BusbyBerkeley

This podcast episode sold me on it. GTA talk starts around minute 12. I've essentially only been playing the online with a few buddies. It's fucking great, but I've not had a chance to do the heists yet. The single player is really gross trash in terms of plotting and content and stuff. Good thing you can entirely avoid it.

I started Dota on WC3 B.Net super casually then played LoL for about a year and a half until Dota 2 came out and I've been playing that with my buddies ever since. I've played about 20 something games of HotS now and really agreed with a lot of the points brought up on the cast, but came out feeling totally different from you guys. The reason Dota is so great is because it largely ignores "good game design." HotS simplifies your in game choices moreso than LoL does, and makes actually playing feel super stale. Leveling up increases the stats of your skills, and occasionaly lets you alter them in a neat way, so it ends up being like seven choices you can make with regards to how you are going to play your hero that game. This is I think my big problem with the game. There's very little room to counter an enemy after team selection, and you can't counterpick heroes because your team is already selected so you can just get stuck with a team composition that fails vs the enemy. I've not encountered this though, because the heroes rarely feel super different from each other. Most of the spells look pretty cool but don't actually seem very impactful. Which is maybe tied to the fact that heroes cost money/blizzbux to unlock. They can't really balance the heroes around each other because people don't have access to them all. LoL has this same problem and it ends up making a bunch of heroes feel really same-y. I could go on and on about tweaks simplifying things and making them less engaging (bushes vs trees for juking!) but it's probably not that interesting unless you're already into Dota. I'm admittedly pretty steeped in the genre so my complaints might not matter at all to a person who hasn't dropped hundreds of hours into this shit. After comprehending Dota playing any other LoMa feels like dota minus everything that makes it really great.

Those new items are bonkers. Cool down reduction and magic damage life steal! Can't wait to play support this patch.

Cosigning the X-Men love. Caught that time travel one two weeks and remembered that I really liked the first couple movies. The whole mutant metaphor thing is very potent and super engaging for me, much moreso than the good/duty/honor whatever of most superhero flicks. Also I watched last years Godzilla movie and woof, that was a clunker. The main guy's name was Ford Brody, which is the only detail I remember about the character only because it's so insanely generic. It could have been taken from that MST3K bit with Butch Deadlift and all that. Give me more monster battles, you dumb movie!

I believe you can report that kind of thing to steam.

Can you join multiple crews? I just picked this up to play with my buddies and all the rockstar social stuff is confusing.

Here's a shot I took in Elite Dangerous right before I suffocated in the blackness of space. The key detail is the time my oxygen runs out and the time to the nearest space station right where my canopy is cracked. I don't know how to embed pictures on here.

I was playing with a stick + keyboard and adding a throttle with some hats on it was what pushed it over into the turbo cool zone. Having your thrusters on all usable by your thumb on the throttle is just so much fun. Also having a hat solely for looking around the cockpit is great, but still kinda clunky. Nothing an Oculus (or more realistically a Vive I guess) won't solve though.

So I've played around 15 games of this and it seems really... easy? You just always go for the objectives and push, right? I don't see any real reason to not try and constantly push lanes except for when an objective is happening. There's no farming really. Everyone has so much health as to make attacks and abilities feel really inconsequential to use. I guess I'm not really surprised they took it so far in the other direction on the DotA-LoL scale, but it doesn't seem worth it when people still whine at you in games. I want to keep coming back because of the unlocks happening all the damn time but that's a garbage reason to keep playing a game. Is there some level of strategy I'm just not seeing at all?

It looks like domain squatting, which can range from a dumb prank to someone leveraging a payout. Not good for a reputable brand to deal with. I don't know that the dude should be fired or that it gives bait to gamergate people, but it's definitely not nothing at all.

RE: that New Vegas bit

Yeah that seems really stupid and unprofessional. I don't read Polygon, but that feels like something some smaller site would try to pull in like 2006 or something. It's not a BIG DEAL but it's also not a "pfft whatever" deal. It's definitely a thing that makes Polygon as a whole look really juvenile and dumb. You can say that a thing is bad and not be a rabid misogynist conspiracy theorist.

I'll take a key off your hands if you've still got a spare.

I've already jumped into the deep end. Join us. The water is so immersive now.

Aw man. There's not gonna be any way to get it on my steam account short of buying it again, huh?

Turns out I'm a fool and I meant to say Unified Remote Pro. It lets you control a PC on your WiFi network. Great for watching movies and junk in bed. Also I use Pocket Casts and its great.

Did they rejigger the NPC bounty values recently? I used to get around 15k for getting a bounty in resource extraction points, but now i'm getting closer to 100k per. I got a nicer Kill Warrant Scanner and hit a 238k bounty tonight. It's a lot of fun practicing my combat skills and it's super safe as long as you engage with a group of NPC officers. I got half a million credits just clearing out a few ships tonight. SO MUCH MONEY.

Hoplite is well worth paying for the premium version. Best game on android, bar none. I also played a lot of Galaxy Trucker and Pixel Dungeon. As for general paid apps, I really love Universal Remote Pro and Nova Launcher.

Hey guys, disregard my last post, I'm a dumb idiot who downloaded the software but not the drivers and that's why it wasn't working. This is the only HOTAS setup I've used but holy shit does the game feel so fucking rad with switches and buttons and knobs and not touching my keyboard at all save for comms and system lookup. I'll have to rebind some stuff from the defaults but good lord this is amazing. The throttle still needs you to lossen it up a bit beforehand but after that it's golden. the stick feels great and I still need to move my hand to hit all the buttons, but its not that big of a deal because you don't really need to hit all the buttons at once. The POV hat in particular is super handy. I'd recommend you try to find a place to test drive it before dropping the cash, or maybe just go for the X52 unless you really want the cooler switches like I did. I'm apparently lucky in getting a pre-greased stick, though I don't know if they are all like that and it was just a bad first batch or what. It helps that the first thing I did after I got acclimated to the new setup was secure a 72k bounty on an Asp in a REP. Finally got my eagle kitted out a bit! This game owns.

Is this open for the public yet, or do you still need an invite? If so, anyone have a US invite to give to me?

Even still, online writers aren't your buddies. That is a really, deeply depressing post. Holy fuck.

Got my X55 the other day. haven't had a chance to configure it fully yet, but it does feel rather light for how cool it looks. the switches are really cool, and the throttle feels nice, though it is stiff until you jiggle it up and down a few times. The joystick itself is fuckoff huge and I have to move my hand from the base to comfortably reach the top button and hat switch. These are pretty minor annoyances though. I didn't have time to set all my bindings so i had to use some of my old setting to navigate the galactic map and stuff, but everything seems to work alright and it's really fun to use. It's MASSIVE though, and a lot of the button placement on the throttle is really close together. all the knobs and switches on the right side of it are really cramped. Usable, sure, but still cramped for how giant this thing is. The software from the saitek website to configure it is fucking awful though. It straight up doesn't work for me at all. I don't know if there are workarounds or third party solutions or if it will be updated, but it's really bad. Still trying to figure out how to turn off the lights. I'll try to see if I can get everything going smoothly tomorrow. It feels fucking GREAT to throttle up on this thing though. Holy shit.

Ooh, nice get!

Only had enough time to make it to the first town with the tree last night. Setting is pretty interesting so far. What kind of characters are you all running? I made a nature godlike ranger with a bear summon. Need to recruit some wizards and a rogue asap.

Aigh! I'm at work for so many more hours!