Ninety-Three

I fully acknowledge that I'm playing the game in not the way that it's intended to be played, but save-scumming away the improbable misses (I draw the line at scumming to enable one in a million sniper shots) and anti-infantry tank hits allows me to play it like a deterministic puzzle game. It's fascinating, and I'm certainly not making the game too easy by trying to get all optionals with minimal turns. I get that potentials are good for character differentiation, but they would do that just fine without being hidden. It's annoying to have to constantly consult a wiki rather than the game just showing me what they'll grow into on the recruiting screen. As for leveling, hah. Scouts are insane and get the majority of my XP, lancers get the majority of the remainder (because the one thing scouts can't do is one-shot tanks) and shocktroopers get the rest, though I don't use them too much (I advance way too quickly for them to use much reaction fire). I've learned that if there's an enemy around the corner, you can slowly tap the walk button and you'll find a tiny window where you can shoot at them, but you're not yet drawing reaction fire for entering their vision. Is the economy completely broken? I have enough money to max out all my soldier upgrades at all times, and probably to max out upgrades to the tank I never use. Does that continue throughout the game?

Just pulled this game out of my Steam backlog and I've been enjoying it a lot. Scouts are super broken but it's fine, the game's A ranks require you to complete each mission in an absurdly small number of turns so it makes an interesting puzzle to try to A-rank a mission while completing as many optional objectives as possible. There's a lot of save-scumming involved (mostly to give your lancers perfect aim) and I'm convinced some missions are impossible to A rank while getting all objectives (maybe if you grind skirmishes for hours to get everyone to very high levels). The hidden potentials thing is annoying, I wish the game would just tell me how my characters are going to level up so I know who to pour points into. I bounced off the story very quickly, so I appreciate the game making it so easy to skip through. Am I missing out on a decent story there? Are you sure? I've noticed anecdotally that it seems to reduce incoming hits, which makes sense if they're going with an X-COM (the original) aiming model as opposed to XCOM (Firaxis): your hitbox presents a smaller profile, reducing the odds of random scattered shots connecting.

MMO servers handle many world functions. Hop into a single-player instanced dungeon and you've got a server handling NPC AI that could (and traditionally would) be done locally. I did say technically.

OnLive (a service that let your notebook remote in to a powerful gaming PC) was practical. Other than that, I suppose MMOs and anything else based on a central server are technically cloud computing.

I agree that promotional was pretty much the only way it could have gone, and I see that as not a defense of the interview but an indictment their guest selection. It was an interview more concerned with promoting a product than being worth watching, and I can't help but assume that's deliberate (which is to say, it feels like the interview was "selling out").

This is particularly egregious when it comes to teaching programming. Some classes will make you write out short code segments on paper tests, and you will lose marks for missing semicolons, despite the fact that any development program on the planet will highlight a missing semicolon for you like it's spellcheck. A missing semicolon will never cost a real programmer anything other than a few seconds of their time. I can't tell if it's a holdover from the punch card and assembly language days when writing syntactically flawless code was actually useful, or if it's just that memorization and paper tests are how the rest of the system works, and no one thought to change it for this area.

Is it too early to complain about the new Daily Show? The interview they did last night was awful. The guest was there entirely to shill for their product, and the interviewer seemed entirely on-board with that. Jon Stewart often had people on promoting their stuff, but I never ended one of his interviews feeling like I just watched an infomercial. It seems like the kind of thing that doesn't happen by accident, Trevor Noah wasn't just a weak interviewer who let her shill, he was an active participant in it. I'm worried that it's an indication they intend to sell the interview slot to people with something to advertise, and we'll get tons of awful product-pushing interviews.

I think I'm quitting Divinity Original Sin. To paraphrase someone's description of the game: "There are two main complaints about Divinity: 'The game is too hard' and 'The game is too easy'. You spend half your time figuring out how to break the game, and the other half figuring out how to make it interesting again." I managed to make it interesting for a while, but my characters seem to grow in power faster than the enemies and I think the game has settled into its final resting place of "broken". I played with the following restrictions: No crafting/upgrading, two person party, no Glass Cannon. I settled on each of my characters being identical Rogue-Mage hybrids: A focus on backstabbing for damage and enough INT to do self-buffs, summons, and crowd control. It was interesting and challenging at first, but now that I'm level 15, I no longer need to do all the crazy crowd control just to survive, so every fight is the same and I don't feel particularly threatened. Apply self buffs (haste and damage boost), summon spiders to act as meat-shields, run around backstabbing everything, resummon meatshields if they die. I think I've gotten too good at positioning summons so that they draw aggro away from my main characters, plus summons are kind of fundamentally broken when you're higher level and have so much AP that they don't cost you most of your turn to use. I don't have it in me to reset and try a new build (I'm certain that any ranged character would fall into the degenerate strategy of "use your mobility advantage to back up and shoot while they spend all their time running after you", warrior is just rogue with worse DPS, and I doubt "rogue without 'no summons' rule" is viable) so I guess I quit. The experience was brilliant at levels ~1-8, it's a shame things got easier further in.

Just you wait. Rick and Morty isn't all dark all the time, but it goes to an actually dark place in season two. And then the episode ends and we snap back to the status quo as if nothing ever happened, it's weird.

I watched the movie for the first time in 2013 and the only thing I knew about it was "He's dead the whole time". The movie still worked great, and I believe my experience was quite different than that of someone re-watching it. Despite being famous for its twist, the movie isn't about the twist. It would still work as a movie (probably a less good movie, but still a functional one) if the protagonist were an ordinary living human. The fact that I was expecting it to be more built around the twist than it was made the actual structure of the movie a pleasant surprise. Basically by going in expecting a twist, I created a scenario where the real twist was that there was a main story.

People made real-time edits of TPDS pretty quickly and those were interesting to watch. As much as it feels like cheating, I prefer the format to Twitch Plays Pokemon where it's 90% of the time is spent backtracking or menuing uselessly. TPP goes faster, but it doesn't actually get stuff done faster, and it's far easier to create a watchable edit of TPDS.

Mangela said it was mind boggling that anyone could see the hours of twitter ranting as anything other than harassment, so I attempted to explain how one could (and how I did). Like I said above, if you see inciting to be the same as doing, then I get calling it harassment.

My point was that the hitman is a murderer, you as the person who hired them are not (which is (hopefully) obviously not to say that hiring hitmen is okay). Sure doesn't, I wasn't defending him, just correcting the information you brought up.

I was focusing on the difference between harassment and inciting (you're not a murderer if you hire a hitman), if you see no distinction between those then I get calling it harassment. The attached photo had his Twitter handle, and the immediately preceding connected tweet had his name.

It looked to me like what he was mad about was her saying "and during this phone call, he was flirty as fuck. comments abt getting married." He said he hadn't been, and seemed to take it as a willful attack on his character. The hours of tweets are definitely a crazy asshole rant, and you might say they were inciting others to harass, but given that he was blocked at the time, how do you see them as harassment? It seems to me that by definition, you can't verbally harass someone who can't hear you.

I thought more about this, I think this feeling is because your trajectory in the game is only upwards. You start out with in the middle of nowhere with only the clothes on your back. From there you will find shelter, acquire tools and build up a stockpile of food. There is no increasing difficulty, so unless you're bad enough at the game to immediately contract hypothermia or get mauled by a wolf, player power will only increase over time, making the world feel accommodating rather than hostile. Compare it to Don't Starve. On day 1 you're threatened by hunger and darkness. By day 5 or 10, you'll be feeling the effects of your gradually lowering sanity bar and you'll have to do something about that. After weeks, winter sets in and you have to be prepared to deal with the cold plus the fact that things have stopped growing. Throughout that, the game will be spawning increasingly large groups of hounds, and the spider ecology will be growing. You can't just sit on your big pile of food and develop a routine because you have to prepare for the next threat.

I experienced the exact same apathy about growing my one-week food pile into a two-week pile. Assuming it's deliberate, my only explanation for the balancing is that perhaps this is a game you're only supposed to play once or twice. When you don't know anything about how to play effectively, medium can actually threaten you, and easy doesn't feel downright insulting. Building for inexperienced players would explain why there's so many medical supplies in the game despite how difficult it is to get injured (once you know what you're doing). Then again, that's probably not it because there's systems like the bow which no inexperienced player will ever put together: harvest maple saplings which only spawn in two places per map, harvest animal guts, spend five days drying them to make a bow, then harvest a different kind of saplings that only grow in a few places and spend five days drying them to make arrow shafts, scavenge scrap metal, coal and a hammer, take them to the one forge in the game to make arrowheads...

No, nothing respawns (except possibly animals, I'm not sure about them). However, a single deer carcass will yield three days worth of food, a few branches worth of firewood will let you boil a week's water, and running out of cloth/metal to repair your equipment is a "heat death of the universe" sort of scenario. I think the game badly needs story mode. The first hour or two of a playthrough is interesting because you're trying to establish yourself so that you're not one meal away from death. Once you're sitting on a big pile of food, the goal becomes an indefinite "keep doing what you're doing so that the pile doesn't shrink". Unlike, say, Don't Starve, there's no mechanism where more systems are naturally introduced over time, so gameplay stagnates.

It wouldn't be as cleanly communicated to the player (maybe put a signpost block to explain the concept at the beginning of the level), but you could achieve this from a design perspective by only placing three coins in the level and having those act as your green stars.

You can still find and harvest deer carcasses for their fur. Rabbits too I suppose, but I've never seen a wolf catch a rabbit. I found that by far the most important thing when playing The Long Dark is not skill, but knowledge. After a couple hours with the game I had a decent idea of the layout of Mystery Lake and I could shift from aimless wandering to straight line paths between scavengable buildings. I've also learned some extremely useful things about managing my resources: sprinting uses way more calories and fatigue, carrying 10 kg causes less fatigue than carrying 20, and you can leave your hunger/thirst at zero for a while to get more mileage out of your food because those bars don't go negative (you just take health damage, which will regenerate once you eat). From talking to other people and reading reviews, I've been surprised to find that other people seem to have a lot more difficulty with the game than I do. On medium I'm swimming in resources and wolves are no problem (I only see the occasional wolf, and from far enough away that I can just walk in the other direction to avoid danger). On hard, it feels like danger is simply the harshness of the game's level generation. I'm threatened only at the beginning by things like "running out of resources because I can't find any #*&! tools" or "freezing to death because the game started with a snowstorm and the path to the house I wanted is blocked by wolves".

It's not so much that the wolves ruin it, it's that resources are too plentiful for survival to be any kind of challenge and there's nothing to do once you're flush with resources. The wolves are certainly not great, but the game's core problem is one of balance. Oh well, that's what Early Access is for, they've got plenty of beta testers to recognize the problem and time to fix it.

My friends have been telling me that I ought to watch Fury Road already, is this the sort of thing one should watch after the "original", or does the idea work for a first viewing?

I don't even have Mario Maker, but I feel the need to post in this thread to tell you that that album art is the coolest thing, TangoCharlie.

This falls into a broader sort of cutscene stupidity I despise. Broadly speaking, it's "Stuff that only works because video games can arbitrarily take away your ability to do stuff". In Mass Effect 2, you come across a disabled enemy ship that doesn't appear to be damaged, my first thought was "Power up the main guns and let's make it really disabled", haha nope, walk into the obvious ambush buddy. In Shadowrun: Dragonfall, there's a bit where you are told that when you push a button, enemies will come in and also those sentry guns over there will turn on and start shooting you, but for no reason you can't destroy the sentry guns now, you have to wait until they go hostile. Hollywood apparently has some kind of soundboard full of default gun noises, and every time I hear a particular pistol-unholstering noise it brings me back to Jedi Outcast.

I've been thinking about the hypothetical you cite here. I think the difference may be that when a person with dark pigmented skin and typical african body-traits comes to the United States, there is an understanding that the totality of american race-circumstances is about to be imposed on them. So they are involuntarily entering the context due to how they look rather than purposely changing their body's appearance. Volition is a difference between them, but I fail to see how Dolezal's action being voluntary is what makes it not okay. Is the contention that both the African migrant and Dolezal are doing something bad by becoming a part of a new culture, but the migrant has no choice in it which makes it acceptable?