Kyir

How does Nick so consistently create perfect moments?

I'd disagree pretty strongly, but that's okay!

All media journalism is kind of exhausting me lately. Polygon is especially exhausting because it's mostly inch-deep pieces on whatever new shiny thing is floating around. I should probably just stop engaging with things that exhaust me. Bring back Objective Game Reviews!

I ended up a theater for the first time in a while and enjoyed the trailer to Crawl a surprising amount. Lots of the percussive sound design you guys have been talking about, and I noticed that it doesn't actually reveal what the monster is for a bit. I think it was this cut in particular: It was in the middle of actually 20 minutes of other trailers I enjoyed significantly less, so I'm feeling like I need to find a new place to watch movies.

It was mentioned in this episode that the corn vs. maize talk page used to be much longer and bloodier. I went back to look at some of the old archived talk pages. I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Maize/Archive_2 is my favorite in terms of sheer tension between the different factions.

I just don't watch enough movies for them to actually inform my consumption, so I'm usually in the position where they're the thing that's taking up time before the movie I actually came to see. I did enjoy the first episode of the podcast though! Will definitely listen to more.

Trailers aggravate my constantly, so I'm genuinely curious to hear why they are the way they are. Can't wait to listen. The only thing that sticks in my mind as a trailer is that one Dragon Age: Origins cinematic trailer, though I'm not sure 4 minutes of no actual gameplay counts as a trailer for a video game?

NieR: Automata: So many people I respect say this is a great game, so I feel like I have to take their word on it, but nothing about it clicks for me in practice. I love hack and slash-y stuff, and I'm all about weird robots in a weirder world, but it just doesn't pan out no matter how many times I try. The combat felt stale after three or four hours, the story never felt as deep as people told me it was, and I didn't feel very attached to any of the characters. The whole "tons of possible endings" thing actually makes me want to find them, but I can never muster the energy to sit down with it for more than 15 minutes. It's such an enigma to me.

The subsequent runs go very fast since a large portion of the game no longer has any real reward. It's a nice little challenge to see how fast you can go while doing optional content and stuff.

I beat Sekiro three times in a row! It's a really great game, probably tied for my second favorite of all of From's titles. It can take a while for everything to click, but once it does the combat is incredibly satisfying in a way that will almost certainly ruin other action-y games for me.

Nick's been playing Sekiro on stream and seems to be having less fun than usual. Let's all send him words of encouragement! Or mockery! Either one.

Aside from any discussion about what meaningful means, I absolutely would love to see more stuff than the standard sort of puzzles and combat. I think Undertale did a pretty good job in terms of melding the way those two things interact with characters and broader themes, but I'm not sure how much that could be replicated with stories about other topics. Complex themes seem like they're going to necessitate complex gameplay when intermeshed in the way you're describing.

Nearly six(?) months after the end of this podcast, I finally played some games of Netrunner. It was fun! Thanks again for all the listening.

I apologize for the short response to a lengthy post, but I can't help but feel like being meaningful is a metric that's impossible to define in this context, and as such isn't particularly useful as a means of evaluating the progression of games as a medium (or any individual game). Just like how people are going to find vastly different things fun, I imagine people are going to find vastly different things meaningful. Given that, I feel a bit doubtful that a closer merging of narrative and gameplay would have significant effects overall. I could just as well say that people probably aren't going to play enough to receive any directed messaging if the gameplay isn't enjoyable, so that should be the foremost concern. That said, I haven't seen Chris' talk either, and I feel like I may be missing something fundamental in the argument here? Sorry if that's the case! Separately, I think the ability of people to draw personal meaning from media that isn't about specific topics or themes is being somewhat underrated here.

Nick beat Gwyn again! There are too many good clips, so I'd recommend just going through them all here: https://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/clips?filter=clips&range=7d

The Battlerite Royale variant is free now that it's out of early access! It's really good, and I find the experience of a top-down royale much more pleasant. There's still other kinds of stress, but it feels much less like a constant battle just to see everything around me. I highly recommend it.

I've been enjoying it too, though I'm not good at it by any means. The stark verticality of some areas is a nice change to much flatter royale maps, and I much prefer the ziplines and faster movement to things like cars. I have found it to be significantly less enjoyable playing with random people, but that's part of every game. Being able to play solo at all would be nice.

It should have had giant robots.

Nick is back to DS1 in true form! That is, the return of R1 to talk. (He did also do a bunch of parrying out of nowhere too.)

I'm excited for the fast-paced smiting action promised in promotional videos.

Yeah, later versions of Diablo 3 being considered a failure does not making me particularly hopeful about the foundations of future Diablo games. It's admittedly my only played game in the franchise, but I've gotten a few hundreds hours of enjoyment out of it at least. That's not to say it's a perfect game by any means, but I'd be hard pressed to identify anything besides writing that it absolutely tanks. Then again, maybe the fact that it failed to constantly extract money from the players is what they're talking about.

Additional Nick Moments(TM): The Pizza Backstory Nick hates many things

A lot of vanilla's charm for me was how much was unknown about everything (mostly due to a lack of tools and dataminers.) There's a certain sensation with making discoveries (small and large) that you just don't really get with modern WoW, both because of Blizzard's decisions and the prevalence of outside tools. It's also something you can't exactly recreate now.

Nick had an interesting experience with having pizza delivered on his stream last night (feat. Janel) https://clips.twitch.tv/DependableAverageOryxBatChest (also apparently featuring a bunch of my typos in chat)

I both did not know people said that and am in no way surprised people said that.