Ninety-Three

Same, I disliked the script, not the actor. I didn't like that his first episode (or was it his second?) ended with him essentially scaring the villain away through only the power of his reputation (for a better use, see Silence in the Library where his reputation makes the villain hear him out, but doesn't just magically win the day). His reputation comes up again and again, I think Moffat is far too enamoured with the idea of the Doctor as an unstoppable badass.

Writing assembler was never cool.

I can't imagine playing this on a handheld, my beloved crossbow would be hell to aim without a mouse. Seriously, try PC! I play pretty methodically, but good god, random? You're a maniac! I only ever play as Y.V., Steroids or Robot, they seem so much stronger than the other chumps. I also try to control the randomness a bit: golden crossbows for all, and I'll only pick up maybe a quarter of the weapons I find, the ones I really like. Maybe I should try a "Pick up and use every gun" run with Robot.

Sheesh, season 8 was the best run of NuWho to date. I haven't finished season 9, but it had two episodes back to back that didn't resonate emotionally at all (I'm talking about episode 4 and 5). The villain in episode 4 was introduced a few minutes before he was defeated,...I dunno. Season 8 was the best one of NuWho for me because of its focus on character development. In season 9, in its first 5 episodes at least, Clara is barely a character anymore, and there's not much of a development in her relationship with the Doctor. I watched episode 6 a few weeks ago, and it was alright, though not as good as its premise would have lead you to believe. It was too much of a farce for me, too reliant on comedic relief. Oh well... It's interesting to see how split opinions are, the last season I really liked was 4. There were of course good episodes after that, but I felt it started going downhill with 5 and bottomed out with that stupid River Song arc (though special anti-shoutouts to the episode where they had the Doctor just straight-up gratuitously murder the already-neutralized villain because he was angry, fuck that episode and everyone involved with it).

Some more bits of hidden info that I realize I didn't post in my original "tons of hidden mechanics" post: Random thoughts: I love love love basic crossbows. I've carried a golden crossbow to the Throne more than once, hell I once played Steroids with Strong Back Muscles and two basic crossbows. The slugger (especially the gatling slugger) also takes that role of accurate one-shot kills on most enemies. After the hectic Lil' Hunter fight on 5-3 and the panicked "Find the necromancer before you run out of ammo" on 6-1, I find 7- to be downright chill. The enemies are big, slow-moving and even when it gets bullet hellish, the shots move so slowly. The Throne as well, an impossible-to-miss bullet sponge that makes you play a relatively stately bullet hell.

I think we should have two megathreads, one for discussion of everything, and a second spillover thread for when we get off-topic.

If 2014 was the Year of Meh, for me 2015 was the year of "I hate your Game of the Year". I could make a top 10 list of games I hated that made everyone's top ten lists. I made a top 4, because filling out arbitrarily-sized lists is silly. I thought about it and there are exactly four games I found special enough to mention. 4. Infinifactory Zachtronics continues to deliver its "Engineering in a game-shaped package" games, and I continue to be exactly their target audience. Spacechem felt more engineery than Codex of Alchemical Engineering (where you would often have to scrap a solution and rebuild from the ground up, rather than tweak it), the addition of 3D means Infinifactory has even more room for tweaking and engineering, I've never had to scrap an approach as unworkable. The drawback to 3D is that there are a lot more moving parts than Spacechem, I sometimes run into the problem where I know exactly what I want to build or how I want to tweak my solution, but doing so feels laborious. 3. Nuclear Throne I don't know how to say much about this. It's a twin-stick shooter where one playthrough lasts maybe twenty minutes, whose big innovation is random weapon drops that add a lot of variety to each play. And it's really good. 2. Thea: The Awakening A 4X game where instead of managing an empire, you manage one settlement populated by seven to a couple dozen people, each with their own stats and equipment to manage. What I love about it is that it's asymmetrical, rather than you vs the AI empire, it's you vs the monster-filled environment, which neatly dodges the typical 4X problem of "The AI is dumb and the difficulty settings just give it double resource production to compensate". 1. Sunless Sea It's not the best game I played all year, but it's the most irreplaceable. If I didn't have Nuclear Throne I'd play some other shooter, but nothing else can provide what Sunless Sea does. You know how every game is designed as a game first, and then the writers come in and put a story on top of the video game? Sunless Sea is the only game where it comes across that it was first and foremost, written by professional writers, then had game mechanics added. In addition to the generally excellent writing, the game's overarching theme is about endings or "Dying well", and it really worked. Whenever I finished a playthrough I'd sit back and just process the experience, like after a really interesting book or movie. I'll end on this quote from the game's postmortem, because atmosphere is very important to the game.

I'm five episodes in to Jessica Jones and it is a source of immense frustration for me that the bad guy keeps getting away because she insists on taking him alive (to save one person, nevermind that he's out ruining more lives when he escapes). If I keep watching am I going to continue to be frustrated? Unrelated, has anyone been keeping up with Doctor Who? I felt like the last several seasons had been lousy, but I kept watching for some reason. I finally quit for good, and now another season's gone by so I thought I'd check: has it gotten better?

I don't hate spoiler culture, but I think people generally care about spoilers too much. I saw Sixth Sense knowing he was dead the whole time, and it was still great, I saw Star Wars spoiled and it didn't ruin the movie. I think spoiler culture fixates on the wrong stuff. This quote came out of a discussion on the Overthinking It podcast and sums it up nicely: I watched Sixth Sense knowing that he's dead the whole time, and I still loved that movie. The spoiler that would have made it worse for me is "He finds peace by helping a little kid solve a haunting". Similarly Star Wars 7 wasn't ruined by knowing .

When you say "Hate spoiler culture" do you mean "Hate the way people tiptoe around spoilers" or "Hate the way people are always spoiling everything all the time"? Because without context, it's so ambiguous a phrase I can't tell which side you're talking about.

Max difficulty here. I think I used one potion throughout my entire playthrough, and that was an out-of-combat healing potion. The first area, I found the combat bland and a little difficult (it had that button-masher feel where taking some damage is basically inevitable, unless you use the cheesiest "one attack then retreat" strategy). By the time I got to the second area I still had starting gear, the only skills I had were "+10 healing out of combat" and "Spend adrenaline to cast", I had figured out how aggressive I had room to be, and I was finding it easy. Even when I was beginning, solo fights were trivial, the only threat was getting surrounded, and a "fighting retreat" strategy worked pretty well to prevent that.

Twice now I've been killed by snowbots while running gamma guts + scary face. I don't know what's going on, but there's some one-in-fifty bug that makes them hit you before they die. So don't trust that combo.

What crowns do you all use? Obviously crown of guns for Robot, but on other characters I've never found a crown I like. I usually end up taking crown of Curses, all the other ones seem like more downside than benefit.

I discovered something amazing about Steroids and I think he's now my new favorite character. I grabbed a screwdriver early and decided to carry it for the golden weapon. For giggles, I held down the screwdriver button while shooting and I realized something special: Forget the damage, spamming a fast-charging melee weapon is like a bulletproof shield. My golden weapon was the wrench, and it's not quite as spammable as the screwdriver, but it has much more range and, holy shit, this is the way to play Steroids you guys. Go get a golden wrench, it's unreal how good it is!

My point wasn't about mechanical advantage, it was that the decisions had very obvious moral answers. That's an interesting dilemma to present when you have to weigh morality against your better interests "I could let this criminal go because I want the money more than I want justice", but with the way the game delivered mechanical rewards, it set morality in step with your better interests. "I could let this criminal go and get some money, or I could turn him in and get some money, justice, and a shop discount. Why was I considering letting him go again?". There is no reason, narrative or mechanical, for you to let the criminal go, unless you're playing the Chaotic Evil puppy-kicking sort of character.

There was a choice? I didn't even notice that there was a choice to be made there, I just kept going and killed it, because as far as I could tell I still needed to kill it to get the information I was after. The dwarf forge quest made me think "Hm, this guy's trying to bribe me. I could be an asshole and take the money, or I could turn him in, get paid better for doing that, and not pointlessly let an arsonist go free". I looked it up after the fact, and as I predicted, he tries to bribe you with the same amount of gold you'd get for turning him in, and turning him in nets more XP, plus a shop discount. I guess it was technically a choice, but it wasn't at all interesting because what the game mechanics wanted lined up perfectly with what obvious morality wanted. I had the exact same problem with the quest to recover medicine: the option to turn the resistance in to the invading Russians seemed pointlessly evil, and I could tell it wouldn't offer me a better reward than letting him go free (I checked, it doesn't). Again, with the woman in the infirmary: I could walk away and let her die, or I could do a quest, get a reward, and maybe have her not die: That's not a moral conundrum, and it's not a mechanical conundrum. I handled the pellar by quitting in disgust at the stupid padded-out questline. I was not having fun, and the game telling me to wander the woods and ring a bell until I found the right hotspot to trigger a goat sounded like the opposite of fun. By railroaded, I mean the game seized control of Geralt in a cutscene and made him do a significant thing that I didn't want him to do, and that he didn't need to do. In previous similar situations the game had given me control over that sort of decision, which made the cutscene decision more aggravating.

If it's tasty it's aluminumnum.

I disagree with this wholeheartedly. I played the game for seven hours and I could not tell you a single thing about Geralt's personality. Is he violent? Well the game let me work to avoid a bar brawl with peasants, then a cutscene railroaded me into escalating a different confrontation into a bar brawl. Is he greedy? Again, the game let me tell someone I needed no reward, then railroaded me into demanding a reward for doing something. Other than inconsistent characterizations regarding his level of violence and greed, I don't recall anything about his personality. I guess there's "dry sense of humour".

I wasn't set against it, and I don't understand what would make you say that. I had enjoyed other games in the genre and the only expectation I had was "This will be a fun videogаme". I played it and simply didn't enjoy it. As for why I'd dismiss it: Nothing happened and no characters were established. I'm being glib, but only slightly. Seven hours of game went as follows: Ciri is Geralt's daughter figure. Geralt durdles around in Whitefall killing random monsters until the person he's looking for shows up and finds him. They go to the King who tells him to find Ciri. He starts looking for Ciri, and his investigation is spent building big chains of dependencies: "A told me to do B for him which requires me to talk to unrelated C who told me to do unrelated D for him which requires me to talk to unrelated E who told me to do unrelated F...". Almost nothing has happened, and the only characters that have been established (in the sense that I know anything about their personalities) are the Pellar who is insane, and the Nilfgaardian captain who is friendly until pushed. The only worldbuilding details that've been established are "There was a war that the Nilfgaardians won", and "Ciri is pursued by the Wild Hunt, who are ghost pirates." Compare that to the amount of worldbuilding and narrative that had been done by the seven-hour mark in Mass Effect, and you'll see why I said nothing happened. The only times I felt like I had agency* were when the game offered me the choice of whether to reject or demand a reward, and whether or not to start a brawl with peasants. Both of those choices were undermined when the game later served up the exact same scenarios and cutscene-Geralt automatically took the opposite of the path I wanted. *Technically I was also offered the choice between giving medicine to local resistance fighters, or turning the resistance in to the invading Russians, but the latter was an act of such pointless, puppy-kicking evil that it didn't even register as a choice to me.

You know how Fallout 4's dialogue options have been described as "Yes", "Yes", "Sarcastic (Yes)" and "I'll do it later"? That's kind of how dialogue interaction felt to me in The Witcher 3. I wasn't interacting, I was pushing Geralt along a narrative railroad where my only input was deciding whether or not to pursue a particular quest right now. I think there were a couple times I got to choose between having a fistfight with some peasant, or Jedi mind-tricking them. The one time I did use Jedi mind-trick, the game decided to punish me by making me spend a minute, literally sixty seconds, walking his glacially slow ass about thirty feet west, and I swore off mind-trick because clearly the devs hated me for using it. Other than those peasant fights, it felt like everything was just choosing between "Yes" and "Sarcastic (Yes)".

My guilty pleasure is Long Arms + good melee. Whenever I find a shovel, or get an early Long Arms, I try to go for this build. At this point I've tried it so many times that I have statistically significant data, it is a strategy that hurts my chances, but I keep doing it because it feels so good. I honestly think a big part of what makes it so satisfying is that THUNK sound effect melee has. I don't find that to be a problem at all. So Steroids starts with a golden laser pistol, 20 Energy, zero bullets and a revolver. How is that more of a problem than, say, YV starting with a golden laser pistol, 20 Energy and zero bullets?

I'm perplexed as to what this game did that's getting it on everyone's Game of the Year lists. It's not the combat, because people in this thread seem to be confirming my assessment that it's a bit bland and button-mashy. After seven hours of play I think I had about ten minutes of fun (playing Gwent, before I realized all the strategy of that game was completely undermined by the pay-to-win TCG nature of it). Do the quests get that much better later on in the game? Is it just really easy to forget the bland combat and chains of Fedex quests to focus on the highlights? Because it does have a way of eating up hours without me noticing, if it weren't for Steam telling me I'd played for seven, I would think I'd only given it around three.

Robot is my favorite, but only since I started going for Crown of Guns. Before that I was a big fan of Steroids, whose ability totally worked for me (you have to select weapons to work well with it, I'm especially fond of crossbow, shotgun or shovel in the alt slot). Has anyone ever made explosive weapons work? Almost every time I decide to use an explosive weapon long term, that weapon is what ends up killing me.

Yes. I don't have his nigh-perfect memory of traps and unique weapon spawns, but I've played through the game a few times and have a pretty good memory. The major difference between our playstyles is that he follows the intended quest progression, while I like to make a quick trip to New Vegas (still following the U-bend path, I'm not a maniac) so that I can rob the energy weapons store and use the proceeds to buy the Intelligence implant while still level 2. After that I fast travel back and more or less follow the main route. Also, I get a lot more mileage out of the cowboy repeater. I got a new machine that happens to come with some decent recording software, so I've been recording my sessions, although I don't have any particular plans for the videos. Maybe so that if something really cool happens I'll have video of it.

You taunt me with your secrets. I can see what you're doing on the page source, but I can't figure out how to make it happen.