Vasari

I played this at Rezzed and I'm so excited for it to come out now. They definitely like to throw you into bigger crowds of enemies though. I was luring guys out one or two at a time and waiting for patrols to move around, but I get the feeling I was probably supposed to be able to take five or so guys on at once. I'll be interested to see how the full game presents it.

Rezzed was great! I can't even remember all the cool stuff I saw there so I'll just list some cool games: Aviary Attorney: Phoenix Wright with fancy French birds. Really well written and a gorgeous art style, the way they make it is like the webcomic Wondermark where everything is repurposed art from a 19th century illustrator. Line Wobbler: A game from the train jam made with Arduino. It's a 1D dungeon crawler that takes place on an LED strip. You use a springy paddle to move back and forth, attacking enemies and avoiding lava. It's not the kind of thing that could show up on steam but if you ever get a chance to see it in person it's really cool. Monstrum: I'm a bit biased since the devs went to my university, but I genuinely really like this game. It's a first person horror game on a procedurally generated cargo ship where one of three monsters hunts you as you try to repair an escape route. It looks really nice and has stuff like traps and loads of items to interact with, which makes it more interesting than stuff like Outlast where you just had to run and/or hide from everything. Radial G: I loved this because it reminded me so much of Wipeout. It's a gorgeous racing game with cool floating racecars (Like Wipeout) and an awesome sound track (Like Wipeout). Bloodborne: I'm a big Dark Souls guy so I was really into this. I love what they've done with the combat and the aesthetic. Also it only took me four tries to beat the demo, what now motherfuckers Gunsport: I'd never heard of this one before but it's the kind of game I love. It's like volleyball + Windjammers but all the players shoot the ball with guns. It sounds dumb but it plays really well and the art style makes it look like Street Fighter 2. I unfortunately didn't get a chance to sit and play Her Story or Beacon I also got a free hotline miami tshirt at the loading bar and then left it behind, which I'm really upset about. It was a fantastic show though.

You should definitely not play XCOM while drunk. That bottle of whisky in the commander's drawer cost us the membership of two countries and a satellite array over Canada.

Yeah, it definitely comes up in other games, I guess the problem here is that Destiny is an action game and it leaves alot more room for weird pathing or AI exploits. I wish they were more aggressive with patching that stuff out.

A Bungie dev gave a talk at GDC where he explained the "loot cave" situation. The part that stuck out to me was that he explained how the loot cave wasn't actually a good way of getting rewards, it was just an easier way than playing the game properly. The lesson is that Destiny players care far more about effort than about actual reward or enjoyment, and it's making raids incredibly frustrating because everybody wants to use whatever exploits they can instead of just playing normally. Tonight I was doing a raid encounter that involves the team crossing a bridge. Three players have to stand in certain positions to hold open the bridge, and then one player can cross at a time if they're holding a sword. So everyone stands in position, we kill the enemy who drops the sword, one player goes across, and we repeat that until three players have crossed. Then they can hold the bridge open from the other side, and the remaining three can cross. It's not too hard to pull off. But people are constantly finding ways to "cheese" this encounter. Technically what ends the encounter is killing the boss who spawns once all players have crossed, so through some clever manipulation of the scripting we used a different method. We opened the bridge, I took the sword and crossed, then they instructed me to hide in a corner where none of the enemies could reach me, and then everyone else killed themselves. Since the only living player was on the other side of the bridge, that made the boss spawn. Then someone self-revived, brought everyone else back, and they killed the boss while I crouched behind a vase. And it was fucking boring. These raids are the best part of Destiny and nobody wants to actually play them properly. If we'd just done it like normal it'd have taken the same amount of time and we would've had way more fun doing it. It also might make these people not terrible at the game, because the final boss of the raid took 4 tries since if anything went wrong nobody knew how to handle it. One of the things the last boss does it summon a giant orb in the sky whenever a player dies. If the orb doesn't get destroyed then it wipes the group and we have to start the fight again. We died twice to it because people don't know how to react when someone dies and start asking if we should just let the group wipe, instead of just shooting the massive orb that takes up 80% of the screen. It's not hard to recover from something like a player dying or missing a round of damage to the boss, but if things don't go perfectly then people get confused and assume we've lost the fight. It really bums me out because the raids are so much fun if people are playing it fairly and communicating, but it's just not fun when people aren't even trying to enjoy it.

Ireland dun goofed!

I'm going to be at Rezzed this year! Does anyone know if RPS are doing their meetup like last year?

I put the word "disrupt" into my dissertation proposal because I wanted to sound clever, then my supervisor asked me "what exactly are you disrupting?" and I didn't have an answer.

Haha, alright, cool! I just want to make sure I'm not way off base, I get most of my news through twitter these days.

Maybe that's a dumb way of putting it since I'm from Scotland and I've never been anywhere near the west coast of the US, but it seems like there's a huge tech culture there of awful silicon valley journalist types who get all glassy-eyed and start writing thinkpieces about how Elon Musk should be president whenever a company like apple has a conference to announce their new stuff.

Oh god, Twitter has been unbearable today. People are either loudly proclaiming how much they don't like Apple and picking apart everything that's wrong with whatever they do, or they're being San Francisco as Fuck and fetishising laptops. I think the worst thing about owning a macbook is that as soon as I pull that thing out in public, I instantly know what everybody in the room thinks of apple products.

I'd love to do this, but I'll probably be too busy to take part in any meaningful way. So how about we make this a big success so we do more of them in the future?

I was just watching an Aziz Ansari standup on Netflix, and at one point he did a joke about playing Halo with his cousin that went "Cause every time the board starts he grabs the rocket launcher and kills everyone", and I realised that Aziz Ansari is the kind of person who calls multiplayer levels in video games "boards." Why do people call them that? Maps, levels and stages I understand, but board is a weird term to apply to it. I've never seen an actual Video game use the word "board" to describe a level outside of something like maybe Mario Party, which makes sense because it's specifically based on boardgaming. It's a weird term to use and I can't get over it! I want to meet Aziz Ansari and ask him what the deal is.

I've been in the mood for Mànran tonight. Gaelic folk rock!

I remember being really bummed out that my Buzz Lightyear toy didn't have Karate Chop Action.

Awesome, well hit me up if you ever see me online.

Wow, that's ridiculously similar. Oddly enough, Lucas Pope also made a game about running a newspaper and publishing articles to either support a government or a revolution. The Republia Times.

I know it's a long shot since the networking thread has been dead for months, but does anybody still play Destiny? It's one of the only games I have time to play anymore, hit me up if you ever want to do weeklies or raids or whatever. PSN: Wracketeer

Oh thank god, not knowing what the thread title meant was really bugging me.

My PSN name is Wracketeer. Keep SUPER EARTH free.

The battery life on the PS4 controller is stupidly short, it's definitely worth getting a longer charging cable.

Sweet! I'm Wracketeer, add me on PSN if you want to play. e: That goes for anyone else who wants to play stuff tonight!

I played Helldivers at Rezzed last year and it was hilarious. If it's out tonight we should organise some groups here to play it.