Ninety-Three

Once the enemy comes on screen and starts fighting me, that's way too late to read over all their skills. The death overview is the very definition of "too late". What I want is to join a game, see the enemies I'm playing against, and get to read their abilities in the opening minute of the match. Sitting down and committing all the heroes to memory is not an option, memorizing over a hundred heroes times four plus abilities is insane.

That was very helpful, god the in-game tutorials were awful comapred to that. Just the advice "only go for last-hits, don't push lanes in the early game" was huge. I've settled into using Clinkz, who seems like a good noob hero, am I right in that assessment? My current source of frustration is that I keep dying to abilities I didn't know the enemy had. It's like losing in a TCG because I'm not allowed to read what the other person's cards do. Surely there's some in-game UI that lets me look up the abilities of each enemy, but damned if I can find it, someone point me in the right direction?

I vote we start it on a Monday, rotating the movie every two weeks. I was thinking the 4th, I had the impression we were talking early January.

How does one learn to play Dota 2? I ask because the in-game tutorials are garbage. They do a decent job of teaching you the basic verbs of gameplay, as in "push B to jump", but they don't even try to teach you how to play well, and Dota is a game with an especially wide chasm between "technically playing in that I am pushing buttons to execute game actions" and "playing well". I tried some bot matches, I did badly, and I have no idea what I'm doing wrong or how to improve. Surely someone on the internet has put together a decent guide on the subject, could someone refer me to such a guide?

I already mentioned, I Googled it and it's not specific to the card (I found video of multiple people using the card successfully, and a general absence of evidence other people were having the problem with that setup).

Radeon R9 390, why do you ask? And yes, drivers are up to date.

Looping tips: Crown of Guns is amazing, it's the best at everything all the time forever. Having good weapon selection is just such a huge deal. On Robot, no ammo isn't even a drawback, on other characters I generally get enough off chests and weapon pickups that I can afford to keep one primary weapon fed, while either alternating my secondary weapon in accordance with ammo needs, or using a melee secondary. Also, it stacks multiplicatively with Heavy Heart which is rad. My prioritization of perks is as follows: Tier 0: Heavy Heart (you only get one chance to take it, if you pass, it goes away forever) Tier 1: Scary Face, Hammerhead, Strong Back (except on Robot), Throne Butt (on some characters) Tier 2: Anything that will unlock Heavy Heart. Special mention to Long Arms because melee is amazing in the Throne fights Tier 3: Bloodlust, Rhino Skin, Protection, Second Stomach, Rabbit Paw Everything else scores so low that I don't even want it. Usually Hammerhead is not very good, but occasionally you will get dumped into a wide open room full of enemies, and in those situations Hammerhead is the only chance you've got. If you're okay with randomly getting screwed by levelgen now and then, feel free to knock it down to Tier 3. Strong Back is amazing firstly because it lets you simply go full-auto on the Throne with much less concern for running out of ammo, and secondly because if you don't use Crown of Guns, it's the best ammo conservation perk in the game. For each weapon you have under 20% max ammo, you get +30% ammo drops, and for each weapon over 60%, you get -35% ammo drops. Since Strong Back adds to your max ammo capacity, 192 bullets goes from 75% to 37.5% full, kicking you down a tier in the drop tables. The ideal loadout for the Throne 1 fight is a melee weapon (I will sometimes carry a basic wrench all the way from World 1, just so I can have melee for the Throne), and anything high DPS. When the fight starts, the Throne is pretty chill, and a melee weapon lets you safely destroy the giant green balls to farm for medkits and ammo. Farm up to full, kill three generators and farm back to full, then kill the fourth generator and just unload on the Throne. When it dies, run away from the portal: this will give the portal time to suck in the weapon from the chest at the beginning of the level. For the Throne 2 fight, try to keep one of the basic IDPD alive, as Throne 2 will only spawn once you've killed them all. With one left alive, run around and grab the guns you want, then start the fight. Farming it with a melee weapon is still possible, though more difficult. I generally find it sufficient to pick up a high DPS weapon with reasonable projectile speed and kill Throne 2 quickly. In the post-loop levels, I usually meet my doom at the hands of the loop-exclusive IDPD units. I haven't fought them enough yet to know if that's because they're just that badass, or because I have yet to learn their patterns.

Edit: Never mind, I am a dumb.

Random observations: I've seen the green rat charge a few times now, and every time it's only after the rat has spawned a lot of sub-rats. Maybe that's got something to do with why I don't normally see it. Boiling Veins counts towards unlocking Heavy Heart. Equip a wrench and try to survive indefinitely against the Throne. It's very doable (I did it with only Long Arms, though +medkits, +healing and Stress would make it easier) and it's a great way to learn the thing's patterns in what is otherwise a hectic "oh god, dump all my ammo, just kill it now!" fight.

Well damn, I took one look at the art and said to myself "Sigh, another 3D Zelda I won't like". Apparently I have to look through all the handheld Zeldas again.

I think I did that four times before I developed the reflex not to. At this point I've figured out how to safely walk across the carpet to trigger the centre beam, just because it gives a reprieve from the bullet hell. Maybe I'm a slow learner, but it took me thirty or forty hours to get to the point where I was any good at looping, gradually building up skill at each level. I think a lot of the nuanced learning is about observing AI patterns and getting a sense for how each enemy will act, and if you just go through trying to kill everything and preserve your fragile butt, it takes forever to piece together enough observations to gain understanding. Stick that Golden wrench in the Proto Chest and give it to Steroids, not only is melee Steroids amazing, but he's incredibly safe to play. If you want to spend some time observing enemy patterns, that's the way to do it. Figuring that out was a pretty key part of my strategy, now I'm taking Crown of Guns on every character. It can make the ammo situation slightly awkward now and then, but it means you get three or four times as much weapon selection, which isn't just powerful, it's critical to looping. Unless you're a bullet hell master who can fight the Throne indefinitely (being Crystal or melee Steroids is a huge help there), you need a weapon that combines high DPS and reasonable ammo efficiency. With Crown of Guns I get enough chances to find one that looping no longer feels dependent on getting the right drops or mutations (strong back + recycle gland).

Have they been making 2D Zeldas since after the GBA days? I loved the 2D ones but never really cared for the series in 3D, I'd be very excited if there's a 2D Zelda I've missed.

I had that happen a couple days ago, and not again since. It must be very rare, so I'm not sure it's new.

There's an anime of it if you're interested. It's a visual novel, so as medium shifts go, you're not losing too much. I didn't care for it, but I wanted it to be something it wasn't, everyone else I've heard loved it.

I got around to watching the Doctor Who Christmas episode. It was good, nothing special, but good. It helped me figure out something about the show: The character drama aspects of it work best when they are contained to an episode (optionally with simple background details previously established), the characters go through an arc with a beginning middle and end. Things go off the rails when the writers assume "The audience has been watching this character for two seasons, they must love and care about the character, so they'll be automatically invested in this plot". It's not just that the assumption can be wrong, the writers use the assumption to skip past writing a beginning for the character arc. When they stop to write a beginning instead of saying "You've watched two seasons, there's your beginning", you get something that works thematically, like the Christmas episode.

A little bit, but it's not like it's a big "He was dead the whole time" twist, Steins;Gate becomes pretty clear about what it's doing as it introduces that element.

You're skipping over a step, which is why you're arriving at "caring is bad". It's not that getting trolled is bad, it's that feeding the trolls, falling for trolling is bad. The troll sets out to aggravate someone, and if you get aggravated, they've accomplished their goal, they win. The only way for the trollee to win is to realize "This person just wants to aggravate me. I should ignore them.". To do anything else is to, like a chump, play into the hand of someone whose goal is to upset you. Having tweeted a dozen times that "feminism is cancer", Milo isn't just a cool dude doing it for the lulz, he is clearly trolling. Milo's the hero because people are biting, therefore he's winning, which means 4chan sees feminists as losing, and since they dislike feminists, of course they like Milo's actions.

Spoilery explanations of things:

Pf, that's half a level further. If you're going to discard the acronym you'd better say "Super Nintendo Entertainment System".

Speaking of malaise, I think I've figured out the common element to this year's theme of "Ninety-Three hates everyone's GOTY". Pillars of Eternity, Witcher 3, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, Undertale, Life is Strange, all these games and more get GOTY praise for their writing, which bounced right off me. It's not that I'm uninterested in story and writing, Planescape and The Longest Journey are among my all-time favorites, and Sunless Sea is my GOTY this year, but it seems like modern game writing is going in a very character-focused direction that I just do not care about. And that's disappointing, because I have a feeling it's going to edge out my preferred plot-driven stories. Am I imagining trends that aren't there, or has anyone else noticed an overall shift in the medium towards towards more character-driven writing?

I played for eighteen minutes, which is how long it took me to determine the pop-in was not going away. It's seriously as bad as that screenshot, everywhere. The game is playable, but I really don't want to play it like this. It doesn't seem to be specific to my graphics card and Google didn't offer any solutions, so I guess they've got two weeks to patch it before I cash my Steam refund.

I'm playing on a high-end machine and I am having the worst pop-in. That's about average for my experience so far. I'm also getting pretty long load times whenever I skip a cutscene, even if that cutscene isn't masking a zone transition (tangential complaint: why the hell do I need to go to the pause menu to skip a cutscene?). Has anyone figured out any graphics settings I can tweak to make this go away?

I told you, I was using homoglyphs. I can see everyone else is bypassing it by opening then closing an HTML tag, but I can't figure out how to make this forum software do that.

You know when you're typing up a post to a thread, and the forum gives you a little popup saying "New posts have been made, display them?" Why does that notification only happen like, one time in four? Is there some special rule governing when it triggers? I swear it has not triggered for me more than it has.

It wasn't my favorite season, it's just the last point before my opinion of the seasons went into the negative. Having now watched the last three episodes of season 9, the third-last wasn't that interesting, and the last seemed to care far more about the characters than I did, but wow the penultimate episode was really good. It's not Blink, but it largely works on its own, and I'm enchanted with what it did. If you're at all into Doctor Who and haven't seen it, I recommend you at least go watch that episode.