Ninety-Three

This still seems pretty gross to me. Why are we putting the number for what Polygon-as-a-Whole thinks of the game, on the review written entirely by one reviewer? If we want the number to match the review, just ask the writer to make a number they think reflects the text written, instead of some board. If we want to know what Polygon-as-a-Whole thinks, then why not have Polygon-as-a-Whole do a review, instead of tacking their number on somewhere else?

A tip for the tutorials: Normally planet-scanning is a race, whoever's first to deploy will get ahead of those who spend more time scanning and deploy later. However, the tutorials magically pause this clock, you can spend half an hour scanning every last tile of the tutorial maps before deploying, and the AI will wait for you.

Woah! That seems super gross. "We've read your review, game seems good, we're going to call this an 80%." "That seems awfully high, I wouldn't say it was that good." "Well then maybe you should make your review more positive."

Offworld trading, it's right in the name! As far as I can tell, the prices you get for selling goods offworld are randomized upon game start, only viewable upon building an offworld launcher, exorbitant, and impossible to deplete. The campaign does an absolutely terrible job of teaching the main game (locking most of the buildings, messing with production ratios), it has a way of solidifying your build order, rather than encouraging you to experiment and adapt. I think it's for people who want a sense of progression, and a between-matches metagame. I also wouldn't say it's more challenging, I've been finding it a cakewalk compared to the quick games, though you can always turn up the difficulty a few notches. I recently got to play a neat map which only had four iron deposits, so by my first expansion I claimed three of them, and nuked the fourth, crowning myself Iron Baron of Mars. It pretty much knocked the steel-dependent AIs out of the game, and the existence of those weakened players made for an interesting metagame between me and the remaining Scavenger.

I never understood why Metacritic is so universally reviled. I've gotten a lot of use out of it as simply a list of reviews, where when I research a game, I'll pull up both the highest and lowest scoring review to figure out what people love and hate about the game. And for all the talk of how an average review score is a terrible metric to base your game purchases on, it provides a very useful function in "Ooh, that game looks interesting. Let's check on Metac- 63/100, maybe not." Would people be happier if we moved to a Rotten Tomatoes system where each review is deemed only positive or negative, and the percentage of positive reviews is displayed? Surely we all acknowledge that it's useful to have some kind of system that gives an idea of whether or not a game is good without having to read pages and pages of reviews. Is the problem just that some people like to take the Metacritic score as completely representative of a game's quality, rather than vaguely indicative? If so, it seems unfair to criticize a tool based on how it's misused by people.

There are a seemingly infinite number of puzzle, adventure and exploration games that fit the bill, so I'll name a few from more unexpected genres. Kerbal Space Program is a game about designing rockets and going into space (or frequently, having a bad problem and not going to space today). Offworld Trading Company is a 4X game, only with no military component. You build a base, buy and sell resources on an open market, and eventually win by outmaneuvering your opponents economically and buying out their companies. You can pay to perform acts of industrial sabotage, but I wouldn't call it violent, and if it weren't for that mechanic, there wouldn't even be any conflict in the game besides the final buyout. I'd also be inclined to count Minecraft as nonviolent. Sure you can hit a zombie with a sword, but it's very much not about that, and many players completely disregard those systems (either by playing on Peaceful, or just avoiding monsters by only going out in the daytime). EDIT: There's also the "construction genre", whatever term you'd like to use that encompasses Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon, the games where you build stuff to make money roll in to build more stuff.

Ooh, this is an interesting topic. I'll share a few weird loopholes that I'm familiar with. Magic: The Gathering has online tournaments meant to mirror the real life tournaments. However, they can't hand out cash prizes because that would be online gambling. So instead the winner of an online tournament earns an invite to a special exclusive side-event at the next physical tournament they attend. This side-event is a single match between two people, the last two online tournament winners. First place gets one thousand dollars and 24 packs of cards (value: approximately $3 each), and second place gets... one thousand dollars and 12 packs. US law has a blind spot regarding games that are not technically random. Theoretically, you could bet on an online version of Rock-Paper-Scissors and it would be allowed because the choices of the other player, while inscrutable, are not random in the same way a deck of cards is random. This is the principle that's allowed Jason Rohrer to make Cordial Minuet actually work.

My understanding of the Curiosity prize was that it was made clear from the beginning that the profit share would occur during his reign as God of Gods which is a specific thing, so it is technically on the up and up since they were under no obligation to create the feature that would turn on the profit share (putting aside the issue of using a lottery to hand out cash prizes, which I imagine they're getting away with only because the enforcers of gambling laws neither understand nor care).

They all have their uses. The Lampad is very fast (with it and the best engine, you can outspeed the game's biggest enemies, backwards), and the Phorcyd is the cheapest and lightest ship to get a Forward weapon slot which essentially doubles your firepower. Combat is something you generally want to avoid (until you set out with the goal of killing a particular thing), but I've found the gun upgrades to be useful for the ability to easily blow away random crabs or jellyfish without having to dodge around them or risk hull damage in combat. Similarly, engine speed is a luxury you pay for in worse fuel economy, and it lets you outrun enemies (useful for either blazing past and avoiding combat, or outmaneuvering in combat). I think the core problem you're seeing is that it's pretty easy to avoid combat once you've figured things out, and there's not much incentive to fight unless you want a specific kill. Having played the game a ton, that's definitely there, and it's not great.

So today I discovered a cool undocumented feature. Pressing 1,2,3,4 lets you take control of that numbered player. Or maybe it's documented and I just missed it. But it's neat!

I played a really disappointing game where I customized the Cultists, and went for a one city science victory. Since the game makes public announcements when a player is making progress on a science victory, I expected the AIs to drop what they were doing and attack to try to prevent my imminent victory. Instead they just sat there content and lost the game. The AI is really stupid overall. It never reaches Civ 5's level of suicidal mismanagement, but it never does anything smart: in battles it's completely predictable, and in empire building it doesn't plan well. I think it would be interesting to see how the game plays out with humans, would anyone like to find that out together?

<Trivia_nerd> Because it's a springloaded button the user must keep their finger on to maintain the beam (that way if you drop it, it turns off and doesn't slice up your legs). You can't use the Force to unpress a held-down button.</Trivia_nerd> It's generally implied that range is at least a factor when it comes to the Force.

I never felt like she stopped being implausibly evil though. Sure she gets a backstory about a lousy upbringing, but she was too evil for that to make her sympathetic, and she continues her mustache-twirling-villain level of disdain for anything north of True Neutral.

She is a cartoonish sociopath who loudly voices her objections to you doing anything remotely kind! I didn't find her insufferable because I couldn't even take her seriously. She didn't feel like a person, just an absurd caricature. I mean seriously, she objects when you help other people, not because it's a waste of resources, but just because "screw other people". What exactly is there to like about her?

Crap, I just realized that I will actually be busy then, won't be able to join you. I would love to get into a multiplayer trainwreck with some other humans, do you plan to have more games later? Unrelated, I've been finding the Robots are a really good race to practice with. Because they skip the water tree, they have to respond a lot less to market forces and resource availability, so there's a more (not absolutely) concrete build order to learn. I think maybe you're supposed to build your structures out in strings rather than clumps though. It gets you slightly less adjacency bonus, but it makes it way easier to protect from EMPs and Power Surges (even if goons don't intercept the surge, they block it from propagating further).

What if Valve releases Half Life 3, and then a few minutes in, it starts asking you to perform math for an amphibian? It slowly dawns on us: Half Life 3 is Frog Fractions 2.

I played it ages ago so my memory's a little hazy, evidently I completely forgot about the boomerang. Now that you tell me the boots were in the second dungeon, I remember the specific point at which I quit. I turned the game off partway through that dungeon, and when I came back the next day, it had set me back to the dungeon entrance (like it does). I started running back to where I'd been to continue the dungeon, and I got to a section of magnetic wall I had to sloooowly clank across. I declared that nope, I'm done, there's no reason for the boots to be that slow.

A cool thing I noticed: An iron mine and an aluminum mine will give each other adjacency bonuses, because they're both mines. Presumably the same is true for carbon and silicon.

I did not get far enough to see anything that's being praised here. I don't remember how far exactly, but I definitely only completed one dungeon. I think the single thing I disliked most was the stupid magnet boots. They were so slow! Why did they have to be slow? And they were a pretty uninspired item for Zelda, I've found that the best items are the ones with broad applications (Roc's feather, pegasus boots, boomerang, etc), while the worst are essentially keys for specific gates and puzzles (magnet gloves from oracle of seasons, the level 2 power bracelet). Every series has at least one gate-opening item, but I can't remember it ever being the first dungeon's item before.

It's not so much that there's a lot of player interaction, as that player interaction is devastating, and you're unable to defend yourself from it. You just can't effectively use three goon squads to protect twelve buildings from EMPS, power surges, and dynamite/nukes on the really valuable single targets. Maybe the solution is that goons should protect adjacent tiles as well, I've played a couple games where I had 3-4 goon squads up, and I got nailed by a dozen sabotages, one of which I intercepted. Also, this thing. How is it being set up? Exchange Steam names?

I've played all the 2D ones, I meant to ask for 3D recommendations, yes.

This seems to have become the general "Talking about Zelda" thread, and it's related, so I'll ask my question here. I grew up on the 2D Zeldas, didn't have an N64 so I missed out on that era. The first 3D Zelda I got was Twilight Princess, and boy, I just didn't like anything about that game. It soured me on 3D Zeldas as a whole (so much of what I didn't like felt like it would've been better if it were on a Gameboy), and I pretty much gave up on the franchise. Since then, I've been told repeatedly that TP is the weakest 3D Zelda, so I'm thinking about giving the series another try. I have a 3DS, where do you recommend I start as a fan of the 2D ones?

I updated and set up the Eshop, and was amused when it asked me for my province to determine sales tax. I bet Nintendo thinks 90% of their Canadian demographic lives in Alberta (lowest tax rate in the land). After that, I got annoyed by a series of things and quit before I got what I wanted. Half the touch menus are still unnavigable by D-pad + A/B, for no good reason. To download this game demo you need to set up a Nintendo ID, why? To set up this Nintendo ID, you must make a Mii, why??? It's not that it's too much work for the result, I just resent the interface forcing me through unnecessary wastes of time. I don't suppose there's any way to skip all that nonsense and just get my demo is there?

Well I just had a miserable game against the AI. I was playing as Robots, and I was hit as early as possible in the game by random shortages on both Power and Electronics. I was crushed by mounting debt, and never had a chance. The random shortages/surpluses seem to function only to randomly screw or reward players outside their control. I find it weird that there's options to disable the black market and auctions, but not shortages, because those are the real RNG screw in the game. Other than being mad about that, I'm observing a weird trend that makes sense when you think about it, but is unintuitive for anyone used to 4X games. Because there's no army movement, you can strike at any player anywhere, instantly. Since there's a public leaderboard, you don't really want to be the player in first place, because it attracts all the sabotage attempts (and boy are they devastating, especially to my poor Robots who build more densely than most). A quiet second place feels like where you want to be. Call it the Blue Shell principle.

Is this an all humans game? I could go for that, it'd be fun for trainwreck value alone. I don't want to shark anyone, so I should warn you, I've played all four tutorials, I'm basically world champion.