Vasari

I loved this game, and almost immediately fell off of it. There's a pretty high skill ceiling to it and it doesn't mess around with difficulty, which might've driven alot of people away. It takes time to learn but god, is it fun!

It's absolutely good business, I don't have a problem with them building a program to bring new players in. That's a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do, and I hope it works out. And sure, people on reddit are getting overdramatic about the whole thing, but they're getting that way because they're the players who actually care about the game and they've had nothing new this month except for some bugfixes. I totally understand why Bungie is making new content to attract new players, but that content doesn't apply to the players who are here right now, who are the ones who care the most about new content. Between refer-a-friend and cosmetic microtransactions, Bungie is clearly trying to supplement their income while they work on their next big release, but that model feels shitty to the people who are starving for new content right now.

I think a new quest still feels important because there are so few in the game as of now, and we haven't had any indication that they'll be added with any regularity. From the sounds of the Kotaku article, Destiny isn't getting another major content update like it did previously. Maybe we'll be surprised at PSX next week, but the promise of the Live team was that they'd provide incremental content updates throughout the year. Until we get those regular updates I wouldn't blame anyone for being cynical about Bungie's focus on expanding sources of income.

With all my heart I love Kentucky Route Zero. I can't wait to play another episode.

Is it too late to set the Idle Thumbs Winter Gamejam in the Fallout 4 pipboy?

I got my first real job three months ago. I was absolutely terrified but it could not have gone better. I'm testing software with a bunch of cool people, I've learned so much about the industry in a great professional environment, and for the first time in my life I'm able to spend money without feeling immediately guilty about it. We released a new version of an app today so my name now appears in the credits of something! My contract also got extended another three months and they had nothing but good feedback abou my work, so I'm feeling really positive and I know that wherever I end up working next I'll feel a hundred times more confident about applying.

So I don't think I'm too far in but I have some questions about the main story from beyond Goodneighbour.

I just met the leader of the Brotherhood of Steel. I told him I thought the Brotherhood were assholes who didn't really care about the Commonwealth. He promoted me to Knight and gave me a suit of power armour. I like having the armour available early on, it makes sense as a vehicle that you can pull out every now and then. But the way they throw it at you seems like they want the player to feel powerful as soon as possible, which is an awkward fit in an RPG (Where you become powerful by engaging with the game systems and building your character up).

Kudos to you for sticking with Duke Nukem as long as you did, that's definitely a game that doesn't hold up to modern design conventions. I feel like the early chapters are interesting because they mimic real world environments, but they drop that so quickly that the rest of the game becomes the usual early-nineties shooter environments that are completely meaningless. After reading this I'm really in the mood to go back to Marathon though. Or Marathon 2. They definitely had archaic level design (especially M1) but I loved the storytelling in those games. In fact I might make a separate thread for those games because there's something really special in their madness.

WRT the Fallout setting, I've always thought of it as a representation of the brightest hopes and worst fears of 1950s America's vision of the future. On one hand, nuclear power was supposed to revolutionise life and make science fiction a reality. You'd have nuclear powered cars and robot servants in every home, but all that optimism about the American Dream in the 50's came with the caveat that at any moment it could be instantly destroyed. The Fallout setting is about both of those things coming true.

Number inflation caused some issues for World of Warcraft, to the point where they implemented the Stat Squish to reduce the numbers on everything.

I watched an episode of TNG recently where the Enterprise rescued two Ferengi whose ship was about to explode. What struck me was how they've rescued these two people on the brink of death, but they immediately raise questions about the security of the ship and how this might be a dastardly trap to steal technology from the federation. Riker is particularly bad about it; as soon as the two Ferengi are on board he says "Find quarters for the Ferengi. Not near my quarters." At that point I started mentally replacing the word "Ferengi" with "Pakistani" and it made everyone on the Enterprise seem like real fucking assholes. On that note, did anyone else play Binary Domain? I thought that game had a really interesting representation of prejudice. Brendan Keogh wrote some really good articles on that game; I'm about to go to bed but I'll look them up tomorrow.

As I recall, Heavies unlock a perk that lets them do a ton of damage to robotic enemies. That's what got me through; that perk lets you one-shot all but the toughest robots.

It's a shame that voice-based game mechanics can be circumvented like that. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory had a feature in co-op play where talking over the microphone also created sound ingame, so if an enemy was near you had to whisper to your coop buddy, and if you were sneaking up right behind him you couldn't speak at all or he'd notice you. Now that I think about it, that Steel Battalion multiplayer game had voice chat stuff too. If you had a certain piece of equipment on your mech, you could listen in to the other team's voice chat and hear what they were planning. It was even cooler because it required physically turning a knob to the correct radio frequency. I think to talk to other teammates you had to turn the knob to their channel, so you only could only talk to one other person at a time. If someone wanted to listen to you they had to find which channel currently had people talking. My memory is fuzzy though, I might be wrong about some of that.

Jeff Goldblum is starring in a series of adverts in the UK where he shows up to tell people not to be disappointed about things. It's... You should watch it and see for yourself. Oh gosh, I didn't even realise, there's an entire video of outtakes!

For some reason the Fallout hype has been nowhere near the level of interest I've had in other Bethesda games. It was only yesterday that thought to myself "Oh right, that Fallout game is about to come out." It's not like I'm expecting it to be bad but it's weird that this is a game I should be excited for that's just crept up on me. This is something I never thought I'd say, but I wish the marketing for this game was more obvious!

I've always wished that instead of Star Wars, the science fiction film that became a timeless phenomenon was The Fifth Element. What a weird world that would be!

This is my favourite version I guess Nick was confused and had combined that in his head with this mod that turns all the spiders into Spiderman

I was on mobile. I'm only confused because it's seems like a popular service and I can't believe that in 2015 this is the best we can do in terms of listening to music.

I tried Spotify for the first time today and I'm not sure I understand the point. I wanted to listen to Run The Jewels 2, so I searched for that. It gave me a playlist that had some of the songs from that album, and some other RTJ songs, and some adverts, and then after a while it wouldn't let me listen to any more. Are you just supposed to hope it gives you what you actually want to listen to?

I didn't know there was another jam planned until I heard it on the podcast today. I was in the middle of my dissertation for the last one and I was really gutted that I couldn't take part. I'm definitely in for it this time around!

I haven't managed to finish a run of this yet, like Dewar I think the difficulty can really spike if you're in a tough spot. But good god, the look and sound of this game is just phenomenal. It's like John Carpenter's Desert Strike. I've spent all day at work listening to the soundtrack. Right now the gameplay feels a little bare and there's obviously a long way to go with it, but I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Please stop saying the word "Daddy"

Man, the Unlimited Shadowshot exploit is ludicrous. It's all over the Crucible right now, I don't blame them for cancelling Trials of Osiris this week.