ariskany_evan
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Posts posted by ariskany_evan
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It's Erin McGathy, her fiancé, who she talks about throughout, is Dan Harmon, the creator of Community and Rick and Morty. To be slightly vain (this is plug your shit after all), he talks about me at around minute 31 of this episode of Harmontown. It was really fun to record the podcast with her!
That's awesome! I got a shoutout on the bombcast once and it made my ears burn, but this is truly next level!!
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After making a valiant attempt to unceremoniously blast through my backlog a few months back (let's just say I was quite active on the Quitter's Club), the timing of this sale doesn't seem terrible! Though for the life of me the only game I can think of off the top of my head that I want to pick up is Skyrim (PS3 died and I miss the world). Maybe Starbound? Otherwise I feel like I'm all caught up on games I want. Crazy!
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The Raymond Scott song Dilla samples from is also very good.
My wife was just this weekend rediscovering a bunch of Raymond Scott. It's amazing how little Dilla had to do to Lightworks to make it one of his own. A head-nodding beat wayyyyyy ahead of its time.
Also so easy to forget about Raymond Scott! Lonny Tunes adaptations, Sleeping Sounds for Babies, adverts. Love how all over the place his work is. Some great facts in his wiki:
Used the pseudonym Raymond Scott because he was worried about charges of nepotism when his brother's orchestra started playing his compositions in the mid-1930s. Called a six-piece band a Quintette because he thought the word sextet would take the focus away from the music. He worked as director of Motown's electronic music and research department from 1971-77. No Motowen recordings using Scott's inventions inventions have been publicly identified. He classically fell into obscurity as he aged, ran out of money, had some strokes. Got some renewed interest a few years before he died. The end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wDio3pjUr8
Same guy!!!
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Seems everyone's running with the bad voice acting story today. Ben Kuchera wrote at the end of his op piece:
"This is the alpha, so there's plenty of times for the lines to be re-recorded, or replaced or improved through some kind of post-processing effect, but for now they actively weaken a game the Polygon staff has been enjoying."
JUST NEEDS MORE FLANGER.
(I took a moment and thought about pulling the audio out, dropping it into Logic, adding flanger, exporting the file, uploading it to youtube, then posting it here, and got really tired just thinking about that whole process. So you'll have to use your imagination.)
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Yeah I updated it before I jumped on. I'm on PC by the way.
It's probably the DLC, I saw an "Attrition: Expedition" game mode. This really highlights the problem with map DLCs for mutliplayer stuff. It completely fragments the user base. I was really disappointed, I've been using Titanfall as a game to fill an hour or so, but not finding a game at prime time sucks. That experience also makes me not want to buy the DLC in case I still can't find a game.
Seems like a poor business model to make people pay for maps.
Bummer! I tried last night after not playing for a solid 2 weeks, and when I chose "Attrition: Expedition", I couldn't find a game for a good 3 minutes. When I switched over to just plain old "Attrition", I was thrown immediately into a lobby with 8 seconds left before the game started. Of course, it was for one of the DLC maps, so if they're rotating DLC maps into the regular queues, that means that the player base is going to be even more split. I had figured that the DLC maps were going to be only in the completely separate queues. This means that buying the DLC gives you more of an opportunity to find a game. (This is the first COD-style online FPS I've played, so I don't know if this is par for the course)
But yeah, we're only 3 months after release. Not a great sign that we're already facing long matchmaking times.
According to Zampella: "On PC it started off really strong and it's starting to dip a little bit now more than we expected. We're looking at that. What are the reasons? Is it something we're doing wrong? Is it the matchmaking? So we'll pay attention to that and figure out what that is. We want to see it go up."
And he also stated in the interview that once the next free patch comes out the team is going to take a break, so I can't imagine that if people aren't interested in playing now, they won't be given a new reason any time soon. I'm still enjoying my time. Inching my way up to level 50.
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So is Titanfall officially dead now? At least in the EU? I don't have the DLC, so that could be something to do with it, but I waited 10 minutes for a game tonight. I gave up and played something else. Talk about a fast burner!
Origin is weird and doesn't like to automatically update Titanfall. The last time I had a ton of trouble finding games it was because I hadn't updated. Here's hoping it's that for your sake!
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Urgh, everything I read/hear about this makes me want it. Hearing someone describe it as "Halo x Phantasy Star Online x Borderlands" just makes me want it. Hearing the phrase "there are raids of 8 people..." makes me want it.
God damn it Bungie I DON'T WANT A PS4!
I'm forcing myself not to watch game play videos. That'll be £400 I can't spend right now, and my partner will go mental considering I just bought a Wii U.
Well you've got 2.5 months to come up with the cash! Just stop eating meals.
Regarding Dinklage's voiceover: I didn't mind it. Was never made clear who or what he was, but the story seems pretty silly so far. Better to have a purposefully detached/monotone narrator (opportunity for some dry humor?) than someone trying to wring out every last emotion from moon wizards. I recognized Lance Reddick giving some explore mode quests, so that's great!
Anyone on the alpha get to try out the Crucible stuff? Is it just standard deathmatch/capture the point stuff?
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Hit the level cap at level 8. The ambient "explore" mode is wonderful. You can choose to pick up little tasks one at time, or you can just explore. There are community events like having a giant tank-bug fall down and a 5 minute counter appears. I really like that the main quest is completely separate from the explore mode.
It has so many hooks! You can only gain a limited number of arena-combat points a day, which means that kids who have all the time in the world can't just grind away in the first week and get all the cool stuff right away. Shops have counters letting you know how long it will be until inventory resets. Character upgrades tend to feel nicely substantial. There's a whole sub-class thing going on, but I think you have to get higher than level 8 to unlock that stuff. There's just a lot going on that makes you want to keep playing (just one more turn), but also good reasons to "check in" every day, which moves this game into the dangerous to purchase territory.
It's just really pretty. I liked being in the world, though combat being the only way of interacting with the world will get tiresome sooner than in something like Skyrim, where you could at least count on odd NPC interactions/quests breaking up the gameplay loop of killing things.
Curious to see how much more content is available in the beta, and to hear others' impressions of the alpha.
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So far:
It's pretty! The day/night cycles are beautiful.
From my ship I can choose to go to Earth, where I can choose to either free-roam and look for "quest beacons" or play a story mission set in the same zone (Old Russia). There is what I think is a second story mission, but I can't access it as it requires Playsation Plus. I'm tempted to subscribe just to test out the rest of the content, but this is a short "alpha" and I've already played the available free games for June on PS3. There seems to be a lot to do with the free-roaming, though, so I'm not lacking for content.
From my ship I can also go to The Crucible, which I'm guessing is deathmatch-style multiplayer arena combat? It's locked away by Playstation Plus as well.
Then there's The Tower, which is a hub-like location. It's in 3rd person, and I can run around and talk to shop keepers, guild peeps, etc.
Loading times are a bit much between The Tower and Earth, but nothing overly crazy.
It's the first Bungie game I've playing since Marathon Infinity, so I'm not the one to say how much like Halo it feels. The aim-assist feels pretty heavy. Thankfully you don't have to click on items to pick them up like in Borderlands.
Overall, though, I'm just running around shooting things, and it's fun. And shiny. The polish is pretty intense. There's got to be a lot of developers mad that Bungie is playing with the definition of "alpha"...
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Downloading the alpha now thanks to joncole! I'll be on as BearRawrr tonight (in 8 hours or so...)
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Anyone seen Pitch Perfect? I found the main male character to be characteristic of the "nice guy" mentality. He wore her down throughout the entire film until she finally "understood" how great he was. His final line of the movie to her after she and her group just gave their best performance of all time: "I told you so." Ugh. The whole movie was just terrible, but this stood out to me as notable.
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Life
in Idle Banter
Have so much fun! I hope it's so much fun!!
Though I love to drink, I'll throw in a vote for not taking a drink beforehand. Something about being completely clear-headed (and a nervous wreck) was exactly what I wanted for our ceremony. But everyone responds to stress differently, so just listen to your body that day!!
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This is fun, even if you're not a creepy dude and just want a quick inspirational quote!
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/13/5807468/bell-hooks-will-text-creeps-for-you
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Argh, I was really excited when I heard there'd be Alpha access this weekend on PSN. Unfortunately I'd been out for a funeral all week, so only really occasionally glancing at E3 coverage, so it's just this morning I see that it looks like you had to sign up to receive alpha access? Is that right? What're the odds they do what the Titanfall guys did and say at some point "okay, everyone can get on now?" Gonna keep my fingers crossed. Watching a bit on Twitch and it looks pretty neat.
Alpha is just a 3-day thing that required sign-ups. I signed up and didn't receive an email about it, though I should probably check my PS4 tonight just in case. They're doing a "pre-order the game and you get into the beta" which starts July 17. Maybe they'll also do another limited sign-up towards the end of it just to stress test it?
The ads I've been seeing for Destiny look pretty terrible. All third-person shots with stiff animations. I guess it's the low bit rate of ads coupled with in-game footage that makes it look primitive, but geez it doesn't get me jazzed especially with the way everyone is talking about how Activision is putting their marketing muscle into it.
Mington, let us know how it plays! Is it just a sleeker Borderlands?
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Adzu looked exactly like an Underwater Journey, and then I find out it's being made by some ex-Journey people. I love the setting, but all of the little vignettes had such specific camera angles, makes me wonder how linear it's going to be. Also given Flower/Journey's heavy-handedness with themes, here's hoping they're crafting something a bit more understated.
I loved how rough No Man's Guy looked. Maybe it was the quality of the video, but the animations were all a bit stiff, the textures on the outer space stuff we pretty blah, and you can see the mountains being drawn in the first time the ship leaves the planet. The graphical roughness of the demo actually made it all more believable. I got more excited for it because it felt like Hello Games were actually showing us what they've got. I don't love not knowing what we're actually going to do, though. Hopefully they talk more about that as the show goes on.
Excited to have a reason to play through Grim Fandango!
Not really psyched by much more than that, though. Was surprised (and personally disappointed) to see so much co-op.
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Two questions.
Not gross: Shoes on or off while in the house? Includes guests coming over or you being a guest in someone else's house.
Gross: Is peeing in the shower while actively taking a shower acceptable?
I'm a shoes off person for my house. I ask people who come over to take their shoes off as well. Only people I don't ask to do that are people doing us services like landlord or plumber, etc. If I go to someone else's house, though, I just ask if they want my shoes off. If they're fine with shoes on then I leave them on. I don't get anxious about cleanliness, thankfully, but I just know that living in a city means I step in all kinds of stuff all day, and I like to sit on the floor of my apartment in my undies.
I have a hair-catcher on the drain, so it would make the daily cleaning of that a bit more gross if it's got a bit of urine residue on it. I don't know of any health concerns, so I wouldn't have a problem with it otherwise.
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Kinda curious what Nintendo'll do. It might be boring, but every now then they have the capacity to charm & delight in the most surprising manner. Let's hope this is another one of those years. They need it, too!
DLC for MK8, featuring more stares and glares.
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Not much of a fan of gangsta rap, but Madlib makes this album. Not that Gibbs isn't good, but eh, not really into lyrics that talk about the thug life. Freddie makes it bearable and puts more soul into his lyrics than other gangsta rappers these days, imo. But damn, that fucking beat. Madlib straight up owns this album.
Spotify has just the beats for the full album....
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After giving up on Don't Starve, I finally got around to playing Minecraft for the first time. Bought two accounts for my wife and I, and we loved it. We got lost a lot in the beginning, and spent a multi-day (irl) epic journey of trying to find each other again (she made the mistake of making a bed way away from home and we didn't realize that all she needed to do was destroy her bed and die to go back to the original spawn point). It was so exciting when we found each other, though I ended up accidentally killing her digging a shelter on the way back - a bit of an Orpheus situation!! Though that was fun, we also spent a lot of time wondering where the rest of the game was. We'd been keeping ourselves from reading wikis as much as possible and we wandered around a lot wondering what to do next. We'd find some crazy resources, but have no clue what to do with them. As soon as we opened the wiki floodgates, the game opened up immensely! Suddenly we had all sorts of things to do! We'd find a singular, new object and instead of hoarding it away hoping to unlock the mystery of the object through happenstance, we'd just look it up. And we're having fun still!
So now I'm back at Don't Starve in windowed mode and I have the wiki up at all times. I had never been able to make to winter before, but now I'm through my first and have gotten to Day 55. And it's been a lot more fun! Hooray for knowledge.
Beefalos poop in their sleep fyi
There are brief moments of feeling like I'm on top of all my supplies, and those are actually the worst moments of the game for me. I have no idea what to do next. I keep building new machines to build new things, but I still find it hard to keep on top of why I should build certain objects. Or, for instance, getting a clear sense of a tech tree. I get a new, rare resource, so I look up its use. The wiki then goes on to describe, "You combine this with the object you get when you do this specific thing to this rare creature, which when combined makes a new tool that you use in this very specific instance." (If it seems unclear, that's exactly what my brain does when I read some of these item descriptions).
But. Then I go, "oh shit!" I'm out of brush or twigs or logs or food. And then some dogs attack. And then one explodes on my fertilized crop of brush. And I completely forget all about finding some new thing to do.
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Life
is
Good.
®
On jeeps drives me batty!
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Has anyone mentioned how good the challenge rooms are? A lot of the ways abilities can combo together are never told explicitly, but a lot of the challenge rooms give you a certain set of abilities and require you to complete a task, and in order to you often need to figure out how to combo them together, which can get really interesting. Especially when you start using Get() in conjunction (not necessarily combination) with other things.
I enjoyed the challenge rooms quite a bit! I was glad that they gated them, otherwise I would have completely paused the narrative in order to get through each of them all at once. They're all fun, too! Survive, beat the timer, change your build per round. A lot of games make the challenge rooms feel prescriptive (turning an action game into a mechanical puzzle game), but Transistor somehow made me learn new combos while still feeling like I had room to play around.
Anyone do a build that didn't rely on Jaunt()? I loved attaching the Corruption function to it, so every time I dashed she'd shoot out little enemy-seeking bullets. Couldn't live without it.
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There's no reason that the landscape inside the Transistor couldn't be shaped in the same way that I assumed Cloudbank was. There's basically two people that had a hand in making the Transistor as it is now, so it makes sense that the inside of it would reflect both of them.
As for your additional questions, I assumed that all of Cloudbank is inside one ultra-computer, thus it wouldn't be a firewall as such, but some sort of wierd internal security measure. Maybe gates that represent getting admin access to the system? Since the Transistor has USB prongs on it, I think the socket is simply a USB plug of sorts, plugging a controler into a system to change the settings (and stop the process) much as you would a keyboard or Xbox controller.
As I've ruminated on it more, I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the specifics aren't as important as the overall concept. Oh, that and the fact that Red is crazy selfish in killing herself rather than rebuilding the world.
Edit: Apologies if my brief inability with BBCode spoiled anything for anyone.
So to expound on your thought that her not rebuilding Cloudbank is selfish (thanks for keeping it at that, as it allowed my thoughts to spiral out a bit):
One of the Camerata obliquely mentions being brought into the Transistor is a permanent thing. As if otherwise disconnecting from Cloudbank is not permanent. All of the people that became functions are super users; the best of the best Level 80 WoW raiders that spend as much time in the game as they possibly can. In Cloudbank you never have to disconnect, and the power users never do (and maybe a good bunch of the common citizens, too). Though if you disconnect from Cloudbank having been subsumed by the Transistor, there’s no way back in. You can look at it as a bit of hacking. Someone logging into your WoW account and stealing your fully leveled character from you for their own gains.
This makes it seem that Transistor (the game) is playing with the idea of taking a piece of interactive art seriously. We see the world only through the eyes of those who take Cloudbank as their reality. The viewpoint of the common citizen is only expressed through the majority or through news reports. So we, the player, feel the same confusing viewpoint that the power users feel. Cloudbank is the only world that matters. And as you noted, Red subverts that idea by being selfish. Cloudbank is now just a broken piece of software that no one knows how to reprogram manually on the outside.
Which leads to: Developers have long left this project, as whatever commands the process are given are executed without additional coding. DLC is immediate as long as they get enough votes. Cloudbank has now been around for long enough that no one remembers how it was all started. Maybe in some ways Cloudbank was originally developed and sold as a truly free and democratic society.
One thing I'd like to pay more attention to in Recursion: the language of the reporter. Is she talking about this like when an MMO gets shut down? You know that empty-hearted feeling you get when you really, truly connect with a world of fiction, and then that world ends? It usually happens to me with books. Or the loss you feel all day when you wake out of a particularly vibrant and lovely dream? Curious to see if that’s what the language is like.
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And an answer to one of my earlier questions: A thread on Reditt posits the idea that the Spines are large Processes. In order to wipe the entire system clean, there have to be larger beings doing the heavy lifting. They make the Transistor slow and glitchy by being near, much the same way running a really process-heavy application slows down and heats up a computer. That makes sense enough for me!
btw, I liked Transistor.
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Double post: I am on the verge of being done with Game of Thrones.
This entire season so far has been bleak and joyless. GoT was always cruel, but also had enough moments of levity (the enjoyment of seeing Tyrion do his thing) or wonder (Daenarys in Qarth comes to mind) to balance things out. Season 4 has been one horror after the other. One rape after the other. Exploitative torture & a rape factory. And now they've killed off the one character that was actually a bit of fun this year, a ray of sunshine in the sooted chimney; Oberyn. His truly heinous death at the hands of the Tower has left me sickened, and more than a bit tired. If it doesn't regain any sense of joy or wonder, not a redeeming spark, I might be done with the whole thing.
I've been feeling equally down on GoT this season. Brienne and Pod in the episode before the most recent (haven't gotten to the most recent yet) reminded me of the levity and fun the show could have. I was also following this same trajectory with the books, though, finding 4 and 5 to be a steady descent into skimming, so I'm not surprised. I've decided not to continue with the books, but to finish out the show, especially now that the show is just starting to give us glimpses of things that haven't been written.
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I was always pretty sure that final fight was inside the Transistor though, especially given that the traces that were in the transistor for the functions were in the mounds where the fight was
Though I like Dewar's interpretation, I think the monolog pre-fight points that they're the Transistor, too. Royce says "It's just, well, someone's going to have to rebuild. But we flew a little close to the flame there so... Now... We're here not there. We're stuck. And unfortunately the only way back I'm aware of, is, well... Unpleasant." Also I didn't notice this when fighting, but when they go into planning phase you can see the outlines of "beings" inside the pylons.
But of course they could just be in some other space that is neither Cloudbank, nor the Transistor, but I'm having trouble finding a link to some other place that isn't those two.
More questions: Anyone know comp sci in such a way to make sense of the space Red plugs the transistor into? Is that some sort of terminal? Some sort of primary code base that can function without the rest of the program? I'm guessing the red airlocks could be firewalls?
General Video Game Deals Thread
in Video Gaming
Posted
Only thing I'm tempted by in today's Steam Summer Sale is Witcher 2. Anyone know if they continued with the whole Geralt sleeps with a woman and gets her soft-core porn trading card thing from Witcher 1? That was the worst.