Ninety-Three

That made me realize that some people talk about the government as though it's a conspiracy theory. Not "The government faked the moon landing because reptilian aliens", but when some people talk about societal problems, they talk about them as though they're the deliberate product of a massively organized system, or a singular anthropomorphized Mr. Government, instead of a million little wheels. To give an example, I remember this quote from an article around the time of Ferguson and similar shootings: In the past I'd always figured that sort of thinking was a product of anthropomorphizing systems, but there's merit to the conspiracy explanation where people are just trying to map order and function onto a random and emergent system. For actual conspiracy theories, I never liked the "Conspiracy theories are a way of imposing comforting order on an uncaring universe" explanation, because there are a lot of conspiracy theories which serve to only generate worry about something normally benign. Chemtrails, lizard people, the moon landing, these sorts of conspiracies take something orderly and unremarkable and tell us "It's out to get you", our world has been made strictly worse by the introduction of the conspiracy. Those seem just as common as the "reassuring, in a way" theories, so the driving force behind conspiracy theories can't be the desire to resolve the problem of an uncaring world. One could say that there are two types of theories, and only one type is about the uncaring world, but that seems wrong because the uncaring world theories have so many common elements with the other theories that there is clearly some common human drive behind them. I have no particularly good ideas as to what that drive might be, but do you agree that there appears to be commonality between most conspiracy theories, and explaining the uncaring world can't be it?

We seem to disagree about the meaning of the term. Since Twitter has permanent (deletion notwithstanding) archives, posting to Twitter is literally entering something into the public record. That's more public than shouting something in the middle of town square, that's like putting up a poster, a poster that will never come down. Put simply, when you make information public, doesn't it become public information?

I saw that, you were saying that the information is publicly available "with relative ease", which seemed like practically the definition of "at your convenience". It's easy to open a new browser session and go to twitter.com/someaccount/with_replies, so I'd say I have anyone else's (anyone public) Twitter feed at my convenience. I'm really upset that my neighbors started closing their blinds. Why would they have open glass portholes into their lives if I wasn't allowed to look in? That's a terrible comparison and surely you know it. The privacy of one's own home seems like a perfect comparison for accounts marked private. Public Twitter accounts are public.

Those statements seem contradictory and I am confused. Nobody is entitled to information which is public and easily accessible at their convenience?

I loved Pokemon back in the Gameboy Colour days, but I've been completely unable to get back to into it. One of my big problems is that back then I was a little kid who played the game the suboptimal way it was meant to be played: evenly sharing XP among a team of six. These days, I realize that easily the best strategy is to pour all my XP into one pokemon so that it's twice the level of everything I fight (varied TMs can ensure you're never not very effective, and even without that, pure level advantage easily makes up for being on the wrong end of elemental rock-paper-scissors). Having figured out this strategy, I can no longer imagine playing the old way, I'd be expending more effort just to make things more laborious, I might as well choose not to learn Bite and stick with Tackle. I suppose that's on topic because this is the game-quitting thread, has anyone else had that experience with Pokemon?

We must visit different sites, because everything I've seen and heard is nothing but positivity, including the last page or so of this thread (I didn't have time to read from page 1). But more importantly, the anti-hype isn't negativity. I said some negative things about rockball planets and soda crackers, but "We haven't seen enough to have any idea if this game will be good" isn't negative. "This game will probably suck" is negative, "We don't know anything about this game" is as neutral as it gets.

Recently I moved to a new place which happens to be much closer to where I work, so I'm not taking the bus any more, which has ended most of my 3DS use. I'm only partway through Fire Emblem and I quite enjoy it, but it feels weird to pick up a handheld when I'm in my own home and my PC is right there. Is this a problem unique to me, or does anyone else have trouble choosing handheld over PC, and how do you deal with it?

Based on articles like this, they seem to be really pushing the procedural generation and exploration aspect, and I am extremely skeptical that it's possible to make an interesting procedural exploration game. My skepticism about procedural generation aside, I think everyone's getting hyped over nothing, literally. We have nothing to go on, no idea what the gameplay is, pretty much all we know is that there's going to be procedural planets to wander, some of them look like that, and there's some kind of resources to gather. It's the problem Spore had all over again. Everyone got hyped about the broad-strokes concept, without really knowing anything about how the game plays. We're not even imagining "Oh it'll be a sweet FPS" or "Oh it'll be Minecraft with better combat", everyone just seems to think "It'll be great" without considering how. No possible gameplay for Spore could have lived up to the game people were imagining, and that's because everyone's imaginations stopped at the broad strokes, not bothering to consider what the gameplay could actually be. I can't understand the thought behind this. They seem to be saying "What Spore needed was more lifeless rockballs". Sure it makes the interesting stuff more special, but it does that by forcing the player to slog through a bunch of uninteresting stuff. That's like saying you can make a box of chocolates better by taking nine tenths of the chocolate and replacing it with soda crackers.

It's just bad luck, detention centers come up like anything else. Extra agents are so good that if you don't have one, it's worth hitting executive terminals to find one. My next favorite mission is augment crafters, because I prioritize the armour-piercing passive highly (and because I always run Nika, who wants Predictive Brawling so badly), and I always hit terminals until I have parasite, something to beat demons, and either lockpick 2 or hammer. Vaults (and vault codes) are actually my lowest priority, every other mission has something I irreplaceably need, vaults just have bonus credits which will get sunk into agent speed. For the longest time I favoured Hunter (5 power, ~3 recharge, kill one demon) over Ram (2 power, 0 recharge, randomly move one demon), but I just had a run where I was forced to take Ram, and holy crap it's so much better if you have Xu. Xu's disable bypasses demons, but a safe that's been opened with it still technically counts as firewalled, so Ram will still dump demons onto it. I played through three levels, and every single use of Ram sent a demon to somewhere I never intended to hack (audio bugs, safes, cameras in empty rooms, etc), it was just strictly better than Hunter.

Combat is (in most games) core gameplay, it's what you'll spend most of your time doing. I don't feel the need to formally define "minigame" because surely everyone knows it when they see it. Hacking minigames are far more videogаmey than navigating dialogue or merchant menus. This lack of definition leaves some grey areas, but the grey areas don't matter to my initial question. I wouldn't say that, I had fun with Bioshock's Pipe Dream, and it's the minigamest minigame that ever minigamed.

It recently occurred to me to wonder about a fundamental aspect of game design. Why are there hacking minigames (and lockpicking minigames, and diplomacy minigames, and so on)? Why do so many developers decide "Man, you know what would be great here? If we forced the player to stop playing the game for a moment to play Breakout/Pipe Dream/Word Search/etc. And then did so again every fifteen minutes for the rest of the game." Do they really think (presumably for reasons of pacing) that the minigame is more fun than just letting the player move on and do more core gameplay? Is it just that the game industry has a habit of copying without thinking?

The more I think about it, the weirder the ending is. The ending cutscene crams in about three times as much plot as the rest of the game put together, and I wonder why Klei decided to get plotty all of a sudden. Plus the cutscene tends to not fit what's going on: I've had Monst3r getting cutscene-panicked about incoming guards when every single guard in the level is either dead or heavily sedated and being dragged. My favorite team is Xu and Nika. Xu disabling safes saves so much power, and his shock trap gets useful in the lategame where it has infinite armour penetration. NIka's base augment, plus Predictive Brawling (seemingly the most common aug) plus a volt disruptor gives her two attacks every turn, and +9 AP per attack. As long as there aren't a lot of high armour guys, it feels like you can just chainsaw through anything without regard for stealth. She can even taze a downed guard to trigger the AP boost when no one's still standing. It took me a while to realize that rewinds refresh with each mission, I'm used to the EA system where you got X rewinds across a playthrough. Even just the one rewind per mission on expert feels strong, letting me push my luck and try to find the last safe on a completed level, three or even five rewinds must feel like infinite take-backsies where you don't have to worry about making mistakes.

Except they're built by and for humans. I'm not usually the one going "Ragh, capitalism corruption everything sucks", but our first generation of robot overlords are going to be commissioned by the 1%, and the second generation will be made by the first. Pragmatism aside, you're making some strange assumptions. If we build emotionless arbiters of pure logic, why are they going to care about humans at all? You'd have to hard-code empathy and morality into them, and to do that you'd first have to convert morality to an internally consistent logical system, good luck with that.

There's an unquestioned assumption in the concept of the Singularity that always bothered me. Regarding AI, the Singularity proposes that we'll make an AI 10% smarter than us, then it will make an AI 10% smarter than it, that will make an AI 10 more percent smarter, and so on until the power of compound interest makes an unfathomable supergenius. The problem is that it assumes there's a linear difficulty curve: a 200 IQ human can make a 220 IQ AI, a 220 IQ AI can make a 242 IQ AI which can make a 266 IQ AI and so on. What if the law of diminishing returns will apply here as well as it does to everything else? A 200 IQ human makes a 220 IQ AI which makes a 230 IQ AI which makes a 235 IQ AI and things plateau rather than explode exponentially. Broadly, the whole thing is based on looking at the curve of the technology graph, and assuming that trend will continue indefinitely.

That feels like using a cannon to kill a mosquito. Do we really need a history prof to point out such nuanced ideas as "Apartheid was bad" and "It's spelled Weimar"?

You're missing out. Ping costs 1 PWR, has 3 recharge, and lets you click anywhere on the map to generate a sound, which guards will go investigate (I don't think this will draw their attention away if they're already investigating something else). It's too powerful to just start with it in inventory, but I can imagine an interesting version of the game where you start with a higher PWR cost Ping as part of your toolbox. Maybe I should mod that, that seems really fun, and like it would go a decent way towards mitigating some of the less fair RNG-screw. Edit: It totally does distract guards who are already investigating something, though not if they have "hunting" status. This EA thing has messed me up, I have no idea if it changed, or I'm imagining that it used to work that way.

Well there's my favorite program Ping, but I only get that on ~50% of runs. There's one other major source of distraction (though it's limited by several situational factors): you can deliberately sprint to attract a guard's attention. Overall I agree though, you mostly either KO guards, or stealth them, and that feels like a deliberate design choice, the guards are more like terrain obstacles than enemies. I sometimes wonder if the devs were trying to produce a Far Cry 2-esque "shit hits the fan" cascade of errors simulator, because the game takes on an interesting and completely different tone when things start to go wrong, but the game is so punishing that it often just quickly leads to an agent death followed by a restart.

By the endgame, there will be guards with 2 armour. If you're lucky, you can dodge them, or do some fancy bait and cloak shenanigans, but it's possible to end up needing to KO them (once, on the second mission, the only exit from the starting room was a hallway with a stationary Armour 1 guard staring down it, no cover to be had. KO necessary, and no armour-piercing weapons had even spawned on level 1 ). The other big thing is that the endgame will demand you break so many firewalls. I don't feel comfortable unless I have two "DPS" programs with different characteristics (ideally Hammer and Parasite 2), plus a way of generating extra PWR (Prism straight-up generates PWR, Xu or anyone with an EMP generates virtual PWR by disabling things rather than requiring a hack, or anyone with Hacking skill and a Portable Console). Unlike with armour-piercing, I've never felt like I got screwed because the game didn't spawn hacking stuff, but it's important to know to prioritize it. Disclaimer: This is based on playing with Fusion for PWR generation, I haven't played much since Seed came out, but it looks like it could make hacking way easier if you can reliably get a program that can use all the Seed PWR. Also, extra agents are, while not necessary, five times better than all other rewards so prioritize detention centers above all else.

Not knowing anything about the sausage-making of journalism, I had no idea that's how it worked. I'm curious as to just how widespread a trend that is, but it proved remarkably difficult to Google, do you know where I might read up on it?

I hate all of the cut scenes, voiced dialogue, and increased animation since Early Access. Having played the game before they were in, every time I'm forced to spend a second watching the plane fly across the globe, or click through the opening text I think "A month ago the game wasn't wasting my time with this". I also noticed that guards spawned from alert levels now seem to have loot, which means if you can take the difficulty, you should now max out your alert level and check the pockets of every guard spawned to maximize your payout, gross. Those are minor issues though, the core game is still fun, and pretty much the same as when it was in EA. My main complaint is that I wish that the game tried a bit to bell curve your rewards rather than generating them completely at random. You can get some pretty huge swings in power level from the right items (holographic terrain is practically god mode, and you're fucked if you can't assemble enough armour-piercing weapons and augments by the endgame), and finding an extra agent in a detention center is still about four times as good as any of the other mission rewards.

I remember Telltale's Sam and Max games (jeez, those were almost a decade ago) had adjustable automatic hints that could be thought of as a difficulty slider. If you were stuck in a particular area, the game would notice and have your character say something to themselves that gives you a hint on the current puzzle, and you had options to adjust both the directness of the hint, and how quickly hints would come. It wasn't perfect, sometimes the most direct hint was cryptic and useless, and sometimes it pretty much handed you the answer, but it easily cleared the low bar of "Best scaling system in an adventure game". Speaking of hint systems, I used to play a lot of flash puzzle games, and something that started popping up within the last five years or so was a trend towards having a walkthrough in the game. On the options menu, there would be an embedded video player, or a link to Youtube that just showed you how to solve each puzzle, the thinking being "Someone's going to make a walkthrough for people who get stuck, I might as well put it right there to save people time looking". I wonder why that's not done more, are designers afraid that making it too easy to peek at the solution will have everyone doing so the moment they get stuck instead of trying harder to figure it out?

I haven't played DS2 so I have to ask: Is that gameplay footage? Because that's the best-looking water I've ever seen in a game.

I didn't know why, so I Googled it, and look at what I found. In light of this thread, I thought that was pretty funny. I looked through several articles and found a lot of "Jaden Smith quit Twitter" with zero explanation, could someone fill me in?

I'd be up for that, were you thinking many human players or something 1 on 1? Either way, I'm Ninety-Three on Steam, add me so we can set up something.

Yo dawg, we heard you like boats.