Ninety-Three

Definitionally, I should think that mansplaining can only be performed by a man. Personally I'm in favour of abandoning the word altogether, as misuse has caused its meaning to degenerate to the point of near-uselessness. Just like "troll" has degenerated from "to deliberately incite bad feelings in someone" to "to mess with or deceive someone in any way", mansplain seems to have moved from "A man patronizingly explains to a woman, about a subject he knows little of or less of than the woman" to a point where it is often used as "A man explains anything to a woman".

Um... I think it's odd to expect that your tastes should be so divergent from a bunch of game reviewers that what the reviewers think has zero correlation with what you think. If everyone's tastes were that unrelated, there would be no such thing as consensus. People wouldn't agree that Half-Life 2 and Tetris are good, and Colonial Marines is bad.

I agree with all of that about BIoshock Infinite. Somewhere I read an interesting article which pointed out something about some of those glowing 90% reviews (about BI specifically). Some of the reviews notice the flaws, they complain about them. The review "reads like a 7/10", right up until they give it four and a half stars. It's like they're not rating the game based on how good it is, but how closely it conforms to the platonic ideal of a AAA videogаme. Side note: What do you mean about mechanically conflicted? Mechanically, I felt it was stripped to the bare bones of a two-gun regenerating health shooter, there wasn't much left to be in conflict.

Does the matchmaking account for level? I thought it went purely on match win-loss history.

I just killed a dragon, and it was more epic than any card game-based combat system deserves to be. It felt like every decision I made in the game led up to that point. My long-term decisions focused on maximum resource-gathering capability, then specced my tech tree towards the singular goal of mass-producing Mithril spears. In the medium term, I made the decision to leave my village supplies completely undefended so that every man woman and thing could leave town and lend their strength to the dragonslaying party. In the short term, I got really lucky in the fight, and played skillfully enough to protect the lives of all my troops. I wish I could communicate how great this felt. I killed a dragon, and for the first time in my video game career, it doesn't just feel like I killed another sack of hitpoints named "Dragon", this took preparation, skill and luck. I actually killed a dragon.

I'm only a few hours in, but oh man, I am loving this. Special shout-out to the music which is both great on its own, and perfectly atmospheric. However, I'm troubled by the nagging sensation that somewhere off-screen, there's a timer ticking or an enemy army building strength, and if my empire-building isn't efficient enough, I'm going to fall behind and get crushed. It's not that I wish there was no pressure, I'm just troubled by having no understanding or tracking of the pressure.

What is a corporation but a collection of authors (and managers and human resources and so on)? Why does an author's work lose the right to privacy because they're working for a company instead of themselves? If a two-person authorial team forms a company for tax purposes, is it suddenly different than a single author? How big does the company have to get before they lose the right to privacy? Three people? Four? Ten authors and a manager? ​So what you're saying is that people have no right to privacy of IP, and stopping violations of that privacy is the individual's ultimate responsibility. That's an awfully anarchistic view to take. If someone breaks into George R. R. Martin's house and steals his next book, is the public entitled to the leaked book and it's Martin's fault for not buying better locks? If you're not okay with that, why are you okay with someone leaking the Fallout 4 script? Is it just a matter of magnitude, the public is entitled to violations of IP privacy if it's not violated too much? Holy shit that's entitled. You're proposing the argument that Bethesda's doesn't really own the Fallout 4 script because they owe part of their past success to modders. I can't even engage with that. I quit.

When the things in question are the company's authored IP, absolutely yes. Should George R. R. Martin's partly-finished manuscrupt stay secret just because he wants it that way? Should my amateur partly-finished manuscript stay secret just I because I want it that way? Yes, because that's how privacy works. The public does not have an automatic right to know about any and all IP currently being produced.

What have they done that makes them deserve to have their internal documents leaked?

That's a pretty big assertion to drop in a twelve word post. Firstly you're saying that the consumer should get to know now more than Bethesda should profit from a well-managed release of information. Secondly you're presenting an "ends justify the means" approach despite the fact that the ends involve a negative to an unconsenting party (Bethesda) which is generally frowned upon even when it results in a net benefit.

My view on it (and the view of at least one other who thought Kotaku was in the grey) is that the leaker is definitely doing something bad (because Bethesda didn't authorize the release, the leaker broke an NDA, stole it, something), and by printing the leak, Kotaku is enabling the bad behaviour. Kotaku is to the leaker as a fence is to a thief: they don't bear as much responsibility for the bad thing, but neither are they completely innocent. Now it's subjective and debatable as to what percentage of the responsibility is Kotaku's (I imagine you feel the answer is "virtually none"), but can you at least understand where we're coming from?

If you were being serious, I hoped that the title made the Y axis clear. The rest is basically a scatter plot with a line fitted to it.

Really? I thought Kingpin was terrible. They spent so much time building him up and characterizing him, but they never did anything with that, and then at the end

I went through my Steam Library, which by pure coincidence, contains exactly 200 games with Metacritic ratings. I labeled each one as "Love it" or not. My definition of "Love it" is vague and completely arbitrary, but suffice it to say there are lots of games I've liked, and plenty I've played for dozens of hours, that didn't make "Love it". 70 games were marked "Love it", 130 weren't. The average Metacritic score of beloved games was 82.4, and the average score of unloved games was 79.2. The distribution of the data is best illustrated by this graph: I'm quite surprised by how clean the graph is, it makes things very easy to interpret. Clearly Metacritic score is linearly correlated with whether or not I will like a game, but that correlation is very weak.

Do you all like data? Do you like analysis of data? Prompted by this discussion, I just went through my two hundred-some Steam library and noted everything's Metacritic rating, plus whether or not I loved the game. Would anyone be interested in a post about what I learned?

I'm not sure it's right to say they've optimized towards it. Once you pick a solution like that, it tends to stick by the power of pure inertia. That said, I prefer this to the normal model and I think it really is better.

I just spent ten minutes clearing out my Steam inventory by selling off dozens of stupid Steam Trading cards for a few cents each. Then I went to the next tab of my inventory and found this. Hot damn. Apparently the hat economy is still going strong.

Metacritic gets a bad rap. Yeah yeah, numbers can never sum up someone's opinion and games are subjective anyway and blah blah blah. It's incredibly useful to be able to open a game's Steam page and go "Ooh, this looks interesting, maybe I'll-" *Metacritic 62* "... or not." It's also useful to be able to say "I'm in the mood for a new FPS. What's good?" *Sort by Metacritic*.

I just remembered, Dungeons & Dragons Online handled F2P in an interesting way I liked. You could either have a standard $15/month MMO subscription, in which case you had access to absolutely everything (for as long as you subscribed), or you could play F2P and pay one-time fees to unlock things. Pay a few dollars to permanently unlock this pay-only dungeon, extra bank slots, extra character classes, etc. It was great, because it let people like me play the game off-and-on without feeling like I was wasting subscription money by rarely playing. What would you do with Crossy Road once the F2P was removed? Speed up the rate of unlocking to compensate, unlock all characters at the start?

I think there's some clarification that needs to be done about what we mean by "horrible". Farmville has an evil/shitty pay model, but it is very good at getting people to pay. Being evil doesn't necessarily push people away. I think at least some elements of LOL's model are evil. For instance, they sell boosts that increase the rate at which you gain account XP, which is used to unlock new in-game abilities and more slots for in-game passive boosts. "Hey kids, grind for hours so you can level up and unlock Ignite! Or... you could buy an XP boost." Any time you design a system that's meant to separate players from their money at the expense of fun (usually by inflicting grinding on them), I'm inclined to call it evil.

My biggest annoyance was a completely trivial moment when Penguin cutscene-hits Bats with an ice ray. Bats breaks free in seconds, with no narrative consequences, but it still ruined things for me. As it happened, I had been shouting at the screen "You idiot, don't just-" *sigh*. It wouldn't have happened to a competent protagonist, it wouldn't have happened to me in gameplay, and the fact that they managed to get cutscene competence right in Asylum made it all the worse that they messed it up here.

This is a tangent, but I find it interesting that despite the shared universe of all the Marvel movies/shows, the Marvel Cinematic Universe really has no continuity. Every now and then they'll have a cross-show cameo or say "Remember the time aliens attacked New York?" (which they have to keep telling you in words, because there sure isn't any other evidence it ever happened). You can feel that they're working under the constraint of "Continuity is confusing, we can't afford to alienate anyone who hasn't seen other MCU stuff". It makes me wonder what the point of the MCU is, why have a shared universe if you're not going to share anything?

Arkham Asylum did a great job of making you feel like big powerful Batman (slamming the Joker against the wall in the elevator rather than having him escape thanks to mandatory cutscene incompetence, going out of his way to save criminals, getting a one-shot cutscene KO on Harley), and the series has been working hard to undo it ever since. City had you get sucker-punched by literally every big villain, and by Knight you're running over people with a tank and

Jesus, I had forgotten that LOL made you pay to unlock each champion. Do they sell some kind of "unlock all" package, or do you really have to buy all one hundred twenty-seven champions at, what is it, $5 or $10 each?