Vasari

I picked this up recently and I'm having trouble getting started. Like most people have said, I'm not quite sure what to do. I bought a new ship that's supposed to be more combat focused but I'm still getting wrecked in fights. I can't tell if anyone I've encountered is a player or an NPC, which is pretty confusing. Should I just run cargo bounties until I can buy better stuff? Also I'd really appreciate any tips on judging when you should decelerate when supercruising to a destination. I overshoot every time!

I came across this awesome flowchart that Dontnod released. It shows all the different ways the conversation with Frank in episode 4 can go. Spoilers obviously, but it's really cool to see the different ways it can play out! http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Life-Is-Strange-Frank-flowchart.jpg

People datamined a bunch more stuff related to "The Dawning", I wonder if any of that is coming this month?

Oh my god, is GG trying to absolve Mark Kern of Firefall being a shitty game by blaming it on SJWs? Like, is that actually what he's doing there? e: Oh, my bad, that's Mark Kern's twitter. Still, is he really trying to pin it on SJWs? Cause the problem with that game is not that the engineer wears trousers.

As you can probably tell, I think DS9 has some standout characters.

I laughed so hard at that. I finished MGS5 a few nights ago and still don't know what Snake's name is supposed to mean.

What really gets my goat is that you all refuse to call it the Mega Drive.

This face is probably all you need to know about New Star Trek.

I started playing tonight on the PC since the podcast got me in the mood, and I've found the PS4 controller to be far better than the Xbox gamepad. I haven't used a steam controller, but if you have the option I'd recommend trying one of those alternatives.

I think right now she's covering the entire story, and there's alot of it to go through so she's reporting each step in detail. The scepticism is going to come later, since the only questions are around the beginning, when he was captured.

That Fiasco game was just the best. I was nearly in tears at the security gate part.

Helldivers went under the radar for alot of people when it came out on PS4. It's a shame because that game is brilliant fun. The Magicka DNA is definitely present; I think what Chris was going to say before he got side-tracked by Super Earth is that the stratagems work like Magicka spells where you input a combination of buttons on the D-Pad to call in different abilties, for example a reinforcement drop to bring back dead players is "Up Down Left Right Up". This is also how you activate objectives like oil drills, and just like in Magicka it's very easy to get these combinations wrong in the heat of battle. The other point about Helldivers is that EVERYTHING has the potential for friendly fire. For example, the drop pods you can call in to reinforce or resupply can land on top of a player. The mech you can call in and pilot will squish any friendly players that get too close. The automated turret that targets enemies doesn't care if a player is standing in its line of fire. And the nuke you use to destroy enemy nests (called the Hellbomb) has to be activated manually, has a five second detonation timer, and sprinting out of the blast radius takes about four seconds. Since all four players can call reinforcements on a personal 30-second cooldown, the game is happy to let you die over and over again because it's simple enough to have another player bring you back. That ends up being the reason that singleplayer is so dull; playing alone just gives you one automatic reinforcement, but the thrill of the game comes from four idiots all trying to do their cool thing at the same time and inadvertently blowing each other up. Which come to think of it, is the same elevator pitch for Magicka. I don't know how the population is on PS4 anymore, but I imagine it's had the same trouble as any downloadable console game that relies on matchmaking, so I hope it finds a second wind on the PC.

And watch out for that new Mad Max, it's turning innocent men into feminists! If only those SJWs understood the influencing power of media, right?

I'm really glad to see people enjoying Dead Money! It caught alot of flak when it first came out for taking away your inventory (You'll notice none of the later DLCs do that) and the amount of traps/difficulty in general, but it's easily my favourite too. I really liked being forced to scavenge for supplies and conserve ammo, and the characters are all so well written. The scope of the setting is small enough that there's a fantastic amount of detail to everything and it always ties back to their theme.

I haven't finished yet, but I just got to a point that's presumably near the end. Oh boy, if you're at the point where you have to do something that looks like it leads to the endgame, don't wait until you're ready, just go for it. It's not the end, you can come back whenever you need to, and that place has SO MUCH ALUMINIUM.

Yes! I forgot to mention how glad I was to hear someone talk about The Darkness, because I adore that game. It's a noir-horror nightmare made by the people who did the Riddick games. The atmosphere is absolutely brilliant from start to finish; it doesn't really give you a reason to explore but it's an open world game where all the environments join together, which means you spend a good amount of time just wandering through empty New York streets, and you get between locations by using the subway trains. Those environments are also used for combat and sections of story exposition, and I really loved how a single location would switch between gameplay, dialogue and empty silence throughout the course of the game. If you've never played The Darkness you should definitely pick it up. There was a sequel made by a different studio that I don't think is worth playing. It's one of those situations where it seems like the new devs didn't understand what made the original so great, so they doubled down on the comic book stuff and made it cel-shaded and really actiony and gratuitous (Not that the first game isn't violent, but it's violence that fits the bleak context). Plus the first one ends so well that there was never a need for a sequel, and they had to do some weird retcons to justify it. Oh boy, and speaking of sadgames, I was at one of the worst points of my depression when Hotline Miami came out. Now there's a game you shouldn't play if you have a warped sense of reality.

I'm going to have to go to bat for spoiler warnings. I completely understand that people should be able to freely talk about a piece of fiction, and I'm not arguing that the discussion is a problem. But I think the value of that discussion is completely lost on someone who hasn't experienced it for themselves. If you want to tell me how amazing some film is because of what happens at the end and I haven't seen it, we're having a completely one-sided conversation because I have no perspective of my own to bring, and even if I go ahead and watch it afterwards I'm doing so with your perspective in mind instead of forming my own. I also completely disagree with the idea that a work of fiction that can be "ruined" by having a key point told to you in advance was never good to begin with. Being told or reading key plot points is a poor substitute for experiencing the fiction the way the author intended. To me it comes across as a position of arrogance (And I mean that in a general sense, I'm not accusing anyone of being arrogant) to say "I played this game and I enjoyed it so I want to talk about it, but I personally don't think it matters to your enjoyment if I tell you what happens in it." I don't think someone else can tell you how you're going to enjoy something. What I do agree on is that we definitely need to be better at talking about fiction in terms other than big shocking moments. I've had the opposite problem of a spoiler with Undertale since everyone talking about that game says "IT'S SO GOOD YOU NEED TO PLAY IT BUTICANTTELLYOUWHY". I'm finding it a bit underwhelming so far because the only expectations I've had going in were that it was literally the best game ever (Suck it, Ocarina of Time.) I think it's a problem of media literacy that people don't know how to critically praise a game in a way that doesn't hinge on reciting the best moments.

I think we have to find a clear boundary between tacos, enchiladas, burritos and fajitas. Tacos don't get to be good by pretending to be a different kind of food. More importantly, I can't BELIEVE what Jade Raymond did at the Game Awards

I've never understood all the love for The Incredibles. Is it the superhero thing? It seems like it's only good if you look at it through the lens of superheroes being popular. The Incredibles is Cars-tier as far as I'm concerned.

I've had to hide my disgust of tacos for so long. You don't know how much it means to hear you say that.

I'm going to take a controversial stance: Fuck Tacos. Seriously, what a crappy eating experience! Who invented a food with the opposite shape than the shape of your mouth? Who looked at burritos and said "What if it was smaller and shittier?"

Bungie just secretly made a Wipeout game, I am SO excited.

Man, I get all kinds of anxiety even hearing about Cibele. A game about teenage chatlogs and having your first real relationship through an MMO hits way too close to home! I don't think I can handle how real that is. I wish I could remember all the weird ways I played games when I was younger. I definitely recall playing loads of TDM botmatches on Quake 3 for the Dreamcast and coming up with an overarching narrative of red vs blue. What the whole conversation most reminded me of was that my friends and I would do a sort of Abe's Oddysee roleplay on the playground at school when we were about seven years old. Most people would take on the role of mudokons, pretending to mine for bones like in the second game and occasionally trying to organise a rebellion or just take out a guard. A few people would be slig guards who would watch us and keep us in line by pretending to whack us with imaginary guns. In fact alot of the playing we did revolved around roleplaying whatever video games we were into at the time.

I'd hesitate to even call some of the stuff in Bethesda games "bugs". They're more like quirks of the engine and scope of the game that come together in unexpected and potentially frustrating ways. Like the time Piper was standing perfectly inside a corn stalk so that I couldn't talk to her from any angle.

I'm not sure how many choices carry over, but some certainly do. The name of your dog is an obvious one.