yeah, mainly about the developers and the culture of the people who are the target market for those games. How did the developers reach the conclusion that Kirk Douglas or the Saw clown were a good fit for GTA that would be something people would buy? Or is it truly scarcity of assets, in which case why is it so difficult to find those assets and where are they found? What kind of culture is it where someone would walk into a store and say "Oh no way, Kirk Douglas and GTA sound like something I'll buy!" Just curious as to the environment that leads to that. Scarcity definitely has a lot to do with it, but what is the rationale behind all of this? What is going through the heads of everyone involved? Just seems so zany.

I think it's part of what makes DotA interesting, you have two decisions: let her get farmed and bet on rolling her team, or gank her and bet on her team not getting too big in your absence. You need to find a balance that works for your team composition and level of cooperation, I think. Your response (ideally) would be different whether you have pushing presence you can apply to the other lanes while you focus her, or you have a teamfight-oriented lineup.

Very few people know details about how VAC works outside of the trivial things that all anti-cheats do (look for hooked DLLs, etc.) and the very few things Valve has released (recently, it checks to see if your PC has been phoning home to hacking software's own DRM servers). Anyone claiming otherwise is purely speculating. The only option you really have is to wait about a month and see if anything happens. It sucks, but that's also why it's so effective.

Additionally/alternatively, gank. Ideally before she gets out of control.

Oh my god, I have so many questions.

At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I'm tempted to romanticize scarcity like that. I enjoy shopping for antiques because of the search, and finally finding something you've been looking for is very enjoying and makes you appreciate that item much more. But I'd imagine we wouldn't have the quality we do now without the quantity. The funny thing is I think that search and scarcity still happens in the Steam-generation, as there is such a flood of games that don't interest me. I'd buy a Humble Bundle with 10 games in it and pick through them for the one that really resonated with me. When I do find a game that I really truly enjoy, it's like finding treasure. I end up playing it thoroughly as I'd imagine kids looking for scarce games would have upon discovering a dusty set of diskettes.