Dragonfliet

Don't count on that pricepoint. The console retails for $350, and the $400 price for the VR doesn't include the PS eye (which is required), so the retail cost is just north of $800. I would expect that we might see bundles for $800 with a few games, maybe $750, and $700 as an outside likelihood. I would actually expect $800 or $850 for the whole bundle, a few games and the move controllers as well, though, which is a lot, but is the same price as the Vive (and probably similar to the Rift + hand controllers). Still, that's including an entire system in that package, so it seems like a pretty sweet deal. This has me very, very excited for VR. Now all I really need is for MS to freaking partner with someone (oculus or valve) to get VR on their headset and really get people on the VR bandwagon.

There are a ton of things going on with stats, as they interact with your other stats. It almost always works as expected, but sometimes just confuzzles me. I'm honestly having a hard time trying to figure out if I should increase base damage, or get +3% against elites, or some other kind of garbage (so many guns and mods have like 5 different factors to take in), so I just try to get the maximum dps while accomodating my playstyle (mostly assault rifles + snipers, though I didn't have a very nice run with an m249 with a +53% extended clip (so 153 bullets in the gun) which was awesome. Enemy spawn points became ridiculously easy). I took full advantage of spring break and played nearly 30 hours and got to level 29, though only a bit of darkzone play. I think I'll get to 30 before I head back into the deadzone and start working on that whole....thing. This game is a little annoying, but has the same kind of annoying/claws into your brain mix that Destiny did. So...that is great and a problem. At least there is more content than Destiny, so i've never felt like I was grinding.

Yeah, I've had good experiences with people, so far. The best have been wandering the Dark Zone alone, like a fool, and a tense moment in an extraction zone with a group of 3 leading to an invite, and some excellent running around with random cool people. The game is a bit scary when you realize you might need to group with strangers, but I've found people to be pretty decent, on the whole (well, except for roving groups of griefers, from time to time--ugh). Question: does anyone know if the game levels enemies to the party leader, or just to the highest level member of your group?

Wow, looks great! Kudos!

Ran a few missions before the servers crapped out, which allows me some time to be a responsible adult before sleep. Do add me though, for other late night adventures.

Hey, I shall probably be interested in gaming with folks on PC. My uplay is: Dragonfliet I'll tend to be on later in the evenings, after my wife has gone to sleep and can't remind me that it is a terrible idea to put off my oppressive load of coursework for silly mmo-like games.

Overclocking is nice, but it will NOT get you a few more years. You can delay an upgrade a little bit, but not a significant amount of time. It can boost your cpu performance a good little bit, but it's not going to be anywhere near the gain you'd get from a newer processor. The point of overclocking is really to reach the next tier price upgrade, more or less (or to boost the top tier if that's what you have), but each new release will blow it out of the water. If you've never overclocked things before, you can simply increase the multiplier, without futzing with the voltage (which can start breaking things for real) without any real harm. Just make sure that you monitor the temps and do stress tests and you'll be fine.

I feel exactly the opposite. Puns amuse the heck out of me.

Granted, I only ever worked in slightly nice to upscale places, but I never made anything close to minimum wage for a pay period. Always way above. Your smaller, cheaper, "home cooking" type places, though, this can be a problem. But those places are very flagrantly breaking the law. Yes, people can break the law, but this doesn't meant that the laws are in place (it's also really, really easy to sue for violations as there is a very simple paper trail where you declare your tips each night, and this is reflected on pay stubs. But this is actually another reason I'm very opposed to adding tips to any service. Banning tips and requiring employers to just PAY their employees makes things less subject to abuse (part of the problem with tipping is that it is a very fluid, under-the-table kind of system, much of the time), as the paper trail is much clearer and straight-forward.

So, I may be expanding the conversation here beyond the realm of what it should be (if so, I apologize), but I did want to weigh in on a few things. I don't know how postmate works, if the drivers are employees or contractors (which works out in different ways), or whatever, but I DID want to clarify that in the US, all companies ARE REQUIRED to make sure that their employees make the minimum federal wage ($7.25/hr). While this IS a separate minimum wage for tipped workers (2.13), if an employee makes less than an average of 7.25/hr for a pay period, including their declared tips, the employer is required to make up the gap in their paycheck (ie: if you worked 50 hours and made $0 in tips (you would be a terrible waiter, but whatever), instead of getting $106, like normal for people that make more than minimum wage on their tips, you would get $362 on your paycheck). Now, this doesn't mean that you should tip people who rely on tips--largely because the minimum wage is garbage and shouldn't be used as a barometer--but it is an important clarification, and also something that many people who know about the separate wage for service workers don't seem to know. I do have another thing on these topics though: Tipping is awful and we need to get rid of it. Services that don't allow tipping are far, far, far better. The actual wages of the job should be what attracts people to the job, and the fact that businesses externalize their expenses into a separate system is entirely ridiculous. This does not, in any way shape or form mean that you should stop tipping people who rely on tips (don't be an ahole), because they people rely on their tips--don't punish the people lowest on the totem pole for a messed up setup. BUT it DOES mean that for new services and new jobs, etc, that don't necessarily include tipping, please dear god, DO NOT push for it. Tipping doesn't reflect service, almost ever (something study after study shows), and it's very possible and easy for systems to work without tipping (see: somehow food industries in non-tipping countries manage to exist), but it DOES create unnecessary frustration.

I enjoyed this a lot. Eco was an incredible writer, though I haven't read about half his novels, and have only read a handful of his nonfiction (which is smart and thoughtful and wonderful, if dry). This was a marvelous little tribute, and a great introduction for readers who aren't that familiar with his work. I would say, however, that while The Name of the Rose is a little easier to get into for some first timers, mostly because of it's pretty traditional Sherlock style genre trappings, I feel like Foucault's Pendulum is such a better book, and much more wryly funny.

Yeah, just that. When you're flagged, other players can kill you without becoming rogue themselves. Plus, they earn cash and xp for killing you, PLUS you lose xp and items for dying while rogue. It's a pretty heavy penalty, actually. So if you're going to go rogue, make sure you have a team with you (and hope you're not on a really populated server).

I think it's a combination of things. The first is the contrivance of the conspiracy. So this guy is sort of a bad parent, and partly as a result of this, his kid dies tragically. His response? He locks the gate (doesn't just retrieve his son or anything, just locks a gate) and stalks everyone who goes anywhere near the body. For years. And then he gains the ability to listen to anyone's conversation, and does this to you, transcribing your conversations (wait, what? Why? He's just trying to keep you away), manages perfectly to follow you/evade you, concocts an elaborate conspiracy involving a moose research project, selectively pulls from recent conversations (apparently he's been taping all of the conversations as WELL as transcribing them), etc., all to, in the end, say: oh, hey, you found my son. I'm pretty bummed and was just hanging out. Sorry for the scares, and setting an enormous fire and all that. The whole conspiracy resolving to simply a crazy person and wild imaginations on the part of Henry and Delilah isn't bad (although it is anticlimactic), but the sheer level of incredulous moments piled up onto one another gets irritating. Honestly, at the point it gets to, it almost makes more sense that there is a fucked up psychological experiment ACTUALLY studying them than the series of random, perfectly coordinated events by a single, education hating whackjob. And people like conspiracies: seeing them defeated or thwarted (or failing to do these things in more depressing narratives) is really satisfying. So we don't get the satisfying part, but we do get all of the crazy, and the implication is that this version is more "realistic." The second thing is the lack of a real resolution with Delilah. This part I would actually defend against pretty wholeheartedly, as it feels very natural and wonderful and the disappointment you feel as a player very wonderfully mimics the disappointment Henry would feel at seeing Delilah just go. Still it is another anticlimactic ending that frustrates promises the game seems to be making when it establishes a relationship between a man and a woman that is increasingly romantic and flirtatious AND we are given the direct physical connection to her tower via the trolley thing (that you still use at the end to get to the helicopter). This relationship not being consummated is a little on the side of unrealistic (After two months of flirting, people aren't going to travel at night to hook up?), and it's a bit of a betrayal of implicit promises. Again, since I see this as pretty much the point of the game, I would defend it as the "good" kind of disappointment. But when you add these things up, as well as the game starting slowly, with giant gaps of time in between sections, and then building tension and building tension and adding some big drama points and really ratcheting up the intensity, you get people feeling really betrayed by the ending. And unlike Gone Home, where it's sort of your fault for imagining the dark, horror story ending we all pretty much imagined when we found the secret entrance, this time it wasn't our fault. We didn't imagine a conspiracy, it was very specifically (though, in hindsight, wildly implausibly) laid out and confirmed with physical evidence. I think a very satisfying ending version of this would be something like Foucault's Pendulum (poor dead Umberto Eco), where the conspiracy is a fake, but it becomes real, and the narrative becomes what it is striving against. Here, we don't even get that satisfaction. Just: A crazy guy did it! WHEEE. So yeah, people are pissed at the ending. Partly they shouldn't be, and partly it makes 100% sense. I still think that the game is overall pretty great, and there is a lot about the ending I liked, but it has some significant problems, even on the level of art, much less on the level of entertainment--which is where many of the dissatisfied people are approaching it from.

I'm not sure if you two aren't saying the same thing. You, the player, come to act as Henry, and interact as Henry--you don't get to submerge yourself into the game, because it isn't your game. Things like Gone Home completely repress the personality of the protagonist, and that's fine, but this allows the game world to let you begin to understand Henry's problems instead of thinking of them as your own. I much prefer this, to be honest, but both are interesting decisions.

My novel got accepted and announced by an exciting small press, and now my colleagues are buying me many rounds of beer. This is a very nice happiness because this semester for my PhD I'm taking 3 classes, teaching two, and doing an insane amount of work that it feels I'll never accomplish.

So I have no idea your position, or role, but helping students is easy: all you have to do is make the world a better place by making your students better people. See? Easy. But seriously. I don't know what field you're in (I'm a writer/lit person, so make of that what you will), but the role of a teacher is twofold. For classes, you're expected to bring students from level x to level y in whatever specific topic you're teaching, and the varying degrees of levels have some explanations as to why they exist. Find a way to make that matter to you. As for the individual students: aside from fulfilling random obligations, just try to help them get where they want to go. It's really simply in theory. As for caring: don't worry about it. Some people care a fuckton, some people less so. Some are friends with their students, others not. Me, I get super awkward when I accidentally see my students in the gym or whatever. In the end, you're just trying to use your knowledge to help them get smarter. That's it. You'll figure it out.

I'm legitimately curious to see how this panned out. Also, What the hell PhD position interviews in September?

Signed the contract on my first novel today, which makes me both very happy, and very anxious. Happy because I've been trying to publish this sucker for almost two years (it is an experimental piece of literary fiction, so not super easy to find a home for it), and anxious because they want to get it out relatively soon, which means that I'll be revising the book in the middle of a semester where I'm taking 3 classes and teaching two (a very, very full load for a PhD student), which should be a whole lot of fun. Still, this is the good kind of anxiety, I think.

This was a delightful, stunningly beautiful, and wonderfully written game, with excellent sound design. It was such a shame that it couldn't pull itself completely together. As it is, it's a very good game, and I hope that the followup is something great. I guess I was mostly surprised by the lack of interesting mechanical complexity, or narrative through gameplay. Jake, Chris and Sean have an intense expressed love of mechanical games, and talk at length about how these build narrative, and Nels is such an incredible designer of such systems that I couldn't believe that most of the mechanics were essentially find y, so you can press A at x location. It also didn't really add to the main narrative arc. This isn't entirely true: our protagonist having his relationship through a radio--at a distance--felt really resonant to what Henry is going through (and his emotional distance and struggle even during the prologue), and that part was incredible. But randomly finding tools to clear a gamey roadblock doesn't tie into any of these issues, and being told to go to one location or another didn't really tie into the mystery aspect, the abandonment question of Henry and Julia, OR the budding romance/friendship with Delilah. Most of the game was just kind of stuff that the player does. Comparing this with Gone home seems most apt, as they both occupy that walking simulator type gameplay. In Gone Home, the setup, that you are coming back from college, and some time abroad, and exploring the home of your family, to find out secrets about them you didn't ever really notice before--that makes sense. This idea of coming home but it seeming different now that you're growing up, the discovery of seeing things you know in a new context, and finally being able to tie them together. Even though it is "just" walking around a house, it felt so thematically resonant. Here, walking it the woods made sense, a walden-esque escape from society, but that's just the set-up, the actual things you do don't reinforce the narrative goals. Which is a damned shame. This game is so masterful in so many ways. Each individual aspect just works. No department turned in less than a stellar performance, but the sum of the parts doesn't really excel. I think this is largely a story/design issue. Not that the writing is bad (it's really good, actually), nor that the twist, while a major disappointment relative to the setup (which is on purpose, so I'll not give that much flak), is a problem. Instead, it seems that things aren't really tying themselves up. So the father "failing" to be there for his kid immediately hits home with Henry's failures as a husband, and that works well, but the question of surveillance is a HUGE metaphorical question that is raised and let die, as is sexuality (Delilah's fake report writeups calling her sexually aggressive, with many lovers) and the bloom of relationships. Especially in the context of a burgeoning fire. These ideas are given some weight, but never fully explored. The bigger shame is that they COULD have been explored. Henry DOES have responsibility in the game, and the mechanics to exercise it. He could actually spot fires and report them to put them out. He could actually be tasked with cleaning up the cans, or clearing pathways, etc. These responsibilities speak directly to his spousal responsibilities that he has failed on (or, at least, as set up in the game, feels that he has). Especially when you add Delilah to the mix, this can become especially powerful: what if building a relationship with her is at the direct cost of these responsibilities? Is this a lack of faithfulness speaking towards his husbandly duties? This would also further speak to the biblical relation that something like Delilah brings up. Stuff like this--stuff already in the game, but not brought into mechanical/narrative relevance, is striking. But I will get back to how much I really enjoyed the game, and how well it does things. Because I've been really critical here, which hasn't allowed me to comment on the feeling of betrayal at seeing your emotionally wrought conversations written down--how vulnerable it feels to see your vulnerabilities. Or the incredibly done building of tension. Seriously, the final third of the game had me on the edge of my seat. Every snapped branch made me wheel around in fear. And I genuinely was interesting in the relationship with Delilah, and I was so saddened by the death of (shit--can't remember his name....), etc. It's really good. I just wish that it were slightly better. Not that this wasn't good enough, but that a team this talented has the ability to make something truly incredible (and they were peeking in that window with this game).

I'm happy for Laidlaw leaving. It must have been infuriating to have had a story for the finale to what he'd been working on (a story that sold millions of copies) and it just....doesn't ever come out. Instead there are some comedy games he's not that involved with and then, TF2 comics and DOTA 2 barks? HL3 is the cut on the inside of your cheek of video games. It is a wound that we can't help but probe. As long as the wound is there, we will hurt ourselves by reminding each other of the thing we don't have.

I can only imagine the people at Valve and HTC were heartened by this announcement. After claiming they were going to be the more premium, in terms of price, I feel like the Oculus announcement (after MONTHS of them claiming in the ballpark of $350) might have given them a little breathing room to not be at a much-higher pricepoint. Hell, they may even have enough momentum to swoop in for a cheaper price.

That price hurts. I had girded myself for $400-500, but this is just... a lot. Considering that my GTX 780 is just barely good enough and will need to be replaced I'm pretty bummed to admit that I'm pretty much just giving up on this. Oh well. So sad. The price will come down a little eventually.

I finally got around to playing The Beginner's Guide. I would post in the kind-of thread for it, but the articles people posted there mostly covered it. I was pleasantly surprised by it. It does some really interesting things in the story, and is a powerful (ly depressing) contemplation on creation and the twist comes when it REALLY needed to (the story, if it kept going where it was going, would have become pretty trite). Granted, I think the ending falls apart, but it falls apart in the best possible way that I wish more games would be willing to do: going somewhere new, experimenting and playing and letting things end abstractly (without getting overly crazy about it).

Awesome. If they keep the price reasonable, I'll definitely be pre-ordering. The Vive seems great, but my study is pretty small, and I think there is only like 3'x 8' of room to walk when the computer chair is jammed in.

I have also noticed this. Except, my reaction is: THANK GOD. Video game writing has almost uniformly been excruciatingly bad, with a few notable exceptions of mediocre with an ultra-rare dab of: pretty good. In recent years, the move towards decent character based writing has been a soothing balm. I love cool things and neat twists, but not at the expense of good character writing. That being said: people keep praising Her Story and I don't think it was a very good game. It was REALLY interesting and thoughtfully put together from a mechanic level, and the writing was solid (and acting was great), but...it's a story-based game in which the story is a twist that is clever, I suppose, but ultimately meaningless--it gives the story no weight, it merely satisfies a technical detail.