Ninety-Three

In their defense, there were exploits that could only be done by scripting a TAS to spend days iterating to find a memory glitch. That's doing something beyond ordinary TAS shenanigans, it's just that it's so brief that it's not very showy. Can someone who's been paying more attention than I have make some kind of SGDQ highlights list? People have been recommending individual runs here and there, but it would be great to pare down the ~170 hours to about a quarter of that, something I have a chance of actually watching through.

All the ones I found were trivial with my trusty flying rock, but I did miss a bunch. My real difficulty wasn't getting to them, but finding them in the first place. I think I gave up at 50% after a while running around the map and flying past all the obvious places.

Thanks for the warning. It's a real shame, because that would be an interesting puzzle to solve. You could lay out a bunch of carry-able rocks and plug in Flying and Hive Mind to build a bridge up pretty far. From there you can set a railgun pet atop the bridge, then give the bridge repulsor and make it hate the railgunner so the gunner gets thrown even further. I don't remember how far out Maze was, but I have to imagine that would do it. That's the kind of stuff I would've loved to pull off in this game, with interactions between multiple abilities.

I always heard the etymology to be simply "gang-kill" (as in "gang up to kill"). My brief trip to Google tells me that the rap usage primarily means "steal" or "rip off", and I can't find anything suggested a shared etymology (the only dictionary declarationon on the game term I could find on it said "Perhaps from rap, perhaps sports jargon, origin unknown"). Do you have a source I can read on that? ​I'll defend the use of strategy. Merriam-Webster: Collins: Dictionary.com: While we're getting pedantic, finishing as quickly as possible is not your strategy, it's your goal. That's like saying your strategy in war is to kill the other side's guys.

This is something I thought of as I was writing it and probably should have elaborated upon. I get that there's lots of possible solutions, but in the order I encountered things, there was always only one or two ways to do it, because of the limited set of abilities I had. Because I had one power that could oviously address the situation, it led to the keyhole feeling. This was compounded by a sort of recency effect: "New puzzle, I bet the ability I just acquired will be useful here." As you said, I think the issue might be more about the difficulty: I wasn't solving puzzles, just plugging in a relevant ability in the obvious way, that tutorial-section feeling. Looking back, I'm pretty sure you can get the railgun before you beat the hiver queen, in which case you can then beat the hiver queen and have Maze come in to talk to you, then make a railgun pet set to hate Sky Bastards, and it should shoot her. The only reason I haven't tried is that I'm almost certain the game won't let me attack her and I don't want to spend an hour running through the game to be disappointed. Did anyone else try something like that?

The first water level in Amnesia: The Dark Descent was perfectly put together, it created so many amazing horror moments for me. I could write a small essay on that level. I love Farbor in Creeper World 3. Image reference: Most of that game is about pushing to gain ground against a fairly constant enemy aggression, but Farbor puts you on relatively safe islands under discreet time pressure, then allows you to interact with that clock by shooting down the respawning miners. It's also the only level in the base campaign that allows/rewards early aggression: Rather than setting up a base, you can land command centers on the main island and take out an ore processor before they get their defenses online. It's like the level has its own metagame of clock management. Portal: Chamber 16/Advanced Chamber 16 (Chamber 16 is the one with all the turrets, the Advanced version puts them all in mesh cages to make them indestructible). I find it incredibly elegant that both Basic 16 and Advanced 16 play well and feel natural, rather than one feeling like a shitty demake/challenge mode of the other. This is one of my favorites not because it's the most fun, but because I admire the design so much.

Just finished episode 2, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm not so much playing Max as the angel on Max's shoulder. There's little things, like the adventure-gamey way she'll say "No, I don't want to go that way" when you hit an area boundary and you're not supposed to leave, or the fact that it's labeled "Max's room" not "My room", but there's also the basic principle that unlike, say, a Bioware game, your choices aren't shaping the character's personality, you're just influencing events for her to react to. There's a lot of times that I'll want to say something quite reasonable and relevant (often telling people information gained from rewinds) and Max just doesn't give me the option to. Finally, the camera. In a game that's so much about photography, we're not allowed to take our own photos, all we can do is press X to capture nature's beauty at the few places where Max's whims permit it. Did anyone else have this feeling? Do you think it's supposed to be intentional, or just a result of the limits of a narrative adventure game?

Apparently Little Inferno is supposed to be some kind of super artsy statement, and you're supposed to get dissatisfied with the gameplay so the Big Message can come in. Joke's on them, I just focused on the items that burned in exotic ways and had fun with it as a "Burn weird stuff" simulator. Fire Emblem Awakening is a turn-based strategy game with a fixed-seed random number generator, meaning you can savescum the hell out of your turns, but your die rolls are essentially fixed, so you can't simply retry a hundred times until you get lucky enough that all your shots hit and all theirs miss. I enjoy turning the difficulty up to maximum and playing it with heavy savescumming because it essentially turns the game into a tactical puzzle game. "Okay, my next attack is going to be a Dual Strike, after that I have a very low roll queued up so it'll miss if I use anyone but Chrom, when I end turn these enemies are going to go here here and here..."

Pedantic niggle of the day: a mirror set up to reflect things from one side and let you look through from the other side should clearly be called a one-way mirror, not a two-way mirror. A two-way street is a street that works the same both ways, a two-way door is a door that can be used either way, what kind of maniac would call it a two-way mirror when it only acts like a mirror one way?

The joke in question: Is it possible to tell a trans joke without it being transphobic? Because that joke doesn't seem like it stigmatizes, stereotypes, or otherwise does anything bad regarding trans people. "Person X looks like Y + Z" is a standard joke formula, are we just not allowed to plug trans people into that formula? I'm not trying to argue in defense of the joke, I'm genuinely asking. I can imagine being told "You're never allowed to make trans jokes" the same as "White people are never allowed to say nigger".

Oh BoC is super easy to cheese. Easy mode involves sniping the sides with arrows, and in can't lose mode, all you have to do is stand in the right spot in the middle of the map and lob firebombs (there don't seem to be clipping planes to block them like you'd expect). I've found that many of the bosses are quite safe. Just run away from Gaping Dragon until it does the charge attack which leaves it exposed for about ten seconds of beatings, Quelag won't hit you if you circle-strafe and only attack from the sides... playing defenseively and waiting for an opening is a shockingly strong technique.

I was also always fastrolling, so I don't have that excuse.

I have 179 hours on Dark Souls, and I just figured this out. Equipment in slots you're not currently wielding counts towards equipment load. If you're currently two-handing your slot 1 sword, then your encumberance counts your slot 1 sword, slot 2 sword, slot 1 shield and slot 2 shield. Am I the only one this slow? Was the system obvious to everyone else?

So you know how some people are objectively wrong about the pronunciation of "gif", insisting that it has a hard g because it stands for "graphics interchange format", and graphics has a hard g? I finally found a simple and concise way to show that they're wrong, which I shall share with all of you, my fellow pedants: Pronounce "SCUBA". The hard g gif proponents had better have just said "scubbah" instead of "scoobah", because the U stands for "underwater", not "oonderwater".

I didn't mean to imply that you were "wrong", I was genuinely curious about what you found interesting. In light of that, I think my issues with it came partly from the fact that I immediately figured out how the scoring worked and developed a degenerate strategy, and partly from the fact that I just wanted to get back to the creature mechanics part of the game.

They're not just funding from Kickstarter, and I suspect not even primarily. Suzuki acknolwedged in deliberately vague terms that Sony has a hand in the production, marketing and publishing (which is to say, all of it). I'm certain that there was a meeting in which an exec said "We'd fund your game, but we just don't believe there's enough of an audience for it", to which Suzuki responded "What if I ran a Kickstarter to prove people were still into it?"

Ah yes, the iron-fisted tyranny of a list. With this collection of game names, TB shall rule over the entirety of Steam, all dissenters squashed! An indie dev shall start making a game that runs at 30, but his friend will whisper to him "Oh you don't want to do that. You'll be put on a list." Why does everyone else see this like TB is declaring war on every game and developer that runs at 30, and I'm the only one who sees a fucking list, a Steam tag by other implementation? What does TB's list to do attract so much of your ire that this Steam function doesn't? Is it just that you hate TB because he's shitty, and so everything he does must be maximally shitty? It can't be because an internet random used the list to find a dev to send nasty emails to, because I guarantee that's been done with the Walking Simulator tag. Is it really that you object to the connotations of "Police" that strongly?

I wouldn't call it repetitive or tedious, it just seemed like a tutorial where the real game never started. Now you have repulsor, here's a gap you need to be repulsored over. Now you have shield, shield a creature and have it kill the hiver queen. I never built something that felt like it was my own, never even felt like I was solving a puzzle, just putting a series of abilities into a series of ability-shaped keyholes. Boy, was that part dull for me. Eager to get back to the interesting creature mechanic thing, I figured out the system very quickly and built a corridor out of ten identical tiles, then populated it with a repeating series of things in a straight line. Top marks. What did it do for you that it felt brilliant?

I finished the game, found it pretty disappointing. It felt like it completed the tutorial then ended, a couple hours in with all the gameplay potential left unexplored. Having gotten all the abilities in what felt like a basic Zelda or Metroidvania "Use fireproof on fire door to unlock shield, use shield on shield door to unlock ~...", I geared up to ghost the Sky Bastard with an army of flying, railgun-equipped insects, and it turned out that was massive overkill, all I would've needed is an inanimate anything with a railgun on the outlook, and a flying platform to get out there. Having beaten that, I was funneled through a bunch of heavily scripted, low-interactivity plot stuff, and eventually the game ended. As the credits rolled I was thinking "This better not be the end. This is a fakeout, right? Then the real game where we get to explore these mechanics starts?" Was the point of this to be some artsy statement about game development that went over my head because I just wanted to play a game? Is it actually a fakeout and I have to do something to unlock the rest of the game like get a 10/10 on the level designer or 100% the collectibles?

Well yes, those are different aspect ratios. Would you say that regarding 1280x960 vs 640x480?

You're being pretty harsh. He doesn't say his position is moderate, just that there are people more extreme than him. He said that 60 FPS is better and things got all "60 FPS PC Master Race" wanky, but the only negativity was stated as personal taste, that he and some others disliked 30 FPS. Is it shitting on 1 megapixel cameras to say that 4 megapixel cameras are better? You're missing the point. The list isn't for commenting on games, it's for marking games which run at 30 FPS, so that people who dislike that can avoid them. It's using a brush exactly as broad as the task calls for. Yes, they banned the 30 FPS tag because it was being abused, placed on games that ran at 60. This list is maintained by TB who ensures that games are only added if they actually run at 30, how is that abuse?

Back when tags were introduced, there was a lot of deliberate misuse (for instance, someone tagged MGR with "Nanomachines son", people saw it and started tagging it on everything up to and including Barbie games), so Valve banned a whole bunch of tags. Apparently, 30 FPS was among them, so now it's lost to us forever.

But he wasn't shitting on people. The announcement wasn't "These games are 30 FPS and isn't that just terrible", it was "I don't like 30 FPS, if you are one of the many people who don't like 30 FPS, here's a list of games which are 30 FPS so you can avoid them" (it's an attempt to use a Steam Curation group as a tag, because you can't literally tag something 30 FPS in Steam). That's a useful service. You can't play up games with 60 FPS because the majority of Steam games run at 60.

Ah, now I feel silly, I hadn't thought to check his Youtube page for it, so I see the point about low profile retractions. Given that some of TB's followers are internet jerks, and that internet discussions of framerate are always garbage, how do you think TB should have done this? Just been very loud about declaring upfront "Hey, don't be internet jerks and yell at developers about this"? If he had said those exact words, I expect there would still be people being jerks about it (although certainly less people), so would he still be responsible in that case?

In what world is a group with the description "We catalogue games that are locked at 30fps so you can see them at a glance and mention if it is possible to unlock the framerate by other means." comparable to handing out guns? As for lower traffic places are you talking about? He sent the anti-witchhunt announcement to all members of the Steam group, and also tweeted about it. As I asked in the bit you quoted, how much more high profile can he get? This is a case where he was as public with the response as with the initial action.