Vasari

For real, the best Video game/rap mashup is the Mashtion EP. It's Bastion rap remixes. https://soundcloud.com/buffwalrus/sets/mashtion-ep

I think the solution is that you don't have to have every player in the game hearing the same story. For example, the first mission in the game has the rebels break into a corporation refuelling facility to refuel their spaceships. Rebel players are capturing points to siphon fuel, while corporation players are capturing points to activate AA guns to shoot the ships down. But no matter what team wins, the match ends with the rebels refuelling their ships and escaping. All they need to do to fix that is to tell me, as a corporation player, that we blew up their ships and we're now winning the war. It doesn't matter to any other player what dialogue I get, since they can have their own dialogue. That means that another player in that game might be at a totally different point in the story where they're trying to accomplish a totally different objective, even though we're playing the same map and mode (Or they might not even be playing story mode, they might just be in multiplayer matchmaking). With that approach there are a huge number of possibilities for how the story could be told. That's not even getting into sending the player to a different level based on what happened in the last mission i.e. If you won the match you play CTF on map A, and if you lost you play deathmatch on map B.

It wasn't just the lack of singleplayer that frustrated me with Titanfall, it was that their concept of "campaign multiplayer" was so barebones. The campaign randomly assigned you to one faction that you were stuck with for the duration of the story, and you had to play the maps in order. Ingame, the only difference was that the story played out in little video clips in the corner of your screen. I was assigned to the evil corporation's team, and we proceeded to win every match. But the story was all about the rebels fighting back and beating the corporation, so every mission ended with "Good job! But turns out the rebels won anyway." I felt like a really competent henchman working for an inept cartoon villain. But man, I can't help getting excited about the possibility of campaign multiplayer being great. There are so many things they could do to make it really cool and rewarding. If the gameplay is just regular multiplayer, why not have a branching narrative that each player sees differently? Or have the players be actual characters in the story instead of them only existing in your HUD? I hope their response to the first game's campaign is to be ten times more ambitious about it because there's something potentially great about the concept.

Woohoo! Third time's a charm, I'm actually going to make something for this one!

I'm still confused about this one. Didn't they turn it into a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena?

I'm level 24 now and rapidly losing patience with this game.The missions are really fun, but there's so much crap between the missions that I'm nearly ready to give up before the endgame. After completing a mission you need to be at least one level higher for the next mission. And that means spending half an hour doing side missions and encounters which are the same crappy repeated objectives in every zone (and don't even think about doing side missons/encounters from previous zones, they don't give enough experience anymore to matter!). Once you've done enough side content, you can trudge your way out to the next safehouse to unlock the travel point and hear some terrible dialogue from the side mission giver in that area. Imagine if you couldn't go directly to the next story mission in Destiny without doing a bunch of patrols first? It's really frustrating that there's so much Ubisoft Open World Design between the best parts of this game.

I just want to express how much I appreciated hearing Spaff attempt to describe The Chuckle Brothers to Americans.

Online dating is the worst. I don't know how you're supposed to use words to make a good impression of yourself but I'm awful at it.

Please play Spec Ops: The Line and have Brendan Keogh on the podcast! That game is really smart and Killing is Harmless is a brilliant piece of writing. I think Spec Ops succeeds at going beyond just criticizing the player for shooting people.

I only just realised how weird it is how the footmen in Warcraft 3 say "Don't ask, don't tell." That's a weird thing to reference in your fantasy RTS!

Chris's calamitous caper began when he cracked a caveman's cranium and bested a bewildered bear, but he was jumped by a jaguar and engaged in a joust before jumping after an aquatic artifact under the care of a crocodile that curtly chomped him until he expired it with an expert excavation, and he almost escaped until he was eviscerated by an elk.

I remember reading about how the game compared to the real Japanese legal system years ago, I recall that it's unrealistic in all the ways you'd expect but accurate in alot of ways you wouldn't expect. The system is apparently almost comically biased against the defence and if the prosecution decides to take a case to trial it's because they know they'll win it. There were some adverts in Japan for the AA games starring a famous defence attorney, who'd gained celebrity status in Japan because in his 20 or so year career he'd won three cases.

I think my soft spot is courtroom drama. Big thanks to the podcast for getting me into The Good Wife, I started watching it on Netflix and it's fantastic! More recently I've been playing Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. I'm a longtime fan of the AA games but time I played one I was 17, and coming back to it now makes me realise how ridiculous and cheesy it all is. But I still love it! It's silly in an endearing way, and I'm saying that as someone who has no interest at all in anime. Even though I now know they're using the word "Objection" totally wrong I just love the dramatic courtroom battles, and those games do such a good job with the animation and audio to make the arguments seem exciting. I got sidetracked and never got too far into it, but Aviary Attorney came out on Steam recently and it's basically an indie Ace Attorney game with fancy French animals instead of people and a Wondermark-style aesthetic of cut-outs from a 19th-century illustrator. What I played of it was really well written and I really want to get back to it this coming weekend.

I think the problem is that it wasn't just boring to run around evading enemies, it was easy. In turn-based games you tend to make your move knowing that your opponent will get a chance to strike back at you on their turn, and so you have to plan your moves accordingly. In Chess, you know that taking your opponent's piece might leave one of your pieces exposed or open up a gap in your defence, so you either make a move that doesn't leave you exposed or you make sacrificing a piece part of your larger strategy. In Transistor you don't have to account for that nearly as much because when you're not planning your turn the game moves in real time, so your only real concern is ending your turn in a position where you can start running away. To use a stupid analogy, it's like making your move in Chess, but instead of your opponent getting a turn they only get to chase you around the room for eight seconds and try to hit you with a stick.

Normally I'd get this on PC, but I have friends getting it on PS4 and the cheating stuff on PC had me a little wary, so I'm going with the console version.

I'm going to preorder this + the season pass so I can get very mad when it doesn't live up to my expectations. The one thing that still makes me nervous is that they have said very little about the PvE endgame. I'm not sure what to expect from it and I'd feel alot better if they'd at least shown an example of what it'll be like.

I'm finding some real depressing parallels between my experience of online flat hunting and my experience of online dating.

The hotswapping stuff is really cool. I kind of wrote it off when it was first introduced as a gimmick to try and keep the game fresh, but in challenges or endless mode it's really useful to keep you going and let's you pull off some really awesome tricks.

I still have no idea what the joke was!

I'm not sure what just happened here.

About six months ago I was graduating from university and freaking out about not being able to get a job. I ended up actually getting the job, on a three month contract. Three months later, they said I was doing great and offered me another three month contract. Three months later, we're in the present and I've been offered a permanent position, which means a pay rise and benefits. Most importantly, being permanent means I can convince a rental agency to let me rent a flat instead of having to live with my Mum. I am so excited about being completely independent for the first time in my life.

About six months ago I was graduating from university and freaking out about not being able to get a job. I ended up actually getting the job, on a three month contract. Three months later, they said I was doing great and offered me another three month contract. Three months later, we're in the present and I've been offered a permanent position, which means a pay rise and benefits. Most importantly, being permanent means I can convince a rental agency to let me rent a flat instead of having to live with my Mum. I am so excited about being completely independent for the first time in my life.

I figured out a really good hotswitching trick tonight. Normally when you hotswitch, you lose the weapon the person you switched to was holding. But if you stun that person right before switching into them they'll drop their weapon, and once you've switched it'll be floating directly in front of them and you can grab it.

The experience of playing Devil Daggers blind makes me feel like I'm 6 years old again and don't know anything about games. I didn't even know the shotgun attack was possible until I watched someone else's replay (If you didn't know by the way, the game automatically uploads a replay for your best run, and clicking the eye symbol next to anyone on the leaderboards lets you watch their replay). There's another function in the keybinds menu called "homing" or something and I still don't know what that does. The cool part is that because the game has a super high skill ceiling, and that skill is the only way to progress, there is stuff in the game that even people who really love it will never see unless they get good enough to last that long. I've heard there are bosses later on but I have no idea if that's true. That feeling, plus the whole 90's demonic aesthetic makes this game feel like something that would show up on an episode of CSI about a Video game that turns kids into Satanists. All the conversations people have about getting the highest score and how only one person in the world can get to 500 seconds would also be perfect corny TV dialogue.

The Idle Thumbs twitter account put out some very good news. Alex Navarro of Giant Bomb has spoken at length about this campaign, so I'm very excited to hear Nick's take on it. I got very excited to hear that email about NPC barks, because they are my weird passion. I have an ironic love for hearing dumb canned dialogue in games, especially if it inadvertently repeats too often. There's a line in LA Noire that goes "Let's bust in there and find the goddamn evidence!" and it always stuck out to me because it plays in every police station, and since you always start each case in a police station you hear it constantly. It came to mind again recently because I was playing The Division beta, and there are a group of NPCs in your base right next to the vendors who are discussing some sort of plan. Their discussion doesn't last very long but it plays on repeat, and every 30 seconds you hear a guy say "Let's go in, let's go around back", and the frequency with which he says it makes me imagine that everyone else is trying to figure out some complicated plan and he keeps butting in with his one idea that everyone knows won't work, but they're too polite to tell him to shut up. In terms of actual good combat barks, Spec Ops: The Line has a really interesting system with them (spoilers if you haven't played it, and if you haven't you definitely should because it's brilliant). In Spec Ops, the combat barks for both the protagonists and enemies change throughout the game. The protagonists start off as straight-laced soldiers out doing their job and fighting the bad guys, while the enemies start off as a confident military force. But as the game progresses, things get worse for everybody. You mow down wave after wave of soldiers, and every situation you face seems to end in the worst possible way. You kill innocent people, your character's ear gets ripped off, you all end up battered and bloodied, and it actually takes its toll. When you order a squadmate to target an enemy at the start of the game, your character will say something simple like "Take him out!". By the end of the game he's screaming "KILL THAT SON OF A BITCH NOW!" The enemies change in relation to you in that by the end of the game, they're fucking terrified of you. You and your two squadmates have killed literally hundreds of their comrades, and they get progressively more afraid of you until they are outright running from you in terror. There was an interview with the developers at the time where they talked about coming up with these systems and realising that they'd actually never been done before in a game. I wish more games did it, because it's a really cool way of progressing the state of the world. I'm actually a little surprised that nobody on the podcast mentioned it, but Dishonored has great idle NPC chatter! NPCs have conversations with each other that are procedurally generated from questions and responses. There aren't that many lines so you notice the patterns pretty quickly, but it's a really cool way of creating dialogue in situations that would otherwise have to be entirely scripted, or completely silent.